Milosevic, Saddam cases show need to streamline trials of ousted rulers

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Slobodan Milosevic's death and the chaotic prosecution of Saddam Hussein underscore the need to streamline trials of ousted rulers to prevent them from stalling the proceedings and rallying their followers.

Milosevic, who was found dead in his cell Saturday, had been on trial before the U.N. court in The Hague since February 2002 on 66 counts of crimes, including genocide, allegedly committed during the Balkans wars of the previous decade.

In the Milosevic case, the prosecution decision to file such a large number of charges all but guaranteed a slow, ponderous trial, experts say. The court's decision to let Milosevic handle his own defense worsened the defendant's health and brought even more delays.

Milosevic was careful not to leave a paper trail. Decisions were taken among a small circle of top officials, requiring the prosecution to find witnesses from a select group.

Given all those obstacles, some international jurists and human rights experts believe that in future cases, it would be better to zero in on a handful of allegations and prosecute them quickly -- even at the expense of depriving some victims of a measure of justice.

All the problems that had dogged the Milosevic trial were carefully studied by American and Iraqi authorities as they prepared the prosecution of Saddam in far-off Baghdad.

U.S. officials close to the Saddam case said they believed The Hague prosecutors made a mistake in filing too many charges against Milosevic.

To avoid the same pitfalls, U.S. and Iraqi officials decided instead to divide the prosecution of Saddam into a series of about a dozen narrowly focused cases -- each involving specific atrocities.

The first trial, which began Oct. 19, was limited to the roles of Saddam and seven co-defendants in the deaths of about 140 Shiite villagers following an assassination attempt against the ex-president in Dujail in 1982.

Other cases, such as alleged mass murder of Kurds, the suppression of the Shiite revolt of 1991 and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, are in various stages of preparation and may be tried later.

If Saddam is convicted of a capital offense before the whole series of trials is completed, Iraqi authorities have the option of executing him and forgoing the rest of the proceedings.

The Iraqi court also has refused to allow Saddam to handle his own defense, and when his attorneys walked out during a raucous session in February, the chief judge appointed replacements.

After a few weeks of a boycott, the original defense attorneys returned to court. A get-tough policy by the new chief trial judge has curbed outbursts by Saddam and his half brother Barzan Ibrahim and generally put the proceedings on track after chaotic early sessions.

A U.N. tribunal investigating the 1994 genocide of more than half a million people in Rwanda, meanwhile, has convicted 20 suspects and acquitted three since it was set up in 1994.

In an interview Saturday with the British Broadcasting Corp., David Owen, a former Balkan peace envoy, cited the Iraqi formula, saying fewer charges should have been filed against Milosevic in the interest of a speedy trial.

"If we'd had a much shorter trial and verdict, the world would be much happier about the whole process," Owen said.

Such an approach, however, probably would have angered those whose cases were not deemed important enough for a trial.

However, Dicker, of Human Rights Watch, said that even Nuremberg did not provide a final accounting of Nazi crimes. That took the separate trials of Adolf Eichmann and hundreds of lesser figures

"I think we need to dial down our expectations of the history-telling functions of these trials," Dicker said.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Robert H. Reid, correspondent at large for The Associated Press, covered the Balkan wars and the arraignment of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague in 2001.