Milosevic was the price that had to be paid

By Martin Woollacott

LONDON: The most significant thing to happen at the Hague tribunal on Tuesday was when Slobodan Milosevic looked at his watch on the way out and said: "Hmm, 10 minutes." He meant, pretty certainly, that 10 minutes was not much time for the eyes of the world to have been trained on him, considering the kind of public exposure he has been used to for so many years. His moment, indeed, is over. The fact that he will not be on trial for a long time means that, far from being propelled into a new prominence, he has in effect been shelved.

Barring serious illness or a suicide attempt, he will fade into obscurity during the months in which, behind closed doors, the lawyers sift the evidence, draw up additional indictments, and argue over procedures.

In Belgrade, by contrast, Milosevic had remained a political actor, and a pivot for extreme nationalist forces. The leadership of the Serbian Socialist party virtually lived with him in prison. But even in Serbia his importance lay in how much use he could be to people who in the past had been used by him. Those who had been closely associated with him defended him and tried to keep him out of the Hague because they were and are fighting to keep some sort of place in Serbian politics.

The Serbian political contest is complex, with former servants of the old regime both battling with and mixed up with more liberal figures, none of whom can afford to neglect the nationalistic instincts of most Serbs. What was morally wrong during the war years is in the argument somewhere, but only as part of a confused debate about both history and who is doing most to serve Serbia's national interests now.

Two shaky governments, that of Serbia and that of the Yugoslav "federation" of Serbia and Montenegro, offer positions of maneuver in this struggle. The first is shaky in the main because it has no money -- something now partially repaired, thanks to the aid granted after Milosevic's transfer -- and the second unstable because, although it partially controls the armed forces, it governs little else.

Some 80 percent of Serbians in a poll this week agreed that Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian prime minister, took the right decision when he chose to hand over Milosevic. But how many approve because they see him as a war criminal and a man who took Serbian society as a whole down the path of crime, is another question.

People being what they are, it is perfectly possible to believe that Milosevic and Serbia under his leadership pursued just objectives and at least were no guiltier than others of the war's excesses and to believe that now it is necessary to do what the United States and western Europe want. What may link the two in the understanding of some Serbs is the idea that, in dealing with the foreigners who always try to frustrate Serbia's national interests, sometimes you have to fight them and sometimes you have to appease them.

The analyst Srdjan Bogosavijevic has suggested that at one end of the spectrum of Serb public opinion is a 15 percent grouping which holds to the view that both the objectives and the methods of the wars were justified, and at the other 20-25 percent who believe the opposite. In between are the majority of Serbs, looking for a narrative of recent years that makes sense to them and has some continuation into the future. Gradually, in the view of the optimists, most of these will be drawn into the liberal camp.

Meanwhile, today's ambiguities are illustrated by the fact that the US$1.28 billion of aid released by the handover of Milosevic is not too different from some estimates for war damage, enabling it to be obliquely presented to Serbians as reparations under another name. Serbs are aware of an even bigger pay-off which may come with a rescheduling of the country's debts. A generous interpretation of Serbia's obligations would involve repayments of $40 billion over 20 years, as opposed to nearly twice as much under more normal terms.

Prime minister Djindjic's message to Serbians and indeed to other former Yugoslavs, as he put it in a speech in Sarajevo, has been: "We lost 10 years. We cannot afford to lose another 10." To a country full of impoverished, underpaid, and unemployed people, the message of economic rehabilitation is a powerful one, worth Milosevic's head and the heads of others in the future.

If many Serbs see Milosevic's transfer as a price that had to be paid rather than a move necessary for reasons of justice, the attitude of others in former Yugoslavia is also tinged with cynicism. One Bosnian commentator suggested that: "The survivors of the Bosnian war have little more than disgust for this and all other facts of international bargaining ... No punishment meted out in the Hague will alter the fate of his victims who would not have suffered at all if Milosevic had been stopped when he should have been."

Not one Kosovan leader commented on the handing over of Milosevic on the day on which it happened. In Kosovo there is not much inclination to let Serbs as a group off the hook by concentrating on Milosevic's role. In all the former Yugoslav territories outside Serbia, there may be some understandable resentment at the way in which that country, having contributed so much more than the others to the strife and suffering, now effortlessly seems able to re-engage the western countries.

Kosovo struggles vainly to get a commitment on independence, Bosnia is half forgotten, Macedonia is subject to periodic bouts of NATO and EU headbanging, and even luckier Croatia thinks it is not receiving the help which it deserves. But in peace as in war Serbia holds the center stage. Serbia, yes, but no longer Milosevic.

The United States led in putting pressure on the Serbian government to send Milosevic to the Hague. It did so, it may be speculated, because it wanted to punish a man who forced it into a war it desperately did not want to fight, as the recent memoirs of Gen. Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander, make clear.

The Europeans would have been even more threatened if the Kosovo war had ended in failure or compromise. When the trial finally gets under way, we may find out more about the motivation of the man who led us all to the brink -- but perhaps not as much as we expect, at least not in terms of rational motivation.

Milosevic and his wife led an enclosed, almost fantastical life, in which her constant reinforcement of his self esteem and his undoubted tactical skills, first at exploiting Serbian discontents, then at outwitting his Yugoslav enemies and befuddling his western opponents, propelled them from crisis to crisis as if in some terrible dream.

He may not have that much to tell. Something of the infantile quality suggested by his pudgy, wide-eyed features has long been understood by his Serbian opponents. One of their posters at the time of his fall showed that face ornamenting a teething ring, with the caption Broken like a baby's rattle. The story we may in the end hear in the Hague could be more psychiatric than political.

-- Guardian News Service