Milosevic: the prosecution rests its case

WAR crimes prosecutors abruptly rested their case against the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic yesterday, bringing the landmark hearing to its half-way point more than two years after it opened.

Prosecutors had planned to call four more witnesses and submit an unknown number of documents in two remaining days of hearings.

But they decided to file a motion to close their case prematurely following the weekend announcement that the presiding judge was resigning because of ill health and because Milosevic has been ill for the last two weeks. Judges have now ordered that Milosevic begin his case in 150 days.

Officials are privately confident they have done most of what they set out to do and have pinned the blame for orchestrating three Balkan wars on the Serb leader, despite a raft of problems that threatened to derail the case.

First came the decision of the Hague’s Swiss chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, to charge Milosevic with crimes in three wars - Croatia in 1991, Bosnia from 1992 and Kosovo from 1998.

The decision produced 66 charges in a charge sheet so long it is printed as a 125-page book, plus a trial that has seen more than 200 witnesses and half a million pages of evidence.More delays have ensued from Milosevic’s ailments - flu and high blood pressure - which have seen almost three months of court time lost and the trial changed to a three-day week to conserve his strength. The trial has also been extremely costly, as it is the centrepiece of a tribunal system with an annual budget of around 70 million. Finally, the feeling is growing that the most serious of Milosevic’s indictments, alleging genocide in Bosnia, will not be proved. Genocide is not just the most serious charge on the books, it is one of the hardest to prove - requiring not just proof that genocide took place, but that prosecutors prove genocide was Milosevic’s intention.

But despite months of witness testimony, access to more than 100 wiretap conversations and the use of seized documents, prosecutors have failed to get inside the former president’s mind.

Instead, the court has been frustrated by revelations that he ran his country in secretive style, giving orders to individuals, rather than during committee meetings, committing little to paper and being careful what he said even during phone calls.

The trial has failed to produce a "smoking gun" - a witness who remembers Milosevic ordering some of the crimes he is accused of - and no document recording such orders has surfaced.

But while he might escape the genocide charge, Milosevic is likely to be found guilty many times over for the other accusations. Unless he can mount some extraordinary defence, he is likely to get a life sentence for the charges of crimes against humanity, violations of codes or customs of war and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.

None of that, of course, will bring back the estimated 100,000 people who were killed in the three wars he is accused of unleashing, nor will it do much to ease the plight of the two million made homeless in ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in 1992 and Kosovo in 1999. But the trial, if not providing reconciliation in the Balkans, seems to be doing its part to provide an alternative to revenge.