The presentation of Timothy William Waters’ cross-disciplinary examination of the longest, most controversial war crimes trial of the modern era, “The Milosevic Trial – An Autopsy” was less of a book launch and more of a series of personal accounts of the bloody history of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavian states. CEU’s Rector John Shattuck, former judge and the first Chief Prosecutor of ICTY Richard Goldstone, Legal Studies Professor Tibor Varady and Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law Timothy William Waters shared their views on the Yugoslavian tragedy and Milosevic on the May 27 event at OSA.
As former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State under the Clinton administration Shattuck said in his opening remarks, the event was “both interesting and exciting for having four people together who were involved in the Milosevic drama.” He described Milosevic as the “symbol of post Cold War disintegration,” and the trial as the “symbol of limitations of international lay to bring about reconciliation.” Shattuck recalled the time he and Senator Bob Dole met Milosevic after a fact-finding tour to Kosovo. In reaction to findings in Kosovo, Milosevic said he was “fighting terrorists.”
Nationalism, racism, and the “organized crime head” behavior were the key points of the “Milosevic story,” Shattuck said. He created a national narrative of victimhood and introduced the concept of ethnic cleansing early on via the Serbian media he controlled. He managed to use people so that he never had to dirty his own hands, thus escaping indictment for so long.
In his closing comments Shattuck praised the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), saying it was instrumental in ending the war.
Richard Goldstone’s first visit to OSA coincided with the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia. He recalled trying to get Milosevic to accept NATO’s minimum points to end the bombing and how Milosevic’s refused to negotiate. “It didn’t register for him that he might end up in the Hague.” Goldstone praised Waters’ book for the way it “juxtaposes the academic and legal contributions,…and adds original and new info to the Milosevic trial.” He also noted that as the trial ended prematurely due to Milosevic’s death in 2005, it’s still unclear if the prosecution had made a good case against Milosevic.
Tibor Varady, who contributed to Waters’ book, shared his personal experiences of life of Yugoslavia in the past decades of its existence. Yugoslavia was the most multiethnic country in Europe, he said, noting that other multiethnic countries, such as Czechoslovakia and the USSR, fell apart peacefully. Disintegration was violent only in Yugoslavia. By the time Tito died in 1980, the power of the communist party – the cohesive force in Yugoslavia - was fading, yet there was a growing number of people identifying themselves as “Yugoslavs”, not as Croats, Serbs, and so on. In the 1980s Milosevic was popular with the West, not only for “being a New York banker” as Shattuck put it, but also for being in favor of centralization. Under Tito, a “well-balanced Yugoslavian” history was created. After his death, every ethnic group thought their people’s suffering had been concealed by this well-balanced history and the narrative of victimhood appeared, Varady explained the difference of history-creation under and after Tito, and why Milosevic could only base his leadership on nationalism.
Varady shared less-known facts from the first years of the war in Serbia: the anti-Milosevic sentiment of Serbian intelligentsia, and the humorous mock trial of NATO leaders in Belgrade, which all came to an end with the NATO bombing of Serbian TV. “The question of who were the good guys and who were the bad guys in Yugoslavia remains. But it’s the wrong question. At this point we don’t have a better answer than this book,” Varady concluded.

Instead of presenting his book, Timothy Waters chose to reflect on the Milosevic trial, which “was supposed to be the flagship trial of ICTY,” but ended prematurely without meaningful closure. Waters highlighted the extraordinarily high expectations for and the ambitions of the trial. Milosevic was accused of more crimes than any other inductee, and most crimes had already been tried in other cases. As Waters explained, what made the Milosevic trial different was that in it, the prosecution alleged a single criminal network covering all three wars and almost all the crimes committed by Serbs. "If there was a Serbian criminal network, Milosevic was the network," Waters argued.
Waters shared his theory regarding the different ways history was used during the trial. We saw the Tribunal trying to produce both sweeping historical narratives and fine-grained accounts of criminal organizations. Talking about the consumption of history, Waters added that advocates of the tribunal claim trials create truths that lead to reconciliation, but that there is no evidence this is true. Finally, Waters touched upon the structure and mission of his book, “The Milosevic Trial – An Autopsy.” The authors of the collection have worked on the tribunal, are scholars and specialists of the region. The mission of the book was to put the Milosevic trial in a broader context, and to “measure the effects of international criminal law in the conflicts zones which are supposed to be the beneficiaries of its work.”






