The Strange Death of Slobodan Milošević and Its Cover-Up by the ICTY

Part I

More than 15 years have elapsed since the death of Slobodan Milošević, former president of Serbia and, subsequently, of Yugoslavia, in The Hague. Western mainstream media reacted to the news with gleeful rejoicing, albeit tempered with furious annoyance that they had been denied the delightful spectacle they had been eagerly waiting for: the U.N.-established ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia handing down multiple genocide convictions on a political leader whom they had reviled for the better part of two decades.

Yet no sooner had the ICTY announced his sudden death than a number of troubling stories began to emerge about Milošević’s last days in the ICTY’s prison.  The ICTY responded to these stories with its usual campaign of prevarication and obfuscation. As for the media, they had little interest in investigating the strange death in ICTY custody of a man whom leading NATO countries had targeted for assassination and whom they had sought to arrest and remove from Yugoslavia since the conclusion of their frustrating and largely unsuccessful 11-week bombing campaign in 1999. To the media, any coverage of the ICTY that was less than wholly adulatory was an act of lèse majesté.

From start to finish, the ICTY controlled the investigation of Milošević’s death, not to mention the flow of information to the outside world. As always, the ICTY, though supposedly under the authority of the U.N. Security Council, was accountable to no one but itself. It was inevitable therefore that the ICTY’s public relations blitz would eventually prevail, and that we would never find out what really happened to the ICTY’s most famous prisoner. To this day, Milošević’s sudden death remains shrouded in mystery.

Slobodan Milošević died on the morning of March 11, 2006, at the Scheveningen detention center—the ICTY’s own private prison—a few weeks before the expected conclusion of his trial. The cause of death appeared to be a heart attack. The ICTY responded initially by suggesting that Milošević may have taken his own life. However, by the time the ICTY published the results of its internal inquiry more than two months later, it had given up on the suicide theory. Instead, while it accepted myocardial infarction (medical term for heart attack) as the cause of death, the ICTY nonetheless insisted on blaming Milošević himself for his own death. In order to do so, it went from one convoluted theory to another, presenting almost no credible evidence in support of any of them. The ICTY’s report was of a piece with much of the rest of its work during its 25-year existence: long on rhetoric and conjecture, short on evidence, free and easy with smears and unrestrained in unsubstantiated accusations.

ICTY’S FIRST RESPONSE

Slobodan Milošević’s death was not unexpected. He had suffered from a heart condition and high blood pressure for some time, and had been ill ever since NATO forces—in defiance of an order from the Yugoslav Constitutional Court—had abducted him and flown him to The Hague in June 2001. Since the fall of 2005, his health had visibly deteriorated. In November 2005, three medical specialists—one French, one Russian, one Serbian—examined him and warned that his condition was serious, that he had to rest for at least six weeks and that he needed to undergo tests. On Dec. 12, 2005, Milošević’s “assigned counsel”—attorneys that the ICTY had imposed on Milošević, but who worked independently of him—formally requested the ICTY trial chamber to release him provisionally so that he could receive treatment for his heart condition at the Moscow-based Bakulev Center for Cardiovascular Surgery. The treatment would take place during the upcoming Christmas recess. The ICTY prosecutors protested this request vehemently, filing innumerable motions in opposition, leveling all manner of accusations against Milošević and at the medical specialists who were recommending alternative, non-ICTY-sanctioned treatment. Though there had been considerable urgency to Milošević’s request given his obviously failing health, the tribunal judges, inexplicably, made no decision for more than two months. Finally, to no one’s surprise, on Feb. 23, 2006, the ICTY denied the request. A little more than two weeks later Milošević was dead.

On March 12, the day after Milošević’s death, the ICTY announced that preliminary autopsy results indicated that the cause of death was “myocardial infarction.” “Further,” the ICTY press release went on, “the pathologists identified two heart conditions that Slobodan Milošević suffered from, which they said would explain the myocardial infarction.”[i] The ICTY also promised a toxicological examination.

On March 17, the Dutch public prosecutor’s office released a statement, confirming that Milošević had “apparently died from a heart infarction.” Furthermore, the statement went on, the toxicological examination gave no indications of poisoning; instead, “a number of medicines prescribed for Mr. Milošević were found in the body material, but not in toxic concentration.”[ii] The statement also disclosed that

A request was received on Sunday, March 12 from the side of Milošević’s family to allow a Russian physician to be present during the autopsy. In view of the time passed from the moment of the decease, however, this turned out not to be possible anymore. Russian pathologists have been given the opportunity at a later time (March 14) to view the photographs of the autopsy and to study the preliminary autopsy report. Neither the Russian and Serbian pathologists nor the family have commented on the results of the autopsy.

Milošević was by no means the first prisoner of the ICTY to die in its prison. His death came on the heels of the death, apparently by suicide, of former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babić. In fact, defendants have died at Scheveningen at a fairly brisk pace. In addition to Babić and Milošević, Djordje Djukić, Slavko Dokmanović, Milan Kovačević and Slobodan Praljak have died in ICTY custody with legal proceedings against them still pending.

The ICTY responded to Milošević’s death the same way it had to the deaths of the other inmates. Whenever the ICTY’s media-tailored reputation for fairness and humaneness threatened to unravel, anonymous sources from within the bowels of the tribunal would put out one story after another, leaking highly selective tidbits from various “internal” documents to cast the tribunal in the best possible light and the recently deceased in the worst possible light. Thus, within hours of Milošević’s death, the ICTY was suggesting, via the usual embedded journalists, that it was the former Yugoslav leader, and he alone, who was responsible for his own death. Even as the ICTY was promising a full—internal, naturally—inquiry into the circumstances of Milošević’s death, it was anticipating the outcome of such an inquiry by telling the world that the ICTY had done nothing for which it could be blamed; that, to the contrary, it had provided first-rate, world-class medical care; and that it had behaved with impeccable professionalism and bend-over-backward generosity.

“The tribunal has nothing to be blamed for,” ICTY spokesman Christian Chartier was reported as saying on March 11. “The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia takes the utmost care of its indictees and of [Milošević] in particular.”[iii] In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Reppublica, Carla del Ponte, the ICTY’s chief prosecutor declared, “Conditions of detention in Scheveningen prison are absolutely the best that anyone could possibly imagine. No-one has ever complained. On the contrary, the detainees themselves recognize the enormous amount of positive attention lavished on them.”[iv]

No one has ever complained? Well, Milošević complained, though it didn’t do him much good, since his complaints were routinely ignored. Serb nationalist leader Vojislav Seselj also complained. He complained that he had had to wait three months for routine intestinal surgery; it didn’t do Seselj much good either. “Is this how General Djordje Djukić, Dr. Milan Kovačević, General Momir Talić and Slavko Dokmanović were killed?” Seselj asked.[v] “They all died because they did not receive medical assistance on time.”

Others also complained. Following the death of Milan Kovačević, his lawyer, Dušan Vučićević, accused the ICTY of negligence, claiming that his client had “bled to death because of errors by the prison staff.” He said that prison staff had initially ignored Kovačević’s cries of pain. Then, according to a New York Times report,

When the prison doctor arrived an hour later, the lawyer contends, the doctor misdiagnosed Dr. Kovačević’s crisis as a kidney problem and gave him a painkiller instead of rushing him to the nearby hospital. The lawyer said the autopsy had shown that Dr. Kovačević had not died of a heart attack but of a ruptured major blood vessel in his abdomen, which could have been repaired surgically…. In February, the hospital had found that Dr. Kovačević had an aneurysm, or widening, of a major blood vessel in the abdomen. “That aneurysm was never treated,” the lawyer said. “It was like a time bomb ticking in his body. We repeatedly asked for treatment.”[vi]

It was not surprising, therefore, that, in the aftermath of Milošević’s death, ICTY officials could feel confident that any story they came up with, no matter how little sense it made, would encounter little challenge.

Sure enough, on March 17, Judge Fausto Pocar, the tribunal’s president, announced,

I have full confidence in the professionalism of the Detention Unit’s Commanding Officer and his staff. This has been confirmed by thorough and frequent inspections of the U.N. Detention Unit by highly respected independent bodies. They have consistently reported that conditions in the Detention Unit are of the very highest standard.

Pocar also declared, “I met this week with a team of Russian pathologists who reviewed the autopsy report and informed me that in their view the procedure was conducted at the highest level and they were in full agreement with the results. I am informed that the Serbian pathologists hold the same view.”

This was strange, for, as we have seen, according to the Dutch public prosecutor’s office, “Neither the Russian and Serbian pathologists nor the family have commented on the results of the autopsy.” Moreover, in a subsequent letter to Pocar, Marko Milošević, the former president’s son, disclosed, “Should I mention the fact that the autopsy was conducted without the presence of the independent expert team sent by our family, even though we insisted on it? Or that the Russian doctors were denied the access to the body and the tissue samples? Or that we have been denied his blood samples?”[vii]

ICTY self-congratulations in the days following Milošević’s death were naturally echoed in media that had for years served as its public-relations agency. Typically effusive was the BBC’s Chris Stephen who declared Scheveningen to be “world’s most luxurious prison, more a hotel than a jailhouse....A doctor is on permanent standby, along with a nurse and a psychologist, and several Dutch hospitals—among the world’s most advanced—are within minutes of the prison gates.”[viii] (Stephen cited no sources for these extravagant claims.) Stephen, though ostensibly reporting for the BBC, was in reality an ICTY lobbyist of long standing posing as a “journalist.” He wrote for the Observer about the Balkans while employed by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a body closely tied to the ICTY, funded by many of the same sources and staffed by many of the same people. Stephen could barely contain himself as he continued with his rhapsodies. “Officials say many prisoners leave the jail healthier than when they arrived…. [M]eals are carefully balanced and exercise is encouraged.” There is a “Comfort Room” which—nudge, nudge, wink, wink—”contains a bed and is reserved for conjugal visits, though whether Mr Milošević ever made use of it, during the visits of his wife Mira Markovic, is a closely guarded secret.” That “officials” may have self-interested reasons to lie obviously never occurred to this “journalist.”

“There is a reason for all this comfort,” Stephen’s ode to Scheveningen continued. “[W]hen the prison was designed, the court’s first president, Antonio Cassese, was determined to press home the idea that inmates are innocent until proven guilty. Once an inmate is found guilty, he is sent to another prison in a volunteering U.N. nation. No decision had been taken on where to send Mr Milošević.”

“Where to send Mr. Milošević”!  Like most “reporters” covering the ICTY, Stephen had made its ethos his own. Sentence first, verdict afterwards, to quote the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Neither Stephen nor his editors at the BBC saw any contradiction between his initial “innocent until proven guilty” claim and his later reference to “where to send” Milošević after his inevitable conviction. 

Stephen also slipped the odd falsehood or two into his report for good measure. “Suicide has been a problem at the jail,” he said. What’s the reason for that? “There are no cameras inside the cells, as it is a remand centre.” No cameras inside the cells? That’s odd. Rule 39 of the ICTY’s Rules of Detention explicitly states:

In order to protect the health or the safety of the detainee, the Registrar…may order that the cell of the detainee be monitored by video surveillance equipment for a period not exceeding thirty days. Renewals which shall not exceed a period of thirty days shall be reported to the President.

Moreover, it had been widely reported in the media that Milošević was kept under 24-hour video surveillance when he arrived at The Hague and for some time afterward. In fact, it’s not known when, if at all, this surveillance ended.

Stephen’s assertions were, not surprisingly, quickly shown to be absurd. Following Milošević’s death, the ICTY invited the Swedish government to send a team of penologists to carry out an audit of Scheveningen. Inadequate and superficial though the Swedes’ audit was (their visit lasted only three days, and much of their brief report was taken up by mind-numbingly tedious descriptions of the detention unit bureaucracy), they nonetheless didn’t come away quite as thrilled by the prison as the BBC’s man. The Swedes described the “Comfort Room” as “shabby and downright unpleasant.”[ix] They also made a point of mentioning the poor quality of the food and the insufficient time prisoners were permitted to spend in the fresh air.

According to the Swedish group’s calculations, something like two-thirds of the people detained at Scheveningen have not been convicted of anything. “At the time of our visit,” they revealed, “half the inmates had been in custody for at least three years. The detainee of longest standing had been there for 8½ years.” This, incidentally, was the finding of a group that was favorably disposed toward the ICTY. In sending the penologists to The Hague, the Swedish government openly demonstrated which side it was on by declaring, “Sweden has attached great importance to the ICTY and its struggle against impunity for those people who committed crimes in the former Yugoslavia.”

ICTY IN A DILEMMA

Milošević’s death had put the ICTY in a bind. Milošević was its most famous prisoner. He had been head of state—first of Serbia, then of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—for 13 years. He was, in the ICTY’s telling, the architect of all the evils that had befallen Yugoslavia. And now he was dead. If the ICTY were now to argue that Milošević had been seriously ill for some time and that his death was not unexpected, then it would have to explain why it had continued his exhausting trial for four years; why it had allowed the prosecution to mount a vast, unwieldy, incomprehensible—even, as it turned out, to the Milošević judges—case spanning more than 10 years of Yugoslav history and three wars; and, above all, why it had refused to permit Milošević to receive the recommended medical treatment.

If, on the other hand, the ICTY were to argue that Milošević wasn’t really that ill and that its doctors had certified him to be in pretty good shape, then it would have to explain his sudden death.

If the ICTY were to claim that Milošević had committed suicide, then it would have to come up with some proof: a suicide note perhaps or testimony from friends or fellow-detainees suggesting that Milošević was discussing or contemplating suicide. Nothing like that was available. No suicide note. And people who had spoken to Milošević during his last days described him as optimistic and in fighting spirit.

Yet, within hours of his death, Carla del Ponte was indeed floating the possibility of suicide. In that same La Reppublica, interview, she said,

He [Milošević] may well have thrown down the final gauntlet in our faces…. The trial was drawing to a close. He had only 40 hours’ worth of courtroom time in which to finish questioning his witnesses for the defence. Then it would have been the prosecution’s turn once again and I would have delivered my final speech. The trial would have been over before the summer. According to our assessment, it would have ended with a sentence of life imprisonment. Perhaps he wanted to avoid all of that.[x]

However, the Dutch forensic report, which said that no toxins had been found in Milošević’s body, pretty much closed off the suicide option. Any suggestion that Milošević may have taken a poison that left no traces would have redounded against the ICTY. It was the ICTY that controlled and monitored Milošević’s medication intake; it would have been far better placed than he to find and administer a toxin that left no traces.

The possibility that Milošević may have been murdered was dismissed with the superficially plausible argument that the ICTY and the NATO countries wanted to see Milošević convicted, not dead. Why would they have gone to the trouble of putting him on trial if it wasn’t to convict him and thereby to provide a post facto justification for NATO’s decade-long destruction of, and war against, Yugoslavia? Indeed, following his death, NATO government officials wailed interminably to the effect that, by dying before the judges could bring in their guilty verdict, the ceaselessly-reviled “Butcher of the Balkans” had escaped justice.

This argument however overlooked an important point. Milošević’s trial had not gone well for the prosecutors. They had presented a weak case, and his conviction would have convinced only those who were already convinced of his guilt. Critics of the ICTY would have had a field-day picking apart and ridiculing the trial judgment and, subsequently, the appellate court judgment. The cause of Milošević had already attracted the support of a number of high-profile lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and activists. Milošević’s living in a prison cell in NATOland, would have been a rallying point for NATO’s critics.

ICTY’S PROBLEMS BEGIN TO MOUNT

The ICTY faced a number of near-insurmountable problems in the aftermath of the Yugoslav president’s death. First, there was the Nov. 4, 2005, report from the specialists, expressing serious concern about the medical treatment Milošević had been receiving at the ICTY. Milošević’s deteriorating health had been apparent to anyone but the willfully obtuse. On top of his high blood pressure, he had complained of hearing problems and buzzing in his head. A couple of times, he had even left the courtroom complaining of ill health and—extremely unusually for him—had allowed the trial to continue in his absence. The specialists’ joint opinion was:

[T]he state of health of the patient is not stable and that complications are possible. Such a state of health requires further tests with the aim of identifying the origin or origins of the current difficulties. It is therefore necessary to propose to the patient a period of rest, i.e. the suspension of all physical and psychological activities for a period of a minimum of 6 weeks which would probably help diminish the symptoms or at least to stabilize them and then approve additional indispensable diagnostic procedures in order to prescribe a more appropriate therapy.

One of the specialists, Margaret Shumilina of the Bakulev Center, said that Milošević may be showing “initial signs of more serious cerebral circulatory disorders.” Another, Vukasin Andrić, an ear, nose and throat specialist from Serbia, wrote that Milošević’s hearing was rapidly deteriorating, probably caused by his heart condition. The ICTY’s response to the specialists’ recommendations was outright hostility, bordering on fury. “Are you deaf?” presiding Judge Patrick Robinson infamously barked on Nov. 15, 2005, seeking to silence Milošević after he had alerted the trial chamber to the independent physicians’ report. It was a particularly spiteful comment, given that Milošević’s most recent complaints had involved his deteriorating hearing, which may well have been caused by his cardiac condition. Judge Iain Bonomy wrote on Nov. 15 that the medical opinion of Vukasin Andrić, an ear, nose and throat specialist from Serbia, was of no value because he had been a defense witness. It was inappropriate, Bonomy piously declared,

for the Trial Chamber to be asked to take account of the views of Professor [Vukasin] Andric. The Trial Chamber’s first and foremost consideration must always be to ensure a fair trial of the Accused. It should not countenance the risk that a situation could develop in which its impartiality, and hence the fairness of the trial, might be put in question. The Trial Chamber should not be placed in the position where it may have to assess the reliability of a witness in a context unrelated to his evidence in the case prior to having to evaluate that evidence. Issues relating to the management of the trial process should be dealt with through the assistance of experts who are not involved as witnesses of fact in the case.

Bonomy went on, “Whenever issues of health or fitness arise in a court process it is vital that the right decision is made at the end of a thorough and scrupulously objective assessment of the issues on the basis of the opinions of experts who are not involved in the trial.” This verbiage failed to explain why either Andrić’s testimony as a fact witness, or his diagnosis as a treating specialist, was compromised.

Bonomy’s concern about a possible conflict of interest was extraordinary in light of the ICTY’s usual blasé attitude toward members of the prosecution staff testifying as prosecution witnesses, indeed even as expert witnesses. To mention one example of many, in June 2002, prosecution witness Frederick Abrahams of Human Rights Watch frankly admitted that he had “conducted research and provided analysis for the Kosovo indictment against Slobodan Milošević.” Judge Richard May dismissed any suggestion that there might be a conflict of interest: The “fact that he worked on this particular indictment does not make his evidence inadmissible.”[xi] A political activist such as Abrahams was clearly far more trustworthy than a professional physician offering a professional diagnosis. Wisely, Bonomy, though happy to cast aspersions on Andrić, evinced little interest in cross-examining him.

Moreover, Bonomy’s punctiliousness and demand for scrupulous objectivity when it came to medical diagnoses stood in stark contrast to his and his fellow-judges’ rush in September 2004 to impose counsel on Milošević, who had hitherto represented himself. The ICTY justified its imposition of counsel on the ground that Milošević was allegedly too sick to act on his own behalf. It based its decision on the medical diagnosis of its own handpicked specialist, Dr. Rene Tavernier. According to Tavernier, Milošević was “not fit to represent himself”[xii] but not too sick to stand trial. Tavernier revealed his good faith with his observation, “If Mr Milošević would continue to represent himself this will delay the progress of the trial significantly.” One would have thought a medical doctor’s chief concern is the wellbeing of his patient, not with the “progress” of some trial in which he was not involved. But then everyone associated with the ICTY has always been determined to push the ICTY agenda.

When Milošević sought a second opinion to challenge that of Tavernier, ICTY prosecutors protested that there was no need for any further examinations because Milošević had left his challenge to Tavernier too late. The judges agreed, refused to permit a second opinion and swiftly imposed an attorney on Milošević. It was hard to understand how Milošević’s challenge could have been too late since the court had only just decided to impose an attorney. Moreover, the ICTY had been unable to cite any precedent of a court’s denying a defendant the right to self-representation on grounds of ill health. And the ICTY based its decision on the opinion of one doctor, someone who hadn’t even been Milošević’s treating physician.

However, let’s return to the independent specialists’ report. The ICTY trial chamber’s first response to the report was to turn to the detention unit doctors to ask for their appraisal. Needless to say, they dismissed any criticism of their treatment. On Nov. 14, the detention unit’s resident doctor, Paulus Falke, wrote to Hans Holthuis, the ICTY registrar, citing N.J.M. Aarts, the Dutch ear, nose and throat specialist who had been treating Milošević for two months. Aarts, according to Falke, had said that Milošević’s hearing loss was “commensurate with someone of his age.” “Contrary to the joint conclusion of the Visiting Doctors,” Falke went on, “the treating specialist concludes that that it is unlikely that the vascular abnormalities have a direct relationship with the symptoms complained of. The treating specialist states that a period of rest will have no positive effect upon his symptoms.”

On Dec. 6, Aarts added, “The atherosclerosis is normal in view of the patient’s age….The MRI shows an image of both cerebral hemispheres which is normal for his age. There is no pathological atrophy.”

Milošević’s treating cardiologist at the ICTY, Paul van Dijkman, wrote to Falke on Nov. 23, saying

The patient has no cardiac complaints whatsoever, in particular no chest pains or shortness of breath.….In general, the blood pressure is acceptable, and even the strain in the ECG is somewhat less pronounced. Clearly, the trial sessions are so stressful that the blood pressure increases, together with the heart rate….In view of the current work schedule, it is understandable that the patient feels fatigued. He has three court sessions per week, and spends the rest of the time preparing for them, including interviewing witnesses. There is not much time for rest. It is predictable that the blood pressure will increase again during stressful trial sessions. As in the past, I strongly advise provision for sufficient rest. On the other hand, it seems to me that a six week rest period is somewhat too much.

The six-week rest that the specialists recommended, van Dijkman wrote further on Dec. 1, was an “arbitrarily chosen period, for which in my view, no firm reasons were given.” So there was no need for undue concern. Whatever Miloševic was suffering from, it was all perfectly normal for a man of his age. Maybe he was overworking.

Van Dijkman’s comment was baffling. Why did he consider six weeks be too long? How much would have been enough? His comment hardly suggested overwhelming concern for the health of his patient. Van Dijkman’s generally optimistic diagnosis, at least as far as Milošević’s cardiac condition was concerned, was noteworthy in that a little more than a year earlier, he had happily endorsed Tavernier’s assessment that Milošević “was not fit enough to defend himself”[xiii]! Now Milošević was apparently in such fine fettle that even six weeks’ rest was more than he needed. “Soon the Christmas recess will start,” said Van Dijkman. “Mr. Milošević will be able to get some rest also in this period, which comes very close to the period of rest of six weeks as recommended by the three physicians.”

Well, not exactly. The specialists had recommended a total rest of six weeks, not six weeks of trial preparation.

The ICTY of course refused to follow the outside specialists’ recommendations either on sanctioning further tests or on permitting a period of rest. But now, in March 2006, Milošević was dead and, despite the standard encomia to the tribunal offered by the likes of the BBC’s Chris Smith, some mainstream media were starting to raise questions. They didn’t care very much about Milošević, but the trial’s unsatisfactory conclusion was leading to growing grumbling. Stories about the specialists’ recommendations and the ICTY’s dismissive attitude toward them had begun to circulate. Referring to Dr. Leo Bokeria, head of the Bakulev Center in Moscow, where Milošević had sought treatment, the New York Times wrote:

Bokeria, a Russian heart specialist, who flew to The Hague to review the autopsy records…suggested that Mr. Milošević had died from undetected blockages in his coronary arteries. ‘Two stents’ could have saved his life and given him ‘many long years,’ he said, according to the Itar-Tass news agency, referring to tubes placed in arteries to reopen blockages.[xiv]

An AFP report had Bokeria claiming that “appropriate tests ‘would have shown the levels of narrowing of the vessels….The problem could have been resolved in dozens of countries in the world, and if Milošević had received help he would still be alive.’ ”[xv] Also, Florence Leclercq, one of the three specialists who had examined Milošević, was quoted as saying, “His medical condition was not good, so we asked for additional tests to evaluate his cardiac situation. But these investigations were never performed, and now that’s a problem.”[xvi] Apparently, “Prison officials assured her that some cardiac tests, like an ultrasound, had been done and were ‘normal,’ but they could not show her the actual test results, leaving her to conclude that more was needed.”[xvii]

Then there was Dr. Patrick Barriot, a “French doctor who frequently visited Mr. Milošević,” who said that Milošević “suffered symptoms of increasingly severe high blood pressure in the six months before his death, including headaches, visual changes and a constant thrumming noise in his ear…. ‘Each time I saw him, he was clearly deteriorating, more and more tired.’ ” Andrić was quoted as saying, “What was shocking was that in four years lots of tests and exams on his heart had never been done.”

That outside specialists were openly telling the media that they did not think the ICTY had provided adequate medical care to Milošević was embarrassing enough. Even more awkward to explain away was the ICTY’s refusal, barely more than two weeks before his death, to permit Milošević to receive treatment in Moscow for his heart condition. On Dec. 12, 2005, Milošević had asked the court to allow him to go to the Bakulev Center. “It would not affect your programme in any way,” Milošević explained, “because I would be back here again before this is resumed in accordance with your programme, so I’m asking you to make this possible for me for health reasons. I don’t see any hindrance in the way of this because it really would not disturb your programme in any way.”[xviii]

That same day, Bokeria wrote a letter to Judge Fausto Pocar, the ICTY president, in which he declared that Milošević “is in a critical condition” and urged immediate treatment at the Bakulev center:

I consider that it is my physician and human being duty to insist on immediate interruption lawsuit for the ministration to Slobodan Miloshevich high quality diagnostic and long time, not less than 1.5-2 months aethiopathogenic curative treatment in a specialized cardiovascular profile hospital. [I am ready] to do everything maximally possible for preventing him from cardiovascular catastrophe.

On Dec. 20, 2005, Milošević’s “assigned counsel” made an application to the court for Milošević’s provisional release to enable him to get treatment in Moscow. They pointed out that “the Accused’s current condition was neither originally discovered, nor treated appropriately, by the Registry-approved doctors and consultants.” The specialists who examined Milošević in November had “determined that the Accused’s treatment was inadequate.” Moreover, the ICTY’s prison doctor Falke’s Nov. 11, 2005, response to the specialists’ report “neither addressed nor diagnosed the problems complained of by the Accused, noted by the team of visiting specialists.”

The assigned counsel made two requests: First, they asked for Milošević’s temporary release in order to get treatment in Moscow. Second,

in the event that the trial chamber is not satisfied as to the current condition of the Accused, the Assigned Counsel request the Trial Chamber to hear evidence from the relevant specialists in order to determine (a) the nature of the Accused’s condition and (b) the most appropriate method of treatment.

Clearly, the assigned counsel were anticipating both the prosecutors’ likely fierce attack and the judges’ probable rejection of their request. To ensure that the ICTY didn’t get off the hook, the assigned counsel, in effect, challenged the judges either to show that Milošević wasn’t really ill or to come up with an alternative treatment program. Thus, their warning: Accept or reject the specialists’ diagnoses and criticisms, but don’t ignore them! Needless to say, neither the trial chamber’s Feb. 23, 2006, rejection of the request nor the ICTY’s final report on Milošević’s death addressed, or even acknowledged, the existence of the assigned counsel’s second request. The judges held no hearings with the specialists.

[i] Update from the President on the Death of Slobodan Milošević. https://www.icty.org/en/press/update-president-death-slobodan-milosevic

[ii] “Provisional findings concerning the death of S. Milošević,” Public Prosecutor’s Office, The Hague, March 17, 2006. http://www.un.org/icty/Milošević/report-english.htm.  

[iii] “Former Yugoslav President Milošević dies in UN cell,” AFP, March 11.

[iv] “Hague prosecutor moots Milošević suicide, dismisses poison allegations,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring March 13, 2006.

[v] Prosecutor v. Vojislav Seselj, IT-03-67-PT, Oct. 29, 2003, p. 150.

[vi] “Controversy Over the Death Of a Serb War Crime Suspect,” New York Times, Aug. 18, 1998.

[vii]http://www.slobodan-Milošević.org/news/mm071706.htm.

[viii] “Milošević Jail Under Scrutiny” by Chris Stephen, BBC, March 13, 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4801626.stm.

[ix] Independent Audit of the Detention Unit at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/2006/DU-audit.htm

[x] “Hague prosecutor moots Milošević suicide, dismisses poison allegations,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring March 13, 2006.

[xi] Milošević Trial Transcript, June 3, 2002, pp. 6045-6048.

[xii] Prosecutor v. Slobodan Miloševič, Appeal Against the Trial Chamber’s Decision on Assignment of Defense Counsel, Sept. 29, 2004, paragraph 16, http://bjoerna.dk/dokumentation/ICTY-Appeal-040929.pdf

[xiii] Prosecutor v. Slobodan Miloševič, Appeal Against the Trial Chamber’s Decision on Assignment of Defense Counsel, paragraph 20, Sept. 29, 2004, http://bjoerna.dk/dokumentation/ICTY-Appeal-040929.pdf

[xiv] “Dutch autopsy on Milošević finds no evidence of unusual drugs,” New York Times, March 18.

[xv] “Prosecutors long suspected Milošević of juggling his meds, documents show,” AFP, March 16.

[xvi] “Some Milošević doctors call care by tribunal inadequate,” New York Times, March 16.

[xvii] “Some Milošević doctors call care by tribunal inadequate,” New York Times, March 16.

[xviii] Milošević Trial Transcript, Dec. 12, 2005, p. 47258.