Written by: Andy Wilcoxson

Robert J. Donia testified as an "expert witness" against President Milosevic today. Dr. Donia has served as a consultant for the U.S. Miliatry, and during the Bosnian war (which is what he was testifying about) he worked as a financial advisor for Merrill Lynch. Maybe next week the tribunal can get somebody from Bank of America to testify about events in Croatia. In 1981 Dr. Donia wrote a book entitled "Islam under the Double Eagle: The Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1878-1914."

Dr. Donia has a history of testifying at the Hague Tribunal. He has testified there 8 times, and always against Serbs and Croats -- never against Muslims, in spite of the fact that the book he wrote was about Muslims. However, as Mr. May pointed out, the Tribunal has yet to prosecute a Muslim.

At any rate has spent so much time either testifying at the Hague Tribunal, or consulting the Hague Tribunal that he has decided to teach a class about the Hague Tribunal at the University of Michigan entitled "Inside the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal."

The Croatian media claims that Dr. Donia set-up a foundation through with he solicited money from Islamic countries, and then had the money deposited into Bosnian (Muslim) government bank accounts. Dr. Donia denied the accusations. He admitted that he had set-up a foundation, but claimed that he was the only one who gave it any money and that he only gave the money out to universities.

Call me crazy, but I don' t believe that somebody go to the trouble of setting-up a foundation just to have themselves be the only donor. If he wanted to give money to universities then why didn't he just write them a check?

Dr. Donia compiled a report for the prosecution. He took the minutes and the transcripts of the Republika Srpska parliament sessions, and compiled a report from that material. The formula he employed to write the report was to write a summary, a headline for the summary, and then cite quotations from the transcripts and the minutes of the parliament sessions in order to confirm his summary and headline.

In his report Dr. Donia took quotes out of their proper context, and wrote headlines designed to mislead the reader. President Milosevic spent a large portion of the day reading out full quotations, and then demonstrating how the full quotation refuted the thesis that Dr. Donia was trying to construct with his summaries and headlines.

The most important part of Dr. Donia's testimony dealt with the 30th session of the RS Assembly. Dr. Donia claimed that President Milosevic had advocated a "greater Serbia" policy when he traveled to Pale to try and convince the RS Assembly to accept the Vance-Owen Plan.

Dr. Donia read part of President Milosevic's 2nd speech to the parliament when the President spoke of the Vance-Owen plan being the way for the Serbian people to reach their "ultimate goal."

Dr. Donia said that the goal was left undefined in the speech. Based on this Dr. Donia concluded that President Milosevic must be speaking of "greater Serbia," when he spoke of reaching the undefined goal. Impeccable logic indeed.

Dr. Donia attempted to claim that this speech of Milosevic's was held in a secret closed session of the RS Assembly. However, President Milosevic pointed-out that the session was public, and he proved it by producing a newspaper that at the time the speech was given, printed the full text of the allegedly secret speech.

Moreover, it is untrue when Donia claims that the "goal" Milosevic spoke of was undefined. President Milosevic gave two speeches that day, and in the first speech he was very explicit. He quite clearly defined the goal of the Serbian people as being: peace, freedom, and equality. And looking at President Milosevic's other public statements form the time it is clear that his number one priority was to help bring an end to the bloodshed. It is clear from his statements that peace, freedom and equality were always defined by him as the goal of the Serbian people.

President Milosevic usually has a good "poker face." He usually shows no emotion when listening to prosecution witnesses testifying, but when Donia started saying that by speaking of an "undefined goal" that Milosevic must be speaking of "greater Serbia;" President Milosevic could be seen having a good chuckle at this.

President Milosevic has 45 more minutes to complete his cross-examination of this so-called "expert." The witness will return at an as-yet undetermined date to complete his testimony.