JUDGES DENY MILOSEVIC’S REQUEST FOR MORE TIME
www.slobodan-milosevic.org – October 20, 2005

Written by: Andy Wilcoxson

The Hague Tribunal’s judges refused to consider Slobodan Milosevic’s request for an extension of the time allotted for his defense case at a status conference held before the trial today.

Milosevic says that he needs at least 422 more hours to complete his defense case and call his remaining 199 witnesses.

The trial chamber refused to even consider his request. Judge Robinson informed Milosevic that he had only 106 more hours (roughly 26 working days) to present his case.

Milosevic argued that "the right to defense should not be limited by mathematics” and that he must be allowed to present his entire defense case.

If the tribunal remains firm on its 106-hour deadline, and then turns around and convicts Milosevic, not even the tribunal’s most ardent supporters would be able to seriously argue that the trial had been fair.

Obviously, a conviction can not be considered valid if the defense was prevented from presenting its entire case. One could always argue that evidence that would have exonerated an accused on this charge or that was not heard simply because the tribunal refused give the defense enough time to present its evidence.

One should not forget that the right to a speedy trial is a right enjoyed by an accused, not an excuse for a renegade court to amputate large swaths of the defense case in the name of speeding up the trial.

The judges based their decision to limit Milosevic’s time on the amount of time that the prosecution spent examining its witnesses viva voce. It is worth noting that two-thirds of the prosecution witnesses gave their evidence in the form of writing pursuant to rule 92-bis and rule 89(F).

The prosecution only spent a couple of minutes examining each its 92-bis and 89(F) witnesses live, therefore Milosevic was not credited with any time for their testimony.

Milosevic always argued that admitting witness testimony via 92-bis and 89(F) statements was improper. He consistently expressed the conviction that the trial should be public and that all of the evidence presented by the parties should be public.

The prosecution frequently attempted to falsify and manipulate evidence by abusing the 92-bis and 89(F) statements; it was often the case that the testimony the prosecution wrote for its witnesses was inaccurate. Prosecution witnesses often found themselves denying the testimony that had been written for them.

Milosevic explained that even if he wanted to avail himself of rules 92-bis and 89(F); he didn’t have the facilities to do so. Unlike the prosecution, he does not have a budget of millions of dollars or the resources at his disposal to sit down with each witness and write their testimony for them.

After the status conference, Mr. Nice cross-examined Gen. Milos Djosan. The prosecutor briefly asked the witness about his service in the Army of Republika Srpska Krajina.

Mr. Nice then embarked on a fishing expedition. He tried (and failed) to get Gen. Djosan to say that the bodies of nearly 800 Kosovo-Albanians had been transported to Batajnica during the war in order to hide evidence of killings.

The prosecution’s case is that Serbian troops killed Kosovo-Albanians, buried their bodies in graves in Kosovo, came back to the grave sites, dug up the graves, loaded more than 800 corpses into stolen refrigerator trucks, drove them more than 500 km north to Belgrade while avoiding KLA ambushes and NATO bombs, re-burried the corpses in Batajnica, and did all of this without being seen by NATO spy satellites or by the KLA.

Gen. Djosan explained that no such thing could have happened during the war because transportation was severely interrupted by the bombing. He said that he had to drive to Belgrade on one occasion during the bombing and it took him several days to make the journey because NATO had blown-up so many of the roads and bridges.

It is worth noting that there were not even any rumors, neither among Albanians or Serbs that anything like this had happened until 2001 – a full two years after the Kosovo war. The stories that corpses had been transported to central Serbia began to circulate at precisely the time when the Serbian government needed political justification to hand Milosevic over to the Hague Tribunal. Clearly, whatever bodies were “found” in central Serbia were brought there after the war was over.

Mr. Nice also asked the witness questions about the testimony he gave relating to Nike Peraj. Gen. Djosan had said that Peraj lied against the Yugoslav Army because Albanian nationalists in Kosovo subjected him to pressure.

Gen. Djosan explained that every Kosovo-Albanian who served in his unit, except for Nike Peraj, has been killed by Albanian nationalists in Kosovo. Obviously, Mr. Peraj did not want to share in that fate so he said what the Albanian nationalists wanted him to say.

Mr. Nice also asked the witness questions about things that Natasa Kandic wrote in her books. Gen. Djosan answered the prosecutor by explaining that Ms. Kandic is a traitor and a liar.

Ms. Kandic poses as a human rights activist, yet Gen. Djosan recounted an incident where she assaulted a Kosovo-Serb refugee.

On August 30, 2003 Natasa Kandic assaulted Nikola Popovic, an elderly Serbian refugee from Pec, by slapping him in the face. On that occasion Ms. Kandic was attempting to disrupt a vigil being held by the families of kidnapped Kosovo Serbs. After assaulting Mr. Popovic, Ms. Kandic got into a verbal altercation with several of the people attending the vigil and ultimately had to be removed from the scene by the police.

Mr. Nice ended the day by questioning Gen. Djosan about his war diary. Mr. Nice wants the handwritten original pages, not type written transcriptions. Gen. Djosan assured the prosecutor that the typewritten transcripts were the same as the handwritten version, but promised that he would do his best to get the original written version for the prosecutor anyway.

The trial will resume next Tuesday at 9 AM.

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