Milosevic

The latest witness to testify on behalf of top Hague defendant Slobodan Milosevic was himself under attack this week, over evidence potentially implicating him in the deaths of dozens of ethnic Albanians during the conflict in Kosovo.

Since the start of his testimony, former army colonel Vlatko Vukovic has firmly denied allegations that Milosevic – as president of the then Yugoslavia – used a systematic campaign of murder, rape and destruction to drive some 800,000 Albanian civilians from Kosovo in 1999.

The massive refugee movements, he has argued, in fact stemmed from NATO air strikes and intimidation by members of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, seeking to use the humanitarian disaster for political ends.

But the credibility of Vukovic’s evidence may have suffered a blow this week as prosecutor Geoffrey Nice questioned him about the presence of his tank unit in the village of Bela Crkva on March 25, 1999.

According to the indictment against Milosevic, an assault on the village that day by Serbian and Yugoslav security forces left some 85 residents dead and the remainder expelled from their homes.

During the prosecution stage of the trial Bela Crkva resident Isuf Zhuniqi recalled how on the morning of March 25, he was woken by a dozen tanks of the Yugoslav Army, VJ, entering the village. The motorised column then left the village, he said, but automatic gunfire was heard shortly afterwards ,and just a few hours later, about 16 policemen arrived armed with assault rifles.

The policemen shot dead 12 people who were fleeing the village, Zhuniqi recalled, before sending Bela Crkva’s women and children packing. They then robbed some 65 men who remained, ordered them into a stream and gunned them down. The witness survived by pretending to be dead.

Vukovic has admitted from the start of his testimony that he led a column of tanks from his unit through Bela Crkva before sunrise on March 25, 1999. But he has maintained that they were on their way to take up positions elsewhere and did not even alight from their vehicles.

He has also said that he observed a special police unit passing through the village in convoy that morning. But he insisted this week that he heard no shooting or anything else out of the ordinary.

Vukovic’s account was first called into question last week when Judge Iain Bonomy noted that an order from the time – which the witness brought with him to court – required him to “carry out [an] energetic attack and search the village of Bela Crkva” for KLA members.

The witness insisted this never actually happened, explaining that he decided a search was unnecessary after receiving a report that Albanian “terrorists” were not active in this village.

Given a chance to cross-examine the witness this week, prosecutor Nice demanded to know why an entry in the official diary of Vukovic’s unit for March 25 records that Bela Crkva had indeed been “blocked and cleaned”.

The witness explained that the note had been written by one of his subordinates. It was based on a very brief report he provided over the radio later in the day, he said, in which he gave the unit’s current location. Knowing that they needed to have passed through Bela Crkva to arrive at this position, he went on, the deputy must just have assumed that the order to search the village had been carried out.

Vukovic insisted that the word “cleaned” in the diary entry referred only to the breaking up of insurgent forces and did not carry any connotations of “ethnic cleansing”.

Nice also confronted Vukovic with a Human Rights Watch report entitled Under Orders, which includes a detailed account of the alleged crimes in Bela Crkva on March 25.

Of particular interest was the testimony of a number of witnesses who recalled seeing a man they understood to be a commander standing on the neck of a 17-year-old boy while questioning the boy’s uncle. The commander apparently then shot them both dead in front of their screaming relatives.

One witness remembered that the officer in question, who was around 35 years old and wore a camouflage uniform, had a very distinguishing feature – a “recognisably deformed mouth”.

Vukovic, now in his mid-forties, has had some trouble testifying over the past few days because of health problems which not only make walking difficult but also caused him to slur his speech conspicuously.

Blaming his condition on munitions dropped by NATO forces during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the witness has told judges that the symptoms first appeared during the conflict in Kosovo and that in June that year he was effectively an “invalid”. It was not clear from his testimony whether the symptoms were noticeable before June.

Vukovic stood firm when Nice inquired as to whether the description given by the witness “reminded him of anyone”. It certainly couldn’t have been any one of his men, he said, since there were no “deformed people” in the VJ.

The Human Rights Watch testimony also appeared suspect, Vukovic said, because of the observation that the officer in question had three stars on his shoulders. The witness explained that stars were not worn on combat uniform.

Michael Farquhar is an IWPR reporter in London.