The Baltimore Sun
THE HAGUE, Netherlands – The prosecutors confronted Slobodan Milosevic with Balkan wars and ghosts, dissected the murky history behind his country’s bloody collapse and accused the former Yuglosav president of overseeing campaigns of murder, torture and genocide.
It was only after the black-robed prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia played a videotape Tuesday that Milosevic dropped his poker face and slyly grinned, watching his 1987 declaration in Kosovo that his fellow Serbs would never be beaten.
The first war crimes trial in history against a former head of state began with Milosevic facing charges of crimes against humanity and genocide with silence and a quick, dismissive smile.
Separated from spectators by bulletproof glass, Milosevic sat between two policemen as the history he helped fashion was replayed in detail by prosecutors whose monotone voices could not obscure the righteous rage of their prose.
“We should just pause to recall the daily scenes of grief and suffering that came to define armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia,” chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said. “The events themselves were notorious, and a new term, ‘ethnic cleansing,’ came into common use in our language. Some of the incidents revealed an almost medieval savagery and calculated cruelty that went far beyond the bounds of legitimate warfare.”
Milosevic, 60, is charged with crimes against humanity for his alleged role in conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and charged with genocide in Bosnia. The ethnic wars of the 1990s ripped apart Yugoslavia, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and displaced more than 2 million others.
Milosevic, who does not accept the legitimacy of the court, plans to act as his own defense attorney and is expected to give an opening statement today. He took several pages of notes but no had opportunity to speak Tuesday.
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