by Adam LeBor
When Serbia went to the polls in December 2001, Milosevic’s Socialists did surprisingly well. The DOS coalition won 64 per cent, but the Socialists took 13 per cent of the votes, making the party the largest opposition grouping with 35 seats. Milosevic retired from public life, but did not disappear. In an interview that month with Palma television, he said his ‘conscience is clear and he can sleep well’. He accused Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia of being in the front lines of the October 5 revolution, and blamed them for sanctions and lowering the quality of life in Yugoslavia. The following month, Rade Markovic, head of the Serbian intelligence services, and Milosevic’s old ally, Mihalj Kertes, head of the customs service, were both arrested.
The new authorities opened an investigation into Milosevic’s abuse of power in Serbia. Serbian police finally moved to arrest Milosevic on 31 March 2001. By then the mordant joke about ever-shrinking Serbia had more or less become true. Milosevic prepared to go out fighting. An impressive arsenal was assembled at the house on Uzicka including: two machine guns; thirty assault rifles, a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher; ten cases of ammunition; twenty-three pistols and two cases of hand grenades. Marija Milosevic alone was packing three pistols: a Beretta, a Walther and a Derringer. Sinisa Vucinic, a political ally of Milosevic’s wife Mira, was manning a machine gun.4
The police had launched their first charge in the early hours of Saturday morning. Masked plain-clothes commandos smashed their way through the windows and tried to storm the residence. But their attack met heavy resistance, bullets flew across the garden as the defenders opened up. Two police officers were wounded, and a photographer hurt as well. But when Milosevic lost control over his own back garden, as the police commandos there prepared for another raid, even he began to wonder if it was all over. In the early hours of Sunday morning negotiations started. Members of Milosevic’s own Socialist Party tried to persuade him and his defenders to lay down their arms. The dawn sunlight brought a new clarity. Milosevic told his lawyer he was ready to surrender.
An investigating judge entered the house and read out the list of charges against him. These included financial misdealings, damaging Serbia’s economy and introducing hyperinflation. At the same time a statement was presented, signed by Yugoslav President Kostunica, Serbian Prime Minister Djindjic and Serbian President Milan Milutinovic (also wanted by the ICTY). The statement said that the criminal proceedings against Milosevic were not instituted by The Hague, and guaranteed the safety and property of both Milosevic and his family. The key points were added in two typewritten annexes:
• Slobodan Milosevic will not be handed over to any judicial or other institution outside the country.
• Slobodan Milosevic has guarantees for the daily visits of his family.5
The annexes were signed under the authorisation of Serbian President Djindjic, and signed by a DOS official, Cedomir Jovanovic.
Amazingly, despite the bluster and the shooting, and the amount of alcohol and weapons everywhere, no one had died. Slobo’s last stand was more Balkan farce than Bonnie and Clyde. But his arrest was real enough. At 4.30 a.m. he walked through his front door for the last time. Mira recalled: ‘Our home was full of friends, Marija and I were also there, and people working in the residence, more than fifty people were there . . . They came into the house, and said either we arrest you and take you with us, or we will kill everyone. So what else could he do, just sit in the car? He did not blink an eye, and said of course I will go and he left.’6
After taking several of her mother’s tranquillisers, and drinking most of a bottle of cognac, a despairing Marija fired five shots into the air as her father was driven off. Bracketed by a convoy of police jeeps, Milosevic was driven to a cell at Belgrade’s central prison. Inmate 101980 was housed in the most comfortable wing of the prison, nicknamed ‘The Hyatt’. The fourteen-square-metre cells there boasted an en suite shower, toilet and sink, and hot running water.
The details of Milosevic’s stay in prison were published in a book by the prison governor Dragisa Blanusa, who was promptly sacked. I Guarded Milosevic reveals how the former president snored, made fruit tea, ate a lot of beans and smoked Serbian cigarettes. Mira arrived every day at noon, with a packed lunch.7 She even brought painted eggs at Easter, although neither is religious. Sometimes she lost her temper and harangued prison staff, although she later apologised, blaming ‘a surplus of female hormones’. The former ruling couple spent an hour together, holding hands, kissing each other and stroking each other’s faces. Milosevic was always polite and correct with prison staff, as he is at The Hague.
It was while Milosevic was incarcerated in cell 1121 that the news broke in Serbia that would speed his extradition. In early summer 2001 a series of mass graves of Kosovo Albanians were discovered. Not in Croatia, Bosnia or even Kosovo, but the heartlands of Serbia itself, including one at Batajnica military base, just outside Belgrade. The corpses had been moved north during the bombing campaign. Yugoslav leaders warned Milosevic that if and when NATO troops entered Kosovo, they would find evidence of massacres. Informed of this Milosevic reportedly told his top brass to ‘take care of it.’8
They did not do a very good job. Sanitation workers in the southern Kosovo town of Prizren were summoned in the middle of the night and driven to an army rifle range. The workers were ordered to load the corpses into a white refrigerator truck. In April 2000 a fisherman saw a truck from a food processing company in Prizren floating in the Danube. When local police opened the vehicle a human leg fell out. Inside were 86 bodies, which were then taken to Batajnica base. The details of the killings, and the botched attempts to dispose of the bodies were a profound psychological shock for many Serbs. Vital testimony was provided by conscience stricken Serbs who had been ordered to take part in the disposal exercise.
On 28 June 2001 Serb Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic chaired a meeting of the Serbian government. 28 June, St Vitus’s Day, or Vidovdan, was the date of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on Vidovdan in 1914. The decree authorising Milosevic’s extradition was approved by fourteen votes to one, the sole dissenter a member of Vojislav Kostunica’s party.
Three hours later Milosevic was told to pack his bag. He asked where he was going, but the answer was obvious. The new government had deceived her husband with a false promise, said Mira. ‘They brought a document signed by the Yugoslav president and the Serbian prime minister, and other top officials. He was given this document and we believed it. We believed it. If my husband had signed something, he would not have breached it, as this current president did.’
Milosevic was taken to a police base. Fearful that the army might intervene, Djindjic had ordered an aircraft to land there as a feint, but the military did not move. In what appeared to be a well co-ordinated operation between Belgrade, London and Washington, Milosevic was then taken by helicopter to the US military base at Tuzla in northern Bosnia. From Tuzla Milosevic was flown in an RAF jet to a Dutch military base. At 11.00 p.m. he was led through the gate of the UN detention centre.
* * *
Milosevic’s initial fury against the court appears to have abated. When he first appeared in court before the presiding judge Richard May on 3 July 2000 he refused to enter a plea. He condemned the ICTY as ‘a false tribunal’ and an ‘illegal organ’.9
It was an unedifying performance for a former head of state. When Judge Richard May asked if he wanted the indictment read out to him Milosevic replied, ‘It’s your problem’. Which was incorrect, as it is very much Milosevic’s problem. All three indictments against him since have been rolled into one. Milosevic is charged with crimes against humanity in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia, as well as genocide in Bosnia.
Milosevic is the first state president to be tried for genocide. His indictment covers three wars, between 1991 and 1998. Milosevic is not personally accused of taking part in massacres and ethnic cleansing. However, in all three indictments he is accused of individual c
riminal responsibility under article 7 (1) of the ICTY statutes, for having planned or ordered such acts, and of individual criminal responsibility for the acts of his subordinates, under article 7 (3) of the statutes. Had President Tudjman lived he would have almost certainly joined Milosevic in the dock. Both men sat at the apex of power in states that launched sustained campaigns of murder, terror and ethnic cleansing.
Critics charge that the ICTY tribunal is ‘victors’ justice’. If so, it is tardy. Between 1991 and 1999 Milosevic was treated by the West – and Russia – as a respected international statesman, even though the UN imposed harsh economic sanctions on the Milosevic regime for its role in the Yugoslav wars. Milosevic is charged not just with war crimes in Bosnia, but with genocide. A considerable amount of the evidence on which the prosecution has constructed its case against Milosevic has been supplied, eventually, by western governments. If this is available now, it was certainly known in the mid-1990s. Yet after the war in Bosnia ended, Milosevic was flown to Dayton airbase where his name was spelt out in flashing lights.
In the macabre accounting of the Milosevic era, Kosovo was the least bloody of the regime’s wars (excluding Slovenia). Perhaps two thousand people died before the air-strikes began, a mere 1 per cent of Bosnia’s losses. But NATO went to war against Serbia for Kosovo, which it would not do for Croatia or Serbia. As one senior British diplomat admitted, ‘Of course we all knew Milosevic was the biggest part of the problem right from the outset. But what took longer for us to get was that he could never ever also be part of the solution.’10
The indictment for Kosovo is forty-two pages long, plus seventeen pages listing some of the civilians killed. Among the indictment’s many details is an account of the final hours of forty-four members of the Berisha family, killed by Serb forces at the Kosovo village of Suva Reka on or about 26 March 2001. The village was surrounded by tanks, and the occupants ordered out. Men were then separated from women and children, and six people immediately killed. Serb forces then herded the survivors and other family members into a coffee shop. In its dry, legalistic language, the indictment notes: ‘Forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia then walked into the coffee shop and opened fire on the persons inside. Forty civilians were killed and others seriously wounded during this action.’11 Among the members of the Berisha family killed were Eron and Redon, both aged one year old; Dorentina, aged four and Hanumasha, aged eighty-one. Bodies of the Berisha family members were later dug up at Batajnica military base.
Such accounts of brutality all seem a long way from the ICTY, housed in a former insurance building near the quiet tree-lined streets of Dutch suburbia. Polite, but armed and burly UN policemen scrutinise each visitor’s identity documents, before ushering them through two metal detectors. Armed police also control entrance to all office and other areas. After a shaky start in 1993, by September 2001 the ICTY had transformed itself into a major international operation, with an annual budget of $96 million, employing 1,188 staff members from seventy-seven countries. In April 2002, there were forty prisoners held at the ICTY’s detention unit. Eight other accused had been provisionally released pending trial, while more than twenty arrest warrants remained outstanding. Cases are also pending, or have been concluded, against Croats, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. After sentencing, prisoners are sent to another European country to serve their sentences.
Two television monitors in the foyer announce the days proceedings. The courtroom is open to all. The Milosevic trial is the most popular, and is now a stop on the Hague tourist trail. Visitors walk up a curved staircase and sit in the public seating area. Simultaneous translation is provided in several languages including English and Albanian. Spectators are divided from the courtroom by a plate-glass wall, but otherwise open sessions are held in full public view. There is little sense here of the drama that accompanied the Nuremberg war crimes trials. The most important court case of the new millennium resembles a municipal council meeting. Presiding Judge Richard May sits on a raised dais, between two others. Milosevic sits at one end of the courtroom, usually dressed in one of his double-breasted suits, with a light-coloured shirt offset by a silk tie. He is flanked continuously by two beefy armed policemen.
Milosevic conducts his own defence, aided by one of his Belgrade legal team who sit in the public gallery. His tactics are, broadly, political harangues against the West and NATO for bombing Serbia, which he blames for the mass exodus of Kosovo Albanians, combined with very detailed personal attacks on the character and testimony of witnesses. Many believe that such precise information comes from sympathisers within the new regime. Observers point out that Milosevic’s ability to access such information from a prison cell will eventually undercut any defence that he did not know what was happening, for example, at Vukovar, or Srebrenica.
Wary perhaps of being accused of bias, the judges grant Milosevic plenty of leeway. Milosevic’s rants provide an intriguing window into his mindset. In a courtroom duel with Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, on 3 May 2002, Milosevic expounded his favourite conspiracy theory that an ‘anti-Serbian policy’ was instituted throughout the last decade, ‘intended to annul and change the outcome of the First and Second World Wars’.12 Milosevic then claimed that Germany supported the Kosovo Albanians as a reward for the ‘massive participation of Albanian formations on the side of Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War’.
There are perhaps are two Slobodan Milosevics. One is a charming Balkan rogue – or at least he wants to be seen as one – a confidant of presidents and ambassadors, a deft schmoozer of western diplomats, trying his best to bring his wayward protégés such as Radovan Karadzic to heel. The other is an authoritarian provincial Communist functionary of limited vision and a poor strategic sense.
It is the second Milosevic that is on display at The Hague. His courtroom technique has the effect of intimidating witnesses, often cowed and frightened Albanians who lost their nearest and dearest in the Kosovo war. Milosevic does not show sympathy. Instead he sits back, not exactly sprawled, but certainly comfortable and confident in his chair, before pouncing. He is a commanding presence in the courtroom. Ibrahim Rugova, in contrast, sat hunched and defensive, although it was Milosevic, not he, who was on trial.
Yet like all bullies, Milosevic buckles when he is met with equal force. One of the few courtroom encounters that have left Milosevic flustered was a duel with Lord Ashdown, now the UN High Representative in Bosnia. Ashdown had made repeated visits to Yugoslavia during the Milosevic era. A former soldier in the Special Boat Squadron, Ashdown was calmly confident as he took on Milosevic in mid-March 2002. Ashdown recalled with a certain relish their September 1998 meeting after his visit to Kosovo: ‘I warned you that you would end up in this court, and here you are.’
Eventually, when Milosevic steps over the limit, Judge Richard May calls him to order. He often addresses Milosevic in weary familiar tone of old married couples compelled by circumstance to spend lengthy and unwelcome periods of time in a confined space. ‘Mis-ter Mi-lo-se-vic,’ he sighs, before bringing the defendant back to the matter in hand. Milosevic’s wild rhetoric highlights the fact that for a lawyer, his courtroom technique is poor. Less bombast, and more facts would make a more powerful argument. For example, it is now widely believed – and admitted by western diplomats – that German demands in the summer of 1991 for early recognition of Croatian independence, without adequate human rights guarantees for the Serb minority, did accelerate the drive to war. While there was no ‘massive’ participation of Albanians on the Axis side, several thousand Albanians did join their own dedicated SS division, named after their national hero, Skenderbeg. Albanian SS troops rounded up 281 Kosovo Jews and also aided the German withdrawal from the Balkans.13
Milosevic’s indictment for Kosovo is comparatively straightforward. About 800,000 Kosovars were forced from their home by Serb and Yugoslav troops while Milosevic, as Yugoslav President and head of state, was commander-in-chief of the Yugoslav m
ilitary. Croatia and Bosnia are more complicated, as both of these countries had declared independence and so were sovereign states.
Milosevic’s indictment for war crimes in Croatia is thirty-two pages long, with a thirty-one-page annex of civilian deaths from Serb forces. Milosevic is accused of ‘exercising effective control or substantial influence’ over the participants in a ‘joint criminal enterprise’. Its aim was ‘the forcible removal of the majority of the Croat and other non-Serb population from the approximately one-third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia that he [Milosevic] planned to become part of a new Serb-dominated state,’14 through murder, terror and ethnic cleansing.
Another fourteen individuals are accused of participating, including Milosevic’s political fixer during the early 1990s Borisav Jovic; the leaders of the rebel Krajina Serbs Milan Martic and the former dentist Milan Babic; Milosevic’s former intelligence chief Jovica Stanisic, Franko Simatovic, leader of the Special Operations Unit; the ultranationalist paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj, Zeljko Raznatovic and Radovan Stojicic (a.k.a. Arkan and Badza). Arkan and Badza are dead. Milan Martic, also separately indicted for war crimes, surrendered to the ICTY in May 2002. Borisav Jovic lives in Belgrade where he has reinvented himself as an author and television pundit. Seselj is an MP in the Serbian parliament, representing the Serbian Radical Party, which won twenty-three seats in the December 2001 elections. The others are living freely, probably in Serbia.