I sit in the press gallery of court number two at The Hague, separated from Slobodan Milosevic by a sheet of floor-to-ceiling bulletproof glass, thumbing through the list of charges. I'm looking for familiar place names. Like many of the reporters covering Milosevic's trial, I've spent a good part of my life covering the events he is now accused of instigating. His charge sheet is bound in blue covers and reads like a guidebook to the worst European neighbourhoods of the 1990s. It contains more than 500 incidents spread over three wars, spanning nine years during which Milosevic's regime brought chaos to the Balkans and panic to the chancelleries of Europe.
First up is the Croatia indictment. In 1991, the Croats split from Yugoslavia and Milosevic sent in the tanks. My own first-blooding came in a bombardment of the hospital in the little eastern town of Vinkovci. I fled to the basement, to be confronted by a man being rushed in on a stretcher drenched in blood. He was a wounded patient awaiting evacuation. Then the shells hit, and he was wounded all over again. There is no mention of this incident, only of a much worse one, when Milosevic's men rounded up 255 patients and staff from the hospital of the neighbouring town, Vukovar, marched them outside and shot them.
Next is Bosnia. When Bosnia's Muslims and Croats declared independence in 1992, the Serbs again went to war. Technically, Milosevic himself was not at war, since Bosnia was a separate state. But the Bosnian Serbs used his shells, his equipment, his money and his paramilitary gangs to carve a path through the country. I was denied access to the notorious death camps featured in the Bosnia indictment.
But with the third indictment, for Kosovo, I find what I'm looking for. Kosovo was the third war; once again, it was an independence war and, once more, Serb tanks and artillery were used to smash not just the rebels, but their women and children too. On page 23 of the indictment is an accusation covering the massacre at Meja, which I first heard about one terrible night on the Albania-Kosovo border, reporting on the tide of ethnic Albanians Milosevic was expelling.
A small convoy arrived, well after midnight, with a handful of battered tractors pulling cartloads of women, children and old people, but no men. The men, they explained, had been ordered off the convoy as it passed through Meja a few hours before and herded into a field. When the next convoy arrived, we journalists scampered around it, all asking the same question. Had they been through Meja? Had they seen the men in the field? Yes, one teenager told me, they had passed through Meja and seen the men in the field. "Lying together like logs," he said.
Two months later, with Nato in control, I drove through Kosovo to find Meja. Locating the field was easy. A man's leg, still in its pinstriped trouser, lay in the middle. Around it were the remains of bonfires, where their identity cards had been burned. In a nearby stream, overhung by trees, were bodies-one of a man in jeans and leather jacket, but missing his head. Further on, there was a great patch of yellowed grass, indented by the shapes of men. The bodies had lain here for weeks before the Serbs removed them, prior to giving up their positions to Nato.
Here is what the indictment has to say: "In Meja, Korenica and Meja-Orize, a large, and as yet undetermined, number of Kosovo Albanian civilian males were separated from the mass of fleeing villagers, abducted and executed." That's it. A single paragraph on a single page of a book of charges being levelled at Milosevic. It contains the names of more than 1,000 individual victims and 50 smashed villages, plus camps, rapes, the desecration of 23 mosques, allegations of robbery, unlawful detention and the mass deportation of 740,000 individuals. If his connection to one hundredth of these charges are proved, Milosevic, now 60, will spend the rest of his life in prison.
The former president is taking the only reasonable defence open to him. He is refusing to acknowledge the court. It's a bit awkward, since in 1995 he signed the Dayton Peace Agreement, which included recognition of the court. But no matter; this is Milosevic's position and he is sticking to it with some skill. Watching him in action, you suspect one reason he has refused the use of a lawyer is that few could do a better job. His performance is mesmerising. Try as they might, the prosecutors, and even the three judges lined up in their red robes, are overshadowed by Milosevic.
He spends most of each hearing slouched in his chair. His hair stays swept back, the jowls brood. The expression is insolent-half mocking, half surprised-as witnesses are coaxed into reliving their agonies before him. But it is in the cross examination that Milosevic truly comes into his own.
"You said he was shot at," he thunders at one witness, an ethnic Albanian villager who lost many of his friends in the 1999 ethnic cleansing. "Then you said the house was shelled," he intones, pausing to thumb through his notes. "You have to choose. Which is it?"
The witness mumbles a reply.
Milosevic stares at the man like a judge at a show trial. "You only heard about it? Very well."
His technique never varies-careful questions picking up inconsistencies, however minute, in witness testimony, punctuated by angry accusations. "There was no deportation! They were fleeing the battlefield!" booms Milosevic, finger stabbing the air.
The presiding judge, Richard May, cuts in with a sigh. "Mr Milosevic, I'm going to stop you. This is not the time for comments." With the push of a judicial finger, power to Milosevic's microphone is cut and journalists are left listening to his indistinct rantings from the other side of the thick glass.
Milosevic gets a lot of help. While officially acting without a lawyer, he in fact has a powerful legal team-not in The Hague, but back home in Belgrade. Each evening, and during breaks in the court sessions, he is on the phone, talking to advisers who are watching the trial, live, on Serbian television. His lawyers have plenty of material to work with. Before losing power in October 2000, Milosevic carted off van-loads of documents from the secret service and military, including files on thousands of ethnic Albanians.
Thus he can get a witness checked, among other things, for any record that he was once a police informer. It is a clever technique, but far from infallible. At one point, he tells a witness that he was not the innocent man he appeared to be, as there is a record of his brother being killed in battle. Wrong, says the witness; his brother died of illness. Milosevic has confused him with another man of the same name. There are smiles from the prosecutors but Milosevic is unfazed-one engagement lost, many more battles to come. Over 200 witnesses are due to testify. Even though indictments for Croatia and Bosnia are being merged with that of Kosovo, the case is still expected to take two years. When The Hague's famously slow appeals process kicks in, it will probably take longer.
Watching, you cannot but be struck by the contrast between memories of bloody, chaotic battlefields and the tidiness of the courtroom. Milosevic wears no handcuffs, there are no bars around the dock. His jail cell comes with en-suite bathroom, satellite television, books, computer and phone. The Hague has published guidelines for his detention, including rule 24, which states: "Underclothing shall be changed and washed as often as necessary."
The Slobo show is certainly working its magic with Serbs back home. Opinion polls demonstrate growing support for what is seen as plucky defiance against long odds. Ordinary Serbs see The Hague as a victor's court, especially since three of the five permanent members of the UN security council who set it up were the nations which bombed Yugoslavia. Hague staff worry about losing Serb support, but their deeper anxiety lies elsewhere. Nine years after the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) came into being, the war crimes process is itself now on trial.
Two blocks down the road from the Hague courthouse, sit the offices of the new International Criminal Court. Formally, the ICC has nothing to do with the existing Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals, which were created as ad hoc bodies by the UN security council. Although the UN has done much of the backroom work, officially the ICC was formed independently of the UN by a group of like-minded nations. In 1998, 120 countries voted for the Rome statute, ruling that when 60 nations had passed these rules into their own law, the court could begin work. On 11th April that milestone was passed-and with something of a flourish. Needing four more nation states to sign on, the court got ten: Bosnia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Congo, Ireland, Jordan, Mongolia, Nigeria, Romania and Slovakia. The court will open for business on 1st July, but it has already sparked division in the UN. While the EU, and most South American states, are in favour of it, the US, China, Russia, India, Turkey, Israel and many other important countries are against.
The ICC has the same basic structure and role as the Yugoslavia tribunal, but it comes with a global remit and a permanent operation. For its supporters, the Milosevic trial is the ideal advertisement for the whole process-living proof that even world leaders may fall within the grasp of world justice.
Staff at The Hague insist that the Milosevic trial is a judicial, not a political, process. But the ICTY was born in 1993, of a political imperative. The world's leading powers were under pressure to respond to the Bosnian war. Unwilling to send in troops, but keen to do something, the UN security council nibbled at the problem. There was an arms embargo; then a total embargo against Yugoslavia. There would be peace talks in Geneva and a UN force to protect aid to Bosnia. And then, there would be a war crimes court.
The Geneva conventions of 1949 were a starting point for the court. Unlike the earlier Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, waging war would not itself be the crime, only its misconduct. The world has long been littered with treaties governing the conduct of war but, until now, nobody had tried to enforce them in court. The statutes handed down by the security council to the first generation of Hague judges split into two themes: the rules of war and the treatment of civilians. The logic was simple-fight if you want, but don't cause damage or pain that is not necessary to achieve victory.
From the start there was tension between court staff and the security council nations, who were only too aware that the court might one day turn on them. It had the power to try crimes committed not only between states, but by a state against its own population-further eroding the principle of national sovereignty. These crimes fell into four articles. Two dealt with crimes committed in wartime, the other two with mistreatment of a civilian population, including crimes against humanity and the most famous charge, genocide, which referred to the destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, national or religious group.
The tribunal got its headquarters (The Hague won the toss with Geneva) plus staff, investigators and a prosecution department. But without an international police force to accompany the new international court, the ICTY had a problem-finding someone to put on trial. In its first few years, evidence and indictments piled up, but most of the defendants remained at large. "Only states can execute arrest warrants," Antonio Cassese, the first court president, complained in 1995. He didn't get a police force, but he did get a budget. From ?150,000 in 1993 it shot up to ?6m in 1995, and is now running at ?65m annually.
If the warring sides in Bosnia were deterred by the arrival of Hague justice, they had a funny way of showing it. As the court opened, Bosnia's Croats massacred 100 Muslims, some burned alive, in the village of Ahmici. Two years later (and still no trials) Bosnian Serbs carried out the worst atrocity of the war-the massacre of 7,000 unarmed Muslims in Srebrenica
At the end of the Bosnian war in October 1995, the Dayton Peace Agreement gave The Hague independence from the security council. But it came with a blow. Nato, now occupying Bosnia in strength, refused to use its 55,000 troops to chase war crimes suspects. The generals said they would act only if given explicit orders by Nato governments.
The Hague's combative Canadian chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, toured the world's capitals, pleading for help. In 1996, the man at the top of the wanted list was Bosnian Serb president, Radovan Karadzic, accused of complicity in the massacre at Srebrenica and the bombardment of Sarajevo. Yet he was allowed to live in a villa less than a mile from a Nato base.
The ICTY did, however, get a trial. Dusko Tadic, a former Serb concentration camp guard was arrested, not in Bosnia, but by German police after he had fled to Munich in 1994. Tadic proved the perfect defendant. A florid psychopath, he had enjoyed torturing and killing Muslims in the notorious Omarska concentration camp, at one stage forcing an inmate to bite off the genitals of another. He was jailed in 1997. But Hague staffers felt uneasy. Jailing poisonous minnows did not disguise the failure to haul in big fish.
Then Nato got moving. By 1997, it was clear that the Bosnian peace process was stuck. Nationalists who had led the warring factions were still in charge, blocking peace attempts. As Arbour pointed out, many of these men were on her wanted list. Arresting them for war crimes would be an ideal method of removing them from the scene. Britain, now run by a Labour government anxious to display its ethical foreign policy, took the lead. In July, British commandos swooped on two Serbs who had designed the concentration camps where so many Muslims had died.
The raids had mixed success. One suspect, Milan Kovacevic, was grabbed by an SAS team posing as Red Cross workers, who walked into the hospital in Prijedor where he was director. They had less luck with his accomplice, Simo Drljaca, a local police chief. For three days, the SAS sat hiding in bushes near his favourite fishing lake, hoping to grab him off guard. But even on a fishing trip, Drljaca carried a gun, and he shot one SAS trooper in the leg before another shot him dead. The Red Cross complained about the impersonation of their staff. But what Nato most feared-an uprising by angry Serbs-did not happen. A pattern was set. More arrests, by Dutch, American and French commandos, soon followed. Karadzic remained free, but now he was on the run.
Alongside the SAS raids came new diplomatic pressure, led by the US. Washington turned its guns on Croatia, which was harbouring many Bosnian Croat war crimes suspects. Zagreb was told it would have its aid cut unless it co-operated. The pressure worked, and Croatia handed over ten warlords who had been sheltering in its territory.
When the Kosovo war exploded in the spring of 1998, Arbour's mood was confident. Inmates were filling up a special UN jail. The Hague had managed to demonstrate a "joined up" process-from investigation to indictment to arrest to trial. Two months into the Nato air campaign against Serbia, Arbour indicted Milosevic himself.
Diplomats, looking ahead to peace talks, were furious. "You can hardly meet with the man when you know your orders are to arrest him on sight," said one. However, it was Milosevic himself who took the key step that saw him brought to The Hague. He called a snap election after the war, believing the opposition was too divided to fight him. He was wrong. In October 2000, he was turfed out of office. The new president, Vojislav Kostunica, put him under house arrest-not for war crimes, but for corruption. The Hague had a new chief prosecutor, former anti-mafia investigator, Carla del Ponte. She flew to Belgrade, only for Kostunica to refuse to hand over Milosevic.
By this stage, however, del Ponte had some muscle. In 2001, The Hague passed 18 convictions including the first successful prosecution for rape as a war crime, with Bosnian Croat Anto Furundzija getting ten years. A record 46-year sentence was handed out to Serb general Radislav Krstic, guilty of commanding the forces that carried out the Srebrenica massacre.
European diplomats turned down del Ponte's call for sanctions against the new Serbia, believing these would endanger its emerging democracy. Oddly- given current US opposition to the ICC-it was from George W Bush that del Ponte got what she needed. The new US administration shared little of the zeal for human rights of the Clinton team. Yet Bush officials embraced her demands. Serbia would face a block on all aid unless Milosevic was handed over.
So, on a warm June day, Serb police bundled Milosevic from his Belgrade villa into a helicopter for a flight to a US airbase in Bosnia, and from there he was flown by military transport plane to The Hague.
The big fish was in the net.
The international Criminal Court looks very much like the present Hague tribunal. It tries war crimes and crimes against humanity. On the face of it, the ICC should present no threat to nations which haven't signed up for it. The prosecutor will only be able to try cases that involve the nationals, or the territory, of member states. But the court mandate also covers crimes committed by non-members, if they take place on a member's territory. Washington fears that as a "global policeman" operating in dozens of nations, many of which are ICC members, its own troops and even politicians will be exposed to war crimes indictments. Bill Clinton signed his approval of the new court in his very last day of office-a move calculated to embarrass his successor. As expected, Congress has not ratified the treaty.
Last year, America's war crimes ambassador, Pierre-Richard Prosper, told Congress there had been "abuses" in The Hague and payments to the court were frozen. In March, the ambassador back-pedalled. There is now an odd situation in which the US, while disapproving of the principle, has again taken the lead in the war crimes arena, even if only in order to get the ICTY over and done with. US commandos are once more in Bosnia. In March, they narrowly missed snatching Karadzic. America has frozen $40m of aid, and says it will also block an $800m IMF loan, unless Belgrade hands over its remaining suspects.
Prosper appears to have cut a deal with del Ponte. The money-tap has been switched on, in return for her promise to issue no fresh Yugoslav indictments after 2004. The US wants the ICTY to finish by 2008.
More battles lie ahead. The question of the UN's relationship with the ICC is still open. America wants there to be no relationship at all. The court's members want the UN to have a role, seeing this as a badge of legitimacy. A possible sop to the US might be to give each security council nation a veto over prosecutions. But the court's members have rejected this.
The great hope for the ICC is that it can build on The Hague's deterrent value, holding up Milosevic as a warning to other warlords. Critics, however, will see it as a tool of rich countries imposing their standards on poor ones. The ICC's first challenge is the same as it was for the ICTY-how to get suspects into court. Will America relent and do the dirty work? Or will European Nato members that back the ICC step in?
The Hague tribunal has at least proved that a war crimes court can be made to work, and deliver even a former head of state for trial. Many countries are not yet be ready for the next step: the ICC's fledgling global criminal justice system. But ICC supporters are priming their arguments and one of the biggest assets they have is Milosevic's trial-as powerful an advertisement for the war crimes process as could be hoped for. It will be the last irony if, in his compelling, snarling, derision for the court, Milosevic ends up doing a great service for the cause of world justice.
