Milosevic, who fell ill with flu last week, the first serious bout of any illness since his defence case began in October last year, told the judges he was still feeling unwell.
He asked to begin examination in chief of his next witness – former Serbian foreign minister Vladislav Jovanovic - next week. The judges granted the request, and Jovanovic is expected to begin his testimony on February 14.
During the two sessions that did take place this week, prosecutors tried to shake Balevic’s interpretation of the situation in Kosovo throughout the near-decade of the Balkan wars.
In his main testimony two weeks ago, Balevic spoke of the sufferings Kosovo Serbs were subjected to during this period on the part of their Albanian neighbours - including humiliation, expulsions and killings.
He insisted it was the Kosovo Albanians, not the Serbs, who embraced nationalism and harboured ambitions to have an “ethnically clean” province.
Although the prosecutors presented film clippings and other evidence to challenge some of this interpretation of events, Balevic remained unyielding it his views.
Throughout the testimony, the former Yugoslav president kept his witness mostly focused on the factual background of the indictment, rather than on the charges themselves.
By the end of it, however, he did move to more concrete allegations covering the period after the beginning of the NATO bombardments of Serbia in 1999, when troops under Milosevic’s command are alleged to have expelled some 800,000 Albanians in one of the major operations of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.
During cross-examination, Balevic confirmed he that saw masses of Kosovo Albanians leaving the capital Pristina at the time, but remained adamant that they were not expelled by the Serb security forces, as the indictment alleges.
MILOSEVIC’S LAWYER ORDERED TO STAY
The president of the Hague tribunal this week refused permission for British lawyers Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins to withdraw from their roles as assigned counsel in the Milosevic trial.
The former Yugoslav president is currently presenting his defence in person, but the two lawyers remain involved in the case and have recently been representing his interests mainly in legal and technical matters.
Judge Theodor Meron’s decision, made public on February 7, appears to close all the formal ways for the two lawyers to withdraw from the case they were assigned to in September last year.
After repeated bouts of high blood pressure prevented Milosevic from starting his defence case on schedule this summer, the trial chamber decided to assign him a defence team against his will, appointing Kay and Higgins.
The two lawyers had long been involved in the trial as amici curiae or friends of the court assigned to ensure that Milosevic, who was acting as his own lawyer at the time, received a fair trial.
Upon their appointment as assigned counsel, Milosevic refused to communicate with the duo and on several occasions publicly challenged their competence in the courtroom. His proposed defence witnesses reacted to the development by boycotting the court, effectively bringing the trial to a halt.
Kay and Higgins appealed their own appointment this autumn and lost – but they won an important concession for Milosevic, who was again allowed to prepare his witnesses and conduct the examination in chief.
Almost at the same time, the two lawyers asked to be removed from the case, claiming that Milosevic’s refusal to cooperate made it impossible for them to function properly as his lawyers.
The court’s Registrar – in charge, among others, of assigning and withdrawing the defence lawyers – initially redirected their request to the trial chamber, which refused it, and later turned the request down himself. Kay and Higgins then appealed to the tribunal president, asking him to reverse these decisions.
But Judge Meron denied the appeal on all grounds put forward by the lawyers.
The most important of these appears to be Meron’s conviction that the accused must not be allowed to claim a breakdown in communication in the hope that this would then result in the withdrawal of his defence team.
Instead he advised Kay and his assistant to “realise the breadth of activities they can carry out even in the absence of Milosevic’s cooperation and to continue making the best … efforts … that are possible under the circumstances”.
“Representing criminal defendants is not an easy task,” Meron wrote in the ruling that conclusively tied the two unwilling British lawyers to their equally unwilling client. “Assigned counsel would do well to recognise that fact.”
Kay has already warned the trial chamber that if they refuse to let him leave, he will do so anyway and face the potential consequences at the British Bar Council. It was not immediately clear whether he now intended to act on this warning.
(See Milosevic Judges Face Crucial Choice, TU No 382, 19-Nov-04 http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/tri/tri_382_2_eng.txt )
DEFENCE CASE LENGTH
Milosevic has so far spent 3,465 minutes - 57 hours and 45 minutes - or around 14.5 out of the 90 sitting days allocated to his defence case.
The information - the first systematic account of time Milosevic has spent thus far in the defence stage of the Hague’s most high-profile case - was released by tribunal judges this week.
A year ago, the trial chamber allocated Milosevic 90 days in which to run his defence case – the same amount that the prosecution spent on their phase of the trial, which began in February 2002. A further 60 days were allocated to the prosecution for cross-examining the defence witnesses, amounting to a total of 150 sitting days allocated to this part of the trial.
Milosevic has repeatedly complained that he was allocated for his defence only half of the roughly 300 days the prosecutors spent presenting their case.
But in this first public account of time spent on the defence case, the judges made a point of stressing that during the prosecution phase, Milosevic in fact used more time cross-examining the witnesses that the prosecutors used in presenting their testimonies in chief.
Now, the judges counted, the prosecutors have used almost 11 full sitting days in cross examination. Another almost three days were used for administrative matters, the judges announced on February 10.
The judges warned this amounted to more than two-thirds of the total time Milosevic has spent on his case in chief – the amount of time that was allocated to the defence case.
The judges intend to publish similar records on a regular bases, they announced.
Ana Uzelac is IWPR’s programme manager in The Hague.
