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Brief synopsis of Hague witnesses: 30 june - 11 july 2003
Written by: Vera Martinovic - July 14, 2003
Here's a brief summary of the last 12 witnesses, 5 of which were known by numbers instead of names, with blurred faces and distorted voices, and 1 not even that (he was nameless and numberless, and it was simply announced that his whole testimony would be given in a private session).
B-1244, a Bosnian Serb civil official during the war, first confirmed that 30 Frenki Simatovic's men [Commander of the Serbian Special Police unit] participated in the military takeover of his town (being asked about it by the Prosecutor Groome in a highly suggestive and confusing manner]. Then, when Milosevic asked about these men in detail, he clarified that they were in fact members of the Serbian Radical Party who arrived in the municipality as volunteers with no link to Simatovic or to the State Security Department of the Police of Serbia whatsoever.
C-0006 seemed totally unreliable, claiming to be a Croat who was first arrested by the local Serbs, and then forced to become a member of the Serb Territorial Defence in Vukovar. As a shanghaied soldier, he was somehow at liberty to be miraculously present at all the key moments and places during these two critical days, seeing all of the important players in action at least three times a day, listening to their conversations, coming and going not once but twice to Ovcara Farm, doing nothing, just puttering about.
He even claimed to have seen Major Sljivancanin in person at Ovcara. Such a bold thing has never claimed by anybody so far. He even said hello to the Major, but the latter failed to reply. To boot, he gave his testimony in English. Yet, with all his alleged hovering presence (like a Victorian novelist, he was even able to read minds of his characters), his testimony boiled to already well-known general things that could be told by anybody watching TV at that time.
Witness "X", testifying in a private session, probably gave crucial relevant evidence based on his personal gut feeling about how "Milosevic was a thief who was too much in love with his overweight wife."
Vlado Vukovic, a former Croatian policeman who fought against the JNA [Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija = Yugoslav National Army] in Krajina, became POW and was exchanged later on, claimed that the JNA was in fact attacking this defenseless Croatian village with no reason at all. I repeat, he was captured while attacking a JNA facility near the said village, together with the rest of Croatian policemen and irregulars.
C-1230 testified that how he was the only one who survived an alleged execution by JNA soldiers in Krajina. The problem is that in his previous 3 written statements given to the OTP he never mentioned JNA soldiers, only some local Serb irregulars. Perhaps his memory got better after several years.
Andreas Riedlemayer, a Harvard expert on Islamic architecture, was again commissioned by the OTP (after his testimony about Kosovo) to talk about the destruction of not only the Islamic, but also the Catholic monuments in Bosnia (as an expert on the Islamic architecture, of course, and not on destruction nor on Catholicism).
Riedlemayer was not tasked with researching the destruction of the Catholic monuments destroyed by the Muslims, nor the destruction of the Muslim monuments destroyed by the Catholics - only the destruction of the Muslim and Catholic monuments destroyed by the Serbs.
While not being an expert on arms and explosives (by his own admission), Mr. Riedlemayer somehow managed to know how, and under what circumstances, all of those monuments were destroyed. Although he had never bothered to investigate the destruction of Serb monuments, he somehow knew their destruction was not substantial.
Riedelmayer, was even bold enough to claim that the fact he wrote a letter to Clinton demanding the UN arms embargo against Bosnian Muslims should cease to be respected by the US, did not affect his professional objectivity in the least.
Zoran Lilic, former Yugoslav President, was summoned again, one month after his previous appearance, to testify about some important documents recently received by the OTP from the Yugoslav authorities, namely the transcripts of the meetings of the Supreme Defence Council, as well as some intercepted highly confidential phone calls.
It turned out to be an anticlimactic, the Council transcripts merely demonstrated that Milosevic had even less influence, let alone direct authority over Bosnian Serbs, who opposed him bitterly at every meeting.
The intercepts (most probably made by the Croatian Security Services) were useless due to the poor technical quality, so their written transcripts had been used instead. Nevertheless, they were completely uninteresting, except one: a phone call between Lilic and General Perisic (the YU Army Chief of Staff), where Lilic said it had been agreed that a written guarantee would be provided to General Mladic to assure him he will not be delivered to the ICTY, in exchange for the return of two captured French pilots [downed by the Bosnian Serbs while their Mirage fighter participated in the NATO bombing of the Serb positions near Pale].
The juicy detail was when Lilic said to Perisic he should explain to Mladic when negotiating the release of the pilots that both French President Jacques Chirac and Milosevic had agreed to give that same guarantee [in order not to spoil the upcoming signing of the Dayton Accords in Paris].
Another interesting intercept (or, alleged intercept, since there was no tape at all, just the transcript) was the one in which Milosevic's wife spoke to the Chef de Cabinet of Karadzic about those French pilots. The alleged conversation contains no damning details at all, it could only give a general impression of Milosevic's wife being influential and meddling into her husband's business. The problem was that in this transcript Mrs. Markovic called her interlocutor "Rajko" and referred to her husband as "President Milosevic".
Milosevic claimed his wife never knew any of these people, let alone on a first-name basis, and expressed surprise that she should refer to him as "President Milosevic", after spending her whole life with him. He expressed his concern that the evidence might be forged. He said he would love to hear the tape of this conversation be played in the courtroom. It turned out that Mr. Nice couldn't produce any tape, and so he withdrew this particular piece of "evidence".
Edin Pasic, former translator for Arabic and Turkish in the ex-Yugoslav federal bodies and the current Ambassador of Bosnia & Herzegovina to Kuwait, stated that, while passing the corridors of the Presidential palace on his way to his task of interpreting the telephone conversation between Muammar el Gaddafi of Libya and the Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic in 1992. He saw men in mudded uniforms who were talking of the killings and throat-cutting they had done in Bosnia. He must've passing those clean corridors real slow to be able to hear all the colorful details by those mudded fighters.
Pasic said that the Belgrade mosque on Knez Mihailova street, which he said he attended regularly, was attacked by a hand grenade. When Milosevic pointed out that the mosque (repaired and guarded by the police after that) was not on that street, and when Tapuskovic showed some interest in how come a Communist like Mr Pasic was attending a mosque at all, Mr Pasic explained that the mosque must've been somewhere in the general vicinity of the park (the man had lived in Belgrade for 16 years, mind you), and that he was not a Communist, but merely a member of the League of Communists.
Pasic expressed his disdain for the Belgrade Mufti [the head of the Muslim community], who was regularly seeing Milosevic, or, as the witness put it "flirted with Milosevic".
Pasic claimed that the Muslims in Belgrade lived under terror, feeling as if they were wearing "yellow arm-bands" (used by Nazis to identify Jews), and that the ethnic cleansing had in fact started from Belgrade. To strengthen such a claim he used his own "horrifying experience:" President Cosic allegedly offered him to be his adviser for Islamic countries, but he proudly refused, not wanting to become a puppet to Milosevic, which Cosic already was (the hapless Cosic allegedly admitted as much in desperate whispers to his interpreter/wannabe adviser, who fell down on his knees, begging Cosic to protect the Bosnian Muslims).
After that, Pasic felt as if he had been followed and his apartment entered. The terror was such that full 4 years later Pasic calmly left with his whole family to Hungary, and thence to Egypt, regularly using his passport to do so. Milosevic didn't appreciate the kneeling melodrama in the Presidential cabinet and reminded the witness that Cosic was alive and could testify that nothing similar had happened and voiced his disgust that such a story came from the witness in the worst of taste.
May said the bad taste is unimportant, only the sterling quality of the evidence this witness is providing. Mr Pasic had to say something damning about the Colonel Sljivancanin, too: apparently, during an official reception, the Colonel's face literally "lit up when Milosevic entered the room."
Safet Avdic, a Muslim from Foca who had been a POW in a Bosnian Serb detention facility and who was subsequently exchanged, described his prison days, complaining that he has lost a lot of weight there. Oddly enough, he has never been maltreated, but he heard that some other POWs had.
Jusuf Taranin, was another Muslim from the same municipality, who described how 7 Muslims were killed by a bunch of irregulars in a warehouse that used to belong to the JNA (that must've been the reason the Prosecution summoned this particular witness - the JNA had been somehow mentioned in his testimony). He also stated that 10 days before the clashes began, the JNA came and distributed guns to local Serbs. When Milosevic asked whether this could have been local Territorial Defence guys who came and distributed guns, the reliable witness said: "I don't know, could be."
B-1120 was in the same detention facility in Foca as Safet Avdic, and he also claimed that the local Muslims were unarmed when attacked by the vicious Serbs, and that they never fired at all towards the Serb positions. He had trouble answering how come the battle for Foca lasted for full 8 days, then.
C-1171 was a member of the ZNG [Zbor Narodne Garde = Croatian National Guard Corps] in Vukovar, who saw the end was near and with hundreds of other zenge came to Vukovar Hospital, pretending to be wounded or a staff member, to be able to come out of the town in a humanitarian convoy. Along with the others, he was arrested and taken to the Ovcara Farm. He managed to jump out of the truck, but was caught again. Strangely enough, he was not executed as could have been expected from the Serbs on a killing spree, but was shipped to the Belgrade Military Prison, where he had not been maltreated and where it was established he was a suspect war criminal (a member of the ZNG explosives unit, who demolished private Serb property in Vukovar, killing civilians).
C-1171 was subsequently exchanged. His damning testimony re the Ovcara case was that he, unlike the omnipresent earlier witness C-0006, never saw Colonel Sljivancanin at the Ovcara Farm at all. He did see some uniformed men there who had parts of the JNA uniforms on plus fur hats and various insignia, so sometimes he referred to them as the JNA soldiers and sometimes as the local irregulars.
When directly asked by Milosevic whether he could confirm these people were the JNA soldiers, the witness said he didn't know and playfully added that Milosevic should answer that instead. Witty, but not evidence. There was an interesting moment when Milosevic produced and tendered into evidence the original Vukovar Hospital register [taken away by the JNA after they took over the Hospital], showing that only 45 wounded persons in all (both civilians and military) had been admitted during the fiercest final battle between 2 and 18 November 1991, a far cry from that horrifying picture that the Hospital Director Dr Bosanac had painted of overcrowded facility with hundreds and hundreds of wounded.
The problem with this legal procedure is that it needs some relevant and hard evidence to build up the case against the defendant. So far, it was as described above, or even worse. May I suggest to May & Co. to explain their final sentence by the damning testimony of that secret witness "X"?
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Vera Martinovic is an independent writer based in Belgrade Yugoslavia.