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.
