Milosevic on Trial

by Michael Christoffersen
Icarus Films, NY, NY, 2007
DVD, 69 min., col.
Sales: $398.00.
Distributor’s website: http://www.IcarusFilms.com.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

jzilberg@illinois.edu

Milosevic on Trial is a grave film. Its profundity is only added to through the skillful composition and use of the background music, the cello played by Jane Friedens that attends requiem like to the silent scenes of sites of genocide. The somber musical score longing for life lost, absent justice, the dark key - the utter refusal of Milosevic and his supporters to accept any moral culpability for crimes against humanity. Instead, Slobodan plays the victim to the end, Drag Slav Ognjanovic, his Serbian lawyer mourning him as a good man who died innocent, the court as a sham, the charge of genocide an insult against the Serbian people’s past and future.

Certainly the most chilling moment in the film is when Steven Kay, the British court appointed defense lawyer, rejected by Milosevic, declares as sensationalism the relevance of the evidence on film of the murders in which bound young boys, standing those last moments so defenseless and gently mute, lambs brought to slaughter, one by one are shot in grinning joy. If there was any sense of remote justice to have emerged from the sordidly circus-like trail of Milosevic, it is this footage in and of itself in that it transmogrified the Serbian state and the Serbian people in part to finally accept the fact that crimes of humanity had been committed and to prosecute individuals responsible, a legal process which continues.

Throughout the four-year trial that began in 2002, Milosevic plays the innocent victim. He remains a rock. His bemused demeanor makes a mockery of the court. He contests all and every piece of evidence submitted. Every photograph of murder derided as staged. Every witness abused in the manner of a schoolyard degenerate, Milan Babic accruing immense dignity in the process prior to hanging himself. Eventually, after years of this charade, the first judge Richard May exhausted and buried in the process, the final judge, Ogon Kwon. driven to exasperation, declares: “I am disgusted . . . . You have shamelessly abused this court.” Indeed, this film above all is a testament to how difficult it is to hold accountable a leader of state for crimes against humanity regardless of the preponderance of evidence. Milosevic stands now as a defiant symbol for men of malice worldwide that justice is a Western imperialist lie.

No justice was served in the end. Indeed, as Jeffrey Nice, the chief prosecutor concludes, the outcome would have probably been a disaster, that at least the trial had allowed for the accumulation of a record for the future - as witness – and perhaps where relevant as evidence admissible for the record against Radovan Karadzic. Keeping this in mind and especially that this was the most important and longest war crimes trial since Nuremberg, this film surely raises issues that will continue to bedevil attempts to hold leaders accountable for crimes against humanity as for instance currently underway at the International Criminal Court or being prepared towards that end. For a general audience, and especially for those interested in human rights as for those intending a future career in law, the film will certainly bring an awareness of the problems at hand, conundrums which effectively bind and prevent justice in its own name.

Milosevic begins by charging that this case IT0254T is an illegal indictment and that he holds no responsibility for war crimes against civilians. His tactic is to attack rather than defend, to turn the trail into a stage, to contest every statement and document introduced by the prosecution. His performance provides a textbook case of a total absence of compassion and a stubborn refusal to accept any culpability. In the face of all the evidence, the vastly reduced number of witnesses, the painful forensics and the intercepted code messages perversely referring to “blankets” and ”medicine” as guns and bullets, there is never the faintest hint of remorse. The blame instead is simply laid at the feet of the CIA, the West, Islamic terrorists and foreign mercenaries, all of it an enduring plot against the Serbian people.

Milosevic conducts himself as all men of his kind do. Whatever they say is true by the very fact of saying it. Use the media and the witness stand to compromise all and any evidence presented by the prosecution by claiming it to be all lies. In fact, the way in which this tactic successfully played out to Milosevic’s advantage will make those unfamiliar with such trails wonder what is the purpose of conducting trails of this nature with the same conditions of presumption of justice as required in the normal criminal justice system. If this, the most important war crimes tribunal since Nuremberg could be so problematic and so ineffective, for those who are not members’ of the legal profession, one might surely ask: Is there not something fundamentally wrong here that needs to be addressed? Why not hold a defendant such as this in contempt and contain the charade as would be the case in a normal court? Why allow a mockery to be made of the court in the name of justice itself? Instead, adding insult to the victims of genocide, we submit for the record twice over, never mind once, that the prosecution “can suck my cock”, “eat shit” and “fuck your mothers” to Milosevic’s delight.

Perhaps there are two conclusions amongst others that the viewer might come away with. First, that justice is being pursued elsewhere and more successfully in a limited number of cases. For instance, at the end of the film we learn of some of the ongoing trails and convictions against individuals at different levels in the hierarchy all the way down to the actual perpetrators themselves. Though these are introduced somewhat in passing by way of conclusion, they do point to the fact that justice is being sought at all levels in local courts and in international courts, that the Serbian government itself is taking important steps of responsibility towards achieving justice. If there is any light in all this darkness, this is the source. Second, we see the dark power of the cult of Milosevic and his timeless ilk.

We stare here into the face of intractable resistance, of the love and respect in which such men are held the world over - the witnesses silent as cold black stone, complicit in fear and loathing or gratitude. This is the darkness, the gravity that the music serves to underscore. The tinkling of the votive crosses in the wind at the mass graves provides no solace. How ironic there the failed directive - “no bodies, no crimes” and yet with the bodies exhumed, the effective tautology - “no justice, no crime.” The dead lie there as the farmer sows and reaps that field behind that well used execution barn. The wind blows in war or peace as lacking in judgment as justice itself, gently nursing survivors’ sorrow as surely as it fans the malignant joy of those pure moments of violence’s desire made sweeter in time with impunity.

There is so little of hope in here, so much instead of how the international criminal justice system is hamstrung by the principles of justice itself and the charges of political expediency. No doubt the same problems and the same story in different context will play out again and again. There at the International Criminal Court, outside of the rarest of celebrity cases for key figures from Cambodia, Liberia and the Eastern Democratic republic of Congo, though not Sudan, the brute reality is that of impunity. That is the name of the game, the lingering effect of the film on some. Yet perhaps these trials and especially that of Radovan Karadzic will deliver justice.

Regardless of the Milosevic case and those underway at the Hague, today there is a hallowed term for the abrogation of justice, for the legal provision of impunity. That term is “reconciliation”. Time and time again, it is the victims who must forgive while the perpetrators walk proudly free amongst us as patriots. What’s the message? In times of conflict and in states struggling towards democracy, rape and imprison, beat, torture and murder as you will, you will never be called to justice. If you are, rest assured that it will be virtually impossible to prove your guilt and that a specially assigned defense team will do their best to serve you in the name of justice. Simply deny the crime. Sleep well in assurance that you have served your state, merely obeyed the master’s message, saved from justice by the politician’s magic mantra - “Forgive but not Forget”.