Three genocides mark ugly politics

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "If someone said did I kill people like Dusko Tadic killed people, then I would say I was not guilty," Milan Kovacevic told journalist Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian last year. "But if things go wrong in this hospital, then I am guilty...."

Vulliamy first met Kovacevic in 1992, at the height of the `ethnic cleansing' in Serbian-controlled parts of Bosnia, when Kovacevic was deputy mayor of the town of Prijedor. As such, he was in charge of the concentration camps at Omarska and Trnopolje where the region's surviving Moslem men were being tortured and murdered, though guards like Dusan ('Dusko') Tadic did the actual killing.

When Vulliamy met Kovacevic again in 1996, he was running the hospital in Prijedor. And he was clearly a haunted man, drinking brandy at 10 a.m. as he told Vulliamy he left politics "because I saw many evil things....If you have to do things by killing people, well...Now my hair is white; now I don't sleep too well."

Kovacevic was ready to spill his guts, which is no doubt why he was named in one of the first 'sealed indictments' issued by the UN War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. And now he is sitting in one of the cells at The Hague, downstairs from the courtroom where on Monday (July 14) Dusan Tadic was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his crimes.

Up to now, only concentration camp guards and other little fish have been caught in the tribunal's net. But Kovacevic's capture last Thursday by British troops of the Stabilisation Force might open the door to bigger things, for this canary will sing. It was one of several events in the past week that served as reminders of how an unpurged genocide poisons the life of a whole country.

And even worse genocide, that in Rwanda in 1994, still shapes politics in central Africa. On July 13, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs Emma Bonino launched an attack on what she called the "unattractive side of African assertiveness". It was an arrogant, almost racist phrase, but it arose from her frustration at being unable to find out what has happened to the Hutu refugees in eastern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

The million Hutus in exile there served as shield and power base for the evil men who directed the slaughter of half a million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Many of the Hutu refugees, however, were just innocent people who fled to Zaire in panic when the Hutu-run regime was driven out by the Rwanda Patriotic Front. When the revolt broke out in eastern Zaire last year about 800,000 of them returned home -- but nobody can find up to 250,000 others.

The missing quarter-million included many Hutu fanatics with blood on their hands, but also tens of thousands of people who were mere hostages. The fear is that they were massacred, and Laurent Kabila's new government in the Congo, backed by his Rwandan and Ugandan allies, is blocking a UN investigation.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Rwandan leader Paul Kagame are two of the most dedicated and competent men in African politics, but the shadow of unresolved genocide may come to corrupt even the best intentions of the best people. As it has certainly done in Cambodia.

The Cambodian genocide of 1975-79, when up to two million people (a quarter of the population) were killed by over-work, starvation, and execution, was part of a vast, megalomaniacal project of social engineering run by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. But almost every leading Cambodian politician is tainted by his ties with the Khmer Rouge, and it was those links that triggered the bloody coup in Phnom Penh last week.

Coup leader Hun Sen, a Khmer Rouge commander in the early 1970s, defected to Vietnam in 1977 at the height of the genocide. He came back in 1979 with the Vietnamese invaders, and rose to be their puppet president. But he was left high and dry when Vietnam, exhausted by the endless guerrilla war waged by the Khmer Rouge, pulled out of Cambodia at the end of the 80s.

The Khmer Rouge boycotted the UN-supervised election in 1991 when they realized how few people wanted them back, but Hun Sen's rival Communist party didn't do well either, even though it controlled the army. The winner was Prince Ranariddh's royalist party, FUNCINPEC -- mainly because it had the fewest ties to the Khmer Rouge. But the royalists were not pure.

Between 1979 and 1990, FUNCINPEC fought in loose alliance with the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese occupiers. And though the royalists won the election, their military weakness forced Prince Ranariddh to accept a power-sharing deal with Hun Sen, who became 'second prime minister' and was allowed to keep his own troops.

The arrangement never worked well, and as the 1998 election approached, with FUNCINPEC sure of winning hands down, Hun Sen's agents began to commit blatant acts of terrorism against his political rivals. Ranariddh started looking for military backing against a looming coup -- and he turned to the Khmer Rouge.

The authors of the genocide were still there, hanging on in the jungles of north-western Cambodia with a sizable armed force. Ranariddh's proposal to KR deputy leader Son Sen was simple: hand over the ailing Pol Pot, and the rest of you can come back into Cambodian politics as my allies. Oh, and bring your guns.

Pol Pot rumbled the plot, and killed Son Sen and his entire family. Then the rest of the Khmer Rouge leadership finally turned against Pol Pot and took him prisoner. But it was too late for Ranariddh: last week, Hun Sen seized Phnom Penh in a bloody coup.

Prince Ranariddh is now going round foreign capitals seeking support against the usurper. If he fails, democracy dies in Cambodia. If he succeeds, it probably means a new civil war. Either way, the shadow of the genocide still dominates everything.

Germany was lucky. Defeated and occupied in 1945, it was forced by foreigners to come to terms with the genocide committed by Germans and to punish the perpetrators. Countries that have to do it on their own find it a much harder proposition. There will be no final justice in Cambodia, and only a mangled version of it in central Africa. Even in Bosnia, which is under a kind of foreign occupation, the chances aren't good.

But what if Kovacevic sings, and provides enough evidence that NATO snatch squads get official backing to grab Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the chief organizers of the genocide committed against Moslems and Croats in Bosnia?

Hard to imagine, since both men are protected by huge numbers of bodyguards (and Karadzic still informally runs the Bosnian Serb republic). Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic might even send in his army to protect them, since if they started to sing they would certainly implicate him as well. Even in the Balkans, the biggest fish are likely to get away.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist and historian whose columns appear in 35 countries.