Whenever I am in Belgrade, I go to see Dule. Dule is a former major in the Yugoslav army -- short, fat, and a louring anthology of Serbian resentment. I first met him when the memory of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica was still fresh. He told me that in Srebrenica "Muslims killed Muslims." Serbian forces, he explained, were driving the Muslims out and the Muslims got frightened, so they started killing each other.
Meanwhile, he said, the Serbs should definitely stick with Slobodan Milosevic. But hadn't the great leader just falsified the election results? Yes, but that wasn't Milosevic, "it was the people around him."
Over the years, it was fascinating to see his views change, and his personal memories with them. Three days after Milosevic fell, Dule was all civil and pro-European, like a man suddenly recovered from madness. Why, if Montenegro wanted to abandon Serbia too, that was fine by him. After all, he assured me, "Milosevic was a Montenegrin." (And, said the Germans after 1945, Hitler was an Austrian.)
A fortnight ago I was back in Belgrade. Everyone I met had been watching Milosevic defend himself before the tribunal in The Hague, slogging it out with the prosecutor Carla del Ponte: the Slobo vs. Carla show, a television soap. Dule too. He was in bed with the flu, so he couldn't receive me, but he passed on his views over the telephone.
The Milosevic trial was a disgrace, he said. Never before had a head of state been thus arraigned before a court. Milosevic was doing a great job: "He's fighting, and I admire him." Although, he added, "You know we never supported Milosevic." (Of course, of course, but may I just refer you to page 5 of my notebook entry for Saturday, March 8, 1997, open before me as I write?)
Once again, Dule speaks for much of Serbia. In a recent poll, 42 percent of those asked gave Milosevic 5 out of 5 for his performance at the Hague tribunal. More than two thirds said that the tribunal was biassed against Serbia, and more than half could not -- or would not -- name a single place where Serbs committed war crimes. This is a nation in denial, locked in a narrative of its own victimhood.
Syndrome of victimhood
The problem for enlightened Serbs is that the Milosevic trial is currently reinforcing that denial, and syndrome of victimhood, rather than breaking it open. People like Dule, who blame Milosevic less for starting the wars of the Yugoslav succession than for losing them, see him now as fighting bravely for Serbia against a victimizing world. There is even some danger of a backlash against the reforming Serbian government that delivered him to the Hague.
Does this mean the trial is a mistake? Certainly not. One might hope that a beneficial side effect would be to bring Serbs to confront the horrible things that were done in their name over the last decade. But that is not the main purpose. This is to establish an international standard and precedent by which certain crimes of extreme gravity and large scale, known as war crimes or crimes against humanity, will everywhere and always be pursued. No Fuehrer or Duce, no Pinochet, Amin or Pol Pot, should ever again feel themselves protected from the reach of international law by the palace gates of sovereignty. It may take years, but the world will hunt you down and call you to account.
For this, the court needs to be even-handed and above all suspicion. Carla del Ponte has investigated acts committed by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army and some prosecutions are expected. The prosecutors also looked at NATO bombings of civilians, but concluded these did not qualify as war crimes. Yet while there are just two international tribunals, on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the suspicion of bias will always remain. So we need the UN's new International Criminal Court, and we need the most powerful country in the world, the US, to join it and submit to its jurisdiction.
Even then, I doubt whether such a trial would have the desired effect in Serbia. Some say that in the longer term the evidence presented to the court will filter through into the national consciousness. Certain facts, at least, will be harder to deny. And it's true that today's students still learn about the Nazi crimes from the records of the Nuremberg tribunal. But it's also true that the Nuremberg tribunal produced in post-war Germany is precisely the kind of defensive reaction that we see in Serbia today. "Victors' justice" is not the best way for a defeated country to face up to its own historical responsibility.
A truth commission might resolve more
So what is? The answer, I believe, is a well-made truth commission. This is a model, tried and tested in countries from Chile to South Africa, in which a people confronts its own responsibility, in an open self-examination. Now Serbia does have a truth commission, convened by the country's new, democratically elected president, Vojislav Kostunica. But it's an odd kind of truth commission, consisting mainly of scholars charged with an historical investigation of the whole complex break-up of former Yugoslavia.
History is being written in the Hague, Kostunica told me, when we talked on my recent visit, and the Serbs must intervene to make sure it is written right. By "right" he means accurately and -- here's the rub -- with a fair attribution of blame to others, whether Croats, Bosnians, Americans or British, for their part in the tragedy. He is not looking for the public theater of a South African-style truth commission, with dramatic confrontations between victims and torturers, tearful confessions by secret policemen, reconciliations called for and even stage-managed by Archbishop Tutu. No, says Kostunica, "we don't want soap opera."
This seems to me wrong in two respects. First, the basic moral starting-point of countries confronting difficult pasts should be that you concentrate on what your own people did, not what others did to you. Admittedly, this is complicated by the fact that former Yugoslavia is now many different countries. But the principle remains: Serbs should face up to what Serbs did to others (and to fellow-Serbs), Croats to what Croats did, Bosnians to what Bosnians did, and, yes, the British to what we did -- or failed to do -- in the Balkans' terrible last decade.
But secondly, it is wrong because you do need the emotional public theater, even the "soap opera" of a South African-style truth commission to break through the immensely strong psychological barriers of denial. Those barriers are especially resistant when people feel themselves to be victims of history, as most Serbs do. For how can a victim also be a perpetrator?
It was only in the 1970s that an American soap opera, Holocaust, finally brought home to ordinary Germans, through personalizing and dramatizing, the true horror of the holocaust.
Today, Serbs have one historical soap opera on their television screens: the Slobo and Carla show from the Hague. They urgently need another: a domestically produced reality show. Only when they get it, will people like Dule begin to face the facts and remember.
Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, and the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
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