Milosevic

Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has joined with prosecutors in arguing vehemently against possible moves to break up the war crimes case against him into at least two separate trials.



The option of wrapping up proceedings relating to alleged atrocities in Kosovo in the late Nineties before dealing with charges stemming from the earlier wars in Bosnia and Croatia was raised by judges last week amid increasing concerns about the health of the accused.



Milosevic, whose high blood pressure has caused repeated delays in the past and has forced his trial to be limited to just three hearings per week, had been absent from court for nearly a fortnight after telling judges that he felt unwell.



He has recently asked that the chamber heed a recommendation by his own team of doctors for the proceedings to break until next year to allow his condition to stabilise.



In a tense hearing when the trial reconvened on November 29, Milosevic and prosecutor Geoffrey Nice clashed repeatedly with judges as they laid out their reasons for resisting separation of the Kosovo charges from the rest of the case.



Unsurprisingly, they also came into repeated conflict with each other over the wildly differing arguments that had led them to this shared conclusion.



Prosecutors have already spent months presenting evidence that Milosevic was responsible for crimes including widespread ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.



But the ailing accused, who insists on representing himself in court, has used up over three quarters of the time allotted to his defence case dealing almost exclusively with Kosovo.



Severing the Kosovo charges could arguably allow a judgement to be delivered relatively soon on the allegations that Milosevic has addressed so far, safeguarding this part of the trial from any further deteriorations in his health.



Speaking at this week’s hearing, amicus curiae Professor Timothy McCormack - whose job is to monitor the case from a neutral standpoint - argued that this would be an “expeditious” move in a trial that has already lasted nearly four years.



In a written submission filed just before the court hearing, however, prosecutor Nice claimed the approach could lead to a whole host of problems.



He argued that there is such a degree of overlap between the Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo sections of the case that the three simply cannot be neatly separated.



In the event of such a separation, he went on, judges would also face the impossible task of trying to ignore evidence they had already heard about alleged crimes in Bosnia and Croatia - evidence which Milosevic is yet to answer - in order to deliver an impartial judgement on the Kosovo allegations.



Further difficulties might be created in the subsequent Bosnia and Croatia proceedings as well, he argued, with the judges potentially being biased by what had already passed or was still happening in relation to the Kosovo charges.



The possible solution of putting off the Bosnia and Croatia charges until the Kosovo case, including a likely appeal, had been entirely wrapped up, he went on, would involve a lengthy delay. And the alternative of handing these charges to another trial chamber would necessarily involve rehearing months’ worth of prosecution evidence.



Nice concluded that the judges ought to press ahead with Milosevic’s trial as planned and simply call upon court-assigned lawyers to take over the defence case in situations where the accused is too ill to defend himself, or even to appear in court.



Having heard the latter point, Judge Iain Bonomy cut in to note that while judges in the tribunal’s appeals chamber had considered the option of assigned counsel taking over when Milosevic is ill, this had only ever been raised as a temporary solution. It was also unclear, he said, whether this would be viable in situations in which Milosevic was unable to appear in court at all.



Given the chance to explain his own position in court, Milosevic claimed that the time taken up by his case has only become an issue since he started presenting his defence. He accused judges of ignoring this matter during the prosecution stage of the trial.



He also pointed to the “coincidence” that the question of issuing a judgement on Kosovo should arise at the same time as talks are set to begin on its future political status. He sought to back up this line of argument by claiming that the wages of tribunal judges are indirectly paid by insidious players on the world stage, including NATO member states and unidentified Islamic institutions.



Milosevic went on to insist that the criminal case against him had always rested on the idea that his actions in the Nineties had been part of a single effort to build a so-called Greater Serbia. He argued that breaking up the proceedings would further undermine this central claim, which he has already accused prosecutors of backing away from.



“Even Franz Kafka would feel that he didn’t have great imagination compared to this,” the accused declared indignantly.



He also took advantage of the opportunity to press for more time to prepare and present his defence case, claiming that prosecutors had “tortured” him and directly caused his ill health by bombarding him with huge and unnecessary quantities of documents. Milosevic’s court-assigned lawyer Steven Kay added that the case already amounted to well over a million pages of written material.



Milosevic concluded his speech by “demanding” an adjournment to allow him to recover his health before pressing ahead with the trial as before, without the use of defence counsel.



At the end of the hearing, Presiding Judge Patrick Robinson announced that the chamber would have to consider a number of issues which had arisen and wished to see outstanding medical reports before making a decision on the matter.



In the meantime, Milosevic was ordered to continue presenting his defence case. He used the rest of the week to call two witnesses who served in the Yugoslav Army in Kosovo.



Michael Farquhar is an IWPR reporter in London.