Nancy Paterson; prosecutor built case against Milosevic

The cause was ovarian cancer, her friend Carrie Hunter said.

From 1994 to 2001, Ms. Paterson was one of the prosecutors commissioned by the United Nations to investigate war crimes, crimes against humanity, and sexual crimes during nearly a decade of bloodshed that killed more than 200,000 people in the former Yugoslavia.

With Clint Williamson, who later became the United States ambassador at large for war crimes issues, Ms. Paterson led a team of more than 50 lawyers and investigators who gathered evidence leading to the indictment of Milosevic, whose role in the bloodshed earned him the sobriquet Butcher of the Balkans.

The 54-page initial indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which focused on war crimes in the Kosovo region, was written by Ms. Paterson and Williamson. It was the first time that a sitting head of state had been charged by an international tribunal. The indictment was later expanded to include crimes in Croatia and Bosnia.

Milosevic, the Communist leader whose embrace of Serbian nationalism ignited the ethnic strife, was president of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and president of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. As he rose to power by inciting dreams of a Greater Serbia, he became the prime engineer of conflicts that pitted his fellow Serbs against the Slovenes, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Albanians of Kosovo, and ultimately the combined forces of the NATO alliance.

By fall 2000, Milosevic’s appeals to nationalism were no longer sufficient to keep him in power. After his ouster, Milosevic was placed under house arrest in Belgrade and, in 2001, was transferred to a United Nations detention center in The Hague.

As his four-year trial was drawing toward a verdict — delayed by his frequent bouts of illness — Milosevic died in his cell on March 11, 2006.

By Williamson’s assessment, the Yugoslavia tribunal represented a revival for the international justice system “after a 50-year void from the time of the Nuremburg trials.’’

Though many people were skeptical that it would succeed, he said, “we were able, in a relatively short period, to bring together a very strong case against Milosevic, and Nancy deserves credit for her leadership role in making that happen.’’

Louise Arbour, who was the chief prosecutor at the time of the initial Milosevic indictment, said the Paterson-Williamson team “showed that Milosevic was commander of the army and the police; that everything came under his command both in the political and the military sense.’’

“That,’’ she continued, “established his responsibility for the crimes that were being committed.’’

Ms. Paterson, who had been a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office for 11 years, specializing in child abuse cases and sex crimes, had volunteered to go to Yugoslavia in 1994 as a member of a United Nations commission investigating widespread sexual violence there.

“She worked for years with a small team, all women, bringing dozens of charges of rape,’’ Arbour said. “She was very involved in collecting the evidence, which was very difficult because of the reluctance of victims to tell their story.’’