Judging One Person at a Time, Tribunal Seeks Justice in Bosnia

The trial of Dusan Tadic by an international war-crimes tribunal in The Hague will doubtless be a morality play, but it won’t be a show trial. The tribunal’s work, like the Nuremberg precedent it evokes, will be a lesson in universal conscience and individual responsibility. If it achieves its aims, the tribunal will do far more to secure lasting peace in Bosnia than the 60,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops now stationed there.

Improbably, an antiseptic, high-tech courtroom in The Hague will be a place of national healing. The voices of those who survived “ethnic cleansing” will be heard, and their suffering honored. Those, like Tadic, who have been charged with sadistic crimes, will be judged through fair process rather than lawless vengeance. By judging one man at a time, The Hague tribunal will avoid the sort of collective attribution of guilt that could imperil reconciliation in Bosnia. “Serbs” didn’t commit ethnic cleansing, Chief Prosecutor Richard J. Goldstone reminds us; individuals like Tadic did.

But when the tribunal’s first trial began earlier this month, the man on the dock seemed an unlikely antagonist for a drama of such large scope. Not even a member of the regular armed forces--though apparently well-connected to local Serb authorities--Tadic is alleged to have committed gruesome atrocities as a volunteer torturer at the Omarska concentration camp in northwest Bosnia.

Comparisons between The Hague and Nuremberg are inevitable, and Tadic’s stature brought the two into sharp contrast. Where the judgment of Nazi crimi- nality began with 22 leading figures at Nuremberg, Bosnia’s justice was to start with a 40-year-old former cafe owner and karate instructor. As the tribunal convened to judge Tadic’s guilt, two indicted suspects who bear major responsibility for the crimes committed in Bosnia--Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic--continued to flout its authority by ostentatiously eluding capture. Far more than symbolism is at stake. As the daily headlines attest, their ability to derail Bosnia’s fragile peace cannot be overestimated. As long as they remain at large, the tribunal will fall short in its effort to redeem the rule of law.

Even so, Tadic’s trial is a fitting place to start the daunting task of reckoning with the crimes that raged across Bosnia for 3 1/2 years. By prosecuting him, The Hague tribunal may achieve a measure of justice that eluded the Nuremberg tribunal.

Despite its achievements, Nuremberg skewed the lessons it sought to inscribe in the collective conscience of German citizens. Chief among them was the principle of individual responsibility. That principle--Nuremberg’s central idea--held that men who commit crimes against the human condition are directly accountable before the law of all nations. They cannot elude judgment through such time-honored defenses as “following orders.” After Nuremberg, its architects hoped, every person, every soldier would balk when ordered to commit atrocities.

But the Nuremberg trial might have inadvertently undermined its own message. By focusing on Nazi leaders, the trial reinforced the view that a coterie of evil men was responsible for the Holocaust. Largely lost in this grand narrative was the story of mass collaboration in Adolf Hitler’s crimes.

More than a half century later, historians such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen still labor to correct Nuremberg’s incomplete account, focusing on the dark question presented by mass campaigns of extermination: How can so many ordinary people be so readily enlisted to participate? The real horror of the Holocaust--and of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda--is how easily ordinary people--like Tadic--can be induced to commit monstrous crimes. For example, among the crimes charged against Tadic is forcing one prisoner to bite off the testicles of another, who died of his injuries.

Tadic’s profound ordinariness will make it impossible to miss the central lessons of this generation’s great morality play: Crimes against humanity require the willing participation of ordinary people--countless numbers of them. And international law demands that ordinary people decline invitations to operate the machinery of death.

But if the tribunal’s central lessons are about individual responsibility, there is a paradox at the heart of this work. Tadic’s crimes come within the purview of international justice because he did not act alone. The first witness called by the prosecution, James Gow, painstakingly sought to thread Tadic’s alleged crimes into the complex fabric of recent Yugoslav history. His aim was to show that Tadic’s atrocious crimes were part of a systematic plan conceived in Belgrade and executed in Bosnia and Croatia. These facts are not just contextual backdrop; they are elements of the crimes Tadic has been charged with. Among other things, they transform his depredations from ordinary crimes into crimes against humanity.

Thus, the personal culpability of men such as Tadic should not obscure the fact that countless other individuals willingly participated in the epic crimes for which defendants are brought to book in The Hague. If Tadic committed the crimes he is charged with, he is no scapegoat simply because it was his fate to be captured. But it is both appropriate and necessary for his trial, and others to follow, to serve as object lessons.

Like any great teacher, the trial of Tadic will do its best work not through didactic preaching, but by provoking its audience to grapple with the hard questions it presents. For no one, and no court, can definitively answer the dark questions about human nature raised when brutal leaders enlist masses of humanity to commit crimes against universal conscience. But if those who participated in “ethnic cleansing,” if only by their complicit silence, fail to examine their own consciences, the lessons of The Hague will be incomplete.*