THE trial of former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic was supposed to show the world for the first time ever a political leader answering for his actions. Milosevic stands accused of ordering and encouraging ethnic cleansing and war crimes in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia.
Never before has the man at the top faced such charges. Herman Goering, who was tried and convicted at the Nuremberg trials in 1946, was only Hitler’s subservient and indolent No. 2. Until now it has always been the lieutenants, the henchmen and hangers-on who have been put on trial for crimes instigated by their masters. Milosevic’s prosecution therefore always had a resonance far beyond the tens of thousands of victims of the former Yugoslavia. The world needed to see that repressive rulers could be prosecuted.
After two years of hearings, the trial has lost its way. It began by focusing on the thousands who were slaughtered at Milosevic’s bidding but has reached the stage where the accused himself rather than the victims and their families, has become the issue and might even walk free. This wretched state of affairs has come about for a number of reasons, including misfortune, incompetence and the masterful cunning of Milosevic himself. It was bad luck that the senior judge Richard May whose unflappable calm did so much to blunt Milosevic’s histrionic self-defense, was forced by ill health to quit the case in February and has since died. Milosevic’s cunning has been to turn the court, which he has persistently refused to recognize, into a circus as he rowed with prosecution witnesses and regularly protested about everything from the conditions of his detention to his own health.
There is no doubt that the 62-year old is unwell. His insistence on conducting his own case has placed a strain on his heart and he may well be in danger of a stroke or heart attack.
Most serious however is the poor judgment that has characterized the prosecution’s case against Milosevic. The biggest problem has been the sheer range of the charges, which embrace not only the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, which was carried out by Serb troops of whom Milosevic as president was commander in chief, but also for crimes committed in Croatia and Bosnia. The sheer scope of the indictments and the millions of words of evidence that supports them was unmanageable. Worse, some of the prosecution witnesses had misled investigators, as the former dictator was able to prove triumphantly in court.
The result has been a messy, drawn-out process that far from concentrating world opinion on the depravities of the Milosevic years has been self-defeating because the man himself is now seen to be a victim of the process. A simpler indictment focusing on the most easily proved crimes might have led to a swifter verdict. The court’s decision yesterday to press on with this cumbersome process only postpones the day when Milosevic will claim he is too ill to be tried. If that is accepted it will be justice denied to thousands.
