Adrian Hamilton: Ultimately, this is as much about politics as justice

"Closure" is the word that people keep using about Radovan Karadzic's arrest and likely trial for war crimes in The Hague. And in the sense of the closing of a chapter it is probably the right word – or would be should the real nasty in the Bosnian massacres, General Ratko Mladic, be caught. If the specialists are to be believed, that should follow soon.

One just fears that, if Karadzic was tracked down fairly easily once the will was there, Mladic may prove more difficult if he has actually gone to ground. It took the Italian police, after all, more than 40 years to capture the Sicilian mafia boss, Bernardo Provenzano, and that was not for want of trying (read Clare Longrigg's enthralling new book on the subject, Boss of Bosses).

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But whether Mladic does or does not follow his political boss to the Hague court, one still doubts that the trials will provide the kind of closure that people seem to want and the victims feel they are entitled to. Just look at the cases of the two most notorious figures, and biggest catches, of our era – Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. Both trials were billed as the occasions when justice would not only be done but be seen to be done before a global audience.

In the event, both trials descended into farce and bathos, as the defendants took the opportunity of being centre stage to cavort, cheer and challenge their captors. The result was not closure but anti-climax as Milosevic span out his time to a heart attack before conviction and Hussein managed to make his hanging a point of pity, rather than satisfaction.

The fault was not in the judicial concept, although the two trials – one national, one international – were poorly managed and ineffectively pursued. The concept of holding leaders accountable for crimes against humanity, born out of the Nuremberg trials and developed out of the experience of the endless savage wars of Africa and the Balkans, is a worthy one. The difficulty is that, essentially political in nature (as indeed was Nuremberg), they too easily get trammelled up in the politics of their time.

Winston Churchill thought, as victory came into sight in the Second World War, that the best thing to do with Hitler if caught was to execute him out of hand (as Mussolini was, together with his mistress). A trial, he felt, would only prove counter-productive. And you could see his point. Prosecution and punishment may pay the blood price of the victims. But for the defeated it is just an expression of the victor's power.

Hanging Saddam proved of some satisfaction (although not that much as it turned out) to the Shia of Iraq. To the Sunni, on the other hand, it looked merely vengeful, while to many ordinary Iraqis it felt uncomfortably like the humiliation of a man who was, after all, the country's leader, at the behest of an occupying army. The Serbs feel exactly the same about Milosevic and Karadzic – and Mladic.

The same, too, could be said of the current indictment of president Omar al-Bashir of Sudan for crimes of genocide in Darfur. The whole world, or at least the Western part of it, wants those responsible for the appalling atrocities in Darfur to be brought to book. But to indict the Sudanese president faces all the problems of establishing proof of direct responsibility, let alone the problems of extricating him from his home country and endangering the whole peace process. What is it that we want? To wreak vengeance, to hold to account, to make an example of, or simply to satisfy our own conscience?

It's not as though trials have proved that purgative to the people, even when they are held in the countries concerned. Anyone visiting Cambodia must be struck not just by the lack of retributive justice – the trials have only just begun of the last living perpetrators – but by the lack of will among even the victims for show trials. It is as if the society has been so traumatised that justice no longer has any meaning, or value to them.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission worked in South Africa – in so far as it did – because it wasn't a criminal prosecution as such and because it was clearly focused on assuaging the vengeance of the black victims by acts of public self-humiliation by their white tormentors .

The trial of Karadzic cannot be of final satisfaction to the Bosnian Muslims and Serbs without Mladic, because he is the man for whom responsibility of the massacres can be so directly pinned. Karadzic will talk a great deal and admit little. With any luck, he'll be garrulous enough to reveal much about what happened in those dark days a decade ago. But it's doubtful that anything he says will shock the Serbs or force them to come to terms with their own complicity in the way that the proponents of restorative justice hope. It's doubtful that even the Nuremberg trials did that.

The development of international criminal law is one of the most important, and potentially most hopeful, post-war developments. But we shouldn't hope too much from it. At bottom it is a political act. Just as with humanitarian intervention, we are in danger of corroding the concept by perverting its ends.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

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