PROSECUTION CASE: MILOSEVIC DESTROYED YUGOSLAVIA BY REFUSING TO ACCEPT ITS DESTRUCTION
www.slobodan-milosevic.org - February 13, 2006

Written by: Andy Wilcoxson

Ms. Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff continued her cross-examination of Prof. Branko Kostic, the former SFRY presidency member from Montenegro, at the Hague Tribunal on Monday.

Ms. Uertz-Retzlaff continued to waste everybody's time by spending most of the day asking questions that were completely irrelevant or that had already been discussed.

She unsuccessfully tried to paint Kostic as an extremist. She would take quotes from his speeches completely out of context, and he would reply by reading out the parts of the speech that she didn't read.

Ms. Uertz-Retzlaff attempted to show that the SFRY presidency acted illegally when, in late 1991, it convened meetings without the representatives of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and Macedonia.

Kostic reminded her that the Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, and Macedonian representatives were always invited to attend the meetings but that they chose not to attend. He further reminded her that an imminent state of war had already been declared and under such circumstances the presidency could legally function in a reduced composition.

Ms. Uertz-Retzlaff played intercepts of Kostic's telephone conversations. There was absolutely nothing incriminating on the tapes. In one of the intercepts he was discussing a region in southern Bosnia with Radovan Karadzic. The conversation had no relevance because, as Kostic noted, the region being discussed never saw any combat. Nor was he discussing combat operations with Karadzic. Although, at one point in the conversation he mentioned the need for the JNA to demilitarize Dubrovnik.

Ms. Uertz-Retzlaff spent the end of the day asking the witness about the Hague Conference. Although he was not present at the October 4th meeting Kostic pointed-out that a document had been drawn-up where it was decided that there would be no unilateral changes in the SFRY's borders and that the right of the people to stay in Yugoslavia would be equal to those who wished to leave.

Kostic said that Serbia and later Montenegro voted against the proposal offered at the Hague Conference on October 18th because the proposal called for the wholesale destruction of Yugoslavia. The October 18th proposal threw-out the items that had been agreed to at the previous meeting and called for an outright dissolution of Yugoslavia along its internal republican borders. 

In spite of the existence of the agreements reached on October 4th, Ms. Uertz-Retzlaff tried to claim that it was Milosevic who changed his mind and derailed the peace process.

This whole issue points to the sheer stupidity of the prosecution case. According to the prosecution's logic, by refusing to accept Yugoslavia's destruction at the Hague Conference Milosevic is responsible for Yugoslavia's destruction. Heaven forbid that the blame for Yugoslavia's destruction should actually fall upon the people who advocated it's destruction.

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