Milosevic

Prosecutors mounting war crimes charges against ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic this week had a chance to cross-examine his latest defence witness, a former chief of police in the Kosovo town of Urosevac.

The indictment against Milosevic alleges that security forces under the accused’s control systematically persecuted Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population in the late Nineties, culminating in mass expulsions after NATO launched air strikes against Serbia in March 1999.

But Bogoljub Janicevic has testified in support of Milosevic’s argument that the security forces acted professionally throughout, and that the huge refugee flows in fact stemmed largely from panic caused by the NATO bombing.

He has also defended an infamous “anti-terrorist operation” carried out by his subordinates in the village of Racak in January 1999, which is said to have left dozens dead and is listed on the charge sheet against Milosevic.

The bulk of this week’s cross-examination by prosecutor Geoffrey Nice was given over to attacking the witness’s evidence regarding this legally and historically important episode.

Nice was also keen to hear more about Janicevic’s position as a part-time member of parliament for the accused’s Socialist Party of Serbia from 1993 to 2000, a role the witness omitted to mention when outlining his career at the start of his testimony.

As Milosevic continues to focus on the Kosovo indictment - at the expense of charges relating to the wars in Bosnia and Croatia - it was announced this week that he has now used up over two-thirds of the time allotted to his defence.

During questioning by Milosevic last week, Janicevic talked judges through documents outlining the extent of attacks and kidnappings carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, in Urosevac and the surrounding area in the late Nineties.

He also discussed documents detailing legal proceedings against members of the police found to have been involved in criminal activities at the time. It is Milosevic’s position that while individual policemen inevitably stepped out of line, there was a functioning system in place to search out such “bad apples” and punish them.

Rounding up his examination of the witness at the start of this week, Milosevic focused his questioning on a number of other army and police operations – besides Racak – which are mentioned in the indictment against him.

Janicevic dismissed allegations in the indictment that in the course of an attack on Kotlina on March 24, 1999, women, children and the elderly were driven from their homes, most of the village was razed and at least 17 men were killed and their bodies tossed down wells.

The only people who died, he said, were Albanian rebels who had opened fire on police carrying out an anti-terrorist operation in the area. And the “wells” into which their bodies were supposedly thrown were in fact KLA bunkers.

He gave a similar explanation for deaths in the village of Dubrava on May 25. And he denied that residents were beaten and shot during an attack on the town of Kacanik in late March, insisting that it and the surrounding villages had long been under the control of the police and army.

Beginning his cross-examination, Nice soon switched the focus back to the Racak operation – considered important by prosecutors as an early and particularly extreme example of alleged brutality by the authorities. Some 45 Albanians are said to have died in the incident, including around 25 men who were apparently removed from their hiding place in a building and shot.

Janicevic continued to insist that all those killed in Racak were members of the KLA. He admitted that he didn’t know what role had been played in the rebel army by one particular victim – Halim Beqiri, listed in the indictment as being 13 years of age – but suggested he had probably been helping to provide logistical support.

Asked whether Beqiri might have been an innocent victim of the fighting, Janicevic admitted, “There is that possibility.”

Throughout his examination, Nice demanded to know from Janicevic why estimates for the number of people killed in the village had changed in the period following the fighting.

In a telegram to his superiors on the day the operation took place, Janicevic reported that around 60 KLA members had died. Speaking with OSCE observers the following morning, he changed his assessment to “at least 15”. And in a report compiled several days later, he set the figure at around 40.

Nice put it to Janicevic that this was all part of an inept attempt to cover up what he knew had taken place. But the witness said the difference was between unconfirmed estimates – discussed in internal memos – and official figures, which also changed as an investigation into the events made halting progress amid continuing fighting.

Janicevic objected to the use in court of forensic evidence suggesting that a significant proportion of those who died in Racak were mown down at close range. Such evidence, he claimed, was unreliable because it was collected months after the event, in an area where there had since been fighting.

And he continued to deny that his police cooperated with the Yugoslav Army, VJ, in the Racak operation. He stood his ground even when confronted with statements to the contrary from OSCE observers and from Goran Radosavljevic, a senior police commander who played a key role in the mission.

Elsewhere, Nice confronted Janicevic with accusations by witnesses and human rights organisations that police under his command had subjected interviewees to beatings and electric shocks. Janicevic denied that such things had taken place.

In another development this week, Presiding Judge Patrick Robinson announced the results of an inquiry into a controversy which arose in connection with a video played in court recently by Milosevic.

The video showed the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia Lord Paddy Ashdown – who testified during the prosecution stage of the trial – inspecting a number of guns in a house in Kosovo in 1998.

Milosevic claimed that other people present in the footage were members of the KLA and that Lord Ashdown could be heard telling them that it was a scandal they had such poor quality weapons.

The accused later turned on Judge Robinson for accepting Nice’s reply that Lord Ashdown had not said any such thing in the video and had anyway not realised at the time that those around him might have been KLA members. Nice also said Lord Ashdown had later publicly discussed the incident in detail in his witness testimony and in his published diaries.

Having reviewed the video, Judge Robinson announced this week that the court’s interpreters had confirmed Lord Ashdown did not in fact say the words Milosevic claimed to have heard.

On September 29, shortly after the clip was first played in court, Lord Ashdown reacted to the accused’s allegations in a written statement. “Mr Milosevic has shown that old habits die hard,” he said. “That he peddles in half-truths for his own political survival is well known.”

An attempt by Milosevic to attack Judge Robinson’s conclusions on the matter this week was silenced by the judge switching off the accused’s microphone.

Milosevic will begin re-examining Janicevic on October 18, following a week-long break to allow maintenance work to take place in the courtroom.

Michael Farquhar is an IWPR reporter in London.