MILOSEVIC "TRIAL" SYNOPSIS: OCTOBER 7, 2003
www.slobodan-milosevic.org - October 7, 2003

After nearly a 3 week break taken due to the continued illness of President Milosevic the Hague Tribunal again resumed the so-called "trial." President Milosevic is still ill, his blood pressure today was measured to be 160 over 110 mm Hg. 

The "trial" started off with Mr. Nice announcing that they would not be hearing from Maj. Russo of the Canadian Armed Forces, because he had decided not to come to the tribunal. According to Mr. Nice the Office of the Prosecutor arranged his flight but when it came time to leave, he simply decided not to get on the plane.

Then the so-called "presiding judge" Mr. May made a ruling regarding the prosecution's September 23rd submission. The prosecution was seeking to videotape examinations in chief on days when President Milosevic is unable to attend due to illness. The so-called "trial chamber" denied this request. The Prosecution had also sought to have defense counsel imposed on President Milosevic, the "court" didn't rule one way or the other on that. They simply said that they would keep it under consideration.

The witness today was a Ms. Eva Tabo. Ms. Tabo is a demographer, and an employee of the Office of the Prosecutor. She has worked for the Prosecution since December of 2000.

Ms. Tabo wrote two reports. One report was on the displacement of persons in the so-called "Milosevic case area." This report focused on 47 municipalities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and highlighted 7 municipalities as case-studies. The other report dealt with the so-called "Siege of Sarajevo" and the war-related mortalities in the Sarajevo area.

President Milosevic denounced Ms. Tabo's reports as "a malicious manipulation of statistics," and when one looks at the methods and sources that she employed in order to write her reports it is obvious that she is in fact making malicious manipulations of fact. Her objective is clearly to demonize the Serbs, and to paint them as aggressors against their own country.

First of all, in her report on displacement, she arrives at her conclusions by taking the 1991 census and comparing it with OSCE voter registration lists from 1997 and 1998. She concludes that anybody who was in a different location in 1997-98 than they were in 1991 is a refugee or an IDP.

It is useful at this point to remind ourselves of what a refugee is. According to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (the Refugee Convention), Article 1A(2), the term refugee is applied to a person who owing to well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his(/her) nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself (/herself) of the protection of his(/her) country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his(/her) former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

In her report, Ms. Tabo counted migrant migrant workers as "refugees." She counted citizens who were working abroad before the war in 1991, and who were still working abroad in 1997-98 as refugees.

Her objective here can only be to falsely inflate the number of refugees emanating from the so-called "Milosevic case area."

Even Mr. Robinson had trouble accepting that persons such as migrant workers who were working abroad before the war even started could be considered to be refugees. Mr. Robinson asked her if she was even aware of what constitutes a refugee.

Ms. Tabo sheepishly responded by saying that she wasn't using any "legal definition" to define refugees, but that for the purposes of her report she was using a statistical definition of her own making.

Ms. Tabo eventually admitted that her report did not take into account any of the reasons why her so-called "refugees" had left the country, which means that according to the definition of a refugee used by everybody else she has no basis for calling these people refugees.

As President Milosevic observed, if one employed Ms. Tabo's definition, a tourist could be called a refugee.

Another problem is the question of IDPs. Ms. Tabo defined an IDP as anybody who was living in one place at the time of the 1991 census and was living in another place when they registered to vote in 1997-98.

A problem arises here because the information she is using is not limited to the period of the war. People who moved before the war in 1991-92 and after the war between 1995 and 1997-98 are counted as IDP's (or as refugees if they moved out of the country).

President Milosevic pointed out that there were massive migrations of persons that took place after Dayton. He pointed to the example of the Sarajevo Serbs, where 150,000 Serbs left Sarajevo after the end of the war.

Ms. Tabo's data is not limited to the period of the war, nor does it take into account any of the reasons why her so-called "refugees" or "IDPs" moved from one place to the other. Many people moved solely because of economic reasons yet in her reports they are considered to be some sort of refugee or IDP.

Ms. Tabo, in her crusade to Satanize the Serbs, referred in court, almost exclusively to municipalities in the Republika Srpska where the Muslim declined and the Serb populations increased. The truth about Bosnia is that 88.2% of the pre-war Serb population has left the B-H Federation, and 95.5% of the pre-war Muslim population has left the R.S. The differences in their respective migrations is less than 8%, and not even Ms. Tabo's report, as misleading as it is, makes an attempt to hide that, in fact that statistic is contained in her report.

Ms. Tabo also grudgingly admitted to President Milosevic, during cross-examination, that Serbia gave safe heaven to 70,000 Muslim refugees from Bosnia.

Ms. Tabo's other report dealt with the so-called "Siege of Sarajevo" and it's war related mortalities. For her data sources she extensively relied on Muslim sources. She took the International Red Cross's reports into account in her report and used them as one of 7 data sources, but the other 6 sources were Muslim sources.

She admitted that because of her extensive reliance on Muslim sources that her statistics could be prejudiced by any biases that the Muslims had when collecting the data. Such as in the case of one of her sources known as the "Household Survey," conducted by Muslim researchers, in which Serbs were referred to simply as "the aggressors."

Even though she extensively used Muslim sources she still had to admit that the "vast majority of casualties in Sarajevo were combatants" and not civilians. But because she relied so heavily on Muslim sources, information about casualties among Serb civilians was not sufficiently dealt with in her report.

At the end of the proceedings President Milosevic learned of a new practice that will be employed by the prosecution. The appeals chamber changed the rules and now the prosecution has the option of not conducting the examination-in-chief.

This new practice goes even further than 92-bis. The prosecution compiles a witness statement, then the prosecution writes the witness's testimony for the witness, at that point the witness signs his pre-written testimony and that counts as the evidence in chief. So essentially the witness only has to come to court to be cross-examined.

This new practice is scandalous. First of all, it allows the prosecution to present more "evidence" in less time. Essentially meaning that the prosecution is producing "evidence" faster than the defense can refute it. This practice is like to pouring water into somebody's mouth, not allowing them to breathe, and waiting for them to choke.

Secondly, it makes it extremely difficult for the public to follow the "trial" because we won't have any idea what exactly it is that the defense is trying to refute or accomplish while it is cross-examining the witness. If we don't know what the evidence in chief is we won't be able to understand what point defense is trying to make.

# # #