Checking the Pressure

An article in the London Observer by David Lee and Jonathan Culvert on May 18 echoed in Serbia with its story that the outgoing British government had stopped the Hague War Crimes Tribunal investigation into Slobodan Milosevic’s involvement in organizing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The Observer article said the British government denied tribunal investigators key intelligence data acquired through wire taps on the Belgrade-Pale phone lines to protect financial deals made with the Serbian President. The authors recalled the contract signed by the Serbian government and Nat West Markets and the 96,000 pounds sterling Milosevic allegedly contributed to the Conservative party in 1992 and 1993.

Although many claims made in the article don’t seem too convincing, it is interesting because it has reopened the slightly forgotten issue of Milosevic’s responsibility for the war in the former Yugoslavia, especially the crimes committed by Serb forces. More specifically, it opens the question of whether Tribunal chief prosecutor Louise Arbour has any realistic chance of adding Milosevic’s name to the list of indicted war criminals and causing an unprecedented crisis in FR Yugoslavia’s relations with the rest of the world. That problem can be divided into two parts; one legal, the other diplomatic. Has enough evidence has been gathered to date to raise charges against Milosevic, and is the international community prepared to lend support to those charges?

A draft of the charges against Milosevic was drawn up a year ago but not by the Tribunal: the document Prima Facie Case for the Indictment of Slobodan Milosevic was drawn up by Paul Williams and Norman Seegar and was commissioned and printed by the Alliance for the Defense of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a lobby group based in the US. Although the bias of that group in favor of one side in Bosnia is indisputable, the document should not be disregarded as a propaganda trick because its authors are serious legal and international policy experts: Williams is a former legal advisor to the State Department with a Cambridge diploma while Seegar teaches national security at the marine corps school in Virginia and is an Oxford graduate.

In the introduction, the two authors said that European and American politicians tend to say Milosevic’s guilt is a known fact but that it is impossible to prove. The next 50 pages are a pure legal analysis which uses some 300 sources and testimonies of Milosevic’s involvement in the war and his control over key Serb army and para-military formations in Croatia and Bosnia to contradict the politicians’ claims. The sources in the document are mainly from Serbia and interestingly weren’t taken from the independent media but from the state-controlled media. The crown witnesses include Borisav Jovic, BSA commander General Ratko Mladic, former VJ commander General Zivota Panic, Mira Markovic, Zoran Lilic and Ljubisa Ristic. The authors concluded that Milosevic had to know about the operations against non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia from the start of the war; that he showed a high degree of power, influence and control over federal and republican armed forces, volunteer formations, and the armed forces in Serbia, the Republika Srpska and Republic of Serb Krajina during the war; and that he did nothing to prevent crimes or bring the perpetrators to justice. The document quotes the Tribunal statute to claim that under the chain of command principle Milosevic is a) responsible for the crimes committed by Serb forces; b) guilty of not preventing those crimes; and c) guilty for not ordering an investigation into those crimes.

Although the Tribunal made no official comment on the Williams-Seegar document, a source close to the Tribunal told VREME that the document "was received with interest but the manner in which the charges were raised in it does not fit into the way the Tribunal operates".

"All that is very impressive but press quotes are not the right material to raise charges and Williams and Seegar offered nothing more. The Tribunal operates from the bottom upwards: first it concludes that a crime has been committed, then it searches for the perpetrators, then for whoever might have ordered the crime. There’s still a long way to go before Milosevic is charged."

The source added that the trials against Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic did implement the chain of command principle and made extensive use of media reports and interviews but said that the blame of Karadzic (as RS supreme commander) and Mladic (as BSA commander) is obvious and indisputable while the whole thing is much more complicated with Milosevic. "We need something stronger than a lot of circumstantial evidence to charge a head of state," the source said and added that no charges have been raised against anyone who was in direct contact with Milosevic. "When you see one of his subordinates charged, for example a ranking police officer, you can expect Milosevic to be charged."

That sheds light on the greatest problem facing everyone who would like to see Milosevic in the Hague: the Serbian president was obviously guided by the principle of plausible deniability which has existed in the West for a long time and means that while planning morally dubious operations the head of state systematically leaves himself room to deny knowledge and involvement. Because of that "Serbia was not involved in the war", nor were the goals of the war ever made public, nor did Milosevic ever consider being the federal head of state for the duration of the war. Finally, that principle was the reason why all the para-military formations were veiled in secrecy and misinformation about their origin, manpower and purpose.

If the Serbian President was aware of the possibility that things could go wrong during preparations for the war, that does not mean his subordinates shared his doubts: remember that in 1991 the general belief was that the enemies of Serbdom would scatter at the sounds of guns and that in the spring of 1992 it was hard to find a Serb who thought the war in Bosnia would last over three months. Hardly any precautions were taken in terms of radio and telephone communication allowing virtually anyone to listen in on important conversations. VREME published part of a stenogram of a phone conversation between Milosevic and Karadzic in September 1991. Karadzic asked for weapons and Milosevic told him to contact General Nikola Uzelac, commander of the Banja Luka corps. That conversation, which included Milosevic’s assessment that the Bosnian Serbs shouldn’t bomb Kupres from the air the next day because of a European Council session, was never denied.

If VREME managed to get its hands on tapes like that, imagine how easy it must have been for the specialized Western intelligence services. That takes us back to Observer article which explained the source of intelligence data on Milosevic: that data came from the British monitoring base in Cyprus which is officially the 9 signals regiment attached to the Government Communications Headquarters on Cyprus. The Observer said some members of that regiment were in Bosnia as part of the UN force. Link that fact to the fact that blueprints of Bosnia’s telephone and transmitter lines were probably handed over to Western intelligence services at the start of the war and it’s clear that no conversation between Belgrade and Pale could have been kept secret. Even scrambled lines could have been monitored because the encoding equipment that was used is antiquated. The problem is that intelligence data like that can hardly be presented in court in raw form.

A different category of possible evidence could be available to the Hague Tribunal from other sources. Some reports said that Karadzic started collecting documents which could help him drag Milosevic to the Hague as soon as relations between them grew cold. That moment is dangerously close. US media reported recently that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is starting an unprecedented campaign of political and diplomatic pressure against Belgrade, Pale and Zagreb to extradite those people accused of war crimes to the Hague. Sources in Washington said that maximum economic pressure will be exerted against anyone who disobeys. With slightly more discretion, other informed sources in Washington told VREME that preparations for the arrest of indicted war criminals (primarily Karadzic and Mladic) are well underway and added that military units assigned to the operation have drawn up their plans. The go-ahead almost came last month but SFOR withdrew its approval at the last moment which left many people in the Hague angry. Those sources said that if Albright’s mission succeeds that approval will come quickly.

What Karadzic could say about Milosevic is still just a matter of speculation but no doubt he has things to say. Seselj should also not be forgotten since he once threatened to reveal evidence against Milosevic. General Nedeljko Boskovic and Colonel Veselin Sljivancanin voiced veiled readiness in separate interviews to testify against the Serbian President on condition of immunity. The Serbian President could find some consolation in the fact that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman is facing the same problem. Tudjman’s one time close associates Stipe Mesic and Martin Spegelj testified against him in the Hague recently. Although the chances of Tudjman going to the Hague are minimal because of his health, it’s easy to imagine the two national leaders complaining to each other that their closest associates have betrayed them.

All of that still doesn’t explain why the Hague Tribunal has done so little in the four years since it was set up. It hasn’t raised charges against any of the leaders, apart from Karadzic and Mladic, especially not ranking officials in the Croatian and Serbian police who played key roles in the war.

The conclusion that could be drawn, based on the Observer article and others over the past few years in the West, is that there’s a silent but persistent war being waged among Western intelligence services over the intelligence gathered in the former Yugoslavia. The claims of British obstruction of the investigation against Milosevic are reported to have come from American intelligence sources; an Observer journalist was told that the Americans wanted to hand that information to the Tribunal chief prosecutor but were stopped by the British. The British are angry over that accusation and refuse to accept that the Conservative government had been so corrupt that it could sell out to Milosevic. Although the Foreign Office never comments news reports about intelligence services, a Foreign Office official told VREME that: "If someone did reach an agreement on immunity with Milosevic, wouldn’t it be logical for that person to be the one who negotiated with him the most, Holbrooke for example". Recall the story of Ceda Mihajlovic which the New York Times launched in April 1995 claiming he had documents to prove Milosevic’s guilt, and other less sensational articles in the Washington Times and Newsday, and there’s more proof for that claim.

The actions of the intelligence services are in accord with their very nature: they want to find out as much as possible and reveal as little as possible to everyone else. All that is possible thanks to the obvious lack of political will to allow the Hague Tribunal to go ahead at full steam. If that will did exist all the rivalry would be forgotten immediately, the Tribunal would constantly be just short of funds and the full truth about the war, crimes and victims would be revealed.

Something similar happened in the imposing of peace in Bosnia: a military intervention was delayed for years while the UN, US, Britain, France and Russia traded accusations before they finally reached an agreement. For now, the leading Western states see the Tribunal as more useful as a threat than as an institution that does its job.