STEVANOVIC DAY 6: ALL STEPS TAKEN TO PREVENT AND PUNISH WAR CRIMES
www.slobodan-milosevic.org – May 26, 2005

Written by: Andy Wilcoxson

The testimony of Serbia’s former assistant interior minister, Gen. Obrad Stevanovic, entered its sixth day at the Hague Tribunal’s trial of Slobodan Milosevic on Thursday.

Stevanovic’s testimony picked-up where it left off on Wednesday; he continued to list examples where Serbian police and military personnel were prosecuted for crimes against the civilian population. His testimony shows that the Serbian authorities took all possible measures to prevent and punish war crimes.

Stevanovic testified about sanitizing the terrain or “mopping up” after battle. The prosecution has alleged that when the Serbian police were ordered to “mop up” that that meant evidence of crimes should be covered-up.

Gen. Stevanovic said that “mopping up” meant sanitizing the terrain. He said that it included: the burial of corpses (in accordance with relevant laws), the disposal of dead livestock, chemical clean up, debris removal, and the removal of unexploded bombs and weapons.

He said that the purpose of “mopping up” was the protection of the civilian population from disease and hazardous materials. Milosevic asked him if “mopping up” meant taking bodies to central Serbia and re-burying them there, and Stevanovic said that was not the case.

Milosevic questioned Stevanovic about Batajnica, where the bodies of Kosovo-Albanians are said to have been buried. Although it is not stated in the indictment, the Prosecution claims that hundreds of Kosovo-Albanians were dug-up from graves in Kosovo and re-buried at the police facility in Batajnica near Belgrade in an effort to cover-up evidence of crimes.

Gen. Stevanovic confirmed that the SAJ (anti-terrorist police) had a base at Batajnica. He said that he did not know anything about any bodies being dug-up from Kosovo and buried there.

Stevanovic testified that the police were not present at the Batajnica base during the bombing. He said that the SAJ facilities in Novi Sad and Pristina were bombed on the first day of the war, so the police evacuated the facility at Batajnica because they assumed that it would be bombed too. He said that he thought it was strange that NATO never bombed the Batajnica facility.

Stevanovic said that the only reason somebody would bury bodies at the Batajnica SAJ facility, or anywhere else in central Serbia, would be to incriminate the state of Serbia.

Allegations that bodies had been re-buried in central Serbia first surfaced two years after the war when the new Belgrade authorities needed political justification to send Milosevic to The Hague. Prior to that nobody alleged that any bodies had been removed from Kosovo.

Paramilitaries were a topic of Stevanovic’s testimony. He said that the police were not involved with any paramilitary groups, and that Serbian paramilitary groups were not present in Kosovo.

Stevanovic also denied that the Serbian Interior Ministry had any of its units in Republika Srpska or the Republic of Serbian Krajina during the wars there. He could only think of one case when the MUP had a unit outside of Serbia. In this particular case a MUP unit was stationed just inside the Bosnian border to guard a rail-line that went between two points in Serbia but crossed inside of Bosnia for a couple of kilometers.

A substantial portion of Stevanovic’s testimony dealt with the orders that the police were given. A lot of time was spent exhibiting the orders that the police were given. All of the orders were aimed at the protection of the civilian population. Looting, arson, and the expulsion of the civilian population were prohibited.

In addition to the orders the police were issued, transcripts of meetings between high level Interior Ministry personnel were exhibited. These transcripts showed that the Interior Ministry, at its highest levels, was committed to the protection of the civilian population.

Stevanovic testified that the police appealed to the Kosovo-Albanians to stay in their homes. He said that he personally went to Kosovo to ask them to return to their homes after clashes between the police and the KLA in 1998. He said that he was frustrated in his efforts by a representative of the International Red Cross, who was telling the Albanians not to go home.

As far as people fleeing their homes was concerned, Stevanovic said that people of every ethnicity fled Kosovo during the war. Adding that the first ones to leave Kosovo were the international organizations, which left just before the NATO bombing.

Gen. Stevanovic will continue his testimony when the trial resumes on Friday afternoon.

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