1 Thursday, 26 September 2002

2 [Prosecution Opening Statement]

3 [Open session]

4 [The accused entered court]

5 --- Upon commencing at 9.01 a.m.

6 JUDGE MAY: Yes. It's for the Prosecution to open this part of

7 the case.

8 MR. NICE: Your Honour, today we're represented, as you see, by

9 the Prosecutor herself, by Ms. Uertz-Retzlaff, and by Mr. Groome, and of

10 course by myself. The Prosecutor will make some opening remarks and then

11 I'll make a rather short opening statement.

12 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Madam Prosecutor.

13 MS. DEL PONTE: [Interpretation] Thank you, Mr. President, Your

14 Honours. I will not take up much of your time this morning. Neither will

15 Mr. Nice. I shall limit myself in a matter of minutes to a few procedural

16 and logistical issues that have been and will continue to be of special

17 relevance to this case.

18 Last February, I pointed out that this trial was going to put

19 international humanitarian law and its practice to the test. The test has

20 obviously been conclusive in many respects. The procedural feasibility of

21 such a trial has been established. The Prosecution presented its case for

22 Kosovo in 110 hours, or the equivalent of five normal trial weeks. This

23 achievement testifies to the Prosecution's commitment to an efficient

24 administration of justice manifested in its active contribution to the

25 search for creative solutions in trial management.

1 However, a trial before an international forum is inconceivable

2 without the cooperation of states. It is in this field that the fate of

3 the trial will ultimately be played out. And unlike domestic

4 jurisdictions, international justice has no means of enforcement. Yet

5 state cooperation, in particular cooperation from the Federal Republic of

6 Yugoslavia, is far from being exhaustive. Admittedly, during the initial

7 stage of these proceedings Yugoslavia made it possible to hear several

8 deposition witnesses and facilitated access to some sources of evidence

9 material. Cooperation remains, however, fractious, difficult,

10 unpredictable. More importantly and much to my regret, it does not appear

11 to be guided by the will or the interest to actively participate in

12 establishing the truth.

13 With regard to the segment of the trial opening today, Yugoslavia

14 continues to hold the key to irreplaceable evidence, such as potential

15 witnesses who will need state authorisation to travel and testify, or

16 civilian and military archives, access to which is still denied to date.

17 I have given up the hope of seeing Belgrade encourage potential

18 witnesses to come and testify. The only thing I ask is that they allow

19 them to come while lifting the threat of criminal prosecution for

20 violation of state or military secrets. As you can see, a great deal will

21 depend on the extent to which third parties, including but not limited to

22 Yugoslavia, will comply with their legal obligations before the Tribunal.

23 Allow me to underscore that cooperation should not be limited to

24 strict compliance with our requests. States and international

25 organisations should, in my view, contribute actively to ascertaining the

1 facts by submitting to the Trial Chamber all the evidence they know to be

2 relevant to the case.

3 Furthermore, administration of justice must be transparent.

4 Public hearings must remain the rule, closed sessions the exception,

5 justified only by the prevailing need to protect the identity of witnesses

6 in danger. This very much coincides with the views of the Trial Chamber.

7 A transparent administration of justice is a fundamental component

8 of the rule of law. We therefore call upon all countries in a position to

9 make witnesses available to us, to acknowledge and apply to international

10 justice the principles they hold dear in their own country. In this

11 respect, we should recall that the Trial Chamber expressed time and time

12 again its willingness to take into consideration legitimate state

13 interests by approving closed sessions as required to protect confidential

14 and classified evidence.

15 The efficiency with which the Kosovo case was led is due to a

16 large extent to the cooperation and support of the Victims and Witnesses

17 Section and, above all, to the witnesses' courage, willingness, and

18 self-effacement. Given the magnitude of the trial, the fact that the

19 Trial Chamber heard witnesses without interruption, with the exception of

20 one 20-minute delay, is remarkable enough in view of the many

21 imponderables and factors beyond our control. I want to pay tribute to

22 the witnesses for their flexibility and their goodwill. Some had to

23 extend their stay in The Hague by several days when hearings were

24 adjourned for unexpected reasons.

25 We do not know whether we can maintain this level of procedural

1 efficiency in the case starting today. The cases are different. There

2 will be fewer factual witnesses as opposed to witnesses testifying to the

3 responsibility of the accused, who will be less flexible in terms of

4 availability. This may well render our job a little more difficult. The

5 Trial Chamber may, however, rest assured of our continued efforts to

6 ensure that evidence is led without interruption.

7 I now give the floor, with your leave, to Mr. Nice. Thank you.

8 MR. NICE: Your Honours, it was the accused who wanted there to be

9 opening speeches. We drew to your attention that, of course, there have

10 been detailed indictments, an earlier detailed opening, and a very

11 detailed pre-trial brief to which the accused is in a position to respond.

12 And accordingly, with an eye to who is our proper audience, this opening

13 can be brief. Our proper audience is, of course, Your Honours, not the

14 wider public. These proceedings are in public in order that the public

15 can see our work is done properly, as the Prosecutor has so rightly

16 reminded us. They're not here to provide copy, or particularly good copy

17 for newspapers or matters of that sort.

18 Accordingly, in this opening, I shall simply remind the Chamber of

19 the events of these two indictments and of how we put our case, show you a

20 few maps which I hope will be helpful in filling out the picture. At the

21 end, I will return to say one or two things about the trial process.

22 We already have quite a lot of evidence about events generally

23 from evidence given in the Kosovo-only part of the trial. The break-up of

24 the former Yugoslavia with the development of nationalism in various forms

25 is well known to the Chamber. In the early stages, Serbs for the most

1 part taking or expressing the position that the former Yugoslavia should

2 dissolve, if at all, into component ethnic groups; that is, Serbs, Croats,

3 and other groups officially recognised, not, of course, Kosovars.

4 I trust the Chamber has been given folders of maps, and if the

5 usher would be so good as to place the first map on the overhead

6 projector. I, of course, don't ask for these to be produced at the moment

7 - they will be produced in due course - these are documents simply for

8 assistance.

9 The first map which is from, indeed, the Times map of the Balkans,

10 and a map with a rather complicated legend we can see on the left-hand

11 side, breaking the inhabitants into nations and national minorities, the

12 various colours for Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, striped according

13 to the percentage by which particular areas they occupied territory, shows

14 just how varied a place it was in population terms.

15 We needn't look at it in detail. It tells a story visually. The

16 idea of reformulating this pattern of occupation into one where ethnic

17 groups could be all together is an idea that was always going to be

18 extremely hard to achieve in any peaceful way. Hard; impossible.

19 We turn from that map. We can leave it there for the time being

20 until the next one is placed on the overhead projector.

21 The Prosecution case is that the Serbs plan conceived, as plans

22 can be without people sitting round a table with a leader telling them

23 when their plan should be, reduced to a Serb claim to a huge expanse of

24 the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Their plan was packaged,

25 initially in any event, in terms of wanting people to remain in

1 Yugoslavia, although that phrase, the Prosecution say, was or became a

2 cover for the desire to create a Serb state.

3 Before we move on through the events of these two indictments, the

4 Croatian and the Bosnian indictment we are about to try, a word of

5 resistance to temptation: There may be a temptation to characterise this

6 accused simply as the sole architect, and that temptation may have to be

7 resisted until the precise outlines of his role are etched by evidence,

8 because plans can emerge without a single originator. Such plans can be

9 joined, and there can be those who choose to lead such plans, once they

10 join them, being criminally opportunistic and coming to be seen as and

11 indeed to be central to the plan itself. And this may be a reality of

12 this accused's personal history, he being a man to whom others committed

13 to the plan looked for leadership that he was able to provide.

14 Let's turn to Croatia in more detail. It left the communist fold

15 in May of 1990. It suffered some rebellion in the area known as the Croat

16 Krajina in August of 1990. We will hear evidence of how about this time

17 Jovica Stanisic and Frenki Simatovic, names familiar to Your Honours, and

18 others, spent time in the area arming, training, and organising the local

19 Serb police and armed groups in cooperation with a man called Milan Martic

20 of whom you will be familiar, and of others.

21 We come to early 1991, and in March, as will be dealt with by

22 Mr. Mesic, the present President of Croatia next week, in Karadjordjevo

23 there was, there may be no doubt, an agreement between this accused and

24 President Tudjman of Croatia to carve up Bosnia, a plan that was afoot

25 quite without prejudice to the Croatian war into which those two men were

1 to engage.

2 At the same sort of time, there was Karadzic, leader of the

3 Bosnian SDS party who shared Milosevic's goal, being recorded as saying

4 such things as, "It is as natural as rain falls that the Serbs should live

5 in the same state."

6 On the 15th of March, of 1991, this accused announced that the

7 Presidency of Yugoslavia no longer existed, and indeed in a meeting then

8 secret of local government leaders, revealed what was in his mind when he

9 said, "It is always the powerful and never the weak who dictate frontiers.

10 He also said that Serbia would no longer be bound by decisions of the

11 Federal Presidency, the rump of which he was soon himself to control.

12 The war covered by the Croatian indictment starts really in August

13 of 1991, the accused being President of Serbia, the federal institutions

14 being really only nominally intact. And we will discover that Kadijevic,

15 the Federal Secretary of Defence was a man already being seen to be

16 responsive to the accused, who as I say was but President of Serbia, and

17 although he may have had no formal authority over the army at that time,

18 he was able to exert some effective control. And these mechanisms of

19 control reveal the beginning of the new order.

20 First blood of this war really in the spring of 1991 between

21 Croatian police and rebel Serbs, with interventions by the JNA supporting

22 the Serbs and not the Yugoslav contention, the accused himself pressing

23 that the army should pursue the Serb cause whatever public stance he might

24 have taken. His public statements being already aimed at deflecting

25 international condemnation.

1 This deception was very important, as it was important that

2 Serbian participation in the war should be concealed, something we shall

3 discover acknowledged by some Serb leaders at that very time in unguarded

4 moments. And that may be why so much was done by this accused through

5 proxies, such as the Federal Presidency or Rump Presidency itself, or

6 through other leaders in Knin and elsewhere who could be directed,

7 encouraged, supplied, but then publicly disavowed.

8 Mr. Mesic, as I say now President Mesic, was due for appointment

9 or election to the rotating Presidency of the former Yugoslavia, and his

10 appointment was effectively blocked for several months, between May and

11 July, when he was only grudgingly allowed into office that he was only

12 able to exercise effectively for a few months, until September.

13 May we now then look at a map that shows the ethnic distribution

14 of Croatia; map 2. I'm not sure that the colours on the various maps that

15 I shall provide to you for your assistance are all consistent, but you

16 will see here red for dominance by Serbs, yellow for Croatians. And what

17 is, of course, remarkable or notable is that towards the west there are

18 areas -- I beg your pardon. To the west of the overall map but to the

19 east of the centre of Croatia there are areas strongly red. Further to

20 the east, although there is by the different strengths of shading some

21 Serb presence, you will see nothing of great strength at all; no clear

22 majorities, just some mixed communities and many communities with, as one

23 would expect, a Croatian majority.

24 Leaving that map on the overhead projector the account is as

25 follows as what happened: In early August, the JNA began to take over

1 Baranja in Eastern Slavonia - it's up in the northeastern corner of the

2 map - while stepping up attacks on Croat villages in that area. There was

3 a Croat plurality in those areas only. Not only; there was a Croat

4 plurality, more Croats than others. But the JNA handed over control to

5 local Serbs, ultimately led by the man Goran Hadzic, and a campaign of

6 terror began, reflected in the indictment, involving arbitrary arrests and

7 detentions, mass killings, expulsions, destruction of property carried out

8 by paramilitaries, by local Serb forces and, in some cases, by the JNA

9 itself. So we have the development of the picture of combined forces

10 operating together.

11 And those paramilitaries, part of that combined force, will be

12 shown to have had close ties to the MUP of Serbia, to close associates of

13 the accused whom he would continue to support for years, and indeed to the

14 accused himself.

15 Now, the Croats blockaded the JNA barracks in Croatia in

16 mid-September. This may be relied upon as some explanation for some of

17 what followed. What followed was that the JNA from elsewhere, together

18 with local Serbs, struck in five directions aimed at the dismemberment and

19 total defeat of Croatia, although that objective of the JNA's may not have

20 been at that time the particular objective of the accused whose different

21 interest I have already identified and summarised.

22 Can we now place map 3 on the overhead projector.

23 This reveals the SAOs, the Serb autonomous regions, that were

24 declared. But I use the map at this stage for a different purpose.

25 Although it doesn't have the characteristic arrows on it, the Court will

1 hear in due course how at this time attacks from Serbia were mounted into

2 East Slavonia. That is the etched area on the right-hand side which of

3 course includes Vukovar. Attacks were mounted south from Bosnia moving

4 north into West Slavonia, the middle of the etched areas. There was an

5 intention, it would appear, to cut the access roads into West Slavonia.

6 There were attacks mounted west out of Bosnia towards the Slovenian

7 border, and those were aimed at separating Zagreb from the coast. Then to

8 the south and west on this map, there were attacks from Knin to Zadar and

9 Sibenik nearer to the coast aimed at the coast and to split Dalmatia. And

10 Your Honours will see Skabrnje marked along with Nadin, to which I'll

11 refer in a second.

12 Finally, and not marked but Your Honours will know the geography,

13 from Montenegro and Eastern Herzegovina, there were the attacks on

14 Dubrovnik.

15 Skabrnje near Zadar, we can see. Just an incident of

16 significance.

17 Ratko Mladic, Chief of Staff of the 9th corps of the JNA, carried

18 out a threat he made on his own terms to destroy those two villages there,

19 without justification murdering 45 elderly Croats and some other 26 to die

20 in the following months.

21 He was then, of course, commander of the supposedly neutral JNA,

22 but he and Milan Martic, commander of the rebel Serb militia who was also

23 involved in these crimes, spoke publicly of their full cooperation and

24 integration, one with another. Those two men, Mladic and Martic, later to

25 benefit from decisions made by this accused and others. He was involved

1 in the decisions. Mladic to become the Bosnian Serb commander, Martic to

2 become the Croatian Serb political chief. Approval of men whose acts must

3 already have been known.

4 Dubrovnik, a town with few if any legal targets, shelled about

5 1.000 times for no discernible reason save intimidation or reprisal.

6 There and in the area, over 40 civilians killed. And the Chamber will

7 have to decide in due course whether these attacks could conceivably be

8 justified or whether they were, through disproportionality, recklessness

9 or simple intent, as alleged, criminal acts for which this accused bears

10 responsibility.

11 Vukovar in Eastern Slavonia, at the top of your plans and maps,

12 destroyed with massive loss of life, followed by the awful event where the

13 hospital was emptied and between 200 and 300 men from that hospital

14 executed. Vukovar perhaps an example of how, over time, the JNA made the

15 fateful decision to collaborate with or to incorporate what were called

16 volunteers, often men with no business serving in the army at all, or

17 paramilitaries such as Arkan.

18 Now, the limitations of time quite appropriate and proper for a

19 case like this lead to a selection of charges that we must be careful do

20 not give any incorrect impression.

21 Vukovar and Dubrovnik are towns - cities - identified as under

22 attack, but there were others, and that should be remembered; Zadar,

23 Osijek, Vinkovci in East Slavonia, and other smaller towns similarly. The

24 major and the notorious events - for example, Vukovar - should not obscure

25 the fact that villages in these areas and the area of Dubrovnik even, were

1 plundered and destroyed with the populations fleeing. And their stories,

2 although they may not be before you in great detail, their accounts should

3 not be overlooked.

4 There was, of course, no conceivable reason for gangs, criminal

5 gangs like Arkan's, to be involved in the way they were in this war.

6 Groups that had, as the evidence will reveal, continuing support from the

7 accused, indicative, indeed, of criminal intent. And there can be no

8 doubt, as a witness at a meeting with Cyrus Vance will reveal, there can

9 be no doubt that this accused was confronted in the strongest terms with

10 the detail of what Arkan did.

11 In September, while this assault was being perpetrated, the

12 Bosnian Serbs were themselves establishing autonomous districts covering

13 most of Bosnia, similar to what the Serbs had done. At this stage, you

14 will hear of the degree of contact between this accused and those Bosnian

15 Serbs.

16 As we move in this summary from or to the time when I shall leave

17 Croatia, it may be worth having in mind this: that many of the worst

18 crimes in Croatia happened either sometimes near the end of combat but

19 certainly quite unrelated to military roles and were pure crime. The

20 Vukovar Hospital, the Vocin massacre on the day of the Serb withdrawal,

21 the killings of the elderly in Skabrnje after a ceasefire, and the very

22 worst of the shelling in Dubrovnik which happened on the day before the

23 ceasefire.

24 We reach October 1991, a bad and significant month where patterns

25 may be discerned, patterns that inevitably speak of a plan. The JNA had

1 started to incorporate volunteers of the type I've already described,

2 began cooperating closely with Arkan, and around Dubrovnik we will find

3 officers of the JNA not only tolerating but leading the plunder and

4 destruction of village after village while indiscriminate shelling was

5 claiming lives.

6 At the same sort of time, in Bosnia, any appearance of real peace

7 may have been deceptive, for intercepted telephone calls will show the

8 full involvement of the Bosnian Serb leadership in the Croatian war:

9 sending volunteers and recruits, touring the front lines, the Bosnian SDS

10 party finalising its plans for seizing power and imposing ethnic

11 separation, Karadzic warning that Muslims would disappear.

12 And we will hear of documentary evidence, or see documentary

13 evidence, showing that the Serb preparation for taking power was at the

14 same time a preparation for ethnic separation, something, as we perhaps

15 can imagine and will see most clearly from a map, inconceivable without

16 large movements of population.

17 In Belgrade, the Serbian bloc abandoned legality and seized

18 control of effective power under, effectively, this accused as, for

19 example, Mr. Mesic will say. And a pattern will develop of activities on

20 the ground, both in Croatia and then Bosnia, with which the Chamber will

21 already be familiar from what happened in Kosovo years later. A pattern

22 of Serb forces surrounding and shelling villages, often that being the

23 JNA; entry of the villages often by Territorial Defence, police, or

24 paramilitaries, killing sometimes a few, sometimes many; terror tactics to

25 drive out the unwanted population, expelling survivors, looting homes, and

1 destroying what was left with explosives and fire; an overall process

2 operated as if a single weapon achieving a single objective greater and

3 worse than the individual and component killings or other acts. And the

4 issue, of course, for this Trial Chamber is who was able to operate this

5 weapon? Who influenced its operation, both for this indictment and of

6 course at the other material times?

7 The Prosecution say that the systematic and organised way in which

8 attacks against non-Serb civilian populations in Croatia were carried out

9 revealed a carefully designed scheme and strategy within an overall plan

10 that may be laid at the door of this accused.

11 May we look at map 4, please. The ambitions of the Serbs in

12 Croatia were not entirely realised. This map shows in blue the declared

13 independent areas but in red the areas that they in fact were successful

14 in occupying.

15 In Bosnia, we will see we have census material that goes to show

16 the degree of success of the Bosnian Serbs' operations. We have no such

17 census material for the post-war effects in Croatia because by the time

18 any other census was held, people had moved back. But this map gives an

19 idea of the degree to which they were successful in changing the ethnic

20 balance.

21 Can we turn now to map 5 and to Bosnia.

22 A similar system of legend with colours showing ethnic

23 majorities: Red for Serbs, green for Muslims, and blue for Croats, with

24 intermediate colours representing areas where there were no clear

25 majorities. A very varied map.

1 The top map, if we can just focus on that, shows the position in

2 1991. And if the usher would be good enough to lay the transparency on

3 top of it, please, which you don't have in your papers I'm afraid, I have

4 it here. This is a transparency which repeats what we were able to see on

5 map 2. And the transparency can be available to the Court at any time it

6 wants to see it.

7 We can see the overall composition of ethnic groups at the

8 beginning of 1991. And what's clear, apart from the absolute variety of

9 composition, is that although there is a large Serb area west or centre of

10 the plan, there's no connection of Serb majority areas between that area

11 and Serbia itself. Indeed, there's the gap at the top, when you put both

12 maps together, still a gap in which, of course, features Brcko.

13 Further, if you look at the eastern border of this combined map of

14 Croatia and Bosnia, the eastern border, you can see an area of green;

15 clear Muslim majority. No suggestion, none could ever be made, that the

16 residents of those eastern areas, any more perhaps than those of the area

17 that lay between the western and eastern parts coloured in red at the top,

18 had any desire to leave their territory.

19 So that's the picture of Bosnia with Croatia. We can take the

20 overhead -- the transparency off now. Thank you.

21 That's the overall picture. This, then, the picture of Bosnia

22 itself.

23 The crimes under the Statute charged in respect of the accused's

24 involvement in Bosnia of course include genocide, contrary to Article 4.

25 A crime that needs careful handling, for it creates strong emotions, is

1 regarded as possessed in the language of sufferers of grave crimes,

2 whether those crimes are genocide or not, and a crime that it has to be

3 borne in mind may sometimes be less serious in terms of human suffering

4 than crimes that cannot be categorised as genocide, and thus it's our duty

5 as Prosecutors to keep the most careful and watchful eye on the evidence

6 available to prove genocide, to have an eye to the law related to it. And

7 it will be for the Chamber to decide in due course whether the offences

8 charged here were, as the Prosecution asserts, crimes of genocide insofar

9 as that is charged or whether this is persecution by destruction of

10 individuals. But I repeat, in fact in terms of comparative human gravity,

11 there is no guarantee that one crime or the other will always and

12 necessarily be the worst. But we will submit at the conclusion of the

13 evidence that the accused intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslim community

14 in part in order to fulfil the aims of the objective of the criminal

15 enterprise where prosecutions would be insufficient to achieve the desired

16 result, or alternatively, that genocide was the natural and foreseeable

17 consequence of the joint criminal enterprise, forcibly and permanently to

18 remove non-Serbs from territory, or that the accused was an accomplice in

19 that he knew that some of the principal perpetrators were committing

20 genocide and he took or undertook acts to assist in their commission.

21 And of course, as the Chamber will recognise, an alternative

22 approach under 7(3) of the Statute is that, as a superior, he knew or had

23 reason to know that genocide was about to be committed or had been

24 committed and he took no steps to prevent or punish the perpetrators.

25 In all cases, this accused had an influential role over other

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1 members of the joint criminal enterprise identified, of course, in the

2 indictment. And he used his control and influence over elements of the

3 JNA, or the VJ as it was to become, and the MUP, over individual

4 politicians and over the political and military leadership of the

5 Republika Srpska as that was, in due course, to be declared.

6 In all cases he utilised the many resources at his disposal to

7 ensure efficient execution of the schemes designed to achieve the overall

8 plan. He had a fundamental role in the planning, the organisation, the

9 financing, the direction of the plan. He was thus an essential

10 participant in the criminal enterprise to the extent that, without him, it

11 is hard to conceive of the enterprise or enterprises happening.

12 Briefly the facts and the crimes charged. The autonomous areas

13 here, which we'll see on a map in a few minutes, were declared in

14 September 1991 but are probably less significant or certainly less

15 significant here than the particular municipalities of which you will hear

16 detailed evidence.

17 The pattern of events in all municipalities was similar. In some,

18 the non-Serbs were so cowed that they offered no resistance and the Serbs

19 were simply able to seize control. In others, there was resistance, often

20 quite weak, where Serb forces, the JNA and paramilitary forces with

21 special units of the Serb MUP and units of Bosnian Serbs working as one

22 could attack with criminal disregard for civilian life. And in all these

23 varieties, with or without resistance, the population was faced with

24 expulsion, imprisonment in inhumane conditions, frequently of those

25 holding key positions in local communities, torture, sexual assaults,

1 killings in small or large numbers and with collateral effects, finding

2 themselves sometimes compelled to wear armbands for not being Serbs,

3 facing other persecutions, facing loss of jobs, seeing their mosques and

4 their churches destroyed.

5 Factors significant for the accused's involvement include that in

6 some areas the participation of forces and individuals were closely

7 associated with or subordinated to the accused or to his inner circle. In

8 other areas, the Prosecution will argue that the accused incurred

9 liability through his participation in the joint criminal enterprise of

10 which these acts were a consequence.

11 While we have the map in front of us, can I turn to two particular

12 groups of municipalities that comprise perhaps the bulk of those the

13 Prosecution intends to deal with in detail. It may actually be helpful if

14 I invite you to look, at this stage, at the next map. It may be out of

15 order, but can we look at map 6, please.

16 While that's going on the overhead projector, the Chamber will

17 recall that originally some 47 municipalities were charged. And again,

18 for reasons of absolutely proper judicial economy, decisions have been

19 made only to deal in detail with certain municipalities, to deal in much

20 less detail with another number of municipalities, and finally, for there

21 to be a third category where only demographic evidence will be presented.

22 The map now on the overhead projector shows that plan of ours.

23 The strong blue colour is in respect of the municipalities, primary

24 municipalities as we've described them, where full evidence will be given.

25 The lighter blue but solid colour represents those for which evidence will

1 be presented on selected egregious crimes and in respect of matters that

2 link to the accused. The municipalities with vertical stripes are those

3 where only demographic evidence will be presented.

4 So the Chamber will see that the selection provides a spread - we

5 hope a fair spread - but covers, and I now turn to these two particular

6 groups of municipalities, the Drina Valley in the east.

7 I spoke of the SAOs and said that they were of less importance.

8 It may be valuable for the Chamber for reference purposes to have a

9 knowledge of what were the declared SAOs, and you can see them here; the

10 Krajina, Northern Bosnia, Semberija, Romania, Birac, and Herzegovina. And

11 for what it's worth, the Chamber will observe that in the west, Bihac was

12 not even within a declared area. And as we come to it, those

13 municipalities in the Drina Valley or some of them - Zvornik, Bratunac,

14 Srebrenica and Visegrad - scenes of some of the worst crimes, were also

15 not in any declared municipality, but then the Chamber will recall from

16 map 5 that they were, of course, areas without any Serb majority.

17 In the Drina Valley, starting at Bijeljina, Zvornik, Bratunac,

18 Srebrenica and Visegrad, we discover municipalities that had this in

19 common: Serb minority except possibly in Bijeljina where it was known -

20 and there was a map produced by the accused's own party in January 1992

21 that shows this - it's clear that these areas had no interest in joining a

22 Serb state, whether called Yugoslavia or under any other name. They were

23 all taken early in the war, and they were all taken with the participation

24 of many forces from Serbia with close links to the accused and his inner

25 circle, such as Arkan.

1 They were taken by elements of the JNA commanded by individuals

2 such as Ojdanic or by agents of the Serbian police DB, and special forces

3 of the Serbian MUP and other paramilitary forces from Serbia.

4 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Nice, what's the total number of

5 municipalities on which evidence other than demographic evidence will be

6 presented?

7 MR. NICE: The current, as our list reveals, the current total is

8 of 14 municipalities strong blue, 24 municipalities paler blue.

9 JUDGE ROBINSON: That's 38.

10 MR. NICE: Yes.

11 JUDGE ROBINSON: Out of?

12 MR. NICE: Forty-seven.

13 JUDGE ROBINSON: Forty-seven.

14 MR. NICE: But, of course, in the paler blue colours, it's only

15 individual pieces of material evidence that we will lay before you. And

16 incidentally, although we have had - for which we are grateful - a month's

17 pause before the time when we must make further and give further

18 consideration to and make further adjustment to the indictments, there may

19 be further reductions.

20 Returning to the Drina Valley municipalities, most or all were the

21 scenes of mass executions or mass expulsions. They were places where

22 authority was handed to the SDS party. They were places where crimes were

23 heavily reported by international officials and the international press so

24 thus brought to the attention of the accused.

25 Visegrad itself saw paramilitaries from Serbia, mass killings,

1 people being burned alive, and indeed saw, at one stage, Colonel Jovanovic

2 addressing a group of several thousand Muslims gathered in the football

3 stadium, informing them that the widely feared White Eagles were there

4 under his command. The forces had entered the town in the face of rising

5 tension, it has to be accepted, between the Serbs and Muslims because of

6 something that the Muslims had done. But the Prosecution say the gravest

7 crimes were committed.

8 Bosanski Samac, elsewhere on this map, on the left, taken over by

9 special forces of the Serbian MUP on the 17th of April under the overall

10 command of Simatovic with local Serb police and the JNA involved, saw the

11 local SDS installed as the authority, imposing a regime of egregious

12 persecutions and armbands to be worn by non-Serbs, with mass detentions

13 and killings. That's over in the Krajina.

14 Brcko, the area to which I referred earlier as being between any

15 Serb-dominated areas, indeed an area of Muslim plurality, was attacked by

16 mixed Serb forces including paramilitaries, with local Serb units and JNA

17 members, suffered ethnic cleansing and summary executions in the presence

18 of special forces of the Serbian MUP.

19 Western Bosnia, sometimes known as the Krajina, three adjacent

20 municipalities targeted in what was a campaign of persecution or cleansing

21 in the early summer of 1992. Bosanska Krupa attacked by the JNA and other

22 Serb forces - you can see it there - with mass detentions, executions, and

23 cleansing. Prijedor suffering mass cleansing through the summer, with men

24 sent to the famous infamous camps of Omarska, Keraterm, Manjaca and

25 Trnopolje, with severe abuse and mass executions. And Sanski Most, you

1 also see a plurality of Muslims here, the JNA involved with the defence,

2 Territorial Defence, and local police in repeated mass killings and

3 detentions in camps, just as in Prijedor. Mass expulsion of the remaining

4 non-Serbs with executions by Arkan and his men, Arkan now perhaps being

5 countable as effectively part of the Serbian DB, or at least later so to

6 be counted.

7 Sarajevo. The accused has told the Chamber that he opposed the

8 lengthy bombardment of Sarajevo which happened between 1992 and 1995. At

9 the same time as he may have been publicly opposing the attack on the

10 civilian population of Sarajevo, the VJ was paying the very officers who

11 were in command of the forces responsible for the attack. And the

12 Prosecution will present evidence of that financial support given to

13 offices including, in particular, General Galic, commander of the

14 Sarajevo-Romanija Corps from September 1992 until August 1994.

15 These campaigns, it has to be borne in mind, and their consequences

16 continued, the suffering continued through this armed conflict

17 notwithstanding the presence of UNPROFOR on the territory from 1992 and

18 until the Dayton Agreements of 1995.

19 But of course, one cannot turn from a summary of Bosnia without

20 some words about the safe havens or enclaves. The military campaigns by

21 the JNA and the army of Republika Srpska in 1992 had the effect of forcing

22 fleeing Muslim civilians into particular pockets which came to be known as

23 safe areas; Bihac, Gorazde, Srebrenica and Zepa. Access roads being

24 controlled by that same Bosnian Serb army. The Bosnian Serb political and

25 military authorities adopted a policy of obstructing medical and food

1 supplies into the enclaves, of subjecting the besieged civilians inside to

2 indiscriminate shelling and sniping. All of which were persecutory

3 activities designed, in the words of a VRS directive we will look at in

4 the course of the trial -- I have available if the Chamber wants to see it

5 now, but I'll take it shortly. In the words of a directive from Karadzic

6 creating or to create "an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no

7 hope for further survival or life of the inhabitants."

8 Your Honours, just give me one minute, please.

9 Humanitarian and other aid agencies are in a position to describe

10 the intense negotiations that were conducted with the Bosnian Serb leaders

11 and with the leaders in Serbia, including this accused, for access to the

12 enclaves. But often even after access was granted, there would be

13 restrictions on humanitarian aid, there would be harassment of the

14 residents and continuing unreasonable behaviour, adding to the misery of

15 those living there. So that the enclaves took on increasingly camp-like

16 characteristics with large numbers of Muslims trapped in small,

17 well-defined areas, suffering shortage of housing, living in unsanitary

18 conditions, without food, being unable to move without indiscriminate

19 shelling, finding their hospitals overcrowded, people suffering

20 amputations without anaesthesia, death from infection all being

21 commonplace.

22 The civilian population knew that they could not escape, and as

23 one witness observed, the impression created in the civilian population of

24 this particular enclave was of a relentless and unstoppable momentum that

25 could only lead to the eventual death of everyone inside.

1 Srebrenica and Zepa were eventually taken by the VRS in the summer

2 of 1995, the other enclaves remaining within the control of the Bosnian

3 government throughout the war.

4 So far as Srebrenica itself is concerned: The enclave established

5 in 1993, attacks on Srebrenica, from time to time the VJ intervening, and

6 it has to be accepted, there being operations from Srebrenica by the army

7 of Bosnia-Herzegovina, all led in July 1995 to Karadzic and Mladic

8 deciding to wipe it out by force, killing all the men they found. No

9 doubt, of course, the Dutch report will be considered for admission into

10 evidence on this topic in due course.

11 The accused was linked to Srebrenica in two primary ways. The VJ

12 continued its support for the VRS. We will have, for example, Krstic's,

13 the commander's, VJ ID card found on him when he was arrested, as an

14 exhibit.

15 THE INTERPRETER: Could Mr. Nice please slow down. Thank you.

16 MR. NICE: He's also linked by the presence and involvement of

17 Serb MUP forces in the events of and surrounding Srebrenica.

18 And so throughout, the VJ, a successor to the JNA, was seen to be

19 contributing to crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina through its

20 relationship with the VRS. Throughout the war, it would continue to

21 support that army without real interruption. Without the support of

22 Bosnian Serb forces, it would not have been possible for -- without this

23 support, the Bosnian Serb forces would not have been able to continue

24 their bombardment of Sarajevo, their dreadful assault on the enclaves

25 would not have been able to perpetrate the genocide in Srebrenica.

1 There's one exhibit that it might be helpful to look at. It's

2 available in full, but we can just look at an extract. It's a November

3 order of Ratko Mladic. If we can just lay it on the overhead projector,

4 please.

5 It comes in several pages, Your Honour, but we'll just look at the

6 extract, if we may, to save time. You can see it's a document dated the

7 19th of November. Subparagraph d) on the appropriate page reads as

8 follows as an instruction to the Drina corps: "From its present

9 positions, its main forces shall persistently defend Visegrad ... Zvornik

10 and the corridor, while the rest of its forces in the wider Podrinje

11 region shall exhaust the enemy, inflict the heaviest possible losses on

12 him and force him to leave the Birac, Zepa, and Gorazde areas together

13 with the Muslim population." Words could hardly be clearer in their

14 intent.

15 THE INTERPRETER: The interpreters kindly request that Mr. Nice

16 please slow down. Thank you.

17 MR. NICE: I will indeed slow down, and I apologise.

18 In summary and in addition to show the involvement of this accused

19 via bodies over which he had influence over or control, the Chamber will

20 learn of personnel support provided to the Bosnian Serbs. From the moment

21 of its creation, the Bosnian Serb army was administered as to many

22 significant personnel functions in Belgrade; salaries of all officers paid

23 from Belgrade - there were 12.000 such officers in July 1992 - a programme

24 of financial and other incentives to encourage VJ officers to serve in the

25 VRS; a system whereby even disputes in the calculation of retirement

1 benefits of these very VRS officers resolved in accordance with

2 Yugoslavian law.

3 Training was provided; the VJ retaining a significant role in who

4 would fight in the VRS in that way. We have one case of an officer of the

5 VRS transferred to Serbia for training for a period of two years, it being

6 the VJ, not the VRS, just simply as an example, issuing the order

7 directing his change of assignment. And even during the period of the

8 border closing which we'll hear about in evidence, in August 1994, we will

9 also hear of military installations in the FRY, the republic, being made

10 available for training of VRS personnel. And of course, there was direct

11 military activity, even after the technical withdrawal of the JNA, the

12 army returning on specific occasions to fight in campaigns.

13 In addition, there was supply and support. And it's interesting

14 to note that the accused, in his complaint to the Belgrade court on his

15 arrest there in April 2001, openly admitted the significant level of

16 support he procured for the VRS, support he is alleged in his own country

17 to have illegally diverted from resources of the republic.

18 So far as supply and support are concerned, General Mladic told

19 the Republika Srpska Assembly that 90 per cent of the infantry ammunition

20 consumed had been supplied by the JNA and the VJ and that after that

21 technical withdrawal, or that withdrawal, over 11.000 tonnes of military

22 supplies were provided by the VJ, an amount that would have required

23 hundreds of trucks to cross backwards and forwards from Serbia. And

24 indeed, this Tribunal's Appeals Chamber, in the case of Tadic, recognised

25 the importance of the relationship between the two bodies when it stated:

1 "The armed forces of the Republika Srpska were to be regarded as acting

2 under the overall control of and on behalf of the FRY." That to be found

3 at paragraph 162 of the appeals judgement.

4 Maps 8 and 9, please. Your Honours will find in your papers maps

5 that extract material from what we've seen on map 5, to which I will

6 return in a minute, and pick out those primary municipalities, as we've

7 called them. When the title reads "Primary Municipalities of the

8 Milosevic-Related Area" it should be "Milosevic Trial-Related Area," and

9 these are 14. One can see, looking at the two parts of map 8, the first

10 part on then the bottom part, the distribution of ethnic majorities as it

11 was in 1991; green, mixed colour, red, green, and so on.

12 If we then look at the bottom map, we can see what was achieved in

13 turning areas that had no interest in being Serb states into maps that

14 could be coloured red, as at 1997.

15 Incidentally, the other line on this map is the Dayton line and

16 deals with the current distribution of authority between Republika Srpska

17 and the federation, to which I may say something else -- on respect of

18 which I may say something else in a minute.

19 So thus, therefore, what was achieved by this campaign? Ethnic

20 cleansing; what we can see pictorially and of which we will learn about

21 from witnesses.

22 Your Honours, this Tribunal is, of course, not political. It

23 doesn't need to concern itself with or to explain how it was that the

24 accused was left to recover after Dayton, where this border was

25 identified, as an apparently respectable member of the community. In any

1 event, participators well knew -- participators and observers well knew

2 what he was and what he'd been doing. And the Chamber will remember from

3 my earlier opening what Mr. Eagleburger had said so much earlier in

4 events: The short fact is that the crimes of this accused long revealed

5 -- long suspected have now been revealed by evidence.

6 And a word or so about evidence, categories of evidence, and about

7 the trial process, and I will be done.

8 Evidence in relation to this accused comes from various sources.

9 And it has to be borne in mind that criminals, or politicians who do acts

10 that are or are subsequently revealed as being criminal, don't leave

11 traces behind them. They don't leave paper trails. That's why, of

12 course, this accused operated in that curiously empty office, dealing with

13 people on a one-to-one basis so that individuals could not know what was

14 being said to the others. Maybe.

15 For such individuals, it may be -- as this accused, it may be

16 helpful to think of the available witnesses as coming in circles that

17 surround him. First, there will be the close circle of people, some of

18 whom, for example President Lilic - or ex-President Lilic, sometime

19 President Lilic - who we will be calling, we hope, quite soon. Or Mr.

20 Mesic. People who can be advanced to the Chamber as witnesses whose

21 evidence will be capable of being accepted in full.

22 But others of this close circle may be people who will have their

23 own interests, personal or other, to serve, and who may not be inclined to

24 tell the whole truth. And those close witnesses, particularly the ones

25 who may have their own interests to serve, are really rather like standing

1 stones surrounding the accused.

2 Next out from them in the circles of witnesses, there are others;

3 military commanders at various levels, political people at various levels,

4 associates of one kind or another, who may be able to tell the whole truth

5 as they saw it but whose vision of the accused will necessarily be

6 limited, not least because it may be obscured by some of those closer to

7 him who will want to obscure the full detail. But that next circle of

8 witnesses will be able to provide some light on the accused. They will

9 also be able to look out to the crimes that were committed.

10 And then there is the outer circle of witnesses, witnesses who

11 must be available to the Chamber, although we hope that they will be able

12 to be taken for the most part shortly, perhaps in writing, witnesses who

13 will deal with the crimes that were committed but who may be able to say

14 little or nothing about the accused beyond what they say about identifying

15 units committing crimes that may be traceable by one route or another to

16 him.

17 And so all those witnesses provide differing shafts of light in

18 circumstances where it is, whatever a different audience might hope or

19 think, unlikely that there will be an individual witness who will be able

20 to tell the whole truth about this man. And I make that point because it

21 is important for those watching this trial to recognise that the hard and

22 detailed work that this Chamber has to do is the work of putting together

23 pieces of evidence that will come from different sources. There are the

24 internationals, there are the experts, each of whom will be able to

25 provide but a small vision or view of the accused. It is, of course, the

1 composition of those views that, in due course, will establish the guilt

2 of this man.

3 And I return to one particular point about one particular category

4 of witnesses, those of the inner circle who may not tell the truth.

5 Should they simply, because they may not tell the whole truth, not be

6 called? One can imagine perhaps in any real or hypothetical case of a top

7 leader being tried on his own, the Chamber asking itself the question:

8 Would we rather proceed with or without hearing from witnesses so close

9 that they might have their own, in the vernacular, fish to fry, or would

10 we rather simply proceed without exercising our own judgement on those

11 people?

12 We would invite the Chamber to say that it is obviously

13 preferable, wherever possible, to do as we have already done with one or

14 two witnesses and to call witnesses from that inner circle. We can't know

15 if this accused, who doesn't respect the Court, will call any evidence at

16 all. We judge that it is wise and sensible to call as many of the inner

17 circle as we can, confident that the Chamber will be in a position to

18 assess, and we may be able to assist in that assessment, where the truth

19 lies; confident that if inner circle witnesses turn up, as one may have

20 done or be thought to have done, parrot agreement in cross-examination to

21 propositions that were untrue, confident that those untruths can be

22 proved.

23 There should be no hiding place for witnesses who may prefer not

24 to give evidence but who can, and of course morally should, provide a

25 fuller truth for this Tribunal.

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1 Can we return, please, to map 5. We've only really looked at the

2 top part of map 5, but now we can look at the top and the bottom part of

3 it together, bearing in mind that the extracted form is also available for

4 you in map 8.

5 We're going to hear, in due course, of the statistics of deaths

6 and transfers connected with Croatia and with Bosnia. They're not

7 depicted on these maps which show things in a more graphic way.

8 The top map shows the -- I should say again we can't do the same

9 exercise for Croatia because the census figures aren't available for the

10 post-war position. But the top map shows the varied, the untidy, the

11 human face of Bosnia as it was before this conflict.

12 The bottom map -- we may now look at that, please -- shows the

13 much tidier map with clear Serb majorities, clear Muslim majorities, clear

14 Croat majorities, the Croat and Muslim majorities being composed within

15 the federation, split as to its governance, as the Chamber knows.

16 That tidy map was sought by various individuals, the Chamber may

17 be quite satisfied, including this accused, but it was a tidy map bought

18 by thousands of killings, innumerable acts of inhumanity, and countless

19 acts of ethnic cleansing. Were the map for Croatia available in similar

20 form, it would show a similar change from comparative untidiness to

21 tidiness.

22 It is the inhumanity that led to those changes into which we must

23 now inquire.

24 JUDGE MAY: We will adjourn now. 20 minutes.

25 --- Recess taken at 10.19 a.m.

1 --- On resuming at 10.43 a.m.

2 [Defence Opening Statement]

3 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

4 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] First of all a technical question.

5 Can we clarify that, Mr. May? As for my statement, you have restricted my

6 time to three hours. It is exactly quarter of eleven right now. I would

7 like to state that, already speaking in net terms of time, as for today,

8 20 minutes are missing. Please bear that in mind so that I would get

9 those remaining 20 minutes at the beginning of tomorrow's session.

10 JUDGE MAY: Yes. You will have the time which you've been

11 allocated.

12 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well. Before I start to speak,

13 I would like to have a cassette played first. Could you please start

14 playing the tape now.

15 [Videotape played]

16 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic -- just let the tape stop for a moment.

17 Mr. Milosevic, there's no point playing this to us unless we have a

18 translation. We've got no translation of it into one of the languages.

19 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, I assume that you can get an

20 interpretation from Serbian, because this statement of Simon Wiesenthal

21 has subtitles in the Serbian language and it won't be a problem for the

22 interpreters to read that. It's very brief. The rest of the text is

23 either in English or with a translation into English if the original is in

24 Dutch.

25 JUDGE MAY: We will make an inquiry of the interpreters as to

1 whether that's possible or not.

2 Could the interpreters let us know whether we can follow the

3 course which the accused is suggesting, translating from the subtitles?

4 THE INTERPRETER: The interpreters will do their best.

5 JUDGE MAY: Thank you. Very well. Replay the tape again, please.

6 [Videotape played]

7 THE INTERPRETER: [Voiceover]

8 "SPEAKER: I know. I know. This was written by Hermann Neuburg

9 [phoen] the East/West task. And Hitler sent him to Croatia. After the

10 war, he was sentenced in Yugoslavia to 20 years in prison, and then he

11 returned. Then he wrote a book about his conversations with Ante Markovic

12 and the rest. They said to him that we have a problem with the Serbs:

13 One-third of them have to die, one-third have to become Catholics, and

14 one-third can remain alive. That was their programme.

15 "SPEAKER: The programme objectives of the HDZ are nothing else

16 but a renewal for the Ustasha Independent State of Croatia. However, they

17 forget that this was not only a quisling state but it was also an

18 expression of the wishes of the Croat people to have their own state as

19 well as of various other factors, in this case, Hitler's Germany that

20 wanted to introduce a new order in Europe and to change borders.

21 Therefore, the independent state of Croatia was not a mere caprice of the

22 axis powers but it was also due to various historical factors.

23 "SPEAKER: I saw them all over; Munich, Paris. For them, the war

24 was not over. They never felt defeated.

25 "SPEAKER: Our friends the Serbs, who are persuading and they had

1 bitten too. They never left their Belgrade pasaluk. They never crossed

2 the Sava or the Danube. They had bitten Vojvodina after the year 1918.

3 They are biting Macedonia. They are biting Montenegro. They are well

4 into biting at Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now they have started biting

5 Croatia. Are we going to permit that? Are we Croats not capable of

6 taking to arms and, therefore, pro patrium?

7 "SPEAKER: And some people, some individuals in Croatia and

8 especially abroad who were not friends of Croatia, were saying that there

9 shouldn't have been a war, that we were also guilty of war. I was saying

10 and I say, yes, there would be no war if we had given up our aim, creating

11 a self-reliant and independent state of Croatia.

12 "SPEAKER: I think that I have fulfilled my task. There is no

13 more Yugoslavia. Thank you.

14 "SPEAKER: Regardless of where they are, to all of them, male and

15 female, young and old, jihad, on the path of God for the liberation of our

16 Muslim people here in Bosnia and wherever they may be. It is God's order

17 to us and human obligation.

18 "SPEAKER: Which held the country together now became a target for

19 those who wanted to break it apart. At a Croatian separatist rally in

20 Split in May of 1991 demonstrators strangled a young soldier of the

21 federal army and then tossed his dead body onto the street. This and

22 similar events seemed to bear out predictions by the US Central

23 Intelligence Agency.

24 "SPEAKER: The CIA said in 1990 October, that Yugoslavia faced

25 break-up, probably violent, as early as six months from the time of the

1 report, and nobody paid any attention to it in the higher echelons of

2 government.

3 "SPEAKER: By June of 1991, however, US Secretary of State James

4 Baker decided to make one attempt to prevent a disaster. He flew to

5 Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, to confront leaders of the six

6 republics.

7 "SPEAKER: He said, Don't any of you take steps that are not

8 agreed on by the others.

9 "SPEAKER: However, Milan Kucan and Franjo Tudjman, leaders of the

10 Slovenia and Croatian republics, were confident that they could ignore the

11 US Secretary of State. They declared their independence just days later,

12 on June 25th. Because they could count on the support of German Foreign

13 Minister Genscher and Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mak. The cycle of

14 violence which would destroy Yugoslavia began when Slovene President Milan

15 Kucan ordered his troops to seize customs posts on the Yugoslav borders

16 with Austria and Italy and the Slovene capital of Ljubljana. Yugoslav

17 flags were taken down and replaced with Slovenian flags.

18 "SPEAKER: The Slovenians thought they had a right to take down

19 those flags, the end of an internationally-recognised friendship. I don't

20 think that for a moment Belgrade expected there would be violent

21 resistance.

22 "SPEAKER: German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher flew to

23 the Austrian border with Yugoslavia to join President Kucan and warned the

24 federal army against efforts to maintain control of federal borders.

25 Kucan ordered his forces to fire on Yugoslav army troops, including those

1 who carried no live ammunition. Faced with international opposition led

2 by Germany, Yugoslav President Markovic ordered the federal army to

3 withdraw from Slovenia without a serious attempt to counter separatist

4 forces. Slovene leaders conducted a masterful public relations effort.

5 Foreign reporters were kept occupied in an underground press centre, with

6 briefings that suggested that Slovene forces had defeated the fourth

7 largest army in Europe. Journalists in the press centre routinely

8 reported as news fanciful briefings from Slovene officials on various

9 battles, including some that had never happened.

10 "SPEAKER: What was going on in Slovenia, where the Slovenians

11 declared independence and set up customs posts on the road, tended to be

12 seen and portrayed on television as the Yugoslav army acting aggressively

13 against Slovenia as opposed to the Slovenians declaring independence.

14 "SPEAKER: The manipulation of the foreign press corps set the

15 tone for new wars of secession in Croatia and Bosnia. Repeatedly, the JNA

16 was described as an occupying force dominated by Serbs. The reality was

17 different, however. The army's Chief of Staff, Veljko Kadijevic, was half

18 Croatian, half Serb; air force chief Zvonko Jurijevic was Croatian, and

19 the commander of the navy, Stane Brovec, was Slovenia. If German and

20 Austrian leaders still believed that Slovenia and Croatia could be

21 separated from Yugoslavia without a wider war, the Americans strongly

22 believed otherwise.

23 "SPEAKER: Because we said if Yugoslavia does not break up

24 peacefully, there's going to be one hell of a civil war. It nevertheless

25 broke up non-peacefully. It broke up through the unilateral declaration

1 of independence by Slovenia and Croatia and the seizing by these two

2 countries, republics, of their border posts, which was an act of force and

3 which was an act that was in violation of the Helsinki principles. But

4 the European powers and the United States ultimately recognised Slovenia

5 and then Croatia and then Bosnia as independent countries and admitted

6 them to the United Nations. The real problem was that there was a

7 unilateral declaration of independence and a use of force to gain that

8 independence rather than a peaceful negotiation of independence, which is

9 the way it should have happened.

10 "SPEAKER: While most of Europe, including England, France and

11 Russia, opposed the break-up of Yugoslavia, only the Americans were strong

12 enough to oppose Germany.

13 "SPEAKER: The United States saw that Germany would have to be

14 largely responsible for the incorporation of Eastern Europe and Central

15 Europe into the West, because Germany was -- had a national interest; it

16 was its neighbour, its periphery, and it was financially the most powerful

17 country in Europe and had the resources to do it.

18 "SPEAKER: In the post-Cold War period, Germany wanted once again,

19 the evidence is very clear, to re-colonise Yugoslavia, to re-colonise the

20 Balkans. And the United States tied itself to German policy through its

21 need of German power and influence in stabilising Eastern Europe, Western

22 Europe through the exercise of dominion by the European Community, now the

23 European Union, and potentially eventually in the lands of the former

24 Soviet Union. The problem was that there was one very important country

25 standing in the way of this, and that was Yugoslavia.

1 "SPEAKER: While citizens of Croatia were initially divided over

2 whether to remain in Yugoslavia, the separatists were led by the most

3 extreme elements, remnants of the pro-Nazi Ustasha. As The New York Times

4 colonist A. N. Rosenthal would write, in World War II, Hitler had no

5 executioners more willing, no ally more passionate than the fascists of

6 Croatia. They are returning from 50 years ago from what should have been

7 their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler considered

8 Yugoslavia to be an artificial creation of the hated Versailles treaty

9 which ended World War I. To break it up, he set up a puppet state and

10 enlarged Croatia, which also included Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was the task

11 of top Muslim leaders who, with few exceptions, collaborated with Hitler

12 and the Croatians.

13 "SPEAKER: There was in occupied Bosnia, also under German

14 patronage, a strong Muslim wing which was very anti-Western. It was

15 represented internationally by the mufti of Jerusalem. You heard of his

16 viciously anti-Western views, and he was brought to Sarajevo and mobbed by

17 enthusiastic crowds.

18 "SPEAKER: After the war ended, Croatia and Bosnia were never

19 de-Nazified. Not only were there no apologies to the Serbs, Jews, and

20 Gypsies, but attitudes remained frozen under the surface of Tito's

21 official policy of socialist fraternity amongst peoples. Following the

22 death of Yugoslavia's long-time leader Tito in 1980, right-wing emigre

23 organisations took out an advertisement on the opinion page of the New

24 York Times, stating that Yugoslavia would not survive and offering a map

25 which included all of Bosnia as part of Croatia. It was a map nearly

1 identical to the Nazi-created Independent State of Croatia. By 1990, as

2 communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe, Croatian separatists pinned

3 their hopes on a former communist general named Franjo Tudjman who had

4 been gaoled for excessive nationalism by Tito in the 1970s.

5 "SPEAKER: You know, I met him very soon after he came out of

6 communist gaol, while Tito was still alive. He had then championed the

7 racialist form of nationalism, and when he came out of prison, instead of

8 doing what you would think a dissident would do and say to hell with the

9 conformists, he said, Oh, what are we going to do with the regime? It is

10 those horrible Serbs who are repressing us and the Serbs are responsible

11 for everything and the Serbs are guilty and the Serbs began it all.

12 "SPEAKER: Tudjman received important help from outside Croatia in

13 his rise to power.

14 "SPEAKER: The German secret service was enormously active in

15 Croatia and in all of Yugoslavia, trying in the '80s to build bridges

16 between what were called the national communists, Stipe Mesic, Franjo

17 Tudjman, in Yugoslavia and the Ustasha revanchist organisations which

18 lived in the diaspora of Croatia, that is to say all of the people of

19 weight and influence who had fled the former Nazi puppet state in 1945.

20 "SPEAKER: Tudjman found it useful to make -- come to terms with

21 them and because he was running on this xenophobic platform, there was

22 really no difficulty about it. What was difficult was when he was trying

23 to sell his cause in the West. And he managed to, partly because he had a

24 very good lobby, a very effective and much more effective than the Serbian

25 lobby, and partly because he covered up his intentions.

1 "SPEAKER: Tudjman often embarrassed his most important

2 supporters, such as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. For instance, Tudjman

3 had written a book minimising the crimes of the Ustasha and claiming that

4 the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated. 'Thank God my wife is neither a

5 Serb nor Jew,' he told one interviewer. For the national flag, Tudjman

6 chose a replica of the chequerboard emblem that flew over the Croatian

7 death camps of World War II where Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies were

8 exterminated.

9 "Tudjman's anti-Semitic views were covered beneath rhetoric

10 acceptable to the West. With the help of Ruder and Finn, a high-powered

11 American public relations firm, The New York Times found space for General

12 Tudjman's new and misleading image on its opinion page. In the article,

13 Tudjman promised that there would be no purges against the Serbian

14 population in Croatia if it separated from Yugoslavia.

15 "SPEAKER: Tudjman's racist slogan. Croatia was for the Croats,

16 that was his slogan, a racist slogan, Croatia for the Croats, with the

17 implication people who weren't Croats, and there was a very substantial

18 Serb and Yugoslav mixed variety, didn't feel that they had any

19 -- they were in fact second-class citizens, and he recognised them as

20 such.

21 "SPEAKER: A full six months before fighting broke out, Serbs were

22 purged from positions in government, news organisations and the police.

23 Their homes were dynamited in cities such as Zagreb, Zadar and Dubrovnik.

24 For the first time since World War II, Serbs in Eastern Croatia began to

25 flee across the Danube River.

1 "SPEAKER: Serbs working in Croatian cities were required to sign

2 loyalty oaths. Those who did not sign were fired; those who did sign,

3 were fired later. Serb homes, apartments, and businesses were attacked.

4 "SPEAKER: President of the Republic of Croatia, Mr. Franjo

5 Tudjman, allowed us for the first time to set up unarmed detachments under

6 the auspices of the HDZ.

7 "SPEAKER: Expulsion of Serbs in Croatia was removed by Tomislav

8 Mercep, a senior member of Tudjman's ruling party, the HDZ. Mercep would

9 later be identified by Croatian police reports as one of two Croatian

10 leaders who directed death squads that murdered hundreds of Serbian

11 civilians in Eastern Slavonia around Vukovar and Osijek in the fall of

12 1991. He received little press coverage in the West but Mercep was in

13 many ways the spark that set the fire of war in Slavonia, the disputed

14 region of Croatia where the Yugoslav war began. Mercep's co-leader of the

15 Croatian death squads was Vladimir Glavac, of Osijek. Unlike more

16 discreet members of the HDZ party Glavac made no secret of his

17 identification with the World War II Croatia Ustasha as he welcomed

18 returning Croatian prisoners of war.

19 "Feel free to say that you are Ustasha. You are and you have

20 come here.

21 "SPEAKER: Intellectuals were hailing Croatia as part of the New

22 Europe. Old and familiar forces were at work. Osijek became a magnet for

23 neo-fascist groups fighting with Glavac. They included British skinheads,

24 German and Austrian neo-fascists, and followers of the French extremist

25 Jean Marie Le Pen.

1 "SPEAKER: We'll leave for Zagreb to get orders from headquarters

2 but not from the regular Croatian army. We're going with the right wing

3 Croatian defence force. We'll leave for the front somewhere in Slavonia.

4 "SPEAKER: The United States, which soon adopted Germany's

5 approach to the Balkans, ignored recent history and offered a simple

6 explanation for the fighting which broke out in the predominantly Serbian

7 region of Croatia which was known as the Krajina. Assistant Secretary of

8 State Richard Holbrooke, who spent the early years of the Yugoslav war as

9 the American Ambassador to Germany, represented what became the official

10 American view.

11 "SPEAKER: The Serbs started this war. The Serbs are the original

12 cause of the war.

13 "SPEAKER: Those who tried to prevent the war saw it differently.

14 "SPEAKER: The Serbs in Croatia, and indeed outside Croatia, had a

15 very vivid memory of what happened in 1941 and 1942 when Hitler declared

16 Croatia a sort of independent puppet state, if you like, and the horrors

17 that went on there, and the murders of the Serbs were still -- I mean, a

18 very large number of Serbs were murdered at that time. I mean, hundreds

19 of thousands. And I think it was very understandable that when Croatia

20 declared its independence and promulgated a new constitution without any

21 safeguard for the 600.000 Serbs who still lived in Croatia, that the Serbs

22 were very perturbed about this.

23 "SPEAKER: From the beginning, the Serbs were blamed, and they

24 were partly blamed out of ignorance because nobody bothered to look back

25 at the history to put it within its historical context and to see why the

1 Serbs who lived in Krajina and the Serbs who lived in the area that is

2 called Bosnia-Herzegovina, why because of their historical experiences,

3 were so hostile to being under Zagreb or under Muslim Sarajevo rule.

4 "SPEAKER: In hope of heading off disaster, the European Community

5 organised a constitutional conference in 1991, led by respected British

6 diplomat Lord Peter Carrington, to find a compromise between those who

7 wanted to separate from Yugoslavia and those who wished to keep it

8 together. The problem was that administrative borders or internal

9 frontiers devised by Tito in 1943 left one-third of the Serbian population

10 out of Serbia, mostly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. As Yugoslavia

11 slid towards civil war in 1991, two referendums were held on the same day

12 in Croatia. Croatians voted overwhelmingly to separate from Yugoslavia

13 while ethnic Serbs, particularly those from the Krajina region, voted by a

14 similar margin to remain within Yugoslavia. A compromise favoured by

15 European Community negotiators would have permitted Croatia to leave the

16 Yugoslav federation but would have permitted the regions where Serbs

17 formed a majority to remain in Yugoslavia or to gain substantial autonomy.

18 Serbs who lived in an independent Croatia would be guaranteed full

19 citizenship and human rights protections. In the capital city of Zagreb,

20 Croatian President Tudjman seemed reluctantly prepared to accept this

21 compromise which would have prevented a major military conflict. Germany,

22 however, announced they would recognise both Slovenia and Croatia within

23 Tito's administrative borders before the end of 1991. There would be no

24 compromise.

25 "The Serbs were bitter that the first act of a newly-united

1 Germany would be to divide the Serbs of Yugoslavia into at least three

2 separate countries. A crucial opportunity to divide Yugoslavia by

3 peaceful means was now threatened by Germany's action.

4 "SPEAKER: It broke up the constitutional conference because once

5 you go throughout the six republics' independence, those two had no

6 further influence to the constitutional conference. You will have to ask

7 the other republics whether they wanted their independence, which meant

8 that you had to ask Bosnia. And it was perfectly plain that Bosnia --

9 there was going to be a civil war in Bosnia if you did do that.

10 "SPEAKER: UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar sent a strong

11 letter to German leaders warning that recognition would be a disaster.

12 Germany and Austria's own ambassadors in Belgrade privately warned against

13 recognition of Croatia.

14 "SPEAKER: The Germans risked being isolated, but the pressure

15 from the -- from the Kohl party and from the huge lobby of -- Croat lobby

16 in the southern parts of Germany, and Bavaria particularly, were such that

17 it was difficult for Genscher to go on postponing the support.

18 "SPEAKER: By the time the war started, the German public had

19 already been prepared by repeated attacks on the Serbs in an influential

20 German newspaper in Frankfurt. The strident commentary of Johan Georg

21 Greismuller which favoured Croatia and reviled the Serbs - any Serbs, all

22 Serbs - reminded Peter Hanke of the way Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph

23 Goebbels once characterised the Jewish race.

24 "SPEAKER: It was the German press in the form par excellence of

25 the right-wing Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and its journalist that

1 fundamentally influenced German policy.

2 "SPEAKER: I remember talking to the Germans in the Foreign

3 Ministry and they said they didn't call it the Frankfurter Allgemeine

4 Zeitung anymore, they called it the Zagreb Allgemeine Zeitung. And it had

5 that reputation and it was a tremendous pressure group, and I think this

6 was a factor.

7 "SPEAKER: German support for Croatian separatists received an

8 unusual tribute: A musical thank you on Croatian state television.

9 "SPEAKER: Thank you, Germany.

10 "SPEAKER: ... public relations firm Ruder and Finn, Croatia

11 successfully used the media to manipulate a larger audience, particularly

12 Germany and the US, to gain support for its separatist agenda. This was

13 particularly evident in the reporting of the war around the resort town of

14 Dubrovnik, a favourite vacation for German tourists. Working through its

15 Washington PR firm, the Croatian government managed to convince much of

16 the world that Dubrovnik was being destroyed by the Serbs in unprovoked

17 attacks which lasted for months during the fall of 1991.

18 "SPEAKER: The public has been led to believe that the federal

19 army attack on Dubrovnik was not precipitated by anything but sheer

20 malice. However, on August 25th of 1991, Croatian forces attacked a base

21 in the Bay of Kotor and the Bay of Kotor, and they were repulsed with

22 heavy losses.

23 "SPEAKER: Yugoslav troops based in Montenegro then fought their

24 way up the coast, confronting Croatian forces near Dubrovnik.

25 "SPEAKER: Targets outside the Old City were hit, consisting

1 mostly of hotels which had been taken over as barracks and spotter points

2 by Croatian forces.

3 "SPEAKER: Contrary to news reports, there was little damage to

4 the historic Old City.

5 "SPEAKER: Yes. It has been reported some 15.000 shells rained on

6 the Old City of Dubrovnik. I counted 15 mortar hits on the main street.

7 The Yugoslav federal army could have destroyed the Old City of Dubrovnik

8 in two hours. It is not destroyed.

9 "SPEAKER: Washington Post reporter Peter Maas, who visited the

10 Old City several months after the fighting stopped, found Dubrovnik in

11 what he described as 'nearly pristine' condition.

12 "SPEAKER: There are many people who go to these scenes of mayhem

13 and adventure who don't know where they are, who don't know the languages,

14 cannot really communicate with the people, and who take press handouts

15 from the local authorities. So there is certainly an orchestrated effort

16 on the part of the Croatian and Slovenia, Austrian and German media to

17 portray the Serbs as a bunch of howling, Byzantine uncivilised

18 barbarians.

19 "SPEAKER: These impressions helped strengthen Germany's resolve

20 to lead a reluctant European Community to recognise the separatist

21 republics and thereby dismantle Yugoslavia. To overcome British

22 opposition to recognising Croatia, German Prime Minister Helmut Kohl

23 offered British leader John Major a deal which left Britain free to

24 disregard or opt out of the social provisions of the 1991 treaty creating

25 a unified Europe which was being hotly debated in the British parliament.

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1 This helped John Major politically at home but Bosnia would pay a high

2 price.

3 "The French, who needed German help to stabilise France's

4 currency, also dropped their opposition to recognising the separatist

5 republics. The United States, the only power strong enough to oppose

6 Germany, began to waiver. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger,

7 who had once served as US Ambassador to Yugoslavia and spoke Serbo-Croat,

8 knew well the dangers of a wider war if recognition were extended before a

9 settlement had been reached between the different ethnic groups.

10 "SPEAKER: I think the major lesson here is that when you get

11 involved in something like this with a thousand years of history

12 underlying it all, you need to understand that once the dam breaks, the

13 viciousness can be pretty awful, on all sides.

14 "SPEAKER: In the end, here also peace would be sacrificed for

15 domestic politics. There was an American election coming up.

16 "SPEAKER: When we finally went ahead and recognised, one of the

17 reasons we did so is because it had become a major domestic political

18 issue for us here. We have particularly a large Croatian-American

19 community. And Mr. Bush lost most of them in the election that he lost

20 because they were unhappy in our having delayed as long as we did in

21 recognising Croatia.

22 "SPEAKER: While German actions encouraged the armed secession of

23 Slovenia and Croatia, it was US diplomacy, particularly through Ambassador

24 Warren Zimmermann, which helped light the spark for a war in

25 Bosnia-Herzegovina by supporting Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic in his

1 bid for a separate state.

2 "SPEAKER: And then we were the ones that went to the Europeans

3 and insisted that they recognise Bosnia and then that we would recognise

4 all three of the new states, and that was a deal that was made, and of

5 course, it was precisely that that led to the current war.

6 "SPEAKER: This was a war that European leaders believe could have

7 been avoided.

8 "SPEAKER: The Bosnian Serbs, until comparatively recently, have

9 been in the majority in Bosnia, and then the Muslims, who had a very much

10 higher birth rate than the Serbs, became the predominant -- the majority

11 population. And this, of course, was something very hard for the Serbs to

12 swallow. And they made it abundantly plain very early on that they were

13 not prepared to accept a situation in which there was an independent

14 Bosnia under the constitution which then prevailed. And indeed under the

15 constitution which then prevailed, it was not -- it was illegal for

16 Izetbegovic to declare independence because any constitutional change of

17 that magnitude had to be agreed by all three parties.

18 "SPEAKER: Privately, European leaders worried about Izetbegovic's

19 close ties to Iran and the possibility of a Muslim fundamentalist state in

20 the heart of a newly-unified Europe.

21 "SPEAKER: Izetbegovic himself had ties to the Iranians going back

22 long before they came to power in Bosnia, really beginning not too long

23 after the Iranian revolution, came to power in 1979.

24 "SPEAKER: In his book, 'The Politics of Diplomacy' then Secretary

25 of State James Baker wrote that Ambassador Zimmermann strongly advised him

1 to recognise Bosnia. Recognition of Bosnia, however, violated the most

2 basic diplomatic norms. For a government to be recognised, it must be in

3 full control of its territory, it must have clearly established borders,

4 it must also have a stable population. Not a single one of these

5 essential conditions existed in Bosnia in February of 1992 when Zimmermann

6 made his recommendation. US intelligence analysts predicted that

7 recognition would lead to war. Even the Germans thought that recognition

8 of Bosnia would be a serious mistake.

9 "SPEAKER: We did have some different opinions in early 1992 as

10 the Americans supported the recognition of Bosnia whereas we, the

11 Europeans, believed that we should first establish a framework for the

12 whole region.

13 "SPEAKER: Lord Carrington tried to avert disaster by appointing

14 Portuguese President Jose Cutilheiro to find common ground among the

15 Serbs, Muslims and Croats before an independent Bosnia was recognised.

16 "SPEAKER: I asked him to go to Sarajevo and to Lisbon and to have

17 talks with the three parties in Bosnia to see whether or not some

18 agreement could be reached with an unitary state, I mean a state, an

19 independent Bosnian state but in some sort of federal idea in which you've

20 got the three communities to agree.

21 "SPEAKER: This set up a central government of Bosnia-Herzegovina

22 and three ethnic cantons, on the model of Switzerland.

23 "SPEAKER: It was the last chance, I think, of trying to preserve

24 Bosnia before the war broke out in earnest.

25 "SPEAKER: If the Lisbon plan had been adopted, British author and

1 BBC journalist Misha Glenny wrote later, 'The war in Bosnia probably would

2 not have happened.' But two days after signing it, following a meeting

3 with American Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, Izetbegovic changed his mind

4 and disavowed his signature.

5 "SPEAKER: Izetbegovic turned around and reneged, as he's reneged

6 on other things.

7 "SPEAKER: Zimmermann later acknowledged to David Binder of the

8 New York Times that Izetbegovic had reluctantly signed the agreement to

9 gain European recognition. More than a year after the bloodshed began in

10 Bosnia, Zimmermann also admitted that the Lisbon plan was not bad at all

11 but recalls telling Izetbegovic, 'If you don't like it, why sign it?'

12 "SPEAKER: Zimmermann told Izetbegovic, Look, why don't you wait

13 and see what the US can do for you, meaning we'll recognise you and then

14 help you out. So don't go ahead with the Lisbon Agreement, don't accept

15 the Cutilheiro plan, and just hold out for some kind of unitary Bosnian

16 state. So this is a major turning point in our diplomatic efforts.

17 "SPEAKER: The American administration made it quite clear that

18 they thought that the proposals, Cutilheiro and my proposals were

19 unacceptable.

20 "SPEAKER: With no agreement amongst the Muslims, Serbs, and

21 Croats with all sides mobilised for war, the European Community voted, as

22 the US insisted, to recognise Bosnia on April 6, along with Slovenia and

23 Croatia. This act, Roger Cohen of the New York Times later wrote, was 'as

24 close to criminal negligence as a diplomatic act can be.' Indeed,

25 international recognition and the outbreak of the Bosnian war were

1 simultaneous. The world put light to the fuse.

2 "SPEAKER: God is great. Allah Akhbar. Call for the holy war.

3 Holy warrior. Allah-u-ekber. God is great. Holy warrior.

4 Allah-u-ekber. God is great.

5 "SPEAKER: ... determined that we should not take sides in this

6 war by becoming a combatant, and we have held firmly to that position and

7 we plan to continue to hold firmly to that position.

8 SPEAKER: By the time US Secretary of Defence William Perry

9 testified before Congress in June of 1995 that the US was not taking sides

10 in the Yugoslav conflict, a full range of secret military assistance

11 operations to the Croatian government and Bosnian Muslim forces were

12 already underway. At a remote air field high in the mountains of the

13 Croatian island of Brac, American intelligence operatives assembled the

14 unmanned aviation vehicles, known as UAVs, for reconnaissance while

15 Croatian soldiers guarded the airport grates. Only one month before

16 Defence Secretary William Perry testified that the US was not taking

17 sides, a predominantly Serbian civilian area, supposedly under UN

18 protection, was suddenly attacked by Croatian forces. Several UN

19 soldiers were killed in what turned out to be a massacre of the Serbian

20 civilian population of Sector West. Thousands of Serbian refugees fled

21 across the Sava River from Croatia into Northern Bosnia. Croatian sources

22 put the number of Serbs killed in the attack at 1.000. Serbian Orthodox

23 Church officials stated that 5.000 civilians were killed. But there is no

24 criticism of this atrocity by American officials, including the killing of

25 UN soldiers, because the US was deeply involved in assisting the Croatian

1 military. Efforts by British and French representatives on the UN

2 Security Council to place sanctions against Croatia were repeatedly

3 blocked by America's UN representative Madeleine Albright. Six months

4 earlier, in November of 1994, the US Departments of State and Defence had

5 approved a contract between a group of retired four star generals and the

6 Croatian government.

7 "SPEAKER: The Croats paid for it but they were authorised by the

8 Pentagon.

9 "SPEAKER: I had constant reports of American officers who were,

10 quote, retired, no longer on active duty, acting as advisors to the

11 Bosnian government's military, acting as advisors to the Croatian

12 military. And they were very active on the ground.

13 "SPEAKER: The retired generals, described as high level

14 mercenaries, belonged to a private company known as Military Professional

15 Resources Incorporated, or MPRI. MPRI included such luminaries as

16 Lieutenant General Ed Soister [phoen], former head of the Defence

17 Intelligence Agency, Major General Richard Griffiths, Deputy Chief of

18 Operations in Central Europe, and most importantly Karl Vuono. General

19 Vuono and his colleagues at MPRI would be a major asset to the Croatian

20 army in its efforts to forcibly expel the ethnic Serbian population from

21 the Krajina, which was technically under UN protection in sectors north

22 and south. But the destruction of Sector West, a UN protected area for

23 ethnic Serbs, would have consequences in nearby Bosnia. Lord Owen wrote

24 that by acquiescing in the Croatian government's seizure of Sector West,

25 the US had, quote, in effect given the green light to the Bosnian Serbs to

1 attack Srebrenica and Zepa. When Muslim paramilitary leader Naser Oric

2 launched an attack from Srebrenica against the Serbian village of

3 Visnjica, this time the surrounding Serbian forces counterattacked

4 Srebrenica, entering the city.

5 "SPEAKER: It is well known to anybody who has followed this that

6 Oric was launching repeated attacks out of a supposedly demilitarised zone

7 against surrounding Serbian areas around the Srebrenica enclave, to the

8 point where, after repeated warnings, the Serbs simply could not allow him

9 to continue to do that and decided to take the town.

10 "SPEAKER: Oric and several thousand of his soldiers fled across

11 Serbian held territory to the town of Tuzla several days before Serb

12 forces entered Srebrenica and Zepa. Muslim women and children in

13 Srebrenica were placed on buses by Serbian forces and sent to safety in

14 Tuzla. But between 1 and 2.000 Muslim men were captured by the Serbs who

15 blamed them for participating in a string of massacres led by Naser Oric.

16 A Croatian soldier who claims to have fought with the Bosnian Serbs

17 testified at The Hague that he took part in the execution of 1.200

18 Muslims, although the number of bodies recovered from the site was 200.

19 UN [sic] Ambassador Madeleine Albright, however, used greatly inflated

20 numbers to describe Serbian reprisals at Srebrenica. According to the

21 International Committee of the Red Cross, thousands of Muslim men,

22 allegedly missing, were found serving in Muslim army units near Tuzla.

23 Washington Post reporter John Pomfritt [phoen] reported that 4.000 armed

24 Muslim soldiers had escaped to a town near Tuzla, yet these same soldiers

25 were still be included in official reports years later as missing Muslims

1 from Srebrenica.

2 "SPEAKER: Secretary Albright in particular was very insistent on

3 using such numbers like 8.000, 10.000 Muslim men and boys who were

4 executed in Srebrenica by the Serbs. There's simply nothing to document

5 those numbers.

6 "SPEAKER: ... that year whose records of fighters had killed many

7 Serb civilians. Other sources claim Oric knew about that proposal. The

8 subject of Oric wasn't discussed for very long. Mehovic claimed that

9 Izetbegovic referred to his meeting with Clinton.

10 "SPEAKER: Alija told us about Clinton's offer to have the

11 Chetniks enter Srebrenica and that a military intervention would follow.

12 He asked what we thought about that. We rejected this proposal because we

13 thought that this was outrageous, to murder 5.000 persons.

14 "SPEAKER: However, the idea of Clinton proposing that Serb troops

15 attack Srebrenica and carry out a massacre to justify military

16 intervention seemed utterly ludicrous, but the UN investigation shows

17 Hakija's words are not unfounded.

18 "SPEAKER: UN report delegation have stated that President

19 Izetbegovic also told them that he had learned that a NATO intervention in

20 Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible but could only occur if the Serbs were

21 to break into Srebrenica.

22 "SPEAKER: President Izetbegovic denied having made any such

23 remark. He did admit he asked for an opinion on the land exchange.

24 "SPEAKER: We then talked about an exchange. He offered to

25 replace Srebrenica by Vogosca, and we rejected that too.

1 "SPEAKER: Negotiations will include the demand, first of all,

2 that the maps be altered so that the Bosnian republic acquires Muslim

3 areas along the Drina.

4 "SPEAKER: ... episode, the Croatian army attack on the

5 predominantly Serbian Krajina region was yet to come. On August 1st,

6 1995, Croatian troops launched a massive assault on the Serbian population

7 of the Krajina, sectors north and south.

8 "SPEAKER: It was an operation of about a hundred thousand

9 Croatian military, yes. Tanks, planes, artillery; the works.

10 "SPEAKER: While officially denying any involvement in what the

11 Croatians called Operation Storm, American forces were actively supporting

12 this bloody operation of ethnic cleansing.

13 "SPEAKER: American equipment was used to jam Serbian

14 communications at a critical moment so that command and control, at least

15 in the communications sector, was blocked and then there was a documented

16 pair of raids on Serbian Krajina military facilities by US navy planes

17 flying out of Aviano which knocked out radar and other facilities.

18 "SPEAKER: The shelling of Knin was a deliberate terror

19 bombardment meant to hasten the departure of the remaining Serbs and was,

20 you know, committed against an unarmed populace. They had street cleaners

21 coming in and removing any evidence of the murders or the vandalism before

22 they brought the cameras in to show the triumphant return of the Croats

23 into Knin. So it was all very carefully planned.

24 "SPEAKER: Having denounced ethnic cleansing, American military

25 planners helped Croatia carry out the largest ethnic cleansing of the war

1 up to that point.

2 "SPEAKER: It would appear to be the largest single incident if

3 you count people affected in the first few days. It was 170.000 people.

4 "SPEAKER: That number quickly grew to 200.000 as a river of

5 humanity clogged the roads. Recently retired US General Charles Boyd

6 Deputy Commander of NATO, confirmed that the US helped plan and implement

7 the attack.

8 "SPEAKER: Croatia would not have taken its military offensives

9 that it has taken, either in Sector West or throughout the north and

10 south, throughout the Krajina, without explicit approval of the US

11 government.

12 "SPEAKER: Roger Cohen of the New York Times quoted a Croatian

13 military journalist who confirmed that General Vuono, of MPRI, met with

14 his Croatian counterpart repeatedly in the days preceding Operation Storm.

15 "SPEAKER: The tactics that they employed when they attack into

16 the Krajina was exactly the same tactics that were used during Desert

17 Storm. They were from American doctrine, attacking on many fronts with

18 lightning-type attacks, and interestingly enough, the Croatian attack was

19 called not Desert Storm but was called Storm.

20 "SPEAKER: The way they deploy and employ their forces is a direct

21 reflection of that training. So it's been very effective and it's been

22 very much a part of the official US policy.

23 "SPEAKER: Canadian UN officers identified an ethnic Albanian

24 commander, Agim Ceku, as responsible for the massacre of Serbian

25 civilians.

1 "SPEAKER: Our officers, Colonel Lesley, General Foran [phoen],

2 that were there on the ground, wanted indictments against the artillery

3 commander in particular, the commander of the operation, and even wanted

4 Tudjman, the Croatian President, indicted for his role.

5 "SPEAKER: Emma Bonino [phoen], Refugee Commissioner for the

6 European Union, noted that as many as 10.000 Serbian civilians were

7 missing from the stream of refugees who fled the Croatian attack on the

8 Krajina. Many of these ended up in mass graves.

9 "SPEAKER: When you go to the villages, you will see the

10 cemeteries, the graves without any names. Mostly it's 90 per cent.

11 "SPEAKER: Sometimes when I'm thinking about what happened there,

12 I think also about the role of the Americans in preparing our army. So I

13 really don't know how they educate our soldiers, but if it is the

14 education for democracy, they look very bad.

15 "SPEAKER: I don't think the American people have drawn that

16 correlation of those incredible war crimes that happened recently in the

17 Krajina and the fact that the Croatian army was trained and advised by and

18 virtually almost led by former American military leadership.

19 "SPEAKER: They have in fact been accomplice to a massive ethnic

20 cleansing of Serbs from Croatia who had lived there for many, many

21 centuries. It was their home. I think we need to step back and be

22 representative of the principle because we only -- not only deny our own

23 principles that way but we create more problems than we solve.

24 "SPEAKER: Three State Department sources told former New York

25 Times reporter David Binder that the green light to undertake Operation

1 Storm came from US envoy Richard Holbrooke, who flew to Zagreb to meet

2 with Croatian President Franjo Tudjman two days before the attack. At

3 first, Holbrooke insisted that he try to prevent Operation Storm, but in

4 his memoir of the Dayton negotiations, Holbrooke acknowledged that he

5 encouraged Operation Storm which drove ethnic Serbs from their homes in

6 the Krajina.

7 "SPEAKER: If you read Holbrooke's memoirs, he writes he was

8 encouraging the Croatian government in every way he could to move fast and

9 hard to get them out.

10 "SPEAKER: Having blocked UN and European peace agreements to end

11 the fighting in Bosnia, the Clinton administration encouraged a joint

12 military offensive by Muslim and Croat forces in Western Bosnia. Like

13 Operation Storm, the offensive was designed to force Serbian civilians

14 from their homes, the very ethnic cleansing the administration had once

15 denounced. In his book 'To End a War', Richard Holbrooke writes that he

16 even advised Croatian forces which Bosnian Serb cities to attack. Those

17 attacks produced nearly as many refugees as Operation Storm and an unknown

18 number of mass graves in Western Bosnia. The following year, after the

19 Dayton Accords were signed, a mass grave of Serbian civilians at Mrkonjic

20 Grad was unearthed. At the time of its discovery in 1996, it was the

21 largest mass grave the war had produced in Bosnia.

22 "With Muslims and Croats on the offensive in Bosnia during the

23 summer and fall of 1995, the US military began to intervene openly against

24 the Serbs. All that was needed was an incident in one of the safe zones.

25 On August 28th, 1995, yet another explosion occurred in the Markale

1 marketplace in Sarajevo, killing scores of innocents and providing a

2 pretext for NATO bombing.

3 "According to the London Times, French and British investigators

4 determined the shell came from Muslim-held positions in Sarajevo, but this

5 time an American officer overruled their finding.

6 "SPEAKER: Now what's significant at this time is exactly within

7 hours after this, NATO, this incredible air armada that was pulled back,

8 cocked, locked, ready to go, the minute this was -- like it was

9 orchestrated in part of a play, this mighty arm of NATO air launched

10 forward and started attacking Serbian positions. They were waiting for

11 that very excuse.

12 "SPEAKER: I have studied Markale I and Markale II for a long time

13 and at the scene and I've talked to a number of people who were involved

14 in the investigations of both, and I am completely persuaded that those

15 two explosions were caused by Muslim forces.

16 "SPEAKER: Bypassing the UN Security Council, which had the legal

17 authority to act in Bosnia, the US had already picked out Bosnian Serb

18 targets, some of them supplied by Muslim commanders.

19 "SPEAKER: We entered the war, took the side of the Muslims and

20 became their air force, bombing the Serbs on this supposed atrocity

21 created by the Serbs where everyone that was on the ground said it was

22 created by the Muslims, which, by the way, is the oldest trick of war.

23 And we fell for it.

24 "SPEAKER: Selective media coverage of the war had created

25 tolerance, if not enthusiasm, for a US military intervention from the

1 American public.

2 "SPEAKER: What amazed me was that American doves, liberals, my

3 allies from the anti-Vietnam days, the sort of people I thought I could

4 count on to oppose reckless American military intervention, were all

5 screaming for military intervention. They were the biggest hawks of all.

6 "SPEAKER: For the Clinton administration, intervention in Bosnia

7 represented a chance to justify the continuation of NATO, an American

8 dominance in Europe.

9 "SPEAKER: NATO's very problem in the early 1990s was simply that

10 the mission for which it was designed had come to an end. It was designed

11 to protect Western Europe from an aggressively expansionist Soviet Yukon.

12 "SPEAKER: The logic would go: You've got to expand NATO, and the

13 only reason to keep and expand NATO is to have a mission. Where is the

14 mission? Bosnia, Balkans. The Balkans had become hostage to an American

15 power concept which is to keep Europe down and America up.

16 "SPEAKER: Senior military officers were amongst those most wary

17 of administration policy.

18 "SPEAKER: I think the mess we have today is a result of political

19 errors. I think we were all too quick to recognise these individual

20 republics as they declared their independence and asked for recognition.

21 We failed to think through the history of this region. And so it's a

22 little -- a little strained to have that political context and then ask

23 the military to go solve the problem."

24 JUDGE KWON: Mr. Milosevic, before you move on, could you tell us

25 the source of this tape, also as to it is originally one tape or, rather,

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1 a compiled one?

2 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, as you can see, these are all

3 statements exclusively taken from Western sources, and once again

4 exclusively from very prominent personalities which they undoubtedly gave

5 and made, and this is a compilation which just briefly illustrates the

6 whole picture in view of the very limited time that I have at my disposal.

7 JUDGE KWON: If could you later submit to us the programme --

8 names of the programme later, in due course, together with the tape.

9 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I have a lot of original tapes, and

10 it won't present a problem for me to look through them and do that.

11 Now, with respect to international law, in the crisis in

12 Yugoslavia, the sole international legally protected subject was

13 Yugoslavia itself, as a member of the United Nations and the sole bearer

14 of the international legal subjectivity, as a legal subject. So that in

15 that territory, there were no wars. There was just one single war, and

16 that was the war against Yugoslavia. And that war, the fans of that war

17 were flamed [as interpreted] and directed by the greatest power in the

18 modern day world, with reliance on its internal allies, the nationalist,

19 separatist nuclei along with the dominant presence of those forces who

20 were vanquished during World War II.

21 That war used all possible means at its disposal; media,

22 political, military, et cetera. That war, first and foremost, was led by

23 a media campaign that went on for decades. It abused the monopoly over

24 the world information media. Then with a foreign policy intervention

25 which was directed towards the creation of independent states from the

1 Yugoslav -- former Yugoslav republics and the terrible economic campaign

2 against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that can only be qualified as

3 genocide, which went on for many years. And finally, we see the military

4 aggression that took place in 1995 against the Republika Srpska and in the

5 Storm onslaught which we saw a moment ago, along with the participation of

6 NATO forces in the largest possible ethnic cleansing ever recorded, and in

7 1999 against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia itself.

8 This large-scale media campaign, political, economic, and military

9 campaign to break up Yugoslavia and to restructure the Balkans into new

10 spheres of interest were -- they used manipulations on genocide of Serbs

11 that crowned this false indictment and have great pretentions for it to

12 perform a historical task, and that task being that the basic aim is the

13 last intervention in history. That is to say, through a sort of legal

14 procedure and by legal means to transfer falsehoods and manipulation into

15 the truth.

16 It is necessary for the protagonists of the crimes and those

17 responsible for breaking up Yugoslavia over the decades and who were

18 responsible for the crimes should free them, rid them of their

19 responsibilities and then use this judgement as a historical truth in

20 itself. And that is why I should like to say that this illegal Tribunal,

21 Court, does not exist in a legal framework but exclusively in the media

22 framework, because it in itself represents a means of war and part of the

23 crime that is being perpetuated against the Serbian people.

24 However, this war is being waged with greater or lesser intensity

25 against other peoples as well throughout the world. The victors in the

1 Cold War had said that they are entitled to establish world hegemonism and

2 they've coined that concept; they don't want to make the world a better

3 place to live in, more humane, more legal, but the first post-war decade

4 clearly showed that this was a concept and means to rule over other

5 countries and their natural resources and human resources and that in fact

6 it was a form of new colonialism.

7 And this process that started with the breakdown of the Berlin

8 wall is not a finished process. It is ongoing and is attended by enormous

9 confusion, this sphere of law and legality, history and philosophy, and a

10 new world order is being seen more and more as world chaos, whereas the

11 first post-war Cold War phase has been aborted. These are even

12 assessments by Western experts and the destruction of Yugoslavia ranks

13 among those as well.

14 The messages, such as Clinton's message to the effect that the

15 Serbs were responsible for causing two world wars - that means that the

16 Germans were not responsible for any world war - have the ability to

17 pacify reality and threaten to become a model for shaping the future.

18 This message, launched by the President of America as a world leader - and

19 when I say a world leader, I mean America, not Clinton himself - can be

20 used as a metaphor for a whole decade of a campaign of lies. And I think

21 the only competition to that is what we have been hearing from the

22 opposite party this morning and from the material they have tendered. And

23 that message, the message that I'm talking about, is particularly absurd

24 and unhonourable if we know that it was precisely in those two wars for

25 which, according to Clinton, it was the Serbs who were responsible, it was

1 precisely the Serbs with enormous victims, went hand-in-hand with that

2 same America which was 50 years later to assess that Yugoslavia, and

3 especially Serbia, was standing in its way to realising its new interests

4 and that a free and independent Yugoslavia could not be incorporated into

5 those interests and that with its successful development and

6 freedom-loving spirit, it set a bad example to others and that is why it

7 had to be broken up and turned into a Third World country and, even worse,

8 to send it right back to the Stone Age. And that is why there is nothing

9 more pertinent to the Serbs and Serbia and everybody else, all other

10 freedom-loving people.

11 The great task is to combat lies. And I think that this illegal

12 Tribunal of yours here is quite contrary to the ideas of the people who

13 created it, and despite the restrictions in broadcasting the court process

14 and distorting information, it is part of the decade-long demonisation of

15 the Serbs and a mirror for the perpetrators of crimes against Yugoslavia.

16 This might seem to be paradoxical, but in the historical sense, we have

17 two contradictions here contrary to the ideas of the people that set this

18 Tribunal up. They -- but I would like to have the truth returned to my

19 people and the whole freedom-loving people.

20 This indictment is completely false because in Croatia and in

21 Bosnia it was not a case of aggression but it was a civil war. That is

22 the first point.

23 The second is that in both cases, for the Serb people in Croatia

24 and for the Serb people in Bosnia, it was a defensive war, a war of

25 defence.

1 And a t