Yugoslavia Bargains With The Hague

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Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2002
Yugoslavia's cooperation with the Hague-based U.N. war crimes tribunal remains the biggest challenge for the post-Milosevic authorities in Belgrade. The issue is omnipresent but comes to the fore when relations with key Western countries are discussed and particularly when negotiations over credit arrangements, Yugoslav debts, and Western support for Yugoslavia's rejoining of international financial institutions, are in question.

In extraditing Milosevic to the Hague, the government of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic applied the tribunal's own statute, providing a rather complicated legal justification for doing so. According to the Yugoslav federal constitution, all international treaties, conventions, decisions, or statutes of organizations of which Yugoslavia is a member automatically become part of Yugoslav domestic law. At the same time, the Serbian constitution explicitly empowers the Serbian government to ignore or annul any decision of any federal institution if the decision is deemed contrary to Serbian national interests. The irony is that this very article of the Serbian constitution had been brought in by Milosevic himself back in 1989. So the Serbian government now simply argued that Serbian national interests were threatened by the federal state's refusal to implement the U.N. tribunal's statute. And the Hague tribunal statute itself stipulates that all states must meet any extradition request by the tribunal and that this obligation takes precedence over any national extradition law.

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The Serbian government decision showed that it is possible to cooperate with the tribunal even without a law on cooperation, but also that such cooperation will be limited to extradition. Many other areas of cooperation, such as the tribunal's access to the Yugoslav and Serbian national archives and the procedure of summoning witnesses, would be difficult to handle without a law. The guidelines of cooperation, which appear ever-expanding with no clearly defined limitations in sight, are also potentially problematic from Belgrade's point of view.

One of the conditions that has surfaced is the request for access to confidential military and intelligence archives, to which Yugoslav President Kostunica has openly stated his disagreement. The disagreement between Djindjic and Kostunica, who have opposed each other on just about every important policy matter, further complicates the matter. Their dispute over Milosevic also brought to light the discrepancy between Djindjic's real power and Kostunica's legitimacy, which stems from the popular mandate he received in the September 2000 elections. Kostunica's victory inspired the popular uprising against Milosevic two weeks later.

While the issue of extradition is no longer taboo, it remains a divisive force among politicians. The arrest and extradition in November of two Bosnian Serb war crimes suspects in Obrenovac near Belgrade by the elite Red Berets police unit resulted in a small mutiny. The members of the unit did not know who it was they were arresting. Many of them had participated in the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo and suspected that they too might one day find themselves accused of war crimes. They held street protests, including a blockade of an important road link. Those events called into question the government's ability to control the police.

In November, the weekly Reporter published a list of army and police officers who the paper said had been indicted by the tribunal. The development raised the temperature in the country sharply, even though the government denied the authenticity of the list. Djindjic threatened harsh measures against media outlets that publish unconfirmed information of such a divisive nature.

More than anything else, the atmosphere among leading politicians underlines the need to pass a law on cooperation with the tribunal. Without such a law, the cooperation is bound to continue on an ad hoc basis?usually coinciding with Serbian officials' visits to Western capitals or to the tribunal itself. In such an atmosphere, one often hears statements referring to the process of cooperation with the tribunal in market terms. Certain sections of the Serbian body politic even accused Djindjic of selling Milosevic too cheaply.

Meanwhile, the Serbian government maintains that it will continue to apply the tribunal statute directly if it finds that federal government policies harm Serbian interests. But it is not clear what criteria will be used when it comes to who will be extradited and when. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress has passed a resolution stipulating that the Bush administration cease supporting the government in Belgrade if it doesn't provide more evidence of cooperation with The Hague by 31 March. Human Rights Watch stressed in its annual report on Yugoslavia that the country did not cooperate with the court, except when extraditing Milosevic. Given the U.S. Congress deadline, the odds are that another high-profile extradition, carried out by the Djindjic government over the protests of Kostunica and his allies will follow soon.

The end result could be that the real purpose of the tribunal and the crimes it is meant to examine get obscured in people's eyes by the rapidly spreading impression that the process of cooperation with The Hague is a bargaining process in which the suspects are being "kidnapped and sold." As a country, Yugoslavia might come to be increasingly seen as a territory in which decisions are made by tribal leaders and not by institutions.

This article was edited and adapted from Transitions Online: Intelligent Eastern Europe. A longer version is available at: www.tol.cz. Petar Andric is Chief of Cabinet of the Serbian Justice Minister.