for more serious crimes. Over time, the impressive corruption of succeeding regimes has come cumulatively to present a barrier to prosecution of cases of this type.
Members of the regime also conspired to falsify election results, the most controversial being the local elections of November 1996 and the presidential and parliamentary elections of September 2000. Both elections were followed by massive protests. After the 1996 elections, the regime was forced to pass a “special law” recognizing the results, which it had earlier declared invalid when it discovered the opposition had won. In 2000, the regime tried first to declare victory, then to force a second round, and finally to nullify the election results. This effort was stopped by massive protests in October 2000, which forced Milošević to resign.
Among the most widely publicized acts of domestic political violence in the Milošević regime are the murder of newspaper editor SlavkoĆuruvija in 1999,37 the attempted murder of politician Vuk Drašković (four people were killed in the attempt) in 1999,38 the murder of organized crime figure Željko Ražnatovic-Arkan in 2000,39 and the kidnapping and murder of former president Ivan Stambolić40 in 2000. In addition to these, attention is occasionally drawn to several acts of ethnic violence committed or organized within the borders of Serbia: the kidnapping and murder of nineteen ethnic Muslim passengers from the Belgrade-Bar railway at Štrpci in 1993,41 the intimidation and expulsion of ethnic Croatian residents of the village of Hrtkovci in 1992,42 and the kidnapping and murder of seventeen ethnic Muslim passengers from a bus in the village of Sjeverin in 1992.43
All the crimes ICTY can prosecute are also crimes under the Criminal Code of Serbia. The domestic Criminal Code also includes some charges ICTY does not have the authority to level, such as promoting ethnic and religious hatred, aggression, and crimes against peace.44 Charges of “provoking public danger” were applied against Dragoljub Milanović, former director of Radio-Television Serbia, for failing to remove his employees from RTS headquarters when it was bombed in 1999.45
The various elements of corruption, fraud, theft, and violence could possibly to be tied together into a wide-ranging charge of conspiracy—defining the parties in power during the Milošević regime and their associates as constituting a criminal organization responsible for corruption, fraud, political violence, and war crimes. While accountability for war crimes in Kosovo that were committed by police and military forces falls under direct chain of command, accountability for similar crimes in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina might be limited to financing the organizations that committed them,46 unless evidence of more direct connections is revealed.47
There may indeed exist a temptation to consider conspiracy prosecutions of this sort, not least because it seems obvious that the regime’s domestic and international abuses were linked. However, the (limited) previous experience of using conspiracy theories in international trials has been mixed. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg rejected conspiracy as a basis of prosecution. But conspiracy was the principal basis of prosecution at the Tokyo Tribunal. This led to some convictions that could easily be considered miscarriages of justice. For example, Hirota Koki was sentenced to death for conspiracy to wage aggressive war on the basis of his membership in Japan’s Cabinet (foreign minister between 1933 and 1936, prime minister in 1936 and 1937, and foreign minister again in 1937 and 1938), and despite the fact that as a politician he opposed the actions for which he was prosecuted. Similarly, General Yamashita Tomoyuki was sentenced to death for atrocities committed by troops under his command in the Philippines in 1944, despite convincing evidence that he neither knew about the atrocities nor was able to communicate with his troops at the time. The same standard was applied against Generals Kimura Heitaro and Muto Akira, who were also sentenced to death.48 The Tokyo Tribunal’s use of conspiracy as a basis of prosecution undoubtedly led to great efficiency in the prosecution and conviction of suspects. But this efficiency came at the cost of the Tribunal’s credibility, and probably did much to prevent serious public engagement with issues of responsibility in Japan.
A further obstacle to wide-ranging prosecution of figures from the Milošević regime in Serbia is that the regime never entirely left power. In June 2008, following parliamentary elections that produced a protracted coalition crisis, the party formerly chaired by Milošević joined the governing coalition led by the Democratic Party. A number of figures from the Milošević period found themselves occupying high public office again. The leaders of the parties sought for a time to portray the coalition as a sign of reconciliation between the opposed forces of the previous decade.49
Why Establish Anyone’s Guilt?
The smell of corpses from the freezer truck found at Tekija, buried long ago in the capital city, is spreading through Serbian public space and offers a shocking reminder of what everybody who had a grain of conscience in this country already knew: war crimes were committed (also) in Kosovo. They were not incidents, but official policy, the realization of which included the leading figures of the military-police establishment. Their Rashomon over the last week demonstrates that (yet) another horrifying neologism—“reclamation of the terrain” [asanacija terena]—was the work of the state, like the killing.50
The investigations and arrests of leading figures from the Milošević regime, including Milošević himself, marked a turning point brought about by a combination of forces, including public opinion, international pressure, and the early actions of the post-2000 Serbian government. Another turning point came about through a combination of chance and orchestration, in the interaction between silenced local knowledge, a minor local media outlet, and a window of opportunity. Information became public about an incident in 1999, when a local resident witnessed a freezer truck being pushed into the Danube River near the eastern Serbian town of Tekija. A diver engaged to investigate found the truck; police opened it to find it full of human corpses. The interior ministry instructed the police not to investigate, warned prosecutors that a “state secret” was in question, and ordered the bodies to be removed and destroyed or hidden in another place.51 The truck itself was destroyed by police at Petrovo Selo.52 While many local people certainly knew about the freezer truck,53 police did not investigate and media did not report the incident until two years later, when an article in the local Timočka krimi revija (Timok Crime Review) was picked up by national, and eventually international, media. Not long after, police began to release information about a program to destroy evidence of massacres in Kosovo, under the code name “Depths 2,”54 and to declare that evidence traced the program directly to the commanders of the police and military and to Slobodan Milošević personally. Over the next month, more burial sites of massacre victims were “discovered.”
If the case were only a question of establishing that massacres took place and that evidence was destroyed, its main significance would be legal. Probably its principal legal effect in Serbia was to force prosecutors to begin reconsidering the decision not to charge Milošević and his associates with war-related crimes (otherwise there was a distinct political preference for less controversial corruption charges). It may well have compelled the government to consider the domestic capacity to try such cases and opt for ICTY’s capacity instead.
The main significance of the case, though, probably lay in the way it brought war crimes into public discussion. As the investigation began, interior minister Dušan Mihajlović declared, “I think that this case will give a completely different picture of our so-called patriots.”55 The popular commentator Stojan Cerović, who had been arguing in his weekly column against cooperation with ICTY in the preceding months, dramatically revised his assessment:
If we want to avoid the Hague Tribunal, the reason can absolutely not be that we do not believe that crimes were committed—because we can see the evidence swimming to the surface—nor that we think we have some justification—like that other people did the same thing—because we do not believe those justifications ourselves. What I mean is that, to the extent that we have any kind of moral
