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The Butcher’s Trail

I was unable to attend Julian Borger’s book presentation today in DC, but here is my appreciation of his recently published account of the search for and trial of Balkans war criminals:

Who knew the search for war criminals could be so entertaining? Julian Borger, now the Guardian diplomatic editor who reported from the Balkans during the 1990s, has a sharp eye for relevant detail and an ironic sense of its role in the story of how war criminals were tracked and captured in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia after the Dayton peace accords were signed in 1995.

His Butcher’s Trail is enlivened with a menagerie of well-drawn and memorable characters: the “Serb Adolf” (that’s what he called himself), an evangelical American general trying to redeem the loss of Marines in Somalia, a former mayor so anxious for status that he drives into Croatia to keep an appointment with the senior UN official plotting his capture, the American-trained Polish special forces who in their first operation ever snatch him, the planned use of a gorilla costume to distract Radovan Karadzic’s guards on a winding mountain road at night and his frumpy wife’s successful effort to evade massive and concerted American efforts–coordinated in part by David Petraeus–to track her to her husband.

This would all make for an interesting, if sometimes excessively John Irving, novel. It makes for captivating non-fiction.

I was involved as a State Department officer in some of the earlier and notably unsuccessful efforts to capture war criminals in Bosnia. The generals commanding the hunt thought the protection of their troops far more important. A deputy to the Supreme Allied Commander told me point blank in the summer of 1997 that President Clinton wasn’t interested in capturing war criminals. The general and his boss–Wes Clark–got me withdrawn from the effort in order to block reports to the State Department about what they were doing, or more likely what they were not doing.

Later the hunt for war criminals–PIFWCs in milspeak (Persons Indicted for War Crimes)–became far more serious, though the Americans lagged the British and Dutch in the effort. Trying to minimize risk, Washington often deployed far too many people and too much apparatus, without however knowing much about the environment and terrain in which they had to operate. Borger tells the story of their bumbling well. Nor does he spare the French, late-comers to the competition to capture PIFWCs, whose keystone cops even ended up facing off with each other in the hotel room of one of Radovan Karadzic’s mistresses. But Borger also gives some credit: the Americans at least learned and applied their lessons later in the hunt for Al Qaeda and other terrorist operatives.

While Borger’s focus is on the hunt, he never looses perspective on the reasons for it. He colors in the stark words of criminal indictments with vivid eye-witness descriptions of rape, ethnic cleansing, torture and cold-blooded murder. And he fits these crimes into the main political programs they served: primarily the Croatian and Serbian efforts to carve up Bosnia.

By dying in 1999, Croatian President Tudjman escaped accountability for his concerted efforts to force Bosnia’s Muslims away from his borders and annex territory where the Bosnian Croats were in the majority. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic wasn’t so lucky. Defeated at the polls in 2000, he was shipped to The Hague in 2001 for trial at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a precursor of the International Criminal Court. Borger’s account of how and why the Serbian government took on that responsibility is compelling, as is his description of how Serbian security forces continued to provide protection for Karadzic and Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic.

Borger is keen to make a sharp distinction between the judicial bungling of the Tribunal–whose trials are lengthy and unedifying, with highly variable and sometimes reversible outcomes–and the critical role of its chief prosecutors (especially Louise Arbour and Carla del Ponte) and their small intelligence units in tracking down war criminals and pressuring Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia into handing them over, often with leverage provided by the European Union and the United States. His point is well argued, but it is unlikely to save the Tribunal from those who think it should have done far more far faster to hold its indictees accountable.

It would be hard for any court–even a well-established one–to proceed expeditiously and still provide due process to the butchers Borger describes so well. ICTY has proven unequal to those demanding criteria. But it has still set an important precedent of holding at least some people accountable for the horrors they perpetrate. And, as Borger is right to emphasize, it removed homicidal leaders from countries in which they would have otherwise played spoiler roles. That is, he rightly emphasizes, the Tribunal’s major contribution.