Balkanalysis.com

A retired waiter, 56 year-old Radiboj Milutinovic, has been spurned in his singular proposal for world peace, that is, to marry Hague hag Carla Del Ponte. She sent back the Montenegrin wine, the flowers, the chocolates- even the Serbian raki. With the way things are going, however, it looks like this may have been her best current offer.

Once respected as the supreme avenger of abstract Western values, Carla Del Ponte has suffered the unsurprising reversal of fortunes fated by her many years of overblown, overweening hubris. From the beginning, it has been argued again and again that the prosecutors had more to lose here than the defendants- always the reality in hastily thrown together, guilty-before-proven-innocent trials. The West’s fatal error was in extraditing Milosevic, rather than forcing him to face justice in Serbia. The rest, as everyone knows, has been monkey games and shenanigans from the wily ex-president. In this court of the absurd, not only are the prisoners’ cells better than the homes of their fellow Balkanians, they even win elections they will never be allowed to honor. Placing a gag order on Milosevic and Seselj- hardly anyone’s idea of human rights- has only served to show Del Ponte’s fury and frustration, how she has become an international laughingstock rather than a messiah.

It was a fair game, however, and she was playing to win. Human rights aside, it has long been clear that the Hague’s inquisitor-in-chief saw the tribunal as a chance to win accolades and, at the very least, international credibility for herself as a prosecutor. However, she has won neither, being pulled off the Rwanda case last year and still unable to find a smoking gun against Slobodan Milosevic. Now, her obsession with finding Radovan Karadzic is increasing in proportion with her chances of not apprehending him. And so the woman who once received the firm and constant financial and rhetorical backing from Western leaders is now apparently provoking only cringes in the corridors of power. All things considered, it was hardly a tragedy.

The most telling indicator of Del Ponte’s demise- considering that she presides over a kangaroo court set up by the Americans- is that Washington desperately wants her to step off: according to the Guardian, American plans to reconfigure the power structure of the court is an attempt to “rein her in.” The sentiment is that the tribunal has gotten out of hand, and become far too much of a personal vendetta of one woman against the indictees. The paper quotes a tribunal official as saying, “…Del Ponte has got too much independence. You’ll never see such extensive powers vested in one person in international justice again.”

This is epoch-making stuff. The UN Security Council, which oversees the court, decided that the tribunal should be closed by 2010: “…Ms Del Ponte has to complete all trials by 2008 and issue indictments by the end of this year. She has already reduced the scope of her investigations and hopes to charge about 25 suspects by the end of the year.” A bitter pill for a zealot whose statements often indicate she would like the entire population of Serbia in jail, just to be on the safe side.

It is in this context- thwarted, ridiculed and with time running out- that we can understand Del Ponte’s histrionic performance yesterday. Even more over the top than usual, the frumpy dowager charged that fugitive Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is hiding in- Belgrade. NATO’s continuing failure to catch the elusive Karadzic is apparently starting to affect her sanity.

“I received just last week information from a credible source that even Karadzic is now in Belgrade,’ Del Ponte told reporters in Brussels. ‘So Belgrade is now a safe haven for our fugitives… Karadzic is now residing in Belgrade.’”

The failure to think through the effects of statements such as this is probably why the internationals are wincing at Carla’s every enunciation. Serbian PM Zoran Zivkovic told Reuters that Del Ponte

“had never given ‘either information or any other kind of help which would lead to locating or catching the suspects’ or prove they were not on Serbian land.

…She (Del Ponte) predicted he would be caught ‘this year,’ as she did in 2003 and 2002. Radical Party chief Tomislav Nikolic said sarcastically that if Karadzic were in Belgrade the ‘pro-American government… would rush to hand him over (and) extradite him in the blink of an eye.’

‘Why doesn’t she tell us the address? How can it be proven he’s not hiding here? She might as well say he’s in London,’ Nikolic told Reuters.”

The enormous amount of time and taxpayer money NATO has spent over the past few years in the symbolic hunt for symbolic fugitives is approaching its penultimate moment. The Hague prays that US Army U.S. Maj. Gen. Virgil Packet, commander of NATO troops in Bosnia, will be proven right when he speaks confidently of nabbing Karadzic, who is apparently “beginning to choke” under NATO pressure. Just as likely, however, the fugitive will elude their grasp, precisely because even those Serbs who dislike Karadzic loathe Del Ponte even more.

Bosnia viceroy Paddy Ashdown announced on Monday that the assets of 10 Bosnian Serbs had been frozen , including those of the former Bosnian Serb president, Mirko Sarovic. Sarovic will also be forced to resign as vice president of the Serb Democratic Party. Already formidable critics in Serbia, such as Vojislav Kostunica, have protested the heavy-handed interventionism of the West here. So far, despite its new eagerness to placate Del Ponte, NATO has not succeeded in doing anything besides irritating people.

And so, whether Karadzic sings or not, the Hague opera will wind itself up before too long. It’s already winding down, as the Guardian testified: “…Judge Theodor Meron, the tribunal’s president, said that some of those indictments may be thrown out, not on the usual grounds of prima facie evidence, but because the suspects were not senior enough.”

Clearly, Carla is interested in the big fish, because she is interested in being seen as the big fisherman. Aside from that, however, this new consideration merely confirms the Western rationale governing international justice: that the big fish are the only ones worth catching, and this for their symbolic value more than real. A pretentious and well-funded tribunal can only be defended in itself if its indictees are more prestigious than it.

With its particular variant of international war crimes jurisprudence, the West is not trying to punish any real crimes here; the point is not to crack down on anyone who actually pulled the trigger or dropped the blade. Their part in the murder may be unfortunate, but it pales in comparison to that of the archetypal evil mastermind behind it all. World War II may have ended almost 60 years ago, but the Hitler Model for international justice remains, even if fleshing it out has more often than not proved tough.

And so reality has to be force-fit into a costume it can’t quite wear. The point here is to stage a kind of morality play, an instructive fable to reinforce the prevalent discourse of political responsibility. According to it, only “senior” officials, all the way up to a country’s leader, should be the sole targets of any inquisition. Regardless of whether
they actually did anything, their role as personalities and figureheads gives them the same power over evil as our own personalities and figureheads apparently have over the good. This desperate attempt, a reification of the state as the fundamental negotiating body in international affairs, only betrays the state’s increasing powerlessness in a changing world.

However, it does support the American ideal of equating a population with a state and its leader, to facilitate war against an easily-understood single personality. So it was with Milosevic, and so with Saddam. So far, the former has merely humiliated the prosecution and wasted its time; the latter could, if allowed an open and public defense, reveal much more incriminating details regarding his past relationships with sitting American leaders- revelations that could prove more than just embarrassing for the Bush Administration. First of all, however, they have to make it through Milosevic’s defense- set to start May 19th, and sure to cause controversy.

Learn how to support this website – by buying your books from Amazon.com.