Prosecuting Slobodan Milošević. The Unfinished Trial

Multiple connections exist between the author and the topic of her book. Nevenka Tromp-Vrkić was born in Zagreb and served at the research team of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Currently, she teaches East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and her academic research is affiliated with the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, where the famous Srebrenica Report was written during 1996-2002. The monograph is based on her 2015 PhD thesis with the more emblematic title ‘The unfinished trial of Slobodan Milošević: justice lost, history told’. As a biography, of sorts, of the notorious Yugoslav leader, it is certainly not unique. In recent years, Slobodan Milošević–who was ousted in 2000, extradited in 2001, and died in prison in March 2006—has found many biographers: Judith Armatta, Adam LeBor, Caroline Fetscher, Lenard J. Cohen, Ralph Hartmann, and Vidosav Stevanović among them. Some of them analyse his entire life, but in their majority, they focus on his trial in The Hague.

Historians and other scholars are only beginning to appreciate the mass of records produced by the ICTY, an estimated quarter of a million pages: thousands of witness reports, the defence by the accused, documentary evidence, and voluminous background reports by expert witnesses (xi). In terms of processing these archives in academic studies, they have so far only scratched the surface. In the preface, Tromp ponders the pros and cons of her position. When Milošević died (only weeks before the verdict), she had been working on the prosecutor’s team for his trial for six consecutive years. She reflects, on the one hand, on the question whether her previous work compromised her academic impartiality and, on the other hand, she has concluded that, although the trial is unfinished and justice has not been served, history still might be. Tromp is absolutely right in reminding the reader (and herself) that despite the mass of records, the inherent bias of evidence in the trial of a war criminal is an intentionalist one, suggesting that a premeditated plan by the leader has shaped events rather than vice versa. Yet her discussion of the similarities between ‘doing justice’ and ‘doing history’ and the historical contextual evidence in the courtroom is somewhat one-sided. Although it is true that history writing continues after the legal verdict has been passed, the historians’ essential freedom to frame events and personalities within an alternative or larger question is mentioned only in passing. Nevertheless, Tromp’s categorisation of historians’ judgements of Milošević is quite telling: ‘intentionalists’, who discern a masterplan; ‘relativists’, who qualify his actions as ruthless but reactive; and ‘apologists’, who accept his good intentions (24-25). In sum, her research question as a historian closely resembles the question the judges would have had to answer, had Milošević lived to hear the verdict: ‘that essential question of criminal investigation’ (31).

The book’s structure is shaped by the consecutive steps in the implementation of Milošević’s alleged ideological plan for Yugoslavia (and not by the stages of his trial): from the SANU Memorandum of 1986 to the demise of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia and its unrepentant leader fifteen years later. The first evidence-based chapters analyse the leader and his ideology. The next four chapters respectively cover the four steps in his grand strategy, as reconstructed by the author: recentralising Yugoslavia; war in Croatia; war in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and war in Kosovo. The conclusion discusses ‘the unmaking of the leader’, certainly not envisaged in the grand strategy. In the first chapter, Tromp revisits the classic debate whether Milošević had been a mere pawn of Serb nationalism or whether he had singlehandedly instrumentalised this ideology and its mobilising power. The added-value of the court witnesses, however, in reconstructing his life story and innermost motives is in the details. The main thrust of the story is well-known from academic literature and other sources, such as Ivan Stambolić’s book. Tromp weighs and contrasts the various statements made by contemporaries and eyewitnesses at ICTY.

Nevertheless, the fact that the courtroom in The Hague constituted a unique kind of burning glass deserves more reflection. Pre-2000 reports on the dictator’s character, grand strategy, actions, and failings were obviously also biased by the authors’ political interests. In the courtroom, however, everyone with an axe to grind could be sure that Milošević’s days were over and must have been acutely aware of the breathless attention of world public opinion. Witnesses were (un)knowingly presenting pieces of the puzzle, adding to one or another overall image of the fallen dictator. In other words, ‘witnesses, who were once close to him – or had engaged in political negotiations with him’ were valuable assets for the prosecutor trying to make a case. The historian, however, knows no distinction between incriminating evidence and witnesses for the defence.

The penultimate chapter on Kosovo features a similar alternation of historical narrative (from Rambouillet and Raćak to NATO intervention) and ICTY courtroom accounts. The author argues that the trial did prove beyond doubt the Serbian leader’s responsibility for atrocities committed in Kosovo. She also firmly believes in the so-called ‘transformative value’ of the ICTY trials, even if unfinished, for public debates and narratives in the Balkans. The conclusions again underline the importance of the evidence put forward by the prosecutor as a counterweight to some regimes’ continued efforts to cover up the historical truth and propagate an embellished view. As the book’s title indicates, the message is that ‘controlling the post-conflict narrative’ (273) takes precedence over justice in a legal sense.

Nevenka Tromp’s well-written study on Milošević’s political strategy and actions through the prism of ICTY evidence is another valuable building block in the booming historiography on the rise-and-fall of communist Yugoslavia and its aftermath. Tentatively, the book’s perspective and the author’s theoretical reflections point toward a fascinating set of questions. How will historians ever be able to master the valuable documentary evidence piled up by ICTY? And, no less challenging, what are the questions this evidence can help answer, beyond the unfinished legal question of guilt? Or, to quote Tromp’s final sentence: ‘Judges and lawyers do not necessarily have the last word.’ (275)