Milosevic Transcript 2003-07-23

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Wednesday, 23 July 2003

[Open session]

[The witness entered court]

[The accused entered court]

--- Upon commencing at 9.02 a.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Nice.

MR. NICE: Summary paragraph 42.

WITNESS: WITNESS B-[Resumed]

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

Q. Witness B-083, in the course of your time at the Ministry of Defence, just in general, did you see there any of the following people: Did you see Goran Hadzic there ever? Just yes or no.

A. Yes.

Q. Milan Babic?

A. Yes.

Q. The man known as Arkan?

A. Arkan, yes.

Q. And the man known as Captain Dragan, Dragan Vasiljkovic?

A. Yes. Yes, I did see them.

Q. Before we move on, in which place or office did you see those people?

A. I saw them in the building of the Ministry of Defence, which was in Nemanjina Street, number 11, where the government of the Republic of Serbia has its offices today. ²⁴⁷⁴¹

Q. Paragraph 55. How many times did you see Arkan; once or more than once?

A. I saw Arkan twice. Once I had no contact with him. The second time, I spoke to him.

Q. Dragan Vasiljkovic, did you see him once or twice? Once or more than once, I beg your pardon.

A. I saw him twice; once in 1991 and once in 1992.

Q. Thank you very much. Finally, then, of this part of your evidence, paragraph 66, in fact at the top of page 10.

MR. NICE: May the witness see Exhibit 507, his Exhibits, tab 4. The Chamber sees that this is a document purporting to come from the Republic of Serbian Krajina's Ministry of Defence going to the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Serbia in September 1992. The Chamber will see at the end of the document that there's a reference to money from the above work organisations is to be transferred "to our Knin account" or "our transfer account in Knin" from their accounts in Knin, and it says: "We are forced to work in this way because of the cessation of transfer of payments between the Republic of Serbian Krajina and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia." And the body of the document has reference to various businesses and sums of money.

The document appears to have been sent to Lieutenant Colonel Jelic, and at this stage all I ask of this witness is this, and it comes from Colonel Spanovic:

Q. Just yes or no: Did Lieutenant Colonel Jelic work at the Ministry of Defence at some stage, to your knowledge? Just yes or no. ²⁴⁷⁴²

A. In those days, he did.

Q. Thank you.

A. And his responsibility was to carry this through. I assume he did so, but we can't say from this document.

Q. Thank you very much.

MR. NICE: Your Honour, I would now seek for this witness, in respect of some other matters, private session. I can point Your Honour to the first paragraph where that would arise, and I can address the justification perhaps itself in private session, with your leave, but it starts at paragraph 25.

[Private session]

[redacted]

[redacted] ²⁴⁷⁴³ Pages 24743-24756 - redacted - private session

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[redacted]

[Open session]

THE REGISTRAR: We're in open session.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Kay.

MR. KAY: I raise it now as it's probably as good a place as any. It concerns the timing and the order of witnesses. The Prosecution are masters of their own agenda for their own purposes. For the accused who receives the weekly witness list, the order of witnesses is no doubt very important in terms of his preparation, and the times that are given as total times on the witness list are also very important because, by that, he is able to put together a system to establish his working pattern, and I should imagine those working with him divide their time appropriately and concentrate on a schedule of time that is indicated by the witness list, and they move no doubt from one topic to another as the weekly witnesses are heard. ²⁴⁷⁵⁸ ^{BLANK PAGE} ²⁴⁷⁵⁹ And it is very important, I should imagine, for their preparation that the order of witnesses is kept to - and I raise this now because there was talk yesterday of Mrs. Budding being inserted above a Rule 92 bis witness - but also in relation to the time available to him, because he, no doubt, conscious of the Court view of time in this case prepares his cross-examination for what appears the allotted span on the witness list, and so the material that is given to him, no doubt, and the matters that he has to consider are based on that allocated space of time in the weekly schedule.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. I think it has been made plain before that, as far as the times are concerned, nobody can be bound by what the Prosecution estimate as to the time for each witness. It's merely an estimate. And if he's relying on it, he's been told before and he shouldn't do so. But we will return to the order, which I take the point on, that continual changes of order make preparation difficult. Of course I understand that.

As far as timing is concerned, we have to have regard to the overall time that this case is taking. Of course, in a sense, the Prosecution are responsible for the number of witnesses and the length of time that's taken over them. They've called all these witnesses, and it's therefore not surprising that things take a long time. I think this is the 214th, by my calculation, and we have the autumn to go. But still, we have to have in mind time.

Is the answer not this: That the accused should be allowed time, but his time must be used reasonably. He can't, for instance, concentrate ²⁴⁷⁶⁰ and argue with the witnesses, as he does, and then complain afterwards that his time is restricted, he's not able to perhaps ask some important questions at the end. If he concentrated on that, he'd get on better.

MR. KAY: I think that that is a matter of technique that experienced advocates would understand how to fit things -- something into a pint pot or litre pot, whatever it should be.

The issue here can be, for him, that if the Prosecution, particularly with Mr. Nice, who can go like an express train from the starting station to the end terminus and do witnesses very rapidly in a short period of time, getting over a large amount of information, there is concern here that this can rebound against the accused who would get lesser than otherwise because there are different skills that are at play here and cannot deal with all the topics in the time -- his time is accordingly shortened because of the apparent brevity of the Prosecutor in dealing with these issues very, very rapidly. And I say that so the Trial Chamber can bear that in mind when considering this issue on behalf of the accused.

JUDGE MAY: He gets longer with slower counsel.

MR. KAY: Yes. It is noticeable that it has that effect. And Mr. Nice probably takes the most important witnesses. We go back to the witness Kucan, who was quite an important, significant witness, and he was done in a day. Well, we've had less important people here who have been days.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Surely the point is that it is the content of the evidence and the substance of the evidence that is important rather than ²⁴⁷⁶¹ the length of the examination-in-chief.

MR. KAY: Yes. I agree with that, and that is why I'm saying length of Prosecutor here, for the accused, may not be an indicator, because Mr. Nice is capable of getting in a vast amount of detail in a short period of time. I don't want to discourage him, and I don't want to use up too much time myself, but I do say this because it's important to bear this in mind with the litigant in person.

JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

MR. NICE: My only observation, Your Honour, would be that I hope I, and indeed my colleagues, are progressively simply narrowing the focus onto the critical pieces of evidence, and we would press the Chamber -- or press the accused and the amici, through the Chamber, to focus their cross-examination accordingly. And I would respectfully submit that the accused has shown himself to have rapidly developed the skills of cross-examination, and as he frequently reveals by the end parts of his cross-examinations, when forced to it, he does understand what has to be dealt with by way of joining issues. It's rather sad sometimes, that he gets there -- sad from our point of view, that he gets there at the end rather than at the beginning.

[Trial Chamber confers]

JUDGE MAY: An hour and a quarter.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. May, I suppose this is not something for the closed session or a private session, discussing the establishment where this witness worked. I'm not going to ask him any identifying questions. And I believe it was in open session that the ²⁴⁷⁶² matter of where he worked, where he was employed, was discussed.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. That was mentioned in open session.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] All right. Cross-examined by Mr. Milosevic:

Q. [Interpretation] Mr. 83, I would like to go through very briefly a couple of matters. [redacted],

[redacted].

MR. NICE: Your Honour, that is something that will almost -- a matter for the witness, but it may well transgress the protection measures in place.

JUDGE MAY: That matter was dealt with in private session.

MR. NICE: It was.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. We'll go into private session.

[Private session]

[redacted]

[redacted] ²⁴⁷⁶³ Pages 24763-24791 - redacted - private session

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[redacted]

[Open session]

THE REGISTRAR: We're in open session.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. Witness 83, since we are now again in open session, would you please look at these two statements of yours from -- the 2001 and 2002 one in which there isn't a single paragraph in either of these statements without deletions or corrections or notes made by you that it is incorrect, that it is erroneously interpreted, that there are errors, et cetera, et cetera. Is that right or not? ²⁴⁷⁹³

A. That's right. And I did that because that -- I had the occasion to receive those statements in the Serbian language, the things I said. And it is my conviction that I didn't say that in that way and I feel that it is not in order for these charges to be made against you, and I explained to them and the Tribunal that I think it is not fair for us to discuss something that I myself think is not correct. And I think it's a waste of time for the Court, because I say quite plainly that there are errors of such a nature that I couldn't under any circumstances sign such a statement. The people realise this now, and what we were saying today I wrote in my own hand. If I had written such a statement in my own hand, I would stand by it, but believe me, many of these things would not have been said if that had been the procedure, especially as there are some things that are absolutely untrue. For instance, that story about a car that I heard from some secretary somewhere and then I told them about it, but I wouldn't have allowed it to be entered into such a document. If I had known it would have been, I would not have allowed them to do it. I asked them to show these corrections to you in time so that we wouldn't need to discuss them. These are technical errors and things that absolutely are out of the question, because that is not what I think and what I believe, and I don't want such charges to be put to you. That is an omission on my part, and I apologise to the Tribunal. It was my mistake for not reading it carefully and for not being careful, and maybe I wasn't sufficiently businesslike and cautious in signing something I hadn't read.

Q. So in your own statement where it says -- I'll give you another ²⁴⁷⁹⁴ ^{BLANK PAGE} ²⁴⁷⁹⁵ example of illegal collection of funds. At that time, the police was involved in organised car thefts, and you wrote in your own hand next to that, "Not true."

A. Right. That's not true.

Q. And this and similar things are to be found in every paragraph. There is not a single paragraph without deletions, without additions or explanations to the entirely opposite effect. So these statements absolutely do not correspond to --

A. The interpretation of the interview is not correct. When you say something that can fill three pages and it is then put into ten lines cannot be correct, and I can explain to you. If this was a closed session, I would tell you who was responsible.

The conclusion is not correct. But there was one fact that was true about this car.

Q. And in your own hand, you continue to say: "Corrections should be made in keeping with my remarks and with these revisions and explanations should be handed to the accused providing him an explanation of the reasons for such errors, which are more than obvious, and I believe personally that it is not proper to charge him using such information and interpretations of what I said." And that's what you signed and dated.

A. Correct.

Q. And at the end of this paper, you say: "Started to revise a part of this statement, making serious objections, but when he saw the statement translated into Serbian, investigator Gerald Sexton told him that he should not be doing that because he would have occasion to do so ²⁴⁷⁹⁶ in The Hague during proofing."

A. That's correct.

Q. So in The Hague a couple of days ago you actually did not have enough time to read this through properly.

A. If I had been given occasion to do so in Belgrade, there would be no need to discuss this now. We would not be wasting a single minute over it.

Q. Now that we have gone through this series of your submissions regarding the illegalities in the work of certain people in your ministry, sloppy work --

A. Bad organisation, poor skills, abuse of people.

Q. Errors made in various departments in the provinces.

A. Financial omissions, deficiencies, losses of property that remained unexplained because the management was not interested in finding out what happened to this property.

Q. You say you tried to get these errors redressed. Do you remember that two ministers were actually arrested due to financial crime, white-collar crime?

A. I know.

Q. I'm not talking about low-level employees. I'm talking about two ministers who were arrested for this.

A. I'm sorry, I can't remember this, but I take your word for it. Those who were involved in this, Mr. Milosevic, actually got promotions, and they still feature in our society while we are sitting here talking. Those who put us in this situation, us who asked you and other management ²⁴⁷⁹⁷ to redress the situation and to work properly, we would perhaps not be rich but we would be living better if it had been done in time.

Q. You discussed mainly matters that had to do with sloppiness, lack of professionality, certain conduct among people.

A. And also abuse in the ministry.

Q. What does that have to do with what we are discussing today?

A. I don't know whether it is relevant. I don't know. I didn't know what it would be used for, for what charges. I was just telling you what happened, and I see that your associates placed it in wrong hands.

Q. But as you know, such submissions are always forwarded from the cabinet of the president of the republic to the Prime Minister. You don't call that wrong hands, do you?

A. Well, I addressed it to him too, and you see how I ended up.

Q. You say in your statement, page 4, paragraph 2, that the Assembly of Serbia decided to conduct an investigation and that you headed this investigation and found out in Kosovo that a lot of equipment, including weapons and ammunition, was stolen.

A. Yes. It was missing. And I handed my report to General Simovic personally.

Q. Did you establish who stole the weapons?

A. We were not given the opportunity. As far as I'm concerned --

MR. NICE: The witness is alert to the fact that we are in public session and whether he has any concerns about the previous two questions and answers.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. Yes, Mr. Milosevic. ²⁴⁷⁹⁸

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. You say: "A lot of equipment, weaponry and ammunition was missing, stolen, including money. Kosovo, as an underdeveloped region, was receiving aid amounting to 1.5 million dollars per day."

A. Not from us. There is some confusion. They received aid, as an underdeveloped region, from all republics.

Q. That's from the federal budget.

A. Yes, federal.

JUDGE MAY: One at a time. One at a time. You're giving evidence, Witness; remember that. And you're cross-examining, Mr. Milosevic, not having a conversation. Yes.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] All right, Mr. May. I'm glad for this opportunity to talk to this witness whom I had not known before, but I see that he was involved in this work, and he does not wish to perjure himself.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. You say on page 4, paragraph 3: "Many Serbs had already left this region." Tell me why.

A. Well, they certainly didn't escape from anything good. They had to leave. I don't know if you mean Krajina or Kosovo.

Q. Kosovo, Kosovo. You are talking about Kosovo in this part of your statement, because immediately after that you say that Kosovo was an underdeveloped region receiving aid and many Serbs had left it.

A. I know the situation in Kosovo very well because I had visited it both as an inspector and on other business, and I am familiar with what ²⁴⁷⁹⁹ was going on. The irredentists were not active starting from 1990s. They had been active for 50 years and more. So these problems go hand-in-hand.

Q. You mention the Karic brothers. They had claimed to the authorities that they were planning to build 30 to 50 companies for Serbs who wished to go on living in Pec.

Do you know, since I am familiar with this myself, that they were famous for employing both Serbs and Albanians?

A. Mr. Milosevic, that is a free interpretation. I did not say this. I know Bogoljub Karic myself too as a businessman. All this is gossip that I heard. I never inspected his businesses, and they would not have been included in this statement if I had been given a chance to review this properly.

Q. You know, although you didn't inspect and audit their businesses, that they had built universities, a foundation, schools, et cetera, and all of this in Serbia.

A. I know all of this. And I believe that this interpretation is improper. But I did say that they had received loans and that they had used them for promoting the economy. And if I had been given the chance to review my statement, this would not be included in it. I don't think this is worth discussing further. I believe this man is a businessman and that he used the money properly.

Q. He is still a renowned businessman, by the way.

[redacted]

[redacted] ²⁴⁸⁰⁰

[redacted]

MR. NICE: [Previous translation continues]... the witness may have overlooked that.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. You say - that is on page 5, paragraph 1 - that documents never indicated the names of persons who received the money, and the money was channelled through the SDK, the social accountancy service. The confidentiality of disbursements and the SDK do not go together. You as an expert must know this.

A. Of course. Of course. Why are we discussing this when I already confirmed this, Mr. Milosevic? And I have to tell you, you are perfectly right.

Q. Thank you. Thank you. I have seen here, and may I point this out to you, this claim that I together with Adzic and Simovic organised and planned clandestine financing, and so on and so forth.

A. Let me reply to this. They must have asked me who was responsible when things like this happen, and I must have answered, "If it's happening on a ship, it's the captain who is responsible." And in the state, I ²⁴⁸⁰¹ said, according to the normal chain of subordination, who is responsible? If it's the command of operation, it's the head of the General Staff. If it's the ministry, it's the minister. If it's about the state of Serbia, it must be you. And as for whether something is clandestine or not --

Q. So you actually told them only that I was the president of Serbia at the time?

A. Correct.

Q. And then you mention -- I don't want to this say because I don't want to go into private session, because this concerns a person who is a relative of yours.

A. [redacted]

Q. You say that he asked me to help resolve the housing problem of his relative who is a refugee, and I replied that there were 600.000 refugees that need to be taken care of.

A. That is your Kum, your best man.

Q. You mean my daughter?

A. Yes. And Marija is his grandchild. And after that, he retired, in '83.

Q. Is this something we can really call a matter of principle? A person who is working with me, or for me, asking me to help his relative and I told him we can't make exceptions, we have 600.000 refugees and we held them all equally?

A. That is not the only example. You know in Krnjak how many people were there. He had a brother there, and a sister, and cousins. Three generations of the family. ²⁴⁸⁰²

Q. But you stated here my reaction, and my reaction was that we have to treat everyone equally. There were 600.000 refugees.

A. My wife told me about this. It's her family. I'm telling you this is true, but this is not relevant. We are only wasting time. We can discuss this outside this courtroom.

Q. Now, tell me, since you are involved --

A. I'm not involved in anything. I'm a retired person now.

Q. You are dealing with a budget in this statement. Tell me, please, you don't know what the budget was at the time, do you?

A. The budget is a matter of public information. It was published in the Official Gazette of Serbia. I cannot discuss that. I don't use words like "black funds." I don't use such terms. I never did in my life.

Q. I'm glad to hear you say this, Witness 83.

A. That's not the kind of terminology an expert uses.

Q. Because you say here there is a secret part of the budget which is called the black fund.

A. Out of the question. If we were discussing football perhaps the term could have been used, but not here.

Q. It also says in the statement that you said that this part of the budget was higher than the official budget.

A. Out of the question.

Q. But it was marked here as something that you said.

A. And I crossed it out, saying that it was incorrect. And I also asked them to convey my apologies to you because I had no opportunity to read it previously. Please, this is not worth discussing, and I wrote ²⁴⁸⁰³ specifically that this should not be a charge levelled against you.

JUDGE MAY: Evidence is what is given in this court. It's not what's in your statement. It doesn't matter what's in your statement. All that matters is what is said in this court.

Now, Mr. Milosevic, you've got five minutes left. In my judgement, you've taken up your time dealing largely with matters which are of peripheral relevance at best, and it's entirely your own fault because you were told at the beginning how much time you had. Now, you've got five minutes left.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well, Mr. May, but could you tell me what relevant matter I have not mentioned?

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. Your conversation with an individual, for example, Witness. I don't want to have to go into private session so I won't mention the name, but a person that came to the ministry and you happened to meet that individual, and he asked the assistant minister, right, what had happened to his funds, to the resources.

A. No. The person that came from the diaspora, and I was already on sick leave --

Q. No, no. That's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to the person who led the volunteers. And you say he asked what had happened to his resources.

A. Ah, yes, yes. I remember now. I understand; in the office.

Q. Yes, when you brought in your sick leave papers, as you said.

A. Yes. ²⁴⁸⁰⁴ ^{BLANK PAGE} ²⁴⁸⁰⁵

Q. Now, do you know that they were resources which were taken away from him, confiscated from him by the police, and in view of the right of volunteers to go, he asked that someone intervene to have these resources given back to him.

A. That I don't know. What I do know I said here to the letter, and it was introduced into the statement and I signed it.

Q. You personally just spoke about the Red Star football team.

A. Yes, the Red Star football team and Tigric. And I had a nice time discussing that.

Q. All right. So now we've cleared that point up. As you mentioned the participation of the diaspora in financing this aid and assistance, do you have any idea how much the diaspora, in fact what role it played in the financing?

A. I have no idea, but I just said that I was revolted and sick and explained to that man I was rather revolted, and I suppose he went to see the Prime Minister to set out the problems with him and see what the diaspora could do for its own people in the homeland. And I was revolted, and he was telling me of the situation. And he said, "What's -- why do you feel like that?" I said I felt inundated. When there's a flood, everything rises to the surface. So I write about these leaders who have come to the surface, delving in murky water. So one cannot be different from one's environment. And I'm sure you had problems too of the same kind, because you had people around you who should not have been there.

Q. All right. Now, tell me, as Mr. Nice presented a document here and the title was "Information about resources ensured by the budget by ²⁴⁸⁰⁶ the republic for assistance to Serb regions in Croatia with a proposal for their implementation." Is that right?

A. Yes.

Q. Is it clear that we're talking about financial assistance to the Serb regions in Croatia? Is that right?

A. Quite right.

Q. And is it also right that there wasn't a single man in Serbia who wasn't in favour of helping these people over these difficult times?

A. Correct. And you personally and me personally too. But the irregularities came to the fore when people handled these resources. It wasn't professionally handled, and then the resources were devaluated and so on and there were other problems that these leaders had to face that they weren't up to facing. They weren't professionals in the field.

Q. All right. So they are the ones you complain about; right?

A. Yes, that's right.

Q. A little below the top echelons of your ministry.

A. Yes, well, actually they were in the topmost circles. They took decisions and were promoted for them. And they still have fared fairly well today too, they're not having a hard time of it, and we were -- not like us who were opposed to them.

Q. And in tab 4 we see a letter that was sent, and in the letter -- actually it comes from the Republika Srpska Krajina: "Because of the impossibility of directly transferring money to our transfer account, we have concluded a contract with work organisations whereby you will transfer money to their transfer accounts," et cetera, et cetera. Tell me ²⁴⁸⁰⁷ now, please - that's all in tab 4 - is there anything there which was not aboveboard, if I can put it that way, dishonest in any way?

A. I saw the document for the first time here but that was a way of bridging the mistake, the gap in the interruption of payments flow, and I said yes, it was all right, that things should be done this way for the money to reach the ultimate destination and that this was the participant.

Q. Mr. Nice asked you something about the markings of the document, the numbers, and did it say "confidential," "strictly confidential," or whatever?

A. Yes, and I saw that it did say that.

Q. Yes. We're not disputing that, but just tell me this now, please, as you worked there for a long time: Is it true and correct that at least 90 per cent of the documents throughout your years of service, all the decades you spent working in that ministry, that it was characteristic of that particular ministry of yours that 90 per cent of the documents would have "strictly confidential" written up at the top as a header?

A. Yes, because the level of the people who determined the level of confidentiality was such that they were not able themselves to assess whether a document was actually confidential or not and they would err on the side of caution and put "strictly confidential" everywhere.

Q. Yes, but that was the practice of decades.

A. Yes, that's right.

Q. Everything would be termed "secret" or "strictly confidential" or the like.

A. Yes, you're quite right. ²⁴⁸⁰⁸

JUDGE MAY: Your last question, Mr. Milosevic.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well. If that's the case, I can't ask all the questions I have here, although I'd like to have been able to ask this witness more questions.

THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I would have liked that too.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. Now, you deal with documents, and you say that the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia had no other source of financing but to receive funds from Serbia, or, rather, it's quite clear to you that they did have some sources themselves.

A. Yes.

Q. However that, without our assistance, they wouldn't have been able to survive.

A. It is my personal opinion that they would have had a hard time of it, a hard time surviving under such difficult circumstances at such difficult moments and that it was quite proper to lend assistance to them.

Q. All right. Thank you very much.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Tapuskovic.

MR. TAPUSKOVIC: [Interpretation] Just very briefly, Your Honour. Questioned by Mr. Tapuskovic:

Q. [Interpretation] Witness, these two documents, tab 2, in fact, which relates to information about resources provided for by the budget of the republic for assistance to the Serb regions, and the other document, tab 3, it is the complaint, the submission with regards to illegal and inappropriate activities. ²⁴⁸⁰⁹

MR. NICE: Private session.

JUDGE MAY: We'll go into private session.

[Private session]

[redacted]

[redacted] ²⁴⁸¹⁰

[Open session]

THE REGISTRAR: We're in open session.

MR. TAPUSKOVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. Witness, my next question deals with the documents that were brought up during the examination-in-chief, the ones that were requested, and you saw the documents which requires assistance of some kind. A document was mentioned asking for 92 million marks, German marks for example. Do you remember that?

A. Yes, I do.

Q. Now, my question to you is, with respect to those documents, although there were others too, but my question is: Do you have any knowledge apart from knowing that this assistance was sought that you know that certain resources and funds were sent out towards regions outside the Republic of Serbia? Did you see documents to that effect and do you know how much money was sent?

A. Yes, I do have knowledge of that. I dealt with that personally. I opened some of those accounts personally in the branch offices, and I think it says so in the document, whether in that one or in other documents. I know it was in Knin, Novi Sad, et cetera. Therefore, I did know about that, and that is correct.

Q. Now, I'm interested here about these 92 million marks.

A. Marks aren't mentioned there. It's dinars that are stipulated.

Q. Well, are -- is that the equivalent number of dinars corresponding to the 92 million German marks?

A. I can't calculate the exchange rate now as it used to be at the ²⁴⁸¹¹ time. I can't really say.

MR. TAPUSKOVIC: [Interpretation] Thank you. I have no further questions.

MR. NICE: I have a couple of questions in private session.

[Private session]

[redacted]

[redacted] ²⁴⁸¹²

[redacted]

[Open session]

THE REGISTRAR: We're in open session.

MR. NICE:

Q. Dealing as we can with the first two documents that were produced in open session and that deal with the passage of money to the Serbs in Croatia and the suggestion that money was not being passed to kill people, the money that went, was that to serve members of the Territorial Defence? Yes or no.

A. Yes.

MR. NICE: That's all. ²⁴⁸¹³ ^{BLANK PAGE} ²⁴⁸¹⁴

JUDGE MAY: Witness B-083, that concludes your evidence. Thank you for coming to the Tribunal to give it. You are now free to go. Just wait, if you would, while the blinds are brought down.

[The witness withdrew]

MR. NICE: Your Honour, while that's happening, may I repeat what I'm sure I've said at least twice before, so that the accused can have this in mind: Figures in the long, we hope helpful, witness schedule setting out the times that witnesses may take are estimates that we have to put in because we are trying to calculate what witnesses we can call. Wherever I'm in a position to take a witness more shortly or to ensure that one of my colleagues does, I will do so, either because it's possible to deal with the evidence more swiftly than one had previously calculated or because we will be cutting out from the evidence material that we had previously thought relevant but which we judge not to have sufficient relevance or not to be of such great relevance as to merit the time of the Court. So therefore, we will be focusing our efforts on calling from the maximum amount of evidence whatever is relevant and it may take nothing like the time set down beside the witnesses, and we would press the accused to prepare on the basis of focusing his attention on what is relevant first as well.

Your Honour, that much for that. The next witness on the original list was to be a 92 bis witness. The Court will remember that yesterday I asked that we reverse the order, and I think that 92 bis witness is not yet here. The position is that if a 92 bis witness was taken, the accused would have to be dealing with both witnesses in cross-examination today in ²⁴⁸¹⁵ any event because the 92 bis witness would only take an hour, and I would ask to be allowed to call Audrey Budding next.

JUDGE MAY: How long do you think you will be with the witness in direct examination?

MR. NICE: Less than half an hour.

JUDGE MAY: Perhaps you could check to see if the witness 1102 is here.

MR. NICE: No, not yet. A few minutes.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] A moment ago Mr. Nice said that an assessment of the time he gives doesn't represent any information. Why, then, are time estimates made at all? Isn't it logical and proper and correct that if an assessment of time is made and if you assess that it will last for as long as you assess, that this should be a piece of information for me to be able to plan how long my cross-examination might last? So what's the purpose of giving out information if it doesn't bind the person giving out the information to stand by what he does? There's no sense to it or any logic.

JUDGE MAY: You've heard the explanation which has been given. The time is put there for the Prosecution's internal planning. Now, it can only be regarded as an estimate to show the time which they estimate that the witness may take. It may assist you in trying to plan your examination, but it can't be anything more than that, and they certainly can't be bound by that particular figure.

Now, the proposal at the moment is that Audrey Budding should be ²⁴⁸¹⁶ called. Now, do you want to say anything about that? Just one moment.

[Trial Chamber and registrar confer]

JUDGE MAY: Is there something you want to say about that?

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. May, it's up to you who you're going to call and how. All I wish to clarify here is this: A moment ago, the piece of information we heard from Mr. Nice was that this particular witness, lady witness, called in here as an expert witness who will be testifying about some kind of historical background to Serb nationalism, which touches upon, as far as I can see, her interests going back to the fifteenth century, that she will be cross-examined -- examined-in-chief for half an hour. Let me say at the outset that for this particular witness, I'm going to need at least -- I'm going to need far more time, incomparably more time, and I think it is your duty to give me that time, because I do need --

JUDGE MAY: That's not the issue at the moment. Have you any objection or do you want to make any point about calling this witness next, as is proposed?

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, it's all the same to me.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. If it's all the same to you, call the next witness. We will consider in due course when the examination-in-chief is finished how long there should be in cross-examination.

MR. NICE: Your Honour, again I don't want the accused --

THE INTERPRETER: Microphone, please, Mr. Nice.

MR. NICE: Sorry. I don't want the accused to languish under the ²⁴⁸¹⁷ misapprehension that we're trying in any way to disadvantage him. And it's a procedural matter that he doesn't focus on, I suspect: Expert witnesses fall under a different category. They are, as the Court knows, witnesses whose is typically tendered through their report and they may be subject to no examination-in-chief by the Prosecution. Where we do that, or where we take the evidence shortly, there is no suggestion on our part that the accused should be limited in cross-examination time to the short period of time we take.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, of course.

MR. NICE: And I don't want the accused, who is wont sometimes to impute motives to us, to think we're doing anything other than abide by the rules of the court and try to save time.

Your Honour, I hope that the Court has the witness's expert report and her curriculum vitae.

JUDGE MAY: I don't think I have a curriculum vitae to hand.

MR. NICE: I suffered the same shortcoming last night, and I think it's now been recopied.

JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

[The witness entered court]

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

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

JUDGE MAY: Thank you very much. If you'd like to take a seat.

WITNESS: AUDREY BUDDING

MR. NICE: Your Honour, there has been a revision to the report, ²⁴⁸¹⁸ for I observed comparatively recently that some of the footnotes in B/C/S had not been fully translated. There is, I think, a revised version for distribution, if the Chamber would find that helpful, depending on the degree to which they've marked the earlier version, but I gather that the page numbering of the body of the report is not in any way affected. May the report be given an exhibit number.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. The new report should have the exhibit number on it.

THE REGISTRAR: Your Honour, the new report with the end notes will be Prosecution Exhibit 508.

MR. NICE: And may the witness's curriculum vitae be given a separate and perhaps following number.

THE REGISTRAR: 509.

MR. NICE: Thank you very much. Examined by Mr. Nice:

Q. Is your full name Audrey Helfant Budding?

A. Yes, it is.

Q. Associate at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies?

A. Yes, that's correct.

Q. Educated at Swarthmore College in Greek, and Cambridge University in social and political sciences, and then at Harvard where you took your Ph.D in 1998, the dissertation being on "Serb Intellectuals and the National Question."

A. Yes, all of that is correct. ²⁴⁸¹⁹

Q. Do you have experience for the United States Foreign Service, inter alia, at the United States embassy in Belgrade between 1987 and 1990?

A. Yes, I do.

Q. And have you taught and published on various matters, including on aspects of the former Yugoslavia?

A. Yes, I have.

Q. Did you, at the invitation and instruction of the Office of the Prosecutor, prepare a report for use in this case headed "Serbian Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Historical Background and Context"?

A. Yes, I did.

Q. Has that publication been available publicly, it having been filed publicly at this court?

A. Yes.

Q. And therefore, it's been available for critics to make comments on it, those comments no doubt being available to the accused and his team if they had sought them; correct?

A. Yes.

Q. It's Mrs. Budding?

A. Yes. Or Dr. Budding, as you prefer.

Q. All right, Dr. Budding then. And I'm only -- because your report's been available to and read by the parties, I'm just going to ask you a few questions, and in each topic - perhaps at most half a dozen - I would ask you to confine your answers to a limited number of sentences, just a few minutes, so you can provide the overview on a particular topic ²⁴⁸²⁰ that I seek.

And first, you're an historian and, of course, you come here simply not to argue any point adverse to the accused but to provide a background source for the Chamber and the parties to consider. With your knowledge of the history of Yugoslavia and your knowledge of the general topics we are dealing with here, and a mind to your report generally, what topics, in your judgement as an historian, should we have in mind in approaching our task?

A. If I could choose a single historical concept that I believe helps in the understanding of contemporary events in the Balkans, it would be the concept of the frontier society; that this is a region where empires and, later, great powers have clashed repeatedly over the centuries, and the consequences of this for the peoples of the Balkans are twofold. One is simply the very extensive migrations of peoples that occurred throughout the early modern era, meaning that people, the populations of many regions become confessionally mixed; later, as people gained national consciousness, nationally mentioned.

The second major consequence for the peoples of the Balkans is contained in what I call in the report the repetition of cycles of status reversal. In other words, that each new ruler favoured co-nationals, or co-religionist, that each new change of regime privileged certain groups and suppressed or oppressed others, with the result that intercommunal relations on the ground, if you will, however favourable at the local or village level, were repeatedly overwhelmed by these larger political events. ²⁴⁸²¹

Q. Moving through selected passages of your report in an orderly fashion, we would find on page 10 reference to something that's been raised by the accused in respect of Drenica and what happened there at or after the Second World War. In a few sentences and in light of the way that's been raised, can you help us with what your research into Drenica reveals.

THE INTERPRETER: Could we ask the speakers to please slow down because this is very succinct subject matter, thank you.

MR. NICE: I apologise. Yes.

THE WITNESS: As I mentioned briefly in the report, first of all, at the end of the Second World War, it was re-incorportated into the Yugoslav state by the Partisans against very substantial resistance on the part of the Albanian population. Specifically with reference to Drenica, that was the scene of a revolt by an Albanian leader Shaban Polluzha, who had originally been a part of the Albanian National Front, the Balli Kombetar, had later in the war joined the Partisans and in fact been authorised by them to mobilise troops for Partisan forces in the Drenica region. He did so in approximately the late fall of 1944, but in January of 1945, he and his men revolted against the Partisans, refusing to be sent to the Srem front north of Belgrade, and this revolt was put down with substantial bloodshed. We don't have exact numbers, but the sources suggest that perhaps a few thousand of the Albanians may have been killed, some in battle, and some in summary executions.

Q. At page 14 of your report, you observe that over the 30 years preceding Yugoslavia's collapse, you will argue that every decline, ²⁴⁸²² ^{BLANK PAGE} ²⁴⁸²³ cultural or political, in Yugoslavia, evoked mobilisation of all Serbs and more specifically that the weakening of Yugoslav unity immediately and dramatically focused attention on nationally-minded Serbs within Serbia on the position of Serbs outside Serbia.

Can you give us one or, if time permits, two examples of that?

A. Well, when I refer to that process, it ties in with my larger point about the emergence of a certain Serbian national mind set, that is a set of beliefs related to the Serbian question in Yugoslavia, and a central component of that belief was that if Yugoslavia was not to exist as a unified state, as a state that might unite all Serbs, then Serbia ought to attempt to protect or unite, if not all Serbs, at least as many Serbs as possible. This phenomenon is very visible in the period of Yugoslavia's dissolution. The main earlier parallel that I see has to do with the late 1960s, the period of extensive decentralisation based on the constitutional amendments. And at that time, the idea was raised in discussions, for instance, at the Belgrade law faculty, that if Yugoslavia was to be decentralised, as it would be by those amendments, that then Serbia's borders should be changed.

Q. Thank you. The accused may have stated first his position on the change of Yugoslavia's borders in 1990. This can be, I think, referenced on pages 35 and 64 of the report. Can you help us with how that was received in Yugoslavia or what reaction to it was predictable in your judgement?

A. Well, in June of 1990, as I state in the report, Mr. Milosevic first raised the possibility of Serbian border changes in connection with ²⁴⁸²⁴ discussions of the new Serbian constitution. I would say that the reaction outside Serbia was one of consternation in large part because people were fully aware of the degree to which the Yugoslav populations lived intermingled. In other words, that there was really no way to enlarge Serbia's borders to include Serbs and only Serbs. With reference to whether these reactions were predictable, I think entirely so. And in fact, in the report I cite a statement from 20 plus years earlier, Dobrica Cosic's statement at the 14th plenum of the Central Committee of the Serbian party where he suggested in the context of the constitutional discussion of the constitutional amendments that if the process of state formation within Yugoslavia were to be continued, the Serbian people would also seek a single state, that the political -- the consequences of this needed no political imagination to foresee.

Q. Pages 57 and 58 of your report you make reference to the accused's brinkmanship and violation of the rules of the game of Yugoslavian politics, of Yugoslav politics. Can you explain that a little further?

A. When I made that statement I had in mind primarily events between the summer of 1998 and the collapse of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in January of 1990. That's the period that came to be known as the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution; in other words, the use of mass meetings of citizens to overthrow the leaderships of the province of Vojvodina and of the Republic of Montenegro as well as the substantial abrogation of Kosovo's autonomy through the -- through the constitutional amendments of spring 1989, which made possible the reduction of the province's autonomy in the new constitution of 1990. ²⁴⁸²⁵ I think that I characterise this as brinkmanship first because this showed Mr. Milosevic's willingness to push for a somewhat decentralised Yugoslavia at all costs, even at the risk of alienating others from the existing Yugoslav state. I think that it's very clear that they in fact had that effect, specifically the fall of the Montenegrin leadership in response to crowd pressure was seen by republican leaders outside Serbia as deeply threatening, as perhaps opening the door to further exploitation of the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution into other republics, specifically with regard to the rules of the political game in Yugoslavia, that that is the accepted rules of political conduct. One of the most of these was the principle known as reaching agreement or "usaglasavanje," which was a principle central to the 1974 constitution. Clearly, using mobilised popular support to overthrow leaders of other republics was entirely contrary to this principle.

Q. Before I turn to a couple of questions about Kosovo, is it possible, briefly, to trace in a way that may be of assistance to understanding how people were thinking, the concept of all Serbs living within one state and to use that as a generalised concept rather than any label that may from time to time be attached to it?

A. Well, as I state in the report, the idea of collecting all the people in one state is not in any way unique to Serbian nationalism. It's really the principle that's central to all nationalisms, that cultural and political borders ought to coincide.

In my view, this element of Serbian nationalism became ²⁴⁸²⁶ particularly destructive and self-destructive at the end of the twentieth century because Serbs in the course of the nineteenth century had sought a unified state. And whether this was to be a state of Serbs or South Slavs was really not clearly stated. This, in the nineteenth century, historically what happened was a process of simple expansion of the Serbian state. This process was overtaken by the events of the First World War which made possible the establishment of a Yugoslav state on the basis of South Slav territories of the Habsburg Monarchy being combined with the independent state of Serb, and the consequence of this process, I would say, was that the idea of where the borders of Serbia should be was never fully internalised among Serbs. I think I can make that point clearer if I might be allowed a brief comparison. Many states in the Balkans and elsewhere have various state projects greater; greater this, smaller this. If we were to take the example of Bulgaria at the beginning of the twentieth century, Bulgarian nationalism consistently, and in many instances aggressively, sought a greater Bulgaria to include large parts of Macedonia. By the end of the twentieth century, this concept had been politically marginalised among other reasons because Bulgaria had chosen the losing side in two world wars in pursuit of its territorial claims. The process in Serbia was very different because in entering the Yugoslav state, Serbian borders were not defined in the international sense, and when the Yugoslav state collapsed, the borders of the Republic of Serbia were in many, although not instances, not perceived by Serb populations inside and outside Serbia as the legitimate borders of Serbdom. ²⁴⁸²⁷

Q. Thank you very much. Kosovo's autonomy, the changes in that autonomy, what effect, in your judgement, did they have on the federal constitutional and political structure? This is dealt with on various pages in the report, but about 41, 7 and 8.

A. First, if we consider the status that Kosovo and of course Vojvodina as the other autonomous province had in the constitution of 1974, they were defined as constituent elements of the federation, and that was carried through very consistently at the federal level. The provinces, exactly like the republics, had one representative on the federal collective Presidency. The provinces in both Chambers of the federal parliament had their own delegations, and although these delegations were smaller than those of the republics, this had very little practical significance given the requirement for reaching agreement by -- by agreement of all the delegations on most important questions. Therefore, it was impossible that the Serbian leadership could change the relation of the autonomous provinces to Serbia in the constitutional sense without simultaneously changing the balance of power at the federal level. And the specific effect of the curtailment of the autonomy of the provinces, of the replacement of fairly independent provincial leaderships with leaders who were under the influence of Mr. Milosevic meant that the balance of power at the federal level was greatly changed, that after that and the anti-bureaucratic revolution in Montenegro, Serbia in effect controlled the votes of four members of the federal Presidency, of four delegations in each house of the federal parliament. ²⁴⁸²⁸

Q. I think I've got three more topics as short as the ones we've already covered.

Bosnia-Herzegovina: In your judgement, how did that fit into both Serbian and, if it helps us by way of contrast, Croatian national thought?

A. Well, there are certainly parallels between Serbian and Croatian national claims on the territories of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Most important, both Serbs and Croats have historically claimed Muslims as members of their own nation, simply differing confessionally and in many instances have not accepted the idea of Muslims or Bosniaks as a separate national group.

I see some contrast between Serbian and Croatian national claims on Bosnia in that the Croatian claims have often made more use of historical arguments and as a corollary have generally denied the existence of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a historical entity, whereas the Serbian arguments have often made more use of ethnic claims. Logically so, I think, since the Serbian claims on Bosnia arrive -- arise particularly in the last few decades of the nineteenth century at a time when Serbs made up the largest single group of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

JUDGE MAY: Is that a convenient moment?

MR. NICE: It is. Thank you very much.

JUDGE MAY: Dr. Budding, we're going to adjourn now for 20 minutes to take a short break. Could you please remember, as we have to warn all witnesses, during the adjournment and any others there may be in your case, during your evidence, not to speak to anybody about your evidence ²⁴⁸²⁹ until it's over, and that does include the Prosecution.

THE WITNESS: Yes, sir.

JUDGE MAY: Twenty minutes, please.

--- Recess taken at 12.16 p.m.

--- On resuming at 12.40 p.m.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Nice, before you resume, one or two administrative matters. We have to deal with argument on 92 bis witness statements for the remaining witnesses on Bosnia, Bijeljina, Zvornik, et cetera. We must find time for that argument this week.

There are also motions for the admission of transcripts in relation to Visegrad and Brcko, one of the witnesses being scheduled to come next week. So we ought to deal with that on Monday morning at the latest, hear the argument about those transcripts.

MR. NICE: Your Honour, I foresee it as a possibility that we could conclude this week's listed witnesses before the end of Friday. We're already making arrangements to advance next Monday's witness to Friday. Although I shan't be here on Friday, Mr. Groome can deal with the Bosnian arguments generally then.

JUDGE MAY: All right. If you would alert him to that, dealing with those.

MR. NICE: I will.

JUDGE MAY: The other point is that we shall lose an hour and a half next week because we finish on Friday at 12.00. We must try and find an additional hour and a half during the week. If you can bear that in mind. ²⁴⁸³⁰

MR. NICE: Yes, indeed.

MR. KAY: Your Honour, if I just may raise a matter on the legal argument. We filed detailed submissions in relation to all these matters. I won't be here tomorrow because of the other legal work I'm undertaking on the case. I don't think there is any further elaboration which is needed from the written documents that have been already filed by the amici.

JUDGE MAY: Thank you. Yes, Mr. Nice.

MR. NICE:

Q. Dr. Budding, I think it has gone up from what was forecast as two topics to about three. The ante-penultimate being the SANU memorandum, of which you write extensively in your report, starting at page 53, and of which the Chamber has already heard quite an amount of evidence, but in brief, its significance, and if you can also offer some assistance for those of us who don't come from single state countries with academies, the role of an academy in this setting.

A. Well, if I might address the second part of the question first. I think that intellectuals, and particularly intellectual institutions, have had in Eastern Europe a political importance that can be rather hard to understand if you're coming from a different system, in part because intellectuals served as spokesmen for the nation in the nineteenth century against, in many cases, multinational empires. And because their participation in politics was much more common and at a higher level than is common in Western countries, I would say in large part because in many parts of Eastern Europe the educated class was relatively small so the ²⁴⁸³¹ ^{BLANK PAGE} ²⁴⁸³² same people would very frequently be university professors, then government ministers, then back to professors. The Serbian academy specifically was certainly seen as the most prestigious intellectual institution of Serbia and one might say more broadly of the Serbian people, which clearly gave its pronouncements a great importance. Now, to turn to the memorandum itself, I think that it is important to note that the document known as the memorandum was a draft which was not adopted by any body of the academy because it was leaked to the press and work on it was stopped while it was still in the draft stages.

Having said that, in many ways the memorandum presents a very developed statement of what I have referred to as a mind-set about the Serbian national question in the mid 1980s. In my view, the most important part of the memorandum from this point of view is its very one-sided emphasis on Serbian victimisation, the presentation of the decentralisation of Yugoslavia as uniquely damaging to Serbs, the overstatement in regard to the difficulties faced by Serbs in Kosovo, the characterisation of Serbs in Kosovo as exposed to genocide were, in my view, exaggerated and one-sided statements.

And finally, to conclude the memorandum's significance, although it certainly does not set out a post-Yugoslav national programme, it suggests that the existing Yugoslavia is so damaging for Serbia and for Serbs that Serbia must look to its own interests which --

JUDGE ROBINSON: Dr. Budding, may I ask you on what do you base your conclusion that the characterisation of Serbs in Kosovo and their ²⁴⁸³³ victimisation was exaggerated?

THE WITNESS: Well, if we look at specifically the statistics for serious crimes committed in Kosovo in the 1980s, the instances of rape and murder, the most serious crimes, were actually lower than the Yugoslav average. I think that genocide is not a word that can be used in the absence of wide-scale killing.

If I might expand slightly on the difficulties faced by Serbs in Kosovo, I think that there were certainly some acts of intimidation, including some acts of violence, but that these simply did not at that time reach the level that could be described fairly as genocide.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you.

MR. NICE:

Q. Dr. Budding, you were -- thank you. Dr. Budding, you were in the process of explaining that although the memorandum didn't set out a post-Yugoslav national programme, it's suggested that the existing Yugoslavia was so damaging for Serbia and for Serbs that Serbia should look to its own interests, and then you were about to conclude that sentence, I think.

A. Thank you. I was going to suggest that the memorandum and certain other things that appear around the same time represent a real novelty in the Serbian attitude towards Yugoslavia, that up until that time the predominant attitude had been that Serbs had a special interest in Yugoslavia, that Yugoslavia was in some sense indispensable to Serbs. I see in the memorandum, as many contemporary observers did, the beginnings of a Serbian turning away from Yugoslavia as an optimal ²⁴⁸³⁴ solution to the Serbian national problem.

Q. At page 69 of your report, you deal with the 28th of March, 1991, meeting of the presidents. You explain at the foot of that page that the accused's basic stance was that Yugoslavia's dissolution was possible only upon the basis of self-determination of peoples carried out through national referenda, somewhat otherwise unspecified. Can you comment further on that and would you like to comment on what a referendum of the Muslims would have appeared like?

A. Well, to me, the basic point about the call for national referendums is that it was entirely impractical in the Yugoslav context. It's simply impossible to imagine how it could have been carried through in nationally mixed areas, and certainly many people in Serbia, as elsewhere, were fully aware of that. I include in my report a sentence that Zoran Djindjic had written in the summer of 1990, where he suggested that if the land could shake in Yugoslavia with the wish of its inhabitants to go elsewhere with their land, that some parts of Yugoslavia would experience a permanent earthquake. So that to me the main point to be made about the idea of national referendums is that it's simply impossible to see how it could have been carried through. If there had at that time -- if such an attempt had been made at the time -- you ask specifically about what the Muslim stance might have been. My guess would certainly be that the majority would have chosen at that point to remain within Yugoslavia because Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia were specifically the two republics that tried hardest to find some sort of compromise solution to enable the continued existence of ²⁴⁸³⁵ Yugoslavia in some form.

Q. At the foot of the same page, 70, picking up from that and the top of the very last page of your report you quote Alija Izetbegovic at the same meeting asking the question and someone would have to explain what a national referendum means, and what, for him, was the predictability or predictable result? If you would like to just comment on that before we come to my very last question.

A. Well, what he said was someone would have explain to me what a national referendum would mean in Sarajevo where there were large numbers of Muslims, of Serbs, of Croats, and he answered his own question, saying a referendum and then we would be shooting at each other from the windows. I think he saw the absurdity of the idea. If I might expand very slightly on that point. I think that he recognised there a truth that the idea of the national referendum was simply not applicable to the urban populations. There were some rural areas where it might have been possible to draw territorial borders along ethnic lines, but in the major cities - in Zagreb with 100.000 Serbs, as well as in Sarajevo with perhaps 170.000 - this was, in my view, a meaningless concept.

Q. Finally - this is a question you may feel you've answered sufficiently already in your reference to the clash of civilisations - but in a case where we're concerned not only with the acts and thoughts, for example, of the accused but also the acts and thoughts of individuals, you of course have the long history at your fingertips, others less so, but whether it's the long history or the more recent history of the genocide ²⁴⁸³⁶ of the Serbs as you I think yourself would describe it in the Second World War --

A. Certainly.

Q. -- how significant, in your judgement, may some aspects of history be in understanding the thinking of the various participants?

A. If I might, before turning to my main answer to your question, simply address the phrase "clash of civilisations" very briefly. I would not characterise my presentation of the problem as clash of civilisations, simply because that term is very often used to imply that, for instance, Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim people, by virtue of being Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, being of incompatible nations and simply cannot live together. So my presentation of the clash of empires and great powers in the region was meant in a different sense.

Q. Thank you.

A. As far as the way that -- what one might call historically shaped frames of mind influenced the events of the 1990s, in my view the single most important aspect is the availability within living memory of what some scholars have called crisis frames; that is, that even though people are living in nationally mixed environments, are working with people of other nations, are frequently marrying them, their social reality may be multinational, they at the same time have - particularly of course in the memory of the Second World War - a vivid idea that things can be very different, that there's an alternate reality that may exist and can be called forth, and I think that helped to shape the events of the post-Yugoslav wars and the dissolution. ²⁴⁸³⁷

MR. NICE: Thank you, Dr. Budding, you will be asked further questions.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic, you can have the rest of today - perhaps if we go a little after quarter to - and you can have the first session tomorrow morning, and if you ask for more, we would review the position, but you can have two and a half hours, something of that order, if that assists you in preparing your cross-examination. Yes.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. May, I must tell you straight away that this time is absolutely inadequate to cross-examine this witness who has filed a very extensive report dealing with historical issues, and I request you to give me the whole day tomorrow.

JUDGE MAY: Let's start and see how we get on before we decide anything like that.

Judge Robinson has a question.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Before you start, Mr. Milosevic, I wanted to ask Dr. Budding something about the last comment that she made. The influence of the reality of the Second World War. I think you said that although people with different ethnicities were living together, they had with them at that time what you call an alternate reality that may exist and can be called forth. So are you then saying that during the Tito period, where the different ethnic groups were held together by Tito, that there was always present this -- the concept of this alternate reality?

THE WITNESS: It's quite a complicated question, Your Honour. I think that it was not necessarily present in people's conscious minds. In fact, if you look at how people who had themselves lived through the ²⁴⁸³⁸ Second World War chose to address it, many of them chose not to discuss it with their children in any way, and so those children, I think, would not at that point have had that present in their minds. I think that it was -- it was there, submerged, depending very much on which part of the country we're talking about and how much destruction that part of the country had experienced during the war. I think that the problem was greatly compounded by the fact that there was no free and fact-based discussion of the Second World War in Titoist Yugoslavia but, rather, an extremely ideological presentation of the Partisan conflict.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you. We'll probably come back to that during the cross-examination.

Yes, Mr. Milosevic. Cross-examined by Mr. Milosevic:

Q. [Interpretation] Ms. Budding, it was said at the outset that in addition to this report which you titled "Serbian Nationalism in the Twentieth Century," four years earlier, that is in 1998, you defended your doctoral thesis, titled "Serb Intellectuals and the National Question, 1961-1991." Is that true?

A. Yes.

Q. Now, let us note one thing here. This report that you produced here was prepared by you as commissioned by the side opposite. Is that true? And I suppose that your doctoral thesis was the result of your free and independent scholarly choice; correct?

A. Yes. ²⁴⁸³⁹

Q. Just one general question that I will come back to in the course of my cross-examination. Are you aware of the differences between your report, the one you prepared for these purposes here and your doctoral thesis, although both deal with the identical topic, the Serb national question?

A. Certainly in many ways they deal with the same subject matter, and as I state in the report, parts of -- substantial parts of the report are adapted from my dissertation. Although they obviously serve different purposes, I, to the best of my ability in both of them follow the same standards of scholarly objectivity.

Q. All right. But I hope we can agree that the purpose of developing a scholarly paper cannot jeopardise the standards of scientific objectivity and change the opinion of the same author, depending on the purpose?

A. [Previous translation continues]... enter into a theoretical discussion of that point, but I can state that in the preparation of my report, which I viewed as a piece of scholarly work, that I did my very best to present matters objectively and on the basis of available evidence.

Q. Very well. Tell me, please, is it true that in the introductory part of your doctoral thesis you deal with complaints of non-Serbs during Tito's rule, to a certain extent?

A. To a certain extent, because I present the context of the Serbian national movement in the national movements of other peoples. I have, for instance, a brief treatment of the Croatian spring or "Maspok." ²⁴⁸⁴⁰ ^{BLANK PAGE} ²⁴⁸⁴¹

Q. Let me just remind you, you state, and I'm quoting: "Serbs were the largest national group in Yugoslavia, with about 36 per cent of the population" in the 1970s -- in the 1980s, correction -- "whereas Croats, the next largest group, amounted to about 20 per cent. The Serbs had the greatest share of party membership," and it says in brackets "in the 1970s Serbs and Montenegrins together amounted to -- accounted for over a half of the party membership compared with 40 per cent for the rest of the population." And --

JUDGE MAY: What are you quoting from? What are you quoting from, Mr. Milosevic?

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I am quoting from the doctoral thesis of Ms. Budding, pages 10 and 11.

JUDGE MAY: Have you a copy of it for the witness?

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] No, I don't, but I'm convinced that the witness, who defended her thesis, knows very well what's written in it.

THE WITNESS: I don't recall every word, but I think I recollect the passage you're quoting.

JUDGE MAY: Have the Prosecution got a copy in case we need it?

MR. NICE: We don't have a copy at the moment. If the accused provides his, it can be copied. Alternatively, overnight we will be able to get one providing the Court is happy for us to communicate with Dr. Budding about it.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. That seems to be proper. Yes. Go on, Mr. Milosevic. ²⁴⁸⁴²

THE WITNESS: I'm sorry, was there a question in that?

JUDGE MAY: No. I wouldn't bother with that one. Go on. What's the next question? If you're quoting from the thesis, what's the question?

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. Well, I only wish to note this fact. It continues to say: "Overly represented in party membership, even more among army officers." And then you say: "On the other hand, Serbs as such did not enjoy special privileges in Yugoslavia and Serbia did not dominate within the federation either economically or politically." Is that correct, Ms. Budding?

A. I make a very similar statement in my expert report.

Q. All right. And is it then undisputed that in your doctoral thesis you describe Serbs and Montenegrins in post-war Yugoslavia and in the period after the Second World War as a unified national whole?

A. I say that. As you may be aware. I have in the report a specific discussion of the question of Montenegrin national identity, and in that discussion I present the process by which Montenegrins during the socialist period were progressively treated as fully separate people because in the immediate post-war era this was something of an open question. In the dissertation I cite Milovan Djilas who, as the leading Montenegrin communist, spoke for the party on this question and presented the Montenegrins as a nation in "nacija" but not necessarily as a "narod," a people.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, if one of the planks of your cross-examination is going to be differences between her dissertation and ²⁴⁸⁴³ her report, then we are all at a disadvantage in not having the dissertation, and I think you need to consider that. Perhaps you should postpone those -- that line of questioning until we have the dissertation and she has it.

Is that going to be a consistent line of your cross-examination?

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] No, not in any large measure, Mr. Robinson, but I believe I am entitled to ask these questions, because Mr. Nice pointed out in his examination-in-chief precisely these two papers, this report and the doctoral thesis, and Ms. Budding confirmed that. I therefore believe the question is not whether I can ask the author of both papers about the differences between them depending on the purpose for which they were elaborated.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Continue, and we will see to what extent we can get ahead without it.

JUDGE KWON: And Dr. Budding, if I can advise you this --

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you, Mr. Robinson.

JUDGE KWON: We have difficulty in following your first part of your answer because you start to answer while the previous interpretation is going on, so please put a pause.

THE WITNESS: Oh, I'm sorry.

JUDGE KWON: So please put a pause. Thank you.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. I only wish to remind you that I quoted the part of your thesis where you state that Serbs and Montenegrins combined accounted for more than half of the party membership and so on. And based on that, I asked ²⁴⁸⁴⁴ you whether it was undisputed that in your doctoral thesis you treat Serbs and Montenegrins in post-war Yugoslavia as one national whole, one entity, because you combined them.

Is it therefore undisputed that you treat them as one entity, one national group?

A. I do not in fact do that. In my report, I didn't deal with the question of the national identity of Montenegrins really because it didn't seem particularly relevant.

As far as citing the figures of Serbs and Montenegrins together in such discussions as the army, as -- as I'm -- I've seen in a number of sources this usage. It's not confined to the army. I think in the discussions happening in Serbia in the mid-1980s about Kosovo, it was almost universal to refer to the population of Serbs and Montenegrins in Kosovo almost as one word, Serbs-and-Montenegrins. And I think the reason for that is that there are a substantial number of Montenegrins who do believe themselves to be Serbs. Recent evidence such as the very even split between Montenegrin voters in referendums on Montenegrin independence I think suggest the same conclusion. But as far as whether I personally believe that Serbs and Montenegrins, that these are nationally identical terms, no, I don't.

Q. All right. I don't want to call into question the Montenegrin nation by any means. I only want to point out quite openly the very different views that you indicate in your thesis as opposed to your report. Let me remind you of --

JUDGE MAY: You will have to justify that sort of allegation. ²⁴⁸⁴⁵ It's no good making a wild allegation of that sort without justifying it.

MR. NICE: Your Honour, I don't know how many -- I don't know how many pages the document is, but it's presumably in English. If the accused makes it available to a member of either the court staff or us, we can copy it within probably five minutes.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. There's no need to go and get it. Mr. Milosevic, have you got a copy of that document? Have you got a copy?

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I don't have it with me. I only have my notes. I reckoned that Ms. Budding feels at home discussing her thesis and her report alike.

JUDGE MAY: She wrote it five years ago so she could know it word-for-word? Of course she's not going to be able to do that. Now, let's move on.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, Mr. May, she did not challenge this quotation, either of the quotations, in fact. If she ever does, we will --

JUDGE MAY: No great point has been made so far. Now, let's try and find something more substantial, shall we?

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] It seems to me that all of these are substantial questions, Mr. May, but let me continue with my cross-examination.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. I will remind you, and you will tell me if you don't remember, you say precisely on this topic in your thesis, among other things, in the ²⁴⁸⁴⁶ Serbian national thought or thinking that prevailed before the communist period, all Serbs, Montenegrins, and Slovene Muslims were treated as members of the Serb nation.

A. [Previous translation continues]...

Q. And only a few pages below - this is page 5 of your thesis - on page 61, in the first post-war census, many Muslims declared themselves as Serbs. Is that correct?

A. Yes, that's correct.

THE INTERPRETER: Interpreter's correction: The first page was 55, not 5.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. And you even say emphatically based on available data it seems that the Serbian commitment, the Serbian ethnicity was by far the most popular. Among those who declared themselves as Serbs were the highest Muslim priests and the president of the republic, Alija Izetbegovic; is that correct?

A. [Previous translation continues]... state that and give sources for that in the thesis.

Q. All right. Is it then undisputed from your own thesis that it is not only part of the Serb national thought that there were tendencies to treat Serbs, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and some Muslims as Serbs but in the post-war period, they themselves in large numbers declared themselves as Serbs.

A. As I state, I certainly recognise the fact that large numbers of Muslims declared themselves as Serbs at that time. I do not draw from ²⁴⁸⁴⁷ that the conclusion that in their traditional thought they had considered themselves as Serbs. I think we have to consider the political context of the 1948 census which in fact did not give Muslims any other possibility than declaring themselves as Muslims Serbs, or as Muslims Croats. If we consider this in the context immediately after the Second World War in which the Bosnian partisan movement had been -- Serbs had been over-represented in that movement and therefore were -- I mean, over-represented with regard to their percentage of the population and were therefore over-represented in the post-war political structures, it seems to me unremarkable and explicable by the political situation of the time that Muslims not being given the choice to declare themselves Muslims in a national sense would declare themselves as Muslims Serbs rather than Muslims Croats.

Q. Let us specify that. As Serbs of Muslim faith; right?

A. Not exactly. In the census, the category was Muslim-Serb or Muslim-Hrvati; in other words, Muslim-Serbs or Muslim-Croats, so they were not making a statement that they considered themselves to be Serbs of the Muslim faith necessarily.

Q. Not necessarily. But in large numbers in the post-war period, they declared themselves as Serbs; correct?

A. That is correct in the first post-war census of 1948, but I would point out in the second census of 1953 when the category of Yugoslavs-undetermined was introduced, that the largest number of Muslims now used that rather than using the Serbs or Croats. And to carry the story a little further, that in the 1961 census, when the category of ²⁴⁸⁴⁸ Muslim ethnic belonging was introduced, that that was then chosen by the majority of the Muslim population.

Q. All right. But please tell me, then, why is it that in your expert report you date back the emergence of the Serb and Montenegrin nation? So it turns out that in the period between two world wars we can speak about separate national identity.

A. You mean why do -- why do I consider that in the inter-war period that these groups in fact had a national identity that was predominantly not Serb?

Q. No. I'm asking you this because I would like to know, are you aware of the difference between your thesis and your report, that difference being obvious in the concept of the identity of the Orthodox population in Montenegro, for instance? Is that true?

JUDGE MAY: I don't know what you're talking about. Which part of the report have you in mind, and let us deal with this in a concrete, as opposed to an abstract, way. If you point to something in the report the witness can deal with it. She can't deal with these general allegations of this sort.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. Did you understand my generalised claim?

JUDGE MAY: No. It doesn't matter about what the witness understood.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] All right. All right, Mr. May. I'll move on. I will not insist on this response. I believe the witness ²⁴⁸⁴⁹ will understand.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. Because -- tell me just one thing. Is it true that in your doctoral thesis you implied that not only between the two world wars, but for a long time after the Second World War, Montenegrins considered themselves as Serbs, whereas in your expert report you state that the national separation between Serbs and Montenegrins dates back to a long time ago, long before the two world wars?

JUDGE MAY: You must tell us what the references are. We don't know if this is true what you're putting. It requires a minimum of organisation to say I am -- to refer the witness to a particular passage and make a point.

THE INTERPRETER: Interpreter's correction: Dates back to the Balkan wars.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. May --

THE INTERPRETER: We can't hear the accused.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] This is not a witness statement. This is an expert report.

JUDGE ROBINSON: No. But Mr. Milosevic, we as Judges have to make sense of the evidence, and we can only do that by ensuring that what you say relates to what is in the report, and the best way to do that is to refer us to a page. If your associates in preparation have not done this, they have done you a disservice. You must refer us to the pages in the report if we are to follow it.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. May, I was bearing in mind that ²⁴⁸⁵⁰ I'm speaking to an intellectual who had defended her doctoral thesis and several other scholarly papers. I have read her thesis --

JUDGE MAY: You mistake, as you frequently do, your function here. You're not speaking to anybody. You're asking questions of a witness before a court, a court of law I remind you. Therefore, it must be done in a way in which the Court and the witness can follow. Now, we bear in mind you're a litigant in person. You're doing it yourself. You're not a qualified advocate from that point of view. If you were, you would be in more trouble. But what you must do when you come to examine any witness, including this one, is you must put a passage to them if you say X or you say Y. Put the passage to them and make sure that whoever is preparing your cross-examination, or if you're doing it yourself, you refer to the passage. Otherwise, nobody can follow what you're putting. So overnight, could you make sure you've got your references.

Let's see if we can progress today.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I hope that we can indeed, because I didn't make my notes referring to pages and items in the document. I made them on the issues on which Ms. Budding is testifying and appearing as an expert at that. It is a completely different situation from the one where you have a witness and his statement marked paragraph by paragraph. An expert report is an integral scholarly work, just as a doctoral thesis.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. Ms. Budding, do you say in your doctoral thesis that Rankovic's state security service was no more cruel against Albanians than it was ²⁴⁸⁵¹ ^{BLANK PAGE} ²⁴⁸⁵² against Serbs, former Chetniks, and the so-called info bureau people and Stalinists?

A. Yes, that's correct.

Q. Well, but why then do you speak in your expert report only about the abuses of this service to the detriment of Albanians allegedly motivated by nationalism?

A. That actually is not what I say in the report. I refer in the report also to the persecution of alleged non-conformists, that is, followers of Stalin after the 1948 Tito-Stalin break, and I use that instance to make the more general point that political identifications trumped national ones in Titoist Yugoslavia.

Q. All right. But a moment ago when speaking about the Serbs moving out from Kosovo and Metohija, and you mentioned the same in your doctoral thesis, the emigration of Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija was ascribed by you by Albanian intimidation -- Albanian intimidation. Is that correct?

A. That's not a fully accurate statement. What I say both in the dissertation and the report is that the motives of the Serb and Montenegrin families leaving Kosovo have to be understood as mixed, that economic factors played a role and so did acts of intimidation.

Q. Yes. But in your expert report, you qualify this emigration just as a complex phenomenon; correct?

A. No, that's not correct. I mean, I qualify it as a complex phenomenon, but I have a further discussion of it in which I refer, among other sources, to the poll conducted by the Serbian academy, I believe in 1985, of some hundreds of families who had left Kosovo and who described a ²⁴⁸⁵³ mixture of motives prompting their decision to emigrate.

Q. We shall come back later to the issue of the academy. You explained what the Serbian academy of sciences was just a moment ago, and you referred to it a second ago, so I will avail myself of the opportunity to ask you one question.

You served in Belgrade, and you were very familiar with the situation in Yugoslavia, and probably not only at the time you served, but also in the past.

You said a moment ago that such academies of sciences in East European countries were a sort of spokesman for the people. Is that right?

A. I stated that, but that was mainly with reference to a much earlier period, actually to the period when the national states did not yet exist. But although that was the context in which I made that statement, I would agree that at later times also the academies have sometimes played this role.

Q. All right. Now, do you know that it was precisely the Serbian academy of sciences, arts and science, was throughout, that is to say throughout socialism, in a position of the opposition with respect to the powers that be at that time?

A. I would not characterise its position during the whole socialist period as one of opposition, but certainly I think that for the beginning and the middle of the 1980s that is an accurate characterisation.

Q. Very well. In your introduction to the expert report, you say that the report will identify and attempt to clarify elements of the ²⁴⁸⁵⁴ national state of consciousness which in the 1980s was enjoyed by the majority of Serbs, was commonly held among Serbs, and then discuss how this mind-set contributed to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Now, my question to you is this: Do you know -- are you aware of the fact that the fact that Yugoslavia did not disintegrate of its own accord? It was under international pressure, and support, political, media, financial, support to the separatist forces, in fact, separatist forces, and nationalist leaderships in Slovenia and Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, that it was broken up?

A. Well, you've preferred to two subjects. One is the role of the international actors in the dissolution of Yugoslavia, which I do not address in the report because I don't believe it falls within the time frame that I was dealing with. The other is the actions of certain other republican leaderships.

I do state explicitly in the report that although the focus of the report is the actions of the Serbian leadership and how those contributed to the dissolution, that I am not thereby making the claim that the Serbian leadership was solely responsible for the collapse of the Yugoslav state.

Q. All right. I hope we'll establish the contrary, but do you know of the evaluation made by Samuel Huntington that the war in 1992 broke out because of pressure from the Vatican to assist the Roman Catholic republics in Yugoslavia, to have them secede, and the fact that the leading factors of Western civilisation joined forces with their collaborators in Yugoslavia? He writes this in his book "The Clash of ²⁴⁸⁵⁵ Civilisations." That's the title, and I'm sure you've read it, because it's your field of expertise.

A. Yes, I've read the book. I can't claim to have read it recently. My recollection of his argument is certainly that he explains the alignment that various countries took with the warring parties in former Yugoslavia after the dissolution on the basis of religious - what he considers civilisational - affiliations, rather than that he attributes the dissolution of Yugoslavia to the actions on this -- on this religious line, but I really have not read the book recently enough to be able to comment on that.

Q. Very well. Now, what I mentioned a moment ago as you having said in your introduction that the report will identify and try to explain the elements of a national mind-set among the Serbs, held commonly among the Serbs, could you tell us what makes up the national mind-set, national consciousness and awareness and what the elements of the national mind-set with the Serbs consist of?

A. Well, I referred to that earlier in my testimony when I said that what I meant by a national mind-set was a set of views about the Serbian national question. In other words, I do not mean a national mind-set in the sense that I believe that all Serbs by virtue of being Serbs had a certain set of beliefs.

The elements of that mind-set to which I refer, one important perception is the recognition of Yugoslavia's decentralisation as uniquely disadvantageous to Serbs, and ignoring the facts that members of other peoples were also divided within Yugoslavia, admittedly not quantitatively ²⁴⁸⁵⁶ to the same degree. I'm thinking particularly of Croats, of Muslims and of Albanians. And I think that the mobilisation on this basis, in which decentralisation was perceived as a wrong done to the Serbs, rather than on a more abstract level as raising certain questions of how are national and territorial rights to be reconciled with each other, which obviously could be done institutionally in a variety of ways. That's one important part of what I mean by the Serbian -- the predominant Serbian mind-set about the Serbian question.

Q. All right. Fine. You just said that the Albanians were broken up in Yugoslavia. Where was it that the Albanians in Yugoslavia were broken up? They were mostly concentrated in Kosovo and Metohija.

A. Well, certainly they were concentrated there and increasingly so during the period of socialist Yugoslavia's existence, but as you know, there was also a very substantial Albanian minority in Macedonia and a smaller one in Montenegro.

Q. All right. But here to jump to something else because I want to comment about what you said a moment ago, during the examination-in-chief, in fact, something that Mr. Nice asked you about, and then in response to his question you said that Drenica was incorporated after the Second World War into the Yugoslav state. Did I hear you right?

A. As far as I recall, I said that Kosovo was incorporated, reincorporated into the Yugoslav state. I don't think I used the phrase with reference to Drenica, although obviously Kosovo included the Drenica region.

Q. Yes. But you speak in your report and you spoke about it a moment ²⁴⁸⁵⁷ ago that the Partisans in 1944 and 1945 - and I've made a note of this - due to force of circumstance - this is on page 16 - stifled the greatest rebellions on the part of the Albanians and that the largest battles were held in the Drenica region. Is that right?

A. Yes, that's correct.

Q. Now, do you know that at that period of time, that is to say, 1944 and 1945 when all this was going on, that the Partisans were a regular and internationally recognised military force. It was recognised by the big powers because they fought against Fascism as allies and members of the anti-Hitler coalition. Isn't that right?

A. They were certainly aided by the Allies at that point. I don't know that that amounts to international recognition. I'm not sure in what sense an armed force can achieve international recognition.

Q. All right. Isn't it true that they -- this stifling wasn't done -- actually, they didn't stifle rebellion on the part of the Albanians, as you tend to generalise it, but a rebellion that was highly dangerous of the Albanian fascist guerrillas, in fact, under the name of the Balists who, as allies of the Germans and Italians during World War II, committed terrible crimes and atrocities against the Serbs and Montenegrins in Kosovo? Is that right or not?

A. It certainly is true, as I state in the report, that crimes were committed against Serbs and Montenegrins during the Second World War in Kosovo. I would not accept the characterisation of all Albanians who resisted the Partisans as thereby allies of the fascists. I think if we recall the course of events during the Second World War, there were points ²⁴⁸⁵⁸ during the war when the Partisans themselves appeared willing to let -- let Kosovo join Albania, and I think it's quite clear on the basis of all the available evidence that that was the wish of the great majority of the Albanian population of Kosovo regardless of their political affiliations in other ways.

Q. All right. Now, as this is your field of expertise, do you know that the Drenica uprising at Kosmet, Kosovo and Metohija, was the sole example in World War II, that after the withdrawal of the German army deep into the rear, the army which was a member of the anti-Hitler coalition, that allies of Hitler or, rather, the Albanian Balists opened up a new front?

A. I would not agree with that characterisation of the Drenica revolt. I addressed it very briefly in direct examination. If I might be permitted to take a little more time. Contemporary sources suggest about the motive for the Drenica revolt, there are a few possibilities coming from various sources. One is that when Polluzha and figures like him agreed to join the Partisans they were still under the impression that the Partisans, in fact, would support some form of association between Kosovo and Albania. Whether that would happen within the context of a broader Yugoslav-Albanian federation or any of the other possibilities that seemed open at the time.

With regard to the immediate circumstances of the revolt, the available contemporary evidence is that the reason that Shaban Polluzha and his men, after having joined the Partisan movement, refused to go to the Sremski front, the front in Srem, was that there had been Chetnik ²⁴⁸⁵⁹ bands active in the Sandzak and in the area of Drenica also, and that they were determined to stay in that area in order to defend their homes from the Chetniks.

Q. So you therefore claim that this revolt was not a revolt by armed allies or, rather, Balists, the armed allies of the German army, in fact, but that it had quite a different character?

A. Yes, that's true. I would not deny that many of the participants in the revolt may have been former members, former Balisti. I really have no quantitative information on that point.

Q. You don't. But do you know what that Balistic movement was, who the Balists in fact were, and do you know what their role was in World War II and whose side they fought on?

A. I think certainly that there's no -- I state in the report that the majority of the Albanian population in Kosovo in some sense welcomed the result of the occupation in the Second World War, that is the establishment of a Greater Albania including Kosovo.

Q. Yes, but I hope there's no doubt that the greater -- that Greater Albania was Mussolini's creation or, rather, a fascist creation?

A. It was certainly a creation of fascist Italy. I don't think that's in any doubt.

Q. Well, all right then. Is it then without a doubt that those Balists were, in fact, Albanian fascists? I'm not talking about the Albanian nation; I'm talking about the Albanian fascists. There were Albanian Partisans as well, for example.

A. I think that to characterise the Balisti as Albanian fascists is ²⁴⁸⁶⁰ not accurate because they didn't support a fascist organisation of the state, the forms of government that are considered typically fascist.

Q. What did the Balists support then? They supported the Italians as an occupying power in the region, that area of the Greater Albania that Mussolini has created, isn't that so?

A. Certainly they supported the creation of a Greater Albania.

Q. I'm not talking about the creation of a Greater Albania alone. I'm saying that they supported and warred on the Axis powers' side, that is to say, the Italian and German forces during World War II. Is that right or not?

A. I'm not familiar with every military action taken by the Balisti during the war. In this situation there were many groups that took varying positions at different points during the war.

Q. All right. If you're not familiar with that, then let me go back to these other questions that we were talking about earlier on when I asked you about the elements of national consciousness or the national mind-set with the Serbs and then you gave us your explanation. Tell me, please, in your introduction and in several portions of the book, you mention Serb nationalism fairly frequently. What do you imply when you say "nationalism"? Do you equate it with chauvinism? And what is -- what are European nationalisms of the nineteenth century? As indeed today, for example, French nationalism or what have we, the burgeoning euro nationalism, if you like.

JUDGE MAY: Now, let the witness answer.

THE WITNESS: Well, first, what do I understand by nationalist -- ²⁴⁸⁶¹ ^{BLANK PAGE} ²⁴⁸⁶²

JUDGE MAY: I think perhaps the first point was the original question, which was specifically about Serb nationalism. After all, that's the matter that we're dealing with.

THE WITNESS: Well, when I say "Serb nationalism", I would not necessarily mean chauvinism or national exclusivism. I would be referring specifically to nationalism as a political principle that holds that political and cultural borders should coincide. I'm citing here, as I do in the report, the definition given by Ernest Gellner, for all nationalisms, of course, not with any special reference to Serbian nationalism.

MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

Q. All right, then. Do you consider that Serb nationalism in the nineteenth century was different from or was it a component part of a similar type of nationalism, let me say European? We're talking about the nineteenth century. I'm not talking about World War II. The nationalism of the Germans, the Italians who were at the time fighting for a state of their own.

A. I think it's extremely similar in its content. The circumstances were somewhat different, as I point out in the report, given that the boundaries of Serbdom were contested in a way that the boundaries -- the boundaries of who is a German were contested too, of course, in a different sense should German unification happen around Austria or around Prussia. But the more general question of identity, as I state in the report, in the nineteenth century, the complete equation of Serbs with Serbian Orthodox believers, which has happened in the twentieth century, ²⁴⁸⁶³ was not yet complete. So I see that difference in comparison with some other European national movements.

JUDGE MAY: If that's a convenient time, we're going to adjourn. Yes, Mr. Nice.

MR. NICE: If we can find -- if we can find the doctoral thesis before the close of business today, we will make it available informally to Chambers as well as to the accused.

JUDGE MAY: Or tomorrow morning, if that failing. Dr. Budding, would you back, please, at 9.00 tomorrow morning.

THE WITNESS: Certainly.

JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

--- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 1.50 p.m., to be reconvened on Thursday, the 24th day of July, 2003, at 9.00 a.m.