front cover of Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
Louis Sell
Duke University Press, 2002
In Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia former U.S. foreign service officer Louis Sell fills a gap in the literature on the Yugoslav conflicts by covering both the domestic Yugoslav side of the collapse and the history and consequences of international interventions in the wars in Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, Bosnia in 1992–1995, and Kosovo from 1998–1999. Sell focuses on the life and career of Milosevic, from the perspective of both a diplomatic insider intimately familiar with the region and a scholar who has researched all the available English and Serbo-Croatian sources.
Sell spent much of his diplomatic career in Eastern Europe and Russia, including eight years in Yugoslavia between 1974 and 2000, and witnessed the events that contributed to the dissolution and ultimate destruction of Yugoslavia. In Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia he provides first-hand observations of Milosevic from the heady days of his rise to power and, later, in the endgame of the Bosnian war, including the Dayton Peace Conference. Drawing on a wide range of published material as well as interviews with Yugoslav and foreign participants, Sell covers such areas as Milosevic’s relationship to the military, his responsibility for war crimes, his methods of persuasion and negotiation, and his notoriously explosive personality.
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Travesty
The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice
John Laughland
Pluto Press, 2007
In 2006, Slobodan Milosevic died in prison in the Hague during a four-year marathon trial for war crimes. John Laughland was one of the last Western journalists to meet with him. Laughland had followed the trial from its beginning and wrote extensively on it in the Guardian and the Spectator, challenging the legitimacy of the Yugoslav Tribunal and the hypocrisy of "international justice."



In this short book, Laughland gives a full account of the trial---the longest trial in history---from the moment the indictment was issued at the height of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia to the day of Milosevic's mysterious death in custody. "International justice" is supposed to hold war criminals to account, but---as the trials of both Milosevic and Saddam Hussein show---the indictments are politically motivated and the judicial procedures are irredeemably corrupt. Laughland argues that international justice is an impossible dream and that such show trials are little more than propaganda exercises designed to distract attention from the war crimes committed by Western states.



"Study this story. . . . The truth is hard to find, but in John Laughland we are fortunate to have a man blessed with the desire to find the truth."
---Ramsey Clark, from the Foreword

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front cover of Twilight of Impunity
Twilight of Impunity
The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic
Judith Armatta
Duke University Press, 2010
An eyewitness account of the first major international war-crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg trials, Twilight of Impunity is a gripping guide to the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The historic trial of the “Butcher of the Balkans” began in 2002 and ended abruptly with Milosevic’s death in 2006. Judith Armatta, a lawyer who spent three years in the former Yugoslavia during Milosevic’s reign, had a front-row seat at the trial. In Twilight of Impunity she brings the dramatic proceedings to life, explains complex legal issues, and assesses the trial’s implications for victims of the conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s and international justice more broadly. Armatta acknowledges the trial’s flaws, particularly Milosevic’s grandstanding and attacks on the institutional legitimacy of the International Criminal Tribunal. Yet she argues that the trial provided an indispensable legal and historical narrative of events in the former Yugoslavia and a valuable forum where victims could tell their stories and seek justice. It addressed crucial legal issues, such as the responsibility of commanders for crimes committed by subordinates, and helped to create a framework for conceptualizing and organizing other large-scale international criminal tribunals. The prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague was an important step toward ending impunity for leaders who perpetrate egregious crimes against humanity.
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