The evidence is stacked against him but Slobodan Milosevic is proving to be an adroit lawyer at his war crimes trial in The Hague. Chris Stephen watched proceedings and reports on their possible wider implications
Between Slobodan Milosevic and me there is floor-to-ceiling bullet-proof glass, blue-shirted armed guards and a charge sheet which will keep him in jail until hell freezes over, but when the former "Beast of the Balkans" looks my way across a crowded court room, I freeze.
Whoever wrote about the banality of evil wasn't talking about people like Milosevic. The man who is the first former head of state ever to be tried for war crimes dominates Court Room Number Two at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague the same way that he dominated the war-torn Balkans for the best part of a decade. If he was less evil, you might say that he has star quality.
It was not supposed to be this way: Milosevic is in a place his victims never dreamed of seeing him - inside the world's most heavily-fortified court house, facing one of the longest charge sheets in the world. But he is in command.
Maybe the intimidation I felt on seeing his glance came from having seen his brutality from the receiving end: I was in the Croatian hospital in Osijek in 1991 when it was targeted by his artillery. Then there was Bosnia, and those guns hammering away at Sarajevo. And in 1998, in yet another war, his artillery was once more at work, tearing into panic-stricken civilians in fields near the town of Jakovo.
The contrast between those muddy, bloody, battlefields and the antiseptic calm of the court room is striking. Milosevic may be accused of unleashing the most brutal acts man can devise, but his trial chamber judges take pains to make sure he is sitting comfortably.
Milosevic is perfectly attired, today wearing a sharp, dark suit with red and black silk tie. And when cross-examinations of the witnesses begin, it is clear one reason he has spurned a lawyer is because few could do such a good job.
"You said he was shot at," he says to the latest witness, thumbing through pages of scribbled notes about the man's earlier testimony on the death of a neighbour in Kosovo. "Then you said the house was shelled. You have to choose. Which is it?"
The witness mumbles a reply. Milosevic counters: "Once again you don't know what happened, but you only heard about it. Very well."
His technique never varies: careful questions picking up inconsistences, however minute, in witness testimony, punctuated by angry accusations that has the British chief judge, Richard May, scurrying to cut him off.
Milosevic is accused of mass murder, torture, rape and the ethnic cleansing of two million people in three separate wars, and the trial chamber judges take pains to make sure he is sitting comfortably. Because he refuses to wear headphones, he has his own special speaker in front of the dock translating the English-language proceedings into Serbian.
Milosevic has refused the option of a lawyer, saying he does not recognise the court, but he is making good use of that phone. At the other end of it is a team of lawyers in Belgrade which makes use of extensive files from the secret service and military files which Milosevic looted by the van-load before losing power two years ago.
With the eyes of the world upon the Dutch, standards are scrupulous. More controversially, there is a room set aside in the jail, housed inside a the main prison in The Hague, for conjugal visits. "I won't give details," a senior Hague official told The Irish Times. "But the room is there for visits by those who have an established long-term relationship. You can't phone our for a call girl."
It is apparent that there are two trials taking place at The Hague.
The first one is the legal battle. And here Milosevic is losing. The evidence is overwhelming. To prove guilt in war crimes it is not necessary to show the accused fired the gun. It is enough to show that atrocities were committed and that the accused, as the commander-in-chief, knew about it, and did nothing to stop it or punish the accused.
And Milosevic has no obvious defence: he was most certainly the commander-in-chief of the Yugoslav forces which rampaged through Kosovo. And that rampage is extensively documented. An open and shut case and one reason why he has opted for the only reasonable defence - the refusal to recognise the court.
But there is another trial also going on - the one in the court of public opinion, and in this one Milosevic is winning hands down. His thunderous cross-examinations provide the best sound bites. His ringing denunciations have left the prosecutors flat footed. "Slobo has an advantage," says one court official. "He can lie. The witnesses cannot."
A good example came with the very first witness, Mahmut Bakali, a former ethnic Albanian politician.
The regular trial heard about how he went, as part of a delegation, to see Milosevic early in the war, and tell him about the horrors. But the cameras focused on a cross-examination which followed. In this, Bakali mixed up two dates, of a Milosevic speech and a Milosevic action. The mix-up hardly matters but the cameras caught both Milosevic's growing anger and Bakalis fumbling uncertainly. Back in Yugoslavia, ordinary Serbs are cheering him.
And in the wider world, if this goes on, many may wonder if war crimes trials are a good thing.
Later this year the world will get its first truly global war crimes court, the International Criminal Court. A building is already earmarked for this court, and rules are being set. But although about 60 nations, including most of the EU (I believe not Ireland), have signed up to it, many have not, including the US.
For the court to persuade the Americans and others to agree to it, the prosecutors at this key trial need to play a good game. And so far, at least as far as the sound bites are concerned, they are doing badly.
Milosevic is going to jail. But the man who brought so much pain and misery to the world may be about to taste a final victory by undermining the arguments of those campaigning to finally make the age-old dream of a global policeman a reality.
Chris Stephen is a freelance journalist based in Moscow. He reported extensively during the civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia, and during the Kosovo conflict