No Immunity in War Crimes

The way is now clear for former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to be tried before an international court for crimes against humanity. His trial would be the most significant since the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany faced justice in Nuremberg in 1945.

Milosevic and as many as 15 confederates are expected to be transferred soon to The Hague, where a U.N. tribunal has indicted them all on charges of genocide and complicity in atrocities in Kosovo, the autonomous Yugoslavian province against whose Albanian majority the central Serbian government waged a brutal war of “ethnic cleansing” in 1998-99. Milosevic would be the first former head of state brought before the tribunal.

Milosevic has been jailed in Belgrade since April on unrelated domestic charges of corruption and abuse of power. Public opinion among Yugoslavia’s Serbs, which once strongly opposed transferring any indicted officials to The Hague, has shifted, especially since Serbian authorities linked Milosevic to mass graves believed to hold as many as 1,000 victims from Kosovo.

But it was the pressing need for foreign aid, debt relief and investment that seems to have finally prompted Yugoslavia’s multiparty Cabinet to authorize the transfer of war crimes suspects. On Friday, at a scheduled donors conference in Brussels, Yugoslavia will appeal for at least $1.2 billion in aid and cancellation of much of its $12-billion foreign debt.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced in April that the United States was ready to help out, but the State Department said Monday that Washington wants more details on Milosevic’s transfer to The Hague before deciding whether it will attend the Brussels meeting.

Help for Yugoslavia, including support for private investments, will encourage Balkan stability and European security. Washington should be generous. But even more important is assuring that Milosevic and his henchman are called to account, first because their many alleged atrocities demand it, but no less to reassert, as at Nuremberg, the principle that national leaders responsible for crimes against humanity cannot hope to remain immune from international justice.