ROLAND KEITH TESTIFIES AS THE "TRIAL" COMES SCREECHING TO A HALT

www.slobodan-milosevic.org – September 14, 2004

The third witness to testify in what is being called “Slobodan Milosevic’s defense” took the stand at the Hague Tribunal on Tuesday.

The witness, Roland Keith was the commander of the Kosovo Polje field office in the OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM).

Mr. Keith served for 32 years in the Canadian armed forces where he obtained the rank of Captain.

Keith is a veteran of UN observation missions. Before coming to Kosovo, he served as a UN military observer and a UN troop commander in the Middle East.

Mr. Keith arrived in Kosovo in the first week of February 1999, and he remained in Kosovo all the way up until the KVM was withdrawn on March 20, 1999, four days ahead of the NATO bombing.

In his testimony, Keith described the training program that the OSCE monitors underwent. According to Keith, the training was inadequate and left the observers unprepared to competently carryout their mission.

According to Keith most of the observers had little or no military background and couldn’t understand, or properly report what they were witnessing.

Keith said that the structure of the OSCE observation mission was flawed. He said that the observers were road bound, and unable to see what was going on outside of the beaten path.

Keith described the KLA a guerilla terrorist organization, and said that the KVM’s confinement to the roads kept them from being able to effectively monitor the KLA’s activities.

In direct contradiction of almost all of the prosecution’s Kosovo-Albanian witnesses, Keith said that the KLA had a detachment or what he called a “home guard” in every village. He said that the KLA even manned check-points at the entrances to the villages, which makes it all the more amazing that so many the prosecution’s Kosovo-Albanian witnesses never saw the KLA.

Keith said that he never saw the MUP or the Yugoslav Army (VJ) mistreat anybody, and that the MUP and VJ forces cooperated with him fully.

Keith said that the KLA was a different story. He said that the KLA refused to cooperate with the KVM on many occasions. He also said that the KLA violated the cease fire agreement regularly.

Keith said that the MUP and VJ abided by the cease-fire, and that the VJ mainly stayed in its barracks.

According to Keith’s testimony, the format followed in Kosovo was for the KLA to initiate an attack and for the authorities to retaliate.

When Keith first arrived in Kosovo he was sent to the village of Glogovac, where he witnessed a KLA sniper attack on the MUP.

One week later he was sent to Kosovo Polje where he established the KVM’s field office.

The village of Grabovac was in his area of responsibility and according to Keith, a platoon of KLA terrorists was occupying a wooded area in the environs of that village. He said that those KLA members were armed with rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, machine guns, and various other weapons.

He said that this KLA platoon would engage in sniper attacks against workers at a mine that operated in the vicinity of the village.

Keith spoke of another instance of KLA violence when the KLA ambushed a MUP patrol on the Pec-Pristina highway. According to Keith one Serb police officer was killed and another was gravely wounded in the attack.

Keith said that in this instance the VJ came to assist the police, and that a tank was used. But according to Keith the VJ showed restraint and only used machine-guns and not the main armaments of the tank to deal with the KLA attackers.

Keith repeatedly asserted willingness of the Yugoslav authorities to cooperate. He said that he had been working together with the Serbian police to facilitate the return of Albanian villagers, who had fled amid fighting in 1998, from the village of Donji Grabovac.

Keith said that the police had even offered to provide these villagers with small arms so that they could defend themselves from whoever might try and harm them. Unfortunately, he was evacuated from Kosovo before he could see this effort bear fruit.

Keith said that the KVM’s leadership had certain political objectives and that it did not really seek the normalization of the situation in Kosovo. It would appear that he had more to say on this topic, but neither Mr. Kay nor Mr. Nice was particularly willing to discuss it and so it went by the way side.

Keith also said that the villagers would wildly exaggerate claims of displacement of population. He said that they would claim that hundreds of people were chased from a given village, when in reality only a handful of displaced persons would have left the village.

Of course that didn’t stop Mr. Nice from reading out lengthy passages from the OSCE’s “Kosovo-Kosova: As Seen, As Told” book which relies heavily on the accounts of the same unreliable villagers that Keith was talking about.

Mr. Nice took great pains to waste as much time as possible. He read out even more lengthy passages from the OSCE’s “blue book.” Nice asked Keith to comment on things that were alleged to have happened in Prizren and in other parts of Kosovo which were outside of his zone of responsibility.

Mr. Keith behaved like the military professional that he is and confined his testimony to places and events that he had direct knowledge of. 

Being unsuccessful in drawing Mr. Keith into a hypothetical discussion, Mr. Nice tried insinuating that Keith had written irresponsible and inaccurate articles about the Kosovo war, but Mr. Nice never quite got around to actually challenging the veracity of any specific part of Keith’s work.

Mr. Nice, even though he has taken more time than Mr. Kay with all of the witnesses, is still batting 0 for 3. All three of the defense witnesses have defeated him, and he has come-out looking like an idiot.

Slobodan Milosevic again demanded to have his right to self-defense returned to him, and again Mr. Robinson turned off his microphone, and in an added twist resorted to name-calling and accused Milosevic of being “petulant and puerile.”

For his part Milosevic responded by saying, “I wish, Mr. Robinson, to say something to you in relation to the observation you made in view of my attitude and position. I think that the right to defending oneself is a right of principle -- " and again Robinson cut off the microphone.

Things are not going well for the tribunal. Mr. Kay announced that he couldn’t find any more witnesses who would agree to testify.

The witnesses have banded together and are boycotting the proceedings to protest against the draconian conditions that the tribunal has imposed though its denial of Milosevic’s right to self-defense.

Mr. Kay is asking that the so-called “trial” to be suspended until the appeals chamber has made its ruling on the appeal that he has made against his own appointment.

There will be a hearing tomorrow to consider the future conduct of the trial, but one thing is clear the tribunal has made this so-called "trial" into a total farce. By denying Milosevic the right to self-defense, they have brought all of these problems crashing down onto their own heads.
 

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