THE HAGUE: At least 100,000 people died as Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990s. Enda O'Doherty traces the mayhem of which Slobodan Milosevic stands accused
In mid-June 1999, after 78 days of NATO bombardment, Serbian forces withdrew from the largely ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo. If European commentators had often been in sharp disagreement over the political wisdom, morality and conduct of the NATO campaign, they were at least all in general agreement now that it was over as to who had been the winner and who the loser.
Though the UN Security Council resolution which spelt out the terms on which the Serbs had agreed to withdraw spoke only of granting "substantial autonomy" to Kosovo "pending a final settlement", this was seen by most as merely a form of words designed partially to sweeten the pill and cloak the inescapable political imperative that the province could never again be subjected to rule by Belgrade.
The fact of another political and military defeat was obvious to most Serbs, but not at first to their leader. "We have proved we have an invincible army," said Slobodan Milosevic, which has "shown the whole world how our nation defends itself and how firm and united it is . . ."
Mr Milosevic's people had lost their third war under his stewardship since 1991, but for the Federal President of Yugoslavia, the Serbian nation had again shown itself to be a hero.
Mr Milosevic was feeling heroic but this was not a sentiment shared by others who took part in the Kosovo campaign. One army commander remarked that he had never once engaged the enemy - the elusive, informally structured Kosovo Liberation Army. "The tanks," he said, "which cost $2.5 million each were used to slaughter Albanian children . . ."
Another officer witnessed the murder of about 30 women and children by a reservist armed with an anti-aircraft machine-gun: "The half-inch bullets just tore their bodies apart. It looked like a scene from a cheap movie . . . I don't know how I will live with these memories, how I'll be able to raise my own children. I'm not willing to accept the collective guilt. I want to see those who committed these atrocities stand trial for their crimes."
In 1999, some analysts argued that NATO's bombing of Serbia was not only wrong but likely to prove counter productive politically, with the beleaguered Serbian people rallying around Mr Milosevic and the embryonic democratic opposition marginalised in the face of a new mood of defiant national unity.
But such an effect, if it occurred at all, was to be short-lived. With Serbia's economy in ruins and the regime effectively abandoned even by its former Russian and Chinese allies, Mr Milosevic's political race was run. After losing elections in autumn 2000 he was eventually handed over for trial in June last year to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague in the Netherlands.
The charges Mr Milosevic now faces relate to three separate but linked conflicts, in Croatia in 1991, in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999. In each case he is accused of participating in a "joint criminal enterprise" whose aim was to ethnically cleanse the territories in question of non-Serb elements with a view to carving out by war a viable ethnically homogenous "greater Serbia" following the collapse of the Yugoslav state.
Historians of the decade which followed that collapse have little doubt about Mr Milosevic's responsibility (though not sole responsibility) for much of the bloodshed and misery of Yugoslavia in the 1990s (at least 100,000 dead and 4.5 million displaced). The task of The Hague prosecutor, Mr Geoffrey Nice, is now to prove that responsibility beyond reasonable doubt.