MR. NICE'S CROSS-EXAMINATION OF DRAGAN JASOVIC
www.slobodan-milosevic.org - June 16/17, 2005

Written by: Andy Wilcoxson

Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice completed his two and a half day cross-examination of Dragan Jasovic at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on Friday.

Jasovic was a police detective working for the Urosevac SUP in Kosovo until June of 1999. His examination-in-chief was completed in April, but the prosecution needed a couple of months to prepare his cross-examination.

Jasovic provided the court with testimony about events in Racak based on statements given to him by witnesses in 1999. According to the statements he took, 30 of the people listed on Schedule A of the indictment (and considered by the tribunal to be innocent civilians executed by Serbs) were known KLA fighters.

The witnesses that Jasovic took the statements from were predominantly ethnic Albanians. They told him that Racak was a KLA stronghold, and they gave him information about the KLA's activities in the area.

Jasovic first came to the tribunal as a prosecution witness in the Limaj trial. He was added as Milosevic's defense witness during the testimony of Danica Marinkovic. It was Mr. Nice himself who suggested that Jasovic, as a police officer from the area, could provide testimony about the events in Racak.

Keeping in mind that Jasovic was brought to the tribunal by the prosecution in the first place, one really had to wonder, when viewing this cross-examination, about the integrity of the Office of the Prosecutor. Mr. Nice spent practically the entire cross-examination trying to destroy Jasovic's credibility.

Mr. Nice asserted that Jasovic was a criminal who beat-up and tortured Albanian civilians and forced them to sign false witness statements against the KLA. Mr. Nice claimed that Jasovic generated the "false" witness statements in order to legitimize the Racak "massacre."

The only problem with Mr. Nice's theory is that nobody even knew these statements existed before Jasovic exhibited them at the Milosevic trial. Furthermore, it wasn't originally Milosevic's idea to call Jasovic -- it was Mr. Nice's idea.

If the idea was to cook-up some sort of false political legitimacy for a massacre, then these statements would have been available a long time ago. They certainly would not have been sitting in a police archive for more than six years gathering dust.

For his part, Jasovic stuck to his testimony that the witness statements were taken for the internal use of the police, and not for any other purposes.

Jasovic repeatedly denied allegations that he beat people up in order to extort false statements from them. He said that he understood why Albanians would deny cooperating with him now, and he insisted that they gave him statements of their own free will during 1998 and 1999.

Jasovic has a good point, there isn't an Albanian alive who is going to admit that he collaborated with the Serbian police against the KLA, and if he did admit such a thing he wouldn't stay alive for very long. The only reliable way to judge Jasovic's evidence is to compare it with other evidence, not to go by what some Albanians, whose lives could be in jeopardy, are saying more than six years after the fact.

We know from the videotapes that Danica Marinkovic exhibited during her testimony that the Serbian authorities were shot at when they entered Racak. We saw from those tapes that the KLA had bunkers, trenches, and a lot of weapons in Racak. We know from the testimony of Prof. Slavica Dobricanin that 37 out of the 40 corpses found in Racak had gunpowder residue on their hands from firing weapons.

Jasovic's evidence that 30 out of the 40 people killed in Racak were known members of the KLA is hardly a surprise. It would be obvious even without his testimony, and without the witness statements he took, that the people killed in Racak were KLA members.

During the cross-examination, Mr. Nice did his level best to mislead the public and the court. For example, Mr. Nice repeatedly and deliberately misread a police report that referred to the "liquidation" of terrorists at Racak. When Mr. Nice read-out the document in court he didn't read the word "liquidate," he decided to say "execution" instead.

This type of behavior is par for the course for Mr. Nice, the man is a pathological liar. When Mr. Nice was confronted with his lie, he tried to say that there is no difference between "liquidating" somebody and "executing" somebody, so he didn't think that taking such a liberty with the text of an official document made any difference. Of course there is a world of difference between those two terms. Enemy fighters who die in combat are considered "liquidated," whereas unarmed people who are imprisoned before being killed are considered "executed."

In another instance, when reading from another police report, Mr. Nice took the premise of a question and magically turned it into proof an allegation. The police report outlined a conversation that a police chief had with a member of one of the KDOMs. The KDOM official asked "how come the military took part in the operation in Racak?" The police chief responded that the military did not take part in the operation.

According to Mr. Nice's "logic" this document "proves" that the army took part in Racak. Mr. Nice says that the premise of the question would not have been included in the report if the premise had been a false. Mr. Nice claimed that the document was "proof" that the police had lied to the international community about the role of the Army in Racak. If Mr. Nice was a character on "Star Trek," he would give poor Mr. Spock a heart attack with that type of logic.

Naturally, Jasovic disagreed with Mr. Nice's suggestion and said that he had no information to indicate that the Army had taken part in the events in Racak.

Towards the end of the cross-examination Mr. Nice drew Jasovic's attention to the testimonies of some witnesses who he said had "escaped" from Racak. Mr. Nice read out the names of people he called "survivors" and asked how come most of them were not listed in Jasovic's documents as KLA members.

I really have no idea what Mr. Nice thought he was proving, but he did a masterful job of showing that the people known from Jasovic's documents to be KLA members were killed in Racak, while people not considered to be KLA members lived. Obviously this means that the KLA died in combat, while civilians were not targeted.

Jasovic will be re-examined by Slobodan Milosevic when the trial resumes next Monday.

This summary only covered June 17th. The broadcast from the ICTY was not available on the 16th due to technical difficulties. Judging from Mr. Nice's performance with this witness on the 15th and today, I don't think we missed much of anything on the 16th.

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