EU/UN: After two years of listening to the case against him, Serbia's former leader today begins his defence, writes Chris Stephen in The Hague
Yugoslavia's former dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, will this morning at last get his chance to put his side of the story after a two-year pummelling by prosecutors at his war crimes trial in The Hague.
Since the case opened in February 2002, nearly 300 witnesses have made the journey to Courtroom Number One at this UN courthouse, tucked away in the northern suburbs of the Dutch capital, to provide a tide of allegations against Milosevic.
He is accused of responsibility for murder, torture, false imprisonment, rape, ethnic cleansing, the bombardment of a European city, together with subversion, assassination, illegal seizure of power and embezzlement of billions of dollars from state coffers - all as part of a campaign that unleashed three wars in the Balkans in the space of nine years.
Now, at last, the 62-year-old with the distinctive brushed-back white hair and brooding jowls will get to tell his side of the story.
No one knows what defence Milosevic can bring against a litany of crimes that stretches to 66 counts on a 125-page charge sheet, so long they have bound it in book form between blue covers.
But he is expected to come out fighting. He has already told the judges he will kick off his defence case with a four-hour speech.
A mea culpa is unlikely: Milosevic has used previous appearances in cross-examinations to pour scorn on the UN court, accusing it of being the tool of NATO - and much more is expected of him now.
In a technique oddly similar to Saddam Hussein's first court appearance, Milosevic has, during impromptu speeches in his cross-examinations, identified himself with his people, the Serbs, claiming that any crimes committed in these wars are tiny compared to those committed by his enemies.
Certainly in the two years that the trial has already run, Milosevic has never looked troubled by the allegations put to him, even from witnesses who have limped into court, the victims of savage beatings allegedly meted out by Milosevic's security forces.
At his own insistence, Milosevic is conducting his own defence, and a major surprise during his trial has been the skill which this man, admittedly a trained a lawyer, has brought to bear.
In cross-examination he has proved an expert shot, sniping at kinks in the prosecution evidence. This is likely to be most sustained now he is in the driving seat.
Most observers expect him to hammer at weak links in the prosecution's mammoth case. Firstly, Milosevic will attack the failure of prosecutors to produce a single top-level witness in the trial so far who could remember Milosevic actually giving an order for atrocities to be carried out.
Prosecutors say this does not matter - their evidence of ethnic cleansing and concentration camps and massacres is so strong, they insist, that they can prove a circumstantial link to the man at the top.
A second perceived weak point is the failure to tie Milosevic to the most serious charge, that of genocide.
There is evidence of genocide itself - notably the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and teenagers in the town of Srebrenica in 1995. But no evidence has been shown in open court tying Milosevic to this crime, and one of the three-strong panel of judges has already decided that the evidence is so weak that the charge should be thrown out.
Thirdly, Milosevic is likely to ask why he, and former Yugoslavia, has been singled out for war crimes justice. Why is there no international court for Iraq, or for anywhere else save Rwanda, he may ask.
Hague judges will likely ignore this argument, saying they are there only to judge this case, but to the wider world audience watching on TV, this argument may strike a powerful chord.
The big decision that observers are waiting for is whether Milosevic's principal witnesses will agree to attend. He has already summoned British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, former US president Bill Clinton and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to answer questions about their part in the NATO bombing of Serb forces during the Kosovo war of 1999.
For the moment, none has been summoned, because Milosevic, as part of his policy of not recognising the court, refuses to fill out a subpoena order. His argument is that to put something in writing would be tantamount to recognising a tribunal that he insists is illegal.
But if he decides to put pen to paper, these leaders will face an awkward dilemma. Their presence in court is unlikely to change the course of the trial, but it will mean an uncomfortable afternoon for each man in the witness box while Milosevic hammers them before a guaranteed global TV audience.
Yet these leaders will hesitate to refuse a Hague summons: all come from states that are heavily committed to the UN war crimes court, which was set up by the Security Council in 1993 with instructions that all UN member nations must co-operate.
Prosecutors have a different anxiety: time. Originally this case was supposed to last two years from start to finish. It has taken longer than that to get to the half-way stage. This is partly because Milosevic has missed two months through illness, and partly because of the fiendish complexity of this huge, unwieldy case. Each of the 290 witnesses has had to be flown into Holland. Overruns and Milosevic's illnesses have upset this programme, with some witnesses returning two or even three times.
Then there is the sheer amount of evidence. Prosecutors recently spent $1.5 million printing out 440,000 pages of material they are required to give Milosevic. He is to read this in a specially constructed office built for him in the UN's Scheveningen prison. Nobody has yet totted up the expense of the entire trial, or estimated the final bill.
The biggest question of all is whether Milosevic's health will hold out. At 62, he already suffers from high blood pressure and frequent bouts of flu, and his condition may get worse as the stress of the trial increases. If he dies, or is ruled too sick to be tried, the prosecution decision to try him for crimes in all three wars in the 1990s - Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo - will be seen to have failed.
If he lasts the course, and is found guilty, they will have succeeded in proving their central contention, that Milosevic was the prime mover in a decade of war that shook the Balkans and much of Europe for the best part of a decade.
A trial of this magnitude has never been attempted; the tribunal is pushing at the very frontiers of international law. Crises have dogged proceedings, most recently in February when the leading trial judge, Briton Richard May, suddenly retired through ill health. Milosevic refused to give his permission for such a move, and the case appeared headed for a retrial until appeal judges decided to press ahead with a replacement judge.
Judge May died last Thursday, having left a powerful footprint on the trial with his daily joustings with Milosevic, sometimes cutting power to the defendant's microphone when his speeches went on too long. The new judges will struggle to match May's experience, and will anyway be dealing with a man who is now entitled to make as many speeches as he wants. While few predictions can be made about the coming months and possibly years of Milosevic's defence case, fireworks can be guaranteed.
- Chris Stephen is the author of Judgement Day: the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, published this month in hardback by Atlantic Books