Mind Games And The Quality Of Justice.(Brief Article)

On the old radio show "The Shadow," Lamont Cranston possessed the power to "cloud men's minds." If he has a latter-day incarnation, it is Slobodan Milosevic. As Western peacemakers have learned over the years, he is a wily adversary, skilled at turning disadvantage to advantage-- and obscuring facts that seem clear and unambiguous.

So it has been with the opening weeks of the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. Witness after witness has trooped to the stand, mostly Kosovar Albanians grimly recounting how their villages were burned, their families killed or driven from their homes by Yugoslav forces during the 1999 war. To each, Milosevic offers a pat cross- examination. Did you know that "terrorists" of the Kosovo Liberation Army were in the area? Did you help them, give them food or shelter, let them live among you, perhaps send your sons to fight?

The answers are inevitably a compromising blend of "yes" and "no." For what Kosovar could not know of the KLA, in their small and tightly knit province? By implication, the presumed victims are in fact collaborators, part of the problem that needed to be attacked if Yugoslavia was to preserve itself. Indeed, this is the core of Milosevic's defense. Everyone in the Balkans was guilty in the wars that engulfed them. Why blame only Serbs?

The argument plays well in Belgrade, where Slobo is again a star. "A real Serb," they call him, a near majority awarding him marks of 5 of 5 for his performance, according to the NEWSWEEKly Nin. If coming to terms with history is a goal of the tribunal, as in Nuremberg, this is not an auspicious beginning.

Watching all this, I remember standing one sunny June day in a field in Kosovo, the year after the war ended. It was a beautiful and peaceful place--sprinkled with blue and yellow flowers, the trees deep green against white-tipped mountains to the west--save for the scraps of clothes and muddy shoes lying here and there, flattened by a winter under snow. On the morning of April 27, 1999, Serb forces began shelling and burning villages in the area. By midday, 10,000 people were on the move in a four-mile caravan of tractors, cars and horse carts, herded by the Yugoslav military toward exile across the nearby border with Albania. At the tiny village of Meja, Serbian police and paramilitaries separated 150 to 200 boys and men from the column and marched them into this field. There they were divided into groups of about 20. Some were forced to lie down on the ground. Others were made to sing Serbian songs and shout, "Long live Serbia" or "Slobo is great!" Then they were shot.

I know this from reports prepared by the Organization for ...