THE HAGUE: The opening of the UN war crimes tribunal yesterday claimed Mr Milosevic "did not confront his victims" but "was able to view events from high political office", writes Ian Black
The opening yesterday of the UN war crimes tribunal case against the former Yugoslav president, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, was a sweeping history lesson replete with difficult but familiar Balkan names.
Familiar names include Mr Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader at large and wanted for genocide; the paramilitary chief Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan, later murdered; and foreign envoys such as Cyrus Vance, Lord Owen and Lord Carrington, who tried to intervene but failed to stop the killing.
In one curiously intimate moment, Mr Milosevic was heard in an intercepted telephone conversation discussing weapons deliveries to Bosnian Serb forces with Mr Karadzic, who described the man in Belgrade as "the Boss".
Tracing Mr Milosevic's story, the prosecution zoomed in on archive footage of him in April 1987, as Serbian communist party chief, telling cheering Serbs in the Albanian-majority province of Kosovo: "Nobody will be allowed to beat you."
"It was that phrase," said deputy prosecutor Mr Geoffrey Nice, "that gave this accused a taste of power. It gave him an opening.
"The evidence will show that the accused had a central role in the joint criminal enterprise" to create a greater Serbia. "This trial is about the climb of this accused to power, exercised without accountability, without responsibility or morality."
Mr Milosevic "did not confront his victims" but "was able to view events from high political office. He had these crimes committed for him by others. In these days, when press, radio and television bring wars into our homes as they occur, he cannot not have known."
Mr Milosevic has refused to appoint counsel since being handed over to the tribunal by the reformist government in Belgrade last summer. However he used a mid-morning break to pass a note to one of three lawyers appointed as amici curiae or "friends of the court" to ensure he has a fair trial.
Mr Zdenko Tomanovic, one of his two Yugoslav legal advisers, quoted his client as saying: "Do you hear this rubbish? How can you not react?"
After lunch, Mr Milosevic briefly nodded off during a long passage about the role of the Yugoslav army in Bosnia, before jerking awake.
He is expected to give a lengthy opening statement today or tomorrow, arguing the trial is inherently unfair and that the tribunal, set up by the UN in 1993, is illegal and biased in favour of his NATO enemies.
Prosecutors face a difficult task in drawing a direct link between Mr Milosevic and crimes committed by Serb forces against Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians.
Witnesses will include the Kosovan leader, Mr Ibrahim Rugova, and the former US head of the Kosovo peacekeeping mission Mr William Walker. Many others are to appear as protected witnesses, their identities shielded.
"Many victims cannot come before you because they did not survive," chief prosecutor Ms Carla Del Ponte said.
Mr Richard Dicker, an observer from Human Rights Watch, said he was impressed by the prosecution.
"So much has been said about 'insider witnesses' but what's striking is that they have introduced a couple of documents that were very compelling in the clear linkage between Belgrade and the Bosnian Serb military and Croatian Serbs and military."
Mr Vladimir Krsljanin, a member of Mr Milosevic's Socialist party monitoring the trial, said the prosecution portrayed "an absurd picture of Milosevic's career and placed totally outside the historic context. It's a desperate attempt to prove what is unprovable."
The trial's opening phase, likely to continue until the summer, will focus on the murder charges of hundreds of Kosovo Albanians and the expulsion of some 800,000 people from their homes in 1998-99. The case is expected to last two years.
There are two camps of Milosevic supporters. One is a group of Yugoslav legal advisers in close contact with the prisoner, cautious in the wording of its statements to the media, sober-suited and restrained in its delivery.
The other is a more international group, which accuses the tribunal of barring it from seeing Mr Milosevic.
They range from former US attorney-general Mr Ramsey Clark to prominent French lawyer Mr Jacques Verges, an Italian film-maker, and members of parliament from Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Greece. Unlike Mr Milosevic's Yugoslav lawyers, the European and north American activists talk expansively.