HYPOCHONDRIACS OR ACTORS?
www.slobodan-milosevic.org – February 28, 2005

Written by: Andy Wilcoxson

Dr. Vukasin Andric concluded his testimony at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on Monday. He was cross-examined by Mr. Nice and subsequently re-examined by President Milosevic.

During his examination-in-chief, Dr. Andric testified that thousands of ethnic Albanian teenagers feigned poisoning during 1990 in order to blame the Serbs and provide justification for the Albanian separatist movement in Kosovo and Metohija.

Mr. Nice did not try to claim that those Albanian youths actually had been poisoned, but he did try to claim that they were not maliciously faking illness. Mr. Nice produced a document from the UN stating that the Albanian teenagers, who were complaining of illness due to the alleged poison gas, were suffering from “mass hysteria.” In other words, Mr. Nice’s case was that these teenagers weren’t malicious, they were simply hypochondriacs.

Dr. Andric disagreed. He testified that those Albanian teenagers hammed it up for the TV cameras. He said that when cameras weren’t present the teens would be up walking the hospital corridors and playing music, but when TV cameras would come they would suddenly act as if they were bed-ridden. If they were really hypochondriacs, TV cameras would not have effected their condition.

During Dr. Andric’s examination-in-chief many videotapes and written statements were exhibited. Those tapes and documents showed the statements that ethnic-Albanian refugees gave during the NATO bombing. According to what they said then, they were fleeing from the NATO bombing.

In preparation for Dr. Andric’s testimony, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) sent investigators to Kosovo to track down some of the people who gave such statements. The prosecution claimed that it had found a few of the people, and its investigators took statements from them last week.

In some cases, the people that the prosecution found were not the same people who had given the original statements. One example was an Albanian woman whose refugee convoy had been bombed by NATO.

In this woman’s case, she gave a statement to an investigating judge to the effect that she was fleeing from the NATO bombing and that while she was fleeing, NATO bombed the convoy of refugees she was traveling with.

The prosecution claimed to have found this same woman, and they said she gave them a statement last week that contradicted the statement given to the investigating judge.

Judge Kwon compared the two statements and he observed that the woman’s name was spelled differently on the prosecution statement, her date of birth was different on the prosecution statement, and her signature did not look the same as it did on the statement given to the investigating judge. The obvious conclusion is that the woman the prosecution interviewed last week was not the person who gave the statement to the investigating judge in 1999.

Another person that the prosecution claimed to have tracked down was an Albanian lawyer. Mr. Nice played videotape of his interview given to OTP investigators last week. Interestingly, the man on the OTP video did not look like the man depicted in the original videotape filmed in 1999. Dr. Andric, and even Judge Robinson, expressed doubt as to whether this was the same person.

The man on the tape claimed to be the same person, even though he didn’t look like the same person. None the less, this man told a nonsensical story about how he only said what he said in the 1999 interview because Arkan’s men, Seselj’s men, the Red Berets, and the Yugoslav Army were all hiding behind his tractor, and somebody was sticking a machinegun in his back.

Dr. Andric, who was on the spot when the original interview was filmed in 1999, said that no army or paramilitary formations were present. He also testified that no Serb paramilitary formations even existed in Kosovo.

After Mr. Nice concluded his cross-examination, President Milosevic re-examined the witness.

After Dr. Andric’s re-examination, legal argument regarding the admissibility of the statements that the OTP gathered last week in preparation for Dr. Andric’s testimony were heard. After the tribunal ruled that the statements were inadmissible, President Milosevic called Dr. Dobre Aleksovski as a defense witness.

Dr. Aleksovski, who is Macedonian, served as the director of emergency medical services in Skopje during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign. He and the staff that worked under him traveled to the Macedonia-Kosovo border to administer medical treatment to ethnic Albanian refugees that had come to Macedonia during the Kosovo war.

Dr. Aleksovski began his testimony late in the day, and things did not get much further than his curriculum vitae. His examination-in-chief will continue on Tuesday.
 

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