In the fourth week of his testimony in defence of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, retired Yugoslav army general Bozidar Delic saw his credibility melting away under cross-examination by the court’s prosecutors.
Relying on numerous documents and witness testimonies, lead prosecutor Geoffrey Nice portrayed Delic as a liar and a hard-line Serb nationalist, who fought both in the Bosnian war as well as in Kosovo, and may have personally been implicated in numerous war crimes during the Kosovo conflict in 1999.
But by dismantling witness’ credibility, Nice has likely made it impossible for his colleagues to call Delic - as they initially planned - as an expert witness in another high-profile case due to begin in the Hague in 2007: that against the former Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj.
The general spent much of the time this week fending off allegations - backed up by witness testimony and documentary evidence - that he personally ordered atrocities during the 1999 war in Kosovo, including the shelling of a civilian home and murders of unarmed men.
He also clashed with Nice over accusations that the Yugoslav Army, VJ, as a whole operated outside the usual legal chain of command in Kosovo and regularly used excessive force in its operations there.
Milosevic is accused of planning and orchestrating the expulsion of some 800,000 Kosovo Albanians from the province in 1999. The campaign coincided with the NATO air strikes on Serbia between March and June that year, and it is alleged to have included widespread killings, rape and looting conducted by both VJ and Serbian police.
During the prosecution stage of the Milosevic trial, several witnesses testified that some of those murders happened under Delic’s direct orders.
K32 - a protected witness who fought under Delic in Kosovo - testified that in early August 1998 he heard the general order a tank to shell an Albanian home. Civilians were seen running from the building, he said, which hadn’t appeared to be offering any fire.
This week, Delic rubbished the allegation, arguing that K32 hadn’t been in his presence at any time during the period in question and couldn’t possibly have heard him issue such an order.
Eventually, though, he acknowledged that he had in fact ordered a tank to fire on a house near where the event was said to have taken place.
In an effort to explain why he hadn’t mentioned this at any point earlier on in nearly four weeks of testimony, Delic insisted it was a separate, irrelevant incident. The inhabitants of this particular building, he claimed, had long since been driven out by “terrorists” who were using it as a firing point.
K32 also claimed in the prosecution stage of the trial that during an attack on the village of Jeskovo in March 1999, he heard Delic ordering soldiers to “make an effort not to let anyone remain alive”.
Confronted with this second allegation in court this week, Delic was indignant. “I am a Serb officer,” he declared, “and a Serb officer could never say something like that.”
As his outrage apparently began to snowball, the general put K32’s allegation down to the fact that Hague prosecutors “coach” their witnesses.
He appeared rather taken aback, however, when both Nice and the panel of judges immediately pounced on his suggestion, persistently demanding to know what basis he could have for it. Delic eventually apologised and retracted the claim.
Instead, he went on to say that K32 had been coached by “certain Albanian individuals in Pec”. Getting back on the offensive, he also rebuked Nice for his courtroom manner, describing his methods of questioning as “improper” and “perfidious” – provoking an angry reaction from the Presiding Judge Patrick Robinson, who asked the witness “to restrain himself”.
A second protected witness, K41, who testified in the prosecution case against Milosevic three years ago, reported that the same attack on Jeskovo resulted in the deaths of ten civilians.
But Delic this week insisted that the only dead were nine members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. In an effort to explain why his men had killed the fighters without managing to take any prisoners, the general said the dead men were elite troops, determined to “fight to the bitter end”.
Delic was also presented in court this week with evidence of more widespread criminal behaviour by Yugoslav forces in Kosovo.
This included a document from former VJ chief Nebojsa Pavkovic, in which he made reference to torching of houses by Yugoslav soldiers and prohibited such behaviour in future.
Delic dismissed the suggestion that this order was part of an effort to reign in a “rampage” by VJ troops, perhaps because of the presence of international observers in the region. Rather, he said, it was just a response to a few isolated cases in which soldiers had stepped out of line.
Delic’s credibility suffered further blows when the prosecutor focused on his testimony about the chain of command that was put in place during the Kosovo conflict.
The prosecutors insist that a special body called the Joint Command was formed at the time to supervise and conduct the cleansing operation. The Joint Command had its seat in Kosovo capital, Pristina, and it comprised high-ranking politicians, military and police officers. This body, the prosecutors claim, issued orders under Milosevic’s direct supervision to both military and police, bypassing the regular chain of command and implementing directly the defendant’s political will.
If proved, the existence of the Joint Command could significantly boost prosecutors’ charges that Milosevic directly planned, ordered and approved the cleansing campaign in Kosovo.
Delic, who personally brought to The Hague a few orders headlined “Joint Command”, kept on denying this body ever issued any binding orders to the army. Instead, he insisted that Joint Command was a “coordinating body”. He kept on denying its power to issue orders even after Nice showed him an order issued by the Joint Command stating that police and military are not allowed to undertake any actions without its approval.
Chipping further away at his credibility, Delic continued to refer to Albanians throughout his testimony as “Shiptars” - a term considered insulting when used by non-Albanians. The term also figures in all official army documents he brought along. The prosecutors also managed to find the witnesses’ PhD thesis, which he successfully defended at a Belgrade military college in 1997, in which he used the same term and also claimed that the goal of Kosovo Albanians was “to expel the Serbs by expansion based on high birth-rates”.
Delic’s cross-examination will continue on July 18.
Michael Farquhar is an IWPR reporter in The Hague. Ana Uzelac is IWPR’s project manager in The Hague.
