The dead bear witness: former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for war crimes. Will the Balkans finally get a taste of justice?

• Author: Fisher, Ian
• Position: International

The remains of 372 people killed 10 years ago were laid out on a warehouse floor in the Bosnian town of Sanski Most. In the sameness of the bones, there were traces of distinct human beings--a Mozart T-shirt, a pocket watch. Two forensics experts arranged the bones like pieces of a puzzle and labeled them: B for a whole body, BP for something less.

What seems overwhelming is the size of the crime: These Bosnian Muslims were among thousands killed and dumped in mass graves across the former Yugoslavia during the decade of wars that marked the breakup of the nation.

For the past nine months, the man accused of being most responsible for these deaths, Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Yugoslavia, and of Serbia, its largest remaining republic, has been standing trial before an international tribunal in The Hague, the Netherlands.

Milosevic (me-LOH-se-vich), the first head of state ever to be tried for war crimes, is accused of leading a campaign of genocide, the systematic murder of an entire people. His aim, prosecutors allege, was to "cleanse" the land he believed belonged to ethnic Serbs, eliminating other groups who had long lived there, such as Croats, Muslims, and ethnic Albanians. The accusations against Milosevic span three wars, in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. His trial--the most significant war-crimes prosecution since Nuremberg, where the leaders of Nazi. Germany were judged for the crimes of World War II--is expected to last another year.

Milosevic, who is his own attorney, says he is innocent, that he will show he acted only to keep Yugoslavia whole. "This is a malicious, utterly hostile process aimed at justifying the crime against my country, using this court as a weapon against my country and my people," he told judges in The Hague.

A LOST BRIDGE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

Before it began breaking apart in 1991, Yugoslavia was an imperfect but functioning multiethnic state in the Balkans, a mountainous area in southeastern Europe. It was a unique bridge between Islamic East and Christian West: Serbs, whose religion is traditionally Orthodox Christian, made up 36 percent of the population; Croats, mostly Roman Catholic, 20 percent; Bosnian Muslims, 9 percent; and Albanians, mostly Muslim, 8 percent.

Milosevic was already the President of Serbia, one of Yugoslavia's six republics, when Slovenia and Croatia broke away in 1991, thus starting the first Balkan wars. Then in 1992, the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence, sparking a brutal war that lasted until 1995. Milosevic had been elected President of all Yugoslavia by the time war erupted in 1999 in Kosovo, a predominently ethnic Albanian province in southern Serbia.

More than 200,000 people died in the wars of Yugoslavia's breakup, most of them Muslims. Bosnia is now largely divided along ethnic lines; international peacekeepers patrol the borders. Foreign bureaucrats run Bosnia (now an independent nation) and Kosovo (which remains part of Serbia), and will continue to...