HE HAGUE, Dec. 15 — In a grenade-proof courtroom far
from the battlefields of the Balkans, Slobodan Milosevic, the former
Yugoslav president, came face to face on Monday with Gen. Wesley K. Clark,
the former NATO supreme commander who waged war against him.
For nearly five hours, General Clark, who is seeking the Democratic
presidential nomination, testified in closed session in a trial against
the Balkan strongman, whose intransigence brought on NATO's 11-week
bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and added to the long list of criminal
charges he is facing.
It was the first encounter between the two men since January 1999, when
General Clark warned Mr. Milosevic in a tense session in Belgrade to
either end his terror campaign against the ethnic Albanian population of
Kosovo or be bombed. Mr. Milosevic replied by calling the general a "war
criminal." The bombing started two months later.
Now it is Mr. Milosevic who is on trial as a war criminal. In the most
important war crimes trial since those of the Nazis at Nuremberg, he faces
66 charges stemming from his role in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the
breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990's.
"Today Milosevic is delivered by his own people to the hands of justice
in The Hague," said General Clark in an interview. "It's a powerful
testament to the rule of law and the force of ideas."
The 281st witness to be called before the special court, formally known
as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, General
Clark is also one of the most important. He is the most senior official
from the Clinton administration to testify against Mr. Milosevic in a
trial heard before three judges in black silk-trimmed robes: an
Englishman, a South Korean and a Jamaican.
He served as a military representative in Ambassador Richard C.
Holbrooke's delegation at Balkan peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, that led to
an agreement to end the Bosnia war and has spent more than 100 hours with
Mr. Milosevic. The Serbian leader figures prominently in General Clark's
2001 memoir, "Waging Modern War," an account of the planning and conduct
of the war in Kosovo and the diplomacy that preceded it.
Prosecutors were expected to follow the same line of questioning they
have used with many other witnesses to prove that Mr. Milosevic was aware
of Serbian wartime atrocities and failed to prevent them or punish those
responsible.
But the historic significance of the day was undercut by the fact that
General Clark's testimony was delivered in secret, an unusual step in a
tribunal that has prided itself on its openness.
The Bush administration has invoked a rule under the tribunal to allow
State Department lawyers to review and edit the testimony to ensure that
it does not violate American national security or intelligence sources and
methods. Under universal rules of the tribunal, all witnesses are
precluded from talking about their testimony until it is over.
Adding to the drama and disarray, Mr. Milosevic, who studied law but
never practiced it, is serving as his own lawyer.
The former Serbian leader has tried to use his trial, which is
televised in Serbia, to his political advantage at home. Throughout the
trial, he has been chided by the chief judge for grandstanding and
pontificating and was expected to challenge General Clark's credibility
under cross-examination, which began Monday.
From his detention cell near The Hague, Mr. Milosevic, who was removed
from power in 2000 and later extradited to the tribunal, is also running
his own political campaign as head of his Socialist Party of Serbia's
electoral list for parliamentary elections planned for Dec. 28.
In Belgrade on Monday, the European Union foreign policy envoy, Javier
Solana, condemned the inclusion of Mr. Milosevic and three other suspected
war criminals on the lists of candidates in Serbia's parliamentary
elections.
"It is not a good idea to have on the list people who are indicted" by
the tribunal, Mr. Solana told reporters before heading to The Hague on
Monday evening.
A videotape of General Clark's testimony will be shown perhaps in an
edited form on Friday, both at The Hague tribunal and on its Web site.
General Clark said he did not object to the delay in his testimony and
was not concerned that he could be censored.
General Clark's two-day appearance in The Hague tribunal, which was
paid for by the tribunal, was called a break from his campaign activities
and he did not travel with his campaign staff. He was assisted by James P.
Rubin, who was a senior aide to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright
and is serving as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to his campaign.
But the trial has thrust General Clark, a retired four-star general,
back into the foreign policy and national security world that defined him,
far away from the messiness of the political campaign
In addition, the timing of his testimony — a day after the Bush
administration announced the capture of Saddam Hussein — allowed General
Clark to draw attention to his own tough treatment of a dictator who was
forced to back down by the first military campaign in NATO's history, and
without a single American combat casualty.
"This is an important day for me but it is far more important for the
people of the region," he said in the interview. "For men and women and
children who were tortured, imprisoned and run out of their homes, who
lived in fear because of the thugs and the paramilitaries and the
heartless coercion of the Serb armed forces, the world listened. And led
by the United States, we took action."
Mr. Hussein's capture also required General Clark, who has been highly
critical of President Bush for conducting what he has called the wrong war
at the wrong time and diverting resources from the pursuit of Al Qaeda, to
adjust his message.
In the interview on Monday, General Clark called the capture "an
amazing sort of coincidence in time" that Mr. Hussein was captured while
Mr. Milosevic was on trial for war crimes. "This is the precedent, the
first case in which we've tried a head of state for war crimes," General
Clark said.
On Sunday and again on Monday he said Mr. Hussein must be brought to
trial, but noted that The Hague tribunal does not allow for the death
penalty and that "all options have to be on the table."
General Clark, with Mr. Rubin's help, rewrote a major foreign policy
speech delivered to the Netherlands Institute for International Relations
on Monday evening to include his reaction to Mr. Hussein's capture.
Calling the capture "good news" but not sufficient, he charged that
Iraq "is still in danger of becoming a failed state."
