Kosovo Through the Looking Glass

Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic this week called a British journalist to testify about apparent discrepancies between realities in the Balkans in the Nineties and the way events in the region were portrayed in the western media.



Eve-Ann Prentice began reporting from the Balkans in the mid-Eighties, first for the Guardian newspaper and later for The Times. She told the court that over that period, she became increasingly aware that the situation in the region was far more nuanced that it appeared in the reports of most foreign journalists.



At the same time, she said, “This inclination to try and portray the conflicts as black and white, good against evil seemed to me to intensify as the years unfolded.”



Prentice’s testimony focussed on the conflict in Kosovo in 1999, during which Milosevic is alleged to have overseen a brutal campaign by the Serbian police and Yugoslav Army, VJ, to evict some 800,000 ethnic Albanian civilians from their homes.



The witness recalled that fear of NATO bombing and pressure from the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, were in fact by far the most common explanations offered by Albanians for their decision to flee the region. Only one refugee ever told her that he was leaving because he feared the Serbian authorities, she recalled.



The Albanians in question had reportedly been told by the KLA that it was their “patriotic duty” to leave their homes, in order that the world might see how they suffered under Belgrade’s yoke. The KLA leadership apparently argued that, with NATO waiting in the wings, this was a golden opportunity to move a step closer to breaking away from Serbia and uniting with Albania.



Prentice also offered evidence supporting Milosevic’s contention that much of the damage to civilian property in Kosovo which prosecutors blame on torching and wanton destruction by the police and VJ was in fact caused by NATO bombs.



She recalled arriving in the town of Gnjilane in the immediate aftermath of an air strike on an industrial estate to find many civilian casualties, some still trapped under collapsed buildings.



She also said she was present when Nis was bombed in early May. Though the target appeared to be the town’s airport, she recalled seeing damage caused by cluster bombs in residential areas, thirty dead bodies in the streets and another thirty seriously wounded people in the local hospital.



As a further example, she cited a block of flats located near a petrol dump on the outskirts of Pristina which, she said, was targeted almost nightly until it was reduced practically to rubble.



Prentice also recalled an episode when two cars transporting her and a number of colleagues along a mountain road were bombed by what she was convinced were NATO aircraft. Her driver was killed but the rest of the party was rescued by Yugoslav soldiers who gave them food and medical assistance before escorting them back to Pristina.



Throughout her testimony, Prentice stressed that she hadn’t arrived in Kosovo until early May, over a month after NATO began its air campaign. This was a theme that prosecutor Geoffrey Nice was keen to develop during his aggressive cross-examination. He reminded the witness that a reporter with the Los Angeles Times who was in Kosovo throughout the bombing had noted that expulsions of the Albanian population in fact came to an abrupt halt on April 20.



Nice went on to read a series of passages from Prentice’s book, “One Woman’s War”, which painted a much darker picture of the conduct of the Belgrade security services in Kosovo. Prentice wrote that VJ soldiers spoke openly about summary executions of KLA suspects and about paramilitary units who failed to distinguish between armed combatants and innocent women and children.



The book also revealed that during key encounters with Albanian refugees, Prentice had struggled to shake off her Serbian companions, whose presence the witness agreed was likely to be somewhat intimidating for her interviewees.



Prentice’s one-day-only appearance came as an interlude in the testimony of Montenegrin politician Branko Kostic, who has already been in the witness stand for several days and is due to return when the trial resumes on February 6.



Prior to the interruption, Kostic spent the start of this week building on his exhaustive account of the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early Nineties, during which time he sat on its eight-member presidency.



He took issue in particular with the way in which prosecutors have portrayed the fact that, following moves by Croatia and Slovenia to gain independence from Yugoslavia, authority within the presidency came to rest with the so-called Serbian Bloc. This bloc comprised of representatives from Serbia, Montenegro, Vojvodina and Kosovo and Metohia, who it is alleged were all under Milosevic’s influence at the time.



Far from usurping power from the presidency’s remaining members, said Kostic, these four representatives were in fact just following guidelines laid down for how the body should function when there was an “imminent threat of war”. Under such conditions, he explained, decisions could be made by as many members of the presidency as were able to gather.





Michael Farquhar is an IWPR reporter in London.