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Milosevic's Arrest Marks Rough Entrance Into New Era
By Walter Truett Anderson, Pacific News Service, July 5, 2001

The trial of a former head of state on charges of crimes against humanity, in an international court of justice, marks a truly enormous change. We are looking at a world of law, where no single state, no single authority is in charge of meting out justice -- a peaceful world -- but the path will not be a smooth one. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson is the author of "The Future of the Self" (Tarcher Putnam, 1997).

It would be nice if former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic could have been delivered to an international war crimes tribunal in an orderly and dignified way.

Instead, we saw Milosevic secretly spirited away to The Hague -- leaving his supporters marching in the streets of Belgrade and Serbian and Yugoslav leaders bitterly divided over the issue. Worldwide, people either cynically saw the Yugoslav prime minister's cooperation as simply a sellout to the rich countries or wonder why, if Milosevic is to be tried, other people with questionable human-rights records -- Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Alberto Fujimori, Vladimir Putin, Ariel Sharon or Henry Kissinger, to mention a few of the nominees -- aren't getting the same treatment.

It would be nice, but unfortunately we don't know how to make changes of this magnitude smoothly. And this is a truly enormous change -- as great a transition as any the human species has ever undertaken -- into a world of law in which ordinary people can have some hope of living in peace, and where power-mad tyrants know they are in constant danger of ending their careers in prison. A world of law in which -- and this is the really tough part -- the laws are fairly applied without any single central authority to make that happen.

This change has been underway for a long time. International law first appeared centuries back. Some 50 years ago, the world's governments began negotiating and ratifying treaties outlawing war crimes. It is a decade or so since human-rights activists stepped up the pressure for enforcement of those laws and the media intensified public awareness of them. Now we are in a takeoff period, and the world in 2010 will surely differ significantly from the world of 1990.

Yet the old order has not gone away. We still have the passions of nationalism, political agendas of all kinds, and the ever-popular principle of sovereignty. Sovereign nations can't simply be ordered to comply with international law in the same way an American state can be ordered to comply with federal law. They comply for other reasons, some of them complex and subtle and some of them anything but.

Serbia provides an example of "anything but." The linkage between Milosevic's trip to The Hague and the meeting of Western donors in Brussels was obvious -- an international group of diplomats ready to open their pockets. No apologies are due from either party. Advancing human rights is one of the better uses of American money -- especially considering how much of it has gone into the Swiss bank accounts of murderous tyrants. And Serbia's prime minister can scarcely be blamed for wanting to repair his country's ravaged economy -- with, incidentally, Slobodan Milosevic as one of the chief ravagers.

But money is not the only reason Serbia wants to get beyond the Milosevic era and all it represented, and go about the business of becoming a full member of the world community rather than the home of ethnic cleansing.

The coming few years are likely to be dicey as the world awakens to the fact that we have created a global system of criminal law applying to violations of human rights, and that the system is in some ways borderless.

Technically the laws can be enforced by any government against any person believed guilty of war crimes. This means scenarios of some group kidnapping an American leader and trying him in another country for war crimes -- against Iraq, for example -- are far from fanciful, and very nervous-making in Washington and other Western capitals.

There are lots of reasons to be nervous, even to wish we could turn around and go back to the good old days of national sovereignty and borders. That, however, is not going to happen.

Economists have a saying: prices are sticky up and slippery down. Many different forces tend to produce inflation, relatively few tend to bring prices down. Some similar principle applies to building a system of international human-rights law. There are many reasons we are moving in that direction, and, for all the resistances and difficulties, won't move back. But don't expect a smooth ride.


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