Brief Thoughts on Slobodan

It’s too bad he died before the trial could be completed, not so much because he needed to be punished more severely (although he did), but because he was an interesting test case for international justice.

I did not support (and still do not support) the prosecution of Augusto Pinochet in a European court. It seems to me that some incentive must be left for dictators to peacefully and safely leave power, and as long as Pinochet isn’t dictator of Chile, I really don’t care all that much about him. Much worse, in my view, would be setting a precedent under which a dictator peacefully steps down, with agreement for his own security in place, and then is prosecuted anyway. The question, for me, is simply not a moral one. That is, I’m not terribly interested in the question of what dictators deserve. I’m much more interested in the problem of removing dictators from power without bloodshed, and if we begin prosecuting guys like Pinochet, we’re likely to see dictators more reluctant to step down. Fidel Castro is a bad guy, but if he were willing to take a billion dollars to step down and move to France tomorrow, I think it would be a good policy outcome.

But, as I recall, this really doesn’t apply to Milosevic. His regime collapsed, and his home state sent him to The Hague. A fair trial (to both Milosevic and to the prosecution) could not be had in Serbia. There should be some international mechanism to deal with situations like this, and it’s a pity that the mechanism didn’t get fully tested in this case.

Kat has more.

UPDATE: In comments, Randy asks

Then another dictator takes power and wants an immunity agreement. Where do you draw the line?

My first response is that I think this is a nonsensical question. I may be wrong regarding the personalities of authoritarian rulers, but I’d be pretty surprised to find that any of them thought very much, while attaining power, about whether they would be prosecuted if they fell. I don’t think that there’s any moral hazard here; allowing dictators who establish specific immunity agreements before stepping down to avoid prosecution is not, in my view, going to create an incentive for some huge number of potential dictators to seize power and start shooting people. There is already plenty of incentive for seizing authoritarian power; a misguided sense of patriotism, a desire for power, a desire for wealth, whatever. Also, given the number of dictators who fall prey to violent ends or to imprisonment at the hands of successor authoritarian regimes (and this tends to happen more often than the replacement by democratic regimes), you can color me enormously skeptical regarding this portion of the argument.

Second, I’m inclined to say “Who cares?” Aleksandr Lukashenko, Fidel Castro, Islam Karimov, Emomali Rahmonov, and Saparat Niyazov are all dictators with varying degrees of nastiness. I would not hesitate to grant them singly or as a group an amnesty based on a surrender of power to a democratic government. I really can’t see how this would further the ends of authoritarian rulers in the world; I think it’s much, much more likely that, if promised security in their persons and their property (and this doesn’t mean that they keep everything; obviously such solutions can be negotiated), that these leaders would, in situations where they otherwise faced pressure, be more likely to surrender power than to attempt to hold on to it through brutal and repressive means. Note further that this does not involve some kind of blanket amnesty for authoritarian rulers, which is how some seem to be interpreting it. Authoritarians who allow a transition minimizing bloodshed get credit; those who don’t can be prosecuted to our heart’s delight.