The 49-year-old defence witness was brought to The Hague to counter prosecution claims that the Yugoslav army took part in the ethnic cleansing and murder of Albanian civilians in Kosovo during the 1999 conflict there.
But it emerged that the neatly dressed, well-mannered general was himself implicated in several episodes of alleged war crimes in Kosovo – yet, at the same time, is scheduled as an expert witness for the prosecution in their case against the former Kosovo Albanian prime minister Ramush Haradinaj.
Milosevic is accused of orchestrating a campaign to expel hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians from the province during the three-month long NATO air strikes on Serbia in the spring of 1999. Prosecutors allege this campaign was conducted jointly by the Yugoslav army and the Serbian police and included the widespread murder of Albanian civilians.
During the first two days of his testimony, Delic focused on the first half of the 1998 – the prelude to the actual conflict. Moving through a mountain of more than 600 army documents and various videos brought along by the witness, Milosevic appeared set on showing that the army engaged in a restrained manner, trying to contain a rapidly growing western-backed Albanian insurgency in the province.
The witness started off by trying to prove that the Kosovo Albanian rebellion in 1998 had western backing, by showing a video clip of US special envoy Richard Holbrook meeting with a Kosovar guerrilla leader in June of that year. This meeting, which Milosevic has tried to present as a part of a western conspiracy against his country, was in fact conducted in public view and in the framework of Holbrook’s official visit to destroyed Albanian villages in Kosovo at the time.
The witness then showed excerpts from the Dutch documentary “Brooklyn Connection”, which describes the ways the Albanian immigrant community in the United States organised weapon supply channels for the Kosovar insurgents in the late Nineties.
The first clip showed the movie’s main characters Florin Krasniqi distributing weapons to Albanian men - alleged insurgents - from the back of a van. But IWPR’s senior editor Stacy Sullivan - who produced the documentary – later explained to this reporter in a telephone interview from New York that the clip was in fact a re-enactment based on Krasniqi’s recollections, which was filmed in Kosovo in November 2003.
The last segment the witness played showed a fundraising dinner for US presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, where Krasniqi is seen chatting with Holbrook and the former American general Wesley Clark.
The witness then moved to paint a picture of the Yugoslav army’s attempts to stop the growing illegal import of weapons and the infiltration of trained guerrillas from neighbouring Albania. To back up this picture, he used recordings of intercepted radio traffic between the insurgents and various contemporaneous reports he sent to his superiors.
He also described numerous border incidents in his zone of responsibility in southwestern Kosovo - and played video clips of the official army investigations into some of them.
The pictures showed bodies of Albanians killed in alleged shootouts as well as weapons and ammunition confiscated by the Yugoslav army. In one such incident, the witness claimed, six conscript soldiers and one non-commissioned officer ambushed a group of around 175 insurgents and managed to kill 19 of them, without suffering a single casualty.
Throughout the testimony, both Milosevic and Delic referred to Albanians only as “Shiptars” – a term Albanians perceive as derogatory when used by non-Albanians. From the testimony it appeared that the same term was widely used also in the official internal Yugoslav army correspondence at the time.
Throughout the first two days of his testimony, the witness showed to the court only 27 of around 630 exhibits he had brought along. His testimony covered only two of the 18 months that it was expected to span – all this suggesting that his testimony will last far longer than the scheduled 12 hours or three full court days.
Somewhat daunted by this prospect, the judges insisted Milosevic should move through his evidence much quicker, and warned him that he had used already more than half of the time allotted for his defence without even wrapping up his case on one out of three indictments he is facing.
Growing visibly impatient with the defendant’s behaviour, Judge Iain Bonomy of Scotland warned him he would “only have [himself] to blame” should Milosevic reach the end of his 150-day defence period without addressing all the charges against him.
Milosevic has already announced he plans to ask for an extension of the time allocated for his defence.
But the witness himself could turn out to be more damaging for Milosevic’s defence case than the judges’ growing impatience.
Two witnesses who earlier testified in the prosecution stage of the trial have implicated general Delic and his unit in several episodes of deliberate mass killings of Albanian civilians in Kosovo.
In the most dramatic of these testimonies, protected witness K32 - a former Yugoslav army conscript who served in Kosovo under Delic from March 1998 until June 1999 - described several incidents where Delic was personally heard or seen ordering the soldiers to kill Albanian civilians.
The witness described how in March 1999 around a thousand soldiers and some 300 Serbian policemen surrounded the village of Jeskovo. “When we entered the village … I personally heard [Delic] say that we should make an effort not to let anyone remain alive, anyone we find in the village,” he said.
K32 also described how, during an army and police raid on the village of Trnje, Delic ordered the soldiers to “cleanse the village of civilians”. K32 said most of the victims of this raid were women, children and the elderly. The witness then recounted how he was ordered to return to the village several days later and bury the bodies.
Delic was never investigated for any of those events. On the contrary, both he and the brigade he commanded were decorated after the end of the war in Kosovo and he was promoted to the rank of major general.
These allegations make Delic a risky witness, as he appears “ripe for being demolished in the cross-examination”, according to Edgar Chen, a long-term observer of the trial on behalf of the Coalition for International Justice.
This “demolishing effect” is likely to be strengthened, as it comes after the prosecutors managed to seriously dent the credibility of the previous witness - police inspector Dragan Jasovic, whose testimony ended on May 22 and who is likely to be remembered for the numerous allegations of torture levelled against him for his dealings with Albanians in the Kosovo town of Urosevac.
“If the witnesses like [Jasovic and Delic] are in the end remembered by the judges not by the evidence they brought but by the crimes they are alleged to have committed themselves, … they would serve Milosevic no purpose,” said Chen.
But destroying the credibility of both Delic and Jasovic could also prove to be potentially risky and embarrassing for the prosecutor’s office as a whole – they have both been called on by the prosecution to appear in the trials of two Kosovo Albanians. As revealed this week, Delic is scheduled to appear as an expert witness in the Haradinaj trial, which is yet to begin. Jasovic has already testified in the prosecution case against KLA regional commander Fatmir Limaj.
In this way, the lead prosecutor in the Milosevic case is effectively destroying the credibility of the witnesses chosen by his colleagues working on another case. This paradox, according to Chen of the CIJ, stems from the nature of the adversarial system applied in the court, which allows for the same person to be rendered useless in one case because they are subject to sustained cross-examination in another.
But with cases as high profile as Milosevic and later Haradinaj, such a paradox can easily end up as an embarrassment, Chen warns, adding that the prosecutors may try to avoid this embarrassment by removing Delic from their witness list in the Haradinaj case.
“In the end the prosecutors have to choose - weakening their Milosevic case or losing one witness in the Haradinaj [trial],” he said. “Clearly, they would not risk the former."
Ana Uzelac is IWPR’s project manager in The Hague.
