The Hague trial: imperialist hypocrisy on display
Workers Power Global, Paris

Eight months after being taken against his will from Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic has gone on trial in the full glare of the world's media at the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) at the Hague. 

The ICT has charged Milosevic and four of his cronies with 66 counts of "crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war", including genocide, in some of the bloodiest and most notorious events of the series of wars that punctuated the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s - in Croatia (1991-92), the Bosnian war (1992-95), including the vicious massacre of thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica, and in Kosovo in 1999.

By any standards, Milosevic is guilty of at least encouraging, and often directly overseeing, some of the most brutally concentrated expressions of murderous chauvinist hatred seen in the final years of the 20th century. 

From the beginning of the break-up of the Yugoslav federation along national lines in the early 1990s, Milosevic deliberately fanned chauvinist hatred, allying himself with some of the most vicious racist thugs to be found on the planet, in particular the Bosnian Serb leaders Mladic and Karadic. Without a doubt, he is an anti-working class criminal with blood on his hands.

And yet the charade in the Hague, which will probably drag on for a couple of years, does not provide any reason for rejoicing. What emerges from the courtroom is not the sweet smell of justice, but the nauseating stench of hypocrisy.

The ICT is supposedly an expression of the will of "the international community" to prosecute "crimes against humanity". Its supporters claim it stands in the moral (and even legal) tradition of the Nuremburg Trials after the second world war, set up to indict leading Nazis for their war crimes. It is no such thing.

The Nuremburg trials were convened by a small group of victors to prosecute the losers for violation of the principle of state sovereignty by attacking other countries after September 1939. No more, no less. 

In fact when Milosevic's supporters tried to have Nato indicted for its illegal attack on Yugoslavia in much the same way the court prosecutors simply said there was no case to answer since the ICT was not set up to try such matters!

This court's very existence is a testament to the changed logic of the new world order. State sovereignty is not sacrosanct and US-led western imperialism will decide whose sovereignty is deemed worthy of overthrowing and when.

There is no jury, the second rate judges and prosecutors are appointed and accountable to nobody, and the victims of Milosevic's undoubted crimes - the masses in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and of course Serbia - have had absolutely no say in how the charges were framed, nor in the way the prosecution is being carried out.

Witnesses can give anonymous testimony with no possibility of cross examination.

Milosevic is undoubtedly guilty of terrible crimes, but virtually every step of the way he was aided and abetted by the very imperialist powers that today have the barefaced cheek to offload all the responsibility onto his shoulders.

In the wake of the collapse of Stalinism across Eastern Europe, the world's capitalists rubbed their hands with glee at their ideological and, they hoped, economic victory. Vicious demagogues like Milosevic, who had ridden to power in Serbia on a racist and chauvinist wave using quasi-fascist methods, were backed first by the Germans then by the US, as they plotted the national break-up of Yugoslavia, which inevitably heralded a bloody war.

Between 1991 and the end of 1994 between 200,000 and 400,000 people were killed in Croatia and Bosnia. These massacres, carried out primarily by Serb and Croat forces, but also by the Bosnian Muslims, were the direct consequence of imperialism's meddling in the region. 

The blood-spattered assassins were merely the final murderous link in a chain that led directly back to the diplomatic salons of Bonn, Washington, Paris and London. And yet none of these leaders are named as accomplices in Milosevic's crimes.

Sometimes, imperialist participation was even more direct. The notorious massacre of Srebrenica, with which Milosevic is charged, and which saw the "disappearance" of around 10,000 Muslims, took place under the direct gaze of French controlled Dutch UN soldiers. 

The UN claimed they had turned Srebrenica into a "safe haven" for Muslims from the surrounding regions. Tragically, the Muslims believed them and came in their thousands. In fact, Srebrenica was turned into a killing ground for the Bosnian Serb militias. The imperialists simply looked on.

The very countries that back the ICT are also directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Serbs, during the murderous NATO war against Serbia in 1999. In his initial comments, Milosevic has made some telling points about the vile hypocrisy of the imperialists in this respect.

The country that is most responsible for the bloody massacres in Yugoslavia yesterday and in Afghanistan today, the US, is not represented at the Hague. The US refuses to recognise the ICT, preferring to be judge and jury and dole out its own "justice" free from any interference from its "allies" and unrestricted by any international conventions.

The prisoners in Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo know that US "justice" is just as fictitious as that being supposedly meted out in the Hague.

Workers and militants should not waste a moment's sleep over Milosevic's predicament. Let him rot. But they should not be taken in for one instant by the imperialist lies and hypocrisy being spouted at the ICT. The real tragedy is that the victims have been deprived of the possibility of judging the butcher of Belgrade and his whole stinking system. 

Only the Balkan masses have the right to judge Milosevic and all the other war criminals - above all those in high office in the West. The people of Serbia should protest against further extraditions; the vast majority already oppose it anyway.

A reborn independent labour movement in the Balkans should launch its own multi-ethnic war crimes tribunal. Only they have an interest in seeing all the guilty put on trial, and rooting out the whole international system that led to such terror. True workers' justice is the last thing that will come out of the Hague.