How the mighty have fallen

For human-rights workers, the mere presence of Milosevic in the dock is a triumph that was unimaginable when Serbian forces were slaughtering thousands.

By Laura Rozen

Feb 20, 2002 | Slobodan Milosevic blustered through a third and final day of opening remarks at his historic war crimes trial Monday, blasting NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia as the real war crime and saying he had always worked for peace. The former Yugoslav president, who is charged with 66 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, has used his first extended opportunity to speak at his trial to deny any knowledge of or responsibility for atrocities, to show videos suggesting Western powers concocted evidence of massacres as an excuse to bomb Yugoslavia, and to aggressively brandish photos of the charred remains of innocent bystanders killed by NATO bombs.

But even as Milosevic berates the war crimes tribunal, the dozens of people who have struggled for years to bring a measure of justice and peace to the victims of the Balkans wars feel a profound satisfaction -- tinged with disbelief -- that they have lived to finally see the former Serb strongman sitting in the dock. And they hope that the trial, although painful, will allow Milosevic's fellow Serbs to come to terms with what was done in their name.

When the U.N. Security Council mandated the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993, it required a huge leap of faith to believe that a mere legal institution -- operating out of a bland former insurance-company building in this seaside Dutch city -- would ever be able to exert any power over the perpetrators of the worst atrocities Europe had seen since the Holocaust. Justice itself seemed a remote and abstract possibility in a world where one saw nightly news reports of emaciated men held in concentration camps; people shelled and sniped at while standing in bread and water lines in the former Olympic city of Sarajevo; smugly confident Bosnian Serb troops bullying U.N. humanitarian convoys and holding U.N. peacekeepers chained to poles; Red Cross buses full of inconsolable women and girls from a previously unknown town called Srebrenica saying that Bosnian Serb troops had rounded up all of their male relatives. Those anguished reports were the first news of one of the great atrocities of the 20th century: the slaughter by Bosnian Serb forces of some 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys in a three-day orgy of killing in July 1995.

But those who were appalled by the horrors unfolding in the Balkans never gave up. They dedicated years of their lives to reconstructing what had happened in the former Yugoslavia and bringing justice to the guilty -- interviewing survivors of atrocities and family members of those who didn't, lobbying governments to detain and extradite war crimes suspects.

One such person is Stefanie Frease. Currently a program director at the Coalition for International Justice, a Washington nonprofit, Frease formerly worked at the tribunal in The Hague as a researcher in the office of the prosecutor, investigating the killings at Srebrenica, among other atrocities.

Long before the world heard of Slobodan Milosevic, Frease had an experience that gave her a chilling premonition of the ethnic tensions that simmered below the surface in Communist-era Yugoslavia. It was back in 1980, just months after Marshall Tito, the country's longtime communist ruler, died. Frease was an American high school exchange student living in the western seaside town of Split, in Croatia -- at the time one of Yugoslavia's six republics.

"Someone made a remark, using some derogatory word for one of Yugoslavia's ethnic minorities I can't remember now," Frease recalls. "And it just made me think, if there's ever a war here, I have to come to help."

Twelve years later, Frease -- the child of an American Fulbright scholar located in Yugoslavia -- became a humanitarian aid worker for the International Rescue Committee in Croatia. After working in the field for the IRC, Frease headed to The Hague to work as a researcher gathering testimony, interviewing witnesses, and documenting exactly what happened in the weeks and months before, during and after 8,000 people were massacred at Srebrenica. She also researched other crimes. That evidence is part of Milosevic's 29-count Bosnia indictment, which accuses him, among other crimes, of responsibility for genocide.

Tribunal prosecutors say Milosevic paid, equipped and was ultimately responsible for the actions of the troops that overran Srebrenica, besieged Sarajevo and Gorazde, and operated concentration camps where torture, rape and murder were rampant at Omarska and Trnopolje. But Milosevic denies he knew anything about any atrocities committed by Serb troops. He claimed he "heard of Srebrenica" for the first time from Carl Bildt, a Swedish peace envoy. And on Thursday, Milosevic said he asked Bosnian Serb leaders about reports of concentration camps in northwest Bosnia but that they "deceived" him, insisting that they were merely prisoner of war camps where non-Serbs were kept for a short while before being exchanged.

The question of collective guilt -- whether Milosevic and a few other accused leaders are being blamed for the sins, or non-sins, of an entire nation -- is central to the trial. Prosecutors have been at pains to argue that Milosevic is on trial, not Serbia as a whole. For his part, Milosevic has sought to portray both himself and the vast majority of his fellow Serbs as honorable and innocent. "I want to say something that everybody in Serbia knows," Milosevic told the chamber in his opening remarks on Thursday. "In the Serb tradition, and the tradition of the Serb military, a prisoner of war and an unarmed person is held sacred. Whoever violated this sacred principle has to be held accountable. However, this was not done by the military and the police. I am not trying to say that this wasn't committed by some individuals and some groups. But this was not done by the army and police, who defended their own country with honor and chivalry. Such dirty crimes cannot be ascribed to an army, a police, a people, a nation, a country, their government," Milosevic insisted.

In his 10 hours of opening remarks, Milosevic has tried to dip into wells of resentment many Serbs feel not just at the NATO bombing, but for incidents going back to World War II. In his testimony, as during his 10-year reign over Serbia, Milosevic has repeatedly compared NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia to the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia during World War II, in which 2 million Yugoslavs were killed, most at the hands of other Yugoslavs. A detailed accounting by Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, estimates that stray NATO bombs accidentally killed some 500 Serbs and ethnic Albanian civilians during its 1999 air war.

How well are Milosevic's remarks playing in Serbia? Bogdan Ivanisevic, a Serbian Balkans researcher for Human Rights Watch, is watching the trial from Belgrade, the capital of the country Milosevic ruled for more than a decade, and which saw massive protests a year and a half ago demanding he step down. Ivanisevic says it's hard to gauge what ordinary people in Serbia make of Milosevic's statements at his trial. But he says that at some level, Serbs know about some of the crimes committed during the wars, and that Milosevic is not being truthful in his account.

Next Page: Even hard-line Serbs know that Milosevic deported Albanians

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