Milosevic On Trial
Introduction by Stacy Sullivan

Our first issue of CWP Monitor focusses on the UN Tribunal’s indictment of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Summary

The United Nations Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted Milosevic on May 24, 1999, at the height of the Kosovo crisis, when he was still president of Yugoslavia. Although Milosevic is widely believed to have been responsible for war crimes committed in Bosnia and Croatia in the early and mid-1990s, he has only been indicted for crimes committed in Kosovo from January - May 1999. The reason is that in order to issue a war crimes indictment, the ICTY must build a case around specific laws in which it can prove that specific crimes were committed. It has been difficult for ICTY investigators to directly link Milosevic to the expulsion and mass-murder of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia and Croatia from 1991-1995, since they have not been able to unearth a "paper trail" of written commands or to obtain the testimony of high-level collaborators. However, the fresh atrocities committed in Kosovo in 1999 – and eyewitnesses who survived massacres – provided war crimes investigators with ample evidence to build a case against him.

Milosevic has been indicted specifically for the destruction of 10 cities in Kosovo and the killing of 314 Albanians between January -May 1999. The ICTY does not allege that Milosevic committed these crimes himself, but rather is guilty through command responsibility. The indictment alleges that, as President of Yugoslavia, Milosevic was Supreme Commander of the Yugoslav Army and Federal Police and was therefore responsible for their actions in Kosovo. For the destruction of these ten cities and the killing of these 314 people, the indictment accuses Milosevic of:

1. Violations of the Laws and Customs of War, defined by ICTY’s statute to include the wanton destruction of cities not justified by military necessity, attacks on undefended localities, attacks on religious and cultural institutions and plunder of public and private property.
   
   
2. Crimes Against Humanity, defined by ICTY’s statute to include mass murder, extermination, enslavement and deportation committed against civilians on a large scale.

In order to prove that Milosevic is guilty of these crimes, Tribunal prosecutors will have to establish that Milosevic either ordered or knew that the cities named were being attacked and the people listed were being killed, and that he failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures to stop it from happening.