Milosevic trial will force Serbs to confront truth

Vojislav Kostunica must be one of the very few people not to have watched the riveting drama unfolding last week as Slobodan Milosevic stood in the dock at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Why did he, Yugoslav federal president of all people, the man whom many see as Yugoslavia's moral leader, avoid the endlessly repeated television pictures and reports of this historic moment? Because it would have been too painful, he said.

Two days after that ground-breaking court appearance, a Serbian police deputy, Dragan Karleusa, announced in Belgrade that the interior ministry believed the bodies of 800 ethnic Albanians were buried in several mass graves around the capital. Details emerging indicate that these men, women and children were killed in Kosovo during the war and that their corpses were brought to Serbia for disposal.

Thirty-six bodies have already been exhumed in Batajnice, just outside Belgrade. Karleusa went on to detail how a further 75 bodies had been exhumed in a village east of the capital and another grave had been found on the Belgrade-Skopje road. "We suspect that the former regime also disposed of bodies at the bottom of Lake Perucac," he said, adding: "From time to time, some bodies are coming to the surface."

The policeman's last sentence reminded me of a discussion I had in January in Belgrade with Prof Srbijanka Turajlic, who is now Serbia's Deputy Education Minister. She was a courageous and defiant anti-Milosevic activist, known as the mother of Resistance, Serbia's student group; or less elegantly described by some students as the woman with the biggest balls in the university.

I was voicing frustration that, after the October revolution, neither the new government of Serbia, nor of Yugoslavia, was opening up debate on the past or encouraging acknowledgement of what Serbs had done in the wars of dissolution - most notably the 1995 massacre of Srebrenica, when Serbian forces committed Europe's worst atrocity since the second World War.

She told me it was simply too soon. "But wait six months," she said. "And then the flotsam and jetsam will start to float to the surface. And it will start to stink."

She was, as always, right. As Karleusa said, from time to time, some bodies are coming to the surface . . . And it is all starting to stink.

For many people in the Balkans what is happening is deeply painful, sometimes too painful to watch or to confront. The ghosts of history are coming to haunt the new Yugoslavia. And the last 10 years are a brutal and bloody legacy.

But this is just the beginning. Hague chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte was this week in discussion with the authorities in the Bosnian Serb republic, Republika Srpska (RS), whose prime minister, Mladen Ivanic, promised serious co-operation. This raises the real prospect that former Bosnian Serb commander Gen Ratko Mladic and the civilian leader, Radovan Karadzic, will soon join Milosevic at the UN war crimes tribunal.

The trials of these key men, Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, will lift the lid on the monstrous crimes committed in the name of Serb nationalism. And that will be a very painful process.

A generation of Serb youngsters now aged between 16 and 21 were aged between five and 10 when the wars of dissolution started and - aside from the Kosovo conflict, in which they felt victims because they suffered terrifying NATO bombing - many will have always believed what their parents told them and what they heard on television: that, unequivocally, Serbs were victims throughout the Slovenian, Croatian and Bosnian wars.

AS THE EVIDENCE of Milosevic's killing machine emerges, as Belgrade is shown as the place where the architects of ethnic cleansing plotted, and as Serbia is implicated increasingly in what many there had always deemed someone else's war, these youngsters look likely to start asking questions.

It is likely to emerge that the paramilitaries and nationalist Cetnik irregulars involved in ethnic cleansing were often backed by regular Yugoslav army forces. So it seems inevitable that these young Serbs will turn on their fathers, uncles, husbands, brothers who served as conscripts and reservists, asking: What did you do? What did you know? What did you see? How could this have happened?

Sonja Biserko, who spent many years heading the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and receiving hate mail and death threats because she spoke honestly about Serb crimes, has long advocated a programme of de-Nazification. Perhaps the trials in The Hague will trigger this process.

The Hague is widely perceived in Serbia as a Western court that is biased against Serbs. And to show the quality of justice, it will need to act impartially, against Bosnian Muslims who committed atrocities against Serbs, Bosnian Croats who brutally killed Serbs when 200,000 fled the Krajina in the wake of the western-aided Operation Storm in 1995, and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo who slaughtered Serbs.

Westerners should also understand that knowing the truth during the Milosevic era was not easy. His two key tools of power were the secret police and the media. For 10 years, state-controlled television churned out paranoid stories of Serb victimisation. Radio Television Serbia (RTS) created a virtual world of lies.

Now some television stations are providing a more diverse and accurate picture. One even recently showed a Western-made programme about Srebrenica and caused an absolute furore. People were severely critical of the station: most just didn't believe it, or didn't want to believe it. It was just too ugly. One said he would only believe a programme claiming that Serbs did such terrible things in Srebrenica if it was made by Serbs. This is the legacy of RTS.

In the West, press coverage of Milosevic's appearance at The Hague has reeked of moralistic triumphalism. This ignores Western co-operation, verging on complicity, with him up to 1999 - right up to the start of the bombing by NATO. Did Western intelligence really not know for a decade that the wars in Croatia and Bosnia were coming from Belgrade?

Concentration camps were discovered around Prijedor in 1992 and rape camps were discovered in the south-east Bosnian town of Foca that same year, but we continued to work with Milosevic. After the UN deployed in Bosnia, whenever there was a problem with the Bosnian Serbs, negotiators always went to Milosevic in Belgrade, yet no one seemed to want to realise that if Milosevic could always solve the problem, he might be creating it in the first place.

British SAS forces were in Srebrenica when it fell in 1995 and yet the British government has never made SAS reports publicly available. How much did UN headquarters in Sarajevo and London know about the killing of 6,000 Muslims? What did Western governments and NATO - the most powerful military alliance in the world - do to try to stop it? Were Western capitals so concerned about their UN peacekeepers that they knew of the butchery and did nothing? As the trials of Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic go ahead, Serbs will not be the only ones on the receiving end of painful questions.

In the Dayton peace treaty, Milosevic - as guarantor - was transformed into a peacemaker. In 1996, Western politicians were loudly proclaiming that Karadzic and Mladic would be snatched and delivered to The Hague, but so fearful were they for the lives of their peacekeeping soldiers that they actually warned military commanders to avoid arresting them at all costs, thus depriving Bosnia of its only real opportunity of return of refugees, return to multi-ethnicity, justice to help assuage the grief and perhaps, just perhaps, forgiveness.

AND THE list goes on. What of the lucrative deal over Serb Telecom done with Milosevic by former British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd and former British Dayton negotiator Dame Pauline Neville-Jones? After the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and the slaughter of Srebrenica, this pair happily dined with Milosevic and helped sustain his regime through brokering this deal - from which they did very nicely, thank you.

So when the trial of Milosevic starts and if, as seems likely, those of Karadzic and Mladic soon follow, a very substantial can of worms is going to be unlocked. And Western triumphalism is totally out of order.

Milosevic is now in facing charges in The Hague. But it took a lot of lost life and an awful lot of time. Why? Not just because the wheels of justice turn slowly. Western governments worked with Milosevic for as long as he was useful or too powerful to take on. That's what real politik is all about.

Gillian Sandford was Irish Times correspondent in Belgrade until last January. Her book Wheel of Fire, on the UN peacekeepers in the Bosnian safe area of Gorazde, will be published next year