But when the trial's presiding judge, Richard May, asked Milosevic if there were "any issues you want to raise," the Serb seized his chance for a cable-news close-up. He received assurance that May wouldn't "turn off my microphone like the first time," and then launched into a self-pitying tirade. He assumed the guise of a prisoner of conscience, cut off from his family and denied the right to talk to lawyers and the press. Tribunal authorities had "discriminated" against him from the day he arrived: "Why am I isolated from my family? Why can't they visit me in the same way as the others?" For a while May indulged Milosevic's bluster, then lost patience. "There must be an end to this," he said, adjourning the trial for another two months. Milosevic's microphone went silent, but still he ranted as three U.N. guards led him out. It was clear that if Milosevic fails to halt the momentum of the legal process he condemns, then he will attempt to turn it into a circus.
The prosecution team tried to direct attention back to the issues by dropping a bombshell of its own: shortly after the hearing adjourned, chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte announced she would charge Milosevic with committing genocide in Bosnia — the most potent weapon in the prosecutor's arsenal. While the charge may have been intended to boost confidence in their case, the prosecutors had reason to feel nervous. Though its reach has steadily widened since its fitful start in 1993, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) will be judged mainly on how it deals with Milosevic, the first head of state to face an international war-crimes court. A trial that produces anything but a resounding conviction — or descends into political grandstanding — will sap the court's hard-won credibility. "It's a historic moment for the court," says the tribunal's spokesman, Jim Landale. "This trial will be scrutinized more than any other before it, and the tribunal has the responsibility to get it absolutely right."
The consequences will extend far beyond the Hague tribunal's yellow brick walls. The tide of international law has reached a high-water mark, emboldening legal activists and governments to pursue, and win, justice for victims of atrocities. The ICTY's sister court in Arusha, Tanzania — established in 1994 to prosecute war crimes committed in the Rwandan genocide — has apprehended 51 of 74 publicly indicted suspects and convicted eight, including former Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, of genocide. The U.N. has agreed to assist governments in Sierra Leone and Cambodia with their own nascent tribunals. E.U. countries have adopted laws allowing national courts to try foreigners for crimes against humanity committed abroad; in the most sensational example, a Belgian court in June convicted four Rwandan Hutus — including two nuns — for participating in genocide. The proliferation of such dramas has made inevitable the creation of a permanent International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) that could bring to dock the world's worst offenders — that means you, Saddam Hussein. Says Richard Dicker, director of international justice at Human Rights Watch: "We're seeing a major shift away from the idea that people can commit crimes against humanity without accountability."
Milosevic will remain the highest-ranking defendant in international custody for some time to come. But he has already proved exasperating. His rejection of the legitimacy of the tribunal is producing plenty of legal headaches for the court. In early August Milosevic sent the court a motion, written from his cell at the Scheveningen detention center, demanding his release; two weeks later he disavowed the request, having realized that the act of filing a motion amounted to acceptance of the tribunal's rules. On Thursday Del Ponte informed May's three-judge panel that Milosevic has yet to read the indictment against him. Meanwhile Milosevic carps that the tribunal monitors his talks with legal advisers, even though he waived his right to keep such discussions confidential by refusing to grant a defense lawyer the power to represent him. For such obstreperousness, Milosevic enjoys legal privileges unknown to defendants in many countries, including the Yugoslavia he ruled for 13 years. Far from isolated, he has spent over 60 hours with family members and 20 consulting with lawyers. Last week May even designated amicus curiae counsel to help Milosevic conduct his defense in court.
May's court must perform a tricky balancing act: ensuring Milosevic's access to a robust defense without acting against his declared intention to do it on his own, while pushing the prosecution to open its case quickly. May ordered Del Ponte to finish her office's investigations, which are aimed at widening the indictment to include war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia and to cover the continued discovery of mass graves of Kosovar Albanians inside Serbia. (Last week authorities exhumed 36 to 40 more bodies of Kosovars believed to have been killed by Serb forces.) "Due course is not an infinite amount of time," May said. Still, Del Ponte says a trial won't begin until next autumn, more than three years after Milosevic's indictment and 15 months after his arrest. In it, the prosecution will try to prove Milosevic had "command responsibility" for the crimes carried out during his regime. But even if Del Ponte goes after Milosevic under the broadest definition of that doctrine — which states that a commander can be held responsible because he should have known that crimes occurred, or that he made a deliberate effort not to know — it could take years to get a conviction.
That's hardly unusual. Proceedings at the ICTY move at a glacial pace: the case of Zejnil Delalic, a Bosnian Muslim commander, dragged on for close to four years before his acquittal last February. The procedural outline of a typical case at the Hague looks like a diagram of the human nervous system. "This is a perfectionist institution," says Hirad Abtahi, a legal officer in the Milosevic chamber. "We're trying to provide the accused with the highest standards of protection and provide the victim with the best outcome. We're trying to satisfy everybody." Most of the statutes governing the tribunal's practices didn't even exist before the ICTY's inception, and they have since been amended 21 times. Toss in the U.N.'s usual red tape and you get logjam: besides Milosevic, 20 other suspects are still waiting to go to trial.
And yet the tribunal's growth has been remarkable. In 1993, the U.N. gave the court a budget of $276,000. Today the figure is $96.4 million. Thanks to bolder arrests by nato forces, political change in the Balkans and the introduction of secret indictments, the icty has hauled 60 suspects to the Hague and secured convictions of 15 — including Radislav Krstic, found guilty last month of genocide for the 1995 massacre of at least 7,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. From its single-courtroom beginnings, the tribunal can now conduct six trials at once. Says Princeton University professor Gary Jonathan Bass: "It's operating in a way that the leaders who set it up to be a weak token institution might find surprising."
The Arusha court too has made strides since its ignominious start, when it shared office space with hairdressers and flower sellers. The tribunal has snared several masterminds of the Rwandan horrors, including Kambanda and former defense ministry official Théoneste Bagosora, who appeared in court last week. But the court is also riddled with dysfunction: two months ago it revealed that four genocide suspects had been working for the tribunal as unpaid defense contractors. As in the Hague, defense lawyers have abused the tribunal's legal aid system, sometimes sharing with clients the fees paid them by the U.N. Difficulties in tracking down witnesses, schooling lawyers and judges in the court's hybrid legal system and conducting hearings on a consistent timetable have kept some of the accused detained for six years. "It's disgusting," says a defense lawyer. The court's registrar, Adama Dieng, acknowledges errors but says "the tribunal should be seen as a laboratory from which we can learn lessons for the International Criminal Court."
If so, one lesson seems obvious: the plodding pace of justice in Arusha and the Hague has undermined a key goal of war-crimes tribunals — providing solace for the victims of terror and helping shattered societies rebuild. The tribunals are only now winning a measure of enthusiasm in the very countries where the crimes were committed. "Justice as a remedy, as a tool to redress these horrible crimes, gets diminished the longer these trials drag on," says Dicker. Most of those who perpetrated atrocities in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and Rwanda will never be called before an international court; a prosecution official at the Hague told Time that the tribunal will indict only about 250 of the estimated 12,000 suspected criminals from the Balkan wars. And no matter how far judges bend to accommodate accused criminals such as Milosevic, there will remain those who will never regard judgments as anything but victor's justice.
So why bother? In his book Stay the Hand of Vengeance, Bass argues that such tribunals offer "the least awful alternative" to other, more fearsome methods of retribution for war crimes. The best argument for the creation of an International Criminal Court based on the Yugoslav and Rwandan panels — an effort ratified by 37 countries but opposed by the U.S. — is that it would give the civilized world, as Bass says, "another sanction we can use against renegade world leaders short of war." That doesn't mean the I.C.C., or the Hague and Arusha tribunals will dissuade another Milosevic from committing similar crimes. But they might make him think twice. And that is no small accomplishment.