Milosevic is ready to put up a fight at The Hague tribunal

Former Yugoslav strongman, not recognizing authority of court, gears up for epic trial

A woman weeps while holding up a picture of Slobodan Milosevic during a rally in Belgrade on Saturday. More than 1,000 Serbs rallied in support of Milosevic three days before the start of his war crimes trial.

By Douglas Hamilton - Reuters

BELGRADE - Intelligent, ruthless and compulsively defiant, Slobodan Milosevic carried his momentous gambles to the brink of disaster and beyond during a decade of wars over the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The former Serbian and Yugoslav president is unlikely to throw himself at the mercy of the UN war crimes tribunal when he goes on trial tomorrow accused of masterminding ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s.

He has branded the charges as politically motivated and refused to recognize the authority of the court.

«That's your problem,» Milosevic snarled at the judges at The Hague when brought before them last summer, disdaining to enter a plea and serving notice of the fight to come.

Dressed with boardroom sobriety, square-jawed and white-haired, he has used his pretrial appearances to insist on what, apparently, is a sincere conviction of his own innocence.

«I sleep soundly at night. My conscience is clear,» the 61-year-old grandfather has said. He listens to Sinatra ballads, talks regularly to the wife who was his high school sweetheart and helps fellow inmates with their English.

But his combative edge is never far below the surface.

«This is not a battle that I will miss,» he promised the tribunal in a gravelly voice in his last statement before trial was to begin.

Croatian President Stipe Mesic remembers warning Milosevic in 1991 that he was bent on a disastrous course that could spill enough blood to get him lynched by his own people. «He just sat back, puffed at his cigar and said: 'We have yet to see who will be hanged',» Mesic told Reuters.

His grand strategy failed, but Milosevic's brilliance as a tactician and manipulator created ambivalence among Western envoys who dealt with him as peacemaker in a decade of war. Some, including former US Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke, grudgingly admired how he wrong-footed opponents. That sentiment was not shared by former NATO supreme commander General Wesley Clark, who orchestrated an 11-week bombing campaign in response to a Milosevic crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

In foreign eyes, Milosevic was something of a Jekyll and Hyde character - part peacemaker and part warmonger - until he finally crossed the West over Kosovo and was placed definitively among the ranks of the monsters. A campaign of Western propaganda in 1998-99 made him the West's undisputed Public Enemy Number One although, unlike his successor in that role, Osama Bin Laden, he had never directly attacked the interests or the people of Western powers.

In transcripts of wiretapped telephone conversations published recently in Croatia, Milosevic comes across as a run-of-the-mill despot, harassed by a spoiled family, dogged by incompetent yes-men, gratified by a polite call from Bill Clinton aboard Air Force One.

There are as yet no tapes to show what he thought when Bosnian-Serb guns were blasting and strafing helpless civilians in Sarajevo or when Kosovo villages were burning. But his prosecutors and the victims they represent have no need to probe his thoughts. They aim to prove that his deeds led ruthlessly and directly to war crimes and genocide.

The indictments say he was motivated by a desire to enlarge Serbia. He insists he acted to defend Serbs. Some believe all he ever really wanted was to secure power at any cost.

Milosevic earned a fearsome reputation as an unscrupulous leader ready to embrace war and violent nationalism. His mastery of the domestic political scene gave him an iron grip on power for years while he preserved a veneer of democracy. It was in Kosovo that Milosevic first made a name, pledging to protect Serbs who felt threatened by majority Albanians and revoking the province's autonomy to install apartheid-style rule.

He had played the nationalist card in the Croatian and Bosnian wars, but left the dirty work to others like Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian-Serb General Ratko Mladic, the two most-wanted suspects still at large.

He dropped them and withdrew support for rebel Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia when they became too costly to save. Then came his most prominent role on the world stage, when he consorted with world leaders, including Clinton, for the Paris signing ceremonies of the 1995 Dayton peace accord that ended the Bosnian war.

It was a high point for Milosevic who, according to one observer at the talks, «seemed to view himself as the equal of the people with whom he was dealing.»

But, in hindsight, he misread those leaders, miscalculated how far he could go in Kosovo and misjudged his own people.

He survived several waves of popular protests during his rule. But he overreached in 2000, seeking an unprecedented second term as Yugoslav president and losing in the first round to moderate nationalist Vojislav Kostunica. On October 5, still trying to insist on a runoff vote, he was brought down by demonstrators who stormed and set ablaze the federal Parliament and Serbian state television in mass revolt.

Six months later, after a 36-hour siege of his Belgrade villa and one bungled arrest bid, Milosevic surrendered and was taken to prison in the early hours of April 1.