Milosevic's strongmen, Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović, who are accused of widespread persecutions and deportations, will finally face trial. The Yugoslav tribunal ordered them in court on Tuesday.

The UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) will resume the trial of the duo, which was has been delayed on a number of occasions due to the ill-health of Stanišic. The suspect is suffering from a bowel inflammation, osteoporosis, kidney stones and depression.
 
The court has now set out special modalities to accommodate Stanišic's medical condition and enable him to participate in the trial proceedings. He will participate in the proceedings via video-conference link from a room in the United Nations prison in Scheveningen. A telephone line will allow him to communicate with his counsel in the Courtroom.
 
Troubled trial
Stanišić (1950) and Simatović (1950) were indicted in 2003 for war crimes and crimes against humanity but were allowed to await their trial, which started last year, in Belgrade.

But the war crimes court ordered the men to return to The Hague on 5 May 2009 to stand trial for war crimes and genocide, including the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica.
 
Criminal enterprise
As head of the secret police, Jovica Stanišić was former Serbian president Slobodan Milosević's operations chief during the campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats that marked the wars in Croatia and Bosnia.
 
Franko Simatović is the former head of the notorious Special Operations Unit, known as the Red Berets. The two men were key figures in the one-time "military faction" in the early 1990s within the Serbian Interior Ministry that controlled the police and security services and which led the drive to war, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia.

Stanišić and Simatović are accused of participating in a joint criminal enterprise, together with Slobodan Milošević, Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić to ethnically cleanse Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
 
Among the charges is the killing of civilians in Srebrenica in 1995, committed and captured on videotape by members of the Scorpions militia.
 
Slobodan Milosevic died in the custody of the ICTY in 2006, while standing trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader currently facing 11 charges of genocide and war crimes before the tribunal, will face trial in August.