‘Culture and the reception of the defence: Why bad lawyers make good TV

propaganda’

Eric Gordy, SSEES-UCL

ABSTRACT: A truism in criminal law is that a defendant who represents him or

herself has a fool for a lawyer. Legal analysis would certainly show that
defendants Slobodan Milošević and Vojislav Šešelj had remarkably poor
defence cases before the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague.
However both defendants generated the sorts of responses among members of
the television audience for the trials in Serbia that achieved important
extralegal goals for them. Their self-representation undermined the reputation
of the Tribunal and of international involvement in the region more generally,
while making defence of their particular political programmes appear to
constitute defence of Serbian society and culture as a whole. What looked to
the Tribunal like obstruction looked to many in the audience as a sustained
and successful populist gesture, through which the defendants made use of
one advantage they had over the prosecution: familiarity with and
understanding of important elements of the political and cultural environment.
The cumulative effect was to increase the gap between the political processes
of reconciliation that were being promoted from several sides, while elevating
resistance to reconciliation to the level of culture.

Among the express stated purposes of the founding of the International Tribunal for
the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International
Humanitarian Law Committed on the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Since 1991
(more informally, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, or
ICTY), aside from removing “a threat to international peace and security”, ending
“widespread violations of international humanitarian law” and acting to “take
effective measures to bring to justice the persons who are responsible for them”,
the Security Council added a normative social goal: to “contribute to the
restoration and maintenance of peace”.i The last of the phrases might be
understood as international-law boilerplate, or as a tool for the Security Council to
claim jurisdiction over a matter that might be considered the domain of the
General Assembly. But it is also possible to interpret the statement as expressing a
sincere belief that prosecution and trials serve a human purpose. In this way of
arguing for the conduct of criminal trials, they are conceived as contributing to
transcending fratricide by producing clear evidentiary accounts of events, of
confronting accused perpetrators with victims and witnesses and allowing all of
them an opportunity to speak, and by producing judicial findings that constitute a
reliable and comprehensive account of the traumatic events of the recent past.
Somewhere in between the role of the judicial instance as the finder of fact and
the court as the distributor of justice lies the conception of truth as a contributor
to reconciliation and a foundation for a peaceful future. This is at least the ideal
version of the hopes that were invested by some people in ICTY at its founding.

The real experience of ICTY at work and of its reception in the region has,
possibly unsurprisingly, not met these expectations. There are varied reasons for
this disappointing outcome, ranging from shortcomings in the communication
between ICTY and the publics in the region, the constraints leading to a selective
approach toward the choice of which cases to prosecute, lack of receptivity of
political elites to the demands of cooperation with the Tribunal, and residual
celebration of wartime “heroes” in the media. In some instances it appears as
though trials before ICTY have led to revival of conflict rather than reconciliation.
Here I would like to concentrate on one aspect of ICTY procedure that has
encouraged this sort of outcome: the practice of allowing several prominent
indictees to decline legal counsel and lead their own defence. As a result of the
decision by ICTY to permit this practice, the “right to self-representation”,
previously an American peculiarity, has now been affirmed in international fora
with effects that are mostly predictable.

Although presented as traditional, the interpretation of the practice of self-

representation as a right is relatively new. It was established by the US Supreme
Court in a 1975 decision, which was adopted as the basis for extending the
privilege to Slobodan Milošević in his trial. Prior to 1975 the general direction of
law had been moving in the opposite direction, toward attempting to ensure that
all criminal defendants have a right to be represented by counsel. In the common
law tradition the practice of clients representing themselves was either a result of
necessity – trained attorneys were rare and expensive – or was adopted as a
punitive measure designed to restrict defendants' ability to contest evidence
against them and to increase the probability of obtaining a conviction. ii
 Since the Faretta v California decision in 1975, most of the predictions of its
critics have been borne out in practice: courts have faced insurmountable
procedural difficulties, defendants have suffered from their lack of understanding
of law and procedure, the legitimacy of legal processes has been undermined,
courtrooms have been used as fora for abuse and intimidation, and insane
defendants have been permitted to damage themselves with legal sanction. With
the trials of Slobodan Milošević and Vojislav Šešelj, and now of Radovan Karadžić,
before ICTY the practice has been transferred from the US domestic courts to the
international arena. In these cases it can certainly be noted that the defendants
have largely not helped themselves from a legal point of view. But there is an
additional set of issues at stake. The legitimacy and credibility of the trials and of
the Tribunal itself are put into question, as is the abstract goal of contributing to
justice for crimes committed during the wars of the 1990s and the political goal of
contributing to reconciliation in the region.

Here the legal failures of the defendants might possibly be counted as political
successes. If so the success derives from the distance of the Tribunal from its
presumptive clientele. This has the result that Milošević and Šešelj have been able
to manipulate procedures in ways they would not be permitted to do in a Serbian
court, and the window to their success is offered by the fact that they understand
some things about domestic politics and culture that the prosecutors and judges do
not. The consequences of this are amplified by domestic media in Serbia, which
have largely tended to present the defendants sympathetically.

This would be a matter of interest though perhaps not of concern if it were not
the case that something is at stake. In principle, why are trials for violations of
international humanitarian law conducted at all? The simplest answer from the
point of view of law would be that it is a process of establishing responsibility and
identifying and punishing the guilty parties. Anybody with concrete experience of
criminal trials of any kind will already be aware that even this simple proposition is
heavily problematic. I will not enter into that set of problems because they already
constitute, through news, film and political debate, a part of everyday lived
culture.

The problem becomes yet more complex when we look at criminal trials of
this type from the perspective of society and culture. Here trials are expected to
take on ritual functions, historical functions and roles as catalysts of debate that
are far from certain. Let me offer some examples from a couple of prominent
social-legal theorists. Mark Osiel foregrounds the trial as a site of contestation,
where an exchange takes place but a determination is made:

As ritual expressions of collective conscience, trials for administrative

massacre have decidedly not been simple and unmediated reflections of
moral sentiments already universally felt within the society toward the
accused […] [T]he criminal courtroom will inevitably be viewed by all
concerned as providing a forum in which competing historical accounts of
recent catastrophes will inevitably be promoted, in search of authoritative
recognition, and that judgments will inevitably be viewed as endorsing one
or another version of collective memory.iii

Ruti Teitel moves forward from the moment of trial to the diffusion of outcomes
and their eventual repercussions in popular consciousness:

Making the truth “official” presumes a degree of democratic consensus; yet,

in transition, democratic processes are often not fully consolidated, with
implications for the authority and legitimacy of transitional production of
knowledge. In transitional truth-telling, accordingly, there is a concerted
attempt to make historical and political accountability converge […]
Consensus on the history produced is predicated on the truth’s
dissemination and acceptance in the public sphere. […] For what is at stake
is a contested national history.iv

In the principled version of events coming from this school of social-legal theory,
there are some strong expectations attached to the trials. They are supposed to
constitute the realisation of a value called “truth”, and they are supposed to
establish the existence of something called “the past” from which it is necessary to
“break”. These terms are appearing in quotations not because I want to dispute
their applicability but because every time they are used they create a need for
definition. We need to be conscious that looking at trials from this perspective
involves making a set of assumptions about what their importance and effects will
be that are, if not world-historical in scale, at least on a level that anticipates
profound social and moral consequences for the anticipated audience.

It would also be possible to offer a version of the purpose of trials from a

more instrumentally political perspective. Here the reasons would range from an
effort to produce an effect of prevention through catharsis, as the folk theory
advanced in political documents, to various renditions of efforts to ascribe political
responsibility or to gain political control. One version of the more jaundiced
interpretation comes from Gary Bass, who argues that in the face of demands for
more aggressive intervention “[l]aw became a euphemism for inaction”, v whereby
an inactive court could either deflect criticism or confine itself to assigning blame.
Meanwhile nationalists throughout the region overseen by the Tribunal put
emphasis on assigning blame but do not regard the Tribunal as inactive. If one
objection to international trials can be regarded as constant in all of the countries
whose citizens can be charged and tried by the institution, it is that criminal
indictments amount to an effort to discredit the war aims and national policies of
the countries involved. Corollary to this is a perception that charging crimes
committed by the forces of one side amounts to ignoring crimes committed by the
others.

Looking at actual trials before the ICTY might lead to a mixed conclusion, that
it has met both some of the most ideal and some of the most cynical expectations.
It has set major precedents in many rulings, beginning with the Čelebići prison
camp case,vi which led to a new body of jurisprudence on command responsibility,
that enhanced the ability to apply international law to civil wars and to incidents
involving paramilitary formations. It has also produced jurisprudence that has made
a major contribution to including gender-based crimes, including rape and sexual
violence, as violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions and as elements of
the crimes of genocide and torture.vii And together with ICTR it has produced the
first international jurisprudence on genocide since the passage of the Genocide
Convention in 1948. And it established a precedent by bringing to trial at least one
head of state (though it left doubt with regard to others) as well as a few figures
who either not real heads of state or not heads of real states.This represents a
major defeat for the doctrine of sovereign immunity, according to which political
leaders could not be held accountable for their actions under international law. viii

At the same time ICTY has also attracted criticism for some perceived
shortcomings and generated some resentment in the region, both because of its
distance from and failure to communicate with its presemptive „clientele“ and
because of difficulties in the conduct of particular trials and the treatment of
evidence. Consequently both knowledge about ICTY and measures of trust in it
have been consistently low throughout the region.
 A more fundamental problem has involved failed prosecutions that have
contributed to the assault on the Tribunal's credibility, including the trials of
Ramush Haradinaj (failed in part due to intimidation of witnesses, leading to a
later effort at retrialix) and of Naser Orić and Tihomir Blaškić. The problem is
compounded by delay. Milošević waited nearly a year for his trial to commence
after his arrest in 2001, and it was still incomplete at the time of his death in 2006;
Šešelj was taken into Tribunal custody in February 2003 and his trial began in
November 2007. Some indictees did not live long enough to see proceedings against
them begin.

On balance it might be fair to say that the Tribunal has produced a record
of some major legal importance, but at the same time has left some portions of the
record that facilitate the anti-Tribunal argument that legal standards are not
uniformly upheld and that political considerations play an unwelcome role. For
people in the region such anti-Tribunal arguments have a particular resonance as
surveys show that levels of knowledge and understanding of the Tribunal's work are
low. Domestic media deepen this resonance as much of the coverage of trials of
prominent indictees resembles, in the words of OTP spokesperson Olga Kavran,
„fan journalism“.x

It is in this context of mixed expectations and suspicions that a number of

indictees made the decision to reject the standing of the Tribunal to try them, and
to make the effort to negate the legal proceedings as much as possible while using
the media coverage of their trials to take their case directly to the domestic
public. A number of factors doubtless contributed to the decision of indictees to
lead their own defence: they calculated that for political reasons they would be
unlikely to receive a fair trial and that their chances of acquittal were minimal,
they assessed their chances of being prosecuted for other offences in their home
countries in the event that they were released were high, they considered
rejection of the authority of the Tribunal to be not only consistent with their
politics but also potentially their strongest argument, and they saw the opportunity
for receiving publicity for defending acts taken in the context of national policy as
a possible means of restoring their severely degraded popularity. From almost all
points of view other than a legal one, a defence without legal representation
appeared to be a winning proposition.
 This was probably a miscalculation from a legal point of view. In the Milošević
case, at the time the trial began the indictment against him was easily amenable
to defence. The initial indictment was prepared in a hurried and disorganised
manner, and additional elements were added on in a similar manner largely out of
the prosecutors’ sense that there were elements that had to be included whether
they could be proven to a legal standard or not. The prosecutors in the case have
themselves recognised that when they went to trial evidence was still lacking. xi
This may account for the prosecution’s presentation beginning, when the audience
was still large, with a series of extraordinarily weak witnesses, most of them
former politicians, whose testimony bore little relevance to the charges (e.g.,
Mahmut Bakalli and Ratomir Tanić). It is entirely conceivable that if Milošević had
compelled the prosecution to present its evidence at the beginning without
interruption, the case would have collapsed.

Instead by his strategy of representation Milošević did the prosecution two

essential favours. First, he brought about delays that provided the OTP
investigators with additional time to gather evidence, pointing through his
objections in the meantime to places where they might productively look. Second,
through his cross examinations and presentation of witnesses for refutation, he
provided the prosecution with evidence they did not have. Probably the most
productive of these sources of evidence was a favourite defence witness for
Milošević, the former Yugoslav army general Božidar Delić. On several occasions
Milošević called on Delić’s operational expertise to show that allegations in the
indictments were inconsistent with facts on the ground or technically improbable.
On each of those occasions Delić came with documents to be introduced as defence
exhibits. It quickly became clear to the prosecutors that the documents general
Delić was introducing were ones that they had requested from the military and
been told that these documents could not be found or did not exist. Many of the
details of military operations that the prosecution claimed to be able to prove in
their indictments they could not in fact prove until they had damaging evidence
that was introduced by the defence.xii Similarly the highly consequential film
showing the execution of hostages by paramilitary forces at Treskavica in 1995 was
introduced into evidence in June 2005 as a consequence of Milošević’s defence
witness general Obrad Stevanović raising the issue by claiming that he had no
knowledge of it.xiii

If there was a strategic advantage in Milošević’s self-defence from the point of

view of the trials, it may have been primarily in achieving delays that interfered
with the diffusion of information about the crimes. This meant that evidence
pointing to the commission of crimes was often presented with interruptions and
without continuity. Informal suggestions have been made (but formal analysis has
yet to show) that suspensions of the trial due to the defendant’s illness coincided
with the calling of inconvenient witnesses. While this had little effect on what
appeared in the trial transcripts it had considerable effect on the presentation of
evidence in the media. At the same time, audience research indicates that the
trial’s diminishing television audience was less inclined to pay attention to the
presentation of evidence by the prosecution, which was often lengthy and
technical, and more inclined to pay attention to the defendant’s cross-
examinations, which were often tense and entertaining.

As we know the Milošević trial ended with the death of the defendant in 2006,
before all evidence had been presented and without a verdict having been
reached. One of the consequences in domestic politics was that Milošević partially
rehabilitated his reputation. He viewed the trial as an opportunity to demonstrate
the claim he had made as a politician, “they are not attacking Serbia because of
Milošević, they are attacking Milošević because of Serbia”. xiv To the degree that he
succeeded something like a consensus began to develop in Serbian in public opinion
that while he may have been catastrophic and perhaps even criminal as a political
leader, he had defended national interests rather than himself before ICTY. As
little as he may have done to advance his own legal defence, he made a large
contribution toward influencing the political environment to make denial of crime
appear to be consistent with national interests and national culture.

The lessons of Milošević’s defence were learned well by Vojislav Šešelj, whose
trial is under way following a series of false starts after his voluntary surrender to
ICTY in 2003 (conveniently ahead of the murder of prime minister Zoran Đinđić, in
which he was charged as a conspirator). The indictment against Šešelj is also a
shaky one, as it requires demonstrating that he actually exercised command
responsibility over paramilitary organisations associated with his political party.
The strict standards of command responsibility adopted in other cases before ICTY
suggest that it is a case in which a competent defence could obtain an acquittal.
While Šeselj may yet be acquitted, he has ample motivation not to hurry to do this.
He would very likely face a different set of criminal charges if he were to return to
Serbia, where he would be compelled to operate without the support from media
and security services that once made his political power possible. xv In the
meantime too his political party has split, with the much larger part opting to
follow the faction that rejects his legacy and policies. In addition to this he
appears to relish the publicity that the trial gives him, and in his own words “would
never miss such a show”.xvi

Šešelj has gone considerably further than Milošević by declining to offer a

legal defence at all and instead using his trial more or less exclusively for the
purpose of publicity. His interventions include sending long and vulgar submissions
to the Tribunal, indulging in personal insults, using the court chamber as a forum
for disquisitions on nationalist ideology, and indulgence of a number of personal
idiosyncracies. He has made a practice of objecting to translations that use
Croatian or Bosnian rather than Serbian idiomatic conventions. He has objected to
the robes that the judges wear on the ground that they remind him of the Spanish
Inquisition. Some of his abusive letters to the Tribunal registry have circulated
through electronic networks as a type of folk culture. Along the way he has
compelled the panel to indulge behaviour that would be unlikely to be tolerated in
another legal forum for the sake of the trial continuing. Among the results of this
have again been extended delays in the process, so that his trial which has already
lasted for several years is virtually certain to last for several years more.

While spending his time in the ICTY holding facility Šešelj has written and
published extensively. He is an extraordinarily prolific writer, possibly among the
most prolific in the history of the Serbian language. The National Library of Serbia
lists over 200 titles under his name. Most of his works are polemical in character,
explicitly directed toward real and imagined political opponents. In one period
many of them were widely read because he published compromising material about
his opponents that his party had received from the State Secrity services.9 Since
arriving at the Hague in 2003 his titles have suggested a strong focus on
descriptions of his own situation. Here is a sampling of some recent titles by
Šešelj:

2003: Четнички војвода пред Хашким трибуналом [The Chetnik duke

Before the Hague Tribunal]

2004: У чељустима курве Дел Понте [In the Jaws of the Whore Del Ponte]
(Carla Del Ponte, OTP)

2005: Лажљива хашка педерчина Џефри Најс [The Lying Hague Pederast
Geoffrey Nice] (Geoffrey Nice, OTP)
 2006: Холандски курвин син Алфонс Ори [The Dutch Son of a Bitch
Alphonse Orie] (Judge Alphonse Orie, ICTY)

2007: Питомац минхенске пивнице Волфганг Шомбург [The Prodigal Son

of the Munich Beer Hall Wolfgang Schomburg] (Judge Wolfgang Schomburg,
ICTY)

2008: Очерупана хашка ћурка Кристина Дал [The Plucked Hague Turkey
Christine Dahl] (Christine Dahl, OTP)

2009: Смежурано кенгурово мудо Кевин Паркер [The Squashed Kangaroo

Testicle Kevin Parker] (Judge K Parker, vice- president of ICTY)

Нарогушено шкотско говно Јан Бономи [The Overexcited Scottish Shit

Ian Bonomy] (Judge Ian Bonomy, ICTY 2004- 2009)

Ретардирана хашка тужитељка Хилдегард Уерц-Рецлаф [The

Retarded Hague Prosecutor Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff] (Hildegard
Uertz- Retzlaff, senior trial attorney OTP)

Јужнокорејска гњида О-Гон Квон [The South Korean Louse O-Gon

Kwon] (Judge O-Gon Kwon, ICTY)

Смрдљива гвајанска свиња Мохамед Шахабудин [The Smelly

Guayanese Pig Muhamed Shahabuddeen] (Judge Muhamed Shahabuddeen,
ICTY)

Љубавник Џефрија Најса Данијел Саксон [Daniel Saxon, the Lover of

Geoffrey Nice] (Daniel Saxon, senior trial attorney OTP)

Although I have not read Šešelj's books (and doubt very much that anybody has)
it might be possible to discern some patterns in his recent literary production from
the titles alone. In the first place, most of them seem to be deliberately
provocative personal insults directed toward various Tribunal personnel, a practice
that Šešelj had adopted already in an earlier period when most of the people he
perceived as his opponents were domestic political actors. In the second place,
they seem unlikely to generate sympathy for his cause or an interest in reading
among people who are not already his followers and likely to welcome an angry
stance of pure rejection. But third, and perhaps most important, is the tone, which
is not only vulgar and irreverent but uses folk expressions and insults that are likely
to be recognisable to the domestic public. Here he is placing himself self-
consciously into a local tradition, apparent in politics, literature and folk humour,
where a proud but beleaguered weaker party responds to strong pressure with
calculated disrespect. In calling upon this tradition Šešelj offers a pronounced
implicit invitation to the audience to understand him as a representative of the
mythology of resistance.

The trial of another prominent indictee is still in its beginning stages at the
time of writing, but here self-representation appears to be developing in a
direction similar to the way it was practiced in the Milošević and Šešelj cases. At
the end of his cross-examination of prosecution witness John Wilson on 23 June
2010, Radovan Karadžić predicted that Serbia would defeat Australia 3-0 in their
World Cup match that evening and then characterised the situation in the
courtroom as „5-0 for Serbs“.xvii Leaving aside the accuracy of predictions about
football matches – these are easy enough to get wrong and in any case hardly well
suited to Tribunal chambers – the central element here seems to be that Karadžić
equated his own defence with „Serbs“. This is the fundamental strategy at work, to
promote perceptions of identification to the audience rather than to argue
evidence and law to the panel.
Bibliography

Armatta, Judith. Twilight of impunity: The war crimes trial of Slobodan Milošević
(Duke University Press, 2010=.

Bass, Gary J. Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals
(Princeton UP, 2000).

Cerruti, Eugene. ‘Self-representation in the international arena: Removing a false

right of spectacle’. Georgetown Journal of International Law 40:919-984 (2009).

Gredelj, Stjepan. “Vrednosno utemeljenje blokirane transformacije srpskog

društva,” in Mladen Lazić (ed.), Račji hod: Srbija u transformacijskim procesima,
Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, 2000.

Hartmann, Florence. Mir i kazna: Tajni ratovi međunarodne politike i pravde

(Beograd: Chronogram, 2007).

Hesse, Carla and Robert Post (eds.). Human rights in political transitions:
Gettysburg to Bosnia (NY: Zone Books, 1999).

Kelly, Michael. Nowhere to Hide: Defeat of the Sovereign Immunity Defense for
Crimes of Genocide and the Trials of Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein (New
York: Peter Lang, 2005).

Mertus, Julie. "When adding women matters: Women's participation in the

ICTY", Seton Hall Law Review, 38 (2008).

Stojanović, Lazer (ed.). Spotlight on war crimes trials (Belgrade: Humanitarian

Law Centre, 2000).

Teitel, Ruti. Transitional justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Vasić, Miloš. Atentat na Zorana (Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 2005).

Vasiljević, Vladan. Zločin i odgovornost: Ogled o krivičnom pravu i raspadu

Jugoslavije, (Belgrade: Prometej, 1995).

Wald, Patricia M. ‘Note from the Field: Dealing with Witnesses in War Crime Trials:
Lessons from the Yugoslav Tribunal,’ Yale Human Rights and Development Law
Journal, vol. 5 (2002).
 ERIC GORDY is Senior Lecturer in the Politics of Southeast Europe at the
School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His
research concerns political culture, transitional justice, and the everyday
experience of political transformation processes.
i
UN Security Council Resolution 808, S/RES/808, adopted 22 February 1993.
ii
Eugene Cerruti, ‘Self-representation in the international arena: Removing a false right of spectacle’. Georgetown
Journal of International Law 40:919-984 (2009).
iii
In Carla Hesse and Robert Post (eds.), Human rights in political transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia (NY: Zone Books,
1999), pp. 218, 219.
iv
Ruti Teitel, Transitional justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 83, 84.
v
G.J. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton UP, 2000), p. 215.
vi
Full details of the Čelebići and other cases mentioned below may be found at the Tribunal's web site:
http://www.un.org/icty .
vii
Julie Mertus, "When adding women matters: Women's participation in the ICTY", Seton Hall Law Review, 38 (2008)
viii
See G. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001) and M. Kelly, Nowhere to Hide: Defeat of the Sovereign Immunity Defense for Crimes of Genocide and
the Trials of Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).
ix
P. M. Wald, ‘Note from the Field: Dealing with Witnesses in War Crime Trials: Lessons from the Yugoslav Tribunal,’
Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, vol. 5 (2002). In December 2008 Haradinaj became the first ICTY
indictee to be profiled in the entertainment magazine Vanity Fair.
x
Saša Kosanović. “Dokazi protiv Gotovine su veoma uverljivi”, Novosti: Samostalni srpski tjednik, no. 549 (24 June
2010), http://www.novossti.com/2010/06/dokazi-protiv-gotovine-veoma-su-uverljivi/.
xi
G Nice, in conversation with the author. See also Florence Hartmann, Mir i kazna: Tajni ratovi međunarodne
politike i pravde (Beograd: Chronogram, 2007).
xii
During the 2008 presidential campaign in Serbia more details of the story emerged. The Belgrade daily Blic reported
that ICTY prosecutors had engaged Delić as a paid informant, and that the ICTY prosecutor had intervened to help him
in other matters. M. Ivanović and Ž. Jevtić, „Kandidata SRS za ministra odbrane plaćao Tribunal“, Blic, 8 May 2008.
xiii
Sense news agency, “Execution of six young men filmed in Srebrenica”, 1 June 2005, http://www.sense-
agency.com/en/stream.php?sta=3&pid=6649&kat=3.
xiv
B92 vesti, “Milošević napada lidere DOS”, 2 October 2000, http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?
yyyy=2000&mm=10&dd=02&nav_category=1&nav_id=12857 (radio address following election defeat).
xv
The journalist Miloš Vasić traced the source of leaked information that Šešelj frequently produced with great
fanfare in the media and which comprise most of the content of his published books directly to connections in the
security services. Miloš Vasić, Atentat na Zorana (Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 2005).
xvi
Quoted in IWPR, “Šešelj revels in court theatrics”, 16 March 2010, http://www.iwpr.net/fr/node/5753. The
comment was made to French journalists in June 1994.
xvii
Sense News Agency, “What the witness ‘had to know’”, 23 June 2010, http://www.sense-
agency.com/en/stream.php?sta=3&pid=15990&kat=3.