The opening yesterday of the first war crimes trial by an international tribunal for half a century puts the United Nations itself to the test. Dusko Tadic, against whom horrendous crimes have been alleged, is a relatively minor cog in a gigantic wheel. If he is found guilty, he will be judged as a representative of thousands of other Bosnian Serbs involved in the extermination of entire communities of Bosnian Muslims during the ethnic cleansing campaign. The evidence against him will, no doubt, help to document the course of that vicious action.
Whether the proceedings go further, by giving the tribunal the clout it needs to bring more important defendants to trial, is a question of grave significance for the concept of international justice. It is three years since the tribunal came into existence, and in its first case it faces imponderable difficulties in relation to intimidation of some witnesses and reluctance by others to give evidence in person at The Hague. Elaborate technological procedures have been devised to overcome these problems, but their effect on the credibility of the process has still to be seen. And without credibility the impact of the proposed series of trials on public opinion on all sides in Bosnia is likely to be minimal.
But unless those ultimately responsible for mass killings and expulsions face the tribunal, its whole purpose, and in a more general sense the whole notion of trying people for war crimes, will be vitiated. Putting Tadic in the dock without Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic would be the equivalent of trying Klaus Barbie and letting Wilhelm Keitel and Hans Frank, two of Hitler's chief lieutenants, go free. But the UN is operating with a split mind because of the unwillingness of its troops on the ground in Bosnia to search out the leaders indicted by the tribunal and arrest them.
The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals were often derided by Germans as "victors' law", and the strength of this tribunal's mandate is helped by the fact that it attempts to act impartially in the tangled field of Bosnian politics. No one thought of bringing the destroyers of Dresden in 1945 to justice for a gross and unnecessary act of overkill of civilians, and the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was never subjected to judicial review, in spite of its consequences, political and genetic, which went far beyond anything in the history of war. Both, arguably, were unprincipled acts ranking with some of the most serious atrocities levelled against the Nazi leaders.
Allegations now emerging about the slaughter of Palestinian civilians sheltering at a UN camp at Qana, bombarded by Israeli shells, are also relevant. If rules to govern war are to be enforced by international tribunal, how are they to be implemented in cases of this kind when proved to be a deliberate act of bloodthirsty intimidation rather than accident? The suggestion that the UN Secretary General is under pressure to downplay a report about the Qana incident to this effect is not reassuring. The Bosnia tribunal needs unequivocal international support in order to establish the role of justice more generally in defending human rights and strengthen the UN's authority to deal with violations.