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Slobodan Milosevic - History teacher
July
24, 2003
-- By y: Vera Martinovic
Audrey Budding testified who testified on July 23rd and 24th, is a skinny, bespectacled youthful PhD with expressive gesticulation. She knows lots of historical facts. Her clothes and hairdo are unusually interesting for an American. She apparently speaks/reads Serbian.
But that's where the plus side stops. Mrs. Budding's historical knowledge is fragmentary and incomplete and, so she often misses the big picture, and is unaware of important events and sources.
Mrs. Budding used to be a diplomatic official at the American Embassy in Belgrade in the '80s, so she is obviously more of a politician then a historian.
She penned a report commissioned by the OTP on Serbian nationalism in the 20th century, which seems to be a rewrite of her own, more balanced PhD thesis on the Serbian intellectuals and the national question, only with the added twist to make the Serbs look bad, so she supplied a political trial with a politicized rewrite of her own work.
None the less, I have to give her the credit of being much more subtle than the previous Prosecution "expert", Riedlmayer, who was simply ridiculous.
Mrs. Budding was seldom obvious and crude in her conclusions, except sometimes, when Milosevic cornered her with facts and questions, and then she turned stubborn. For example, when she disagreed with the data by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum about the figure of 600,000 victims of the Ustasa concentration camp Jasenovac, claiming the number is 100,000 and explaining that anyway 'nobody knows exactly how many Serbs died in NDH [Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska = Independent State of Croatia, Ustase-led Nazi puppet invention during WW2, comprising today's Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina], in each village and each house' . Although she admitted this was clearly a genocide, she was suspicious about the number, she couldn't be bothered to believe those pedantic Jews at the Holocaust museum, and certainly not Yugoslav sources, because she was unable to personally peek into each village and house.
Another example where she was crude and stubborn was when she refused to accept the fact that the Albanian Fascist movement of the notorious Balli Combetar or balisti, were Fascists. The fact that they were installed by Mussolini to rule Kosovo when it was given over to Albania during the WW2, butchered thousands of Serbs, and then continued armed fighting years after the war officially ended, all that was to Audrey, "a rebellion that started after this region of Drenica was incorporated in the Yugoslav state, which caused the revolt of the Albanians, who didn't want to join the Partisans in the final push against the Germans in 1944 because they were afraid to leave their houses, and so this rebellion was quashed and probably few thousands were killed, some in battles, some executed".
Mrs. Budding stubbornly persisted saying, "to describe balisti as Albanian Fascists is not correct, because they did not support the Fascistic form of the state."
Milosevic got impatient and curtly asked: "And what did they support? Did they support Italian Fascists?"
Mrs. Budding mumbled that well, of course, they supported the creation of the Greater Albania.
Milosevic snapped: "Not only supported the idea, but militarily supported the Fascists."
Mrs. Budding mumbled some more, trailing off and ultimately saying that she's not familiar with it, with each military action, that there were different groups… Some historian and expert!
There were some more gaffes in her paper, like when she wrote that the Ustasa émigrés were a marginal group (Milosevic wanted to know how come they got to run a country for 4 years if they were so marginal).
Also, she found it problematic to define the nascent Yugoslavia as a solution for the Serbs, with the maxim 'all Serbs in one state'. When Milosevic said that Yugoslavia was not a solution only for the Serbs, but also for others, that it could be equally said 'all Croats/Slovenes in one state', Mrs. Budding proudly begged to disagree, 'because there were significant Croatian and Slovenian minorities left in Italy and Austria', but when Milosevic reminded her that also a significant portion of the Serbs were left in Hungary and Romania, so the maxim still applied for the bulk of all nations, Mrs. Budding didn't have anything to say. A historian who argues an issue not knowing what the next related historical fact might be used against her is not a very competent historian.
Almost all other conclusions in her report were less obviously biased, only ever so slightly leaned towards prejudice and one would have to carefully read both her thesis and her OTP report to pinpoint the distortions, although the general impression of a different slant is palpable even from those paragraphs that were read in the courtroom.
Milosevic quoted her PhD thesis where she explained how it was impossible for the Serbs to accept the confederate Yugoslavia and its breaking along the borders of its republics because they were so dispersed; the same issue in her report for the OTP got the subtle addition that the Serbs failed to pay much attention to their ties with other nations within the republics in which they lived outside of Serbia.
Milosevic quipped: "Well, do you seriously believe that the ties of the Serbs in Croatia with the Croats, these ties that include the genocide that you've already explained, are so much stronger and more important than the ties with other Serbs?!" Budding got pretty confused after that and started to babble about life being not only one's nation, but a house in which one lives… To that one can argue that one can indeed live in a house if it still stands and if one is still alive.
Another major problem with Budding's paper is the extremely shallow and selective pool of sources that she used, some of the works completely debunked as political pamphlets (e.g. "Kosovo - A Brief History' by Noel Malcolm), yet she quoted from such articles and books, disregarding or not being aware of the existence of other well known authors and works that Milosevic listed.
Budding was often reduced to answering 'I'm not familiar with this particular work' or 'I do not know about these particular sources' or 'I haven't read all the transcripts, only from the first meeting' or 'No, I haven't seen these diplomatic documents'. Milosevic and his aides have done their homework and at times Mrs. Budding was indeed receiving a thorough lesson in history.
The young doctor was selective not only in her sources, but also in the historical events which she did or did not include in her paper. Thus, she did quote a public speech by the soon-to-be Yugoslav King Alexander, who said that Serbia must be strong so that Yugoslavia could be strong too. She explained that as an example of 'Serbian nationalism', but she failed to quote and explain, or even to mention at all the crucial document of that time, the Corfu Declaration on the creation of Yugoslavia. She explained her omissions with the necessity to keep her report concise. Strangely enough, only the relevant and balanced things got chopped off.
The "learned panel of judges" found themselves in an absurd situation: here they were, admitting into evidence the Prosecution's exhibit going way back into the 15th century, and discussing these despised historical issues which they always pronounced as irrelevant, and of which they knew nothing, and frankly didn't care to know. But, this is what you get when the Prosecution's case so heavily depends on the silly notion that all this is one and the same 'joint criminal enterprise' to create the Greater Serbia, the plan which goes centuries back, so even King Alexander, Vuk Karadzic, Garasanin and other Serbian historical figures must be evoked in order to take their punishment for their participation in this Nice-Del Ponte co-production in Cinemascope.
History is a tough discipline, and it demands a broad knowledge. It was at times hard for me to follow all of the expert nuances, because I certainly haven't read all of the books that were mentioned. But, at least I was able to follow the basic logic of the discussion and arguments.
Mr. May was probably dozing or doing crosswords, because he proved time and again unable to follow or understand the point of a certain line of questioning.
At one point, Milosevic asked Mrs. Budding why she wrote that Vuk Karadzic could be attributed with the authorship of the idea of defining a nation by its language, when there is a whole line of other linguists, historians and philosophers (of which he quoted some) who had stated the same ideas much earlier, and Karadzic had merely embraced that idea?
May interrupted by saying: "I do not know what is the purpose of this list of names?" Milosevic professorially reprimanded him: "Mr May, you have not been listening to the previous question", and he patiently repeated the whole question and said that 'the list you're preventing me from reading are the people who originally created the idea, among them someone whom you might be familiar with, a German philosopher Fichte'. So, not only was Mrs. Budding given a free history lesson, but Mr. May as well.
The time was again the main problem, May not wanting to allow any extension of the cross-examination. Milosevic said twice: "These time restrictions I really regard as violence." And, at one point he mockingly pointed at the courtroom wall clock and told May: "Anyway, the press has been already writing that the central issue here is time, and nothing much else."
As I said, Mrs. Budding was subtle in her intentional bias, perhaps overly subtle, so the point the Prosecution wanted to make with this witness hasn't come across all that clearly. It only left a faint anti-Serb aftertaste, a few hints and insinuations, an admission that yes, no nation of these parts is blameless, but the Serbs were somehow the main culprits.
The time allotted for this witness, both for the examination-in-chief and for the cross-examination, was all to short. And even that short time was interrupted by inane interventions from Nice and stupid questions from May. Milosevic told May at one point (when the latter tried to dismiss one issue as irrelevant): "I don't believe that you should learn the whole Serbian history in half an hour, but since you mainly deal here with altering history, I consider this particular issue to be relevant."
What I find appalling is that the "trial" aimed at rewriting history was dealing in history in such a superficial and brief manner. But, the reason lies precisely in that: when you want to do a quick and crude rewrite, you don't dwell too much on the serious science.
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Vera Martinovic
is in independent writer based in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.