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If he feels personally burdened by the disaster that followed, the 53-year-old president gives little sign of it. "Well, everybody made mistakes. I am aware of mine," he said at one point during the interview, and at another: "Nobody is innocent. There is no innocent side. The only innocents are civilians, regardless of their nationality." Milosevic denies, as he always has, any involvement in ethnic cleansing, detention camps and mass rapes that have become the hallmarks of the Bosnian war; and Western governments have never officially charged him with direct responsibility for war crimes. But some argue that given the amount of intelligence available, the West simply must not have tried very hard. Why? In part because making the link to Milosevic would have been most inconvenient for nations attempting to avoid greater involvement in the war during its desperately bloody early stages, and more recently because it would substantially weaken Milosevic as a factor in any diplomatic solution while leaving him in firm charge of half of the old Yugoslavia.
In fact, though, TIME has learned that at least two Western governments had contemporaneous intelligence that convinced them that Milosevic's responsibility for ethnic cleansing and the general conduct of the war in 1991 and '92 were direct and clear. A former Western diplomat has notes of officially authorized intelligence briefings received from two Western governments in late 1992, just after the Bosnian Serbs had unleashed another major round of ethnic cleansing. The briefings were based on communications intercepts and other intelligence sources. According to the notes, the conclusion reached was stark: "The general staff in Belgrade is obedient to Milosevic. Belgrade doesn't plan only the movement of Serbian forces . The war in BH [Bosnia-Herzegovina] was carefully planned by the top political and military leadership in Belgrade. In BH, Mladic has multichannel communications to both his subordinate commanders and to the [Belgrade] general staff and Milosevic." Despite Milosevic's assertion that there were only 2,000 or so paramilitaries-he calls them "bandits and killers"-responsible for the war crimes, this former diplomat concludes, "It was an elaborate and very systematic series of campaigns, employing a combination of military assets and local paramilitaries. They didn't sweep through 70% of the country in three months just using local maniacs."
While the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague has indicted 22 people on a variety of charges ranging from genocide to rape, all of them Serbs and many believed to be living in Serbia, Milosevic refuses to allow the tribunal's investigators to operate in his country. "There is a very clear article in our constitution," he says, "that citizens of Yugoslavia cannot be extradited and must be tried here." The fact is, though, that there have been only two prosecutions, both of Croatian Serbs. Milosevic also refuses to allow observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor what one human-rights organization calls Serbia's "rational, systematic" repression in the province of Kosovo, epitomizing "the technique of the modern fascist state."