Why I have a sneaking sympathy for Milosevic

By Robert Harris (Filed: 12/02/2002)

I FEEL vaguely ashamed to write the sentence that follows, but here goes. I have come to feel a sneaking sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic.

I know, I know - you don't have to tell me. The man is wicked and cynical, almost beyond belief. He bears the largest share of the responsibility for a series of "small" wars that killed more than 200,000 people and traumatised millions more. If he died tomorrow, I wouldn't care. It was surely a pity for humanity that he was ever born.

Yet still, as he is led into the dock at The Hague this morning, to begin a trial for war crimes that is expected to last until 2004, some obscure part of me will be hoping he makes a fight of it, just as I have found his earlier defiance of the court oddly compelling.

When he was asked at a previous hearing for his opinion of its procedures, and when he retorted, folding his arms, "That's your problem!", I found myself thinking, "Well, yes, actually: good point." Monster he might be, but the sheer, contemptuous resilience of the man, in the face of world opinion, commands an uneasy respect.

We have been here before. Milosevic, as we are regularly reminded, is the most senior figure to be arraigned before an international tribunal since Hitler's number two, Hermann Goering (right) at Nuremberg in 1946, and the way the two cases are developing is curiously similar.

Like Milosevic, Goering was in poor shape, physically and psychologically, when he was first arrested, but prison had a restorative effect. He was detoxified, slimmed down (he lost nearly six stone), and on the eve of the trial recorded an IQ of 138. Too late, the Allies realised the problem they had created.

Like Milosevic, Goering's strength, paradoxically, was the hopelessness of his position. He was in no doubt about the nature of the proceedings facing him. This was a hearing with only one possible outcome. (The prosecutors in The Hague, of course, hotly deny that theirs is a "show trial", but does anyone seriously suppose that Milosevic will walk free at the end of the next two years?)

A court of justice is a theatre; the trial is the play. Once an accused ceases to act the role in which he is traditionally cast - ie, once he stops trying to save his own skin - the drama necessarily takes on a different form. "My philosophy is that if the time has come, the time has come," Goering told his defence counsel before he took the stand.

"Accept responsibility and go down with guns firing and colours flying! It's the defence of Germany that is at stake in this trial - not just the handful of us defendants who are for the high jump anyway."

And so, for several, deeply embarrassing days, Goering cheerfully ran rings around the high-minded, flat-footed American prosecutor, Robert H Jackson. Like Milosevic, Goering had a certain rough and cynical charm; restored to prime condition, broad-shouldered and deep-voiced, he exuded a powerful presence.

Like Milosevic, he also had a reasonable command of English, but chose not to reply to questions until they had been translated into his native tongue - a useful advantage during cross-examination, allowing him time to phrase his replies.

Above all, he played on the nature of the court's proceedings to portray himself as the object of "victor's justice". Perhaps his most telling reply to the hapless Jackson (left) came when the American produced a 1935 document, outlining German plans to clear the Rhine of civilian river traffic in the event of mobilisation: wasn't this, demanded Jackson, a secret blueprint for war?

"I do not think I can recall," responded Goering, "reading beforehand the publication of the mobilisation plans of the United States."

As Airey Neave, a British intelligence officer who interrogated Goering at Nuremberg, ruefully recorded 32 years later: "No one had been prepared for his immense ability and knowledge.

"No one had realised how much his strong character and ruthlessness had been restored by months in prison. Murderer he may have been, but he was a brave bastard too."

Similarly, no one knows how Milosevic will perform in the coming weeks and months. He might try to make long speeches from the dock, a la Goering, inviting the judges to switch off his microphone, as they have done before.

He might try to call such witnesses as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and the former Secretary-General of Nato, Javier Solana (they won't come, we may be sure, but the point will be made - this is an unfair hearing).

He might try to muddy the waters by demanding to know why the deaths and destruction resulting from the allied bombing, or the activities of the Croats and Muslims, aren't also being taken into account. He might, conceivably, say nothing at all.

Goering, in the end, was destroyed by a clear chain of evidence linking him to one, relatively minor atrocity in the great catalogue of horror from the Second World War: the execution of 55 RAF officers who had escaped from a Berlin prisoner of war camp in 1944.

It is possible that something similar will happen to Milosevic - that it will be some small, terrible, single incident, rather than these huge, generalised "crimes against humanity" of which he is accused, that will puncture his bravado and secure his inevitable conviction.

But between now and then, I wouldn't be surprised if Milosevic - lonely, defiant, fighting against the odds - wins some unlikely international sympathy. The British at the end of the Second World War wanted to shoot all the senior Nazis such as Goering out of hand; it was the Americans who insisted on a trial.

Today, with Milosevic, the roles are reversed: the British want the trial; the Americans are uneasy about the embarrassments it might throw up. It could prove that they have a shrewder appreciation than we do of the perils of the Goering Syndrome.

A related and highly recommended article, "Victor's Justice", has also been published in The Spectator.