A voice of sanity in a country torn apart

The first person I met when I entered the old insurance company headquarters in The Hague that now houses the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was an old friend from Belgrade. I got to know Mirko Klarin during the now mythical days of Marshal Tito when Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims were required to take an annual oath (on the Old Man’s birthday) to follow his path of “brotherhood and unity.” Back then, I was a young freelance reporter for the Washington Post, waiting for Tito to die. (“Will the Russians invade?” was the question my editors asked most frequently back then, not “will the country fall apart?”) Mirko worked for the Yugoslav news weekly NIN. By origin, he was a Croat, but his ethnic identity was irrelevant to me, and most of his friends. I thought of him as a Yugo-slav, literally a “south Slav.”

Mirko now runs a news agency called SENSE that follows the work of the tribunal for outlets all over the former Yugoslavia. Running into him on my first day here was fortuitous because it was Mirko who first proposed a Nuremberg-style tribunal for Yugoslavia, back in May 1991, soon after the first clashes between Serbs and Croats. This was well before any real atrocities had been committed, but Mirko had an intuitive feel, based on what happened in the Balkans in World War II, for the terrible bloodletting that was to come. His idea was simple and, with hindsight, eminently reasonable. Why not hold a “mini-Nuremberg trial” before the massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocides rather than waiting until they were all over.

As a journalist, Mirko was particularly well placed to understand the forces that were pushing Yugoslavia to the brink. The fratricide began not as a real war but as a media war — with Serbian and then Croatian Communist era politicians using the media under their control to spread their hate propaganda. When NIN fell under the sway of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, Mirko and some of his friends went to work for a newspaper called Borba, a hitherto stodgy Communist party newspaper. As a federal Yugoslav institution, Borba was one of the very few media outlets not beholden to the ethnic politicians who controlled everything else. It became a voice of sanity as the country broke apart. Here is an extract from Mirko’s editorial of May 16, 1991:

There is no reason to leave the Yugoslav mini-Nuremberg for when this is all over. It would be much more cost-effective to do it before, or rather instead of. Huge savings could thus be made in terms of both human life and material goods. Not to mention the fact that the verdicts would be incomparably more lenient now than if the trial should take place — God forbid! — after six months or six years of widespread civil war. At present, some would still be able to claim diminished responsibility, but after tens or hundreds of thousands have been killed, this would be much more difficult. In brief, a mini-Nuremberg now — not after the war — would be in everybody’s interest, including the planners of the wars themselves.

Mirko based his call for the tribunal on the grounds that Milosevic and rival national leaders were already committing “crimes against humanity” by whipping up ethnic and religious hatred, in contravention to both the Yugoslav Penal Code and the international Convention on Genocide. Sadly, nobody listened to the journalistic prophet crying in the wilderness. It was not until 1993 that the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution establishing an “International Tribunal”– and then largely as a way to defuse demands for direct military intervention. By this time, Vukovar had been virtually razed to the ground, Dubrovnik had been shelled, and Sarajevo had been under siege for two years. The first indictments were not handed down until July 1995, two weeks after the Srebrenica massacre.

While he is only too aware of the criticisms that have been leveled at the tribunal — including its high cost (around $300 million a year), and seemingly interminable trials (Milosevic died while his trial was still in progress) — Mirko defends his brain child. Paraphrasing Churchill, he calls the tribunal “the worst form of delivering justice” to the people of the Balkans, “except for all the other ones that have so far been invented.” He points out that the annual cost of running the tribunal, and paying the salaries of its 900-odd employees, from judges to security guards, is the rough equivalent of one week’s expenses for the Bosnia peacekeeping force, known as I-For.

Two decades after he first came up with the idea, Mirko remains convinced that it was “absolutely necessary” to bring warlords responsible for the bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia to justice. He points out that the absence of a similar accountability mechanism (at least in the Balkans) after World War II made it very easy for politicians like Milosevic and his Croatian mirror image, Franjo Tudjman, to manipulate public opinion with their own version of history. “Our mistake was that we shoved the skeletons into the closet [after World War II], in the name of brotherhood and unity. We never really established what happened, and who was responsible for what. Now at least we will have some facts about the most important events in the war, independently established by an international tribunal.”