DELAYED BUT NOT DENIED
War crimes tribunals often do not work. Despite the shining example of 
Nuremberg, the history of international justice is full of failure. 
Allied efforts to prosecute German and Ottoman war criminals after World 
War I resulted only in failed trials and nationalist backlash. The UN’s 
tribunal for Rwanda is regularly criticized as ineffectual by the 
Rwandan government. Without the kind of total victory achieved by the 
Allies in World War II, imposing justice after a war is always 
difficult.
That is why the tribunal in The Hague dealing with the former Yugoslavia 
had such a rocky start. The ad hoc court was created by a UN Security 
Council resolution in 1993, as Serb nationalists besieged Bosnia's non-
Serb civilians. It seemed a token gesture: the world would not stop war 
crimes while they were actually happening, but it would prosecute them 
afterward. And even that commitment was halfhearted, since the tribunal 
started off without adequate funding, robust political support, or major 
suspects in custody. It could do little to make the war in Bosnia less 
brutal. The tribunal reached its nadir in July 1995, when Serb forces 
led by General Ratko Mladic slaughtered some 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men 
and boys in the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica. Mladic and his political 
chief, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, have been indicted for 
genocide and crimes against humanity, but remain at large. 
When NATO finally struck against the Bosnian Serb army and oversaw the 
Dayton accord that ended the war, the tribunal still had to wait almost 
two years, until July 1997, for NATO troops to begin arresting war 
crimes suspects in Bosnia. Even then, the nationalist regime in Croatia 
and Milosevic's regime in Serbia excoriated its efforts and frequently 
refused to cooperate. It was only in 1999, during NATO's second Balkan 
campaign, over Kosovo, that Milosevic himself -- the prime mover in the 
wars of Yugoslavia's disintegration -- was finally indicted. And it was 
not until after the 2000 democratic revolution in Serbia that he was 
shipped off to The Hague.
In terms of big-name suspects brought to court, the tribunal has made 
huge strides over time. Its first trial, which opened in May 1996, was 
of a mere pawn, a concentration camp sadist. Since then it has snared 
vastly bigger fish, including a Bosnian Serb general who helped organize 
the Srebrenica massacre, leading Serb and Croat nationalists who were 
involved in the slaughter of Muslims, and senior Milosevic aides such as 
the chief of staff of the Yugoslav army. In one of the biggest victories 
to date, Biljana Plavsic -- a wartime Bosnian Serb leader so 
delusionally nationalist that she once told a senior UN official that 
Serb babies were being fed alive to the animals in the Sarajevo zoo -- 
expressed remorse and pleaded guilty to one count of crimes against 
humanity. 
The prosecutions themselves constitute the most basic success of the 
tribunal, even though Karadzic and Mladic -- the most important war 
criminals in Bosnia -- have so far escaped its clutches. To put it 
simply, rather than whipping up more nationalism back in the region, 
several major malefactors in the Balkan wars are now behind bars. 
(Several others, meanwhile, have died -- including Croatia's wartime 
president, Franjo Tudjman, from cancer; the Serb paramilitary leader 
known as Arkan, from assassination; and former Serbian interior minister 
Vlajko Stojiljkovic, from suicide.) The Milosevic case is a perfect 
example of how useful the tribunal can be. "The process itself is a 
success," says Mary Robinson, the former UN high commissioner for human 
rights. "He is no longer a respected figure in Serbia." Even if his 
trial turns out to be a minor train wreck, the prosecution has managed 
to get him out of Balkan politics once and for all.
After Milosevic fell from power, the real question was not whether he 
would be held to account for his crimes, but which court would try him. 
The Hague was and is clearly the best choice. In a perfect world, it 
would have been better to put Milosevic on trial in a Serbian court in 
Belgrade, just as it would have been better to put the top Nazis on 
trial before a German court in Berlin. This point is clear even to many 
officials at the tribunal. "It's a message that can only be put across 
in Serbian," says Jean-Jacques Joris, the diplomatic adviser to Carla 
Del Ponte, the tribunal's Swiss chief prosecutor. But a Belgrade trial 
would have helped matters only if it were a real war crimes trial -- one 
that produced the kinds of revelations about Bosnia and the self-styled 
Krajina Serb republic that are emerging now in The Hague. But Vojislav 
Kostunica, Yugoslavia's president after Milosevic and a committed Serb 
nationalist, has a fierce contempt for the tribunal, and thus at first 
said that he would haul Milosevic up merely on charges of corruption and 
electoral fraud. Even if war crimes had gradually made their way onto 
Kostunica's agenda for a Milosevic trial, such an effort would never 
have been accepted in Bosnia and Kosovo. It might have wound up like the 
1921 trials at Leipzig -- a hopelessly botched effort after World War I, 
in which a German high court either acquitted or glancingly punished 
German soldiers, to French and Belgian fury. As it was, putting Serb 
nationalists in charge of Milosevic's trial would have risked disaster.
THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
That the international tribunal is the least bad option available for 
dealing with problematic figures such as Milosevic would be enough to 
justify its existence. But the current trial is increasingly offering 
more. After an inauspicious start with the Kosovo charges, as the 
prosecution's case moves to Croatia and Bosnia, it has begun to offer an 
unparalleled window into how one of the most murderous regimes on the 
planet really worked.
Watching the proceedings, Milosevic sits with his familiar white hair 
swept back, and on good days (when not complaining of heart trouble), he 
has color in his thick cheeks. He seems alert and quizzical, and rarely 
blinks. He has a way of wearing his Balkan politician's clothes -- dark 
suit, blue shirt, red-and-blue rep tie -- that makes them look sloppy, 
with the tie wrinkling up at his gut as he sits, the suit jacket bunched 
up as he flings his plump left arm around the back of his baby-blue UN 
chair. He knits his eyebrows toward each other and wrinkles his brow, or 
pulls back the corners of his mouth. He shows no particular curiosity 
when a new witness appears.
Since Milosevic is not accused of hands-on homicide and cannot be put 
away simply for espousing unusually loathsome politics, any conviction 
will have to rest on demonstrating his command responsibility. The 
prosecutors must prove that he ordered killings, or that he knew about 
slaughter and chose not to stop it. But the prosecution wants more than 
that. For a real success, the court must convict Milosevic of being not 
merely the end of the Serb military chain of command, but actively in 
charge.
For that outcome, the best witnesses are former Serb officials. Because 
many Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia feel betrayed by Milosevic thanks to 
actions he took during in the mid-1990s, the prosecutors have managed to 
assemble a formidable lineup of insiders willing to testify against him. 
Lazarevic, the former intelligence agent, was among the first of these, 
and he painted a damning picture of the densely interlocking links among 
the various Serb nationalist forces in the former Yugoslavia and the 
government in Belgrade. Another insider identified the voices on a 
Bosnian intelligence intercept as Milosevic talking to Karadzic. The 
courtroom listened in as the two discussed uniting the Serbs in Bosnia 
and Croatia, and Milosevic told Karadzic to get weapons from a Yugoslav 
National Army (JNA) garrison inside Bosnia. On the intercept, the judges 
heard Milosevic telling Karadzic in July 1991, as Tito's Yugoslavia 
crumbled, "Take radical steps and speed things up, and we shall see if 
the European Community is going to fulfill their guarantees, if they are 
going to stop that violence." A JNA general in charge of military 
counterintelligence, Aleksandar Vasiljevic, has testified about 
Milosevic's responsibility for the war in Croatia. During Vasiljevic's 
testimony, the prosecution introduced a smoking-gun letter from June 
1993, in which a leader of the Krajina Serbs asked Milosevic to "put 
pressure" on the JNA to help him in his fight against the Croatian 
government -- the kind of letter one sends only to the man in charge.
The result is a grand history lesson, meant to change minds. Bogdan 
Ivanisevic, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Belgrade, says,
The insider witnesses usually include a narrative about Milosevic 
betraying the Serbs. ... What insiders say is not just that the JNA and 
[the Krajina Serb army] and [the Bosnian Serb army] were one army, but 
that in 1995 [when the Croatian army reconquered the Krajina, sending 
some 100,000 Serb refugees fleeing,] the army didn't even try to protect 
Serbs, that Milosevic had some deal with Tudjman that let the Serbs 
become refugees, that the government did not welcome them. This is very 
credible. This segment of testimony turns many Serbs against Milosevic 
and makes them more willing to accept the testimony about crimes against 
non-Serbs.
"It's the revenge of the Krajina Serbs," says one tribunal official of 
this phase of the trial.
THE KILLING FIELDS
To undermine Milosevic's claims of powerlessness, the prosecutors have 
to show exactly how his regime in Belgrade controlled the entire Serb 
apparatus of ethnic murder and expulsion. This means looking at the 
inside details of whose palms were greased, where the killers came from, 
how the different Serb nationalist units outside Serbia's borders 
coordinated their attacks, how they negotiated in bad faith, how they 
gulled the UN and the world, how deniability was supposed to be 
preserved, what lies were fed to whom -- and how it was all done on 
orders from the top.
The operational details of Serbian expansion, as they spill out day 
after day, are lessons in applied thuggery. According to Lazarevic, who 
was assigned to the Krajina in 1992, the Serb army there had a special 
"antiterrorist unit" attached to each of its corps, made up of "40 to 45 
young men generally with extensive criminal records," in charge of 
harassing or killing civilians and other "dirty jobs" that regular JNA 
officers might refuse. The Krajina Serbs also supplied hundreds of 
muscular enforcers to handle anti-Milosevic demonstrators back in 
Belgrade: "They were selecting really huge blokes, anything over six-
two, to assign them to Belgrade and deal with the demonstrators, and 
most of them actually were joking, like, they're going to go over there 
and beat the living" -- Lazarevic paused for a beat, remembering he was 
in court -- "daylights out of the anticommunist demonstrators."
At one point Lazarevic told of organizing a one-for-one exchange of 100 
dead with the Bosnian army. Since the Serbs had only 90 Bosnian corpses 
ready at hand, he went to the secret police "because there [were] some 
dead bodies kind of buried around." Two Croat prisoners were forced to 
start digging, but ran into difficulties: 
They did dig out four bodies. The problem that I had with them, first 
they were in a high state of decomposition, so it was not something that 
happened recently in a combat situation. Obviously they were there for a 
considerable number of months. And the second even more worrying thing 
was that all four bodies had their hands tied with wire up front, which 
would suggest they were executed, that they did not actually die in a 
combat situation. But being pressed for the bodies, nevertheless I took 
those four, removed the wire, and put them in the body bags.
To fill out his quota, Lazarevic was directed to an officer of Arkan's 
Tigers, the bloodstained Serb paramilitary group: "[He] calmly said he 
doesn't have any dead bodies, however he does have six live ones and I 
can have them if I need them badly enough." The next morning, "there 
were six dead bodies lined up which appeared to be very freshly killed."
From the proceedings, the contempt that Serb nationalists had for the 
West becomes clear. Serb convoys would declare themselves humanitarian 
while actually carrying automatic weapons. When the un-sponsored Vance 
Plan required the demobilization of the Krajina Serb army, Lazarevic 
testified, "What we did, we changed the uniform overnight from military 
olive-green into the police blue and within a very short period of time, 
I'd say within ten hours, we have repainted all the military vehicles." 
At four international peace conferences, the Krajina Serb delegation got 
its instructions from Serbian officials in Belgrade, up to the rank of 
Milosevic's cabinet: "The idea was not to agree on anything. That was 
very simple to follow." "Slobo" or "the boss" is described as wanting 
peace talks to fail.
Chilling as all of these details are, what is most important is the 
testimony about the chain of command. At the trial, Milosevic is 
clinging to the claim that the JNA, for which he was officially 
responsible, was barely involved with the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. 
But Lazarevic, speaking about the JNA and its Krajina Serb and Bosnian 
Serb counterparts, testified, "We are not talking about three different 
armies. We are talking about one and only one army. ... [A]ll the 
supplies and the finances would come from Yugoslavia, Serbia." For 
important military matters, the Krajina Serb military reported to JNA 
chief of staff Momcilo Perisic in Belgrade. JNA officers would commonly 
serve a six-month stint with the Krajina Serb forces. The corridor 
connecting Belgrade and the Krajina Serbs was called the "jugular vein" 
-- "if you cut that one off, the life is gone." And beyond military 
matters, Lazarevic's testimony was just as damning on Belgrade's control 
of Serb secret police forces.
METHOD AND MADNESS
It is too much to say that Milosevic is defeNDIng himself. The judges 
regularly have to remind him to stick to the case ("Avoid narratives and 
concentrate on asking short questions," says one), with presiding judge 
Richard May of the United Kingdom maintaining steely politeness in the 
face of harangues and tangents. The prosecution lawyers are obviously 
unafraid of Milosevic's legal skills. But Milosevic is anything but 
stupid, and he must understand the trap that Del Ponte's office is 
laying for him. So he tries to undermine the insider testimony about the 
chain of command.
Milosevic swings back and forth between two modes: thundering defiance, 
like Hermann Göring in Nuremberg, and evasion of responsibility, like 
Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. In his defiant mode, Milosevic's preferred 
theme is the enduring infamy of the familiar villains of his former 
state-controlled media: "the revamped Ustasha movement" among Croats, 
foreign mujahideen abetting "Islamic fundamentalism" among Bosnia's 
Muslims, and NATO imperialists. The war's atrocities, Milosevic 
repeatedly insists, were faked. The Srebrenica massacre, he says, was 
the work of French intelligence. Commenting on the 1991 massacre of 200 
Croats in a Vukovar hospital, for which The Hague has iNDIcted three 
senior JNA officers, Milosevic said, "Ustashas ... withdrew after the 
surrender of Vukovar and dressed into medical staff clothing in order to 
portray themselves as the medical staff and the wounded." He explained 
that "this practice of killing their own people ... was typical for the 
Muslim side during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina." For Milosevic, 
international condemnation of atrocities is just an anti-Serb plot: 
"Whatever the Serbs do, they commit a crime."
His chances of acquittal, however, lie not in defiance but in his 
Eichmann-style claims that he was just a normal civil servant who 
displayed no particular initiative. At these times Milosevic casts 
himself as a cross between Eichmann and Serbia's answer to the queen of 
England. He was, in this view, almost a nominal figurehead during the 
wars, a president who somehow seems to have been out of the loop on 
every major decision taken throughout the slaughters that raged from 
1991 to 1999.
But the self-important strongman in Milosevic's psyche finds it hard to 
hold the cringing Eichmann pose for long. Thus he clamors for his old 
Scotch-drinking buddy Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. assistant 
secretary of state, to come to The Hague and testify that it was 
Milosevic who reined in the Bosnian Serbs in 1995, paving the way for 
the Dayton accord. This is true -- U.S. diplomats secretly called it 
"the Milosevic strategy" -- but it is also counterproductive vanity. 
Milosevic is inviting Holbrooke to testify that the Serbian leader could 
turn off the bloodbath when he wanted to, proving that he was in control 
and therefore guilty as charged.
Similarly, Milosevic conducts much of his defense using information fed 
to him by Serbian security services that still cling to him. And he 
cannot resist producing letters from loyal supporters in the region that 
nastily accuse the witness of the day of a wide range of treasons. Yet 
this implicitly strengthens the prosecution's case, since the more 
Milosevic can produce secret files or obviously stage-managed letters 
from toadies swearing they never took orders from Belgrade, the more 
obvious it is that he was and is their boss.
During his cross-examination of Lazarevic, Milosevic's most basic trick 
was to just call the witness a British spy or a liar, which he did 
repeatedly and with gusto. (Although there were some inconsistencies in 
Lazarevic's testimony, Milosevic never managed to catch the former spy 
in a major falsehood.) When this tack seemed not to be working, he 
attacked the accusations of command responsibility. For example, after 
Lazarevic testified that the Krajina Serb army was supplied and funded 
by Serbia, Milosevic tried to wave that away, appealing to the long-
suffering Judge May: "Economic aid has nothing to do with commanding, 
Mr. May, and you should know this."
With the vanity of a former head of state, Milosevic could not hide his 
contempt for a low-level spy such as Lazarevic. He rudely told him that 
the tribunal's interpreters speak much better English than Lazarevic 
does. And he boasted that "Several other million Serbs ... call me Slobo 
... which I hope you know." "Well," Lazarevic zinged back, "usually it 
was in a very negative context when they called you Slobo. ... I'm 
surprised that you brought that up" -- a reference to the revolutionary 
slogan of 2000, "Slobo, Slobo, save Serbia and kill yourself."
When Lazarevic said, "Mr. Milosevic, you were at the head of the army at 
that time [in the 1990s] and you know that full well," Milosevic, 
demonstrating that he understands the legal stakes perfectly, replied, 
"That's what you claim, and you're claiming that in order to, how shall 
I put it, support this false iNDIctment." Milosevic asked, "You mean 
that Belgrade wishe[d] to expel the Croats from their homes?" 
"'Belgrade' was synonymous with you, Mr. Milosevic," said Lazarevic. 
"'Belgrade' meant you." "Oh, I see," Milosevic replied sarcastically. 
"That's rather a large synonym."
THE SOUL OF SERBIA?
Milosevic's ultimate audience is not the judges (who have clearly had a 
bellyful of his poor courtroom etiquette), but the Serbs. Since he 
denies that the "false tribunal" has any legitimacy, to him the trial is 
just a colossal paid advertisement for his fiery brand of Serb 
nationalism. In his rants against the non-Serbs, NATO, and the tribunal 
at The Hague, Milosevic is still trying to stir up trouble. A lot of 
people, he says, see Yugoslav affairs his way, and "when I say a lot of 
people, I mean millions."
This is nonsense. Despite his courtroom theatrics, Milosevic remains 
consistently and intensely unpopular at home. A November 2002 survey by 
the International Republican Institute found that Serbian views of 
Milosevic were essentially unchanged since May 2001 (when the tracking 
poll started, with Milosevic in a Belgrade cell waiting to be shipped to 
The Hague): 66 percent unfavorable to only 17 percent favorable. These 
are the figures not of a hero, but of a man who lost an election, tried 
to rig the results, was overthrown in a popular revolution, and finally 
was arrested and deported by his successors.
Despite occasional press reports about Milosevic's gala performance in 
the dock, the opening of his trial in February 2002 gave his popularity 
only a small and temporary boost, from 16 percent favorable in January 
to 21 percent in March, falling back to 17 percent by June. "His 
conspiracy theories still resonate pretty well here," says Ivanisevic of 
Human Rights Watch. "When he is unfriendly to Kosovar witnesses, they 
[Serb nationalists] may relate to this, because of the strong anti-
Albanian sentiment that existed here. On the other hand, objectively 
speaking, he did destroy their lives." 
To be sure, many Serbians despise both the defendant and the tribunal. 
"There was a near consensus of indifference to crimes against non-Serbs" 
throughout the 1990s, says Ivanisevic. A May 2002 poll by the National 
Democratic Institute (NDI) found that 30 percent of Serbians thought the 
tribunal was conducting a fair trial but 57 percent thought it was 
unfair. In another poll, only 32 percent of Serbians supported 
cooperating with the tribunal in The Hague, while 47 percent said they 
would prefer to address war crimes only in Yugoslavia's own courts and 
13 percent said they would suspend war crimes investigations altogether.
In a bizarre irony, Milosevic's most powerful implicit defender is 
Kostunica, the man who overthrew him. In October 2000, during his first 
state television interview after the revolution, Kostunica denounced the 
tribunal in terms not much different from those Milosevic himself now 
uses: "The Hague court is not an international court, it is an American 
court and it is absolutely controlled by the American government. It is 
a means of pressure that the American government uses for realizing its 
influence here." According to Joris (Del Ponte's diplomatic adviser), 
Kostunica's "position is a matter of conviction: this place [the court] 
is evil. He's always been a nationalist. He was a vocal advocate of 
Greater Serbia, but not of rape and 'ethnic cleansing.' But he never 
wanted to see the consequences of that policy. To him, Bosnia was a 
civil war, with deaths on all sides."
Kostunica's government accordingly resisted cooperation with The Hague. 
Prosecutors complained that over half of their requests for documents 
went unanswered. Two JNA officers, indicted for the 1991 Vukovar 
massacre that Milosevic denies ever happened, are still on the loose. 
Prosecutors are particularly frustrated that Ratko Mladic -- twice 
indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity, the second time for 
personally overseeing the Srebrenica massacre -- is still at large, 
despite the pleas of Del Ponte and even UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. 
Mladic, arguably the most hated man in Bosnia, is seen as a war hero by 
many in Serbia. Until March 2002, Joris says, he "was staying in 
military facilities. Top members of the Yugoslav armed forces are 
organizing Mladic's protection."
Kostunica's actions have solidified preexisting Serbian resentment of 
the tribunal at The Hague. Even Zoran Djindjic, the recently 
assassinated reformist and pro-Western Serbian prime minister who sent 
Milosevic to trial, argued for cooperation with the tribunal primarily 
as a way to get Western economic aid. Only Goran Svilanovic, the human 
rights activist turned Yugoslav foreign minister, makes a case for 
extraditing war criminals on principle.
As the Milosevic trial has turned to insider testimony dealing with 
Croatia and Bosnia, many tribunal officials are worried that their 
message is not yet getting through. The tribunal's press office 
complains that some Serbian media outlets -- even the relatively liberal 
ones -- cover the trial too narrowly, framing the story in terms of 
Milosevic's day-to-day courtroom performance rather than the broader 
pattern of atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. Prosecutors complain 
that even after Plavsic contritely pled guilty to crimes against 
humanity in October 2002, there was little soul-searching among Serb 
nationalists. "Most Serbs have a position," says Liam McDowall, the 
chief of the tribunal's regional outreach program. "It's preconceived 
ideas. And then people cheer or pooh-pooh."
Other tribunal-watchers see more progress, however slow. Human Rights 
Watch's Ivanisevic argues,
Even though they have resistance to hearing non-Serb witnesses, people 
do take into consideration what they hear. The trial has caused reduced 
myth-making in Serbia. You don't hear, as you did prior to the trial, 
... that Srebrenica didn't happen or that the Muslims killed themselves. 
I wouldn't minimize this reduced space for rewriting history. As for 
acknowledgment of our side's crimes, it's a psychological barrier too 
difficult [to cross -- admitting] that the policy we supported was 
criminal. It will take time. It may take a new generation that was not 
implicated.
Indeed, even Nuremberg's success (at least within Germany) was largely a 
matter of time and generational change. The trial opened many minds, but 
some unrepentant Nazis would never accept the court -- even though they 
might be cowed into keeping their mouths shut in public. But their 
children took Nuremberg to heart. The new, post-Nazi generation held war 
crimes trials of their own: in 1963-65, the Frankfurt trials for the men 
who ran Auschwitz, and in 1975-81, the Dusseldorf trials for those who 
ran Majdanek.
One can see the possible stirrings of a similar process in Serbia today. 
The young there are noticeably more reformist than their elders 
(although there are plenty of young nationalists too). Among Serbians 
aged 18 to 30, 40 percent support full cooperation with The Hague; for 
those 30 to 44, the figure falls to 38 percent; for those from 45 to 59, 
it drops to 28 percent; and for those over 60, to 24 percent. The NDI 
poll found that Milosevic's biggest fans remain what it called the 
"angry old" -- Serbians who long for the past. More reform-minded 
Serbians, especially what the NDI calls "new Serbia" -- youthful and 
Western-oriented voters -- have nothing but contempt for him. Education 
and gender play roles too; university-educated women are probably the 
least nationalist people in Serbia. There are competing visions of what 
Serbia could become, not just Kostunica's nationalist view.
YESTERDAY'S MAN
If the Serbs constitute a prime audience for the Milosevic trial, they 
are not the only one. The tribunal was meant to nurture not only 
repentance among perpetrators, but also forgiveness, or at least some 
measure of solace, among victims. It is too early to see whether this 
will work for the people of Bosnia and Croatia, whose sufferings the 
court is just beginning to review. But surely it will give them some 
satisfaction. And it should have a broader significance as well, showing 
that there can indeed be a middle path for post-atrocity societies 
somewhere between lasting communal blood feuds and shameful silence.
For all the tribunal's frustrations, there was and is no real 
alternative. Its mission is profoundly important and could not have been 
accomplished better in some other way. Now that Milosevic is out of 
Serbian politics, he is on his way to becoming a nobody; his people are 
no longer interested in him. Only 16 percent of Serbians say they are 
following the trial "very closely," with an additional 35 percent saying 
they are following it "somewhat closely." These people may watch with 
resentment, or with opening minds, but few really care. The Serbian 
public is vastly more concerned with the country's decrepit economy, 
crime, and corruption than with Milosevic's fate. The tyrant has become 
irrelevant.
For the first time since becoming president of Serbia in 1989, Milosevic 
is being treated as yesterday's man. He suffers a host of courtroom 
humiliations. When Stjepan Mesic, the reformist president of Croatia, 
testified against him in October 2002, the current head of state needled 
his deposed counterpart, addressing him as "Mr. Accused." Paddy Ashdown, 
a former leader of the United Kingdom's Liberal Democrats, reminded 
Milosevic that he had been put on notice back in 1998, as Serb forces 
ratcheted up their repression in Kosovo: "I warned you that if you took 
those steps and went on doing this you would end up in this court. And 
here you are." Even worse, by his lights, Milosevic is stuck confronting 
people and accusations that he clearly thinks beneath him. But unable to 
draw on the full apparatus of state power, he often takes a drubbing. 
After Lazarevic's testimony, the former tyrant stayed in his cell for a 
week, complaining of exhaustion. Cross-examining his accuser, he had 
said, "So this is another u

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