- guardian.co.uk, Sunday February 10 2002 01.52 GMT
The setting is modest and the charges against him will be read out calmly and slowly, to make sure the bank of translators is not rushed. There will be nothing, in short, to indicate that this is one of the pivotal moments in legal history - the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, former Yugoslav President and the alleged architect of a decade of wars in the Balkans.
It is the first time an international court has tried a former head of state for such grave crimes. Milosevic is accused of masterminding the ethnic cleansing that saw Serb forces bring mayhem to large parts of former Yugoslavia in nine years of war. Four separate conflicts saw 150,000 killed, three million displaced and tens of thousands raped, tortured and jailed.
If he is convicted, supporters of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia hope it will send a signal around the world that no dictator is safe from his misdeeds.
Milosevic's trial dwarfs all those held so far in the tribunal's nine-year life. More than 200 witnesses are likely to be called, with the chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, saying the trial is likely to last two years. And this is despite three separate trials being telescoped together: Milosevic stands accused of war crimes in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia. Kosovo will go first, the Bosnian and Croatian cases will follow.
Milosevic is only one of five defendants facing charges for Kosovo - the others are key members of his war cabinet, who are still free. They are jointly accused of two charges: crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws and customs of war.
Behind the dry text in the charge sheet are the horrors perpetrated by his security forces during fighting in Kosovo in 1999. In January of that year he is accused of sending troops into the ethnic Albanian village of Racak, unleashing a massacre that left 45 civilians dead. The killings brought a confrontation with Nato that resulted, in March of that year, in war with Yugoslavia.
The war saw a further campaign of horrors - the forcible expulsion of 740,000 ethnic Albanians, many shelled, shot, raped and maimed along the way. The charge sheet details massacres of ethnic Albanians in the towns of Srbica, Dakova and Velika Krusa, where men were separated from women and machine-gunned.
The case against Milosevic boils down to a simple assertion: appalling massacres were carried out by the security forces and Milosevic, as commander of those forces, is indirectly responsible for their conduct.
The trial will take place in a setting a world away from the killing fields of Kosovo. The man accused of ordering the rape of teenage girls and the butchery of boys will stand in court with no handcuffs or other restraints, in case he hurts himself.
There is a rest room behind the dock and at night a comfortable, air-conditioned cell. A doctor is on duty and a fully equipped ambulance is available to rush him to hospital day or night.
Translation of the proceedings is in English, French and BCS, short for Bosnian, Croat and Serbian. To outsiders, this is the language known as Serbo-Croat, but the term is used to assuage Balkan nationalists who say their languages are separate.
Security is tight: the entire building is wired, with electronic doors curbing access even for senior offi cials - none of the prosecutors, for example, can get to the first-floor offices of the judges.
For Milosevic, who was 60 last August, this may be the final act in a roller-coaster career which began one spring day in 1987 when, as a senior official in the Yugoslav communist administration, he was sent to Kosovo to quell a Serb nationalist rebellion and joined the nationalists instead. Within a year he was President of Serbia, the main republic in Yugoslavia, riding a powerful nationalist wave, and oversaw the collapse of the communist system.
When Slovenia, Croatia and then Bosnia opted for independence from Yugoslavia, he sent in tanks. They went in again in 1999 in Kosovo, but this time Nato intervened and in May of that year, as the bombing was still going on, Milosevic was indicted by the court which his actions had done so much to create.
Kosovo was Milosevic's undoing. With Yugoslavia in ruins due to war and corruption, he was ousted in elections in October 2000. The following June, under threat of aid being withheld, the authorities spirited him out of the country and delivered him to The Hague. Milosevic refused to recognise the legitimacy of the tribunal in pre-trial hearings and has chosen not to have legal representation. He does have 'legal advisers', including the French lawyer Jacques Vergès, famous for defending Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal.
The weight of evidence against Milosevic seems overwhelming, but prosecutors still need to prove guilt in individual crimes.
For The Hague itself, the trial is a watershed. Supporters say the court has sent a message around the world that warlords may face the long arm of international law. But there are concerns at the limits of the scatter-gun approach of the tribunal, which will indict only a fraction of those who committed atrocities in the Balkans.
And there is opposition to the court from Serbs, who see The Hague as a victors' court. More than half the 80 Hague indictees are Serbs. 'All of the Serbs will be watching the trial; it is beamed live on state television,' said Mira Milosevic (no relation to Slobodan), a Serbian media researcher in London.
'Serbs don't believe in the justice system of The Hague. The Hague is not interested in what Milosevic did to Serb people.'
