THE HAGUE: Soon after 9:30am on Tuesday, a thick-set man with a distinctive brushed-back grey quiff will enter Court No 1 in The Hague, flanked by two blue-uniformed United Nations guards. There will be nothing, in short, to indicate that this is one of the pivotal moments in legal history - the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, former Yugoslav President and the alleged architect of a decade of wars in the Balkans.

It is the first time an international court has tried a former head of state for such grave crimes. Milosevic is accused of masterminding the ethnic cleansing that saw Serb forces bring mayhem to large parts of former Yugoslavia in nine years of war. Four separate conflicts saw 150,000 killed, three million displaced and tens of thousands raped, tortured and jailed.

If he is convicted, supporters of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia hope it will send a signal around the world that no dictator is safe from his misdeeds.

Milosevic’s trial dwarfs all those held so far in the tribunal’s nine-year life. More than 200 witnesses are likely to be called, with the chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, saying the trial is likely to last two years. And this is despite three separate trials being telescoped together: Milosevic stands accused of war crimes in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia.

Milosevic is only one of five defendants facing charges for Kosovo - the others are key members of his war cabinet, who are still free. They are jointly accused of two charges: crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws and customs of war.

Behind the dry text in the charge sheet are the horrors perpetrated by his security forces during fighting in Kosovo in 1999. In January of that year he is accused of sending troops into the ethnic Albanian village of Racak, unleashing a massacre that left 45 civilians dead.

The war saw a further campaign of horrors - the forcible expulsion of 740,000 ethnic Albanians, many shelled, shot, raped and maimed along the way. The charge sheet details massacres of ethnic Albanians in the towns of Srbica, Dakova and Velika Krusa, where men were separated from women and machine-gunned.

The case against Milosevic boils down to a simple assertion: appalling massacres were carried out by the security forces and Milosevic, as commander of those forces, is indirectly responsible for their conduct.

The trial will take place in a setting a world away from the killing fields of Kosovo. The man accused of ordering the rape of teenage girls and the butchery of boys will stand in court with no handcuffs or other restraints, in case he hurts himself.

Milosevic has ‘legal advisers’, including the French lawyer Jacques Verges, famous for defending Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal. The weight of evidence against Milosevic seems overwhelming, but prosecutors still need to prove guilt in individual crimes.

For The Hague itself, the trial is a watershed. Supporters say the court has sent a message around the world that warlords may face the long arm of international law. But there are concerns at the limits of the scatter-gun approach of the tribunal, which will indict only a fraction of those who committed atrocities in the Balkans.

And there is opposition to the court from Serbs, who see The Hague as a victors’ court. More than half the 80 Hague indictees are Serbs. “All of the Serbs will be watching the trial; it is beamed live on state television,” said Mira Milosevic a Serbian media researcher in London. “Serbs don’t believe in the justice system of The Hague.” —Dawn/The Observer News Service.