At the time of his death in March 2006, Slobodan Milošević had been on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (the ICTY) for more than four years. Greeted initially as a victory in the ‘struggle against impunity’, the progress of his trial was soon hindered by thickets of procedural argument and by the cunning of Milošević himself. Diverting attention from events in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo – the subject of his trial – Milošević manipulated every legal avenue available to him, giving the impression that, like the farcical and chaotic litigation in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of his Own (1994), the trial was meaningless, ultimately ‘about itself’.
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