Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic

by Judith Armatta

An eyewitness account of the first major international war-crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg trials, Twilight of Impunity is a gripping guide to the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The historic trial of the “Butcher of the Balkans” began in 2002 and ended abruptly with Milosevic’s death in 2006. Judith Armatta, a lawyer who spent three years in the former Yugoslavia during Milosevic’s reign, had a front-row seat at the trial. In Twilight of Impunity she brings the dramatic proceedings to life, explains complex legal issues, and assesses the trial’s implications for victims of the conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s and international justice more broadly. Armatta acknowledges the trial’s flaws, particularly Milosevic’s grandstanding and attacks on the institutional legitimacy of the International Criminal Tribunal. Yet she argues that the trial provided an indispensable legal and historical narrative of events in the former Yugoslavia and a valuable forum where victims could tell their stories and seek justice. It addressed crucial legal issues, such as the responsibility of commanders for crimes committed by subordinates, and helped to create a framework for conceptualizing and organizing other large-scale international criminal tribunals. The prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague was an important step toward ending impunity for leaders who perpetrate egregious crimes against humanity.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War

576 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Judith Armatta is a lawyer, journalist, and human-rights advocate who monitored the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on behalf of the Coalition for International Justice. Her dispatches from The Hague appeared in Tribunal Update, published by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting; Monitor, a magazine of political commentary published in Montenegro; the International Herald Tribune; and the Chicago Tribune. Earlier Armatta worked for the American Bar Association’s Central and East European Law Initiative, opening offices in Belgrade and Montenegro. During the Kosova War she headed a War Crimes Documentation Project among Kosovar Albanian refugees in Macedonia. Armatta currently lives in Washington and consults on international humanitarian, human rights, and other rule-of-law issues, most recently in the Middle East.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book makes an excellent case that the Milošević trial was neither merely victor’s justice nor entirely farcical, despite the many substantial problems that arose throughout its lengthy runtime, which was ultimately cut short by the accused’s untimely death before a verdict could be reached. Unlike more polemical accounts that seek to rehabilitate Milošević’s image as a martyr of Occidentalist show trials, Armatta cogently identifies the various inadequacies of the ICTY process while refusing to let him off the hook for his blatant lies and obstructionism, which, in her view, contributed more than anything to the trial’s dysfunction. Many of her critiques are aimed at the court itself, particularly for being too lenient with an accused who openly sought to use the proceedings as a platform from which to espouse historical revisionism.

The book also includes an afterword that gestures toward the idea that the aspiration for a so-called “rules-based international order” remains an iterative and unfinished process, one that global superpowers such as the United States have at times cynically weaponized when convenient, only to disregard when their own nationals and leaders come under scrutiny.

This is also the first book I have read that clearly demonstrates the various machinations and subterfuge committed by the Serbian state during the 1990s in a way that is easy to understand. My only real gripe is the lack of diacritical marks on proper names! Granted, this is a personal preference, and the author explains her reasoning at the beginning of the text. Ultimately, the main issue is that the very title, Twilight of Impunity, has turned out to be wishful thinking, at least so far. The author can hardly be blamed for failing to foresee the future, though.