THE HAGUE: The war crimes tribunal is trying to determine if he's bad. A psychiatrist will pronounce if he's mad. In the meantime, ill-health may kill him. Chris Stephen reports on the trial of the Balkan Fox
Like a real life Hannibal Lecter, Slobodan Milosevic has brought panic and confusion to the world, even from behind the most secure prison bars in Europe.
During his decade of misrule in Yugoslavia, Mr Milosevic earned the nickname the Balkan Fox for his ability to outwit the international community.
Now he has done it once again. By falling ill with high blood pressure he has threatened to throw a spanner in the works: he may cheat his genocide trial by dying before it can reach a verdict.
His blood pressure - which sources here say is very high - is the result of overwork. This in turn is because Mr Milosevic, who was back in court yesterday, has refused to recognise the court as legitimate, and has refused its offer of a defence lawyer, conducting his own defence.
Not surprisingly, this has produced strain. He faces possibly the longest criminal rap sheet ever written - running to 125 pages. The evidence, witness testimonies and military and supporting documents, probably come to a million pages.
With a second week of hearings scrubbed last week, the court has called not just for cardiology reports, but also psychiatric analysis. This holds twin terrors for the prosecution. Mr Milosevic may be pronounced too ill to stand trial. Or he may be pronounced mad.
His possible madness is a moot point. Many say his politics were governed not by rational considerations but demonic obsession. Both his parents committed suicide and he grew up the classic loner. In his lifetime, he had but one friend and one lover, his current wife Mira Markovic - grounds enough to suspect he is not quite normal.
With any other war crimes defendant, ill health would not matter. He would be wheeled off and the court would carry on with other trials.
But Mr Milosevic, the only former president to stand trial for war crimes, is the Big Fish. With the war crimes process now being used as a political football by Europe, which backs it, and the US, which wants it shut down, court officials need a big, successful, showpiece trial.
Even if the doctor, who reports next week, or the psychiatrist, who reports the week after that, pronounce him fit to stand trial, Mr Milosevic's deteriorating health will cause further delays to a trial already expected to run into 2004.
And the biggest stress for the accused is still to come. So far the trial has heard evidence only from the prosecution. But next year he will begin his defence case, where the real work - and strain - begins.
His health problems are mostly self-induced. Although Mr Milosevic refuses to have a lawyer in the courtroom, he has a battery of them outside. Two lawyers regularly visit him from Belgrade, watching proceedings from the public gallery.
Also in Belgrade is a legal team with access to truck-loads of documents stolen from the army and secret service before he left office in 2000, and which are relayed to him in daily phone calls from his prison cell.
Hague judges are considering whether to impose a lawyer inside the courtroom. This is legally possible, but Mr Milosevic is likely to refuse to co-operate, making the job redundant.
More controversially, many are wondering why the prosecution does not lighten the load. It could, for instance, concentrate only on crimes committed in Kosovo, leaving the horrors of Bosnia and Croatia for another time.
Certainly, there are enough atrocities in Kosovo to ensure that 61-year-old Milosevic will be in jail for the rest of his life.
But prosecutors say they need their pound of flesh. They want the full extent of Mr Milosevic's policies in the Balkans to be laid bare in this trial. "He is not Al Capone," one official told me, a reference to the US gangster who was jailed, not for his many murders but for tax evasion.
The difference, say prosecutors, is that this is not just a court of law, but a means of bringing harmony and reconciliation to the Balkans, which means exposing the full ghastliness of his rule.
It is a fine idea, but it carries a high risk. Should Mr Milosevic die before the verdict is in, he will have once again confounded the international community, robbing the court of its single greatest triumph. It is something that Mr Milosevic, who shows non-stop defiance from the dock, may welcome. Death would be a final victory against a world he seems convinced is against him.
Chris Stephen is Hague tribunal bureau chief for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting