Milosevic fights allegations
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) – Working from the U.N. detention unit on a warm Saturday in June, Slobodan Milosevic called one of his legal aides in a huff. Dragoslav Ognjanovic, dressed in a Hawaii-print shirt, shorts and sunglasses, paced nervously on the beach outside The Hague while Milosevic barked down the phone. There was a mix-up at the prison and he hadn’t received prosecution documents on a Kosovo Albanian witness due to testify the following Monday.
“I need them to prepare,” Milosevic told him.
The former Yugoslav president instructed Ognjanovic to find the problem and fix it, and called back hourly demanding a progress report. On Friday, Milosevic will have spent one year in U.N. custody, sharing facilities with more than 40 other suspects from the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
He is the highest-ranking war crimes suspect to be tried by an international tribunal since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after World War II.
Milosevic, who studied law, also is the first defendant before the 7-year-old Yugoslav tribunal to act as his own defense counsel. The case raises new questions for the judges on how much leeway to grant him when he practices polemics rather than law.
Four months into the trial, Milosevic is leading a vigorous defense, shunning courtroom niceties to cross-examine witnesses with combative aggression.
The first part of the trial focuses on the 1999 Kosovo conflict, in which the 13-year dictator of Yugoslavia faces five counts of crimes against humanity and violating the laws of war. Later, he must answer to 61 more counts for earlier conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia, including genocide.
Eating into the prosecution’s time, Milosevic fills hours accusing NATO and the Kosovo Albanian rebel forces of war crimes.
Alone at the defense bench, Milosevic often slumps and feigns boredom during a witness’ testimony. Most victims of Serb violence refuse to look at him, though the witness chair is just a few feet away.
In cross-examination, he often denigrates a witness’s character, accuses him of spinning lies, or of protecting the “terrorists” who opposed him. He theatrically waves sheaves of documents, or somberly narrates video footage of the havoc brought to his own people by his enemies.
Milosevic’s tactics have brought him into regular clashes with the three judges who will decide whether he is guilty and could then determine his sentence. In other cases, the courts have shown flexibility in sentencing, depending on whether the defendant has shown remorse.
Almost daily, Judge Richard May warns Milosevic against haranguing witnesses, and once told him he could lose his right to cross-examine. “He is not conducting a true legal defense, that’s been clear from Day One of the trial,” said Richard Dicker, head of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch.
“He’s engaged in political offense,” Dicker said. “He is trying to rewrite the history of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, casting himself as a victim, NATO as a criminal, and the court as an accomplice.”
The momentum Milosevic had at the beginning of his trial seems to have wavered, and many observers believe several highly effective prosecution witnesses stood up to his interrogation tactics and presented incriminating evidence.
One such witness was former NATO commander Gen. Klaus Naumann, who said that during one meeting he had with Milosevic in 1998, the then-president and his aides mused about “solving” the ethnic problem in Kosovo by shooting or expelling Albanians.
The strain of his defense may be taking a physical toll on the 60-year-old Milosevic. He has fallen ill twice since the Feb. 12 start of him trial, forcing a three-week delay so far. Hearings were again canceled for a week in June while he recovered.
Milosevic’s bombastic courtroom style has been popular back home in Serbia, where it looks good on television. But legal experts say it won’t earn him points with the judges.
“He is still talking to his public, and that doesn’t do much good in court,” said legal analyst Heikelien Verrijn Stuart. “His show is weak. It’s a long-winded gimmick that only impresses those seeing it for the first time.”
Paul Williams, a law professor at American University who represented the Bosnians at the 1995 Dayton talks which ended the Bosnian war, said the prosecutors seem to be proving their case, but that they are failing to convince the Yugoslav people of Milosevic’s guilt.
In the coming weeks, prosecutors are expected to summon what they call their “insider” witnesses, people from the Yugoslav political circle who might link Milosevic personally to actions that led to hundreds of murders and the expulsion of 800,000 Kosovo Albanians from their homes.