A Serbian rebel leader convicted of crimes against humanity was found dead in his jail cell, having apparently committed suicide. It was not revealed how Milan Babib did it, just that he did.

Milan Babic, the Serb leader of a rebel republic in Croatia and one of the key figures in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, committed suicide in prison, the U.N. war crimes tribunal said Monday.

Babic, who was serving 13 years for crimes against humanity, was found dead Sunday evening in his cell at the U.N. detention center in Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague, said a tribunal statement.
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Babic’s family was told Sunday after the chief medical officer of the center confirmed the cause of death was suicide. Dutch authorities were notified and a tribunal judge immediately ordered an inquiry.

The tribunal did not say how Babic killed himself. In Belgrade, the B92 television station said Babic “probably hanged himself.”

Babic’s body was discovered during a routine half-hourly monitoring of his cell, but he had not been on a special suicide watch, said tribunal spokeswoman Alexandra Milenov.

“He gave no indication he was contemplating suicide,” she said. “There was nothing unusual in his demeanor” before his death.

It was the second time a detainee committed suicide. The first was Slavko Dokmanovic, another Croatian Serb leader, in 1998.

Babic was something of a different kind of war criminal. Whereas most of the other warlords linked arms and held together tightly, Babic blabbed his mouth. He ended up being one of the biggest key witnesses against genocidal dictator Slobadon Milosevic. But he himself participated in the ethnic-cleansing of Croatians by the Serbian minority, in an attempt to create an ethnically pure Serbian state.

This article highlights how the suicide reinforces Serbian perceptions that the ICC is biased against them. Most Serbians did not condone the Balkan genocide, even soldiers, as they were forced by a sick dictator to bow to his plans. Milosevic may have been a modern-day Hitler, but the situation after his ousting is akin to the period following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. For how long can you punished an entire people before they begin to support another nationalist dictator?…

The other side of the coin is how the Croatians feel about the suicide. Babic was supposed to serve thirteen years in prison for crimes against humanity, but effectively subverted justice by ending his punishment early. Just as the UN couldn’t help stop the genocide for years after it began, they could not stop Babic from taking the easy way out.

Doing justice by judging and sentencing war criminals is the right thing to do, but they must serve their full sentence in order for justice to have its full effect. Likewise, further injustices cannot be done in reprisal for the actions of people like Babic and Milosevic. Serbia must also develop with its neighbors into a peaceful, democratic state.