Irishman Tim McFadden, head of the UN detention centre at The Hague, ensures that Milosevic receives no special treatment in jail. He talks to Denis Staunton about the high profile prisoner who reportedly listens to Frank Sinatra and reads Ernest Hemingway in his cell.
Slobodan Milosovic rose earlier than usual on Tuesday and was taken the short distance from his seaside prison in Scheveningen to a heavily guarded courtroom in The Hague. The former Yugoslav president was making an appearance before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and keeping an appointment with history as the first head of state to stand trial for war crimes.
For the past seven months, Milosovic has been preparing for this week's trial and for the defence he will present himself. He has refused the tribunal's offer of a lawyer to represent him, arguing that his trial is nothing more than an expression of victors' justice. But he has been consulting lawyers unofficially and studying international law assiduously to challenge the legal basis of his detention and trial.
After years amid the tawdry pomp of Belgrade's presidential palace, Milosovic's home is now a three-by-five metre cell in Scheveningen. The four-storey unit housing a few dozen suspected war criminals from the Balkans is run by Tim McFadden, a 48-year-old former army officer from Co Kildare.
McFadden, who served with UN peacekeeping forces in Namibia and Lebanon, created a stir as soon as he arrived at the prison by insisting that the prisoners should no longer be segregated according to their ethnic groups.
"There was some resistance to begin with but it has worked out very well. We try to create a social mix on each floor so, for example, we wouldn't put all the generals together," he said.
Tall, straight-backed and silver-haired, McFadden has an easy, engaging manner and he is clearly committed to protecting the welfare of the inmates. But there is nothing sentimental about his decision to mix the former adversaries within the prison; it is designed to prevent prisoners organising along the lines of paramilitary groups in some prisons.
Milosovic's next-door neighbour is a Bosnian Muslim general and the two men have apparently struck up a friendship of sorts, playing chess together regularly.
"All these people have great difficulty adjusting to prison life. Despite their different backgrounds, they offer each other mutual support and help each other prepare for court appearances. In the end, they are all in the same position," says McFadden, who makes a point of not reading any of the inmates' indictments and operates on the assumption that all are innocent until proven guilty. Milosovic is a model prisoner - polite and considerate and concerned above all about the effect of his imprisonment on his family. Reviled throughout the world as a genocidal murderer, the former tyrant presents a different face to his jailor.
"As far as I am concerned, Mr Milosovic is a gentleman," McFadden says.
Like the other inmates, Milosovic has a shower and toilet in his cell, along with a wardrobe and a small desk. Each floor of the prison has a common-room, exercise equipment and a small library. Prisoners may leave their cells from 8.30 a.m. until 8.30 p.m. Satellite television shows channels from the former Yugoslavia and Serbo-Croat newspapers and magazines are available.
Each inmate may use the telephone for up to seven minutes each day but they must pay for the calls out of a daily allowance of €2.50 and whatever they earn from work in the prison. All phone calls are monitored and recorded but McFadden refuses to allow prosecutors access to the recordings, which are made to prevent escape attempts.
Among the most controversial features of the prison are what McFadden describes as "intimate rooms" where inmates may receive conjugal visits. But the jailer rejects tabloid descriptions of the prison as a five-star hotel: "It's a prison. They can't leave. Anyone who has ever been locked up knows the difference between a hotel and a jail."
McFadden's role is one of the least visible parts of the work of the tribunal, which was established by the United Nations in 1994. Its public face is its 55-year-old chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte.
This chain-smoking, Porsche-driving, Swiss lawyer earned her spurs prosecuting mafia bosses and has been fearless in challenging politicians and NATO generals to fulfil their obligation to apprehend alleged war criminals.
Del Ponte has adopted a high-risk strategy of prosecuting Milosovic for alleged offences in three Balkan wars in a single trial. She will have to prove that his actions in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo were part of a single plan to create a Greater Serbia. And she must demonstrate that the actions of Bosnian Serb forces, ostensibly independent of Belgrade, were part of Milosovic's plan.
"This trial is about the climb of the accused to power, exercised without accountability, without responsibility or morality," she said at the opening of the trial.
Milosovic is accused of violating the Geneva Convention and other laws and customs of war, of crimes against humanity and of genocide - the attempt to wipe out a race, a religious group or an ethnic minority in whole or in part.
The trial, which is expected to last for two years, will recall such horrors as the massacre of 7,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica and the expulsion of 800,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. The tribunal has already broken new ground by focusing on rape as a war crime (see right). Although the public and press galleries have been packed during Milosovic's court appearances, most of the tribunal's dramas have been played out in half-empty rooms as victims confront their tormentors.
Along with the victims and their families, relatives of alleged war criminals fill the cheap hotels around The Hague's railway station. All look strained and bewildered as they prepare to enter the unfamiliar atmosphere of the tribunal.
So far, the tribunal has heard 31 cases, only two of which have ended with an acquittal. But three convictions have been overturned on appeal and all other convictions are currently being appealed.
Many of those most wanted by the tribunal, such as the Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadzic and Radko Mladic, remain at large.
Some critics complain that Western governments have been slow to exert pressure for further arrests; others, like Milosovic, dismiss the entire exercise as "victors' justice".
The conduct of Milosovic's trial will be crucial for the tribunal's reputation and some lawyers argue that del Ponte's strategy has reduced the likelihood of a conviction. Milosovic will argue that his actions in Kosovo were part of an effort to counter an internal terrorist threat. And he will claim that there is no direct link between him and crimes committed by Serb forces.
Although he will have no formal, legal representation, Milosovic is taking advice from three lawyers appointed amici curiae, or friends of the court. And he has the continued support of his wife, Mirjana Markovic, who is a regular visitor to the prison.
Daily exercise in the prison yard has made Milosovic, at 60, fitter than during his whisky-fuelled days in power, and reports from the prison suggest that he has been taking his mind off the trial by reading the novels of Ernest Hemingway and John Updike and listening to the music of Frank Sinatra and Celine Dion.
McFadden will continue to ensure that Milosovic receives no special treatment in prison on account of his former status. But the jailor says that, if the former dictator behaves over the next two years as he has during the past seven months, there will be few problems. "I have no complaints. I wish some of the others would follow his example."
