A half century after the Nuremberg trial, historians like Harvard Professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen still wrestle with the question of how so many ordinary people could be so readily enlisted to participate in atrocities. Goldhagen's best-selling book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, hypothesizes that the Holocaust was a product of the German people's unique cultural predisposition to "eliminationist antisemitism."(2) But the international war crimes trial of Dusko Tadic, which concluded on November 26, 1996 at the Hague, suggests a different answer.
Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb pub owner, karate instructor, and part-time traffic cop, was the first person to be tried by an international war crimes tribunal since World War II. He was charged with thirty-four counts of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, including the murder, rape, and torture of Muslim men and women within and outside the infamous Omarska concentration camp in northern Bosnia.(3) Over 120 witnesses testified during his recent seven-month trial before the new United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia located at The Hague. Although it did not receive the media attention of the O.J. Simpson trial in the United States, abroad the Tadic case was considered "the real trial of the Century."(4) The proceedings were punctuated by gripping testimony of atrocities, controversial judicial rulings, recanting star witnesses, and performances worthy of an Academy Award.(5)
The story that emerged from the Tadic trial was of a country whose people were swept into the hurricane of ethnic nationalism. Witness after witness testified that there had been general ethnic harmony and a high rate of interfaith marriage in Bosnia before the ethnic conflict began in 1992.(6) The trial proved that the hatred that emerged in 1992 had been engineered, not innate. Serb-controlled television and radio broadcasts spread ethnic hatred like an epidemic.(7) By way of comparison, one of the witnesses asked the judges to imagine what would happen if former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke seized control of all the television and radio stations in the United States.(8) The lesson of the Tadic trial is that given the right set of circumstances, almost any body in any country can become a "willing executioner." It is what the American Historian Hannah Arendt, in her classic account of the Eichmann trial, referred to as the "banality of evil."(9) The Tadic trial showed how provocation, incitement, and propaganda via the mass media can raise hatred and fear to such an extent that ordinary people turn on their neighbors in a savage way. Throw in an official sanction, some coercion by persons in authority, pressure from assenting comrades, and opportunities for personal gain, and you have the active ingredients of ethnic cleansing -- Bosnian style.
What is most shocking about the Balkan conflict is not that atrocities were committed, but that the rest of the world did so little to prevent them or bring them to an end. When the world learned of the atrocities being committed in Bosnia, the United Nations Security Council responded by imposing economic sanctions that were so riddled with loopholes as to be largely ineffective,(10) establishing a "no-fly-zone" which was violated over four hundred times with impunity,(11) and creating so-called "safe areas" which became the sites of the conflict's worst massacres.(12) Until 1995 the Security Council lacked the political will to take more aggressive action, such as air strikes, while hundreds of thousands of civilians were murdered and as many as 20,000 women were systematically raped.(13)
Unfortunately, world-wide ethnic nationalism has not reached its final zenith with events in the former Yugoslavia. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recently wrote, "Of the next fifty states which will come into being in the next fifty years, ethnic conflict will be almost [always] the defining characteristic by which that process will take place.(14) Consequently, the questions raised by the savagery in the Balkans -- how to preserve minority rights, when to recognize claims to self-determination, how to apply preventive strategies, and when and how to use force -- are likely to confront us again and again in coming years.(15) More than anything else, the record of the hostilities generated by the Tadic trial should stand as a reminder to the international community of the perils of unchecked ethnic conflict.
If the fate of the victims of Bosnia stands as a lesson to the international community, the image of Dusko Tadic in the dock, transmitted throughout the world by satellite, sends a message to would-be war criminals around the world that in the future, those who commit such acts may be held accountable for their actions.(16) However, the failure of the 60,000 NATO troops now stationed in Bosnia to arrest the two men most responsible for the Bosnian genocide -- Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic -- risks destroying the deterrent value of the international tribunal.(17) According to NATO Officers, IFOR gave a "monitor, but don't touch" order to its troops on the ground in Bosnia.(18) Under this policy, NATO troops have permitted Karadzic to pass unhindered through NATO checkpoints and have rescheduled inspections of military installations in order to avoid running into General Mladic.(19)
On March 21-23, 1997, the author attended a Law and Policy Planning Workshop entitled "The Dayton Accords and Beyond: Bringing War Criminals to Justice," co-sponsored by the Public International Law and Policy Group, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the University of Dayton. The participants, which included military experts, historians, diplomats, and attorneys, agreed that a military operation to apprehend Karadzic and Mladic would present little problem for the United States troops in Bosnia. The problem, rather, is selling the idea to an administration which has elevated risk avoidance to the level of military doctrine.(20) What the administration must be made to understand is that unless those most responsible for atrocities are brought to justice, there will be no reconciliation in Bosnia; war will reignite as soon as the United States troops withdraw; and future tyrants around the world will be given notice that they also have nothing to fear from international justice for so long as they threaten armed resistance.
1. Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Center for International Law and Policy, New England School of Law; Attorney-Adviser, Office of the Legal Adviser, U.S. Department of State, 1989-1993; J.D. Duke University School of Law, 1988; A.B. Duke University, 1985. During the international trial of Dusko Tadic, Professor Scharf appeared as a frequent guest commentator on Court TV.
2. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust 375-454 (1996).
3. See Indictment, Prosecutor v. Dusan Tadic a/k/a "Dule," Case No. IT-94-1-T (Int'l Crim. Tribunal Feb. 13, 1994) <http://www.courttv.com/casefiles/warcrimes/ documents/borov.html>.
4. See William W. Horne, The Real Trial of the Century, Am. Law., Sept. 1995, at 5-6.
5. The Tadic trial is detailed in the author's upcoming book, Balkan Justice: The Story Behind the First International War Crimes Trial Since Nuremberg (Carolina Academic Press, 1997).
6. See Michael P. Scharf, Luring Out Humanity's Dark Side: U.N. War Crimes Trial of Bosnian Serb Suggests that Manipulation, Not History, Can Turn Ordinary People into "Willing Executioners," Boston Globe, Dec. 1, 1996, at D2.
7. Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and its Destroyers--America's Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why 137 (1996).
8. See Michael P. Scharf, Luring Out Humanity's Dark Side: U.N. War Crimes Trial of Bosnian Serb Suggests that Manipulation, Not History, Can Turn Ordinary People into "Willing Executioners," Boston Globe, Dec. 1, 1996, at D2.
9. See generally, Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964).
10. See Michael P. Scharf and Joshua L. Dorosin, Interpreting U.N. Sanctions, The Rulings and Role of the Yugoslavia Sanctions Committee, 19 Brooklyn J. Int'l L. 771, 774-811 (1993).
11. United Nations Department of Public Information, The United Nations and the Situation in the Former Yugoslavia 13 (1993).
12. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey 355 (1995).
13. See generally, Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), U.N. Doc. S/1994/674, 27 May 1994.
14. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (1993).
15. Warren Zimmerman, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and its Destroyers--America's Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why xii (1996).
16. Tyler Marshall, U.N. Tribunal's Power on Trial; Balkans: First War Crimes Suspects Face Judgment. But Many See Fate of Rebel Serb Leaders as Real Test of Court's Effectiveness, Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1996, at A6.
17. Richard Goldstone, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The Responsibility to Act, Inter Press Service, June 27, 1996, available in LEXIS, News Library, Curnws File.
18. See Colin Soloway & Stephen J. Hedges, How Not to Catch a War Criminal, U.S. News and World Rep., Dec. 9, 1996, at 63.
19. See Colin Soloway & Stephen J. Hedges, How Not to Catch a War Criminal, U.S. News and World Rep., Dec. 9, 1996, at 63.
20. See Chris Black, US Options Seen Fewer as Military Avoids Risk, Boston Globe, July 23, 1995, at 12 (reporting that "risk avoidance appears to have acquired the force of doctrine at the Pentagon. In the Clinton Administration, the concern borders on an obsession with both military and civilian leaders whose view on the use of force was molded by the war in Vietnam.").