War crimes and punishment

Assistant professor of politics and international affairs Gary Bass published a book in September titled "Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals." Bass focused on the 20th century and how war crimes have been punished. He recently spoke with 'Prince' Executive Editor Michael Koike.

'Prince': Where did the idea come from?

Bass: It got started before I was an academic, when I was a reporter and one of the things I was writing about was the Clinton administration's foreign policy and in particular the policy toward the former Yugoslavia, and of course the war crimes tribunal was one of the new things on the landscape. I was wondering why it was that we were only intermittently supportive of this thing, and in the process, I found myself looking at not just what was going on now, but also earlier historical cases.

P: Did you draw comparisons between the former Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany for example?

B: It's not a book about war crimes in particular; it's about how we in the West punish war crimes. People make a lot of comparisons with Nuremberg because it's the only war crimes tribunal people have usually heard of. Trying to understand what's going on in the Hague only by [studying] Nuremberg is like thinking about politics with only one historical example. It's like only looking at Vietnam when thinking about war. I was trying to use more historical examples, and so I spent a lot of time on the efforts to prosecute war criminals right after World War I, both among Germans and Turks. Both of these efforts ended in failure. The fact that they can fail is just as important to know as the fact that Nuremberg was a success.

P: How did you organize the book?

B: There are four 20th-century chapters: one chapter about prosecuting Germans in World War I, one about the Turks in World War I, one about Nuremberg and one about the former Yugoslavia. There's also a chapter on the Napoleonic wars.

P: Why don't the tribunals deter crimes?

B: I am not saying they don't have some deterrent effect. But I think it's a losing argument to try to rest [the efforts of] war crime tribunals just on deterrence. We only consider them effective if they manage to deter some of the most crazy or evil people on the planet. War criminals are hard to deter. If it were easy, they wouldn't be war criminals. And pinning your hopes on that one argument is a losing one. There are a lot of examples where it seems that the people committing the war crimes aren't troubled by the threat of being prosecuted and punished. Sometimes they aren't even deterred by the threat of military force. So why would they be afraid of legal prosecution?

P: What do you see as the future in the former Yugoslavia?

B: I think we are a lot closer than we've been. The fall of Milosevic was enormously important. The new president of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Kostunica, is somebody who has been pretty contemptuous of the tribunal as an institution of American imperialism. But lately, since becoming president, and presumably under pressure from the West, his tone has improved some.

And I am slightly more optimistic about the chances that eventually something might happen, not just to Milosevic, but to the other people who might be prosecuted. There are other important war crime suspects: the defense minister, the president of Serbia, three senior Yugoslav army officers, the former Bosnian-Serb army wartime military chief. They are all believed to be in Yugoslavia, and all of them were indicted. All of them should be turned over to the Hague. Whether or not they will be is another question.

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Croatia also had an election recently in the aftermath of the death of their old nationalist president, Franjo Tudjman. And since his death, we have a new president, Stipe Mesic, who has been quite cooperative with the tribunal. And in Croatia things are looking better. The fact that Croatia is being better behaved makes it harder for Yugoslavia to dig its heels in.

P: What role should the tribunals play?

B: They can play a useful role, but they are part of a much broader process. Think of what we did in West Germany after World War II, when we really rebuilt the country into the democracy that it is today. War crimes tribunals are only one specialized element in that entire nation-building process. If you just do the war crimes tribunals, that's not enough. There needs to be more of an effort to liberalize and democratize and establish the rule of law. But there's a tendency among international lawyers to be just interested in the trials themselves. I'm a political scientist, and so I'm interested in the whole political process. It's only part of a much bigger political story.

P: What more would you like to see happen in the former Yugoslavia?

B: Serbia is still a pretty nationalist place. [More action is] needed if it's ever going to rejoin Europe. Like I said, the fact that Milosevic is out of power is enormously important. For people who say, "He's not in power but he's not in the Hague, so we're not happy about Yugoslavia," I think that's setting the bar too high. It would be great to get him in the Hague too, but getting him out of office is a huge step forward.

Now that Milosevic is out of power, I think you need to resist some of the nationalism that Milosevic had been working up since the late 1980s. You need to replace that with an awareness of human rights. We need to find out how to get Serbia to begin to have genuine liberalism, and that's a difficult thing.

P: How long will it take the former Yugoslavia to recover?

B: A very long time. I couldn't put the date on it, but obviously a very long time. Basically, you probably need to wait a generation. That's some of what happened in Germany. The younger generation could credibly say they had nothing to do with the Nazi period. So maybe we need some of the same thing to happen in the former Yugoslavia.