Current Affairs: Anyone who follows the twists and turns of the Balkan saga will be familiar with the news dispatches of Chris Stephen. For good or ill - most would say the latter - the dominant political figure in the region for almost two decades has of course been Slobodan Milosevic.
Stephen distils his vast experience of the Balkans into this book about the Serbian autocrat's rise and fall and his subsequent arraignment before a war crimes tribunal at The Hague. In the process, the author examines the whole issue of international justice and the need to ensure that those who are responsible for war crimes, whether directly or through their position in the chain of command, are brought to book for their misdeeds.
There is a popular notion that the Balkans is an inherently violent and, in some ways, quite savage region where fierce ethnic tensions make wars and murderous atrocities inevitable and unavoidable. A superficial reading of the historical record seems to bear it out, but Stephen challenges this widespread preconception.
He cites chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte's opening statement in the Milosevic trial. "She read from an official report into Balkan violence which concluded: 'the true culprits are those who misled public opinion and took advantage of people's ignorance'. This report, she revealed, was written not about the horrors of the 1990s but about the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. The report was the work of a Frenchman, Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, in 1914, who had no doubt the ethnic wars he had witnessed, far from being spontaneous and tribal, were the result of manipulation at the highest level."
This is also the essence of the case against Milosevic: that he manipulated Serb nationalism for his own personal aggrandisement, directing and ordering genocide and war crimes in the process. Reading Stephen's book one is forced to conclude that, whatever about the war crimes, it is going to be difficult to make the genocide charge stick.
Quite simply, according to the author, the prosecutors have not produced any evidence in open court to support this charge. "Terrible as they were," he writes, "the campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans are likely to be seen by the judges as projects to move, rather than destroy, the non-Serb populations."
Stephen's book takes us up to the conclusion of the prosecution case and one trusts there will be a second edition to take account of Milosevic's defence and the subsequent verdict. Public and media interest in the case has been sporadic and episodic and there has been a tendency to lose sight of the trial's fundamental significance. It's not every day we see a former head of state in the dock to answer charges about his alleged actions.
Prosecuting and convicting someone in this lofty position is no easy task. It is easy enough to prove that war crimes took place in the Balkans. There is a profusion of evidence in this respect. The problem has been to establish a link between the battlefield and the president's office.
Another difficulty for the Hague Tribunal was that it had no police force of its own and had to rely on individual governments to arrest the suspects. This process can be very hard to distinguish from kidnapping. In a compelling chapter, Stephen describes how Polish special forces abducted a suspect who had been lured under false pretences from what was then called Yugoslavia to a meeting in Croatia so that he could be arrested. The victim was trussed "like a chicken" and a bag put over his head before he was transported on a Belgian air force plane to The Hague to be tried. A similar operation by a British SAS team was less successful, in that the suspect pulled a gun and fired at his assailants before he was himself shot in the head and killed.
Whatever crimes the accused men may or may not have committed, few people would be comfortable with this type of procedure. There must be a better way.
Milosevic himself claimed at the time of his deportation from Belgrade to The Hague that he was being kidnapped, although there was little sympathy anywhere outside Serbia for his predicament. Shock and disgust at the nature and scale of the Balkan atrocities, which were unprecedented in Europe since the second World War, fuelled the drive to bring him and his associates to justice, although the crimes were not confined to the Serb side.
The Balkan atrocities have been well-chronicled, but Stephen takes time to remind us of the gross cruelty and savagery that emerged in those awful years. The indiscriminate artillery barrage against the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, lasted nearly four years and left 11,000 dead including 1,200 children. Rape and other forms of sexual violence were commonplace. Placenames like Srebrenica and Mostar became as notorious as Belsen or Auschwitz. And of course there were the terrible stories of individual atrocities such as the case of the nine-year-old Muslim girl who was raped by Serb paramilitaries and then left to die slowly and painfully while her parents watched from the other side of a fence, prevented from doing anything to save or even comfort their child.
The Hague tribunal and its Rwandan counterpart gave special impetus to moves for the establishment of the International Criminal Court. The ICC still has problems asserting its authority due to the boycott by the US. In line with his objective and balanced approach, Stephen explains the reservations of Americans - not all of them on the right of the political spectrum - about a judicial body which is not subject to the same overall democratic restraints as a national court.
The debate continues and the result of the Milosevic case could be decisive for the ICC. "A good, clean trial, with all charges proven, would be a mighty advertisement for war crimes trials and a boost for the ICC," writes Stephen. But if the trial appeared muddled or key charges remained unproven, US opponents inside and outside the Bush administration could argue that global justice for war crimes was a fine idea on paper but, in reality, deeply flawed.
We owe Chris Stephen a debt of gratitude for explaining these highly complex issues in clear, readable terms and for giving us a salutary reminder of the potential for evil that lurks within the human psyche. The scarifying thing is that the perpetrators seemed to take pleasure in their own brutality. As one of the author's sources puts it: "Anyone is capable of it, I believe. Most of these guys wouldn't have done this stuff if there hadn't been a war".
Deaglán de Bréadún is Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times