Why Milosevic was never trated in Russia?

Serbianna

Views & Analysis
Moscow Calling

Why Milosevic was never trated in Russia?
By Jonathan Widell, Dr Patrick Barriot and Jacques VergÄs


Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his cell in the United Nations Detention Unit in The Hague on March 11, 2006. According to the pathological report, the cause of death was the heart infarction. That is still debated. The cause of death hinges, at least in part, on the question whether the cause of death could have been prevented by the treating physicians. Understandably, they would prefer a cause of death that could not be detected nor treated. The debate can get convoluted and technical, but it cannot be overstated that Milosevic was known to be a sick man when he came to The Hague. The tribunal could not pretend it did not know of his health problems. The detention unit even confiscated Milosevic's antihypertensive drugs on his arrival. Even if Milosevic's hypertensive problems have become part of the tribunal's folklore by now, closer medical attention has revealed much more profound health problems. Those who do not want to admit that the tribunal could have done anything about the problems seem to opt for ventricular fibrillation as the cause of death, because it fills the bill: it was hard to detect and to treat. However, that was not all. To cite just one of the preventable, though perhaps more innocent-sounding, health conditions we could mention the hearing loss, which was ultimately diagnosed by one of the Dutch physicians. Because the cardiac problems had taken the center stage, the tribunal did not have the opportunity to decide how it was going to conduct the trial in spite of Milosevic's hearing problem.
Milosevic's medical history soon turns into a report card of the court's appointed physicians. One does not have to be prejudiced or particularly harsh to conclude that at least the medical officer, Dr Paulus Falke, may have been out of his depth. The Trial Chamber even remarked that one of his reports was unsatisfactory. The fact appeared in all its poignancy after the examination by three "foreign", i.e. non-Dutch, doctors who examined Milosevic on November 4, 2005 at Milosevic's request. One of them, Dr Margarita Shumilina, was bold enough to mention in her report that the treatment of Milosevic in the detention unit had been inadequate so far. The visiting doctors made the concrete proposal to prescribe a six-week rest for Milosevic until further tests could be carried out.

The prosecution thought the medical problems concealed some sinister conspiracy against the tribunal. Its theory must have been that Milosevic was losing his nerve as the end of the trial was approaching and did everything he could to disrupt the remainder of the trial. So he sought an escape by some desperate act. Even the reliability of the visiting doctors was questioned. It did not seem quite plausible to argue that they had been bought by Milosevic to produce reports that he wanted. However, no matter how remote that possibility seemed, the tribunal clung to that explanation rather than admit that its physicians had been wrong.

In the meantime, Milosevic must have been strengthened in his conviction that his health was really at stake and that whatever could still be done about it was not going to happen in The Hague. After a period of medical as well as legal uncertainty, he submitted his request for provisional release on December 20, 2005. He wanted to get treated at the Bakoulev Center in Moscow.

By that time, the reports of November 4, 2005 seemed outdated and, as it turned out, the original reports submitted by the visiting doctors were not formulated clearly enough with Moscow-based treatment in mind. The prosecution made the most of the time gap between the reports and Milosevic's current medical position. In fact, the prosecution realized how useful it was to delay the process. The winter recess, during which Milosevic planned to get treated in Moscow, had passed, and the prosecution was still posing questions about his choice of the Bakoulev Center. The Center's main attraction, the expeditious treatment promised by the Head of the Center, Dr. Bockeria, began to wear thin.

But so did Milosevic's health. The time-consuming case within a case that Milosevic's request had prompted was at cross purposes with the urgency of the matter. The arguments centering on the expeditiousness that were thrown around in the process sounded hollow. All they did was to prolong the resolution of the case even further.

Not that Milosevic's choice for the Bakoulev Center had come out of the blue. Dr Elena Golukhova from the Bakoulev Center had examined him in early 2004, as was confirmed in the Parker report, which the tribunal published after his death. He had good reasons to trust the specialist from the Bakoulev Center, and his declared trust in the medical specialists at the Center was put forward in the request for provisional release as the main reason his wish should have been respected. Instead, the prosecution started making ad hominem arguments against Dr Shumilina, whose primary fault was that she had stated that Milosevic's current treatment was inadequate.

The confidentiality of Milosevic's medical file has been lifted, at least some of it. There are still many unanswered questions, and the documents that would answer them are not available. What we can do is to point out the questions. Still, the medical file to date contains more than 360 pages. In what follows we will review the documentation. Due to the amount of material that we intend to cover, the article is not really an article. It is longer.

I. Row of rotating doctors.......CONTINUED----> http://www.serbianna.com/columns/widell/005.shtml