10-5-2002
Slobodan Milosevic
(N. 29-9-1941)
A La Haye, l'avocat Milosevic
• LE MONDE | 28.03.02 | 12h14 | analyse
• MIS A JOUR LE 02.04.02 | 19h07
Slobodan Milosevic, autocrate déchu, persiste à penser que l'"on n'est jamais aussi bien servi que par soi-même". En vertu de cet adage populaire, l'ancien président a choisi de se défendre seul - ou presque - des accusations de génocide, crimes de guerre et crimes contre l'humanité retenues contre lui par le Tribunal pénal international pour l'ex-Yougoslavie (TPIY). En six semaines de procès à La Haye, Slobodan Milosevic est certes parvenu à imposer sa personnalité dans le prétoire, tantôt bougonnant, tantôt agressif, face à un président de la cour taciturne et des témoins souvent impressionnés par l'enjeu. Mais Slobodan Milosevic n'est pas avocat. Sa défense tourne en rond. Il pourrait devoir changer de tactique.
Qui essaie-t-il de convaincre depuis son box d'accusé au TPI ? Les trois juges qui décideront ou non de l'envoyer passer le reste de sa vie derrière des barreaux ? Ou bien une opinion publique serbe qui le renversa le 5 octobre 2000 ? Sa déclaration liminaire en ouverture de ce procès historique avait esquissé les grandes lignes de sa défense. Après s'être posé en victime d'un "tribunal illégal", il avait tenté de renverser les actes d'accusation en affirmant que les déportations des Albanais du Kosovo étaient le fait de l'OTAN et de l'UCK (Armée de libération du Kosovo) et non des forces serbes, cantonnées, selon lui, dans de "légitimes opérations antiterroristes". "Vous m'avez déjà condamné, moi et le peuple serbe, alors que les Serbes sont les victimes", a-t-il répété aux juges.
L'apparition de Slobodan Milosevic sur les écrans de télévision a eu un certain impact sur l'opinion publique serbe. La procédure pénale du TPI - prévoyant que chaque témoin produit par l'accusation soit ensuite contre-interrogé par l'accusé - lui offre autant d'occasions de faire des digressions, autant de possibilités de mener des charges contre l'OTAN et l'UCK. Impopulaire dans son pays après dix ans de guerres perdues, sa combativité, sa défiance, son arrogance ont été plutôt bien perçues à Belgrade, où le TPI fait figure d'institution "anti-serbe". Mais si les sondages montrent que sa cote de popularité a doublé en Serbie, elle reste basse (20 %) et ne constitue pas un retournement d'opinion en faveur de l'ancien homme fort de Belgrade.
Certains se sont inquiétés, au début du procès, de la tournure prise par des audiences qui, selon eux, faisaient la part trop belle à l'accusé.
"Milosevic a pris la cour en otage", disait un avocat dans les couloirs du tribunal. On reprocha au bureau du procureur de n'avoir pas pris le procès par le bon bout, commençant par le registre politique, dans lequel l'accusé se sent à l'aise. Cette entame accréditait la thèse de l'accusé, qui se dit victime d'un "procès politique", mené au nom d'une "justice des vainqueurs".
Le juge Richard May, qui dirige les débats, en prit pour son grade. Le magistrat britannique était coupable, selon les mêmes, d'accorder trop de liberté de parole à Slobodan Milosevic. "L'accusé n'est pas avocat et il ne dispose que d'un temps réduit pour préparer sa défense", a justifié à plusieurs reprises le juge May. L'œil rivé sur la pendule qui lui fait face dans la salle d'audience alors que le procès devrait durer au moins deux ans, il ne rate pas une occasion de rappeler Slobodan Milosevic à l'ordre dès que ses propos s'écartent trop du sujet.
Le tribunal a décidé de faire preuve d'une certaine clémence envers l'accusé, pour ne pas se voir reprocher sans doute de limiter les droits de la défense. On exhuma ainsi les "amis de la cour" des règles de procédure du TPI. Les trois avocats professionnels (Stephen Kay, avocat de Londres ; Branislav Tapuskovic, de Belgrade ; et Michaïl Wladimiroff, de La Haye), formant les amici curiae, en latin juridique, ne sont pas censés représenter l'accusé, mais l'assister. Dans les faits, les interventions de Me Tapuskovic, particulièrement, ressemblent à s'y méprendre à des plaidoiries.
"LIBERTÉ DE TON"
Parallèlement, l'accusé s'entretient fréquemment avec ses deux avocats-conseils serbes (Dragoslav Ognjanovic et Zdenko Tomanovic). Depuis son incarcération à la prison néerlandaise de Scheveningen, le 29 juin 2001, un rapport du greffe du TPI relève qu'il "a disposé de 430 heures pour consulter ses deux conseillers juridiques". Outre un téléphone public, l'accusé a accès à un fax, un magnétoscope, une photocopieuse dans l'enceinte de la prison, en plus de son ordinateur dans sa cellule. "Tout cela fait beaucoup pour quelqu'un qui se défend seul. Il dispose d'une liberté de ton qu'il n'aurait pas s'il était représenté par l'un d'entre nous", relève un avocat.
Pour un accusé qui, niant la légalité du TPI, affirmait ne pas vouloir lire les tonnes de documents fournis par l'accusation, Slobodan Milosevic a, à plusieurs reprises depuis le début du procès, sorti de sa manche des informations étonnamment précises sur certains témoins. Ce genre de manœuvre vise probablement à les déstabiliser, voire à les discréditer aux yeux du tribunal. Mais, à ce jour, ces attaques sous la ceinture sont tombées à plat. Un Albanais du Kosovo venu raconter son expulsion par les forces serbes s'est entendu demander s'il était bien "le cousin de ce trafiquant intercepté à la frontière bulgare avec 200 kilos de drogue" ! "C'est sans rapport avec notre affaire", lui a rétorqué le président May. Un des conseillers juridiques de l'accusé présent dans les rangs du public à La Haye avouait candidement "donner des dizaines de coups de téléphone à Belgrade durant les pauses", histoire d'activer là-bas "un réseau très efficace", selon lui.
La presse belgradoise s'est fait l'écho des appuis dont l'ancien président disposerait toujours dans les services secrets, l'armée ou la police. Informé, l'accusé l'est, sans aucun doute. Pour autant, cela est-il constructif ?
Ces informations sont peut-être intimidantes pour les témoins " initiés", ces insiders sur lesquels l'accusation compte beaucoup pour établir la responsabilité de Milosevic dans les guerres de Bosnie et de Croatie en décrivant le système de l'intérieur. On peut douter en revanche de l'impact sur les juges de ces véritables fiches de police. Car aux récits très précis de victimes racontant comment elles ont été terrorisées par les forces conjuguées de la police serbe et de l'armée yougoslave - dont Milosevic assurait de jure le commandement suprême en tant que président -, l'accusé répond en ressassant les mêmes arguments : les Albanais ont fui la province par peur des bombardements de l'OTAN et sous la pression de l'UCK, les personnes tuées étaient des "terroristes" ou bien les protégeaient, les villages rasés étaient des places fortes de l'Armée de libération du Kosovo...
Christophe Châtelot
• ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 29.03.02
In mid-February, during the opening days of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, I spent a week in Belgrade talking about him to friends and experts, politicians and victims. I asked them about their reactions to his trial and what effect they thought it was having on their country. My notebook slowly filled up with dozens of contradictory and confusing views, most of them, it must be said, critical of the trial in one way or another. When I went to get a haircut, Branko, the barber, summed it all up in the space of five minutes. As the scissors skimmed around my left ear he said, "Milosevic is innocent." As he moved up to the top of my head he declared, "Milosevic is guilty, but then so were Izetbegovic and Tudjman."[1] When he reached my right ear he said, "Under Milosevic things were great. Now the government will privatize our shop and then we'll lose our jobs." By the time Branko had got to just above the nape of my neck, though, doubts began to set in. He stood up straight and with a sharp jerk of the scissors declared, "Fuck Milosevic!"
It is not surprising that Serbs are confused.[2] For more than a decade Milosevic and his cronies were constantly on television declaring that the Serbs were being set upon by evil, genocidal Croats, Muslim fundamentalists, Albanian drug dealers, American scum, German Nazis, etc. Now, with Milosevic on trial in The Hague and with the proceedings broadcast live, he is repeating his accusations over again—and for hours and hours nonstop.[3]
On February 14 Slobodan Milosevic began his defense before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in The Hague. He stands accused of sixty-six counts of war crimes—including ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the murder of civilians and prisoners, and, gravest of all, genocide in Bosnia. Predictably, Milosevic rejects these charges. He says that everyone else was to blame, especially NATO, that he either knew nothing about the crimes or had no influence on the people that committed them, and that the accusations are lies in any case. Indeed, with an eye perhaps to aligning himself with anti-globalization protesters, Milosevic shrewdly told the court on February 18 that Yugoslavia had been a victim of a Western "strategic concept in realizing global control." It was, he said, the West that was subjugating countries throughout the world [and] causing...conflicts between the Slav and Muslim nations in the hope that they will kill each other respectively or at least weaken each other so much that control may be established over them in such a weakened state. Kosovo and Chechnya in that respect are undoubtedly a link in the same chain....
On one of my first visits to Belgrade, in June 1991, I was held up at the airport because the police were blocking the road for James Baker, then US secretary of state, who had come to plead with Yugoslav leaders to keep the country together. Later he was criticized in the press for not being more explicit and more forceful. Some argued that Milosevic had taken Baker to mean that if Slovenia and Croatia tried to secede then the US would do nothing to prevent the Yugoslav People's Army from restoring order and securing the country's borders. But according to Milosevic's testimony on February 18, "There are some people who haven't realized the truth today," namely that the war "in the territory of the former Yugoslavia is the result of the will and interest of others, the great Western powers."
In case you would like to know what Western purpose could possibly have been served by these disastrous wars, and by the long-term expense of stationing peacekeepers in the region and maintaining weak states and tiny volatile territories with basket-case economies like Kosovo, Milosevic told the court, and indeed Serbia and the world, that the aim was "a new colonialism." But, one might ask, aren't colonizers supposed to get some benefit from their colonies? Perhaps Milosevic will devise an answer to this question later in the trial. For the moment Milosevic's rantings amount to a long plea of "not guilty" and an attempt to carve his name in history as the man who saved the Serbs—not the man who destroyed Yugoslavia, lost Kosovo, and left Serbia an impoverished, shattered state.
In Belgrade this February I went to see Branka Prpa, a historian now in charge of the city's historical archives, who was the companion of Slavko Curuvija, the late newspaper editor once close to Milosevic and, especially, to his wife, Mira Markovic. Curuvija had later changed his opinions—perhaps persuaded by Prpa—and had come out against Milosevic. Especially after NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia began on March 24, 1999, the secret police were watching Curuvija twenty-four hours a day. Just over two weeks later, on April 11, Prpa and Curuvija were assaulted on the street by two armed men. Seventeen shots were fired, and Curuvija was killed. Prpa remained, as she put it, "alive by accident."
Those responsible for Curuvija's death have never been brought to justice. To bring about Milosevic's fall a great many murky deals were made by the then opposition with members of the security apparatus, with the result that many now remain in their old jobs. As a result, as Prpa puts it, you can hardly expect the secret police establishment to "accuse itself of that crime. Are those that participated in it supposed to conduct the investigation? That is possible in fairy tales, but not in reality."
I asked Prpa what she, as both a victim and a historian of Serbian politics, made of the trial so far. Milosevic's defense was "disgusting," she said, because, while the prosecution team made clear that he was on trial as an individual, he was trying, in his attempt to discredit the court, to suggest that in fact the entire Serbian people were on trial and not the man who had actually manipulated them, dragging their country into war and committing vicious crimes. This line, she said, was being taken up by his supporters and former collaborators, who "want to make him a saint" and are "trying to get ordinary people to commiserate with him. They are playing on their suffering during the war...but the fact is that he has destroyed our lives and our country."
Not far from Prpa's flat is the Serbian parliament, where I spoke to Branislav Ivkovic, the leader in the national assembly of Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia. On his secretary's wall is a picture of a youthful-looking Milosevic with his young grandson Marko. Ivkovic told me that Milosevic in his defense was exposing "the media lies about us." He referred to the mauling Milosevic appeared to have given to the prosecution's first witness, a Kosovo Albanian politician, on February 18. When Milosevic hectored him about being an ally of "the terrorists" of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Mahmut Bakalli, who had been the leader of Kosovo until 1981, looked panicky and sometimes confused. In fact, if you read the transcripts of what he said to Milosevic, his replies were mostly, if not all, quite credible. He argued that while the Kosovars resented direct Serbian rule in the early 1990s, they reacted peacefully, by setting up their own civil institutions, until the Serbs became increasingly brutal. Still, Bakalli looked weak on television and Ivko-vic crowed that Milosevic had "destroyed" him.
But credibility is Milosevic's problem, since it is he who is on trial. Milosevic claims, for example, that during the Bosnian war he was president of Serbia and therefore had nothing to do with the war in Bosnia. But what, I asked Ivkovic, of the fact that the Yugoslav authorities paid the salaries of Bosnian Serb army officers, which was common knowledge at the time? According to the present government, they are still doing so, although they are about to stop. Didn't this give the lie to Milosevic's claims? Ivkovic said, as I suppose Milosevic will say in court, "I really did not know this."
During the next few days after Mahmut Bakalli's testimony the prosecution brought Kosovars to The Hague to testify about the mass deportations and flight of more than 800,000 Albanians from Kosovo during the NATO bombing.[4] Milosevic appeared extremely well informed about each of the witnesses, their families, and events that had happened in their villages. He is clearly well supplied with information he can use to try to discredit witnesses. When they testified that soldiers and police had come to their villages to drive them out, Milosevic said that it was the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army that had been there, and that the government security forces had only come in pursuit of them. The Kosovars then replied that they didn't know that guerrillas were present. Contemptuously Milosevic said: "Well, let's talk about something you do know about."
In fact only a very small minority of Serbs, mostly Belgrade liberals, support the Hague trials or want anything to do with international efforts to bring their former leaders to justice. At the beginning of the trial, however, polls showed that large numbers of them were watching it. According to a poll in the popular weekly magazine Nin, 41.6 percent of those surveyed gave their former leader "five out of five" for his performance so far. Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco, the head of Belgrade's Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, told me that the prosecution's opening statements contained errors and that the testimony of the first witness, Bakalli, seemed weak. "People are starting to celebrate Milosevic's 'excellent role' in defending himself like a 'real Serb,'" she said. "Of course, they really blame Milosevic for losing the war, not for starting it."
Ms. Kovacevic-Vuco, like other Serbs who support the tribunal, fears that unless the prosecution can do a better job, their campaign for legal accountability, far from being vindicated, will be badly damaged. One of the main arguments in favor of the war crimes tribunal was that Serbs should face up to the enormity of the crimes committed in their name. So far this isn't happening. The trial is broadcast live, and victims are telling their stories for all to hear; but Milosevic is mocking and denigrating them with some success.
Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian premier, says that he is greatly concerned about the progress of the trial. He told me he thought that the court was "unserious" and that it was giving an impression of "low credibility," with witnesses "unprepared and confused." Last spring Djindjic took a major political risk when he insisted on Milosevic's arrest and extradition to The Hague. This literally paid off when the US and Europeans immediately rewarded him by giving his country generous amounts of financial aid. Now, he says, he is under pressure from Western nations to round up more of the people indicted in The Hague and extradite them, just at the moment that many Serbs, 75 percent according to one poll, believe that the tribunal, just as they expected, is an anti-Serb kangaroo court.
"My concern," Djindjic told me, "is that the trial can change the pro-Western mood in this country. People become cynical." He says that the tribunal is seen as a Western institution, like NATO, which bombed Serbia and destroyed many of its bridges but also claimed to have inflicted huge damage on the Yugoslav army, a claim that was never substantiated. So, he says, people end up believing that the tribunal, publicized as an institution representing democracy and the West, is not serious: it is "a bit of talk, a bit of manipulation but without much substance." And by giving that impression, the tribunal risks creating a political backlash in Serbia. Djindjic did not say what everyone knows: that as prime minister of the Republic of Serbia he is locked in a political struggle with Vojislav Kostunica, the Yugoslav president, and the tribunal threatens his chances to prevail. While Djindjic is a pragmatist and modernizer, Kostunica, who has publicly deplored the tribunal from the first, represents a far more traditionalist, conservative Serbia. Djindjic fears that the tribunal's failings will play into Kostunica's hands.
Kostunica's supporters now feel vindicated. The president's adviser on foreign affairs, Predrag Simic, told me that he thought the prosecution's opening case against Milosevic had been crude, that Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor, had tried portraying the Serbs as Nazis and Milosevic as Hitler. According to Simic, when del Ponte described in court the infamous 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy, which attacked what it called "genocide" against the Serbs in Kosovo, she spoke of it as if it were Mein Kampf. All of this enabled Milosevic to present himself as a modern counterpart of Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Communist leader who was falsely accused by the Nazis of setting fire to the Reichstag in 1933. The problem with such "phony justice," Simic said, is that it tempts people "to fall in love with Milosevic again."
Although Milosevic fell from power some eighteen months ago, his specter is still a heavy presence in Serbian and Yugoslav politics. A huge amount of government time and energy has been spent on dealing with Montenegro, which nominally, if nothing else, is the second republic within what, for the next couple of months at least, is still called Yugoslavia. But the Yugoslav government contains ministers from Montenegro who were once Milosevic loyalists. They want no more government cooperation with the tribunal. Djindjic, for his part, needs to send more indicted Serbs to The Hague if he is to continue getting foreign aid.
Trying to devise a compromise that would not provoke a new political crisis and even the final unraveling of what remains of the state, Djindjic has been saying that he will round up some of the indicted Serbs but not General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army chief, even if he is still in Serbia. It would simply not be worth the political cost to him, he says, if young Serb policemen died in the attempt, killed by Mladic's guards, who may be members or former members of the army. He told me: "We are trying to create a democratic state...and it takes time. Now they say you should do what 50,000 NATO troops did not do in Bosnia—it's not fair."
Djindjic has also ruled out extraditing Milan Milutinovic, who was indicted along with Milosevic for instigating war crimes in Kosovo, and who also still happens to be president of Serbia. If it were held by anyone else, this would be the most powerful job in the country. So, if he were extradited now, there would have to be an election for president and Kostunica might well choose to contest it, and win. Still, predicting the future has become almost impossible with everything now up for grabs. On March 14 Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, succeeded in getting Serbian and Montenegrin leaders as well as President Kostunica to sign an agreement that, if passed by the parliaments of Serbia, Montenegro, and Yugoslavia, would, on paper, create—at least for a period of three years—a country simply called Serbia and Montenegro.
If this actually happens—and it is a big question whether it will—it is far from clear what Kostunica would choose to do, especially if constitutional changes in Serbia itself reduce the power of the presidency. Whether or not Kostunica eventually presides over a very loose union called Serbia and Montenegro, he would still have a strong following. The conflict between Djindjic and Kostunica was evident in the arrest by the military police, also on March 14, of one of Serbia's deputy premiers along with an American diplomat on suspicion of espionage.
One theory was that the diplomat was collecting military evidence that could be used against Milosevic at the tribunal. Djindjic condemned the arrest but Kostunica, who is backed by the military, defended it. The two men were released, but Kostunica's supporters in the army had shown the kind of force they could use. The minister in question was forced to resign.
Milosevic, for his part, can use the weapon of embarrassment. He may make much of the fact that when, in May 1993, he tried to help end the war in Bosnia along the lines of the Vance-Owen plan, he was accused of treachery and worse—by, in fact, Djindjic and Kostunica.
After hearing about the failures of the tribunal in Belgrade, attending it in The Hague is a sobering experience. When the court was created by the UN Security Council in 1993, no one took it very seriously and certainly no one then considered indicting Milosevic himself. Now it seems likely that the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, recently alleged to be hiding in the mountains of Montenegro, will soon join him. However, NATO forces in Bosnia, still smarting from their failure to capture Karadzic inside Bosnia on February 28 and March 1, are not allowed into Montenegro.
Among the first people I met at the Hague court was Florence Hartmann, the French spokeswoman of Carla del Ponte and the author of a biography of Milosevic. During the war in Bosnia, which we both covered as correspondents, we sometimes worked together. Since she knows Belgrade well, I asked her if she was disappointed by the kind of reaction I had encountered there. She angrily replied: "This is not the Olympic Games and there are no gold medals every day. It is not a football game with a winner. You have to build a case which is beyond any reasonable doubt and that takes weeks and months." Was she disappointed that, so far, the sometimes horrific testimony of the witnesses about Serbian police and army persecution did not seem to be getting through to people in Serbia? "Well," she said, "we can't put loudspeakers in the street to oblige people to listen to what happened to the victims. It takes time. Anyway, that's a philosophical point, not a legal one."
I then asked Ms. del Ponte what she made of the charges coming from Belgrade that the trial was worse than ineffectual, that it was giving Milosevic a chance to star as a victim. She replied: "We have a strategy of how to proceed. I can understand how, from the outside, for the public, it is not what was expected, but we can't change our strategy to please the public. My task is to present our case and to secure the conviction and sentencing of Milosevic." She appeared unperturbed by the reactions from Belgrade. Some Serbs have argued, for example, that it is all very well for Milosevic to be made to answer for crimes in Kosovo; but why has not a single Kosovo Albanian leader been publicly indicted for the murders of Serbs and others? Indeed Milosevic has also made great play of alleged bin Laden connections in Bosnia and at least one trial of a Bosnian Muslim general is expected to concentrate on murders committed by radical Islamists, some of whom may have had connections with bin Laden.
Is it true, I asked Ms. del Ponte, that she is looking into the cases of Hashim Thaci, the former political head of the KLA, its former military chief Agim Ceku, and a number of others who are alleged to have presided over crimes against Serbs? Unsurprisingly she wouldn't give me any names, but told me that investigations of "high responsible" Kosovo Albanians are ongoing and that indictments can be expected "within months." But if she did indict "high responsible" Kosovo Albanian politicians who now hold considerable power in Kosovo, might that not risk destabilizing the region? Was that not a factor she would have to take into account? She answered simply: "No—I cannot." After all, she said, this consideration certainly did not enter into her calculations when it came to Serbia or Croatia—so why should Kosovo be different?
A few minutes' walk away from Ms. del Ponte's office, in another part of the building, Slobodan Milosevic was grilling a witness, Qamil Shabani, a Kosovo Albanian. During Shabani's testimony Milosevic yawned, looked at his watch, slung his arm over the back of his chair, and scribbled notes. He kept catching the eye of Zdenko Tomanovic, one of his legal advisers from Belgrade, and they would smirk at each other knowingly. Shabani had been explaining how, during the NATO bombing, the people in his region had been kicked out by the Serbs or had fled. Now Milosevic rounded on him: "You said the Serbian population were preparing to liquidate the Albanian population. Were you yourself liquidated?" Shabani explained that he was in a convoy that had been fired upon as it left. Milosevic insisted: "So, you were liquidated?" This type of caustic humor is certainly part of the reason that Milosevic is scoring points back home.
Milosevic, who refuses to recognize the legality of the tribunal, has no official defense team and so conducts his own defense in court. But lawyers like Tomanovic are helping him. When Milosevic finds out who the prosecution is calling as a witness, he gives Tomanovic the names, and a team back in Belgrade finds out as much as possible about the person or the region that he comes from. According to the Serbian press Milosevic probably has access to military and police intelligence files from the years when he was in office, and this is helping him to put up a spirited defense. Is the prosecution worried? They will not say so on the record, but they are evidently delighted by what they regard as Milosevic's self-defeating strategy. The reactions in Belgrade don't seem to concern them. They believe the more detailed information Milosevic comes up with, the better it will eventually be for them. Milosevic, they say, will not be able to claim credibly that he knew nothing or had no influence on what happened.
The Prosecutor v. Slobodan Milosevic is the case everyone is interested in, but other trials are taking place daily. I went to watch the trial of four men charged with crimes against humanity that took place in Bosanski Samac, a small northern Bosnian town, mostly in 1992 and 1993. Here there were no political denunciations of "NATO aggression," no feeling, as with the Albanians, that, as witnesses, they have come to fight for Kosovo's independence in The Hague. The courtroom was oval-shaped and the judges sat on an elevated platform behind their computer screens. The setup looked familiar and then I realized that it reminded me of the flight deck of Star Trek's USS Enterprise.
As I watched I found it difficult to connect what I was listening to with my own experiences of what happened on the ground in Bosnia. I had, for instance, once seen the body of Selma Mejra, a seven-year-old girl, a few hours after she was killed by a Serbian paramilitary group that raided her village of Hranca, in eastern Bosnia, on May 3, 1992. It seemed impossible to reconcile what happened that day, and on many, many others, with what is happening in this remote courtroom in Holland. But then, as the Bosanski Samac trial went on, I also had the feeling that, if this was like a spacecraft, it was also slowly but surely coming in to land. I heard a witness recalling what a friend had said after he had been beaten up by one of the defendants. "I was beaten," he said, "by Milan Simic, and he came to my pizzeria so many times and I bought him so many drinks!"
Yes, I thought, that is what it was like. People talked about their amazement at the way their neighbors had turned on them and had been pleased when they suffered or died. But Slobodan Milosevic says he had nothing to do with it.
—March 27, 2002
[1] Alija Izetbegovic and Franjo Tudjman were the wartime leaders of Bosnia and Croatia.
[2] New books about the former Yugoslavia are pouring off the presses far too fast for even most specialists to keep up with. Among them are two new biographies of Slobodan Milosevic. Serbian journalist Slavoljub Djukic's Milosevic and Markovic: A Lust for Power (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001) repackages familiar information. Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, by a former US diplomat, Louis Sell (Duke University Press, 2002), is far more thorough. One of the most valuable forthcoming books is by the Greek journalist Takis Michas, Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic's Serbia in the Nineties (Texas A&M University Press, to be published in May). This is a much-needed addition to the literature and provides a shocking record of the way Greece consistently propped up Milosevic's regime, while large numbers of ordinary Greeks actively approved of his policies. A sober, brief, and balanced new history of Serbia has been produced by Professor Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Serbia: The History Behind the Name (New York University Press, 2002). As distinguished from some others who are better known, Pavlowitch has consistently maintained a very high standard of accuracy and scholarship in all of his work on the former Yugoslavia.
[3] Indictments and many other publicly available tribunal documents can be found at its Web site, www.un.org/icty. Transcripts of at least the beginning of the Milosevic trial are also available, and court officials say that the rest will follow. The best and most consistent specialized reporting of proceedings in The Hague can be found at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which is at www.iwpr.net.
[4] For a blow-by-blow account of what happened in Kosovo, see Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo (Human Rights Watch, 2001), available on the Web at www.hrw.org/reports/2001/kosovo.
Ex-Yugoslavia
For the
prosecution
Jul 18th 2002
From
The Economist
print edition
Milosevic
and Markovic: A Lust for Power
By
Slavoljub Djukic
McGill-Queen's University Press; 224 pages; $37.95
Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
By
Louis Sell
Duke University Press; 432 pages; $34.95 and £25
Unholy
Alliance: Greece and Milosevic's Serbia
By
Takis Michas
Texas A&M University Press; 200 pages; $29.95 and £24.95
Serbia:
The History of an Idea
By
Stevan K. Pavlowitch
New York University Press, 240 pages; $29.95.
Hurst;
£14.95
Four books which remind us why justice still needs to be done
SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC, the Serbian ex-leader, is conducting an obstinate defence at his trial in The Hague for war crimes. Since he claims not to accept the court's authority, he refuses to read the documents it gives him. Instead, he cites-selectively-from books on the Yugoslav conflict. What, you wonder, will he make of this double biography by Slavoljub Djukic of himself and his wife, Mira Markovic?
Though published in English as a single volume, it is a condensation of three previous books by Mr Djukic about the ex-Yugoslav leader published in Serbian. It is breezily written and spiced with anecdotes. Mr Milosevic, we learn, held Bosnian Serb leaders in low regard, once telling Radovan Karadzjic, their boss, to “go and lick a salt block”.
But Mr Djukic adds little of substance about the war and its causes. He is a fair example of a Milosevic opponent who is nevertheless a Serb nationalist. Like Mr Milosevic, he holds that Yugoslavia's collapse served interests in the West, and he does not mention the massacre at Srebrenica, in which Bosnian Serbs massacred over 7,000 Muslim men and boys.
LOUIS SELL'S study is a far more substantial book, though hardly light reading.
Mr Sell spent eight years in Yugoslavia as an American foreign-service officer
and attended the Dayton peace conference which brought the Bosnian war formally
to an end. His is the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the war so
far published in English. He is fair-minded and keeps his diplomatic cool until
the end, when with justice he calls Mr Milosevic “an ugly killer” who even now
denies the fact of horrendous crimes, and his own responsibility for them.
TAKIS MICHAS, a courageous Greek journalist, has written a superb and
devastating critique of his country's support of the Serb nationalists in their
war for Greater Serbia. He describes Greece's shameless sanctions-busting and
the lies of its newspapers. These prevented Greek people from knowing the grim
facts and lauded Greek volunteers who took part in the capture of Srebrenica as
heroes. The shrillness of anti-Muslim, anti-Albanian and anti-western attitudes,
which Mr Michas believes are widespread in his country, is both shocking and sad.
He quotes Mikis Theodorakis, a composer, as saying: “I hate Americans and
everything American. I hope that the youth will begin to hate everything
American.”
IF
YOU want to step back and take a more historical view, Stevan Pavlowitch's
account of Serbian history from the Middle Ages until today is a good place to
start. The author is a Belgrade-born academic who has lived mostly in the West.
With so much ground to cover, he travels at a cracking pace, and his account of
the wars since 1991 is inevitably compressed. In compensation, he helps us
understand the conflict in its historical context. Few will disagree with his
closing remark that Serbia after Mr Milosevic is like Jonah released from the
belly of the whale, “free to face its problems in stark daylight”.
A war-crimes trial that's riveting even without a verdict
By Ginanne Brownell
July 26 issue - If Slobodan Milosevic's health improves, he is supposed to take the stand later this summer to present his defense to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The former Yugoslav president, who also trained as a lawyer, rejects the legitimacy of the tribunal and disputes the charges against him, which include genocide and ethnic cleansing. In his defense, the man who sought to create a Greater Serbia—and in the process left millions of people displaced and hundreds of thousands dead—hopes to call 1,400 witnesses to testify. Among them: Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroder. And that's just the latest development in the bizarre case, chronicled in the fascinating and closely observed new book "Judgment Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic" by British journalist Chris Stephen (255 pages. Atlantic Books).
The title is a bit of a misnomer: only the last third actually focuses on the court proceedings themselves, which began in February 2002 and are expected to wrap up in 2005. In the book's first section, Stephen provides a succinct history of the wars in the Balkans, outlining the rise to power of the pudgy, 62-year-old former banker. He recounts in particular detail a mass exodus of refugees from Kosovo in the spring of 1999, including firsthand testimony describing the assassination of 300 ethnic Albanian men in a field near the village of Meja: "A boy on the back of one of the trailers looked up [and told me] he had seen the men lying in the field 'like logs'." The killings in Meja make up just one small paragraph in the 125 pages of charges filed against Milosevic.
So far the case against "old grumpy paws," as prosecutor Geoffrey Nice dubbed Milosevic, has been a legal seesaw. The prosecution was unable to prove that Milosevic directly ordered genocide in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and some witnesses have given unreliable or insufficient testimony. But the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in March 2003 helped the prosecution's case, argues Stephen: the subsequent roundup of 10,000 underworld figures in Serbia put an end to the harassment of many witnesses and led to other "high grade" witnesses' coming forward.
The outcome of Milosevic's trial will likely have repercussions for other international leaders accused of war crimes—notably Saddam Hussein. Since its creation 11 years ago, the ICTY has delivered 50 verdicts; Milan Babic, the leader of the Krajina Serbs, was sentenced late last month to 13 years for ethnic cleansing against Croats. But Stephen argues that the Milosevic trial remains the court's real show pony and, "if it goes well, will become a powerful tool for those arguing that the process should be permanent." Regardless of the final verdict, the tribunal—and Stephen's book—demonstrates the importance in holding world leaders accountable for their actions.
LAWRENCE R. DOUGLAS
Slavenka Drakulić
THEY WOULD NEVER HURT A FLY
War criminals on trial in The Hague
192 pp. Abacus. Paperback, £ 8.99
US: Penguin. $ 8.90. 0 14 303542 8
Pierre Hazan
JUSTICE IN A TIME OF WAR
The true story behind the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
Translated by James Thomas Synder
288 pp. Texas A & M University Press. Paperback.
$ 18.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £ 12.95
1 585 44411 1
Read this article, here
Das Gift des Anwalts
Slobodan Milosevic als Verteidiger seiner selbst / Von Beqë Cufaj
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19.03.2002, Nr. 66 / Seite 45
DEN
HAAG, 18. März
Seit zwei Wochen trennen mich nur wenige Meter von Slobodan Milosevic. Anfangs
hatte ich die (vermutlich närrische) Hoffnung, diesem Menschen vielleicht ein
wenig näherzukommen und besser begreifen zu können, weshalb er bis heute nicht
bereit ist, von seiner Sicht der Dinge abzurücken. Doch mit jedem Prozeßtag und
mit jedem neuen Zeugen erkenne ich deutlicher, daß dies eine Illusion ist.
Hinter dem hohen Eisenzaun, der das Gebäude des Kriegsverbrechertribunals in Den
Haag umgibt, gleich rechts vom Eingang, steht eine riesige Satellitenschüssel
mit einem Durchmesser von bestimmt vier Metern. Von hier aus wird in Form von
Rundfunk- und Fernsehsignalen in alle Welt gesendet, was sich im Saal 1 des Den
Haager Gerichtshofs täglich abspielt. Die Wirkung dieser Berichte ist auf dem
Balkan erheblich anders als in der westlichen Welt. In den Vereinigten Staaten
ist die Direktberichterstattung aus dem Gerichtssaal gang und gäbe, und in
Deutschland hat man sich inzwischen immerhin an forensische Doku-Soaps à la
"Richterin Salesch" gewöhnt. Auf dem Balkan hingegen gab es bisher noch keine
Gerichtsverhandlungen auf dem Bildschirm zu sehen, schon gar nicht den Prozeß
gegen einen ehemaligen Staatspräsidenten, der für den Tod von
fünfundzwanzigtausend Menschen und die Vertreibung von Millionen anderer
verantwortlich gemacht wird.
Was in westlichen Ländern im alltäglichen Fernseheinerlei untergeht, macht auf
dem Balkan inzwischen den billig produzierten lateinamerikanischen Telenovelas
den Erfolg streitig. Allerdings nehmen die Menschen die Verhandlung gegen
Milosevic sehr viel ernster.
Die serbischen Medien in Belgrad ebenso wie die albanischen Medien im Kosovo
stilisieren jede Zeugenaussage vor dem Tribunal zu einem Zweikampf zwischen dem
Expräsidenten und den Albanern. Jeder kleine oder größere Sieg des Angeklagten
wird genauestens registriert. In Belgrad und Prishtina, aber auch in Sarajevo
und Zagreb werden in der Presse Spekulationen darüber angestellt, wer Milosevics
Verteidigung in Den Haag so generalstabsmäßig vorbereitet haben könnte: Wer hat
ihm eigentlich die präzisen Informationen über die Zeugen besorgt? Wer ist dafür
verantwortlich, daß sich Milosevic so energisch und unerschütterlich geben kann
und sich mittlerweile, den eigenen Ankündigungen zum Trotz, an der Verhandlung
beteiligt, als sei er sein eigener, solide vorbereiteter Verteidiger?
Ich glaube, daß Milosevic sehr früh begriffen hatte, daß er auf diese Weise am
besten Einfluß auf die serbische Bevölkerung ausüben kann. Umfragen serbischer
Zeitungen zeigen, daß die Bevölkerung ihm tatsächlich zunehmend Sympathie
entgegenbringt und den ganzen Prozeß als ungerechten Angriff des Westens auf ihn
und sich selbst wertet.
Daß man sich an der eigenen Opferrolle labt, ist auf dem Balkan eine bekannte
Erscheinung. Die Serben und Milosevic fühlen sich als Opfer des Westens,
Albaner, Bosnier und Kroaten begreifen sich als Opfer der Serben. Der Westen
steht dazwischen, und ihm fällt die undankbare Aufgabe zu, alles in die richtige
Ordnung zu bringen. Der Westen muß deutlich machen, daß die serbische
Bevölkerung sehr wohl etwas mit dem Aufstieg und den Taten eines Milosevic zu
tun hat, ohne daß der Eindruck entstünde, man wolle ein ganzes Volk auf die
Anklagebank setzen. Erst wenn dies gelungen ist, kann es auch um die Racheakte
und Verbrechen von Albanern, Kroaten und Bosniern gehen, die gleichfalls gesühnt
werden müssen.
Ein
ganz normaler Häftling?
Das ist keine leichte Arbeit für Frau Del Ponte und ein wahres Horrorszenarium
für die Regierung in Belgrad. Zoran Djindjic weiß genau, daß Milosevics
politische Verlautbarungen im Gerichtssaal nicht auf das westliche Publikum
zielen, sondern daß er mit seinen Monologen an die Gefühle der "wahren" Serben
appelliert, die auf einen Sturz des neuen Regimes aus sind.
Immer stärker stellt sich mir die Frage, um was es diesem Mann geht. Was will
Slobodan Milosevic? Rechnet er wirklich mit seiner Freilassung? Wenn ja, wie
stellt er sich das vor? Will er mit seiner Verteidigung (zuerst sich selbst,
dann den Serben und schließlich dem Rest der Welt) beweisen, daß er unschuldig
ist, egal, ob er verurteilt wird oder nicht? Will er sich die Rolle des
moralischen Siegers aneignen?
Was immer auch seine Strategie sein mag, sie wird nicht aufgehen. Denn Milosevic
hat offenbar eines nicht richtig einkalkuliert: Das ist der psychologische
Effekt seiner direkten Konfrontation mit den Zeugen, mit Bauern und Bürgern,
einfachen Sterblichen und gewöhnlichen Opfern.
In der vorigen Woche, gleich morgens, noch vor dem Auftritt der ersten Zeugen,
beklagte sich Milosevic beim Vorsitzenden Richter May über ungerechte
Behandlung. Er monierte, daß die holländischen Behörden seiner Frau das
Einreisevisum verweigert hatten. Er wolle nur behandelt werden wie alle anderen
Häftlinge, sagte Milosevic. An diesem Vormittag tat er mir irgendwie leid, und
ich vergaß fast, wer dort kaum vier Meter von mir entfernt auf seinem Stuhl saß.
Am Nachmittag desselben Tages erschien dann der erste Zeuge im Gerichtssaal, ein
Opfer des Kosovo-Kriegs. Agim Zeqiri aus Celina bei Rahovec hat sechzehn der
einst achtzehn Mitglieder seiner Familie verloren, darunter seine greisen Eltern
und ein nur wenige Monate altes Kind. Sie wurden von serbischen Truppen
umgebracht. Niemand im Saal, Richter May und Milosevics Berater eingeschlossen,
wagte auch nur laut zu atmen. Aus aller Augen sprach das Entsetzen über das
Schicksal dieses Mannes. Nur einer saß unbewegt da und ließ nicht das geringste
Zeichen von Mitgefühl erkennen. Der gleiche Milosevic, der sich noch am Morgen
über das seiner Frau vorenthaltene Visum beklagt hatte, herrschte nun im
harschen Ton eines serbischen Polizisten, wie er den meisten meiner Landsleute
nur allzu bekannt ist, einen Mann an, der seine Frau und seine Kinder, seine
Brüder und Schwestern verloren hat und sich seither in psychiatrischer
Behandlung befindet. Nun war ich überzeugt, daß Milosevic nicht einfach ein
Verbrecher ist, denn auch Verbrecher, das weiß man, sind nach der Tat durchaus
fähig, Mitgefühl zu empfinden.
Der
Bluff auf der Anklagebank
Doch dieses Bild hatte bei mir und den anderen nur einen Tag lang Bestand. Dann
betrat die Zeugin Ajmane Behramaj den Saal. Sie sagte aus, sie habe keine Schule
besucht und wisse nur eines, daß nämlich ihr wenige Monate altes Kind im Wald
verhungert sei, nachdem serbische Polizisten und Soldaten die Bewohner ihres
Dorfes dorthin vertrieben hätten. Der am Tag zuvor noch so aggressiv auftretende
Milosevic bat nun die kosovarische Mutter um Entschuldigung, er müsse ihr jedoch
trotz des Verlustes ihres Kindes einige Fragen stellen. Ein Bluff? Ich weiß es
nicht. Es schien, als habe er nun, wie alle anderen im Saal, einfach Mitleid mit
der armen Frau.
Dann fand der Milosevic-Prozeß zwei Tage lang unter Ausschluß der Öffentlichkeit
statt. Zwei kosovarische Zeuginnen waren geladen, die während der serbischen
Säuberungskampagne von Soldaten vergewaltigt worden waren. Man wollte die Opfer
vor dem öffentlichen Interesse schützen, deshalb kann nur vermutet werden, wie
Milosevic auf das reagierte, was sie über die Taten der Angehörigen einer Truppe
zu berichten hatten, die von ihm soeben noch zur "anständigsten Armee Europas
und der Welt" erklärt worden war.
Als Beobachter dieses Prozesses gewöhne ich mich allmählich an die Erkenntnis,
daß es an der Persönlichkeit dieses Mannes nicht gar zu viele Facetten zu
entdecken gibt. Er ist so selbstbezogen, hat sich so von der übrigen Welt
abgekapselt, daß es wahrscheinlich unmöglich sein wird, zu den Motiven
vorzustoßen, die ihn zu seinem Handeln veranlaßt haben.
Kummer machen mir inzwischen meine Kollegen aus Kroatien, Bosnien oder Serbien.
Sie haben eine neue Front aufgemacht, an der es jedem darum geht, seine eigene
"Gerechtigkeit" einzufordern. Auf die Berichte, die sie in ihre Länder absetzen,
hat der Angeklagte auf seine Art unübersehbar Einfluß genommen, und mit Sorge
muß man feststellen, daß schon wieder an Wunden gerührt wird, die noch frisch
und kaum verheilt sind.
Das Gift, das noch auf der Anklagebank von Milosevic ausgeht, ist stark und
bewahrt lange seine Wirksamkeit. Dennoch wird Milosevic am Ende auch diese
Schlacht verlieren. Je schneller dies geschieht, desto besser. Denn bevor dieser
Angeklagte nicht verurteilt ist, wird es den Völkern des ehemaligen Jugoslawien
nicht gelingen, ihre schmerzliche Vergangenheit zu begraben und endlich nach
vorn zu schauen.
Aus dem Albanischen von
Joachim Röhm.
15-2-2002
Von Katja Ridderbusch
Den Haag - 232 Tage lang durfte der Angeklagte des Falls IT-02-54 nicht sprechen, zumindest nicht aussprechen. Zwei Tage lang hat er zugehört, als die Anklage ihre Chronik des Terrors vortrug. Gestern endlich war seine Stunde gekommen: Zum ersten Mal äußerte sich Slobodan Milosevic vor dem Haager Kriegsverbrechertribunal zu den Vorwürfen der Anklage - aggressiv, feindselig, höhnisch und auf seltsame Weise befreit.
Doch zunächst ließ er sprechen. Er ließ, vertrautes Instrument seiner Herrschaft in Belgrad, die Medien für sich sprechen, und pikanterweise diesmal die deutschen Medien: Milosevic eröffnete sein Statement mit dem WDR-Beitrag "Es begann mit einer Lüge" aus dem Jahr 1999. Der Beitrag, sechs Mal im serbischen Staatsfernsehen ausgestrahlt, versucht nachzuweisen, dass die Nato-Luftangriffe auf Jugoslawien auf tönernen Füßen standen, dass das vermeintliche Massaker von Racak im Kosovo, verübt im Januar 1999 von serbischen Sondereinheiten an 44 albanischen Zivilisten, das den Ausschlag gab für die Luftangriffe, möglicherweise keines war. "Das ist nur ein Atom, weniger als ein Atom der Wahrheit im Ozean der Lügen," sagte der Ex-Diktator über den TV-Bericht.
Er sprach sitzend, mit monotoner Stimme, energisch mit den Händen gestikulierend, das Gesicht streng und verschlossen. "Die Anklage beschuldigt alle Serben innerhalb Serbiens und außerhalb, alle, die mich unterstützt haben und heute noch unterstützen. Sie beschuldigt die gesamte Nation. Die serbische Intelligenz, die Medien, die Politiker, das Militär, die Polizei, alle Bürger", sagte Milosevic. Chefanklägerin Carla Del Ponte hatte in ihrem Eröffnungsstatement betont, es gehe in diesem Prozess um die "individuelle kriminelle Verantwortung" eines Mannes, nicht um Kollektivschuld.
Es war viel von Kämpfen und Schlachten die Rede in Milosevics Ausführungen, einer Propagandarede gegen das Gericht, gegen den Westen, gegen die Nato. Vorgetragen mit der kalt-kalkulierenden Professionalität eines Mannes, der geschult ist in der Sprache der Diktatur, der juristische Finessen kennt. Aber auch die Rede eines Mannes, der die politische Wirklichkeit lange hinter sich gelassen hat. "Die Serben haben den Krieg im Kosovo nicht begonnen. Die Serben haben keinen Konflikt begonnen. Das ist die historische Wahrheit", sagte der gestürzte Diktator.
Dann begann er seine Suada gegen die Nato, und die Verteidigungsrede wurde zur Anklage. Die Kampfjets der Allianz hätten bei ihren Luftangriffen auf Jugoslawien "mehr Krankenhäuser als Panzer, mehr Kindergärten als Panzer, mehr Schulen als Panzer" bombardiert, gezielt und mit Plan. Seine Einlassungen über die vermeintliche Nato-Aggression waren nicht neu, und doch von beklemmender Präzision. Sie klangen wie hohnlachende Echos aus Zeiten, als Serbien sich noch in klammen Griff des Diktators befand, wie eine Wiederkehr des Krieges der Worte - an einem anderen Ort, mit anderem Mitteln.
Den von der Anklage in den ersten beide Prozesstagen präsentierten Bilder des Grauens -- Massengräber, geschändete Leichen, ausgemergelte muslimische Männer in serbischen Lagern -- setzte Milosevic eigene Bilder entgegen: Bilder von Opfern der Nato-Luftangriffe, noch grausiger, drastischer, entfremdeter: Vom Feuersturm der Bomben verkohlte Leichen, zerrissene Körper, abgetrennte Köpfe und Gliedmaßen, verstreut über die Felder, eingeklemmt in Trümmern, bis zur Unkenntlichkeit entstellt. Bilder, welchen Ursprungs auch immer. Bilder von zerbombten Brücken und Straßen, Häusern und Fabriken. Bild um Bild präsentierte Milosevic, zu jedem Bild nannte er Namen. Mit knappen Worten und herrischen Handbewegungen trieb er den Gerichtsdiener zur Eile, und während er die Bilder ihre Wirkung entfalten ließ, blätterte er in seinen Akten. In diesen Augenblicken trat Milosevic, der einen Verteidiger abgelehnt hat, auf, als habe er vergessen, dass er vor Gericht steht, angeklagt der Kriegsverbrechen, der Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, des Völkermords. Als habe er vergessen, dass er nicht mehr Präsident Serbiens ist, nicht mehr Präsident Jugoslawiens.
Dagegen schien es in beiden ersten Prozesstagen, als öffne sich für Sekunden der Vorhang seiner Selbsttäuschung, als dringe in kurzen Momenten eisige Erkenntnis durch seine Maske. Verschwunden war der verächtliche Ausdruck um seinen Mund, die zur Schau getragene Langeweile. Sein Gesicht war zumeist ausdruckslos, die Gestik minimalistisch. Er beobachtete die Zuschauer in der Galerie, und beobachtete, wie sie ihn beobachteten. Allein dass er immer wieder in seinem blauen Sessel hin und herrutschte, verriet seine Unruhe.
Ein einziges Mal zeigte sein Gesicht in diesen ersten Prozesstagen so etwas wie Regung. Als die Anklage einen Filmausschnitt einspielte, aufgenommen im April 1987 auf dem Amselfeld, Kosovo. Milosevic, damals noch kommunistischer Funktionär war mitten in einen Aufruhr zwischen Serben und Albanern geraten, als ein aufgebrachter Serbe sich beklagte, er sei geschlagen worden. Milosevic sagte spontan und eher leise jenen Satz, der den Beginn seines Aufstiegs markierte: "Niemand wird es mehr wagen euch zu schlagen. Niemand." Milosevic hob die Augenbrauen und lächelte, beinahe selbstironisch.
Er lauscht dem Psychogramm, das die Anklage vor ihm entfaltete. "Ein ausgezeichneter Taktiker, ein mittelmäßiger Stratege", sagte Chefanklägerin Del Ponte über Milosevic. "Suchen Sie nicht nach Idealen bei dem, was der Angeklagte getan hat. Slobodan Milosevic hat nicht aus Überzeugung gehandelt und schon gar nicht aus Patriotismus oder aus Ehrgefühl, nicht einmal aus Rassismus. Sein Motiv war allein das Streben nach Macht, nach persönlicher Macht." Und der britische Ankläger Geoffrey Nice fügte hinzu: "Milosevic hatte eine bemerkenswerte Macht, Millionen von Menschen zu überzeugen. Menschen für sich handeln zu lassen."
Diese Macht ist gebrochen. Die Serben haben ihn abgewählt und dann in einem Sturmlauf der Wut gestürzt. Das ist eineinhalb Jahre her. Wenn er in ihren Namen spricht, in ihrem Namen gegen den Westen zu Felde zieht, dann tut er das auf eigene Rechnung. Slobodan Milosevic ist allein, und er mag wohl ahnen, dass er Den Haag nie mehr verlassen wird. Aber vorher will er reden. Noch einmal und ausführlich. Slobodan Milosevic geht in seine letzte Schlacht.
WDR ist empört
Der Westdeutsche Rundfunk (WDR) hat mit scharfer Kritik auf den Versuch Milosevics reagiert, sich mit Hilfe eines TV-Beitrags des Senders gegen die Anklage zu verteidigen. "Ausgerechnet Milosevic, der selbst die Pressefreiheit mit Füßen getreten hat, missbraucht jetzt die Pressefreiheit, die es bei uns möglich macht, auch regierungskritisch zu berichten", so Chefredakteur Jörg Schönenborn zur WELT. Er wies zugleich darauf hin, dass der Beitrag in allen Details haltbar sei. In dem Film wurde unter anderem der Darstellung Scharpings widersprochen, am 27. April 1999 seien in dem Ort Rogovo unschuldige Zivilisten von serbischer Sonderpolizei massakriert worden. DW