http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4569668,00.html The man of many parts does not play the fool Theatre critic Michael Billington watches a virtuoso performance as the Serb dictator takes centre stage at the Hague in part two of our series on the most significant war crimes trial since Nuremberg Wednesday December 18, 2002 The Guardian In all great drama there is something known as the peripeteia: the turning-point, or the moment of reversal, on which the outcome of the whole story depends. More by luck than judgement, I seem to have stumbled across such a moment in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the international criminal tribunal in the Hague. What is clearly at stake is Milosevic's right to continue conducting his own defence: something the prosecution is challenging on the grounds that it is damaging his health and thereby in danger of disrupting the whole trial. The sense of crisis was underlined one morning when the court sat briefly in Milosevic's absence and considered what to do next: you could almost smell the desperation. >From the few brief extracts I had seen on British TV I had little sense of the atmosphere of the trial. What hits one is the relative intimacy of the proceedings. Janet Flanner described how at Nuremberg journalists equipped themselves with opera glasses and army binoculars to squint at the prisoners 15 metres away: no need of that in the age of closed-circuit TV. Here you are kept from the proceedings by only a bulletproof partition. The effect is curious: it is rather as if you are watching a TV recording of a low-key, modern-dress production of The Merchant of Venice. History is being made, but you become a voyeuristic spectator watching it through a glass wall. I perch at the side in the public seats. After a break I move into the scantily occupied press seats on the left hand side of the room. This gives me a close-up view of Milosevic who sits alone, except for a burly bodyguard, behind a bank of desks. His isolation is both chosen and conspicuous. The three judges presided over by Richard May - a onetime Labour candidate - are on a raised dais. The four-strong prosecuting team, led by the impeccably English Geoffrey Nice QC, confront the accused. The amici curiae, literally "friends of the court" and there to raise legal issues, sit facing the judges. The only isolated figures in the court are Milosevic and today's witness. As in all trials, you are struck at first by the lack of obvious drama: an impression that changes by the end of the morning. And arriving cold, as it were, it is difficult to pick up the narrative threads. The prosecution has already examined the witness, Mustapha Candic: a senior counter-intelligence officer in Yugoslav air defence. It is Milosevic's turn to interrogate him within exactly the same time frame enjoyed by the prosecution. The details of his questioning, to a newcomer and non-Balkan expert, are hard to follow: what is perfectly clear is that Milosevic is out to destroy the witness's credibility and establish his own detachment from day-to-day military decisions. The paradox is instantly apparent. On the one hand, Milosevic denies the legal validity of the tribunal. On the other hand, he cross-examines Candic with the fervour of the practised lawyer he once was. Clearly he is playing it both ways. Far from looking tired or exhausted, he appears to be on top of events. With his dapper suit, blue shirt, heavy jowls, domed forehead and receding thatch of white hair he looks the kind of burly apparatchik you might have met in central or eastern Europe any time in the past 50 years. But what is most striking is his mixture of arrogance - sometimes leaning back in his chair as if the proceedings are beneath his contempt - and determination to nail this particular witness. As I watch my mind goes back to Janet Flanner's account of Nuremberg. She had nothing but scorn for the majority of the 22 Nazi accused who fell back on the line that they were simply obeying orders. Her interest was aroused only by Hermann Goering, who offered no mea culpa but a dissertation on the technique of power. Dangerous diversity "The Reichsmarshall," Flanner wrote, "made Machiavelli's Prince look like a dull apologist: Goering was decidedly more amoral, and funnier. The horrifying weakness in everything he said was that it took no account of the destruction it had caused in other men's or nations' lives." Milosevic is not Goering; and he has yet to speak in his own defence. But Flanner's description of Goering as a "brain without a conscience" seems curiously applicable here; and Milosevic is certainly a skilled courtroom performer. Sometimes he plays the role of the captive head of state coerced into attending a tribunal that, both literally and metaphorically, he refuses to recognise. At other times, he turns into a judicial terrier savaging a particular witness. This is what makes him dangerous. He is a chameleon, a shape-shifter, a consummate actor who can easily switch roles: he can be the illegally abducted political victim or the judicial aggressor as occasion demands. He can even seem to move, in the course of a single morning, from a state of florid robustness to one of harassed overwork. Which is precisely what makes the prosecution's life so difficult. What makes the proceedings both intriguing to watch and difficult to follow is that so much hinges on points of detail requiring historical footnotes. "Where", Milosevic mockingly asks Mustapha Candic, "do you read about Greater Serbia in the Memorandum?" (a reference to a key document that both defined and unleashed Serb nationalism). He derides an argument that several generals signed an oath of personal loyalty to him. "Generals over whom", he briskly says, "I had no authority." His fingers drum on the desk over the question of 216 illegal groups discovered in the JNA (the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army): it is as if he is declaring his distance from day-to-day matters. Above all, he constantly rebuts the witness's suggestion that he was an aggressive Serb nationalist. "When and where," asks Milosevic, "did I determine the boundaries of a Greater Serbia?" In all this there is little sign of Milosevic's reported lassitude: he goes after the witness with terrier-like determination. There also occasional testy interventions by Judge Richard May, who is equally strict with Milosevic and the witness. "Let's move on," he keeps urging Milosevic. "You must explain and clarify," he tells Candic. And when he advises Milosevic that he has only another five minutes with the witness, there is a voluble protest. "But I have another 50 questions left," he says, sounding less like an ailing victim than a man just warming to his task. But the real drama is reserved for the session concerning the future conduct of the case. At one point Judge May threatens to hold the discussion in camera, which produces loud cries of "No" from the public gallery. At issue is what the judge pointedly refers to as Milosevic's "apparently poor health" and an eight-page submission from the prosecution asking that the accused be supplied with a defence counsel: preferably the amici, "who are fully conversant with the facts of the case". What this reveals is Milosevic's fox-like cunning, in that he comes at the argument from every conceivable angle. First he feigns total aloofness: "that's your affair, Mr May," he loftily remarks about future conduct of the case. Then, when an imposed defence counsel is suggested, he goes on to the attack, claiming the idea is "illegal, absurd and ill-intentioned" and saying it offers confirmation that this is "a rigged political trial". He extends the argument by saying he has no time to assess the mountain of evidence against him: he refers to the 200,000 pages of prosecution testimony and pointedly gestures towards seven large folders containing the next witness's evidence. I turned up to see Milosevic on trial and history in the making. What I saw was the accused cleverly subverting proceedings and presenting the court with a Catch-22 dilemma. Either he is allowed to conduct his own defence, in which case his illness will get worse and the timetable will become a shambles. Or the court can impose a defence counsel, in which case he can claim he was stitched up. The old legal joke is that "a man who defends himself has a fool for a client." In fact, Milosevic has proved the opposite to be true: he has played his cards very cleverly and exposed the practical difficulty of making a head of state legally accountable for his crimes: it doesn't invalidate the attempt but it exposes its frailty. My mind went back to George Steiner's remarkable novel The Portage to San Cristobal of AH, in which a 92-year-old Adolf Hitler has been discovered by a group of Jews in the South American jungle. The question is what to do next. By trying and hanging him, argues one Jew, "we'll be pretending what he did can be made good. History will draw a line and forget even faster." The only answer, he claims, is to let Hitler go wherever he wants inside Israel and let him beg for food, water or shelter. We can guess the consequences of that, but Steiner's fiction poses a number of awkward factual questions. How does the law deal with genocide? Can justice ever fully be done? And doesn't the attempt to counter war crimes itself lead to criminal acts on the part of the victors? The tribunal looks like a rational attempt to deal with the monstrous acts committed during the Bosnian war; but at the moment it is the court itself that seems to be the one on trial. Guardian Unlimited C Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
