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The Long Road to Accountability
// The Sentence for Saddam Solves Some Questions, but Leaves Many Others
When, on March 11 of this year, it become known that former Balkan strongman Slobodan Milosevic had been found dead in his cell at The Hague, the attitude of many Serbs towards Milosevic's death could be summed up in the words of someone writing from Belgrade on the internet site of the independent television station V-92: "What's terrible is that he died without being condemned."
The fact that the court in The Hague could not settle the case of the main defendant and prove his guilt came at a huge cost. The first to suffer was The Hague tribunal itself: questions arose not only concerning its effectiveness but even about the rationale for its existence. The second was the West, for whom a sentence for Milosevic would have laid to rest all of the ethical questions provoked by the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. The third was Serbia, where the growth of an anti-Hague mood on the back of a slogan popularized by nationalists, "Hague judges are murderers!", made it practically impossible for those of the accused who remained at large to be handed over to the tribunal. And finally, Russia felt the blow as well: the death of the Balkan dictator pushed Moscow to the edge of a serious row with the West concerning the fate of The Hague tribunal.
That the tribunal in Baghdad has succeeded in sentencing Saddam Hussein would seem to resolve all potential dilemmas. Once the main culprit in the Iraqi tragedy has been punished, it stands to reason that questions concerning the legality of the operations involved in his overthrow, the effectiveness of the new system of government in Iraq, and, finally, about who is guilty of the deaths of thousands of people in the post-Saddam period will be beside the point.
These questions (as long the matter hadn't gotten as far as a sentence for Saddam) would have been posed more and more often, but now it's likely that no one will bother asking. Now those who initiated the case against the dictator can say that a harsh sentence means that justice will ultimately reign, and that all dictators should keep that in mind – that's the key significance of the sentence passed on Saddam Hussein.
However, the sentencing of the former Iraqi dictator, even the sentence that is currently being pronounced, has not laid all questions to rest. The most important of these questions is the following: once the verdict of the Baghdad court has proven the inevitability of justice for dictators, what will become of authoritarian leaders who manage to jump off the train before the final station, which could be an international tribunal?
If one wanted to, one could find many such leaders around the world. On their consciences are many crimes that are barely distinguishable from those committed by Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. But unlike Milosevic and Hussein, these other autocrats have been able to make use of a fortunate historical moment to sell themselves to the international community as regional partners and guarantors of peace – in short, as necessary people.
Incidentally, until he became the "Balkan maniac," Slobodan Milosevic represented himself in the West as the "guarantor of peace in Bosnia." Likewise, Saddam Hussein did not spend his whole life as a bloody dictator in the eyes of the West. But the sentence pronounced by the Baghdad tribunal has nothing to say about that. Otherwise its cost would have been too high.
Gennady Sysoyev
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 07, 2006
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