Pool photograph
Ratko Mladic in court on Wednesday.
LONDON — Whatever truth is revealed at the war crimes trial of General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander who went before an international court on Wednesday, it is unlikely to sway hard-core nationalists who still regard him as a hero.
They rioted when he was arrested a year ago and, even now, some inhabitants of the Serbian village where he was seized are said to want to rename it Mladicevo in his honor.
But will the evidence that comes out of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague at least put an end to a long-running polemic about the nature of the Bosnian war and the Western intervention that helped to end it?
Gen. Mladic is accused of being responsible for the worst atrocities in Europe since the end of World War II, including the massacre in 1995 of 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica.
“Srebrenica is one of the best-documented atrocities in modern history,” the late Christopher Hitchens wrote at the time of Gen. Mladic’s arrest a year ago. “The production of this material in court will, one hopes, wipe any potential grin from his face and destroy the propaganda image of the simple patriotic man at arms.”
A debate still rages over whether all communities were equally guilty of fostering the Bosnian war or whether the Serbian nationalists, guided by Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president at the time, were uniquely culpable.
Oliver Kamm, a British journalist, has written in The Jewish Chronicle that it was a “fatal misreading” to view the Balkan conflict as a “resurgence of ancient ethnic hatreds among Serbs, Croats and Muslims.”
“Responsibility lay overwhelmingly with the Bosnian Serbs,” he wrote. “Their leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, sought to carve out an ethnically pure territory in a deranged, racist scheme for a ‘Greater Serbia.'”
Mladic trial begins. BBC rightly terms Milosevic the architect of Balkan wars of 1990s:bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…
— Oliver Kamm (@OliverKamm) May 16, 2012
The targets of Mr. Kamm’s article were historical revisionists who had sought to play down the Serbs’ crimes. “The facts of the genocidal assault on Bosnia’s Muslims are so horrific that a cottage industry of denial has since grown up,” he wrote.
He has not been alone in denouncing what he calls “genocide deniers.” The late Mr. Hitchins sparred with Noam Chomsky over his claims that the radical American academic had ignored Muslim sufferings in Bosnia in his enthusiasm to support the Serbs.
Mr. Chomsky has argued that the West used human rights violations as a pretext for its interventions in the Balkans. He has also denied he is a Milosevic sympathizer. “He did all sorts of terrible things, but it wasn’t a totalitarian state. I mean, there were elections, there was the opposition…” he once told Serbian television.
Others have more directly challenged the extent of the events at Srebrenica. They include Edward S. Herman, an American economist who follows the Chomsky line on intervention.
“There has been a steady stream of inflated, sometimes ludicrously inflated, claims of target-inflicted deaths in the Yugoslav wars,” said Mr. Herman, who edited the book “The Srebrenica Massacre.”
The debate has led to charge and counter-charge, and even a court case, about the accuracy of reports that emerged from the Bosnian war.
So, will the outcome of the trial in The Hague put the polemic to rest? Or will ideological divisions over the legitimacy of military intervention trump the facts?