Tyranny on trial

It was only a matter of time before a shaven and shorn Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader living in disguise...

It was only a matter of time before a shaven and shorn Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader living in disguise for the past 13 years as alternative healer Dragan Dabic, was brought to trial in the UN8217;s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ICTY at The Hague, Netherlands. Facing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity inflicted on Bosniak Muslims, Croats and other non-Serb civilians during the Bosnian wars of 1992-95, it is not difficult to imagine how the ensuing drama will shape up.

On trial will be History itself, the horror inflicted to ethnically cleanse the region and facilitate the creation of a Greater Serbia, killing around 200,000 and making at least a million people homeless. The tribunal prosecutors will try to nail the mastermind of the Bosnian horrors, eager to make up for the opportunity lost when the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, died mid-trial in 2006. The new pro-Western Boris Tadic-led coalition government will bargain hard for a European Union membership, having delivered their pound of flesh through Karadzic8217;s capture. And on the streets of Serbia and in the hearts of Serbians, Karadzic will forever remain a hero 8212; a man of refined tastes, a professional psychiatrist, a dabbler in music and literature who had the gumption to take up Serbia8217;s cause. Of course, there will not always be 10,000 people organizing pro-Karadzic rallies and clashing with the police.

That paradox, present in Karadzic8217;s person, is at the heart of the moral problem that confronts the trial of most war criminals, accused as they are of usually aiding and abetting, almost never personally committing, grisly massacres on unprecedented scales. Though universally condemned, a lack of political resolve to bring them to justice often allows them a free run 8212; many Nazi leaders led public lives, often without a change in name in post-war Germany; Karadzic lived in disguise under an assumed name in Belgrade, but frequently visited his family, something that those on the hunt possibly could not have been unaware of.

Subsequent captures and trials whether ferreted out of a hole as Saddam Hussein was, a well-orchestrated kidnap as of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960,or Karadzic8217;s arrest on a Belgrade bus similarly demonstrate a singular unwillingness to engage with and confront the complex psychological motives that defy the conventional classification of right and wrong. Trials mostly turn into angry, rhetorical denunciations of the captured individual, failing to take into account the societal complicity vital to perpetrate such carnage.

Hannah Arendt8217;s controversial account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem, regards the failure to address this complex moral and legal challenge 8212; as to why an otherwise perfectly normal human being may yet be unable to distinguish between right and wrong 8212; as the biggest question that had gone unanswered. Eichmann was no ordinary criminal pleading 8220;not guilty8221; to escape retribution. He had invoked in his defence Immanuel Kants8217;s concept of the Categorical Imperative, the ultimate reason/ legislator that compels action in a given circumstance, located in this case in the Fuuml;hrer8217;s orders and the virtue of obeying them. For Karadzic, as head of his self-proclaimed Republica Srspka, such an imperative may have been the idea of Serbian nationalism itself, which justified the means adopted to assert the same. Which also probably explains why his brother Luka Karadzic, after meeting him in prison, said: 8220;Radovan still believes in God, and Justice8221;. The idea, for him, was the legislator.

Arendt counters Eichmann8217;s argument by accusing him of ignoring the principle of reciprocity, whereby the individual is his own moral legislator, which reduces their defence, whether in court or elsewhere, to a series of clicheacute;s. After fashioning murderous concentration camps and unleashing mass rapes on non-Serbs, Karadzic cannot possibly defend the blurring of moral right and wrong as a subjective position, prisoner to his priorities and notional prerogatives.

The Hague Tribunal prosecutors are already preparing for an 8220;exemplary trial8221; presumably for posterity, and though copious documents of the atrocities committed are already in place, it might be difficult to pin the blame on Karadzic, who was, after all, only a civilian head. Eichmann was hanged in Jerusalem in 1962, and Europe never expected to revisit the horrors of looking at tortured emaciated faces through barbed fences till trouble lacerated the Balkans. Karadzic is likely to get a life term, only to demonstrate the futility of human agency and the legal machinery to redress the grievous wrong of the past, or the imminent danger of the future.

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