[ALBSA-Info] Why Milosevic Matters - NEWSWEEK

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Why Milosevic Matters

NEWSWEEK’s Roy Gutman, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of war 
crimes in Bosnia, reflects on how the trial of the former Yugoslav strongman 
could deter other would-be dictators. A Web exclusive 
By Roy Gutman

When I heard last week that Slobodan Milosevic was on his way to The Hague, I 
was in Zagreb, Croatia—one of the former Yugoslav leader’s first targets in 
the series of wars that began, almost to the day, 10 years earlier. It was in 
Croatia in 1991 that Milosevic first developed his style of war: using 
artillery to level populated cities and terrorize their inhabitants; 
paramilitaries to kill, rape and plunder; bombers to attack public buildings, 
including the presidential palace; and all forces combined to “cleanse” an 
ethnic group from lands they had lived on for centuries.     
         
          
BUT MY FIRST THOUGHT on hearing the news was not the horrendous wars of 
dissolution of the multi-ethnic Yugoslav state so much as the more joyful 
event that preceded them. Just 18 months earlier, I had been in East Berlin 
the night the Wall came down, watching East German border guards starting to 
attack that horrible symbol of an entire era with a pickax. For me, what 
linked November, 1989, and June, 2001, was that on both occasions I had 
trouble believing that what I was seeing was true. Both occasions were 
historic turning points; both exemplify real news: something that comes as a 
surprise because you’ve given up anticipating it. 

Milosevic being sent to face a U.N. tribunal may seem a small event compared 
to the demise of the Wall. Yet his handover constitutes a breakthrough that 
helps define this new era as much as anything in the last decade. Britain’s 
arrest of Augusto Pinochet in 1998 proved that ex-heads of state no longer 
have sovereign immunity. But the ailing Chilean president is unlikely to go 
on trial. This time—unlike the Nuremberg trials, which were convened by the 
victors of World War II—an accused major leader will have to account 
personally for his alleged misdeeds in an internationally recognized court of 
the United Nations. This is something that has never before occurred in 
history. 

This region of southeastern Europe is often said to produce more history than 
it can consume. The correlate for journalists is that the region produces 
more stories and story ideas than most editors—and the public—can consume. 
The reason I could stick with the story of Milosevic’s wars longer than most 
colleagues is that I gave up trying to focus on the political machinations of 
the time. Instead I devoted my energies to reporting about the war crimes. 

Unlike ordinary crimes, where states investigate, convict and incarcerate, it 
is states or armies themselves that commit war crimes. Anyone who hones in on 
this issue inevitably risks antagonizing that state—and that means the state 
can act against you if its leaders feel your reporting is causing them harm.

In my case, I was unable to obtain a visa to Yugoslavia from 1993 until even 
after the overthrow of Milosevic last October. I have since heard that 
Milosevic himself kept a small blacklist of foreign journalists to whom he 
would not grant press visas. His nationalist-leaning successor, Vojislav 
Kostunica, who became president after a national uprising last October, also, 
I was told, carried on the practice for his first few months in office.

 On the other hand, if you see visa restrictions as a challenge rather than a 
barrier, there are always ways around them. When access is closed off to 
reporters (as in Kosovo just two years ago, when Milosevic’s forces used 
terror tactics to deport close to a million Albanians), there are usually 
witnesses and survivors. By questioning them and cross-checking their 
assertions, it is possible to reconstruct the facts of a story. That is how I 
first reported in 1992 that Milosevic’s Bosnian Serb cronies had created a 
string of concentration camps in northern Bosnia. I could not get to the 
camps, but searched for survivors after hearing a tip about the existence of 
a network of camps.

Uncovering the story of Omarska and other concentration camps was one of the 
most discouraging moments of my journalistic career. True, the story received 
worldwide attention, and the Bosnian Serbs closed down some of the camps 
following the expose. But what I realized from the moment I heard about the 
camps was that global powers, starting with the United States and its allies, 
had deliberately decided to close their eyes to the atrocities taking place. 
No amount of solid reporting was going to change it.

But as events have shown, major states do get interested over time, 
especially if there is a public outcry, as with the Bosnian camps. Readers 
and viewers want individuals and states to be accountable—and impunity tends 
to generate criticism of the governments that fail to respond. Sooner or 
later, statesmen realize that if carried on a big enough scale, 
state-approved crimes against humanity challenge the whole world order.  

 The danger is that failure to punish such crimes is taken by other would-be 
imitators as a green light. The converse can also hold true: a decision to 
end impunity and instill accountability even in one obscure Balkan location 
can affect the way the world will be run for decades to come.

The immediate impact of the reporting on “ethnic cleansing” in 1992 seemed 
modest at the time. Media reports provided a vehicle used by human rights 
advocates at the United Nations to demand the creation of The Hague Tribunal, 
which will now decide Milosevic’s fate.

When I first visited the headquarters in early 1994, the Tribunal consisted 
of just the deputy prosecutor, Graham Blewitt of Australia, sitting in a big 
empty room leased from an insurance company in The Hague. Today, with three 
trial chambers, a full complement of judges, sound procedures, many trials 
behind it, and Milosevic in the lock-up, the Tribunal is well-positioned to 
write history. 

As this is written from Zagreb, I must recall that one of the signal 
omissions of my profession, not to mention Western governments, occurred 
during the Croatian war, which occurred shortly after the end of the Gulf 
war. At least 10,000 people, mostly civilians, died in the Croatian war of 
secession in the second half of 1991. More significant, it proved to be the 
harbinger of the Bosnian war, in which at least 200,000 civilians were 
killed. All of the war crimes that occurred in Bosnia occurred here on a 
smaller scale. Most of us reporters missed the cues, focusing attention on 
the spectacular events—the Yugoslav Army’s shelling of Dubrovnik, for 
example—rather than the daily seizing of territory and brutal mistreatment of 
civilians in far less glamorous locales.

Had we been looking for the war crimes, I think we could have exposed 
Milosevic’s intentions a good deal earlier. I don’t know whether that would 
have aroused the international public at the time, but for a journalist, the 
responsibility is not for the outcome. Our responsibility is to ring the 
alarm bell the moment we see something alarming.