The former Yugoslav president, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, who is awaiting trial for war crimes at the Hague tribunal, is in good spirits despite 24-hour video surveillance in his solitary confinement cell, according to the Canadian lawyer who has offered to represent him.
Mr Christopher Black, from Toronto, is one of the few visitors allowed to meet Mr Milosevic. His account over the weekend of a two-hour interview with Mr Milo sevic conducted inside the Scheveningen jail, near The Hague, gives a rare glimpse of the prisoner's state of mind and his determination to fight against what he sees as the West's injustice against him.
Earlier this month, Mr Black persuaded the Hague tribunal to let him talk to the former president about legal representation. Mr Milosevic has been charged with responsibility for the killings of more than 600 people and the displacement of 740,000 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. "His morale is pretty good considering he's in jail," Mr Black said. "There are rumours about him being suicidal but he doesn't present as sad, let alone depressed. He's in a cell on his own with a small bathroom. For the first five days they kept the lights on all night. He complained about it and they fixed that. Now he can sleep."
During their meeting, Mr Milosevic insisted that his actions had been designed to defend the integrity of Yugoslavia.
"These guys are playing jokes. I'm here and suddenly I'm the worst thing ever," Mr Milosevic told Mr Black. "They [NATO] have to look at everything they did. I didn't do anything wrong. They did."
In a conference call to supporters of his Socialist party in Belgrade, Mr Milosevic claimed to be the "moral winner" over "those puppets of the West".
Mr Black represented defendants at the Rwandan war crimes tribunal. He is now vice-chairman of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, a campaign which claims that the trial will be no more than an exercise in "victor's justice": fixing in history the West's partisan version of events.