Milosevic Ally Suggests Serbs Rectified Wrongs

Slobodan Milosevic’s former close ally Ratko Markovic continued his long testimony at the Hague tribunal this week, painting the accused as a political leader who strived to protect Serbia from victimisation by other Balkan republics and the international community alike.

Using the arguments and the rhetoric exploited by the Milosevic regime throughout the Nineties, Markovic - a former Serbian judge and politician - tried to show that throughout the different Balkan crises that eventually led to three bloody wars, the Serbs had only been rectifying wrongs done to them by others.

Milosevic seems to be hoping that this testimony would portray him as a responsible politician, protecting his nation’s interests, and not a member of a “joint criminal enterprise” to reshape the ethnic map of the former Yugoslavia, as the indictments against him allege.

Markovic’s testimony - the longest yet in this defence stage of the trial - remained consistently focused on the context and the factual background of the indictments against Milosevic without ever addressing the specific charges contained within.

By far the most dramatic part of Markovic’s testimony came at the end of the examination in chief, when he spoke of the failed political negotiations between the Serbian government and Kosovo Albanians in 1999 in Rambouillet and later in Paris.

At these talks, the Serb delegation decided to refuse a political agreement on the future of its Albanian-populated province of Kosovo and opted to face the threatened NATO air strikes instead.

Markovic, who was at the time the deputy prime minister in the Serbian government and a leader of the state delegation at the talks, seemed as convinced this week that he was doing the right thing as he must have been at the time.

“Many people were killed in the aftermath,” Markovic said flatly. “But we kept our honour and dignity. Serbs always considered loss of life better than the loss of dignity.”

This triggered an immediate and furious reaction from the usually restrained prosecutor Geoffrey Nice, who insisted that “it was the Albanian civilians who paid with their lives for Serb dignity”.

The prosecutors accuse Milosevic of overseeing an operation to expel Kosovo Albanians from the territory, which they allege started immediately after the beginning of the NATO bombing campaign.

Controversy still surrounds the actual number of Serbs and Albanians killed during this period. Belgrade estimates that around 2,000 Serb civilians fell victim to stray NATO bombs, while the Kosovar Albanians claim that 10,000 Albanians died. As many as 3,000 bodies have been discovered to date in mass graves in Kosovo and Serbia proper.

Markovic insisted that the ill-fated Rambouillet talks were “not real negotiations” as the Serb and Albanian sides never met face to face, and the talks were conducted by a team of international negotiators.

“[The negotiators] kept presenting [the Serb delegation] with new versions of the documents, that [were] previously agreed upon with the Albanians,” Markovic said plaintively.

The witness said that in the end, the Serb delegation was given the final version of the agreement on the evening before the talks were supposed to end, and refused to accept it at such short notice.

A few weeks later in Paris, during last-minute talks to prevent the looming conflict, the Serb delegation was faced with the same final document they had rejected.

“[The paper] kept Kosovo formally within Serbia but in fact expelled the state of Serbia from the territory of [the territory],” the witness told the court.

The document demanded that responsibility for law and order be placed in the hands of Kosovo’s local government and also asked for NATO forces to be stationed in the area. The latter was “unacceptable” for Belgrade, Markovic said.

He insisted that the main architect of this ultimatum was then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The witness could not offer any evidence of this, but insisted it was the feeling he built through the negotiations. He also claimed that the delegation had worked on its own without consulting Milosevic, who was at the time the president of rump Yugoslavia, consisting of Serbia and Montenegro.

Also this week, the witness spoke at length about Belgrade’s attempts in the late Eighties to strengthen its control over Kosovo and Vojvodina, which held the status of autonomous provinces within Serbia.

Markovic was a member of the Serbian Constitutional Commission, which in 1989 drafted the amendments that abolished many of the territory’s political rights – but argued that these changes were necessary in order to prevent Kosovo and Vojvodina from seceding.

The prosecution allege that abolishing this autonomy was the first step Milosevic made in establishing Belgrade’s absolute control over territory in former Yugoslavia which he would later try to expand to include parts of Bosnia and Croatia.

However, this background information pre-dates the actual charges contained in the indictments. The 62-year-old former Yugoslav president is charged with crimes committed during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia that started in 1991 and 1992 respectively.

Observers believe that Milosevic is trying to dismantle the prosecutor’s theory of the case and show that what they labelled joint criminal enterprise was in fact a policy of self-defence against secessionist enemies and manipulative international politicians alike.

“[Milosevic] is trying to prove that he was a president doing his job,” said Heikelina Verrijn Stuart, a Dutch legal journalist and a long-term observer of the Milosevic case.

“But the issue is whether he will be able to get any further than the theory of the case and present hard facts to challenge the actual core of the indictment - the existence of war crimes and his knowledge of them.”

The prosecutors insisted that the bulk of Markovic’s testimony was only “marginally relevant” to the case. But during the cross examination that started at the end of this week, the lead prosecutor appeared unusually hostile towards the witness, embarking on an elaborate exercise to undermine his reliability.

Prosecutor Nice insisted that Markovic was a part of the very group that helped Milosevic run his policies, and described him as a man “attractive to the accused”, due to his readiness to “adapt the laws [of the country] as [Milosevic] saw fit”.

He also insisted Markovic was deliberately misleading the court in his testimony and managed to compel the witness to concede that he helped draft some of the laws of the Serb-controlled areas in Croatia in the beginning of hostilities there – something that Markovic initially tried not to admit.

Nice also revealed relatively close personal ties between Markovic and the Serbian ultra nationalistic politician Vojislav Seselj, who is currently awaiting trial in The Hague on war crimes charges.

Both Markovic and Seselj were deputy prime ministers in the government that ruled Serbia on the eve of the NATO air strikes in 1999.

The cross examination will continue on January 24, when Markovic’s testimony is scheduled to end after full five court days.

Ana Uzelac is IWPR’s project manager in The Hague.