MILOSEVIC "TRIAL" SYNOPSIS: OCTOBER 29, 2003
www.slobodan-milosevic.org - October 29, 2003

Today at The Hague “Tribunal” a young lady named Jasna Denona from the town of Bruska, Croatia came to testify against Slobodan Milosevic. She was the victim of a shooting that claimed the lives of nine Croats and one Serb.

She was wounded and was given treatment by Serbian doctors at a hospital that was on Serbian territory.

She had no idea who shot her. She never saw the perpetrator(s). She is another witness who is certainly the victim of a crime and has a sad story to tell, but her testimony had no evidentiary value.

President Milosevic observed that the Serbian authorities in Krajina condemned this crime, and carried out an investigation, but since the witness didn’t know anything about the results of the investigation she was unable to answer any questions about it.

President Milosevic informed her that the investigation had revealed that it was a lone gunman who had opened fire on these people. But that the identity of the perpetrator was never known.

The next witness was a secret witness testifying under the pseudonym of “B-1780.” Allegedly, B-1780 was kidnapped by local Serbs in Zvornik, taken to the Ekonomija factory farm, and beaten senseless there by every Serbian paramilitary formation in Bosnia.

He told tall tales about his 4 day stay at the Ekonomija farm. He claimed that “the Serbs” were cutting Muslim heads off and kicking them about the room, how they were cutting off hands, how they were carrying out mass-executions of 7 men at a time, how they would use knives to cut the skin between people’s fingers and then lick the blood off of their knives with their tongues. He even said that 15 to 20 men jumped on him all at once. He was laying it on pretty thick. Of course he couldn’t identify any of the perpetrators. And neither of the 2 victims that he enumerated has been examined to see if they died in the manner he described.

B-1780 claimed that he was told by a guard that he had been sentenced to death by torture. Obviously they didn’t torture him to death, because he is still alive today.

Eventually B-1780 went to a Serbian hospital and was given medical treatment, but he said that it was a trick. He said that he was being given medical treatment by the Serbs because they were trying to kill him. I know that doesn’t make any sense but that’s what he said.

He was in the Hospital for 4 days, and apparently the trick didn’t work because B-1780 lived. On the 4^th day he told his doctor that he was feeling OK and the doctor told him that he could go home, so he went home.

After he got home he said that he could see, from his house, the Serbs digging a mass grave and putting dead Muslims into it. Of course no mass grave has been exhumed there, and so we are just expected to take his word that this happened.

Finally B-1780 left Zvornik and went to a refugee camp at Subotica in northern Serbia. At the Subotica refugee camp he was given food and accommodation by the government of Serbia.

The refugees at the camp were issued Yugoslav passports and were free to go anywhere they wished. This witness and a number of other refugees went to Vienna.

Apparently B-1780 was engaged in politics somehow, but that couldn’t be discussed in open session.

President Milosevic used his cross-examination to essentially give the witness the rope and then he just let the witness him hang himself with it. After President Milosevic was finished letting the witness humiliate himself; Mr. Tapuskovic made some useful observations. Mr. Tapuskovic pointed out that the prosecutor hadn’t provided a stitch of proof to back-up what the witness was saying. There was no forensic evidence, and undoubtedly some could have been found had it existed at all.

Mr. Tapuskovic produced a statement that the witness had given to the B-H authorities in 1992 about what had happened to him, and in that statement there were differences between what he told them and what he said at the tribunal.

For example, at the tribunal he said that the JNA was present at the Ekonomija farm, but in his 27 December 1992 statement to the B-H authorities he never mentioned the JNA. Some of the dates were different. At the tribunal he said that 9 men on a truck had all been killed, but in his statement to the B-H authorities he said that he didn’t know what had happened to those 9 men.

B-1780 is a liar. Something probably happened to him, but it was abundantly clear from watching him that he wasn’t telling the truth. He was making up stories.

The next witness was another secret witness, a so-called “B-1448.” B-1448 was a member of some sort of Muslim paramilitary formation in Brcko. B-1448’s unit killed a Bosnian-Serbian soldier on May 16, 1992, and B-1448 claimed to have taken some documents off of this soldier’s corpse.

The documents he took were an identification card, which has since disappeared, and some receipts. One of the receipts showed that the soldier had rented a Yugo and driven it to Belgrade a couple of times, and another one of the receipts was allegedly for some weapons that were acquired from the armory in Belgrade on June 20, 1992.

President Milosevic spotted the problem right off the bat. The soldier was killed on May 16, 1992, but the receipt for the weapons was from June 20, 1992. So how did this dead soldier manage to acquire a receipt from the future? As far as I know Yugos aren’t time machines. They can’t transport you to the future and back again.

So much for B-1448’s “evidence,” however a new practice was employed by the so-called “trial chamber” with this witness. They had what they called a “limited cross-examination” which meant that President Milosevic could only ask questions about the dead soldier and the documents, not about this paramilitary group that the witness belonged to, and not about the situation in Brcko.

When President Milosevic objected to this new invention, this so-called “limited cross-examination,” Mr. Kwon tried to console him by saying that “limited cross-examination is better than no cross-examination at all.”

Apparently President Milosevic is supposed to just be happy that the let him cross-examine any of the witnesses at all. After all as Mr. Kwon has illustrated limited rights are better than none at all. 

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