A trial for Serbia at The Hague

As former Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic prepares to go on trial in The Hague next week on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, even his enemies in the new reformist Yugoslav government are thinking of helping him.

Their aim is not to save Mr. Milosevic. Rather, they hope to salvage something of Serbia's tattered reputation in a trial at the international tribunal that they fear will write the definitive history of the Balkan wars of the 1990s and condemn the Serbian nation, not just its president, for the atrocities that were committed.

"If Milosevic is sentenced for aggression and genocide, since he was president of the state, the state would take responsibility," says Predrag Simic, a top aide to Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica. "That poses a dilemma. Should we just let the trial go on without any participation by the state?"

Last week the speaker of the Yugoslav parliament, Dragoljub Micunovic, called on the government to create a legal team to take part in the trial. "The genocide accusation ... risks repercussions on the state," he said. "We must be able to defend ourselves against certain accusations."

Hoping to capitalize on this new mood, Milosevic's lawyer, Zdenko Tomanovic, said Wednesday that he would ask the Yugoslav and Serbian governments to give him documents that could bolster Milosevic's case.

This stance reflects a widespread feeling among Serbs that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is a political court, biased against them.

That feeling, in turn, undermines Belgrade's willingness to cooperate with the court by handing over suspects, even though hundreds of millions of dollars in desperately needed international aid depend on such assistance.

The US Congress has given Belgrade a March 31 deadline for cooperating with the court, in exchange for US aid and US support for continued assistance from international lending organizations.

"The DOS knows it cannot get around the tribunal; it is just a question of how they cooperate," says one Western diplomat here, referring to the Democratic Opposition of Serbia coalition that took power in October 2000 after Milosevic's fall.

Zoran Djindjic, the premier of Serbia, the dominant republic in what is left of Yugoslavia, told the daily Danas newspaper on Thursday that he hoped four men indicted with Milosevic and currently living in Serbia would go to The Hague voluntarily. "If they don't do so, we should find a solution to get them there," he added.

"Someone will have to go," says Nenad Stepanovic, a respected columnist with the weekly Vreme magazine. "But this way of cooperation is not good, making Yugoslav war criminals our only export product, all we can sell to the West."

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