Milosevic: The End of The Line

Del Ponte has already expanded the indictment against Milosevic to cover some 300 newly confirmed Kosovar victims, and expects to add further charges to account for the Serb police's recent discoveries of mass graves. She has also signaled her intention to indict Milosevic for war crimes perpetrated during the earlier wars in Bosnia and Croatia. A trial on those charges would be explosive — it could, for instance, reveal what Belgrade knew about the massacre of at least 7,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica in 1995 — but would also present a more slippery case. Although many observers have suspected that Milosevic's secret police helped coordinate the ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by Bosnian Serbs, the West has been reluctant to grant access to the intelligence it gathered at the time, partly out of fear of exposing the extent to which Western governments did business with Milosevic to secure his participation in a peace deal. And, Scheffer says, "it might be harder to make the case because of the screen of Bosnian Serb leadership." In Kosovo, "it's a pretty clear case of superior criminal responsibility."

As obvious as Milosevic's culpability might appear, the tribunal's verdict will not come soon. Even the start of the trial remains months away: Milosevic's lawyers will likely file a raft of procedural appeals to delay the hearings. The three judges who will hear the case — Richard May of Britain, Patrick Robinson of Jamaica and Mohamed Al-Habib Fassi Fihri of Morocco — will make the ultimate determination of Milosevic's guilt; but the tribunal's brand of painstaking jurisprudence means that his fate may not be settled for years. If he is found guilty, Milosevic will probably face life imprisonment in one of the seven countries that have so far agreed to take in convicted war criminals.

Slobodan Milosevic, in the meantime, returns at the end of his day in court to a 15 x 15m cell at the detention center in Scheveningen, a suburb of the Hague set against the North Sea. A surveillance camera follows his movements at all times and a prison guard passes by his cell every 20 minutes. He has his own shower and toilet, a radio and satellite TV. He can work out in the center's gym, study in the library or pray in the religion room.

The victims of Milosevic's cruelty would howl that such a man should enjoy such comforts. The true solace will come only when the realization of what he has done finally hits Milosevic, and the enormity of his crimes begins to haunt him the way it does his victims, each day for the rest of his life