He's dubbed the Butcher of Belgrade, but Slobodan Milosevic has shown the war crimes tribunal in The Hague that he's a courtroom fighter, too. Denis Staunton on a good week for the accused
Slobodan Milosevic showed no emotion as Agim Zegiri, a Kosovo Albanian farmer, explained that he has needed dialysis treatment ever since Serbian forces beat him almost to death, damaging his kidneys. But the former Yugoslav president erupted in outrage when Judge Richard May allowed Zegiri to leave the witness stand halfway through his cross-examination.
Zegiri, who lost 16 members of his family when Serbian forces burnt down his village, said he was too ill to continue testifying. But Milosevic claimed that, by allowing the witness to leave, the judge was showing bias against the defendant.
Milosevic's intervention was typically robust during a week where he has shown himself to be a gifted advocate with a mercilessly precise cross-examining style. After the first week of witness testimony at his trial for war crimes at The Hague, most observers agree that the man dubbed the Butcher of Belgrade has had the better of most exchanges.
From the moment the first prosecution witness took the stand on Monday, it was clear that Milosevic - despite his insistence that the Hague trial is illegal - intends to mount an active defence. He grilled Mahmut Bakalli, a former Communist leader in Kosovo, for 3½ hours, seizing on every slip and each fuzzy detail to discredit the witness.
Bakalli, now a member of the new Kosovo parliament, said a Serbian security officer told him in 1997 that Milosevic already had a "scorched earth" plan for Kosovo, which allegedly included the levelling of 700 ethnic Albanian settlements.
He told the court that Milosevic conducted a policy of "apartheid" against the Albanian majority in Kosovo. But Milosevic countered the claim, asking Bakalli to define apartheid and insisting that his policies did not conform to the United Nations definition of the term. Demanding a yes-or-no answer, Milosevic then launched into detailed questioning of Bakalli's role as Kosovo's leader, demanding if he knew of arms and drugs-smuggling in the province.
Milosevic remained calm throughout the questioning, but Bakalli became rattled and looked uneasy as the defendant picked holes in his testimony.
After seeing off the first of 350 witnesses the prosecution is expected to call, Milosevic scored a significant victory when he successfully argued that the second witness should not be allowed to testify at all. Kevin Curtis had gathered more than 1,000 witness statements from crime scenes across Kosovo, but the court ruled that his evidence was inadmissible because it was based on hearsay.
ZEQIRI did not look at Milosevic as he described how Serbian forces burnt down his village of Celina a day after NATO launched air-strikes against Yugoslavia in March 1999.
He fled with his relatives, but was later separated from them and was one of just two from a family of 18 to survive.
"I have not seen my family since then. They were all killed," he said.
Milosevic scribbled notes while Zegiri described the murder of a gypsy by Serbian forces.
"We heard the firing, the shots, and I saw a bullet hit the gypsy. He came up to me . . . and then they fired again and he fell down in a ditch and then I left," the witness said.
Cross-examining, Milosevic suggested that the villagers were harbouring terrorists from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
On Friday Milosevic took a rest and allowed a Belgrade lawyer provided by the court to cross-examine a prosecution witness. Fehim Elshani claimed that Serbian forces had entered his village and burned it to the ground.
"There were three elderly women burned by your forces. You should bear in mind that I myself was involved in this and I buried one, together with her son," he said.
Elshani admitted that his son was a member of the KLA but claimed that he had himself had no involvement with the terrorist group.
The trial is expected to last for two years, and the prosecution is focusing on Milosevic's alleged crimes in Kosovo in the late 1990s before moving on to his conduct in Croatia and Bosnia. Prosecutors are not identifying witnesses in advance, but they claim that many of Milosevic's former associates are prepared to testify against him.
For his part, Milosevic is fighting two battles in the courtroom. In the first, he is displaying his formidable skills as a lawyer to weaken the prosecution case and to prevent them from proving that he was responsible for atrocities committed during his presidency.
The second battle may be more important to Milosevic. It is his attempt to justify his actions while in power and to blame Western leaders for the break-up of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed. It is too early to say if Milosevic will triumph in either battle, and the former tyrant claims that he has no chance of a fair trial. But after the first week of his trial, he has persuaded many observers that, in two years' time, he just might leave The Hague a free man.