THE MILOŠEVIĆ TRIAL AND ITS
CONTEXT—A FOUNDATIONAL PRIMER
This Primer is organized in four chapters: conflict, Tribunal, suspect, and trial. The purpose is to provide a foundation to the reader for the chapters that follow: to devise a common vocabulary, and to locate the individual chapters in a broader context. This means that many basic facts about or interpretations of general events are discussed here, rather than in the chapters.* The chapters themselves assume considerable knowledge about Yugoslavia and the ICTY, the basic outlines of which are laid out here. This Primer therefore raises some of the same issues that the chapters discuss, but no attempt has been made to represent the views of the authors of the individual chapters or to bring the arguments and observations made here into alignment with theirs. No single view is intended, as no single view encompasses the diversity of perspectives expressed by the many authors in this book. Indeed one of this Primer’s purposes is to indicate where there is diversity of opinion on a given question, as well as what that diversity means for views about the Milošević trial, the Tribunal, and their relationship to the broader project of ICL.† At the same, time, these introductory chapters express, or imply, some views of their own—of their author‡—and it could not be otherwise.