How the mighty have fallen

"Milosevic has been saying [at his trial] that NATO deliberately tried to kill as many Serb civilians as possible," Ivanisevic -- who risked his safety to count the bodies of those killed by NATO bombs -- cites as an example. "Nobody could believe that crap. People [in Serbia] know that if that were true, thousands of people would be dead, instead of just a few hundred.

"Any person with any intelligence and decency is not really going to put full faith in Milosevic's words," Ivanisevic says. "But now of course, when Milosevic shows those photos [of people killed by NATO bombs], some people are going to be angry. People here don't like NATO.

"But the way Milosevic goes on for hours and hours, this is counterproductive," Ivanisevic continued. "A few words, a few photos would suffice. Now it continues, it goes on and on, and first of all, it's boring. Second of all, a person here can ask himself, 'is this guy normal, showing all these corpses?'"

Ivanisevic says there's a third element that weakens Milosevic's attempt to make Serbs feel like they are on trial with him for war crimes: Despite Milosevic's years of propaganda and control of the media, Serbs know that some of what he says is not true. In particular, Ivanisevic says, they know that Serbian forces and police deliberately evicted Kosovo Albanians from the province in 1999 -- although Milosevic insisted at the trial that they fled NATO bombs. (This is also the position held by the American leftist Noam Chomsky.)

"They know Albanians didn't just leave because of NATO bombs," Ivanisevic says. "My [relative] who hates NATO, who is a Serbian nationalist, will only watch the parts of the trial where Milosevic speaks. But when I asked him about the forced deportation of Albanians, does he think that's a crime, he says, 'Well, they were not killed, just deported.' But when I ask him about the deportation of Serbs from Croatia, he thinks it's a crime, and that's a whole different context. But the significant thing is that my relative didn't deny the Albanians were deported. He knows."

Ivanisevic says the analysts and journalists commenting on the Milosevic trial for Serbian television are surprisingly balanced -- a stark contrast from the days when Milosevic held the country's media in an iron grip, permitting almost no coverage of the Serbian opposition or the wartime suffering of non-Serbs.

For her part, Frease hopes that the trial, by allowing Serbs to come face to face with what actually happened, will have a cathartic effect. "I think a lot about the impact this trial will have on Serbia and on Serbs in the Republika Srpska. I really have a deep hope that the truth is going to be revealed, and that it is going to have a positive impact," Frease told Salon. "That it is going to be able to penetrate people's thinking in a way that the nationalism, and being so wrapped up in the war, didn't allow them to do before. And that people won't need to feel as if this is an indictment against their ethnicity."

The lack of such a truth-establishing mechanism after World War II -- which saw some of the fiercest fighting in the former Yugoslavia -- actually contributed to the myths, resentments and nationalism that fueled the savagery of the past decades' wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, Frease believes.

"I have always wondered what impact this kind of tribunal would have had on Serbs if it had existed 50 years ago," Frease said. "Because it gets at the truth. And when there isn't any sort of justice process in place, it's just impossible to get over things. You need an acknowledgment; there needs to be a recognition of the facts, of what happened. It doesn't work to bury the past, to just say, 'Oh well, that's the past.' It doesn't go away."

Sonja Biserko, the president of the Serbian chapter of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, says while there is still an audience for Milosevic's denials that some forces under his command committed atrocities, this trial could be a turning point.

"This trial is an opportunity for people to disassociate from the Milosevic policy," Biserko -- who has faced serious threats from extremists in her own country -- said by telephone from Belgrade Friday. "I am afraid they still somehow identify with it. Most of the media is defending him, because he took the opportunity to accuse NATO in front of the whole world. But the wider reaction here is not pro-Milosevic. Most people here feel uneasy about this trial, which is normal. Anyone decent enough feels uneasy, for what happened."

International justice activists say the Yugoslavia tribunal, the first of its kind, has been an experiment that will help them in the future, as well as in war crimes tribunals currently underway in Sierra Leone and East Timor.

The tribunal's biggest problem, according to several observers, was its insufficient initial attention to outreach programs -- efforts to explain, in the local languages and in the local context, what the tribunal is about. Such programs are installed in capitals throughout the former Yugoslavia. But Frease says they should have started outreach programs earlier. In the case of Serbia, such programs could have defused considerable hostility: People in Belgrade have tended to look at the tribunal as a totally anti-Serb institution, when in fact the tribunal has also indicted and arrested several non-Serbs accused of committing crimes against Serbs. (Almost all of them have already been handed over by Zagreb, capital of Croatia, and Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.)

Echoing that criticism is Nina Bang-Jensen, the executive director of the Coalition for International Justice. "I think the tribunal initially did not devote enough attention to explaining themselves to people in the region. It took them years to translate the court documents into the local languages. The outreach programs were very slow in coming. It's most improved now."

Indeed, the Milosevic trial is a logistical wonder, with the prosecutors and judges speaking in English, Milosevic testifying in Serbian, and the first prosecutorial witness today testifying in Albanian. The trial is simultaneously translated into Albanian, French, and the triad of almost identical languages that emerged with the breakup of Yugoslavia known as "Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS)." Some 1,200 people work for the tribunal -- judges, lawyers, translators, researchers, investigators, registrars, secretaries and pathologists. Although Milosevic is the biggest name the tribunal has tried to date, it has indicted over 80 people -- Bosnian Muslims, Croatians and Serbs -- some 49 of whom are in its custody, and another 31 of whom remain at large.

Prosecutors and international justice activists hope that Milosevic will not be the last powerful figure to be brought to justice. They are encouraged by growing signs from Belgrade that it may at last hand over the Bosnian Serb general accused of orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre, Ratko Mladic. And on Friday, chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte skipped Milosevic's testimony to go to the Bosnian Serb capital, Banja Luka, to press yet again for the arrest and extradition of former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic. Both Karadzic and Mladic are indicted for genocide at Srebrenica, and for crimes against humanity.

Some of the more utopian of those who backed the idea of the tribunal back in 1993 believed that its very existence would serve as a deterrent to further atrocities. Those hopes have been dashed. But Milosevic's presence in the dock these past two weeks has offered a lesson for leaders the world over who believe that power itself guarantees that they can act with impunity.

• View blog reactions