The BBC4 Storyville documentary on the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, broadcast in two parts on 7 & 8 February 2007, was on the face of it a study of a war crimes trial carried out in a painstaking manner which was ultimately unable to proceed to the foregone conclusion by the untimely death of the accused.
What emerges from a careful viewing is rather different. Although the producers make plain their ready acceptance of the prosecution case, most conspicuously by reporting claimed war crimes as established fact, the real story steadily emerges.
From the moment a caption appears, at the beginning of both parts, stating that 200,000 people were killed during the Bosnian war, it is apparent that programme research was extremely poor. In 2000 the ICTYʼs own demographers had revised their estimate of fatalities down from 200,000 to 100,000.
But the greatest damage is done by the lead prosecutor in the case, the British barrister Geoffrey Nice. Inexplicably Mr Nice had adopted a strategy of calling hundreds witnesses to give testimony of their experiences of ethnic cleaning and massacre. He suggests that it was his duty to present the suffering of the victims to the court – how else could the court come to a proper verdict. Yet Mr Nice would have known full well from his years of experience that one of the cardinal principles of modern law is that there is no special treatment for victims: the duty of the court is to hear all the factual evidence bearing on the guilt or innocence of the accused. Examining countless witnesses, often giving evidence anonymously, and many of whom had quite evidently been heavily coached, was simply wasting an awful lot of time. No court but the Hague Tribunal would have tolerated this farce.
Why then did Nice choose this course? The only rational answer is that he didnʼt even have the beginnings of a case and was struggling to find anything new. His only recourse was to hope that the headline-grabbing testimony of victims would create a worldwide impression of the defendantʼs guilt, enabling the fake Tribunal to return a guilty verdict without inviting too much scrutiny from the outside world.
Although Nice sustained his prosecution for almost four years, he continued to run into embarrassing problems. Witnesses who had entered into plea-bargaining agreements failed to testify as promised. Ignorance of what had happened often led the prosecution to think they had damning evidence when they didnʼt. Sheer desperation to find something that might stick caused them to run with evidence they had not properly checked.
This documentary is really about the slow agony of a prosecution in meltdown with Geoffrey Nice admitting at the end that Milosevicʼs death was probably the best result they could have had.
View the deconstructed version of the BBC4 Storyville documentary: