THE HAGUE, March 1: The UN war crimes tribunal for the ex-Yugoslavia is coming increasingly under fire, including a fierce broadside by the United States at a time when the court’s work is entering a crucial phase.

Criticism has also come from Russia and Belgrade, where even officials who once supported the court are denouncing the high-profile trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic as a “circus.”

On Thursday, Washington sent a chill through the international justice community, insisting the UN courts for both the Balkans and Rwanda were being poorly run and should clear their caseloads by 2008.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, the US State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, said the trial process in both tribunals had been costly, inefficient and slow.

“In both tribunals, at times, the professionalism of some of the personnel has been called into question with allegations of mismanagement and abuse,” he told a US congressional committee.

The criticism came at a particularly delicate moment for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that was established here in 1993 to deal with the conflicts in the Balkans.

The Milosevic case has been billed as the most important war crimes trial since World War II. NATO-led forces are also making their first big push to arrest Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic seven years after his indictment.

The group Human Rights Watch said Prosper’s remarks came at a “highly inappropriate moment.” Richard Dicker, the director of its International Justice Program, said the timing was “incomprehensible.”

But ICTY sources, who asked not to be named, said Prosper was speaking with an eye on meetings scheduled in New York next week to thrash out the court’s budget for 2002. It ran on just over 100 millon dollars last year.—AFP