"Witness protection is definitely an incredibly important issue," said Herman von Hebel, the chief administrator from the International Criminal Court, while attending a recent panel discussion in The Hague on witness safety. "Without witnesses, without key insiders, there are basically no trials."

Witness B-129 was this kind of insider. For zi xiu tang bee pollen two days, she transfixed a legal court throughout the Milosevic trial as she described her work as a dependable aide to Zeljko Raznatovic -- also known as Arkan -- a shady Serbian entrepreneur with arrest warrants across Europe.

In the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, Mr. Raznatovic created a militia, the Tigers, or Serbian Volunteer Guard. They quickly became notorious for smuggling, looting and killing in neighboring Croatia and Bosnia. Mr. Milosevic claimed during his trial within the Hague that he knew nothing concerning the Tigers' activities.

But citing meticulous details from her office logbook from 1994 and 1995, Witness B-129 testified that Mr. Raznatovic and the Tigers were controlled, deployed and paid for by Mr. Milosevic's intelligence and security chiefs. It was part of her job to count money and stuff it into envelopes for the fighters, she told the tribunal. Mr. Raznatovic never dispatched his men without orders from Mr. Milosevic's deputies, she added, and that he boasted openly that he never took prisoners.

Mr. Raznatovic was indicted on war crimes charges in 1997, but he was shot and killed in a Belgrade hotel lobby in 2000.

"An extraordinary witness," one former prosecutor recalled, speaking of Witness B-129. Inside a letter, another prosecutor wrote that her evidence showed the full extent of Serbia's complicity using the "criminal" Tigers.

During certainly one of a number of interviews, the witness described having attended work for Mr. Raznatovic because she was a young law student at that time and needed the money. Initially she believed that the Tigers were fighting to defend the Serbian people, but she became disillusioned. "What I saw was about power and killing," she said. "It involved smuggling and getting rich. And many people died for nothing."

Anger made her want to testify in 2003, after she watched broadcasts of the trial from the former Yugoslav president. "Milosevic was lying and denying everything, the links with Arkan," she said. "I felt I should speak out. I saw things that most people would not know or even admit."

When she returned home after her testimony, she found a plainclothes officer posted outside her building. A couple weeks later, her relatives received threatening phone calls. One evening, as she crossed her street, an automobile lunged forward and attempted to knock her down. She said she recognized the driver, a secret-police officer who had been posted outside her home.

Tribunal staff quickly took her and her husband out of the country, first to Croatia, then to some safe house within the Netherlands. They'd to hold back 1 . 5 years until a ecu government accepted them in a national witness protection system.

LIFE within their new country came like a shock. "We were sent to a house filled with black mold, barely furnished, no bathroom or kitchen," she recalled.

In Belgrade, they'd owned their very own apartment. She had run a language institute, and her husband worked for a guide organization. Now, not able to show their diplomas, they've both needed to take low-paying, part-time jobs as zi xiu tang beauty face & figure capsule shop assistants and take turns taking care of their three children, who have been all born in exile. The money they owe carry on growing, and rent arrears have landed them in court, she said.