THE HAGUE, June 3: Slobodan Milosevic was sent reports cataloguing Serb human rights abuses against Kosovo Albanians by post, fax and e-mail, the ex-Yugoslav president’s trial heard on Monday.
As UN prosecutors sought to show Milosevic had known or must have known of crimes that his forces committed in the south Serbian province, a human rights activist told of the horrors he witnessed in Kosovo and the reports he helped compile on them.
“I know for a fact that all our reports were sent to the accused...I personally remember adding his e-mail address to the e-mail list: slobodan.milosevic@gov.yu,” said Fred Abrahams, a former researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Abrahams said reports by HRW, a non-governmental organisation that documents human rights violations around the world, were always made public as well as being sent to government officials and alleged perpetrators.
To convict Milosevic over Kosovo — one of three indictments he faces at the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague — prosecutors must prove not only that atrocities were committed against ethnic Albanians, but also that he knew or should have known and did nothing to prevent them or punish the perpetrators.
Abrahams’s appearance followed a bizarre setback for the prosecution early in the day, when a Serbian witness expected to give important evidence abruptly refused to testify.
The protected witness, known only as K12, said he had been a driver during his 1988-89 Yugoslav army military service and had then worked for years as a truck driver, but then broke down and said he could not give evidence without elaborating.
“You’re here to tell the truth,” presiding Judge Richard May admonished, prompting K12 to retort: “The truth is that I cannot testify and there is no other truth than that.”
WITNESS “WROTE THE INDICTMENT”: Abrahams told the court of Serb-inflicted murder, rape, torture and destruction of Kosovo Albanians’ mosques and homes, as well as of humanitarian violations by NATO and Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas.
NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign in March 1999 to curb a violent Serb crackdown on Kosovo which HRW also investigated along with KLA atrocities.
Milosevic objected bitterly to Abrahams as a witness, saying the fact he had worked briefly as a research analyst for prosecutors meant he “wrote the indictment” against Milosevic.
The ex-Serb strongman is accused of crimes against humanity and genocide in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He has refused to plead, prompting judges to enter a not guilty plea, and is defending himself.
Abrahams insisted on HRW’s impartiality, saying it had criticised all sides in the Balkan conflicts. But Milosevic cast doubt on that, speaking of HRW’s “role to provide alibis for the interference of international organisations in other countries”.
His suggestion during cross-examination that Abrahams had seen nothing first-hand drew an impassioned response.
Abrahams recounted his experience investigating the September 1998 murders of 21 civilians of the same family in Gornje Obrinje in Kosovo’s Drenica valley.
“I was present in that forest and I will never in my life forget the smell of the bodies that I saw,” he said.
Abrahams followed K12 in the witness box. The court was in closed session for most of K12’s half-hour in the stand and went into open session only briefly before his abrupt exit.
Pressed by judges on why he could not testify, K12 said it could “jeopardise other people”. Judges asked to look at a magazine that had apparently been mentioned in closed session.
Further details of K12’s identity were not clear. But a story last year in the Belgrade weekly Vreme quoted a Serbian truck driver who said he was drafted in February 1999 to drive a sealed refrigerator truck back and forth from Serbia to Kosovo.
The story was published in June 2001, just after Serb police discovered mass grave sites near Belgrade and said they were believed to contain bodies of dead Kosovo Albanians.
After driving a dozen such lorries, the driver known in Vreme under the false name “Nikola” said he had unsealed the truck to find corpses, mainly of civilians, piled up inside.—Reuters
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