It’s been a bad few days for war criminals and a good few days for the elusive concept of justice.
On March 21, the International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo, a former vice president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, of rape, murder, and other war crimes committed during a conflict in the Central African Republic in 2002-2003. Just three days later, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic of genocide and other war crimes — including the infamous Srebrenica massacre — during the 1992-1996 civil war in Yugoslavia.
Does this mean, as many liberals hope, that we are seeing the dawn of a new era of justice in which mass murderers will finally be held to account? And, if so, should this be cause for concern for conservatives who fret that American, British, Israeli and other Western troops will wind up in the docket on spurious, politically motivated charges?
It’s too early to offer a definitive answer, but my hunch is that liberals are bound to be disappointed and conservatives relieved because international criminal prosecutions will remain relatively rare.
The key stumbling block is the bringing of wanted criminals to trial. Jurists in The Hague can issue indictments and arrest warrants all they like, but they lack an army to actually seize the suspects and hand them over for trial. The most notorious case that makes the point is that of Omar Bashir, the president of Sudan since 1993. The ICC issued an indictment against him in 2009 for war crimes in Darfur. Yet he continues to reign in Khartoum and even to travel, evading the best attempts to bring him to justice.
Those who do wind up in the international dock are usually victims of changing politics in their home countries. Karadzic, for example, was arrested by Serbian authorities in 2008 after his erstwhile ally, Slobodan Milosevic, had been overthrown in Belgrade and replaced by a democratic, pro-Western government. Moreover, the European Union had made clear that progress in arresting war criminals was necessary to move along Serbia’s application to join the EU — something that Serbia’s new leaders greatly valued.
In Bemba’s case, two academics who have studied the issue explain, he was arrested because, as the leader of a Congolese militia known as the MLC, he had found himself on the losing side of a civil war in the Central African Republic. The victor, Francois Bozize, found it convenient to send Bemba for trial because it got rid of a rival, pleased international donors, and distracted international attention from possible investigations into his own wrongdoing.
In sum, it takes a pretty extraordinary confluence of circumstances to actually bring war criminals to international trial — and barring the development of a United Nations army (which is, to put it mildly, highly unlikely) always will. That should comfort conservatives who fret about international law and discomfort liberals who pine for it. Neither their greatest wishes nor worst fears are likely to come true.
