Milosevic

The trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic heard evidence this week that the accused personally ordered senior army and police officers to take a tough stance on crimes committed by their men during the Kosovo conflict.

Milosevic is accused of overseeing a systematic campaign of murder, rape and looting directed against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population in 1998 and 1999, which allegedly drove some 800,000 civilians from their homes.

But the latest witness to speak in his defence, retired Yugoslav Army, VJ, security chief Geza Farkas, said he was present on two separate occasions when the former president stressed the need to investigate and prosecute all members of the security services suspected of such offences.

Milosevic was also emphatically opposed to the presence of Serb paramilitaries in Kosovo, the witness claimed.

In a further development, the last hearing scheduled this week was cancelled after the accused failed to show because of bad health. With a subsequent medical report kept under wraps, it remained unclear whether Milosevic’s latest bout of ill health relates to long-term problems caused by his high blood pressure.

Testifying prior to this halt in proceedings, Farkas told judges that he was appointed head of security of the VJ on March 24, 1999, the same day that NATO began an 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in an effort to halt what it considered to be brutal treatment of the local Albanian population.

A month before his appointment, said Farkas, when he was still an assistant defence minister in the Yugoslav government, Milosevic had summoned him to a meeting to inform him of this new posting. The president apparently took advantage of this early opportunity to insist on the importance of preventing soldiers from tarnishing the image of the VJ with criminal behaviour.

Farkas recalled that after he took up his new job on March 24, what were initially sporadic reports of crimes committed by VJ troops in Kosovo began to gather pace. On May 1, on the orders of VJ chief of staff Dragoljub Ojdanic, he set out from Belgrade to investigate.

Farkas argued that some crimes blamed on the army in Kosovo in fact resulted from blood feuds between ethnic Albanian families. In other cases, he said, those responsible were “infiltrators” who had got hold of VJ uniforms. But he acknowledged that individual members of the army also stepped out of line.

Having returned from Kosovo and compiled a report on his findings, Farkas met with Milosevic and other senior police and army officers on May 17. Milosevic apparently reiterated that criminal behaviour within the army and the police should be stamped out and that any instances which occurred were to be prosecuted immediately.

After the meeting, Farkas said, he ordered a team headed by his deputy, Aleksander Vasiljevic, to travel to Kosovo. A few weeks later, Vasiljevic apparently reported that prosecutions were underway and that “investigations had been intensified”.

The witness claimed that some 382 prosecutions were initiated during the conflict in Kosovo for crimes including theft, rape and murder. “What the army could do, it did,” he insisted.

Prosecutors say VJ documentation shows that the army in fact only ever convicted a handful of its members for murders committed in Kosovo. Farkas said the process of prosecutions was interrupted when NATO bombing forced a withdrawal from the territory in June.

Farkas also said that at the meeting on May 17, 1999, Milosevic had been displeased to hear that the Serbian police had accepted an offer of 30 men from the notorious paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan. Some of these individuals were already under investigation for crimes, Farkas told judges.

Insisting that the 30 men in question be removed from Kosovo, Milosevic apparently declared “in no uncertain terms” that such groups should not be allowed to operate in future.

The witness dismissed a conflicting account of the same meeting given by Vasiljevic, who gave evidence in the trial in February 2003. Vasiljevic testified that, on hearing that Arkan’s men were operating in Kosovo, Milosevic “didn’t react at all, as if it hadn’t been mentioned”.

Farkas admitted that, unlike Vasiljevic, he did not have any notes from the meeting.

During cross-examination by prosecutor Geoffrey Nice, Farkas denied that he had been appointed as the army’s chief of security largely because the president considered him to be an easily-manipulated “yes man”.

He admitted being an old school-friend of VJ chief of staff Ojdanic. But he said it was the first time he had heard Nice’s suggestion that his predecessor in the post of security chief had been sidelined after publishing an article arguing for a multilateral approach to the situation in Kosovo.

Farkas also denied accusations that as the assistant defence minister responsible for Yugoslavia’s civil defence plans in the run-up to the conflict in Kosovo, he had been involved in preparations to secretly arm the territory’s ethnic Serb population.

As evidence for this claim, Nice produced an order dated May 21, 1998 requiring local officials to compile lists “for the purpose of arming of the population”. The document went on to say that the focus should be on protecting settlements “in which Serbs and Montenegrins are populations in a minority and are increasingly becoming targets of attacks by Albanian terrorists”.

Farkas replied that the distribution of weapons was carried out in accordance with Yugoslav law.

The trial will resume on November 15.

Michael Farquhar is an IWPR reporter in London.