WAR CRIMES: Christmas will come early today for the Hague's embattled war crimes court, when it passes sentence on the first senior figure it has ever jailed for war crimes - former Bosnian Serb president Biljana Plavsic.
Plavsic, a 72-year-old former biology professor, was one of the directors of the Serb ethnic cleansing of Bosnia in the early 1990s.
She is accused of helping to mastermind a campaign that saw thousands murdered and raped and more than a million non-Serbs driven from their homes. After the Bosnian war, Plavsic, a former confidante of former president Radovan Karadzic, did an about-face, embracing the West and NATO, and with their support winning the Bosnian Serb presidency.
But later elections saw her administration criticised, and nationalists voted for new hard-line leaders to replace her. She surrendered voluntarily to The Hague a year ago and has been on bail awaiting trial ever since.
Two months ago, Plavsic made history, not just as the first former president to be convicted of war crimes, but also for being the first to plead guilty to the Hague tribunal.
Just as important as the jail sentence will be the court's satisfaction that she has admitted her crimes and acknowledged the legitimacy of the court.
This move, court officials hope, will help ease the hostility of ordinary Serbs to a tribunal many have dismissed as a "NATO court". Plavsic pleaded guilty two months ago to crimes against humanity, and in exchange, the prosecutors asked for a more serious genocide charge to be dropped.
Certainly, her complicity is a rare burst of sunshine for a court battling on all fronts.
In an interview with Belgrade daily Politika published yesterday, Plavsic said she had not cut any deals in her guilty plea and would not testify in the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.
"My only condition was not to testify at other trials, and frankly speaking, I would not have anything to say at the trial against Milosevic," she said.
Mr Milosevic, meanwhile, is proving anything but compliant, and his theatrical outbursts have threatened to derail his nine-month-old trial.
Meanwhile, spiralling costs are causing a new set of problems - the legal bill for another leading former Serb leader, Momcilo Krajisnik, has reached more than €750,000, with the actual trial still to begin.
The tribunal has become entangled in the increasingly bitter wrangle between the United States and Europe over what many view as the Hague's successor, the International Criminal Court.
Washington, an opponent of the ICC, has also demanded that the tribunal be closed by 2008. It is unlikely that the US, the biggest single contributor, will pay any more money to meet the court's bills.