Serbs Bristling Under the Specter of Milosevic’s Trial in The Hague

Barely two miles from the apartment houses that mark the northwest limits of this capital lies a training compound for elite police forces where workers last summer unearthed the torn bodies of scores of ethnic Albanians killed in the province of Kosovo.

The mass grave brought the ugliness of the Balkan wars close to home for many Serbs, the people of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic. But after the initial revelation, political leaders and citizens seemed to want nothing more than to drop the uncomfortable subject. And that sentiment is at risk of deepening as the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is set to open Tuesday before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

“Every single person I talk to here is very strongly against the Hague tribunal,” said Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco, a human rights lawyer who supports the tribunal’s work. “People start out by saying, ‘Yes, we have to condemn all war criminals,’ that ‘Srebrenica was very bad, it was a crime, but . . . but . . . but . . . ‘ Always ‘but,’ ” she said.

Srebrenica, a town in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was the site of the most brutal event of the Bosnian war: the massacre over three days of an estimated 7,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbian forces.

“Serbs cannot believe their countrymen did these things, so there is sort of a collective denial going on,” said Bratislav Grubacic, a political analyst in Belgrade.

The trial of Milosevic will be a historic event. For the first time, a former head of state will be called to account for war crimes, including genocide.

The trial will consolidate the three indictments brought against Milosevic so that the charges can be presented together. Evidence from Kosovo will be heard first, followed by evidence from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia.

In connection with Kosovo, the tribunal prosecutor charged Milosevic with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war. The charges involving Croatia include violations of the Geneva Conventions, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war. Only the indictment involving Bosnia includes the charge of genocide. If found guilty, Milosevic would face life imprisonment.

Paul Williams, a law professor at the American University in Washington, who worked at the State Department in the early 1990s, helped to set up the tribunal. According to Williams, it has three main goals: to create an accurate historical record, to deter future leaders from allowing war crimes, and to make the individuals responsible for the crimes answer for them in order to spare the society collective guilt.

Milosevic has sought to undermine the tribunal’s mission in ways that play to a longtime Serbian sense of victimhood and of achieving heroism through grand defeats. Among his first public statements was that the tribunal is “a false tribunal” with no authority to put him on trial. It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that ought to be tried for war crimes, he said, since civilians were killed when the alliance’s forces bombed Serbia during the war in Kosovo.

Viewed through the Serbian looking glass, this defiant demeanor makes Milosevic a larger-than-life--potentially even mythical--figure in Serbia. In conversations now, people often mention that his transfer to The Hague occurred on St. Vitus’ Day, June 28, the same day Serbs fought the now legendary 1389 battle of Kosovo. They lost that battle spectacularly but elevated it into a heroic event by describing the defeat as the choice of a heavenly victory over an earthly one.

“He was delivered to The Hague on June 28, the holiest day for all Serbs,” said Andrija Vujovic, 24, a student of history at Belgrade University, who resents the Hague tribunal for a litany of reasons.

“This has begun to create a myth of Milosevic as a great fighter. It looks like The Hague is doing public relations for him,” Vujovic said, adding that although he dislikes Milosevic, the former president’s crimes were against the Serbian people, whom he bankrupted, not against the West.

In fact, the Hague tribunal and prosecutor Carla Del Ponte have said repeatedly that this is a trial of Milosevic alone, not of the Serbian people. But both because Milosevic’s basic policies are being called into question and because there has been little explanation of the purpose of the tribunal by the current government, people in Serbia find it easy to believe that they stand accused along with Milosevic. That view is being actively promoted by many prominent Serbs, including several lawyers who are acting as informal advisors to Milosevic.

“In the trial that starts on Feb. 12, Yugoslavia is on trial, Serbia is on trial,” said Zdenko Tomanovic, a Belgrade attorney who recently visited Milosevic and who gave a news conference last week.

From pensioners to university students, there appears to be considerable support here for Milosevic’s approach, along with a hardening of views toward The Hague and the West.

“It is obvious that this is a political court, and it’s obvious now that everything is fabricated and it’s mostly fabricated against the Serbian people,” said Dragan Petrovic, 77, who was reading a newspaper and chatting with friends by the Danube on an unseasonably warm January day.

“I support Milosevic in everything he is doing in The Hague. He is a superb patriot. He’s defending the Serbian nation, not himself,” added Petrovic, who said he likes Milosevic far more now than when he was president.

Many political leaders, lawyers and independent analysts have concluded that the only thing that might make the Hague proceedings credible, at least to the Serbs, would be a good defense of Milosevic.

Such a defense would permit questions about some of the gray areas in the Balkan wars and thereby create a more nuanced picture for the historical record. For instance, a defense lawyer--Milosevic has so far refused to hire one--might point out that although atrocities were committed by Serbs in Croatia, the result was the expulsion of tens of thousands of Serbs, many of whom continue to live as impoverished refugees in Serbia. And while Milosevic is now in prison in The Hague, the Croatian president at the time, Franjo Tudjman, was never called to account.

“You’ll never get an accurate historical record because Tudjman was never indicted,” said Williams, the former State Department lawyer. Tudjman died in December 1999, before the tribunal could charge him.

Additionally, before Milosevic took military action in Kosovo, there was considerable rebel activity there by the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, which was made up of ethnic Albanians. That is a crucial difference from the situation when Bosnian Serb military forces, supported by the Yugoslav army, began to kill and expel Bosnian Muslims, said Hurst Hannum, a law professor at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

“The expulsions in Kosovo began after the KLA had started a guerrilla war,” said Hannum, who is also co-director of the school’s Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution.

But no one feels as strongly about the need for a trial that Serbia will heed than the Serbian liberals, intellectuals and members of the government who opposed Milosevic. They see the Serbian point of view as well as that of the West, and they want to find a way for each to inform the other.

“It is very important to shed light on events, on what really happened, what took place,” said Dragoljub Micunovic, the speaker of the lower house of parliament.

“The Hague is writing the history of the Balkans, and one institution and one author is too few for it to be objective. We as a state have an obligation to help the Hague tribunal see all the facts--we would be helping the court but also the public to understand,” said Micunovic, who favors having the government hire a lawyer to represent the people if Milosevic refuses to retain one.

Liljana Smajlovic, a political analyst, said that for Serbs to consider the unbearable acts of violence that were committed during the period, it is important for them to hear the discussion from someone they have faith in, rather than Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the tribunal.

“If Serbs are told a story about how things happened that is clearly authentic and shows how people resort to such cruel behaviors, and if it’s told by someone they can trust, then they can begin to come to terms with it,” Smajlovic said.

“At the moment, Serbs see the trial as a fixed fight. It’s in the interest of the country that our case be stated to an international audience in a system that has a high standard of proof. Even when you list all the Serb arguments, there’s still the fact that bad things were done, but it allows people to stomach it,” she said.