Global Policy Forum

By Marlise Simons

The lawyers trying to defend Slobodan Milosevic have asked to be relieved of their duties, creating new hurdles for the troubled and drawn-out war crimes trial in The Hague. The two British lawyers, Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins, were assigned to Mr. Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, because of his faltering health.

But in a letter to the court disclosed Wednesday, the lawyers said they were unable to present a credible defense for Mr. Milosevic because he objected to their presence and refused to cooperate with them. He is standing trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide stemming from the Balkan conflicts of the 1990's.

Since the United Nations court imposed the lawyers in September, most of the witnesses scheduled to testify as part of Mr. Milosevic's defense have canceled their appearances. Some of them have said they will take part only if Mr. Milosevic regains the right to act as his own lawyer, as he insists on doing.

But while Mr. Milosevic was acting as his own lawyer, since the start of the trial in February 2002, the court often had to cancel hearings, sometimes for several weeks. The three judges conducting the trial imposed defense lawyers after cardiologists determined that Mr. Milosevic's high blood pressure and related heart disease were aggravated by stress, making him unfit to serve as his own lawyer.

But since then, Mr. Milosevic has been fighting to regain his chance to speak for himself, and a month ago he asked his defense to file an appeal. The appeals chamber has not issued a decision, but at a hearing last Thursday, Mr. Kay made it clear that he found his position untenable. He said his team had made extensive efforts to contact the witnesses on Mr. Milosevic's list but managed to persuade few to attend. So far, only five witnesses have appeared. The hearings had to be canceled this week and last for a lack of witnesses. They will resume on Nov. 9.

During the hearing, Mr. Kay showed his frustration and said his task was almost impossible, and also close to unethical. "To window-dress this case put me in ethical and professional difficulty that I have tried to solve," he told the panel five judges. But he added that he had not been able to put forward a meaningful defense for his reluctant client.

It will probably be the judges who appointed him, not, as is usual, the court administration, who will decide if Mr. Kay and his team may resign from the case. The judges could reject the resignation request or ask the defense team to stay on until others are ready to take over, court officials said. But other lawyers would face the same difficulty in producing a defense for an unwilling defendant.

Mr. Milosevic has often laid out what his defense will be: having denounced the court as political, his defense will be political and, as he has said, he will present his own case by denouncing NATO, the United States and what he calls the Western conspiracy against Serbs.

But this is a defense the judges almost certainly would rule as inadmissible, because it would not address the criminal charges. Lawyers following the trial also say that Mr. Milosevic is expected to keep fighting to regain the floor. Short of that, he is likely to try to discredit the court, arguing, as he once put it, that the court is "'illegitimate" and he plans to "overthrow" it.