But the full significance of Serbian police investigator Dragan Jasovic’s testimony will be determined by the cross-examination he faces in two weeks’ time.
Due to the potential weight of Jasovic’s evidence, prosecutor Geoffrey Nice was granted additional time to prepare for the cross examination, which is scheduled for May 17.
Jasovic brought documents to the court this week to show that 30 out of 45 people killed by Serb security forces in the village of Racak in January 1999 were named as Albanian guerrilla fighters in the statements he collected at the time from local citizens.
The Hague tribunal prosecutors agreed this week that these 30 people featured in Serbian police files as Kosovo Liberation Army members or collaborators – and have announced they would later deal with whether or not they were indeed involved with the guerrilla group.
The prosecution does not deny that Albanian insurgents were present in the village just before the massacre. In summer 2002, their commander Shukri Buja testified at the Milosevic trial that the soldiers withdrew from the village hours before Serb forces entered it, exposing the unarmed civilians.
Jasovic was the fifth Milosevic defence witness to focus mainly on Racak, which the accused appears to view as decisive for his case.
The discovery of some 25 Albanian bodies in a gully near the village in January 1999 marked the turning point in the international community’s attitude towards Milosevic.
Observers, including an international forensic team, established at the time that the victims were most likely civilians who were killed at close range. Another 20 bodies were found strewn all over the village.
This prompted the international community to increase pressure on Milosevic to find a political solution for the Kosovo problem. After this attempt failed, NATO launched a series of air strikes in March 1999.
The prosecution has accused the former Serb leader of orchestrating a campaign to drive hundreds of thousands of Albanians out of Kosovo, which started in the hours after the first NATO air strike and lasted for roughly three months.
The campaign, prosecutors claim, was conducted by means of instilling terror in Albanians by the systemic and widespread murder of civilians.
Seventeen atrocities figure in the Kosovo indictment. Racak, which ranks among them, is the only one that took place before the NATO bombing began.
Milosevic is facing more than 60 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in three indictments relating to the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo in the Nineties.
Heikelina Verrijn Stuart, a Dutch lawyer and long-term observer of the Milosevic trial, told IWPR that the former Yugoslav president appeared to hope that Jasovic’s testimony would prove that the Serb forces only targeted Albanian insurgents, not civilians.
“In that sense, this is the first time that the prosecutor’s case seems to be being really challenged,” Verrijn Stuart added.
Ironically, the Office of The Prosecutor first invited Jasovic to The Hague as its witness in the ongoing trial of three ethnic Albanians accused of crimes committed in Kosovo in 1998.
From the courtroom exchanges this week, it seemed that Jasovic was not on the original list of defence witnesses provided by the former Yugoslav president before he started his defence last autumn, but was allowed to testify after Milosevic noted that some Racak victims’ names coincided with a list of alleged KLA members provided by Jasovic in the other trial.
The bulk of the witness’ testimony concerned the background to the Racak case.
He told the court of mounting tensions in the area under the control of the Serbian police department in the nearby city of Urosevac, where he worked as an investigator at the time.
He listed incidents of Serb policemen being ambushed and killed, and both Serb and Albanian civilians being abducted and taken to Albanian-run prison camps.
Like Milosevic, Jasovic referred to Racak as a “clash” between police forces and Albanian insurgents, rather than a deliberate action to kill civilians who had stayed in the village after the KLA had retreated as the prosecutors allege.
But when asked by Judge Iain Bonomy of Scotland whether he knew who was leading the police units in the so-called clash, Jasovic replied that he did not.
Some observers believe that it would be a mistake to focus only on the issue of whether the Racak victims were KLA members or civilians.
“More important than their military allegiance is whether they were killed in battle, or only after they were captured,” said Bogdan Ivanisevic, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Belgrade.
“Even if some of them were KLA insurgents, killing them point blank after having disarmed and captured them would still constitute a war crime.”
The strongest evidence so far to suggest that the men found in the Racak gully were executed rather than killed in battle, came from the leader of the Finnish forensic team that conducted investigation into the massacre. Dr Helena Ranta, who testified at the tribunal in 2003, insisted that the analysis of the ground in the gully where the bodies were found showed many of them were killed at close range.
Potentially the weakest point of Jasovic’s testimony could prove to be the methods used by Serb police to gather evidence. Earlier this week, the prosecution hinted that it would focus on these methods, which they claim do not meet the tribunal’s human rights standards.
This week, Jasovic claimed that some of the information he presented to the court was gathered through “informers and friendly contacts” among the Kosovo Albanians. But it later transpired that the Serb police actually had only one registered Albanian informant, who was killed some six months before Racak.
The witness admitted that part of the evidence he presented in court was gathered through “interviews” with people brought for questioning to the police station where he worked.
During cross-examination of previous witnesses, prosecutors have already shown videotapes featuring three Kosovo Albanians who were interrogated under Jasovic’s instructions in 1999 and had, at the time, identified guerrilla fighters to the Serbian police.
All three said that they gave their statements under various sorts of duress, from intimidation to outright beatings.
The tribunal’s rules forbid it from recognising information that might have been obtained in a way that would compromise the court’s human rights standards.
The witness said he wasn’t surprised by the Albanians’ denial, because they would now face “serious threats to their lives and that of their families” if they were to confirm having made such statements in 1999 – implying such threats would come from other Albanians.
When asked by Milosevic whether the Serb police had ever used force or tortured Kosovo Albanians during interrogations, the witness vehemently denied this.
“Not against any single person has duress been applied, let alone torture,” Jasovic said.
But the court has already seen and heard much evidence of police brutality in Kosovo - most recently during the cross-examination of an earlier Racak-connected witness, Judge Danica Marinkovic.
Another witness to appear in court this week testified about the bombing of a café visited mainly by Serbs in the town of Pec in 1998, in which his son died.
Zvonimir Gvozdenovic also claimed that in 1999 there were no mass expulsions of Albanians from Pec, as alleged in the indictment and heard from several witnesses in the prosecution case.
Instead, he said, the local Albanians who left the city en masse were forced to do so by members of their own ethnic group, who wanted to stage mass expulsions and blame the Serbian authorities for them.
The prosecutors made sure the witness was aware he was speaking under oath, before revealing a Serbian document showing that, at the time, he was a registered member of a Serb paramilitary unit, which had in fact conducted some of this ethnic cleansing.
Ana Uzelac is IWPR’s project manager in The Hague.
