⁴²⁷

Monday 18 February, 2002

[Open session]

[The accused entered court]

[Defence Opening Statement]

--- Upon commencing at 9.30 a.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Before I continue where I left off, I should like to give you a piece of news with respect to the business in hand here. On Saturday evening, on the 16th of February, in Kosovska Mitrovica, the Sveti Sava church was set on fire and the flames were only put out the next morning. Albanian terrorists are in great competition with the Prosecutor in the anti-Serb hysteria in Prizren. Zafir Berisha, the president of the so-called veterans, that is to say terrorists, says in his speech the following: "We are going to secure Kosovo for the Albanians alone and nobody else." And everything is moving along in conformity with the statement that I quoted, the one made by Albright and the Prosecutor when they said they were engaged in the same task, doing the same job.

Now, let me continue where I left off. A strategic concept in realising global control, putting it into effect and subjugating countries throughout the world, is the causing of conflicts between the Slav and Muslim nations in the hope that they will kill each other respectively or at least weaken each other so much that control may be established over them in such a weakened state. Kosovo and Chechnya in that respect are undoubtedly a link in the same chain, to ⁴²⁸ quote an example.

And with the Slav and Muslim nations, similarly, attempts are being made to weaken them further by causing mutual wars or at least in confrontations between the two sides. The Yugoslav peoples, unfortunately, since the beginning of the last decade, that is to say of the twentieth century, were a polygon for training, for trying out different things and were the victims of that particular strategy. In the process of realising and implementing domination - economic, social, political, cultural, psychological domination - over the areas of south-east Europe, the western governments, as the protagonists of that process of domination, have opted for a method of national conflict, to apply the method of national conflict, the goal being that these conflicts should destroy the former Yugoslavia. This method was applied in the case of the Soviet Union as well, and in the case of Czechoslovakia it appeared to be fast and successful, or rather, all the former socialist countries of a multi-ethnic composition were to be destroyed by causing national tensions. That was one form of a settling of accounts with the political systems that prevailed at the time in those countries.

When it comes to the case of Yugoslavia, this method did not prove to be a quick and efficacious method as it had proved to be in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. National tensions were not sufficiently burgeoning. They had to become a national war for the country to disintegrate. And the war in fact began by the fact that within the frameworks of the former Yugoslavia, nationalism was incited along with ⁴²⁹ national hatred and national conflicts. The flames were fanned to turn into a full-fledged war.

The civil war in Croatia between the Serbs and Croats, as well as the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina between the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, are the consequence of fanning the flames of national hatred outside the borders of Yugoslavia. And it is in this national hatred that a great deal was invested; material, financial, the media, personnel, psychological, all these investments were made. And the Yugoslav citizens took place in the war which was incited outside their country without ever being conscious of it, without being aware of it. And when they realised what was happening, the war waged in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. And some people became aware of all these facts only when the war came to an end. Of course, there are some people who haven't realised the truth today; that war in the territory of the former Yugoslavia is the result of the will and interest of others, the great western powers, in fact. The truth is that those governments sent their emissaries to attend negotiations in the republics of the one-time Yugoslavia before they definitely destroyed and disrupted the country. During the war, in the governments of the newly-established states which used to be the Republics of the former Yugoslavia, and especially in the newly-formed Yugoslavia composed of Serbia and Montenegro, most of those emissaries did not have as their goal to put an end to the conflict and to establish peace amongst the warring ethnic groups. What they in fact did was to support, to all intents and purposes, the policy and the protagonists of the policy which was in their interests, that is to say ⁴³⁰ which was in the interests of destroying the country which had as its goal secessionism, separatism, violence, its subjugation and, in short, a new colonialism.

There were, of course, well-intentioned and honest people amongst those emissaries as well, but they were in the minority. The former Yugoslavia, as it stated in its Constitution, came into being through the free will of the Yugoslav peoples - Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins - and their right to self-determination which in itself included the right to secession. Later on, the Muslims were defined as a separate nation themselves and to the Yugoslav coat of arms a sixth torch was added. The then-socialist Republic of Croatia, with its own Constitution was defined as a state of the Croatian people, a state of the Serb people and other peoples living within its territory. So within Croatia itself, the Serbs had the status of a nation, and this implied the right to self-determination.

Bosnia and Herzegovina was Yugoslavia in a small form in which three nations lived, and all the functions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, both in the government and in parliament and in the party, were distributed in such a way that they were -- that all -- the representatives of all three people had a part. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Yugoslavia in small, functioned on the basis and principle of the equality of peoples. The borders between the Yugoslav republics were administrative borders and not borders of nations, people, or state borders of any kind, and no change in their status, which would be at the detriment of any one ⁴³¹ of the Yugoslav nations, was not able to be implemented without those peoples agreeing to it, in conformity with the Yugoslav Constitution. However, with the advent of the nationalists, when they came to power in Croatia, overnight the Constitution was changed against the will of the equal Serb people, and overnight they came second-rate citizens. The secession of Croatia became a public goal. Straight away for the first time and once again after World War II, violence over Serbs began who precisely in Croatia during the Second World War were the victims of genocide and of the puppet nationalistic arranging of the independent State of Croatia.

The territories in which they lived were their homeland throughout the centuries, far before America was colonised, for example. The first armed party formations from the days of Hitler appeared at that time in Croatia. The Serbs rose up and demanded that they remain in Yugoslavia, and they stopped, they barred access to their territory. These events are known as the log revolution because they used logs to set up these barriers. The logs were placed on the roads and in the forests and woods to prevent access to their territory. And as everybody can assume, a log cannot be a means -- considered to be a means of aggression against anyone. A log can only be an obstacle.

Tensions grew, but at the same time, activities were unleashed to seek a political solution to avoid a conflict. The European Community of the day, later to become the European Union, sent Carrington to help. I think that he did indeed wish to help. He wished to find a political solution and to avoid the conflict. And these efforts would have been ⁴³² successful had Germany not taken a radical step and prematurely recognised Croatia within its administrative borders and cut across the efforts to make a political solution. Croatia effected a forcible secession and the conflict was unleashed.

In Bosnia, where tensions burgeoned, they did manage to find a political solution. A plan was suggested, which Carrington's representative, Portuguese diplomat Cutilliero designed and which was signed by all three sides. And that was the Lisbon Agreement. Unfortunately, overnight, at the suggestion of the American ambassador, Warren Zimmerman, Alija Izetbegovic withdrew his signature and the decision was taken on Bosnia's secession without the participation and with opposition from the Serbs, that is to say, one of the three nations. Therefore, this was unconstitutional and forcible. The European Community, also ahead of time, prematurely recognised the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ignoring the will of the Serb people. And this recognition, to make cynicism even -- the cynicism even greater, it took place on the 6th of April, which is the date when, in World War II, Hitler attacked Yugoslavia.

Not even then did the Serbs start any form of violence. A peaceful solution was still being sought. Unfortunately, the opposite side did not refrain from violence. And that these were not just, if I can put it this way, incidents or events, let me remind you, and I assume that this is common knowledge to you all if you do your job properly and professionally, that in the Islamic declaration, its author, Alija Izetbegovic, wrote the following, and I quote: "There is no peace or ⁴³³ life in common between the Islamic religion and non-Islamic institutions." Otherwise, this thing about the role of the American representative was confirmed several years later. New York Times, on the 29th of August, 1993, and it wrote that Zimmermann had prevailed upon Izetbegovic to go against the Lisbon Agreement. A civil war began between the Muslims and the Serbs, and later on between the Muslims along with support from the Croats and Serb -- between the Muslims and Serbs with Croatian support. Later on, the civil war began between the Muslims themselves and the Croats.

Serbia strived for a political solution to the conflict, both in Bosnia and in Croatia. In the Croatia, between the leadership of the Srpska Krajina, the government in Zagreb, and in Bosnia between the three nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and their representatives. And throughout that time, all that time without interruption, without exception, it helped and assisted the peace process.

We strove to establish peace straightaway. I, myself, at the beginning of the conflict when the Muslims in the centre of Sarajevo started killing the Serbs, when tensions had grown, the Islamic conference took place in Istanbul at the time, wrote a letter to the Islamic conference in which I said, among others, that the conflicts must cease immediately and that the Serbs and Muslims were brethren, were brothers, that their conflicts were to the advantage of the foes and enemies of Serbs and Muslims, only to them. And there are other elements and details as well in that regard. And they were complaining amongst themselves that it would be the Muslims who would lose most because there was enormous ⁴³⁴ number of Macedonians living in -- of Muslims living in Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, and that it wasn't to their advantage to step out of Yugoslavia but it could do nothing because it was big-power politics.

On the other side, we strove to ensure that amongst the Serbian leadership of Krajina in Croatia, that a political solution be sought. Cyrus Vance, as a representative of the international community, was a great help and finally did propose to the UN Secretary-General that forces, UN forces, be sent. And that was when the UN Protection Zones were set up, areas were set up in all territories and in Croatia with a majority Serb population.

I supported that plan myself and, at the time, I was criticised. And you can read that -- about that in the papers dating back to that day. You can find various articles. For example, the then-Foreign Minister of the Republika Srpska Krajina said that Cyrus Vance had bribed me, giving me -->20 million that I got in Cyprus for me to agree to -- and for Serbia to agree to have United Nations troops come to those territories. And it was logical that Vance didn't want to accept to propose to the United Nations the arrival of its troops before the leadership of Croatia, the leadership of Republika Srpska Krajina and the Republic of Serbia reached an agreement. So that those troops were to be successful and to have general support.

There was a lull after that. There were no major conflicts, and the Contact Group that was set up worked to find a political solution. However, the Croatian army, despite the presence of the United Nations, ⁴³⁵ launched attacks on the Medac pocket and the crimes that followed Western Slavonia. Many people were killed and nobody was held responsible or accountable.

After that, the situation calmed down once again. They agreed to open the motorway, the highway, and there were other plans. The Contact Group was working, and neither Yugoslavia nor Serbia had any special role to play there because they thought, they considered that is up to the negotiations of the government in Zagreb and the Republika Srpska Krajina. And then Croatia, with the support of America and of the West, as Holbrooke incautiously wrote in his book, carried out an offensive against the Republika of Srpska Krajina. They carried out a massacre right in front of the eyes of the UN forces. Nobody reacted whatsoever. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs were expelled from the territories where they had lived for hundreds of years.

Just before this last war, there were over 600.000 of them in Croatia. The Clinton Administration, of course, not only approved of the Storm, as this attack was called, but they were directly involved. It was no secret to anyone that the Clinton Administration was not only directly involved but that it had, as a matter of fact, carried out this crime. I mentioned to you already that while we were sitting here, I saw in the Washington Times a statement made by David Keene, President of the US Conservatives, that the US was involved in the Storm, because when you're accusing the Serbs in Krajina here, you never say that from the moment the UN arrived, the Krajina people did not attack Croatia. That is to say that since the conflict was stopped and a political solution was ⁴³⁶ sought, and that was at the very outset, there were no attacks by the Krajina people. They were only defending their houses and their villages where they had lived for centuries.

The opposing side says that they are going to bring in a witness who is going to confirm that I did not want to give orders for the JNA to withdraw until the UN forces arrived. So what? That's not true, by the way, because I could not issue orders to the UN -- to the JNA anyway. But I'm certainly not trying to evade the fact that I was advocating the withdrawal of the JNA only when the UN troops arrived, because otherwise, there would have been a massacre of Serbs as had happened in the Second World War in Croatia.

If I'm guilty for having prevented hundreds of thousands of Serbs from being slaughtered in Bosnia and Croatia, then with the greatest pride, I can take upon myself this guilt. That is to say, the prevention of this kind of massacre. These are also historical facts, and I think it was only natural and just for me to advocate that kind of thing. And it was certainly not to the detriment of the other side. In this tirade that we listened to about commanding and this invention command responsibility, it is senseless because it doesn't exist in any body of law. It's also a major lie, a big-time lie because either de jure or de facto I had no command responsibility over the Yugoslav People's Army let alone through that Rump Presidency that was mentioned here because even this Rump Presidency did not have a command function at all because General Kadijevic said himself that he would not accept any decisions made by the Rump Presidency if they did not ensure a fifth vote ⁴³⁷ as well out of a total of eight members of the Presidency because, as he said, that was the only thing that would be in accordance with the Constitution. Apparently the only thing that did not seem to be in accordance with the Constitution was to defend Yugoslavia. So this Rump Presidency could not give orders to the military either. The truth is that nobody defended Yugoslavia. And that is also proof prove that I was not commanding the army. Was I commanding the army, Yugoslavia would have survived, Yugoslavia would have been preserved.

The army of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that managed to defend itself and its country from NATO was a much smaller army. I commanded it and they managed to do what they were supposed to do. They defended the country and I commanded them. When the FRY was established in April 1992, on the 28th of April, 1992, all members of the army who were citizens of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that is to say Serbs and Montenegrins, they withdrew to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Those who were citizens of other republics only naturally and logically remained in their republics.

Of course, there were exceptions on the basis of personal choices that people made. There were volunteers as well, but this was a very small number of people. Of course, there were some exceptions due to family ties. That was only logical as well, because only until yesterday, so to speak, we had been one state.

Afterwards, the army was commanded by the president of the FRY. It was Dobrica Cosic at the time, and the Prime Minister was Jur Milan Panic. They held the army in their hands, and everybody knows full well ⁴³⁸ that I certainly could not have influenced them because when they started working together, their most important objective was how to replace me. I did not have the kind of relationship that could have meant any kind of influence over them.

As for carrying out my alleged orders to the leaderships of Republika Srpska and Republika Srpska Krajina, only somebody who knew nothing of the degree of vanity of Yugoslav politicians, notably Serb politicians, and an intolerance towards any kind of interference by anyone else can build this kind of construction concerning a plan or an organisation.

You fabricated thousands of pamphlets. Had you only looked into the newspapers from those times, you would have seen what the relationship between the leadership of Serbia headed by me and the leadership of Republika Srpska was like and you would have read about the bad accusations that were levelled against me. Not only accusations, insults as well. This was a paradox that anybody could see. We were helping the Serb people on the other side of the Drina River so that they could survive, but we had poor relations with the leaderships. We were leftists, they were rightists. The right opposition in Serbia gave them support, and they used this for their own rhetoric against me. It didn't really matter to me because the people knew very well that I was working in their interest. At any rate, links between their leadership and the Republika Srpska and that of Serbia, calling that an organisation actually is one of the most nonsensical things that could have been said here. And there is so much proof of the opposite. Just ⁴³⁹ look at Dayton and the bitter accusations levelled against me after the Dayton Accords were reached.

As for Karadzic's statement that you keep quoting, that the Serbs do not accept that they be represented by Alija Izetbegovic in front of the international community, that was an act of despair and justified fear that he would take upon obligations for them because the representatives did not want to take this into account in negotiations. And I read a sentence to you a few minutes ago from the Islamic declaration about the impossibility of co-existence with non-Islamic institutions, about the position of Alija Izetbegovic. And then ask yourselves whether it was possible for the Serbs, the Serb people, the Serb representatives to accept that Alija Izetbegovic should represent them, especially after the withdrawal of his signature from the Lisbon Agreement at the suggestion of Zimmermann. After all, Zimmermann himself said that he had made a mistake in suggesting this to Izetbegovic because, in this way, the war would have been avoided.

In Geneva, in the presence of Owen and Stoltenberg, under those circumstances when they did not involve the representatives of the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina, they just kept Alija Izetbegovic as if he were representing Serbs and Muslims and Croats. When they invited Tudjman and me, later on Izetbegovic as well, to discuss a solution together, I had a lot of trouble convincing Izetbegovic, and not only after first meeting, not only after the first attempt, that they start negotiation amongst the three parties, three sides in Bosnia-Herzegovina, namely, he, Karadzic, and Boban. Mate Boban at that time was the leader of Bosnian Croats, and ⁴⁴⁰ Karadzic the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, and Izetbegovic the leader of the Bosnian Muslims. In no way was he the representative of all of Bosnia-Herzegovina. I thought that they had to resolve the problem of all the constituent peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina. I thought that the only solution that would be viable would be a formula that would defend, on a footing of equality, the interests of all three peoples. After all, Dayton succeeded on the basis of that formula.

That is also why this indictment is so malicious and anti-Serb because peace was concluded on the basis of a formula of an equality of rights and equal regard for the interests of all three peoples, not on the basis of genocide. Had this been true, that would have meant that Republika Srpska had been created on the basis of genocide. And the truth is but one.

In the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there was cruelty and there was suffering on all three sides. The guilt is primarily to be borne by those who carried out forcible secession and who started the violence. And also the guilt should be borne by the strategists of this violence outside Yugoslavia. After all, Tudjman said in Geneva in front of Owen and Stoltenberg that such atrocities had never been registered like the atrocities committed by the Muslims against the Croats in Bosnia during their mutual conflict.

Owen and Stoltenberg supported efforts made to bring all three sides to the negotiating table - Izetbegovic, Karadzic, and Boban - and this made it possible for the representatives of all three parties to negotiate. ⁴⁴¹ Tudjman personally never criticised me, saying that I was involved in supporting the Serbs in Croatia. We were in Geneva in order to help the three sides in Bosnia-Herzegovina reach peace. And he also respected our efforts aimed at peace and also opening a dialogue between Krajina and Zagreb, also the highway. And this had just begun. Tudjman also knew of my position towards the offer made by the Muslim side. On their behalf, Adil Zulfikarpasic came to Belgrade to convey this to me. He was Izetbegovic's mentor and sponsor. He is a businessman from Zurich. This was a proposal that the Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina join forces against the Croats, saying that there weren't even 14 per cent of Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina and it was not for them to make any decisions regarding Bosnia-Herzegovina. My answer was that two peoples should certainly not unite against a third. Relations between the Serbs and Croats are of great importance for general relations in the Balkans and in the future I can see these relations only as relations of cooperation and friendship. Mate Granic, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, also knows this. Not from me. He knew about that from Tudjman. And I'm sure that he would have to be in a position to say this in public if his new President allows him to do so. This well-known breaker-up of the former Yugoslavia, Stipe Mesic.

Also what you said about Dubrovnik is sheer nonsense. In spite of the pompous presentation here of various photographs and footage. As that was going on, we were precisely in The Hague, Tudjman and I, with Carrington. I said publicly that Dubrovnik is a Croatian town. The ⁴⁴² bombing of Dubrovnik is an insane crime. Serbia did not have anything to do with that, nor could it have had anything to do with it. Nothing whatsoever with the shelling and bombing of Dubrovnik. As for the Vance-Owen Plan, along with my efforts and the efforts made by the Greek Prime Minister, Mitzotakis, Karadzic did sign this in Athens at this conference on the 1st of May, 1993. The conference went on for a few days. Then we went together to attend the meeting of the Assembly of Republika Srpska in Pale. Mitzotakis, Cosic, the then-President of FRY, and I. And I think that it is malicious and unprofessional, I should say, to make quotations from my speeches. I held two speeches, and I did my very best to have this plan accepted. So then, just to take out one little excerpt that the Serbs attained their objective and then you stop altogether. I said that the objective in which we support them is the objective for them to be free and equal where they live and that that is being accomplished by that plan. This plan, since it makes it possible for them to live in freedom and on a footing of equality within Bosnia-Herzegovina, should be signed. And we brought up many other arguments in favour as well. That is to say, that they should be free and equal where they live and that that is accomplished by that plan. And that we do not support anybody's sick ambitions.

When they rejected the plan, we brought pressure to bear. We adopted a painful measure, painful for us and the people. As opposed to their leadership, we supported the people and we carried out a blockade on the Drina River. We heard stories here that this was not a blockade at ⁴⁴³ all. That is a sheer lie. We accepted the International Mission of Monitors led by General Bo Pelnas of Sweden. There is not a single report that he sent to the United Nations or with which he acquainted the Yugoslav government or the Government of Serbia in which one can find proof of this totally arbitrary statement here that this was not a blockade, it was just some kind of form.

What more could you expect us to do? We even accepted the presence of these monitors there. And then, of course, the opposition from Serbia raced to Pale in order to give support to them, and they were roasting meat together with the leadership of Republika Srpska, and they were levelling the most terrible kind of criticism against me, and they were supporting them in rejecting the Vance-Owen Plan. And it is learning from this experience that with the enormous efforts in Athens, an agreement was signed and then destroyed at Pale. When a new chance prior to Dayton came up, I insisted on having a solution which would eliminate the possibility of having a repeated breakdown of a peace plan, and I demanded that a decision be signed that the delegation was made up of three representatives of Yugoslavia and three representatives of Republika Srpska. From Yugoslavia, there would be two representatives of the republics - myself and the President of Montenegro, Bulatovic, and Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia - and from Republika Srpska also three representatives, but it also stated that if there was a division of votes in that delegation, I would have the decisive vote or, rather, the head of the delegation would have the decisive vote, and that wasn't me. And that agreement was signed. It was signed by the patriarch ⁴⁴⁴ of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Mr. Pavle, as well. His worship Mr. Pavle.

I took all criticisms upon myself. For all the weaknesses that would -- that might exist and that the Dayton Agreement might be criticised, because we saw that they did not have the strength to conclude a peace because of the promises they had given through their own ambitions. And I said that anything they did not like, I would accept to take the blame for, but my only concern was that peace prevail. And even today I think that the Dayton Agreement or the Dayton-Paris Agreement on Peace was a good one and that it should be respected and not to exert pressure over it as is done by the Austrian, the occupier, to the detriment of all three nations, and especially and first and foremost to the detriment of the Serbs and partially to the detriment of the Croats as well.

And it is within this context that I should like to say that it is quite out of place to quote the ideas of Biljana Plavsic, for example, especially in the context of what Serbia did and my own role, because not to ascribe it to this side and party, because everything was the reverse, and it is her ideas, precisely her ideas, the ones that you quoted, that in Athens during the Vance-Owen Plan negotiations, in a television interview which was broadcast publicly - of course, that was not the only subject that was discussed - but the director of the television was asked to comment the ideas that you here quoted against me because they are truly unacceptable for any civilised human being. Now, how I comment those ideas, I have already said the ⁴⁴⁵ protagonists of those ideas should be in a mental asylum. She did not speak to me for many years after that and now you are ascribing her ideas to me. That is nonsensical, it's nonsense and everybody in Serbia knows it's nonsense.

And now I ask myself how any serious-minded person can take accusations or indictments, serious ones of this kind, and base them on anybody's statement where it was said that they were on good terms with me and that I said such-and-such a thing. And that -- what we say is tongues wagging. It's hearsay, just rumours, and it's not serious, you can't use it in any official capacity. And on many occasions I said that nobody is authorised to present his views through me. I am the only person to present my own views, and I do so myself and publicly. So there were a series of nonsensical things bandied about here, and untruths, and everything about Bosnia-Herzegovina is a pure lie because I was engaged in peace there, not war. Serbia, throughout that time, waged a policy of peace. We wanted to save as many lives as possible, both Serb lives and Croat lives and Muslim lives. And your own lives, gentlemen from the international community. How many hostages did I save for you from Bosnia? How many pilots did I save? How many times did Chirac call me up and ask me to help him find those people and thanked me again and again when we succeeded in finding their men and they were alive and well. Not to mention many of the other efforts that were successful, not only with respect to peace but in order -- also in terms of saving human lives

Srebrenica. I heard about Srebrenica from Carl Bildt. And ⁴⁴⁶ Karadzic, whom I rang up on the phone immediately afterwards to asked what had happened, he swore he knew nothing about it. On the contrary, he said he had ordered that the western part be protected, which was under jeopardy, and that he knew nothing about the whole thing. Now, whether he did or didn't, I don't want to enter into that, but what I am saying, what I am telling you now is a fact. And he and Krajisnik said to me quite certainly that in the Republika Srpska there were no camps, there were just centres for prisoners of war where they were kept for a short space of time because they were being exchanged on the basis of one for all on all sides when the numbers mounted up.

Immediately after Srebrenica, or following those days, I saved a whole Muslim brigade; 840 people. I saved them from being destroyed because I approved this. They sent an emissary, pleading for their lives, and I let them swim across the Drina River and avoid this total annihilation. I put them in a police camp on Mount Tara for them to recuperate and they were visited by the entire Diplomatic Corps. After, via the Red Cross, I sent them on to Hungary. I didn't accept giving them up to any side in Bosnia. I didn't do that. I said they are under my protection, they have come to my territory, we are not a warring party, we're not a warring side, we're not going to hand them over to anyone. We're not going to hand them over to you to exchange them or Izetbegovic to send them back into the army because I had no proof that they were volunteers in the army. They can go through the Red Cross to Hungary, a neutral country, and then each individual will be able to decide whether they're going to go and stay with their relatives in America, Australia, ⁴⁴⁷ or whether they'll go back to the army in Bosnia, and so on and so forth. So Serbia was not a warring party, either in Bosnia or in Croatia. And that in fact enabled us to help the peace process, to stop the fratricidal war, the war between brothers, between brethren, although the brothers and brethren had gone a little mad. So everything we have heard here is topsy-turvy. It is absurd. The truth has been reversed and semi-truths are worse than lies very often.

Let me tell you this: We did have our police in Eastern Slavonia. Yes we did. But at the time, it was peace, it was peacetime right up until the end because Eastern Slavonia, the situation there was solved on the basis of agreement. The authorities in Eastern Slavonia and the Croatian government. But policemen were across the borders exclusively in order to assist in police affairs, in the policing of the area because of all the conflicts and situations that existed there. They had -- there was crime, crime was rampant, and they needed assistance to suppress crime, and they were there to assist in that and to prevent different trafficking and the quest for criminals from Serbia who found it easiest to escape across the Danube. And it is a shame and a great pity that things like that are being abused.

We also had a police unit, following my orders, on the territory of Republika Srpska, too, in the Strpce railway station. And I sent them there after the crime that took place where a criminal group stopped a train on the Belgrade to Bar railway line, and it is only -- it enters into Bosnian territory only for nine kilometres and it is a main railway line in Yugoslavia. And at that Strpce station, the train doesn't stop at ⁴⁴⁸ all because it is just a small face, a by-station so the train usually runs right through it. That was the project, the Belgrade-Bar railway. But 17 Muslims were taken from Prijepolje, from that train, and they were killed. And later on, that was established. At first, we didn't know who they were or where they were; but that was done intentionally. And that is why I asked an investigation to be launched in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, and when they came up with no results, I sent our own policemen there to find the people who had thought to be the perpetrators. Some were arrested and brought to the prison in Belgrade but the courts released them later on because we were unable to come up with proof of their guilt. So that was the response. And to see that this was not repeated, I sent a unit there to protect that particular railway station, although it was not on our own territory, to avoid having another train stopped and other people slaughtered. And I told Stoltenberg that I have, across that border, but just across the border on the territory of Republika Srpska, this group of policemen because I did not trust their own people that they would be able to protect the station properly.

So what do you want to make of that? I know that this was a way to transport the conflict to Serbia. And I went to Prijepolje on that very day because the people, the victims were from Prijepolje. Prijepolje is a small town in Serbia. 50 per cent are Serbs and 50 per cent are Muslims of their population and they live in a sentiment of co-existence. They live together. There was no persecutions for all those ten years. During the war in Croatia, no Croat was expelled from Serbia, or Bosnian ⁴⁴⁹ during the Bosnian war. Fifty thousand registered Muslim refugees came to take refuge in Serbia, and here you are speaking, turning the tables, turning everything upside down, speaking untruths and lies It is below my dignity to comment on the various insinuations that have been made here. You are hitting below the belt. You started by showing my speech, me making my speech in Kosovo Polje and saying that I used the popularity - that's how you explained it - that I gained there later to become the party leader myself, where it says on the footage that it was in April 1987.

And I was the head of the party, I became the head of the party one year earlier, before that, in May 1986. And the worst thing about all this is that you have it all. You have all this data and information in your documents. And where you write my biography, you ought to have these facts and figures, but you omitted to read them carefully. And for the event in Kosovo Polje, where I did have popular support, of course, you say that I made use of that to become the party head whereas I had already become party head one year prior to that. I was already head of the party.

And that's what your whole indictment is like. Everything points to the fact that it is a false indictment, that the Prosecutors are grasping at straws because they have nothing but some psychoanalytical, layman's assertions, and they are attempting to depict me as somebody able to hypnotise people into going to commit crimes. You are drawing up some schematics and organisations that they have conjured up yourself and this goes beyond the realm of shunned literature and trash, and you have this ⁴⁵⁰ false indictment and these absurd two indictments for Bosnia and Croatia, which are unfounded, to cover up everything and to wrap it up in some kind of new wrappings and lies and fabrications, whereas we, of course we helped our nation, our peoples in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and we would be amiss had we -- and remiss had we not done so when the people were suffering. We helped them honourably to survive and to be free and equal and not to seize anything from anybody.

And you seem to think it's fine for the Germans to help Croatia, for the Americans to perform -- help in ethnic cleansing and the Storm and the Mujahedins and those who cut heads off with sabres and held two Serbs heads in their hands, be helped by the Muslims. So the Germans are helping the Croats. And those from Saudi Arabia, hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, helped the Muslims. The only things you don't find logical is for the Serbs to help the Serbs, their fellow Serbs. Now, is there any logic in any of this or any moral explanation whatsoever? Neither in Croatia or in Bosnia did the Serbs begin war. Violence was effected over them. And I'm now going to read out to you just several quotations by prominent world intellectuals, and their names are familiar to any educated person throughout the globe. They are household names to educated people.

Edmond Paris of France, 1961: "Studying the balance sheet of crimes, we have calculated that the Pavlovic government succeeded in killing approximately 750.000 Orthodox Serbs and deport 300.000 of them. Also killed were 60.000 Jews, and 26.000 Romanies. And about 240.000 Serb Orthodox were converted to the Catholic faith and most of them were in the ⁴⁵¹ Bishopcy of His Worship Stepinac. So that was Edmond Paris of France speaking

Charles Krauthammer, of America, says the following, August 1995: "This week in a blitzkrieg which lasted only four days, the Croatian army ethnically cleansed Krajina of 150.000 Serbs and forced them to flee for their lives towards Bosnia and Serbia."

I hope that the interpreters are keeping up. "Why is there no certain over the fall of Krajina, a region which the Serbs settled 500 years ago, settled in 500 years ago, far before we settled in North America? It is true they created a rebellion state in Croatia. It is true that when Croatia, in 1991, separated from Yugoslavia, they speeded up the war for independence within Croatia. But they had good reason to enter the war. They did not wish to live under the authority of people who, not so long ago, massacred their parents. The Croatian state against whom they rose up from its inception in 1991 took over almost the same symbols - the same coat of arms and money of the first Nazi puppet Croatian state dating back to World War II - according to the Nuremberg laws, of a genocidal state with concentration camps and a monstrous number of ethnic persecutions and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Serbs."

Let me interrupt that quotation there. That was Charles Krauthammer. For the Orthodox Christmas of that war year, in the camp of Jasenovac, the Ustasha Nazis competed to see who could kill more Serbs in the space of one day and one was victorious who managed to slaughter 1.300 Serbs on one single day. That is a historical fact as well. ⁴⁵² Let me continue with his quotation:

"Today's Bosnia was part of that Nazi state which explains why the Bosnian Serbs also called for independence. The Serbs from Krajina have every reason to be afraid of coming under Croatian power and authority again. This week, their fears arose again. The Croats shelled Serb villages before the army launched an attack, and in that way, they forced the population to flee report the United Nations observers in Croatia. They, too, were fired at."

Where are protests now? Now, what does Karlo Falconi of Italy say?

"The Ustashas certainly exceeded the Germans in their religious racism. When they hit against the Serbs, it was not only hitting against the enemy but also at someone who had betrayed the truth faith. Only in Croatia half a million people were exterminated primarily because of their religion rather than their race. Only in Croatia were people forcibly converted from the Orthodox to the Catholic faith. In history, there is not a precedent for the degree of violence that was carried out in these operations. All of this really does not work in favour of the silence that was kept by Pope Pious the 12th."

Now, what does Rajko Dolecek say in Czechoslovakia in 1993? "The concentration camps in Croatia were within Jasenovac. During the war, about 700.000 people were killed there, mostly by having their throats slit and by having their heads broken open by hammers and sledgehammers. Officers described these atrocities, and they themselves were shocked by it. However, their rulers made it possible for them to ⁴⁵³ carry out these insane atrocities and killings. Usually it is said that the Holocaust in Croatia involved 800.000 Serb lives. In the period from August 1941 until August 1942, 356.000 Serbs were killed in Croatia. Jacques Merlinot of France:

"On the basis of the figures provided by Edmond Paris, almost 200.000 people were killed in Jasenovac in 1941 and 1942. Only in 1942, in Jasenovac, there were 24.000 children, 12.000 of which were killed. Masses of Jewish children were cremated in a furnace that was turned into a crematorium. And everybody knows that the Catholic church was an accomplice in this crime. The high clergy of the Catholic church in Croatia closely collaborated with the Nazis, headed by Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb, who supported the establishment of this new state and blessed Ante Pavelic. This exists in the collective memory of the Serbs." This is Jacques Merlinot of France saying this.

What does Philip Jenkins say from America in 1995? "During the next three years, the Croats massacred Serbs and Jews in such a terrible way that this even made the German officers feel awful. Serbs, just like Jews, lived to see the end of the war, promising themselves that they would never allow the enemy to exterminate them. This can interpret the fact why, over the past four years, the Serbs had to face a situation when their worst expectations came true, when the massacres from 40 years ago could have happened again. There should be no surprise that the Serbs took up arms rather than wait for concentration camps again.

"And what about Bosnia? There as also historical legacy there. ⁴⁵⁴ One of the strangest facts in the Second World War pertained to the fact that many Bosnian Muslims were recruited for the special units of the German SS forces. However, the present-day developments are far more important for the Serbs as well"

I'm going to skip Anita Singh. It is important but it is long and I'm looking at the clock. I'm just going to quote her: "Again the Serbs were victims in Tudjman's Croatia, because there is a conflict raging there so cruel and so bestial that this is not really news in Europe but Europe thought that this kind of thing had been overcome. Jasenovac seeks an answer. Is Fascism really dead?" And what does Louis Delmas of France say in 1994? "Actually, there was no Serb aggression either in Croatia or in Bosnia. There was no attack from the outside. What happened is fully within the feeling of affiliation. This was a rebellion of the domestic population that, through games of diplomacy, came to be included in new states where they did not recognise themselves. That is what happened in Croatia and Bosnia. There were no attacks by external attackers. The republics of Krajina and Pale were therefore established. Is it difficult to understand that genocide cannot be forgotten from one generation to the other? The victims bear this in their blood. Few European Jews can say that they did not have any relatives died in the deportations. There are very few Serbs likewise, from the western part of Yugoslavia, that can say that they did not have any of their relatives slaughtered by the Ustashas. And if we add to this the historical exploitation of four centuries of Ottoman occupation, can one be surprised over the vehemence of their ⁴⁵⁵ response over the secession of a republic which takes as its coat of arms Pavlovic's emblem, Pavlovic's currency.

Mile Budak, one of the greatest war criminals and exterminators of Serbs had many streets named after him. Now they do not hide their anti-Serb feelings, and by the way, they don't hide anti-semitic feelings in their books either." This is what Peter Handke wrote in 1996. How can I forget the sentence from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung full of hatred concerning what is going on in Eastern Slavonia, according to which Serbs in Croatia, who are Yugoslav citizens until now equal to their Croatian compatriots, now according to the constitution of the new Republic of Croatia that was carved up against their will become second-rate citizens. They are simply annexed to the Croatian state, not only the Croatian administration.

These 600.000 Serbs now, according to the degree of the German journalist, and now he is quoting the journalist, "They must most obediently, most humbly feel as a national minority now. All right. We're acting on orders. There today onwards, we agree that we are going to feel like a minority in our own country, and therefore, we agree that your Croatian Constitution is going to treat us that way." So would that be a way out if they were to say that? Who was the first aggressor? What did this mean setting up a state that gave supremacy to one people over another in an area where since times immemorial people lived together? And this kind of development really had to hit them hard, and it had to bring back to mind the persecutions from Hitler's times. So who was the aggressor? ⁴⁵⁶ What did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn write?

"May heaven forbid us from having a Yugoslav option. However, there is a reason for their misfortune. False borders were set up. Serbs were expelled from the historical region of Kosovo and Albanians were brought there. And within 24 hours, the new states were recognised by the power-loving West, not paying any heed to the fact that the present borders were untenable.

And finally Patrick Bariot, and Eva Crepin in 1995: "As a French citizen, I would like to refresh your memories of our French history, the times when the bells of Notre Dame proclaimed to France and Christiandom the tragic defeat of the Serbian Prince Lazar." This is actually a reference to Gazimestan.

The memory of Victor Hugo, who on the 29th of August, 1876, said in horror, "They are killing a people. When is the martyrdom of this small, heroic people going to end?" This is an end of Hugo's quotation. Did he perhaps have a premonition that this martyrdom would not end in 1995?

As a citizen of Europe I put forward the following question: Are we going to allow a people to be destroyed, a people who have been shedding their blood for 600 years for the freedom and well-being of Europe?

So on the 23rd of December, 1991, Germany formally recognised the sovereignty and independence of Croatia, but the decision became effective on the 15th of January, 1992. That is how the armed conflict, the civil war, started in Croatia. This is unequivocally proven by the statements ⁴⁵⁷ made by Tudjman and Mesic, that they had opted for this option. Tudjman, President of Croatia; Mesic, President of Yugoslavia. And when he broke it up, then he was elected speaker of the Croatian parliament. Tudjman speaking in public, on the square of Ban Jelacic, on the 24th of May, 1992, in his message to the nation said, and I quote: "There would not have been a war had Croatia not wanted it, but it was our assessment that only through war can we win Croatia's independence. That is why we pursued a policy of negotiations. But behind these negotiations we established our armed units."

Of course Tudjman the Croatian government could have won the independence of Croatia without war, but without war they could not have killed Serbs and expelled 600.000 Serbs from Croatia. That shows the nature of this war, the war they are still trying to call the liberation war and the homeland war there. That is the way the unfortunate people who fought it feel, but this is certainly not corroborated by the objectives that are shown through historical facts. And on the 5th of December, 1991, Stjepan Mesic, having thanked the Assembly of Croatia, the Parliament of Croatia for the confidence vested in him, he says: "I think that I have carried out my task. There is no more Yugoslavia." Everybody saw that. He was President of the Presidency of Yugoslavia, who took a solemn oath that he would preserve the integrity of Yugoslavia and its constitutional order. He comes to Croatia to say that he had carried out his task, that Yugoslavia was no more.

Many world statesmen, scholars, and even international ⁴⁵⁸ institutions voiced their opinions in this regard. James Baker, the Secretary of State on the 13th of January, 1995, said before the Congress -- I'm quoting Baker now:

"It is a fact that Croatia and Slovenia unilaterally declared their independence in spite of our warnings. They used force and this caused a civil war." End of quotation.

He particularly highlighted that the position of the United States was to preserve the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and that this was advocated by 32 members of the CSC, nowadays the OSCE. I quote him again:

"Everybody supported this. This was the right kind of policy and it is a very bad thing that we did not stick to that policy longer than we did." End of quotation.

As far as back as 1989, he cautioned that if there were to be a unilateral secession, this would lead to the use of force. Unfortunately, at the time when Baker, in 1995, spoke about this, he was no longer Secretary of State. The Democrats came to power, as well as lobbying, and the money that accompanies lobbying.

Again claims are being made, and we heard about this here, throughout these seven months that the Serbs and even Serbia started the civil war. And facts, all of them, unequivocally speak to the contrary. The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was brought to an end by the Dayton Accords. The former Yugoslavia was represented through the representatives of Croatia, Yugoslavia -- the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the international community was ⁴⁵⁹ represented by the host country but also all the contact group members were represented as well. With the highest degree of responsibility, I say that, as far as the establishment of these two entities is concerned, where a war had been raging until then, perhaps the most important role that was played was the role of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and that is what I had been striving for.

Other participants in the Dayton negotiations shared this feeling, and they said this publicly as well. This was also the view of the host country, the United States of America. Nowadays, it is not only that this support is being forgotten, this support that I had enjoyed in pursuing this policy that was aimed at peace, but all the efforts made by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia and I personally are being neglected, although this was crucial, I should say. Also the results of these efforts are being overlooked.

Responsibility for the war is being sought on that side that had advocated peace. Before the eyes of the entire world, there is an inversion. The instigators of war are accusing the protagonists of peace for war, and thanks to their powerful international positions, they are playing the roles of both Prosecutor and Judge. As for me personally, they are accusing me and condemning me in advance precisely of their own warmongering policies and the consequences of these policies that they had been pursuing themselves and that I had opposed to the best of my ability by advocating peace.

This simple truth can be overlooked nowadays only by those who have the interest not to see this. And of course, those who are bombed by ⁴⁶⁰ lies and who are exposed to such media manipulations that they have accepted lies as the truth and the other way around. Of course, this is not the first time in history that truth and justice are losers, but it is the first time in history that the war against truth and justice is being waged by a new weapon and that is the mass media. In the struggle against truth and justice, this weapon is more lethal than all of those that were used until now. And if this weapon is being used by the most powerful country in the world and also the bloc of the most powerful countries in the world, then of course their opponents are condemned to being on the losing side. And journalists, if they do not support truth and justice, are very often paid for what they do and in this way they also become killers and mercenaries.

The decision to establish the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is illegal because the Security Council does not have the right to do this. It is a very unusual Tribunal. It was established for wars that were being waged on the territory of the former Yugoslavia , as if this were the only war waged at all, or at least in this point in time.

Only, in this point in time, in the second half of the twentieth century, hundreds of smaller local wars were waged and international tribunals were not established for them. And indeed why not? Why was the first tribunal of this nature formed because of the conflicts on the territory of the former Yugoslavia? Why? Was this resistance to those who had instigated the war become so great and so visible? Was it because external involvement in this Yugoslav war was so obvious? Or perhaps ⁴⁶¹ because of those who were involved perhaps they thought the results achieved were not sufficient. I think it is for all these reasons. It was so obvious that there was opposition to those who instigated and caused the war and also that there was such a great degree of external involvement. But it is also because the results they achieved were not successful. That is why the participants in the war in the former Yugoslavia are being tried as if they were the only participants in the only war in the world.

I'm not questioning the decision to bring to justice those who killed, slaughtered children, old people, various other victims. However, perpetrators are being sought even amongst those who had worked for peace, as in this case. I claim that this is because the inspirers of war were not happy with the outcome of the war and not happy with the resistance that was put forth. They thought it would be negligible. And if it were to be more than negligible, then its protagonists were to be killed and arrested.

The formation and survival of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is part of that resistance to the -- those who inspired the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, war within it, the suffering of millions of Yugoslav citizens. That is why, immediately after the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, when it came to a close, that tensions were raised in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, following the same principles upon which these tensions started in the former Yugoslavia and began to be created and to function in this latest one.

We are talking about inciting national hatred and intolerance. ⁴⁶² And I think that I have clearly stated and presented before you the historical facts and the background upon which the crime against Yugoslavia was committed. And when we're talking about Kosovo, when it comes to the question of Kosovo, the state organs acted in similar fashion to the conduct that was seen by the state organs in other European but all other countries, not only in our times, in our day and age, but in our civilisation in general. This reaction on the part of Yugoslav state organs was in keeping with the Yugoslav Constitution and in keeping with similar experience or identical experiences of other states. It was treated by the Western governments as violence over the innocent Albanian population in Kosovo, and, therefore, as a cause for the intervention of the international community to protect that innocent Albanian population. And that is what happened. This intervention over a criminal state that allegedly jeopardised the Albanian population on part of this territory came in the form of the NATO pact aggression in a way which introduced into the life of our planet a new form of warfare based on the use of the latest technological achievements of our civilisation, and this aggression resulted in enormous human casualties. I saw on television that the CNN said that they were not showing Milosevic's photographs because they are too gruesome for the public. That was their official explanation. They don't want their public to see their crimes, and thereby they only confirm that they are in the service of crimes and in leading their own public astray. They are afraid of having their own public seeking for the responsibility of their own culprits. They don't know how to explain to their own public that ⁴⁶³ allegedly they protected Albanians by bombing maternity wards in Belgrade or that they were allegedly protecting the Albanians when they bombed a convoy of Albanians in Kosovo and Kosovo towns and villages. And the media that are not informing about this are finding it difficult to take -- are finding greater links with bin Laden's terrorists and the drug trafficking Mafia and links to their money. On the 16th of February, therefore, that is to say a few days ago, the Daily Telegraph writes: "Extremist Albanians who want to create new conflicts in the south of the Balkans are spending millions of pounds that they earned through the sale of Afghanistan heroin --" once again, Afghanistan is mentioned -- "on the European market for the procurement of weapons." The Daily Telegram, referring to reports of the Vienna UN headquarters for drugs control, writes that in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, there is more and more heroin coming in from the enormous stockpiles that exist in Afghanistan and where amassed by Al Qaeda and the Taliban. And where does the KLA get its heroin from? What do you think? The Albanian drug traffickers are endeavouring to take control over the European heroin market, which is worth several billion pounds per annum, and I quote the Daily Telegraph.

Rebels of the KLA in Macedonia are part of a network controlled by criminal organisations of these three countries but they also exist in other countries as well claim the Western intelligence reports from Kosovo. In Macedonia and Switzerland, they say that the Albanian bands last year used part of that money that they earned through the sale of Afghanistan heroin for the procurement of weapons for Albanian insurgents ⁴⁶⁴ in Macedonia who, last autumn, handed in their weapons to NATO. This is becoming evermore evident but the CNN is escaping the truth. And it is logically in line with the fact that three Albanians have been convicted of terrorism and Sulejman Selimi, Kadar, and Usomi [phoen] Ustaku, they are the names from the KLA. They were amnestied, pardoned and received high ranks in the new SS Skanderbeg division which is now called the Kosovo Protection Corps.

Now, why should CNN report on all this and disturb the citizens of America because they are going to fare the same way they did on the 11th of September. Just as nothing is said about how many Italian soldiers fell sick and died because of the depleted uranium that was thrown on Serbian Kosovo. And this was confirmed by an observer in Rome. It was confirmed three years later because the army would not provide facts and figures. The situation in other armies is even worse. But this is something that is being kept from the citizens because it jeopardises the interests and profits of those who are amassing riches on the basis of that. They have to explain to their soldiers that there are patriotic reasons for them to travel far from their country to kill other people's children, and even go to other countries that have never done anything to harm them and who were always -- who were even their allies in both the World Wars and that they are doing this for patriotic reasons. They do not want to inform on the fact that an Albanian held in prison because on the 15th of February, 2001, along the Podujevo-Pristina road by the Livadice village, he blew up a busload of Serbs, full of Serbs that were escorting KFOR. Many people were killed and injured. But this ⁴⁶⁵ man has been released from prison.

I hope that world public opinion will be able to put the parts of this jigsaw puzzle together, including the part of this Tribunal. As for Yugoslavia, violence is still being waged against it and all means are being resorted to.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. It's now 11.00. That would be a convenient moment. We'll adjourn for half an hour. Half past eleven.

--- Recess taken at 11.00 a.m.

--- On resuming at 11.30 a.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] As nobody is quoting the UN Secretary-General reports dating back to 1992, for example, which confirm what I've been saying, I'm going to just read out a brief quotation. I have to make good use of my time, save my time. I have the original of that.

[In English] [Previous translation continues] ... "on the 28th/ 29th of May, took place in direct contravention of instructions issued by JNA leadership in Belgrade. Given the doubts that now exist about the ability of the authorities in Belgrade to influence General Mladic, who has left JNA, efforts have been made by UNPROFOR to appeal to him directly as well as through the political leadership of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. As the result of these efforts, General Mladic agreed on 30th of May to stop the bombardment of Sarajevo. While it is my hope that the shelling of the city will not be resumed, it is also clear that the emergence of General Mladic and the forces under his command as ⁴⁶⁶ independent actor apparently beyond the control of JNA, complicates the issue raised in paragraph 4 of Security Council Resolution 752. President Izetbegovic has recently indicated to senior UNPROFOR officers at Sarajevo his willingness to deal with General Mladic but not with the political leadership of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina." [Interpretation] If we were to read all these things, the situation would be much clearer. The picture would be much clearer because it has been made a caricature of, distorted in a caricature fashion. And when it comes to Yugoslavia, that it was the resistance that Yugoslavia set up is not only borne out by history and the events in Kosovo but also the fact itself that the victims of that brutal aggression were not only the citizens of Serb and Montenegrin nationality but Albanian nationality as well, though the bombing was allegedly to punish the policy of a country which jeopardised the Albanian majority. But there are always victims in war. They are usually women, children, the elderly and sick and the part of the population that has least to do with the reasons of war and which are the tragic result, for the most part. This is a general rule. It was true in Croatia and in Bosnia and in Iraq and in New York and Washington and in Belgrade and everywhere else. The informed part of the world knew that the bombing of Yugoslavia was retaliation by the NATO pact for the independent policy Yugoslavia waged; and the uninformed part of the world was informed that it was a just punishment of what the Serbo fighters did over the innocent Albanian majority seeking human rights, national rights, civic rights, although they had all those rights over and above all world standards. And this is ⁴⁶⁷ something that we have proof and evidence of, of which I have set out a few.

The fact that they asked for Kosovo's secession from Serbia and that they set up a terrorist organisation to implement that secession, the KLA, the infamous KLA which slaughtered everything that was Serb, Montenegrin, and Albanian as well, that is something that has been hidden from the world public and every other public. The truth is quite different.

For example, the Marianne, the French daily, this month asks how the West allowed bin Laden to set up his network in the Balkans and how 6.000 Islamic fanatics from Algeria, and you know what they're doing in Algeria towards the Algerians themselves, from Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and so on fought in Bosnia, that Izetbegovic wanted to effect a large Muslimisation and that the KLA was the second stage of the same project. It was the so-called Green Transversal. The line from Bosnia via Sandzak, stretching to Kosovo and Metohija.

The American representative for the Balkans, Gelbard, at a press conference held at the Hyatt Hotel in Belgrade on the 20th of February, 1998 said, and I quote: "We are profoundly concerned and energetically accuse terrorist actions -- condemn terrorist actions and groups in Kosovo, particularly the KLA. It is without doubt a terrorist group that we are dealing with here."

He added that this was something he knew enough about to be able to assess. But at that time, obviously he wasn't made aware of the secret plans of his bosses and the activities of the alliance for this Balkan ⁴⁶⁸ operation which advocated an all-out war against Yugoslavia, and as a civil servant, he was sent to take up the post of ambassador in Indonesia, right the other side of the world. The future will show that Yugoslavia was a polygon, a model. Like the countries of the former USSR, where the main point of confrontation was Russia and the Ukraine and that Ukraine be included into the NATO pact by 2000.

That is why Albright herself said -- and this is in Michael Mendelbaum's book, September 1999, that the most important thing that they did was Kosovo. And Professor Michel Kosodoski, on the 10th of April, 2000, said that Kosovo bands were financing -- financed by organised criminals and that at the time of Rambouillet, there was a report being prepared on the links between the Afghanistan and Albanian drug trafficking bands and groups. It is common knowledge that fighters from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, but also Germany, Afghanistan, and Turkey were training the KLA.

Diana Johnson on the 23rd of January, 2000, in an article, says that when the judgement decides on crimes, says that Abramovic looked at Albright -- Holbrooke and others to develop Clinton's doctrine of a so-called humanitarian war, and this was to cover up crimes with the aim of effecting strategic interests and he included Thaci in Rambouillet as a pawn.

So that is the same Abramovic who in January, back in January 1986 went to China to prevail upon them to sell Islamic rebels in arms. I should like to draw the attention of the world public to a detail that is rather a good example. The Albania Abdiju Ekrem and Kopula ⁴⁶⁹ Shpend, who were tried in the year 2000 because, at the demand of Saudi Arabia, a Saudi Arabian, Abdiju Laha Duja Hyem [phoen], the head of the World Bureau for the Islamic Appeal, cooperative of bin Laden, organised a Mujahedin brigade which was called the brigade of the 35 Saudi Arabians, Ethiopians and 110, including Albanians as well, and we were able to dismantle them.

After they were arrested and condemned in the year 200, in 2001, the new authorities, and we know under whose orders I've already spoken about that, they were pardoned, amnestied. After that, we see the advent of the 11th of September, and this was directly connected to this Abdiju Ekrem . He otherwise in Saudi Arabia itself, in 1996, was taken to trial and spent one year in prison because, like his co-fighters from Kosovo and Afghanistan, he had serious backers, powerful backers. And this man Ekrem Abdiju in 1992 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, formed the same kind of Mujahedin brigade in Tesajn, Abu Bekir Sadik was its name. I omitted to show photographs that I mentioned of the heads that were severed and the man holding up the severed heads.

So the informed part of the world knew that the bombing of Yugoslavia was retaliation for the policy of independence that Yugoslavia was waging, and the uninformed part of the world was informed that this was just reprisal for the terror of the Yugoslav, allegedly, authorities and the Serb authorities over the Albanian minority. In order to hide the truth that it was retaliation for the Western governments, for the fact that Yugoslavia was not listening to the Western powers and that Serbia was not listening to them and not only was the ⁴⁷⁰ truth masked but a lie was almost perfectly launched, saying that the aggression was a just thing and a necessary thing over the protagonists of Serb violence towards the Albanians. So a large part of the uninformed world, or I might even say the whole of the uninformed world believed that, by bombing Yugoslavia, justice was being done and that the Yugoslav and Serb authorities were led by the protagonists of crimes and that they should be downtrodden.

But when it comes to me, to this should be added personal, the element of personal hatred on the part of those politicians whom I stepped forward and stopped them subjugating Yugoslavia and Serbia and stopped them in the realisation of their plan, the plan that they implemented in all other East European countries, including, of course, Albania, Bulgaria and so on and so forth at the beginning of the last decade of the last century. They did so ten years earlier. And of course to ascribe -- to add to their frustrations, because of the task that was not achieved and the ambitions that were not achieved on the part of those who were given those assignments and failed to carry them out, because even at that time everything that took place should have taken place in Serbia, too. There is much proof and evidence of this of which I have submitted a few. And so for ten years, they tried to overthrow me and finally they succeeded in an unchivalrous and dirty manner by launching threats and by bribery to subjugate Serbia. So this factor of personal hatred is also something that must be added because where can you have greater confirmation that, in addition to all these state reasons, historical, political, strategical and other reasons, when it comes to me, there is ⁴⁷¹ personal hatred, the element of personal hatred, and in a savage way, my whole family is still under attack.

I have been speaking for three days about the political, strategic, and historical reasons. Now I'll only spend three minutes to speak about that personal hatred that is being manifest in this cowardly, savage attack -- in these cowardly and savage attacks on my family; my wife and my children.

My wife, who is a university professor and was a university professor at a time when I didn't delve in politics at all, whose books have been published and translated in Russia, China, the United States, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and so on and so forth, Spain, translated into over 30 languages throughout the world, and they are testimony of the superhuman efforts, public efforts of an intellectual against war, against national conflicts, against violence and primitivism and who served to her honour, especially because they were written during the time of those events and not from the distance of time. And she is the subject of the most savage media campaign, with the most grievous lies and fabrications being bandied about; forgeries and slander. My daughter, who never dealt with politics, was forced to stop working, and she lives -- continues to live in an isolated fashion because she cannot take the violence against her and all the rest of us. And against my son, the media are exerting a horrific campaign, although he has in -- at no time been in conflict with the law or morals. And he is also always considered a good comrade, a person with a high sensitivity for solidarity. He helped everyone, did everything he could. ⁴⁷² He has this avalanche of media hatred come down on his head, and he has left the country and, with him, his newly-established family, his young wife and small son.

This lack of honour and cannibalism has not been noted in Europe to date. CNN even published such lies that my son has golf terrains, that he has a series of pizzerias and a drug trafficking group. This is infamous. It was always a shame to raise your arm against women and children, no matter how much you hate somebody; yet more proof that this personal hatred is something that is generally known. During the NATO aggression, they tried to kill both me and my entire family. They bombed the residence with a few cruising missiles in a wave of several seconds. And you know full well that, according to international law, and according to US law, the murder of a foreign head of state is a crime. And then on that day when they did the bombing, in that house I received the President of the Parliament and the Foreign Minister, and those who were following this could see their cars entering the residence compound and leaving it.

I saw on CNN the other day General Clark, now resigned, retired, that -- saying that my house was a legitimate military target because allegedly underneath the residence there was a command centre, an underground command centre, which is an infamous lie. This house was used by the late President Tito as his residence from the Second World War onwards, and there was never a command centre there nor was there any kind of underground area there. In the middle of the garden is the house itself and underneath is nothing. It did not even ⁴⁷³ have a single square centimetre of bulletproof glass. I did not have bulletproof glass in my house, in my office when I was President of Serbia or when I was President of Yugoslavia. I see that the new authorities and my successor in Serbia placed bulletproof glass very fast so that nobody would kill them.

This house did not have any kind of underground premises. Both Clark and his co-workers at NATO had to know about this because they had available to them all the information about Tito's former generals, from the JNA, from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, those who worked with him, those were on duty in that house, those who were closer to him than Serb generals were.

So is more proof required or greater proof than these two sets of proof; trying to kill me and my family? And I spoke of the strategic and political reasons for three days, but in addition to this, there is this cowardly, undignified personal hatred.

After these three minutes, perhaps it wasn't even three minutes, perhaps it was only two minutes, let us go back to what I'm being charged with here.

I've been charged with a crime here that was committed by others, primarily those outside Yugoslavia, those who invented this Tribunal and who invented this prison so that they would not be held responsible for violence over people, for breaking up a country, for civil war amongst its peoples. With the assistance of this Tribunal that they set up themselves, they accused me of this because I opposed their violence and advocated the preservation of the country. Their prestigious position in ⁴⁷⁴ international relations and their enormous power are being used not only for supremacy in the world but also for cruel retaliation for everyone who opposes their might. That is the core of this trial and that is the true face of this justice. I am here before this false court so that they would not be -- so that they would not be facing a true court. I have nothing to defend myself from. I can only be proud and I can only accuse my accusers and their bosses. They are free men, but they are not truly free. I, arrested, imprisoned, am nevertheless the free. My name is Slobodan, with a capital "S," which means "free" in my language.

Could you please have this tape played.

JUDGE MAY: How long is it likely to be Mr Milosevic?

THE ACCUSED: I beg your pardon?

JUDGE MAY: How long is it likely to be, this tape?

THE ACCUSED: Altogether, I will finish within the time you said that is available for me. It means up to 1.00. So I had no the opportunity to check everything with this. I have no facilities in the prison for that. But within the time given to me, I have to finish. I have understand what you decided.

[Interpretation] I have another video cassette to play after this one, but that would also fit into the time allotted to me.

[Trial Chamber and Court Deputy confer]

JUDGE MAY: There's apparently some difficulty about playing this tape immediately. We'll take ten minutes. Have you got another one? You said you have another one to be played. ⁴⁷⁵

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] No. I want this one to be played first.

JUDGE MAY: I don't know. Let's consider.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Because this one is directly related to what I have been saying this morning.

[Trial Chamber confers]

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] It had been rewound. I don't see that there is any reason why it cannot be played immediately.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic, we don't want to waste any time. So can you go on with your speech for ten minutes and we'll then -- or you can play the other tape, whichever you choose.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Oh, no. I'm going to wait for the cassette to be played. At any rate, we're going to fit into your time frame.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. We'll adjourn for ten minutes, but you understand that we'll finish by 1.00, whatever.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] What does he need ten minutes for to play a cassette? I really don't understand.

JUDGE MAY: There's a technical problem, he can't play it immediately.

--- Break taken at 11.55 a.m.

--- On resuming at 12.12 p.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Let the tape be played now.

[Videotape played] "Two years later, much of Yugoslavia was in flames. A small war ⁴⁷⁶ in Slovenia led to large and more bloody conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Moreover, European nations, the United States and Middle Eastern states were backing different factions in these outbreaks of civil war. Publicly, Western diplomats blamed irresponsible ethnic leaders of the different Yugoslav republics for the bloodshed, including Milan Kucan of Slovenia, Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, certainly no innocents among the warring parties. Privately, however, European Community envoy Lord Carrington and UN mediator Cyrus Vance were furious at Germany's Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher. France would later call the conflict Mr. Genscher's war because of Germany's push to recognise separatists in Slovenia and Croatia. "'Vance argued that recognition would take away the diplomatic leverage that he had to try to bring the conflict in Croatia to an end and could possibly result in Bosnia blowing up.'

"The former German Foreign Minister claimed that his government did not support the break-up of Yugoslavia until fighting began. "'We held a strong position for the unity of Yugoslavia, as I said, but we saw the will to keep it together vanished more and more under the pressure of military events.'

"In fact, however, since the 1960s, Germany's intelligence arm, the BND, was deeply involved in the training of Croatian separatists led by the pro-Nazi Ustasha who fled to Germany after World War II and participated in a number of terrorist actions against embassies and the government of Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito. "'In the early '60s, the BND decided to cooperate fully with the ⁴⁷⁷ Ustasha. This became plain to see after the so-called Croat Spring in the beginning of the '70s. After Tito's death, they accelerated their efforts, together with the Ustasha, in order to disintegrate Yugoslavia into several smaller states.'

"Germany's crucial role in supporting Croatian separatists is confirmed by Anton Duhacek, the former director of Yugoslav counterintelligence, who was himself a Croat.

"'The Germans wanted an absolute and complete subordination of Croatian intelligence that would carry out all that the Germans wanted. And the Germans promised that this would be in the interests of the future independent free Croatia.'

"On the surface, Yugoslavia seemed better off than its east European neighbours in the 1970s and 1980s. The US considered its independent communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, an asset in the Cold War with Moscow. It Yugoslavia's economy was propped up with western loans even after Tito's death in 1980. The carefully-staged 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo offered the world the impression of a peaceful multi-ethnic country working together. Veteran observers, however, could see trouble below the surface.

"'I think the first hint I got of a violent break-up was when I made a tour of all of the republics in 1983 and I heard a lot of sort of separatist sentiments in several of the republics, especially Slovenia and Croatia, but not only, and some very threatening remarks were made in the course of my conversations about what "we" would do to "them" and so on.' "By themselves, neither Slovenia nor Croatia had the diplomatic ⁴⁷⁸ or military power to actually separate, to challenge Yugoslavia's federal army, which was the fourth largest in Europe. But Germany provided not only diplomatic support but also weapons, even after an international arms embargo.

"'And I wrote a story about it, which was called The blockade's a Joke, and so I went and started checking the ports like Split and the ports along the Dalmatian coast, and as best I could, checking the stuff that was coming across the borders, and there was no limitation.' "'We saw a Croatian MG-21 shot down in the Krajina, which the Croatians said came from the former Yugoslav air force stocks. In fact, it was clearly from East German air force stocks - it had the East German radar warning receivers on board - so we knew that, that these weapons were coming from the former East German stocks. They were, if you like, slightly disguised in the sense that they didn't look like West German weapons but they are coming from West Germany, obviously with the West German government's blessing. There can be no other way in which heavy weapons can be supplied like this.'.

"While separatist forces were being armed, Germany was, at the same time, warning the Yugoslav government of Ante Markovic not to use force against separatists. Ante Markovic, who was himself a Croatian, presided over a divided government which was unable to stand up to German pressure or rally his government for the challenges ahead. "'He never lined up, you know, coalition support; he always flew solo. So, you know, he could be welcomed in the White House, and was, but he didn't have any backing at home. So in that sense, he was a real ⁴⁷⁹ failure and a disastrous one in that he preserved the fiction that Yugoslavia was holding together.'

"The Yugoslavia federal army, which held the country together, now became a target for those who wanted to break it apart. At a Croatian separatist rally in Split in May of 1991, demonstrators strangled a young soldier of the federal army and then tossed his dead body onto the street. This and similar events seemed to bear out predictions by the US Central Intelligence Agency.

"'The CIA said in 1990, October, that Yugoslavia faced break-up, probably violent, as early as six months from the time of the report. And nobody paid any attention to it in the higher echelons of government.' "By June of 1991, however, US Secretary of State James Baker decided to make one attempt to prevent a disaster. He flew to Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, to confront leaders of the six republics. "'He said, Don't any of you take steps that are not agreed on by the others.'

"However, Milan Kucan and Franjo Tudjman, leaders of the Slovenia and Croatian republics, were confident that they could ignore the US Secretary of State. They declared their independence just days later, on June 25th. Because they could count on the support of German Foreign Minister Genscher and Austrian Foreign Minister Alojz Mock. The cycle of violence which would destroy Yugoslavia began when Slovene President Milan Kucan ordered his troops to seize customs posts on the Yugoslav borders with Austria and Italy and the Slovene capital of Ljubljana. Yugoslav flags were taken down and replaced with Slovenian ⁴⁸⁰ flags.

"'And the Slovenes thought they had a right to take down those flags. The end of an internationally recognised friendship. And I don't think that for a moment Belgrade expected there would be violent resistance.'

"To avoid violence, Yugoslav army General Andreja Raseta had phoned Milan Kucan privately to let him know that many Yugoslav army troops, responding to this challenge of federal authority, were not even carrying live ammunition.

"'But in fact, the Slovenes had prepared themselves. They were getting a lot of encouragement from across the way, from Vienna and from Germans too, and they foresaw that they could make a very big international case by having what they called a war of independence. It was nothing of the sort.'

"German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher flew to the Austrian border with Yugoslavia to join President Kucan and warned the federal army against efforts to maintain control of federal borders. Kucan ordered his forces to fire on Yugoslavia army troops, including those who carried no live ammunition. Faced with international opposition led by Germany, Yugoslav President Markovic ordered the federal army to withdraw from Slovenia without a serious attempt to counter separatist forces. Slovene leaders conducted a masterful public relations effort. Foreign reporters with kept occupied in an underground press centre with briefings that suggested that Slovene forces had defeated the fourth largest army in Europe. Journalists in the press centre routinely ⁴⁸¹ reported as news fanciful briefings from Slovene officials on various battles, including some that had never happened. "'What was going on in Slovenia, where the Slovenians declared independence and set up customs posts on the road, tended to be seen and portrayed on television as the Yugoslav army acting aggressively against Slovenia as opposed to the Slovenians declaring independence.' "The manipulation of the foreign press corps set the tone for new wars of secession in Croatia and Bosnia. Repeatedly the JNA was described as an occupying force dominated by Serbs. The reality was different, however. The army's Chief of Staff, Veljko Kadijevic, was half Croatian, half Serb. Air force chief Zvonko Jurjevic was Croatian, and the commander of the navy, Stane Brovet, was Slovenian. "'The federal army had held Yugoslavia together under Tito without creating any protests about human rights. Tito insisted on an ethnic balance and, in the localities, it was composed of the people of that area. It was absurd to call it an army of occupation. And we should have - we the West - should have recognised that until there was an agreed arrangement for a dissolution of a state which had been Yugoslavia and which might take years or decades or perhaps be impossible, until then it had to be recognised that these were internationally recognised frontiers.'

"If German and Austrian leaders still believed that Slovenia and Croatia could be separated from Yugoslavia without a wider war, the Americans strongly believed otherwise.

"'Because we said if Yugoslavia does not break up peacefully, ⁴⁸² there's going to be one hell of a civil war. It nevertheless broke up non-peacefully. It broke up through the unilateral declaration of independence by Slovenia and Croatia and the seizing of these two countries, republics, of their border posts which was an act of force and which was an act that was in violation of the Helsinki principles. But the European powers, and the United States ultimately, recognised Slovenia and then Croatia and then Bosnia as independent countries and admitted them to the United Nations. The real problem was that there was a unilateral declaration of independence and a use of force to gain that independence rather than a peaceful negotiation of independence which is the way it should have happened.'

"While most of Europe, including England, France, and Russia, opposed the break-up of Yugoslavia, only the Americans were strong enough to oppose Germany. In a decision that would have far-reaching consequences, however, the Americans decided to back away from this challenge. George Kenney, who would later resign in protest over policy, was running the US State Department's Yugoslavia desk at the time. "'Our marching orders were to keep the US out, to avoid taking any responsibility for a solution to the conflict. The analysts could see that the problem would get a lost worse. They also saw that the Europeans weren't going to be able to handle it.'

"Historically, the United States had supported a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia over a seventy-year period to stabilise the region and serve as a barrier to German expansion. In reality, Yugoslavia, a union the south Slavic peoples, would never have come together in 1918 without American ^{483 BLANK PAGE 487} support from US President Woodrow Wilson. For centuries, the region had been colonised by Austro-Hungary in the Turkish Ottoman empire. The Austrians, under the Habsburg Monarchy, used a policy of divide-and-rule to maintain control, keeping the Slovenes, Croatians, Serbs and Muslims at each other's throats instead of uniting them in their common interests. "'The Habsburg empire kept going and held down a large of what we came to call Yugoslavia and there was no possibility of a Slav get-together until after the First World War when the Austro-Hungary Empire collapsed and the peoples came together and decided to unite.' "With American support, Yugoslavia was founded in 1918 and survived German attempts to divide it up during World War II. When Yugoslavia's communist leader Josip Broz Tito broke away from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in 1948, the US stepped in with military assistance as well as international until loans to prop up a buffer state between the West and the communist-dominated Warsaw Pact. As the Cold War came to an end, however, Washington declared a new world order which emphasised economic competition rather than anti-communism. "'So once that containment of the Soviet Union began to disappear as a need with the decline in after mid-'80s, Gorbachev's reforms, the NATO Warsaw Pact, talks about reducing arms and force build-up, all of that led up to Yugoslavia being essentially irrelevant in its defence posture. And by early 1989, the Americans were really quite explicit. The ambassador, new ambassador to Yugoslavia from the United States, informed the Yugoslav government that the US position was no longer needed, that it was no longer did -- Yugoslavia was no longer ⁴⁸⁸ strategically important to the United States and Western defence.' "Yugoslavia had become expendable. International loans were called in, causing triple-digit inflation. The Federal Government was forced to acquire austerity measures from the different republics. "'Particularly those requirements that led Slovenia as a republic and eventually and other republics to rebel against what was being called economic reform in the constitutional level.'

"Any American efforts to preserve Yugoslavia would also put Washington and on a collision course with Germany when German leaders were enjoying their first taste of real political power since World War II. Moreover, US President George Bush had declared a special relationship with Germany, the kind America used to have with England. "'The United States thought that Germany would have to be largely responsible for the incorporation of Eastern Europe and Central Europe into the West because Germany had a national interest. It was its neighbour, its periphery, and it was financially the most powerful country in Europe and had the resources to do it.'

"'In the post-Cold War period, Germany wanted once again, the evidence is very clear, to re-colonise Yugoslavia, to re-colonise the Balkans, and the United States tied itself to German policy through its need of German power and influence in stabilising Eastern Europe, Western Europe, through the exercise of dominion via the European community, now the European Union, and potentially eventually in the former lands -- in the lands of the former Soviet Union. The problem was that there was one very important country standing in the way of this, and that was ⁴⁸⁹ Yugoslavia.'

"While citizens of Croatia were initially divided over whether to remain in Yugoslavia, the separatists were led by the most extreme elements, remnants of the pro-Nazi Ustasha.

As the New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal would write, 'In World War II, Hitler had no executioners more willing, no ally more passionate, than the fascists of Croatia. They are returning from 50 years ago from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany.'

"Adolf Hitler considered Yugoslavia to be an artificial creation of the hated Versailles Treaty which ended World War I. To break it up, he set up a puppet state and enlarged Croatia, which also included Bosnia-Herzegovina. As its leader, he appointed the fanatical Croat Ustasha Ante Pavlic. Pavlic had helped plot the assassination of King Aleksandar, Yugoslavia's first constitutional monarch, in Marseille, France, in 1934.

"And it was the Germans, the German Nazis who picked up this dreadful Ustasha leader who had made quite clear that he favoured Hitler's solution to be applied, which -- Hitler's final solution to the Jews to be applied to the Serbs. He made no secret of it.

"Simon Wiesenthal, who tracked Ustasha fugitives for decades, along with other Nazi war criminals, told an interviewer, 'I must admit I am obsessed by the criminal character of the independent State of Croatia. Even the Germans were appalled by the crimes committed in it' "How many men, women and children died there? Hitler's special ⁴⁹⁰ envoy to the Balkans, Herman Neubaher, wrote: 'Leaders of the Ustasha boast that they have slaughtered 1 million Orthodox Serbs. On the basis of official German reports, I estimate the number to be three-quarters of a million.'

"Most of these Serbian civilians perished in the notorious Croatian camp Jasenovac, which straddled the Sava River between Croatia and Bosnia. The extermination of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies in Sarajevo was the task of top Muslim leaders who, with few exceptions, collaborated with Hitler and the Croatians.'

"There was in occupied Bosnia, also under German patronage, a strong Muslim wing which was very anti-western. It was represented internationally by the Mufti of Jerusalem, who heard of his viciously anti-western views, and he was brought to Sarajevo and mobbed by enthusiastic crowds.'

"After the war ended, Croatia and Bosnia were never de-Nazified. Not only were there no apologies to the Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, but attitudes remained were frozen under the surface of Tito's policy of socialist fraternity amongst peoples. Following the death of Yugoslavia's longtime leader Tito in 1980, right-wing emigre organisations took out an advertisement on the opinion page of the New York Times stating that Yugoslavia would not survive and offering a map which included all of Bosnia as part of Croatia. It was a map nearly identical to the Nazi-created independent State of Croatia.'

"By 1990, as communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe, Croatian separatists pinned their hopes on a former communist General ⁴⁹¹ named Franjo Tudjman who had been gaoled for excessive nationalism by Tito in the 1970s.'

"'You know, I met him very soon after he came out of communist gaol, while Tito was still alive. He had then championed the racialist form of nationalism, and when he came out of prison, instead of doing what you would think a dissident would do and say, 'To hell with the communists,' he said, 'Oh, it had nothing to do with the regime, it's those horrible Serbs who are oppressing us and the Serbs are responsible for everything and the Serbs are guilty and the Serbs have done it all.' "Tudjman received important help from outside of Croatia in his rise to power.

"'The German secret service was enormously active in Croatia and in all of Yugoslavia trying in the'80s to build bridges between what were called the national communists, Stipe Mesic, Franjo Tudjman, in Yugoslavia and the Ustasha revanches organisations which lived in the diaspora of Croatia, that is to say, all of the people of weight and influence who had fled the former Nazi puppet state in 1945.' "'Tudjman found it useful to come to terms with them. And because he was running on this xenophobic platform there was really no difficulty about it. What was difficult when he was trying to sell his cause in the West, and he managed to partly because he had a very good lobby, very effective and much more effective than the Serbian lobby, and partly because he covered up his intentions.'

"Tudjman often embarrassed his most important supporters such as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. For instance, Tudjman had written a book ⁴⁹² minimising the crimes of the Ustasha and claiming that the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated. 'Thank God my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew,' he told one interviewer. For the national flag, Tudjman chose a replica of the checkerboard emblem that flew over the Croatian death camps of World War II where Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies were exterminated. "Tudjman's anti-semitic views were covered beneath rhetoric acceptable to the West. With the help of Ruder and Finn, a high-powered American public relations firm, the New York Times found space for General Tudjman's new and misleading image on its opinion page. In the article, Tudjman promised that there would be no purges against the Serbian population in Croatia if it separated from Yugoslavia. "'Tudjman declared that Croatia was for the Croats. That was his slogan, a racialist slogan, "Croatia for Croats," with the implication people who weren't Croats, and there was a very substantial Serb and Yugoslav mixed variety, didn't feel that they had any -- they were, in fact, second-class citizens and he recognised them as such.' "A full section months before fighting broke out, Serbs were purged from positions in government, news organisations and the police. Their homes were dynamited in cities such as Zagreb, Zadar, and Borovnik. For the first time since World War II, Serbs in Eastern Croatia began to flee across the Danube River.

"'Serbs working in Croatian cities were required to sign loyalty oaths. Those who did not sign were fired. Those who did sign were fired -- fired later. Serb homes, apartments, and businesses were attacked.' "'[Text subtitled]' ⁴⁹³ "Any doubt that Tudjman himself issued orders for the expulsion of Serbs in Croatia was removed by Tomislav Mercep, a senior member of Tudjman's ruling party the HDZ. Mercep would later be identified by Croatian police reports as one of two Croatian leaders who directed death squads that murdered hundreds of Serbian civilians in Eastern Slovenia around Vukovar and Osijek in the fall of 1991.

"He received little press coverage in the West, but Mercep was in many ways the spark that set the fire of war in Slavonia, a disputed region in Croatia where the Yugoslav war began. Mercep's co-leader of the Croatian death squads was Branimir Glavas of Osijek. Unlike more discrete members of the ruling HDZ party, Glavas made no secret of his identification with the World War II Croatia Ustasha as he welcomed returning Croatian prisoners of war.

"While some French intellectuals were hailing Croatia as part of the new Europe, old and familiar forces were at work. Osijek became a magnet for neo-fascist groups fighting with Glavas. They included British skinheads, German and Austrian neo-fascists and followers of the French extremist Jean Marie Le Pen.

"'[Text subtitled]' "The United States, which soon adopted Germany's approach to the Balkans, ignored recent history and offered a simple explanation for the fighting which broke out in the predominantly Serbian region of Croatia which was known as the Krajina.

"Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, who spent the early years of the Yugoslav war as the American ambassador to Germany, ⁴⁹⁴ represented what became the official American view. "'The Serbs started this war. The Serbs are the original cause of the war.'

"Those who tried to prevent the war saw it differently. "'The Serbs in Croatia, and indeed outside Croatia, had a very vivid memory of what happened in 1941, 1942 when Hitler declared Croatia as an independent puppet state, if you like, and the horrors that went on there and the murders of the Serbs were still -- I mean, a very large number of Serbs were murdered at that time. I mean, hundreds of thousands. And I think it was very understandable that when Croatia declared its independence and promulgated a new Constitution without any safeguard for the 600.000 Serbs who still lived in Croatia, that the Croatian -- the Serbs were very perturbed about this.' "From the beginning, the Serbs were blamed and they were partly blamed out of ignorance because nobody bothered to look back at the history to put it within its historical context and to see why the Serbs who lived in Krajina and the Serbs who lived in the area that is called Bosnia-Herzegovina, why, because of their historical experiences, were so hostile to being under Zagreb or under Muslim Sarajevo rule.' "... deteriorated greatly by 1989, symbolised by the stormy relationship between Slobodan Milosevic, the new leader of Serbia, and Warren Zimmermann, the new US ambassador to Yugoslavia. "'I think Warren came out of Vienna from his last post as an ambassador dealing mainly with human rights, and his first action as ambassador was to go to Kosovo and embrace the Kosovo separatist leaders ⁴⁹⁵ and this automatically offended the relatively new Serbian leadership under Slobodan Milosevic.'

"By the late 1980s, ethnic unrest in Kosovo had already set the stage for the break-up of Yugoslavia. For Serbs who first inhabited the area in the seventh century, AD, Kosovo was the cradle of their civilisation, their Jerusalem, and home to their most revered monasteries. "'A bit of history unfortunately is required here. The Albanians pushed Serbs out in the nineteenth century. The Serbs started pushing Albanians out around 1904, the Albanians surged back, in World War II, under Italian protection and pushed Serbs out.'

"When the war ended, however, Marshal Tito decided to keep the Serbian refugees from returning to their homes in Kosovo. As a result, Serbs lost their majority in the province.

"'Tito's very guilty of that particular drama of Kosovo. He made it much harder to solve, in fact, almost impossible.' "To keep the rest of Albanian population within the Yugoslav federation, Tito's 1974 Constitution gave Kosovo autonomy as a province of Serbia. However, the autonomy was badly abused by Tito's Albanian communist cadres who permitted a campaign of violence to drive out the remaining Serbian population.

"'Life was made extremely difficult for the Serb minority and it was here that the Kosovars began to push to have a pure all-Albanian, meaning racially pure, Kosovo in the areas where there were very few Serbs anyhow. They were pushing them out, and the Serbs used the word that it was ethnic cleansing and that's what it was.' ⁴⁹⁶ "Homes of Serbs were appropriated by Albanians. Orthodox Christian cemeteries and monasteries were desecrated. By the late 1980s, the Serbian population of Kosovo had gone from 50 per cent at the start of World War II to just 10 per cent.

"Shunned meetings with the American ambassador, separatist leaders were receiving a sympathetic ear from Warren Zimmermann. The American ambassador and his boss, Assistant Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, largely ignored the provocations of separatists in Slovenia and Croatia, who were backed by Germany and focused solely on the Serbs. "'The two of them adopted a stance that was, from day one, blaming the Serbs for just about everything. Serbs were the target of all of the actions of the United States of America from the beginning.' "So did American news organisations, whose foreign correspondents relied heavily on the US embassy for their reporting. Slobodan Milosevic served to divert attention from the role of Western powers in making an avoidable war inevitable. While some Western leaders called Milosevic an architect of the conflict, the first shots of the war had been fired by armed separatists in Slovenia and Croatia, strongly supported by Germany. "In hope of heading off disaster, the European Community organised a constitutional conference in 1991, led by respected British diplomat Lord Peter Carrington, to find a compromise between those who wanted to separate from Yugoslavia and those who wished to keep it together. The problem was that administrative borders, or internal frontiers, devised by Tito in 1943, left one-third of the Serbian population out of Serbia, mostly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Croatia. ⁴⁹⁷ "'These frontiers were drawn in a very secretive and very -- might be very irresponsible way by Tito's inner cabinet while the war was still going on and they were never subject to a public debate or discussion. They were never endorsed.'

"... to the war in 1991. Two referendums were held on the same day in Croatia. Croatians voted overwhelmingly to separate from Yugoslavia while ethnic Serbs, particularly those from the Krajina region, voted by a similar margin to remain within Yugoslavia. A compromise favoured by European Community negotiators would have permitted Croatia to leave the Yugoslav federation but would have permitted the regions where Serbs formed a majority to remain in Yugoslavia or to gain substantial autonomy. Serbs who lived in an independent Croatia would be guaranteed full citizenship and human rights protections.

"In the capital city of Zagreb, Croatian President Tudjman seemed reluctantly prepared to accept this compromise, which would have prevented a major military conflict. Germany, however, announced they would recognise both Slovenia and Croatia within Tito's administrative borders before the end of 1991. There would be no compromise. "'The Serbs were bitter that the first act of a newly-united Germany would be to divide the Serbs of Yugoslavia into at least three separate countries. A crucial opportunity to divide Yugoslavia by peaceful means was now threatened by Germany's action. "'It broke up the constitutional conference because once you go throughout the six republics for independence, those two had no further influence on the constitutional conference, but you had to ask the other ⁴⁹⁸ republics whether they wanted their independence, which meant that you had to ask Bosnia and it was perfectly plain that Bosnia -- that there was going to be a civil war in Bosnia if you did do that.' "UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar sent a strong letter to German leaders, warning that recognition would be a disaster. Germany and Austria's own ambassadors in Belgrade privately warned against recognition of Croatia.

"'The Germans risked being isolated, under pressure from the Kohl's party and from the huge lobby, Croat lobby in southern parts of Germany and Bavaria, particularly, were such that it was difficult to go on postponing the support.'

"By the time the war started, the German public had already been prepared by the repeated attacks on the Serbs in an influential German newspaper in Frankfurt. The strident commentary of Johann Georg Reismuller, which favoured Croatia and reviled the Serbs, any Serbs, all Serbs, reminded Peter Handke of the way Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebels once characterised the Jewish race.

"'It was the German press in the foreign Par Excellence of the right wing Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and its journalist that fundamentally influenced German policy.'

"'Well, I remember talking to the Germans in the Foreign Ministry and they said they didn't call it the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung any more they called it the Zagreb Allgemeine Zeitung. And it had that reputation. And it was a tremendous pressure group, and I think this was a factor.' ⁴⁹⁹ "German support for Croatian separatists received an unusual tribute; a musical thank you on Croatian state television. "Serbian television broadcast Croatia's musical thank you interspersed with World War II footage of cheering Croatian crowds in Zagreb, welcoming Hitler's troops. Croatia successfully used the media to manipulate a larger audience, particularly Germany and the US, to gain support for its separatist agenda. This was particularly evident in the reporting of the war around the resort town of Dubrovnik, a favourite vacation spot for German tourists. Working through its Washington PR firm, the Croatian government managed to convince much of the world that Dubrovnik was being destroyed by the Serbs in unprovoked attacks which lasted for months during the fall of 1991.

"'The public has been led to believe that the federal army attack on Dubrovnik has not precipitated by anything but sheer malice. However, on August 25th of 1991, Croatian forces attacked a base in the Bay of Kotor and -- the Bay of Kotor and they were repulsed, with heavy losses.' "Yugoslav troops based in Montenegro, then fought their way up the coast, confronting Croatian forces near Dubrovnik. "'Targets outside the Old City were hit, consisting mostly of hotels which had been taken over as barracks and spotter points by Croatian forces who also put refugees in the lower stories of their own barracks and spotter facilities.'

"'It was obvious that the Croats were using the Old Town as a defensive wall. They were firing from behind hospitals. They had a mortar position next to our hotel. The final straw for me was when there ⁵⁰⁰ was this incredible bombardment in our hotel basement: bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. The worst we have ever heard. And I was furious and everyone else was panicking. And I said to the manager who was down there with us, I said, I wish you would tell that chap with the heavy machine-gun that we're about to stop firing at the Serbs, because they're going to fire back.'

"Contrary to news reports, there was little damage to the historic Old City.

"'Yes, it has been reported some 15.000 shells rained on the Old City of Dubrovnik. I counted 15 mortar hits on the main street. The Yugoslav federal army could have destroyed the Old City of Dubrovnik in two hours. It is not destroyed.'

"Washington Post reporter Peter Maas, who visited the Old City several months after the fighting stopped, found Dubrovnik in what he described as nearly pristine condition.

"'There are many people who go to these scenes of mayhem and adventure who don't know where they are. Who don't know the languages, cannot really communicate with the people, and who take press handouts from the local authorities. So there is certainly an orchestrated effort on the part of the Croatian and the Slovenian, Austrian and German media to portray the Serbs as a bunch of howling, Byzantine, uncivilised barbarians.'

"The facts on the ground, however, mattered little after first impressions had been made. Rather than admit that they had made a mistake, influential columnists on both sides of the Atlantic continued to ⁵⁰¹ write that Dubrovnik had been destroyed. Public opinion was tilted against the Serbs and towards Croatia's political goal, recognition as an independent state.

"These impressions helped strengthen Germany's resolve to lead a reluctant European Community to recognise the separatist republics and thereby dismantle Yugoslavia. To overcome British opposition to recognising Croatia, German Prime Minister Helmut Kohl offered British leader John Major a deal which left Britain free to disregard or opt out of the social provisions of the 1991 treaty creating a unified Europe which was being hotly debated in the British parliament. This helped John Major politically at home but Bosnia would pay a high price. "The French, who needed German help to stabilise France's currency, also dropped their opposition to recognising the separatist republics. The United States, the only power strong enough to oppose Germany, began to waiver. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who had once served as US ambassador to Yugoslavia and spoke Serbo-Croat, knew well the dangers of a wider war if recognition were extended before a settlement had been reached between the different ethnic groups. "'I think the major lesson here is when you got involved in something like this with a thousand years of history underlying it all, you need to understand that once the dam breaks, the viciousness can be pretty awful on all sides.'

"In the end, here also, peace would be sacrificed for domestic politics. There was an American election coming up. "'When we finally went ahead and recognised, one of the reasons ⁵⁰² we did so is because it had become a major domestic political issue for us here. We have particularly a large Croatian-American community and Mr. Bush lost most of them in the 19 -- in the election that he lost because they were unhappy with our having delayed as long as we did in recognising Croatia.'

"While German actions encouraged the armed secession of Slovenia and Croatia, it was US diplomacy, particularly through Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, which helped light the spark for a war in Bosnia-Herzegovina by supporting Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic in his bid for a separate state.

"'And then we were the ones that went to the Europeans and insisted that the -- that they recognise Bosnia and that we would recognise all three of the new states and that was the deal that was made, and of course it was precisely that that led to the current war.' "This was a war that European leaders believe could have been avoided.

"'The Bosnian Serbs, until comparatively recently, have been in the majority in Bosnia and then the Muslims, who had a very much higher birth rate than the Serbs, became the predominant -- the majority population. And this, of course, was something very hard for the Serbs to swallow. And they made it abundantly plain very early on that they were not prepared to accept a situation in which there was an independent Bosnia under the Constitution which then prevailed. And indeed, under the Constitution which then prevailed, it was not -- it was illegal for Izetbegovic to declare independence because any constitutional change of ⁵⁰³ that magnitude had to be agreed by all three parties.' "Privately, European leaders worried about Izetbegovic's close ties to Iran and the possibility of a Muslim fundamentalist state in the heart of a newly-unified Europe.

"'Izetbegovic himself had ties to the Iranians going back long before they came to power in Bosnia; really beginning not too long after the Iranian revolution came to power in 1979.'

"... the negotiations and an agreement was ready for signing that specifically guaranteed that Bosnia would remain a unitary republic which would be given equal status to Serbia within a revamped Yugoslavia. Izetbegovic seemed to indicate his acceptance but then abruptly broke off negotiations aimed at preventing a war.

"'Izetbegovic did what Zulfikarpasic calls a stab in the back because he went on television without telling Zulfikarpasic he was going to do this and accused Zulfikarpasic and the Serbs those who negotiated this deal of selling out as traitors to Bosnia, and this, you know, was a terribly dangerous thing to do in '91 and should have put everybody on warning against the kind of peace-loving multi-ethnic et cetera, et cetera that he and his followers were always giving toward Western journalists and Western politicians.'

"In his book The Politics of Diplomacy, then Secretary of State James Baker wrote that Ambassador Zimmermann strongly advised him to recognise Bosnia. Recognition of Bosnia, however, violated the most basic diplomatic norms. For a government to be recognised, it must be in full control of its territory, it must have clearly-established borders. It ⁵⁰⁴ must also have a stable population. Not a single one of these essential conditions existed in Bosnia in February of 1992 when Zimmermann made his recommendation. US intelligence analysts predicted that recognition would lead to war. Even the Germans thought that recognition of Bosnia would be a serious mistake.

"'We did have some different opinions in early 1992. As the Americans supported the recognition of Bosnia whereas we, the Europeans, believed that we should first establish a framework for the whole region.' "'Basically the policy-makers ignored the analysts and by -- by late January, early February, US policy had come around to the view that we would recognise Bosnia and we wanted the Europeans to recognise Bosnia along with us. So from mid-February on we were pushing the Europeans hard to recognise Bosnia and we were thinking about how we would do that and have the US recognise Croatia and Slovenia at the same time.' "With American support, recognition of a separate Bosnian state was now inevitable. Lord Carrington tried to avert disaster by applying Portuguese President Jose Cutilliero to find common ground among the Serbs, Muslims and Croats before an independent Bosnia was recognised. "'I asked him to go to Sarajevo and to Lisbon and to have talks with the three parties in Bosnia to see whether or not some agreement could come, could be reached with a unitary state. I mean, an independent Bosnian state but in some sort of federal idea where you have got the three communities to agree.'

"The Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all signed the pact, known as the Lisbon Agreement, on March 18, 1992. This set up a central ⁵⁰⁵ government of Bosnia-Herzegovina and three ethnic cantons on the model of Switzerland.

"'It was the last chance, I think, of trying to preserve Bosnia before the war broke out in earnest.'

"If the Lisbon plan had been adopted British author and BBC journalist Misha Glenny wrote later, the war in Bosnia probably would not have happened. But two days after signing it, following a meeting with American Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, Izetbegovic changed his mind and disavowed his signature.

"'Izetbegovic turned around and reneged, as he's reneged on other things.'

"Zimmermann later acknowledged to David Binder of the New York Times that Izetbegovic had reluctantly signed the agreement to gain European recognition. More than a year after the bloodshed began in Bosnia, Zimmermann also admitted that the Lisbon plan was not bad at all but recalls telling Izetbegovic, If you don't like it, why sign it? "'Zimmermann told Izetbegovic, Look, why don't you wait and see what the US can do for you, meaning we'll recognise you and then help you out...'" --

JUDGE MAY: Right. It's 1.00. Let the tape stop. Mr. Milosevic, you lost ten minutes during the adjournment. You can have that ten minutes now. You can either address us if you wish or you can go on playing the tape, whichever you wish.

THE ACCUSED: I would like to continue the tape which is -- which is quite -- about to be ended. But it was not ten minutes, it was 20 ⁵⁰⁶ minutes, Mr. May, 20 minutes.

JUDGE MAY: We won't argue about this. You've got ten minutes now. Do you want to go on playing the tape or do you want to address us?

THE ACCUSED: I want to finish the tape and then I will tell something and finish. There is a couple of seconds more.

JUDGE MAY: Do not misunderstand us. You have ten minutes. Either you play the tape or you address us. You can try and do both for five minutes, if you like. It's a matter for you what you do.

THE ACCUSED: The tape will be finished in couple minutes.

JUDGE MAY: Play the tape.

[Videotape played] "'This is a major turning point in our diplomatic efforts.' "'The American Administration made it quite clear that they thought the proposal to Cutilliero, my proposals were unacceptable.' "With no agreement amongst the Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, and with all sides mobilised for war, the European Community voted, as the US insisted, to recognise Bosnia on April 6th, along with Slovenia and Croatia. This act, Roger Cohen of the New York Times later wrote, was as close to criminal negligence as a diplomatic act can be. Indeed, international recognition and the outbreak of the Bosnian war were simultaneous. The world put light to the fuse."

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] As we watch all of this that I tried to show over this brief period of time during these three days, and now as we have been viewing this video which confirms practically literally everything that I have been saying about the Yugoslav crisis, and there ⁵⁰⁷ are so many more of them, I don't know how those pathetic words uttered by the Prosecutor in this courtroom sound now when he said, no doubt to impress the audience, that what happened in Yugoslavia was not the will of God, the will -- it was the will of this man, and he pointed to me. And as you can see, it was all different and everything shows that the indictment is a false one. If war crimes were carried out over Yugoslavia, what you saw here and what the Yugoslav and world public saw, then those who committed these crimes have to be held accountable. You do not wish to hold them accountable and to call them because you represent them.

However, what came here before the public eye, thanks to this sorrowful trial, put all of those people responsible before a grand jury that consists of the entire public opinion, and they will not be able to evade responsibility for what they did. I am convinced of that because I am convinced that the majority of people are honest people. If I did not believe in that, life would be pointless.

I am sure that over these past three days, under such restricted circumstances, what people managed to see in the broadest possible public is, inter alia, that this Tribunal is an instrument that is used for continuing the commission of crimes against my country. I am sure that it cannot remain that way.

I said to my son, "It is worth staying in this prison for I don't know how long for only one day of an opportunity to say the truth." Once this truth is heard worldwide, nobody will be able to simply turn it off and nobody will be able to deny it altogether. And as you managed to see ⁵⁰⁸ over these past three days, the truth is on my side. That is why I feel superior here and that is why I feel to be the moral victor, regardless of their paragraphs, regardless of your intentions that have also become quite clear to all.

At least you Englishmen can read The Spectator, the latest issue of The Spectator, and you can see how your prominent people view this trial, the indictments, their joining, and the reasons for which all of those who participated in this did. After all, the public will speak up. They are the jury, because this Tribunal does not have one. I have thus concluded. This was my opening statement, as you said. And when the Prosecutor completes everything that he intends to carry out before this Court in accordance with your rules, I'm then going to present my arguments.

I'm sorry that I am not in a position to show this video cassette, too, because that is going to show how photographs were rigged, those that went all around the world and those that caused enormous hatred and fury against the Serbs. Such lies were concocted, and they come from the same kitchen from which the so-called refugee camp on the Yugoslav border was set up. Stankovci it was called. They got 30.000 Albanians from Macedonia there so that they could show them to the media and diplomats on one day. And the next day, when naive diplomats came to see the camp once, it was no longer there because they allowed these people to go home. So it is this kitchen that concocted Stankovci and barbed wires and Racak and Markale in Bosnia and all sorts of deception and deceits that were used in the media war in order to proclaim the Serbs the villains. After ⁵⁰⁹ all, we did not manage to see this tape, although you have the best possible technical equipment here.

So this has been a pretext for lies that was used in order to commit a crime over my country and criminals will be held responsible for this crime. I am convinced of that.

I have thus concluded.

JUDGE MAY: We'll adjourn now for an hour and a half and sit again at 2.40.

--- Luncheon recess taken at 1.10 p.m. ⁵¹⁰

--- On resuming at 2.40 p.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Nice.

MR. NICE: The first witness is Mahmut Bakalli. He's, I think, outside and is in a position to take the solemn declaration, which I think he will do in the Albanian language.

JUDGE MAY: Before you begin, we've seen the summaries, for which we're grateful. They have been given to us in good time. Paragraphs 17 to 20 -- I understand both the accused and the amici, I should say, have had the summaries. Paragraph 17 to 20 described as a final statement seems to consist of entirely his political views about the present situation and is, therefore, irrelevant. Subject to that, we'll hear him give his evidence.

MR. NICE: May he be brought in, then, please.

[The witness entered court]

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Let the witness take the solemn declaration.

THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth.

JUDGE MAY: What does the solemn declaration say? That did not sound right.

MR. NICE: I haven't got the English version with me at the moment, but it may be --

JUDGE MAY: Could you read what's on the form, please. Yes.

THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

JUDGE MAY: Thank you, if you would like to take a seat. ⁵¹¹

THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Thank you.

WITNESS: MAHMUT BAKALLI

[Witness answered through interpreter] Examined by Mr. Nice:

Q. Can you tell the Chamber, please, your full name.

A. My name is Mahmut Bakalli.

Q. Mr. Bakalli, are you presently a member of the Kosovo parliament?

A. Yes, I am.

Q. A few years ago, just yes or no, did you have some meetings with the accused?

A. Yes, in the spring of 1998, I met the accused twice.

Q. Now, I'm going to come back to that, and we're going to focus on that in due course. Let's now go back to the beginning and have a little background.

By training what were you? What are you?

A. I am an independent intellectual in Kosovo presently, and I'm a member of the parliament in Kosova.

Q. Let's go back. I want to go back 10, 20, 30 years. What did you study, and what did you have as a basic occupation, before we come to politics and your life in politics?

A. I studied political science in Belgrade. There, I finished my magastudium and then worked as a professor at the University of Pristina in the field of sociology. And then I was chosen in 1971 as chairman of the provincial committee to represent Kosova and was a member of the Presidency of the Communist League of Yugoslavia under the rule of Tito. ⁵¹² I had several functions up until -- up until 1981.

Q. What was the most senior position you held in the Communist Party?

A. I was head of the provincial committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia for 10 years, and then 11 years was on the board.

Q. You say this was up until 1981. What happened in 1981 so that things changed?

A. Up until 1981, you mean?

Q. Yes. In 1981, what happened? What changes happened to your life?

A. Thereafter, I was politically persecuted by my party and by the government, by the Serb government, in Yugoslavia because we were in conflict amongst ourselves as to the -- an evaluation of several student demonstrations which had taken place in 1981 in Pristina and in Kosova.

Q. Were you able to carry on working in and for the Communist party, or did your work for the Communist party then come to an end?

A. From 1981 on, I was no longer a member of the Communist Party, a member of the former Communist Party, and was no longer active in issues related to the Communist Party, the Communist League.

Q. Were you a free man or were you subject to any restraint?

A. After 1981, when I was in a conflict with my own party, I was persecuted and subject to various types of pressure. For two years, I was forced to stay at home under house arrest. Later, they let me work in an institution for scientific research for various projects, and there I worked until -- well, until Milosevic and his policies began and threw all ⁵¹³ of the Albanians out of their jobs, from their jobs.

Q. What year was it that these last events happened or started to happen?

A. Could you repeat your question, please?

Q. In what year was it that these last events that you've described, Milosevic and his politics, Albanians being thrown out of their jobs? What year was that?

A. That was after 1991, after the changes of -- in the Constitution of Kosova.

Q. I'm going to interrupt you and stop you there. Had you by this time already started to get involved in politics again?

A. No. I began -- from 1981 to 1989, I was passive in politics in order not to interfere with the leadership in Kosova so that it could defend Kosova's constitutional position, and I was active in efforts towards the -- I had been active in the Constitution of 1974 but after Milosevic's speech in Gazimestan, on the occasion of the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1989.

Q. In 1989, was it just this speech of the accused at Gazimestan that was of significance, or were there other events in 1989 of significance?

A. My activities in politics were related to the position of the accused in his speech in Gazimestan. I saw that there was a dangerous project which would lead to war in Yugoslavia as a whole, and especially in Kosova.

Q. I'm going to interrupt you again to try to get things in a chronological order to assist the Chamber. Just yes or no to this: Do ⁵¹⁴ you recall an incident at the Assembly in that year involving tanks? Just yes or no.

A. Yes.

Q. Were you, yourself, present at that incident or not?

A. No, I wasn't, but I did -- I was aware of it.

Q. All right. Can you remember what month that incident happened in? And if you can't, don't guess. Or if you can give us the season, give us the season of the year.

A. It was in the spring of 1991, I think, when Milosevic started an initiative to change the status, the constitutional status of Kosova and wanted --

Q. Let's go back then. If you can't remember the date of the incident I've referred to, let's go back to the Gazimestan speech. Were you present at the speech, or did you hear about it or read about it?

A. I heard about it on the television, on Serbian television, and watched it live, the speech. And then I analysed it, read analyses in the newspaper, and read his whole speech in the newspaper. But I wasn't present personally at Gazimestan, and there were no Albanians there present.

Q. You, a Kosovo Albanian with political background, what was the element of that speech that troubled you?

A. If my memory is still fresh, I would say that the part of the speech which -- in which Mr. Milosevic said that we tomorrow in Yugoslavia will make war, political war, for the future of Yugoslavia and the possibility of armed conflict cannot be excluded. The whole ⁵¹⁵ text, if you analyse it, it seemed to me at the time that it constituted a project for war rather than to solve the problems, rather than a peaceful solution for Yugoslavia.

Q. Did you -- just yes or no to this first. Did you react in some way to this speech? Did you do something as a result of this speech? Just yes or no.

A. Yes.

Q. And before we come to what you did, were you alone in reacting to this speech -- were you alone among Kosovo Albanians to react to this speech, or did others also react?

A. I was not alone. Many other political and intellectual figures in Kosovo reacted too, in Kosova.

Q. Let's now deal with your own reaction. What did you do first on hearing this speech and forming the views about it that you did?

A. My first step was to write a letter, a public letter, a long public letter to a friend of mine, to an earlier friend of mine, Larry Eagleburger, who had been American ambassador in Belgrade. At that time, he was Under-Secretary of State of the United States of America. I wrote him and told him that it was very dangerous what was happening in Yugoslavia and commented on it and commented on the -- Milosevic's speech in Gazimestan and told him that I was worried that a war could take place. I published the letter in Albanian, in the newspaper "Skandija" [phoen] in Pristina, and at the same time in the Zagreb newspaper "Vjesnik".

Q. Were you the only person to publish an article of that sort or did others publish such articles?. ⁵¹⁶

A. As far as I remember, there were others in Kosova who reacted publicly towards the -- Milosevic's speech in Gazimestan and to his -- towards the other measures he took after this speech.

Q. The two other measures he took after this speech, what are you referring to?

A. Well, the first main step was his initiative to change the constitutional status of Kosova as a constituent part of the federation and -- so that Kosova would be ruled totally by Serbia. He took this initiative in contradiction to the will of the Albanian -- the Kosovo people and the Kosovo parliament and changed the Constitution in an illegal manner and in an illegitimate fashion and, as such, totally changed the position of Kosova and put it under Serbian rule. After that, that -- I mean, after the change of the Constitution in Kosova, for the Albanian people there was a situation of apartheid which reigned. Or rather, in every walk of life there was apartheid. People were thrown out of their jobs. They were thrown out of the government offices. They were thrown out of cultural affairs, out of education, and in general out of social life. It seems -- it seemed to be an imposed apartheid which is a crime against humanity, it would seem to me.

Q. Just stop there. I just want you to help us with one detail. You've spoken of the changes to the Constitution of Kosovo, and we know that it had something called "semi-autonomous status". Can you explain to the learned Judges, please, just how substantial was the autonomous status of Kosovo, semi-autonomous status? What were the greatest powers that ⁵¹⁷ Kosovo had in the earlier Federation of Yugoslavia?

A. To put it briefly, under the Constitution of 1974, Kosova had economy of the -- constituted part of the federation and had the same rights as the republics, who were also part of the federation, including the right of veto. All social life, all political life, economic, police, everything was based on the Constitution and the autonomy status.

Q. And the --

A. And all functions which the other republics had in Yugoslavia were held also by Kosova. There was no -- nothing which was under Serbian jurisdiction. In the preamble of the Constitution, it says that Kosova is a constituent part of the federation and that it's a part of Serbia.

Q. And you speak of the veto. At what level, at what government was this a veto that those representing Kosovo could exercise?

A. If Kosova was not in agreement with something, with something -- a solution at the federal level, then it had the right, like all the other -- like all the republics, to impose its veto to oppose something. And we used our right of veto twice in Kosova, and it was well used, because otherwise it would have been to our detriment.

Q. All right. Moving on to the --

JUDGE ROBINSON: Before you move on, I'd like to ask the witness Mr. Bakalli a question. You said that the effect of the constitutional change was to impose what you call apartheid on the people of Kosovo. It's not clear what you mean by "apartheid." Are you speaking of apartheid in relation to the rest of the Federation of Yugoslavia, or within Kosova itself? And can you explain exactly how this amounted to ⁵¹⁸ apartheid?

THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] First of all, we asked them not to bring in constitutional modifications because they would be very negative for us. The Constitution was abrogated. A forced solution was imposed upon us. There were very deep-going changes. I said that we were under an apartheid. It was an apartheid towards the Serb population, the Serb minority in Kosova, and towards the Serbian administration which used the Serbian minority in Kosova and sent their people to administer in Kosova, to rule over the Albanians. It was an apartheid within Serbia.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you.

MR. NICE:

Q. I was going to ask you to deal with one particular aspect of what you described as apartheid because it turns up later in your evidence; education. Following these constitutional changes imposed on Kosovo, what were the educational opportunities of Kosovo Albanians?

A. The only possibility there was to build up an educational system was for the Albanians to organise a parallel education system, which was not legal and was very poor because people were being educated in homes, in private homes. Most of the teachers and the professors didn't receive any salary at all for the work they did with the pupils and the students. But we were actively involved so as not to let the education system disintegrate totally. It was a parallel system of education in Kosova which we built up.

Q. Was there a state system available in some form to Kosovo Albanian children? If there was, why did the Kosovo Albanians choose to ⁵¹⁹ establish the parallel system that was operated from private homes?

A. Serbia, after the constitutional changes, imposed this system, imposed the Serbian education system. In Kosova, we had our own curricula and programmes which had been approved by the parliament of Kosova, the earlier parliament or, rather, the council of education, the Ministry of Education of Kosova. Serbia refused to accept this. And to get an education under our system, with our curricula, we weren't allowed to in the official school buildings. And as such, we had to educate the children in basements and in private homes.

Q. Yes. Would it have been possible for Kosovo Albanian children to be educated in their own language under the state system, for example?

A. On -- in the state education system of Serbia, it would have been theoretically possible for Albanian children to be educated, but the Albanians refused to do this, to take part in it, because they had their own system, their own teachers and professors, and they could not accept the education system which was imposed upon them by the administration in Belgrade.

Q. Then one other aspect of the system you describe as apartheid that I'd like you to deal with in just a couple more sentences of detail: You spoke of -- you spoke of Kosovo Albanians losing their jobs in various places, government offices and so on. Why were they losing their jobs at this period of time??

A. Many Albanians, after the changes, the constitutional changes, lost their jobs because they were forced to sign a declaration of loyalty towards the new constitutional system and towards the Serbian ⁵²⁰ administration and government, and the Albanians refused to do this. Secondly, there were radical changes in the leadership of enterprises and business, according to which the Albanians were thrown out and Serbs replaced them.

Q. Were they being thrown out, so far as you could judge, for any good reason?

A. Well, the real reason was to bring the people of Kosovo down to their knees. By forcing people to sign a declaration of loyalty to Serbia was a type of moral pressure exerted against the people, and political pressure against those employed. And the Albanians refused to do this because they didn't want to be forced to their knees.

Q. You told us about your letter to Lawrence Eagleburger, which was published. Did you carry on publishing expressions of your views?

A. Yes, on a regular basis in newspapers, magazines. Not only Albanians -- Albanian newspapers in Kosova, but also in Europe and in some American magazines and in Belgrade newspapers in Serbian, those which were a bit more liberal or, you could say, oppositional. "Nasa Borba" among them, "Vreme" also, "Revi" [phoen] "Nin" and other magazines, newspapers, in Serbian.

Q. And in summary, what was the argument you were presenting in these articles? What were the concerns you were expressing?

A. In all my publications, my main point of view was the declaration of the Albanian people of Kosova saying that they did not want jurisdiction and Serbian -- Serbian jurisdiction and rule. And the motion of the Albanian part of the parliament of Kosova, which once parliament ⁵²¹ was broken up, they met. These members assembled in Kacanik secretly and approved a -- the Constitution of the Republic of Kosova. So later, we had a declaration by the Albanian people of Kosova via a referendum in which, to put it briefly, the Albanian people declared that they wanted the independence of Kosova from Serbian jurisdiction. And they wanted a Republic of Kosova which would later begin negotiations on the future fate of Kosova in the framework of a confederation or federation of Yugoslavia.

That was my stance in my writing. And as such, I was active publicly in this direction.

Q. Let's move on now on the basis that if anybody in the court wants to ask -- I'm going to move on to the time of your meetings with the accused. But over what period of time altogether were you writing articles?

A. The whole period from 1981 to up until today.

Q. Your meetings with the accused, how did this all first come about? How did it first happen?

A. I think there was a bit of preparatory work involved in my first meeting with him. First of all, in my home and at the -- on the 8th of October 1987, three high officers of the state security apparatus of Serbia arrived. We had a talk in my house.

Q. Can you give us the names of all three or any one of these people?

A. Present was -- there was one called Gajic, who was head of the security apparatus for Kosova, Serbia state security in Kosova. And then ⁵²² he was an assistant of the head of Serbian state security, Stanisic. And another was a high functionary of the Serbian apparatus. I think he was called Adzic Gagic. And there was another one, an officer, major, I think. I don't remember his last name.

They came in order to prepare a meeting between me and their boss, Stanisic, on Stanisic's request. But I used the occasion to tell them what I thought about the repression and the crimes going on by the police and military forces in Kosova. They told me that they had not come to comment on this situation politically or make state comments. They only wanted to arrange a contact with -- between me and Stanisic. I agreed, said that I would be willing to meet Stanisic. Later, two weeks later --

Q. We'll come to that second week. Although they weren't concerned or prepared to discuss things in detail, was anything said to you at that first meeting that caused you concern?

A. You mean the second meeting with Stanisic himself?

Q. No, the first meeting with the state security and the man Gajic.

A. Yes. Could you please repeat the question.

Q. Was anything said by those men or any one of them at that first meeting that caused you concern, that caused you anxiety?

A. Yes, there was. They endeavoured all the time not to comment on the situation, not to comment on the Republic of Kosova, on a peaceful solution through negotiations for the withdrawal of troops and police. But when I mentioned the crimes which had been committed by the police force in Kosova and mentioned a couple of specific incidents, Gajic ⁵²³ told -- said to me that this is -- that that's nothing. We have a plan or we've had a plan with a code name "scorched earth" - sprzena zemlja in Serbian - "scorched earth" policy. But they said we suggested this plan not be implemented in Kosova.

Gajic said the purpose of this policy would be to destroy 700 Albanian populated settlements and to destroy property and to destroy people. I, to tell you the truth, tried to remain calm and simply to reply that this would have been insanity on a large scale; and if such a thing took place, the whole Albanian people would rise to their feet in war.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Bakalli --

A. And --

JUDGE ROBINSON: Stop for a minute. When you said that you were told that "We have a plan, a scorched earth plan", who is "we"? Who had the plan? What was your understanding?

THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I understood -- what I understood is that it was the plan of Serbia, a plan of Serbia or a plan by Milosevic. But Gajic, as the head of the state security of -- in Kosovo was -- had his reserves about implementing this plan. That was my impression at the time. But it seems that a plan, that such a Draconic plan did exist.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you. Go ahead, Mr. Nice.

MR. NICE:

Q. I think you already told us that the next development was a ⁵²⁴ couple of weeks later. Tell us about that. Did you have another meeting a couple of weeks later?

A. Yes. Two weeks later, an intermediary called me and told me that in Brezovica, which was about 70 kilometres from Pristina, that I would be expected that evening and would be received by Stanisic there, who was Milosevic's state security head. I accepted to go. I was with a friend of mine, and we set off. We were in private cars and were accompanied by representatives of state security. It was in the winter, a very cold icy winter day.

Q. The meeting with Stanisic, was he on his own or was he with anybody else?

A. In the building which belonged to state security, Serbian state security, there were people. Gajic was there and some of his colleagues, but I was taken up to Mr. Stanisic on the upstairs into a room where we were alone. We had something to eat, had something to drink, and had a conversation which lasted for about two hours.

Q. Is Stanisic somebody you knew before, or was this the first time you met him?

A. That the first time I had ever met Stanisic.

Q. Did he explain to you why he was there and on whose initiative or whose instructions he was there?

A. At the very beginning he said, "I have been sent by President Milosevic to talk about a meeting between me and Mr. Milosevic." But as I said, that he would inform Milosevic the next morning in Belgrade about the conversation, he said. ⁵²⁵

Q. How did your two hours of discussions with Stanisic end?

A. I don't want to repeat. It was more or less the same ending as two weeks earlier. The problem of Kosova, we had to find a situation, a political negotiations to get out of -- solve the crisis, find a political solution.

I appealed to Stanisic that he stop violence and crimes which were being committed, that he withdraw the concentrations of police and army forces and insisted that we begin political negotiations. He said that he would inform Milosevic about everything, but he added that he was -- he asked me if I was willing to meet Milosevic myself, and I said yes. The conversation was very measured, very, very tranquil, interesting.

After I went down back into the hall where my friend was waiting and the colleagues of Stanisic, among which Gajic were waiting, they asked, "Well, how did things go?" I said, "Yeah. We had a good conversation, a tolerant conversation." And he said, "Well, you had a good talk then, but Mr. Bakalli is a structural nationalist." I don't really -- I didn't know what he meant by "structural nationalist." And I still don't know. I know what a nationalist is, but I don't know what a structural nationalist is.

So in front of this group of people that this term was used which I found very strange. He then asked me, "Mr. Bakalli, would you be willing to assume a post in the federation?" I laughed and said that I've had a lot of posts in my life in the federation. That was probably the most characteristic of the conversations with Stanisic. I don't ⁵²⁶ think that he wanted to buy me with this formula he used, "Do you want a post?" I don't think he wanted to keep it for myself -- for himself. I don't think that was his objective. Why say it in front of others? I don't know.

Q. This was in the 1997, 1998. When was the next contact that you had of a broadly similar kind?

When was the next contact?

A. The next contact was with Milosevic.

Q. Yes. When was that?

A. That was in April of 1998.

Q. How did it come about?

A. There was an invitation from Mr. Milosevic, and two of his people invited me to come to Belgrade one day. I happened to be in Belgrade on that occasion because there was a delegation from Kosova, which was conducting negotiations with the Ministry of External Affairs of Sweden, between Kosova and Sweden. That evening, I spent the night in Belgrade, and two people took me to the hotel where I was staying, and then from the hotel to the residence of the President, of the president called Beli Dvor.

Q. Before we get there, had you notified anybody else of this meeting, anybody in the international community?

A. On a mobile telephone when we were going to Belgrade to meet the Swedish Foreign Minister, a friend of mine called me from Pristina and said that two people -- two of Milosevic's people had called and were looking for me and wanted me to meet Milosevic. So when -- so I talked to ⁵²⁷ the Kosovo people with me. Among them was Fehmi Agani, who was later murdered barbarically by Serbian police forces as he was being expelled from the country on train, and they executed him. I talked to him and to a couple of others, and they said, "Why not meet him? It could be good for peace, for solving the issue of Kosova." But did I contact anyone outside? No. I'm quite sure I didn't. I wanted to inform the American Ambassador Miles, but he wasn't at his residence. And I informed the secretary of the ambassador, Nick Hills. He simply requested that after the discussion, that he be informed about the results of the discussion, about what we had talked about.

There was no instructive -- instructions from anyone or -- with no one.

Q. Let's go to the meeting at Beli Dvor. Were you received by the accused?

A. Yes. We were received in the hall. It was a tolerant conversation, I could say. I was given an opportunity to express my opinion.

Q. And what did you say by way of giving your opinion?

A. I don't want to repeat myself, the whole -- but to put it in brief terms, I suggested and insisted that the crimes be stopped which the police and the army were committing in Kosova, that these concentrated forces of the police and the army be withdrawn from Kosova, and that account be taken of the will of the Albanian people for the republic of Kosova with -- outside the jurisdiction of Serbia.

Q. When you're speaking of the police -- ⁵²⁸

A. And I asked him to be the initiator of political negotiations on these questions. Excuse me. Could I add a little bit? Just a second. I told him, I said to him that the balance of forces at this moment is in favour of Serbia but the balance of forces will not always stay that way. If the Albanians get organised and rise to war, things will change, and the international community will not remain indifferent to the crimes that are being committed in Kosova. I used the -- on that occasion, I used the term -- a term which I know in Serbian "i nad popom ima popa," "Even above a priest, there is another priest." We live in an interconnected world. You can't commit a crime without there being borders, limits imposed on you.

It may be interesting to you the fact that we talked about a lot of other things, but one thing is particularly interesting, about the Jashari family in Prekaz. A little earlier, the police force committed a great crime, the Serbian police force there, and killed the whole Jashari family in Prekaz, in the Drenica region. And I said, "You are killing civilians. You're killing women and children as in Prekaz." Milosevic commented, saying, "We are fighting against terrorists." But, look, there were women and children being killed. I was quite surprised when he used the words -- more a police expression than a political expression. He said, "We gave them two hours to get away, to get out of their building."

Q. Did he seem to be informed about this event or not, the Jashari --

A. Yes. Yes. Yes, definitely. He asked me, "Is it a big family"? "Did I know them"? And actually, I did happen to know them -- I didn't know them, but I knew about the affair. It's a crime against a whole ⁵²⁹ family. If people go to war, okay, you can kill them, but you can't murder a whole family and burn down a whole house.

Q. Now, Mr. Bakalli, you have been speaking of the police having committed offences. What police were you identifying to the accused? What police force?

A. Actually, I don't really know much about the structure of the police from Serbia which reigned at the time in Kosova, but I imagine that they were special forces, special police forces. It's interesting, if you would allow me.

Q. I'm not sure I'm going to allow you because you've only got so much time, but can I ask you another question?

What was the accused's reaction to the complaints you were making about the conduct of the police and the Jashari massacre and so on and so forth? What was his reaction to all this?

A. Unfortunately, he reacted without showing any emotion or guilt. But I told you the words, the term he used. He said, "But we gave them two hours to get away." He said that.

Q. In general, what was the position he adopted in answer to the complaints you were making?

A. I said at the start that the conversation had be correct, tolerant. He allowed me to express my opinion. But from time to time in the conversation, there were arrogant reactions on his part. I, for instance, mentioned the crimes that the police had committed, and he talked about terrorism then. I said that it was the state organs of Serbia who were committing these crimes, state terrorism. He was quite ⁵³⁰ upset about that term. And I don't know if that's usual or not, but this certain time he said "koci te malo" in Serbian, which means "Slow down, Mr. Bakalli. Careful. Don't get so upset when you're -- in your description of such crimes."

And I mentioned then the case of Ukshin Hoti.

Q. Yes. Tell us about Ukshin Hoti, please

A. I was very open. There are many prisoners who are being kept illegally in Serbian prisons. There were two friends of mine. I mentioned a case of a university intellectual who was friend of mine, a friend of mine, who was being kept in prison for years, Ukshin Hoti. I mentioned his name. I said, "Ukshin Hoti is in prison for his political views." "But I have the very same political views," I said. He went over that.

Ukshin Hoti was executed. But at the time, when he was let out of Dubrava Prison on a Sunday one day, which is unusual because on Sunday they don't do anything in the prisons, but they told him he could go home one day.

Q. Have you ever seen him since?

A. No. I never saw him, but I know he was seen leaving the prison door, the big door of the prison. And then he was never seen alive again. And even today, they don't know where he landed.

Q. Now, one other --

A. Or where his body is.

JUDGE ROBINSON: When did that take place, Mr. Nice? How long after his conversation? ⁵³¹

MR. NICE:

Q. Yes. How long after your conversation with the accused did Ukshin Hoti get released, as you understood it?

A. I would say a few months later.

Q. Now, in this conversation, was anything said about aspects of the -- what you've described as apartheid regime but the problems generally, was anything said about education?

A. At the meeting, I said that the education field was not in order, for which Milosevic and Ibrahim Rugova had signed an agreement with the mediation of the Sant'Egidio organisation from the Vatican. But we didn't talk much about it. In my second talk with Milosevic, we talked about it more.

Q. Before we come to the second meeting, the agreement that had been signed with the representative or with the assistance or involvement of the organisation from the Vatican, was this agreement aimed at restoring educational freedoms to Kosovar Albanians? Just yes or no in principle.

A. Yes. I think the agreement which was arrived at with the intermediary of Sant'Egidio, was positive to let our pupils and our teachers back in the existing school buildings and to the faculty buildings. And as such, they would have worked parallel with the others.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Bakalli, you've answered the question.

MR. NICE:

Q. And the question is: Had that agreement put into force or not?

A. No, it was not. It was signed by both sides, but it was never ⁵³² enforced.

Q. That's probably all we need to know for the time being. How did this first meeting with the accused end in terms of how politely it was conducted and ended and in terms of whether you arranged to have a further meeting?

A. I can't say that it ended in a particularly conflictual atmosphere, no. We went out and separated quite normally.

Q. Was there an arrangement to meet again?

A. Yes, there was. Mr. Milosevic proposed that a meeting with Ibrahim Rugova be made and with a delegation and that I should do my best to arrange such a meeting, and I said that I would because my philosophy was to --

Q. Well --

A. Was to begin negotiations, political negotiations. And so I talked to Ibrahim Rugova later about it.

Q. When did the meeting occur, and just tell us, please, the names of the Kosovo Albanian delegation.

A. On the 15th of April, in 1998 we met. There was a Kosovo delegation, met with Milosevic in Beli Dvor. At the meeting present was, aside from me, Ibrahim Rugova, Veton Surroi, Senor Agani [phoen], and Pasic Nushi [phoen].

JUDGE MAY: Just a moment. Let's try and get the date right. You told us earlier, Mr. Bakalli, that the first meeting you had with the accused was in April.

THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] It was May 15. ⁵³³

JUDGE MAY: So the second meeting was May the 15th; that's right, is it?

THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I'm sorry. The -- I had the first meeting in April, whereas on May 15 we had the collective meeting with Milosevic.

MR. NICE: Right.

Q. Now, at this meeting, was the accused on his own or did he have anybody with him, or can't you remember?

A. Only his Chief of Cabinet was there, who took down notes. And at the beginning, there was someone from the Serbian television who recorded, who shot the first moments of the meeting.

Q. Now --

A. Which was that of a pleasant, tolerant atmosphere.

Q. As far as your delegation is concerned, did each member of the delegation have a chance to speak? Just yes or no.

A. Yes.

Q. Can you summarise, please, first what Mr. Rugova said, just in a sentence?

A. He expressed his thanks and introduced our project, our commitment about the political solution to the Kosovo question under the will of the Albanian people.

Q. Then the man Nushi?

A. Mr. Nushi, who was the chairman of the Council for Human Rights in Kosova, spoke more about issues relating to respect for fundamental rights of the Albanians of Kosova. ⁵³⁴

Q. And Surroi?

A. Surroi, who is -- who was a publisher of a newspaper spoke about the difficulties that the media outlets encountered under the Serbian regime in Kosova. Mr. Milosevic told him, "Okay, you are publishing your newspaper daily, 'Koha Ditore.'" Veton answered, "Yes, but I'm always under police pressure, who often detains my -- invites my journalists, my editors and asks them, interrogates them. One day they came and searched our premises, the secret police, I mean.

Q. And finally, after Surroi --

A. Fehmi Agan.

Q. What did he speak of?

A. Agani tried to give arguments and speak openly to Milosevic, telling him that the agreement signed between him and Rugova about the education in Kosovo - and he was -- Agani was directly involved in that issue - he said that this agreement is not being implemented at all because the Serbian side is not honouring its obligations.

Q. Before we come to what you said, can you just give us, as it were, a snapshot of -- a quick picture of what life in Kosovo was like at that time? The education agreement was not being honoured, the education agreement was not being honoured, the newspaper publisher said he was under pressure of the type we're referred to, but what human rights were being violated in the way that Nushi complained of?

A. He spoke briefly, but he had a lot to say because crimes were being committed against humans. People were detained and imprisoned en masse, and Mr. Nushi had collected some information and had information ⁵³⁵ about all these issues which he openly said to Mr. Milosevic, thinking that he was the main person responsible for the violation of these fundamental human rights of the citizens of Albanian origin in Kosovo.

Q. The people being detained and imprisoned, that can sometimes happen quietly and privately or it can happen publicly. What was the position like on the streets of, say, Pristina? Was it peaceful or was it not peaceful at this time in May of 1998?

A. More or less calm, I would say, but you should know that at that time, in response to Belgrade regime stand, demonstrations, calm, peaceful demonstrations were staged by the students of Pristina University.

Q. And of course we'll come back to this a little later; the KLA had by now come into existence, had it not?

A. Yes, in the form of various armed groups. But the demonstrations, the student demonstrations were suppressed as a result of the great number of police force who imprisoned many of the students.

Q. Q. And then finally, you spoke in respect of an earlier people losing their jobs, Kosovo Albanians losing their jobs to Serbs, had that position continued? Were there still Serbs getting jobs and Kosovo Albanians losing jobs?

A. Yes, that's right. During all the time about which we are speaking here, nothing changed. I regard this time a period of apartheid. Nothing whatsoever happened in terms of improving the position of the Albanians regarding employment, in education, in health sector, in culture or elsewhere. ⁵³⁶

Q. We've run through the conversations of the other four members of your five-man party. What did you say to the accused?

A. In fact, I was the one who spoke longer, probably, but most of it, what I said, was the same that I said to him in the meeting we held one month earlier. I repeated again the same phrase that it is his personal responsibility as the head of state to make sure that crimes against Albanians of Kosovo be stopped and for us to start negotiations to find a solution to the status of Kosova. Also on the basis of the expression of the will of the Albanian people of Kosova.

Q. Was anything said by anyone about the possibility of there being a Republic of Kosovo?

A. Almost all the members of our delegation, the Albanian ones, referred to the fact that our unchangeable objective and orientation was to have a Republic of Kosovo, but we want this to be solved through negotiations. But Milosevic did not mention -- did not say anything against or in favour of the idea of republic for Kosovo, but he did say that he's willing to -- to start negotiations between the Albanians and the Serbs.

Q. How did this meeting end, please?

A. In my view, it was in a tolerant atmosphere. Mr. Milosevic was, I would say, a good host of the meeting. He listened attentively. He didn't show any sign of nervous -- nervousness during our meeting, and when we expressed our demands. In fact, he -- I might tell you that at the end of the meeting he took me by surprise when he made a statement saying, "Gentlemen, you should understand that I'm surrounded by ⁵³⁷ nationalists."

Q. That's -- did that make much sense to you, this revelation?

A. As I said, I was taken by surprise really, because I think that the chief nationalists and the head of all these acts perpetrated there perpetrated is Milosevic himself. But the way he said it seemed convincing when you listen to it. But afterwards, the deeds, the facts prove the contrary of what he said. So in my view, this is a kind of hypocrisy on his part as dictator, because --

Q. [Previous translation continues] ... Now, following this meeting was there another meeting with a delegation appointed by the accused?

A. Yes. Milosevic did organise a meeting to start negotiations. On the other hand, Ibrahim Rugova, too, had put up a group of people, moderate people.

Q. When did you first learn who was going to be -- who were going to be the members of the delegation on the other side? Did Mr. Milosevic mention this to you in the meeting, or did you only learn about who they were to be afterwards?

A. No, no. In that meeting, we just agreed that Mr. Milosevic nominate his own delegation and we our delegation, but we did not discuss concrete names. I was very much surprised when I saw in Pristina the delegation of the Serb side. Excuse me. Mr. Milosevic insisted, in our eyes, for members of the Yugoslav and Serb government to be members of the delegation, but we did not discuss the actual names. But in fact, he appointed people who are -- who were neither willing nor had any wish to start political negotiations. They are not moderate people. ⁵³⁸

Q. Can you tell us who they were, please?

A. Yes. Sainovic, who is prosecuted by this Tribunal, a man who was an expert in the deeds that were committed in Kosovo. He was the Deputy Chairman of the Yugoslav government.

JUDGE MAY: Just give us the names.

MR. NICE: And also the -- I'm so sorry, Your Honour. Also the --

A. Professor Markovic, Deputy Head of the Serbian government. And Nikolic, Deputy of Seselj of the Radical Serb Party. Please. It is nonsensical to have such persons be members of a delegation that would conduct negotiations.

JUDGE MAY: Just a moment. Just tell us what happened in the negotiations.

MR. NICE:

Q. Was there one meeting or more than one meeting?

A. There was only one meeting between the two delegations, and it was entirely unsuccessful because all the members because all the Serb delegation spoke against terrorism and wanted that we issue a joint statement, anti-terrorism, not discuss the political status of Kosova about which we were supposed to discuss.

So it was a total failure, I would say. That's why we issued two separate communiques, one as Albanian side and the other as the Serb side. But you should not forget the fact that people who were really moderate people were present in the Albanian delegation. If you allow me --

Q. [Previous translation continues] .... we've got to put ⁵³⁹ everything on the record of this trial. We mustn't take things for granted.

You've told us, of course, about Mr. Rugova. What had Mr. Rugova's political platform been from first to last so far as Kosovo is concerned?

A. Right from the start to the end, I think that Mr. Rugova's platform was one in favour of republic for Kosova outside the jurisdiction of Serbia.

Q. And what had his attitude been to achieving that goal, by negotiation or by force?

A. Mr. Rugova was, from the beginning to today, a man who was in favour of political negotiations and in favour of finding political solutions to these issues.

Q. Did that apply to the other members of your team as well or not? Were you looking for political solutions?

A. I think, yes, because we all had a G-15 group in which some intellectuals, academicians, politicians had worked on a platform for future possible negotiations and had come with unified views. Can I say who was in that delegation, in our delegation?

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Nice, we need to finish this witness's evidence in chief by the adjournment.

MR. NICE: I've got the last paragraph to deal with it.

JUDGE MAY: Very well.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Nice, just let him say when did this meeting take place. We have a second meeting in May. ⁵⁴⁰

MR. NICE: Yes.

Q. Can you tell us when this third meeting happened?

A. The first meeting was at the end of May or beginning of June - I can't remember very well - of 1988. One months, three months -- three weeks after the last talk we had with Mr. Milosevic.

Q. And was there any signs of willingness on the Serbian side to negotiate with the Kosovo Albanians?

A. No. I think that the Serb side did not have any platform or any willingness to start negotiations but only the platform of war and crimes.

Q. An entirely separate question now to complete this, that I want you to deal with. The KLA had come into existence. I don't know if you can give us the year for that. We'll find that out from somewhere else. Did you have any involvement yourself, and if so, what in relation to the KLA?

A. Directly with KLA troops and commanders, I did not have any contacts during the war, or links. I was asked by Mr. Demaci, Adem Demaci, who was political representative of the KLA in Pristina. I was his advisor to give him my ideas, political ideas and views, because he used to keep daily contacts with foreign diplomats. But with KLA troops, I did not have any links, any contacts whatsoever. I --

Q. Thank you very much. We can ask further questions about that, if asked, in due course. Thank you very much.

JUDGE MAY: That's the evidence in chief?

MR. NICE: If I have missed a sentence out and I discover it ⁵⁴¹ overnight, and I'll seek leave tomorrow morning, but as far as I can see, I've finished.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. Cross-examination in the morning. Mr. Bakalli, we're going to adjourn now. Could you be back, please, tomorrow morning at 9.0 for cross-examination. Could you remember during this adjournment and any others there may be not to speak to anybody about your evidence, and that does include the members of the Prosecution team. 9.00, please, tomorrow morning.

THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Yes.

--- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 4.10 p.m., to be reconvened on Tuesday, the 19th day

of February, 2000 at 9.00 a.m.