Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic

The war crimes prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic is one of the most controversial and extraordinary trials ever held. For the first time, a former president is in the dock of a United Nations court, charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes including murder, rape, and torture. Milosevic is being tried for orchestrating three separate wars spread over nine years that tore Yugoslavia apart, killed two hundred thousand, left four million homeless, and ended with NATO being dragged into the first conflict in its history. But this huge trial, featuring more than three hundred witnesses, has produced huge problems. With key witnesses refusing to testify, Milosevic falling ill, and the death of the leading judge, the case has ballooned into a multimillion-dollar trial lasting more than three years. Author Chris Stephen reported on the wars of former Yugoslavia, witnessing some of the crimes of which Milosevic is accused. In Judgement Day he produces a blow-by-blow account of this courtroom drama, centered on the daily battle between Milosevic and his prosecutors. And he tells, for the first time, the remarkable story of the war crimes court itself, created in reaction to the horror of the Bosnian war in 1992. Stephen moves from the brightly lit courtroom to the muddy battlefields to meet victims reliving their sufferings and investigators forced to wade knee-deep in corpses hunting for vital evidence. Finally, he traces the remarkable turnaround of the United States, the nation that did more than any other to create the UN war crimes court, but post–9/11 is now the most vocal critic of plans to make the International Criminal Court its permanent successor. Judgement Day is the first authoritative account of the most important international trial since Nuremberg.