When former Serbian assistant interior minister Obrad Stevanovic started his marathon testimony more than three weeks ago, it seemed he would focus mainly on the charges Milosevic faces in his Kosovo indictment.
But his testimony is likely to be remembered for the dramatic courtroom revelation of Serbia’s involvement in the most gruesome episode of the earlier Bosnian war – the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims after the fall of the Srebrenica enclave in July 1995.
In the course of cross-examination this week, the prosecutors played harrowing excerpts from tape, which apparently shows an alleged Serbian secret services unit executing six Srebrenica Muslims. This could in time become the most important piece of publicly available evidence linking Milosevic to this legally established genocide.
Stevanovic was asked to help identify the people on tape but said he was unable to. In the meantime, the Belgrade government arrested at least eight people in connection with this episode on June 2. [See Srebrenica Execution Tape May Link Milosevic to Massacre TU No 409, 01-Jun-05, http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/tri/tri_409_1_eng.txt]
Along with the unsettling video recording, other similarly chilling facts were revealed during the cross-examination, which seemed to focus mainly on dismantling the witness’ credibility. The prosecutors tried to show him as a man whom Milosevic trusted with sensitive operations and who was an important part of a war machine at the very times when it was suspected of committing atrocities.
By the end of the week, the prosecutors faced Stevanovic with a hand-written diary he kept in the times before and during the war in Kosovo in 1999.
There, in his own handwriting, the witness quoted Milosevic as saying things like “No corpse - no crime” in an apparent context of “cleaning up” of terrain in Kosovo and expressing fears that “the evidence of crimes against civilians may justify aggression” on Serbia.
Milosevic is accused of orchestrating a campaign of mass expulsions in Kosovo, which coincided with the NATO air strikes on Serbia between March and June 1999. The prosecutors say that the aim of this campaign - which was accompanied by mass killings of Albanian civilians - was to cleanse the region for good of its Albanian inhabitants.
The prosecutors allege that the bodies of the civilian victims were then secretly transported to locations in Serbia and Belgrade, where they were buried in mass graves in locations belonging to special police units, in an attempted cover-up of the crimes. This week, Serbian judicial authorities have announced they are hoping to issue first indictments against the people responsible for this by the end of the year.
The entries in Stevanovic’s diary seemed to back up the prosecutors’ version of events. In an entry dated May 1999, Stevanovic wrote in large letters “president” and under it “no corpse - no crime”.
When asked by prosecutor Geoffrey Nice who the president was, the witness reluctantly admitted it was Milosevic. But when asked what was meant by this quote, he embarked on an elaborate explanation that it was in fact the Albanian insurgents’ tactics to hide the bodies of their Serb victims in order to cover their crimes.
When confronted with the next bullet point in this entry saying “they will use evidence of crimes against civilians to justify aggression”, Stevanovic went on to explain that “they” were again Albanian insurgents, this time presenting the bodies of their victims as the victims of alleged Serbian crimes.
When the prosecutor pointed out the discrepancy between the two answers, Stevanovic denied there was any. “When [the insurgents] would fail to bury and hide the victims of their crimes, they would present them as evidence against us,” he said.
Stevanovic consistently claimed there was no state policy to expel and murder Kosovo Albanians or to hide their bodies later on.
Throughout his cross-examination the witness kept insisting that he did not know how the bodies of Albanian civilians ended up in mass graves on guarded police property, hundreds of kilometres from Kosovo - the largest of the sites was in Belgrade. He kept repeating that the corpses must have been planted there by “those who wanted to discredit Serbia”.
“So someone unknown took the bodies … transported them though the whole country in lorries and dug up the graves in a secret location under police control,” Nice summed up the witnesses’ version of the story. “You’re not seriously suggesting this, are you?”
Fumbling, the former assistant interior minister confirmed this was exactly what he was suggesting.
The prosecutor went on to quote minutes from staff meetings of the Serbian interior ministry, where Stevanovic’s colleagues were complaining how they were encountering “resistance” among the policemen supposed to “restore the terrain” – a code word, prosecutors allege, for exhuming the bodies of civilian victims and loading them in refrigerated trucks that took them to Serbia.
Here, the witness suddenly said he had problems focusing and could not understand the prosecutor’s questions.
Earlier in the case, the prosecutors managed to portray Stevanovic as a man who was also involved in several undercover Serbian police operations in Bosnia.
They first elicited an admission from Stevanovic that he and the Serbian special police units under his command were stationed on the Serb side of the border with eastern Bosnia at the very height of the ethnic cleansing operation there in the late spring of 1992. Stevanovic also admitted that at the time he knew of a certain Branislav Vakic - a leader, by his own admission, of volunteer units fighting on the side of the Bosnian Serbs.
Nice then read an excerpt from a newspaper interview where Vakic spoke of how he “in battles [throughout that part of eastern Bosnia] fought alongside the special forces of the [Serbian interior ministry] under the command of Obrad Stevanovic” and had “excellent cooperation with him on the battlefield” and was regularly participating in Serbian police training camps on the nearby Tara mountain in Serbia.
Stevanovic rejected these claims as “semi-truths” and said there was never any cooperation with volunteers on the battlefields and that Serbian police units never took part in any combat operation on Bosnian ground.
But the prosecutors later produced a document that was already introduced in their case, dated June 26, 1995 – just two weeks before the fall of Srebrenica - showing that “Serbian interior ministry and the [Bosnian Serb] interior ministry have sent 350 members of special purpose units that will on June 27 be engaged on Trnovo front”.
Stevanovic, the official commander of these special purpose units, exclaimed, “I’m really not clear about what this means!”
The cross-examination of Stevanovic will continue next week.
Ana Uzelac is IWPR’s project manager in The Hague.
