Chris Stephen

http://nhw.livejournal.com/182162.html

The title makes it sound as if this is a book restricted just to the one event, the Milosevic trial. In fact it's not, and what you get is a very good quick summary of the entire Yugoslav crisis from the beginning, and then also an account of the politics of the establishment of the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, before we get to the dramatic events surrounding the fall, arrest and prosecution of Milosevic. There have been surprisingly few books written since the immediate aftermath of the Bosnian war that covered the developments of the years afterwards.

Chris always struck me as a fun person, who doesn't let his sense of humour leak into his journalism perhaps as much as he should. Of course the appropriate tone for much of the testimony of the victims of Milosevic's wars is restrained outrage, and Chris does this very well. His depiction of the towns of Prijedor and Kozarac, which were very much part of my patch at the time, is totally accurate. The only factual error I caught was that Zoran Djindjic was kicked out as mayor of Belgrade in 1997 very shortly after he got the job, rather then hanging on until 2000.

I think this is a particularly good book to use as ammunition against the wingnuts who see the entire thing as a massive conspiracy against the Serbs. He doesn't quite address the ludicrous US reservations about the new International Criminal Court, but since he's not really writing for that audience I suppose it's fair enough. I see a couple of other reviewers have picked up on the fact that the book ends half-way through, before Milosevic has started defence let alone the trial being over.… (mehr)