THE HAGUE, 31 July 2003 — The United Nations war crimes tribunal hearing charges against former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic broke for its summer recess this week with the prospect of an outcome barely visible in the distant future. Its proceedings punctuated by suspensions caused by Milosevic’s ill health, the court, which began its hearings in February last year, has already sat for 230 days.
The prosecution is expected to take until the end of the year to present its case and then it will be the turn of the defense. If it were to take the same amount of time a verdict is unlikely to be given before 2006. Already the case has lasted longer than any other in the history of the tribunal, beating that of Croat Gen. Tihomir Blaskic who was found guilty after 223 days.
By comparison the Nuremberg trials of the leaders of Nazi Germany lasted less than a year — from Oct. 18, 1945, to Oct. 1, 1946, — and that of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel eight months —from April 11 to Dec. 11, 1961. The trial of Maurice Papon in France for crimes against humanity lasted eight months — from Oct. 8, 1997 to April 2, 1998, — and that of German war criminal Klaus Barbie in Lyon, France, on the same charge eight weeks.
“A trial which reviews the behavior, potentially causing criminal activity, of a man over a decade, which involves three wars and countless victims, is bound to be long,” said tribunal spokesman Christian Chartier. “This is not a trial based on hot air, it’s the history of three countries over 10 years.”
He faces 66 charges relating to his role in the three major conflicts which led to the breakup of Yugoslavia — in Croatia (1991-1995), Bosnia (1992-1995) and Kosovo (1998-1999) — and cost some 250,000 lives. Milosevic was president of Serbia from 1990 to 1997 and president of rump Yugoslavia — Serbia and Montenegro — between 1997 and his ouster in 2001.
Since the trial is being conducted under the principles of Anglo-American law the case is being heard with the prosecution presenting its case, to be followed by rebuttal by the defense. Under the continental European system there would have been a preliminary stage to establish the facts.
Meanwhile, forensic experts yesterday found dozens of skeletons at a mass grave in eastern Bosnia that could contain hundreds of Muslim victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, possibly the largest burial site from the country’s three-year war. “We have found dozens of skeletons, most of them incomplete,” Murat Hurtic, a member of the Bosnian Muslim commission for missing people, told AFP.
Remains are to be removed from the site after the experts have dug up the entire four-by-40-meter (13-by-130 feet) grave. The grave thought to contain around 500 bodies is located in the mountainous countryside near the eastern town of Zvornik, close to border with Serbia. On Monday, bulldozers carefully removed a 1.5-meter (five feet) thick layer of soil to reach the skeletons.
Experts continued to dig with smaller, manual tools, and piles of human bones, clothes and shoes were found Wednesday. The find is feared to be only the tip of the iceberg. The Zvornik site is a so-called “secondary” grave where Bosnian Serbs brought bodies from other sites in order to cover up their crimes.
Such graves often contain parts of skeletons mixed together that had been crushed by bulldozers, which makes identification and even determining the exact number of victims very difficult. DNA analysis would be the only tool to do such a job.
