Milosevic on the Stand; A war-crimes trial that's riveting even without a verdict.

Byline: Ginanne Brownell

If Slobodan Milosevic's health improves, he is supposed to take the stand later this summer to present his defense to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The former Yugoslav president, who also trained as a lawyer, rejects the legitimacy of the tribunal and disputes the charges against him, which include genocide and ethnic cleansing. In his defense, the man who sought to create a Greater Serbia--and in the process left millions of people displaced and hundreds of thousands dead--hopes to call 1,400 witnesses to testify. Among them: Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroder. And that's just the latest development in the bizarre case, chronicled in the fascinating and closely observed new book "Judgment Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic" by British journalist Chris Stephen (255 pages. Atlantic Books ).

The title is a bit of a misnomer: only the last third actually focuses on the court proceedings themselves, which began in February 2002 and are expected to wrap up in 2005. In the book's first section, Stephen provides a succinct history of the wars in the Balkans, outlining the rise to power of the pudgy, 62-year-old former banker. He recounts in particular detail a mass exodus of refugees from Kosovo in the spring of 1999, including firsthand testimony describing the assassination of 300 ethnic Albanian men in a field near the village of Meja: "A boy on the back of one of the trailers looked up [and told me] he had seen the men lying in ...