DOING BUSINESS WITH WAR CRIMINALS

Mark Almond explains how the

Saddam Hussein of the Balkans has become the apple of Lord Owen's eye

Question: When is a war criminal not a war criminal?

Answer: When he signs the Vance-Owen Plan.

SMILES all round greeted the signature of Slobodan Milosevic to the peace plan in Athens on 2 May. Praise was lavished on him as the architect of compromise, the apostle of peace. Lord Owen voiced the general gratitude: Milosevic was a man one could do business with. Listeners to Radio 4 heard Lord Owen glowingly describe the crucial moment in their tete-a-tete when the Serbian President leaned back 'in his chair with his arms behind his head' and observed that this was a 'deal I can live with'. According to the peace-making peer, `Milosevic lives in the real world.' If any- thing the subsequent decision of the Bosni- an Serb assembly to reject Milosevic's version of the Vance-Owen Plan simply added to the Serbian President's aura of sanctity. It was not always so, of course.

Only last December, the US Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, denounced Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal, putting him at the top of a list of nine Serbs whom the Bush administration belat- edly identified as the architects of mayhem in Bosnia.

The Clinton administration backed up the Bush rhetoric about war criminals 'You can run but you cannot hide' — by supporting a UN resolution to establish a tribunal to prosecute war criminals who had run amok in Bosnia. It looked as though the international community was about to outlaw the 'Serb Saddam'. Even British and European diplomats lined up to voice their outrage and to join in the cho- rus of threats against Belgrade.

The French ambassador to the UN, Jean-Paul Merimee, argued that the estab- lishment of a war crimes tribunal was not only necessary to punish the murderers and rapists in Bosnia but also because it would have a deterrent effect on possible future perpetrators of atrocities. 'Prosecuting the guilty is also to send a message to those who continue to commit these crimes, a clear message that they will be held respon- sible for their acts.'

It was left to the British ambassador, Sir David Hannay, to silence cynics inclined to dismiss the UN resolution on war criminals in Yugoslavia as meaningless rhetoric: 'I think that this is very important assurance for all those who have suffered in the for- mer Yugoslavia that their sufferings are not going to be set on one side simply because there is some diplomatic deal.' (9 p.m. News, BBC1, 22 February, 1993) Although the Nuremberg Court tried absentee defendants like Martin Bormann, Milosevic will have noted that the final terms of reference for the Bosnian tribunal to be set up in the Hague ruled out precise- ly that precedent. Instead the first rule of doomed international judicial do-gooding was invoked: first catchee monkey.

Television viewers may be forgiven for regarding Radovan Karadzic as the real war criminal. But in fact Milosevic's reti- cence about appearing before the cameras shows his importance. Running a war is a full-time occupation. Karadzic has time to do half a dozen interviews on any bomby day in Bosnia because he is a spokesman, not really in charge of what is happening. Milosevic has been preoccupied with run- ning the show.

Now it serves Milosevic's purpose to dis- tance himself from the wilder elements in Bosnia and no doubt they are upset about his 'betrayal'. They risk being sacrificed, but even the hardline General Mladic, who spoke so eloquently against accepting the Vance-Owen Plan at the Bosnian Serb Par- liament, was appointed to his post by Milo- sevic during his last 'moderate' period in the run-up to the prototype Vance Plan for Croatia. In Milosevic's 'real world', thugs are pawns like anyone else.

While western eyes were focused on the bombardment of Dubrovnik in the autumn of 1991, Milosevic was already preparing to unleash violence in still peaceful Bosnia. Some of the evidence of Milosevic's cyni- cism is almost comic: during a clandestinely tape-recorded discussion with Dr Karadzic about the supply of arms in preparation for the 'spontaneous' revolt of the Bosnian Serbs, Milosevic was interrupted by the need to tell the Yugoslav air force not to bomb Dubrovnik that day because 'there is a meeting of the European Community and it is not a good day for aviation'.

The peace mediators, Owen and Vance, have long shown a readiness for working with Milosevic. Small fry war criminals are condemned, but the very man who deliber- ately let slip the dogs of communal vio- lence in Yugoslavia is feted as a colleague on the long march to peace. None of Milo- sevic's well-attested actions are taken in evidence. Lord Owen has specifically ruled out any discussion of the oppression of 90 per cent of the population of Kosovo, Milosevic's policy which started the break- down of Yugoslavia. Indeed, Milosevic's arbitrary incorporation of the province into Serbia in 1989, which set off Slovene and Croat fears for their rights, is ignored by Lord Owen who has declared Kosovo an `integral part' of Serbia. The roots of this conflict lie in a period when the peace pro- cess was not even a glimmer in Lord Owen's eye.

Although Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the UN human rights investigator, noted in his widely ignored report that 'ethnic cleansing does not appear to be the consequence of the war but rather its goal', it has been essential for the 'ongoing peace process' to pretend that it is all the result of a misun- derstanding. Unfortunately, it is a malen- tendu which can only be resolved by using the chief ethnic cleanser as the go-between.

The very unanimity of the UN Security Council on the resolution to prosecute Milosovic and other Serbian war criminals should have aroused cynicism in the first place. A Chinese envoy's vote to prosecute ethnic cleansers must go down well in Tibet. Who today remembers that the jovial Russian ambassador to the UN Secu- rity Council, Yulii Vorontsov, used to shut- tle in and out of Kabul as the Soviet deputy foreign minister with special responsibility for class cleansing in Afghanistan?

Milosevic can take comfort from such people's presence in the councils of world morality. Above all, the UN's role in turn- ing the Khmer Rouge into a respectable participant in the Cambodian elections will greatly reassure the 'Butcher of Belgrade' of the insincerity of the international com- munity. Say what you like about Slobo, compared with Pol Pot he is a slouch when it comes to mass murder.

Mark Almond is a fellow of the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies.