The Arrest of Mladic

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The announced arrest of Ratko Mladic cannot go without comment. Mladic was the general who led the Serb forces that stormed the so-called "safe haven" of Srebnica in 1995 that led to the massacre of thousands of men and boys who had the misfortune to live there and not be ethnic Serbs. The international possibility of this massacre taking place was grounded in the application to the conflict in Bosnia of "realpolitik" analysis that claimed the forces in possession of territory should be left in control of it and on a ban on the Bosnian government procuring arms internationally. 


Since Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs could turn to Croatia and Serbia respectively for supply of arms the "embargo" penalised the only multi-ethnic actor in the war and helped to ensure the occurrence of the Srebnica massacre. Responsible here in the UK for this grotesque policy were Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and Dr David Owen who was held up as an international mediator and became chairman of the "Conference for the Former Yugoslavia". Owen effectively acted throughout as a stooge for the Bosnian Serbs and "trusted" Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia. For a general and thorough demolition of Owen's own self-serving memoir on the subject see this report. The policies of Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary dove-tailed with Owen's reflexively pro-Serb position as is brought out well in this review of Hurd's memoirs. Unlike the defensive Owen and Hurd, neither of whom has admitted the error of their ways or the result of the policies they urged, Malcolm Rifkind has since stated that the arms embargo on the Bosnian government was a major error and he is at least to be commended for this, an expression of regret that has certainly influenced subsequent Western policy in Libya as Rifkind has rightly intended.


The appeasement practiced by the British government in the 1990s towards the Serbs was oddly echoed by some on the left at the time who, as usual, fretted about Western intervention anywhere and some of whom preferred to attack Germany (!) rather than Serbia. Such people have been discussed at length elsewhere on this blog and refuted in detail by David Campbell on his excellent site. The striking aspect of this peculiar convergence between the Tory "realists" and apparent leftists does strike one today, as it did then, as serious evidence of the need for a politics that, in true Kantian fashion, focuses on the cosmopolitan need for attention to human rights rather than being based on either narrow ideas of self-interest or reflexive attacks on any form of "Western intervention".


In the meantime it is certainly good to see that Mladic has followed Radovan Karadzic to the Hague and that the disastrous policies of Owen, Hurd and Rifkind are not being currently followed by Western governments.

Related articles

• Ratko Mladic fit to be extradited - Telegraph.co.uk (news.google.com)
• Mladic fit for extradition from Serbia (macleans.ca)
• The Appeasers of Ratko Mladic (pajamasmedia.com)
• Ratko Mladic's arrest is a huge step to Serb moral rehabilitation | Misha Glenny (guardian.co.uk)

War Crimes and Moral Relativism

Last night I made the mistake of listening to BBC Radio 4's programme The Moral Maze. This was a mistake for a number of reasons. One of the key ones is that despite its apparent status as a programme that discusses "moral principles" it invariably is dominated by journalists, commentators and politicians who have the vaguest notion of what such things as moral principles are. The most striking example of this lack of sense of moral principle is certainly the Director of the Institute of Ideas Claire Fox. On last night's programme she advanced a view of international law and the notion of war crimes that amounted to the clearly relativist conception that it was intrinsically impossible to have agreement on what constituted "war crimes" so there was no point in trying.

Fox's concern with the issue of war crimes dates back to her previous role, highlighted on her personal description on the Institute of Idea's website with the magazine Living Marxism (later called LM). In her capacity of involvement with this magazine Fox was part of a campaign by this magazine in support of Republika Srpska's view of the internment camp at Trnopolje, principally by publishing in the February 1997 issue an article by Thomas Deichmann. Deichmann was a chief witness in the defence of Dusko Tadic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague. Tadic was charged with a series of crimes against humanity in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from northern Bosnia and was convicted and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. Despite the fact that Deichmann's testimony was in defence of a man subsequently convicted of war crimes he was presented by LM primarily as an "expert witness" at a series of trials the jurisdiction of which they were in the process of contesting.

The article LM magazine published by Deichmann alleged that ITN journalists had substantially fabricated a report concerning the Serb camp at Trnopolje and led to a libel suit against the magazine filed by ITN. The magazine lost this case against ITN, had a substantial award made against it and subsequently folded as a result. At no point during Fox's presentation of an essentially relativist argument about war crimes during the Moral Maze programme were any of her background in being part of a magazine that engaged so directly in defence of Republika Srpska mentioned. Due to this her argument could have appeared no more than a wooly attack on the idea that there could be such a thing as "international law" or any notion of standards of international justice. Such a position is problematic enough in itself but, when aligned with a past as a revisionist concerning the substance of the issue of the programme itself she emerges as someone with little credit in terms of addressing substantial moral issues.

The defence that LM magazine made of its original article in the libel trial was seriously intellectually confused since, during the course of the trial, it was admitted by both the editor of the magazine, Mick Hume (who now runs Spiked On-Line) and Deichmann himself that the camp in question was indeed a brutal place at which rape, beatings and murders (aka "war crimes") were, indeed, taking place. The primary argument they apparently made in response to ITN was that the Serb camps should not be compared to Nazi-style concentration camps with the implied suggestion that only these could be classed as being legitimately ones to which the term "war crimes" could be attached (a rendition further of Fox's relativist argument as given in the Moral Maze). As Fox put this point on last night's show, any mention of war crimes in connection with the Bosnian conflict suggests a connection with the Holocaust, a connection that she takes to "belittle" the Holocaust itself. This elevation of the Holocaust to an absolute status underpins the generally relativist view of "war crimes" otherwise adopted by Fox, Hume and Deichmann.

The general problem with the arguments of Fox et al and their presentation on a show apparently concerned with "moral principles" is connected to a parallel failure to investigate what is meant by "war crimes" when such are alleged to have been carried out by President Bush and ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Iraq War. On the one hand, there are those who articulate a position of "war crime" or "illegal war" on the absurd ground that a war has not been ratified by the UN and on the other hand there are those who deny that the term "war crime" has any meaning other than political except in a specially sanctified "absolute" case that renders all other judgments merely relativist in comparison. Both such positions merit resistance and indicate a substantial need for concern with the vocabulary of "war crime" including a return to investigation of its meaning prior to articulating its use. For a more extended comment on the background, history and nature of the case LM fought and lost with ITN and the reasons for viewing it as particularly important in this area see two articles by David Campbell here.