"HANDS OFF MILOSEVIC"

An old adversary of the tyrant warns of the risk that Milosevic might be killed or might commit suicide before being brought to trial.

Interview with Marco Pannella

by Renzo Foa

Liberal, 15-22 April 1999

Straight away, Marco Pannella dictates the headline he wants, a clear reminder of the famous slogan used in the struggle against the death penalty around the world: "Hands Off Milosevic". My immediate reaction is to suggest to him that the real risk is actually very different: that the temptation to negotiate with Milosevic will prevail, pretending that nothing has happened in Kosovo, not just now but in all these years. "True, this is the main risk," he replies, "but my position is the result of a story people are not aware of: the Radicals have been working for a long time, and much more than people think, for his arrest, trial, and sentence."

Because the war has actually been going on for ten years...

Yes, but things have gone further than people realise, and there are rumours that partly thanks to us, thanks to a voluminous file put together by a group of lawyers in Kosovo, Bosnia and elsewhere, Milosevic's name features in a confidential list of people under investigation by the International Court in the Hague on war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. For the charge against Milosevic for his criminal actions was brought almost at the same time as our request in 1991 to set up the ad hoc Tribunal...

And that would be the competent court?

Yes, though there is a chance that the case may be transferred to the International Court whose convention was approved in June 1998 and which could come into operation within a few months if 62 states ratify it. By the way, two of our friends have just ratified it: the President of Senegal Abdou Diouf and the President of Trinidad and Tobago Robinson. And we have

also asked the Italian government to act in this direction at international level. So by the autumn the Court might be in place, though it will take longer to sort out the budget and funding, to choose the seat and so on.

At the same time we have handed hundreds of thousands of signatures to the Committee for Human Rights in Geneva, where as Radicals we are members with the right to speak as a first-level NGO. So the whole legal procedure, with the trial and the possibility of his defence, is moving ahead.

Why are you so convinced that international justice will manage to proceed? And why are you so afraid that someone will get hold of Cain before the trial?

In this world people have the terrible habit of executing defeated dictators, if they don't commit suicide first. And yet they could recount a lot of true, and sometimes very embarrassing stories. Benito Mussolini, for example, could have used in his own defence that fact that Benedetto Croce went to the Altar of the Fatherland - when Mussolini was the Fatherland - to donate his ring of gold for the war in Abyssinia.

Will the world powers decide to execute Milosevic, send him to trial, or continue to negotiate with him?

Within a few years, I wouldn't like to say exactly how many, he will probably either commit suicide or by assassinated by the internal and external opposition. And let's not forget that Milosevic, who is a banker, would have a lot more to reveal than Mussolini or Hitler could have done.

When did you first come across Milosevic?

It's a long story. I could say it happened "by chance", but that wouldn't be true, because it all began one day when I went to see Benedetto Croce to ask him for his blessing, so to speak, for our aim as Italian students to see Trieste returned to Italy (at the time it was in allied hands, with Tito waiting in the wings). So I went to Trieste. And I happened to be there the same day the Italian troops entered the city. Then the story continues. As true anti-fascists we went to pay tribute to the mass graves, something which Almirante didn't have the courage to do. Through Trieste, between 1971 and 1974 we discovered the Austrian war cemeteries, forgotten even by Austria. It happened around Redipuglia, where we arrived in an anti-militarist march. I remember that we cleared one of weeds, discovering that it was abandoned partly because, when we managed to make out the names some of them were Italian, or Hungarian or Slovenian, and very few were German...

Do you also remember when, dressed in combat clothing, you went to Vukovar while it was under siege by the Serbs...

It wasn't Vukovar, which had already been flattened, it was Osijek, which was about to be attacked. But before I talk about that, let me go back to when we defended the spirit of peace of Osimo, to defuse the opposing nationalisms and when, at the same time, we were the heart of the environmentalist struggle against the agreements that led to the industrialisation and then the destruction of Carso. And then I surprised myself, listening to a recording broadcast on Radio Radicale of a speech I made in 1981 - as a member of the European Parliament Delegation to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, led by Enzo Bettiza - in which I raised the question of Kosovo and proposed that Yugoslavia should become a member of the EEC. I spoke of the rights to freedom, to be acknowledged for individuals and not populations. That was the substance of the dilemma: on one hand they asked you to acknowledge the rights of a people, of a party, of families, on the other hand you defended the right of the individual.

But it was only by defending the right of the individual that you could also save populations, families, etc. On Radio Radicale I also found the record of all the initiatives we carried out there, the distribution of leaflets, Radical militants expelled from seven towns, unauthorised political rallies, like the one I held in Belgrade when Milosevic was already in power, a meeting of the Federal Council of the Radical Party in Slovenia and another in Zagreb during the Serbian bombing...

So in 1991, in Vukovar and Osijek, Milosevic's criminal actions were there for all to see. Why did no-one stop him?

Because the official policy of the West, of the free world with which we have taken sides, began in 1938 with Munich, although even before that Churchill had said that if he were Italian he would have been a Fascist, the League of Nations had been killed and there had been a policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War. After Munich there was the war, there was the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement and all the rest. What I'm saying is that Yalta, too, is the continuation of the Munich ideology... A real ideology has gradually formed around this, partly responsible for the fact that we have dealt with Milosevic in the same incautious way we dealt with Hitler, Russia and China. Milosevic could be the last episode of the story that officially began in Munich.

One of the arguments used against the request by Spanish magistrates for the extradition of Pinochet is in favour of tyrants. It is claimed that if we try deposed dictators then it encourages dictators still in power not to surrender. Could this be the case with Milosevic?

It might be a contributing factor, though I believe that for now he's not afraid of being put on trial. He might begin to be afraid in a few months.

I know that it also depends on what the Radicals are able to do to establish the International Court. I repeat: I am thinking of the year 2000 for "Hands Off Milosevic", just as we announced the year 2000 deadline for the death penalty.

You have this obsession with setting deadlines, which means setting out objectives years in advance, objectives that seem impossible but which years later become reality...

Remember Nuremberg: it was a case of the victors putting the defeated on trial, with a degree of legality but in complete violation of current international law. Because this was a form of law that the victors established for themselves, proceeding with their own justice. It was a case of full legality but doubtful legitimacy. And now we have reached the limit, we are faced with something that we have been upholding for almost twenty years, that is the duty to interfere.

The duty?

Yes. Not the right, but the duty to interfere, knowing that this involves an obligation. Many years ago, when we were discussing the relationship between the EEC and the ACP, that is between Europe and an important part of the underdeveloped world, and we launched the campaign against famine in the world, we raised the problem of how to bring the African dictators and others to justice. Up to now this task has been entrusted only to political will and not to justice. But now that international jurisdiction is being born, everything is about to change.