Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
The former Yugoslav president stands accused of crimes against humanity as the most important international trial since Nuremberg begins.
Feb 13, 2002 | Shifting in his chair and occasionally taking notes, Slobodan Milosevic, the first head of state to be charged with war crimes committed while in office, listened impassively today as his historic trial got underway. Prosecutors from the U.N. international war crimes tribunal described the former Yugoslav president as the shrewd and calculating mastermind of a decade of brutal genocide, forced deportations and campaigns of "almost medieval savagery," all designed to create a Greater Serbia out of the former Yugoslavia and consolidate his own power.
"We should just pause to recall the daily scenes of grief and suffering that came to define armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia," Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), told the trial chamber. "The events themselves were notorious, and a new term, 'ethnic cleansing,' came into common use in our language. Some of the incidents revealed almost medieval savagery and a calculated cruelty that went far beyond the bounds of legitimate warfare.
"The Chamber will now begin the trial of this man for the wrongs he is said to have done -- to the people of his own country and to his neighbors," Del Ponte said. "How simple that statement is to make today, and yet how remarkable it is that I am able to speak them here. Today, as never before, we see international justice in action."
Del Ponte told the court that the 66 counts of war crimes against Milosevic, ranging from crimes against humanity to genocide to violations of the Geneva conventions, are not "local affairs," and their prosecution belongs in a world court.
"Crimes of [this] magnitude affect all of us throughout the world," Del Ponte said, as Milosevic, in a navy suit with his white hair cut short and brushed back from his face, looked on. "These crimes touch every one of us, wherever we live, because they offend against our deepest principles of human rights and human dignity. This Tribunal, and this trial in particular, give the most powerful demonstration that no one is above the law or beyond the reach of international justice."
Del Ponte, a Swiss, and her fellow prosecutor, British lawyer Geoffrey Nice, allege that Milosevic deliberately fanned the flames of ethnic nationalism and fear that contributed to Yugoslavia's violent breakup. Further, they claimed today, Milosevic was both aware of and refused to halt the savage behavior of troops, police and paramilitaries under his de facto and official control who committed genocide, crimes against humanity, the willful destruction of property and ethnic cleansing.
As prosecutors laid out the scope of their case against Milosevic today, they emphasized that the trial will be an opportunity for survivors of atrocities to tell their stories, and give voice to the tens of thousands who didn't survive to testify.
Some 200,000 people were killed in wars that began in Croatia in 1991, continued in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 and erupted in Kosovo in 1999. Many hundreds of thousands were forced to flee as refugees. Houses were burned, women were raped, ethnic minorities were forced to flee their homes and many thousands of civilians were massacred.
"In 1992, in Visegrad, Bosnia, a young woman, heavily pregnant, found the town taken over by Yugoslav soldiers," Nice told the courtroom today. "Because of what was happening, she and many other people took to the woods at night, indeed she gave birth to her daughter in the woods at night. And it would appear from evidence we do have, that she gave that daughter a name. But we can't tell you what the name is. In due course, that woman, her baby and many others including some 45 members of her extended family were taken to a house that had been prepared for them, with petrol on its carpets. They were burnt alive. And the baby's screams were heard for some two hours before it too succumbed.
"And so," Nice continued, "that is one crime to represent the thousands killed in the Bosnian conflict."
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