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Of all the grand scenes on which he appeared for years, the ex-president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, now only one is left to him, the one he never dreamed about – in the Hague tribunal, where he is being tried for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during wars in Croatia, BiH and Kosovo. But he is using this one last stage and the spotlights on it far better than anyone could have assumed prior to this court process that the prosecutor’s office once described as “the trial of the century”. Obviously underestimated by the chief Hague prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who calculated that after seven months in jail Milosevic would become a broken man, condemned in advance by the jury of the world public opinion that long ago proclaimed him “the butcher and Hitler of the Balkans”, and probably aware of the fact that he will spend the rest of his life in some jail or other, the ex-president decided to play the game to the end, and to make the work as difficult and miserable as possible to those who incarcerated him.
In the first few weeks of this trial, ha set rather high goals for himself. In a courtroom where he sits in the defendant’s chair but also in the chair of his own lawyer, Milosevic also presents himself as the only true protector of the Serbian State and people; he stands firmly, chest out, as the apologist of each specific act of the Army and the police on Kosovo even when it would be wiser for him to claim that he never had heard of some events; he steps forward as prosecutor and witness also against the New World Order, NATO pact and their ally KLA; at every turn he tries to be the “enemy of the court”, one who obviously knows quite well that the battle for the credibility of the Hague Tribunal is not completely over; sort of along the way he tries to derogate his Serbian ideological opponents whom he describes as “the marionette government in Belgrade”; he portrays himself as a victim of judicial violence of the international community, and intends to develop into an icon of anti-globalist resistance; in the final count, he thinks he may acquire the status of a martyr and hero so that, apart from the short-term increase in sympathies for him, he might even throw a few pieces of political profit to some political groupings in the country.
Such strategy already produced some results for Milosevic in the Hague. Immediately after the October 2000 changes in Serbia, he practically disappeared from the list of the most popular politicians and slid, month after month, towards assured oblivion in which he probably would have perished, had it not been for this trial. In the last year and a half he was usually “flying under the radars” of public opinion poll takers, who barely noticed, or did not register at all, his presence and influence on the political scene. Only a few days after the start of the court process in the Hague, Milosevic was again “caught” on those very same radars, where he soared to the fifth place, a very high rating. In an opinion poll in which the citizens rated the politicians with numbers ranging from one to five, Milosevic won 2.7 (previously he remained usually under 2), and only four men outperformed him – Vojislav Kostunica, Miroljub Labus, Mladjen Dinkic and Zoran Djindjic. Research also shows that Milosevic today can count with the support of approximately one quarter of the electorate. He is cheered by the partly consolidated supporters of the previous regime, but also by a number of abstains from the last elections, and even by a small number of DOS supporters, those who, undoubtedly, accept some of his Hague argumentation.
In the first analyses of this phenomenon, it was suggested that this rapid rise of Milosevic’s popularity ought not to concern excessively the DOS authorities whose rating is still influenced mainly by the conflicts inside their own coalition. Most analysts think that the popularity swell of the jailed leader of SPS has already reached its maximum and that it is a direct reflex of a compassion-producing event with Milosevic as a “victim”, rather than a significant political capital to which a concrete political option might be pinned. Such evaluations are largely founded on the fact that the Hague process will soon enter a prosaic phase in which the sorrows of war, mention of the dead, and testimony of survivors will push aside Milosevic’s current self-assuredness, arrogance, even a certain domination over the prosecutors who, at the start of the trial, looked unconvincing. As soon as this “heroic phase” of the defense of the most famous Hague prisoner is over, and when the prosecution starts to speak more convincingly about the horrors of war and about Milosevic’s responsibility, many of those who every morning impatiently awaited at the TV sets to see the Hague will, of their own volition perhaps, start turning off their TVs. On this evaluation also is founded a belief, rather widespread among the analysts, that whatever is happening with Milosevic in the Hague is only a twitch, perhaps one of the last such, of a loser, and that no one will subsequently be able to pick up any important political points from it. According to some opinions, Milosevic might one day give a false ray of hope to those who still support him, just as Draza Mihajlovic, leader of the Chetnik movement in World War Two, did. At the beginning of 1990s, many people perceived Draza Mihajlovic as a man whose trial in 1945 had a clear political dimension and who, in fact, during the WW2, belonged to the anti-fascist movement to a far higher degree than it was admitted in official history books. Despite this, all who tried to achieve something with Draza as an icon, in Serbian politics, remained on the margins, failing to draw from his destiny any palpable political profit.
If the ex-president of Yugoslavia, therefore, has no chance whatsoever “to arrive for the second time amongst the Serbs”, if Milosevic cannot ever be seriously resurrected politically, nor serve as a bridge for the defeated political forces to come nearer to power one more time, then what puts so much enthusiasm, strength and ambition into his appearances in the courtroom, in a fight that many believed was totally lost for him even before it started? Milosevic evidently does not share in the opinion of those who say that his peak hour in the Hague is already behind him, nor does he seem to believe the thesis that, in time, he will be buried by an avalanche of evidence that would smother his defense, now rather vigorous, and reduce it to apathetic sitting in the courtroom. So far, in his confrontation with the witnesses, he did not even try to defend himself in the usual manner of those who worry what the verdict will be – his sole intention was to discredit the witnesses, in the Yugoslav public opinion, as men who in one way or another supported the KLA separatists and terrorists. He forced the first witness, Mahmut Bakali, to confess that the problems in Kosovo did not start with Milosevic, and that the Albanian wish to live in a separate State is at least several decades old. Then he managed to cast doubt, again in the eyes of his domestic public, at the two “strong” witnesses who brought with them numerous documents about the Serbian war crimes in Kosovo: one admitted that, as a “humanitarian worker”, he frequently attended the sessions of the KLA command, while the other confirmed that he was fighting since 1981 for a unification of all territories where Albanians live. All this does not mean that the court will discard the entire testimony of such witnesses as unconvincing nor that it will disregard those parts of their testimonies that are about the victims.
Milosevic is, however, trying to “improve” his place in history, and he obviously feels very clearly that such discrediting of witnesses will, in the judgement of those whom he is really addressing, prove that he had “only” defended his country from terrorists and separatists. At the same time, he is aware of the inclination of any nation to listen and memorize selectively, to pick and choose, from all that is heard in the courtroom, only a half of the story, the half more favorable to them. Thus the Kosovo Albanians will remember only the fragments where victims were mentioned, while to the ears of the Serbian audience (even to many political adversaries of Milosevic) incomparably more pleasant will be the tale of the criminal doings of NATO pact and NATO’s KLA allies.
The ex-president of FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) would probably be also very disinclined to believe that the very start of the trial was his “starry moment” that already slipped into the past. Even if, in the next few weeks, the cameras get slowly and gradually turned off (some, apparently, on a political directive, because the live broadcasts are having such undesirable effects), he reckons that the appearance of his witnesses will in fact be the moment when the Yugoslav media reporters, and the cameras of the global TV networks, will return to the Hague. He includes among “his” witnesses Richard Holbrooke, for instance, and many others with whom he negotiated, for years, about the fate of the ex-Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The arrival of such witnesses will once again make this trial spectacular, and it will also give Milosevic a chance to shed light on some until now less known, shadier sides of his political life, including many deals that he made with world’s potentates; also, to fulfill one of the goals which he set for himself after arriving into the Hague, namely, to drag down with himself into disrepute as many as possible of those who used to consider him their main negotiating partner in the Balkans and who, in his opinion, then betrayed him and sent him into the defendant’s bench. If these witnesses somehow wiggle away from testifying, which they conceivably might do, it will cast a serious shadow on this entire court process, allowing Milosevic to stand as, in fact, a true victim of international community’s judicial violence; he seems to count seriously on this.
After only a few weeks of the “trial of the century”, Milosevic can count among his “successes” many of the trial’s adverse effects that had not been anticipated. Research shows that the Hague tribunal is the only international institution that, in the perception of Yugoslav public opinion, is not improving its rating at all (even NATO improved its image), and, apparently, an increasing number of people here think that a trial like this, and the attitude of Karla Del Ponte’s team, can hardly produce the desired frank look into the crimes, or inter-ethnic reconciliation either. From an even earlier time Milosevic was able to count as a sort of his “Hague profit” the more lasting consequences of the manner of his extradition to the Tribunal. The way he was arrested and packed away to the Hague became a lasting source of instability and “a substrate for new rifts in Serbian social tissue”, while the pompously heralded “getting closer to catharsis” failed to materialize. Shoving a politically dead Milosevic under the Hague rug, which many, including the international community, demanded, is producing only half-way results so far – the politically dead man is arising and walking home again, with the ambition to become, in time, a martyr, a hero, and an icon of certain political options.
It is not yet the time, however, to hurry with an estimate that there can be no possible political profit from the Milosevic trial, nor with a conclusion that Carla Del Ponte has not enough firm evidence in her hands to prove that the ex-president of Yugoslavia is guilty. There is more than enough time for various surprises and turnarounds. In such a long and complex trial it is too early for any definitive conclusion except one – that in the next several years Slobodan Milosevic will certainly have to listen to a lot of stories about the results of his policies, thus facing some crimes that perhaps he was previously unwilling to hear about, while the West, and some of the media, and even the Tribunal itself will have to face some unpleasant truths, and some crimes and deceits that everybody, all of them together, had until now tried to ignore in silence.
Copyright © Nenad Lj. Stefanovic & Alexandria Press, 2002
