THE HAGUE — He's in a maximum-security prison, at grave risk of a heart attack and on trial facing 66 counts of war crimes. Yet in his mind--the only domain where Slobodan Milosevic remains omnipotent--the erstwhile Balkan strongman is still calling the shots.
By refusing expert defense counsel in his trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Milosevic has cast himself in the role of wily attorney defending the falsely accused. It is the performance of a lifetime, even if played more for his shrinking audience of supporters back home than for the three-judge panel that will decide his future.
In the nearly six months since his trial began, the 60-year-old former Yugoslav president has shown himself to be diligent in preparing cross-examinations and alert to inconsistencies in witness testimony, say court observers and prosecution sources.
But the workload he carries in the biggest war crimes trial since Nazi leaders were brought to justice in Nuremberg is taking its toll on Milosevic's health and threatening to further slow proceedings that will, under the best of circumstances, run two more years.
And in that "martyred" state of a man working himself to death to fight a bloodless bureaucracy, Milosevic is playing the abused victim and calling the court's authority into question.
A lawyer by training but not in practice, Milosevic spends hours each night preparing for the next day's parade of prosecution witnesses, who have already numbered more than 100, with 177 left to go. He has so far cross-examined every one of them, often drawing rebukes from Judge Richard May for badgering, wasting time with irrelevant questions or trying to put the North Atlantic Treaty Organization instead of himself on trial for the 1999 war over Kosovo province.
"He has the ability to hold up his rights and his presumption of innocence, and he has made absolutely clear that he will challenge the prosecution at every step," said the court's spokesman, Jim Landale. "But he is entitled to do that, just as he is entitled to the right to defend himself."
Milosevic has also drawn out the trial by refusing to accept any written documentation into the record without live witness testimony, said Florence Hartmann, spokeswoman for chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.
