The Death of a Genocidier

Milan Babic, a key player in the Serbian efforts to create Serb enclaves in Croatia, has committed suicide. He pled guilty in 2004 for persecuting non-Serbs and sentenced to 13 years. In so doing, he avoided four other charges for murder, cruelty, and wanton destruction of villages. He also testified against Milosevic in 2002. Details from the BBC are here and his obituary is here.

The key part of the story for me was the shame and remorse Babic felt for his misdeeds. He said his guilt was a “pain that I have to live with for the rest of my life.” His statement brings to mind what I said about the role of law in my review of the movie Munich:

Sterile academics dissect jus in bello and parse neat distinctions between enemy and non-enemy combatants. But soldiers actually live these rules of war. And the line between a tormented assassin and a noble and heroic soldier is the rule of law. Extrajudicial killing is portrayed in the movie as a type of moral relativism that begins to destroy the avenging assassin as much as the evildoers they are killing. That is why a soldier so desperately needs to know that his actions — his “judicial” killings — are not simply necessary, but morally justified. By sanctioning his conduct through the rule of law, society cleanses his killing of others and the soldier thereby preserves his humanity.

While not every genocidier has such feelings of remorse, it certainly is no surprise that a person who committed grave war crimes took the ultimate step in self-loathing.