Extreme prejudice: the Hague Tribunal and the trial of Slobodan Milosevic

A further witness, who admitted his brother was a member of the KLA, claimed he was an eyewitness to a ‘massacre’ of civilians in his village near Bela Crkva.

He testified that Serb forces had entered his peaceful village, separated the women and children from the men and proceeded to execute seventy men, women and children.

In his cross-examination (time limit imposed) Mr Milosevic asked why, if they killed seventy men, women and children so indiscriminately, would they bother separating them in the first place? After a lengthy silence from the witness Judge May interjected, " I don't think you can expect the witness to know that."

The witness's credibility was further undermined when he denied any knowledge of the KLA kidnapping of both Serb and Albanian residents in his village just a few weeks earlier, claiming he must have been away at the time and upon his return no villagers mentioned it to him. Up to that date the kidnapping was the biggest event to occur in his village for years, yet, as a life long resident there, he had never even heard about it.

Proceedings were taking a predictable course. It didn't take much insight to grasp the following: A) The witnesses told a well rehearsed story. B) If the witnesses got into difficulties during the cross-examination the Judge would intervene.

This observation was further confirmed with the appearance of one Mr Ian Robert Hendry, a member of the London Metropolitan Police who had been seconded to the OSCE and was part of the verification mission in Racak headed by William Walker. Mr Hendry told of his observations while he was touring the Racak "massacre" site, using several photographs that he had taken personally. Under cross-examination, when asked if he toured the site alone, or if somebody had showed him around, he replied that the latter was the case.

"Who showed you around the site?" enquired Mr Milosevic. "I don’t know" was the astonishing response.

So here was a member of the verification team who could not even verify who it was that told him about the "massacre" and showed him the supposed evidence. Mr Hendry was in trouble. Judge May instructed the defence to move to another question. However the other questions got Mr Hendry into deeper trouble. He could not explain why his photographs showed only patches of blood and not pools as would be expected. Nor could he explain why no person's blood had spilled onto another person's body, which it was logical to assume would have been the case if all these bodies, densely packed together, had all been killed simultaneously at this one specific place.

Enter Judge May. "The witness is not a forensic expert and cannot be expected to know these things."

Comments such as this, which pepper the trial every day, can be expected from the prosecution, but from a supposedly neutral trial Judge?

When asked by the defendant if he had ever heard of the "paraffin test", (a test which can determine if a person had recently handled a firearm), Mr. Hendry didn't answer but left it to Judge May to announce that, "This test has been discredited" to which Mr Milosevic added with a touch of sarcasm "But only in the USA, not in Yugoslavia."

Mr Yemeni was the last prosecution witness I observed during my June visit. In his statement he claimed to have witnessed the killing of civilians in his village in Kosovo. He was hiding in his attic from where he claimed to have witnessed the "killings" and also overheard Yugoslav commanders communicating on mobile phones and comparing the number of dead with the number of dead at Racak. Mr Yemeni, at the age of twenty-four, was Mayor of his village.