Paponjak’s testimony aimed to disprove one case of mass expulsions and another of mass executions of Albanian prisoners in Kosovo in 1999 listed in Milosevic’s Kosovo indictment.
The witness - who at the time covered by the indictment served as the head of the Pec city police traffic department - was introduced by Milosevic as the town’s top policeman who, due to the seniority of his position, could replace many other witnesses of fact.
But during two days of cross-examination both his credibility as a witness and his seniority was brought into question by prosecutors - as was his actual knowledge of the events he testified about.
Prosecutors focused on a crucial document Paponjak relied on in his testimony – a Serbian police report titled “On Forceful Deportations of Albanian Population, Persecutions on Racial Grounds and Expropriation of Their Personal IDs”, which was drafted in 2002. This report denies that any of the crimes mentioned in its title ever took place in Kosovo.
This title in fact summarises much of the indictment against Milosevic, who is accused of orchestrating a campaign of terror against Kosovo Albanians in the period of March - June 1999, with the aim to expel them for the region. At the time, Serbia was the target of NATO air strikes, after it refused to resolve the increasing tensions in Kosovo by political means and accept a foreign military presence there.
The prosecutors claimed that the document Paponjak brought to the tribunal – compiled three years after the event – was in fact made solely for the purpose of defending Milosevic from the charges listed in the Kosovo indictment.
What other reason, prosecutors implied, would Serbian police have for making a report on events from three years before, which seemed to mirror the exact wording of the indictment.
The witness denied this, and kept repeating that there was no forcible transfer of Kosovo Albanians in the months that coincided with the NATO air strikes. He even agreed with the prosecutor’s sarcastic remark that the movement of population was “unfortunate, but well-meant chaos”. Albanians, the witness insisted, had left voluntarily, in fear of NATO bombs.
The witness also several times explicitly denied that there were any orders issued to move any population anywhere in and around Pec.
At this point prosecutor Geoffrey Nice confronted the witness with an order that became a focus of a long, entangled linguistic dispute between the judges, the accused and the prosecutor.
The order, dated March 30, 1999, instructed the Serbian forces to “move part of population out of the zone of responsibility of the Pec military district”.
The witness then hurriedly agreed that he knew about these relocations, but insisted that they were “absolutely normal” for that time and were done in order to protect the civilians from “combat activities that were expected in the area”.
Milosevic joined in to insist that the translation was wrong – claiming instead that the order did not refer to “moving people out” of the area but “relocating the people who live in” the area. The interpreters leaned towards the original translation, and finally recommended that the text be sent for review by linguistic experts.
The witness also denied that any personal IDs were ever confiscated from Kosovo Albanians leaving the country, although he conceded he was not present at any border crossing out of the area at the time.
But the bulk of the cross-examination focused on Milosevic’s attempt to use Paponjak’s testimony to cast doubt over one episode of alleged mass murder in his indictment - the killing of at least 50 ethnic Albanian prisoners in the Dubrava prison complex in May 1999.
The indictment claims that on May 22 and 23, 1999, Dubrava prison guards took revenge on the Kosovo Albanian inmates after the complex was hit by NATO bombs on May 19 and 21. The prisoners were allegedly lined up in a field and shot with machine guns from the watchtowers. The following day, according to the indictment, the guards hunted down those inmates who had taken shelter in the prison’s basement, and killed many of them.
The witness brought tapes of official Serbian investigation into Dubrava as evidence to prove that the people killed there were all victims of NATO bombing. Two out of three tapes presented were recorded before the time of the alleged killing spree. The third, the witness claimed, was taken on May 24, after yet another NATO bombardment, and showed people allegedly killed in that strike.
However, prosecutors say that NATO log books do not show any strikes at Dubrava prison after the night of May 21.
One of the bodies shown on camera was marked with a piece of cardboard bearing the name Januz Krasniqi - one of the people listed in the indictment as a victim of the guards’ killing spree. The body bore no obvious shrapnel or blast wounds, and the date “May 23” was written on the cardboard.
Just as the prosecutors were trying to elicit an answer from the witness on what the date on the cardboard could mean, Milosevic hurriedly broke into the testimony to explain that it could refer to “a number of things”, including the date when the body was taken out of the rubble, or when it was identified.
Unlike two previous tapes, this one bore no date. When the prosecutor brought this issue up during the cross-examination, the witness said he assumed “another camera was used” on that occasion.
The witness also admitted that he was not personally present when the tapes were made – raising further doubts about the value of his testimony.
Paponjak had no explanation why the report of a Spanish forensic team that later examined the bodies of Dubrava victims showed that two thirds of them had gunshot wounds.
At first, the witness tried to suggest they may have died in an attempt to escape from the prison. But when pressed by the prosecutor, Paponjak could not confirm that such attempt had been made.
Wrapping up the cross-examination, the prosecutor suggested that Paponjak and his colleagues from the Pec traffic police were actually engaged in a process of selecting the bodies of Kosovo Albanians killed in Pec area and sending those of the obvious non-combatants such as women and children to be buried among others in a mass grave discovered in the Belgrade suburb of Batajnica.
The witness first denied any knowledge of any such operation. "I have not received any information about it, let alone that bodies from Pec were found there,” he told the court.
But then he quickly retracted this statement when the prosecutors quoted newspaper reports about a Belgrade judge who established that some 50 bodies form Batajnica grave were from Pec, and who had helped organise the return of the bodies to their families in Kosovo.
“We got some information that there were bodies identified as from Pec and being returned to their relatives,” the witness said, prompting the judges to remind him he was clearly contradicting his previous answer.
Both judges and prosecutors alike were almost palpably frustrated with the four-day long testimony of this witness.
But at the end they still agreed to admit all documents used during the examination into evidence, despite prosecutor Nice’s request to have them all excluded as “fundamentally flawed material”.
The case continued with the testimony of Serbian police general Obrad Stevanovic, who was assistant interior minister at the time covered by the Kosovo indictment. This makes him equal in position to the fugitive general Vlastimir Djordjevic, who has been indicted by the Hague tribunal and is believed to be hiding in Russia.
Obradovic’s examination in chief, scheduled for at least 12 hours, is likely to last throughout the next week.
Ana Uzelac is IWPR’s project manager in The Hague.
