This book could not have been more ill-timed. It is not just that last week’s dramatic news from The Hague (is Slobodan Milosevic genuinely ill or is he throwing an elaborate sickie?) has significantly changed the story. That might be accounted simply bad luck. Chris Stephen’s problem of timing is much more serious. He has written about a contemporary trial as though it had already ended with a resounding guilty verdict, when in reality the defendant hasn’t even begun to present his case.

Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought a defendant is presumed innocent until he is proved otherwise. There are no such legal niceties here. Stephen rarely even adopts the useful word for crime reporters, ‘allegedly’. The man in the dock is presented as a tried and convicted genocidal monster, who single-handedly started the wars in former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Unfortunately, most of the world’s media cover the Milosevic case in much the same way. It should make us wonder: why bother with the expense of messy trials when so many journalists already know who the war criminals are?

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