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Prosecution Case - Kosovo


“And he turned to me and said, “General Clark,” he said, “We know how to handle these murderers, these rapists, these criminals.” He said, “We've done this before.” I said, “Well, when?” He said, “In Drenica in 1946.” And I said, “What did you do?” He said, “We killed them.” He said, “We killed them all.”
Testimony of NATO general Wesley Clark on 15 December 2003 about a conversation he had with Slobodan Milošević in October 1998.



On 24 March 1999, Mr. Reshit Salihi saw Serb forces shell his village in western Kosovo, set fire to its buildings and its mosque, loot property, and later saw his brother shot dead. On 25 March 1999, 15 minutes after midnight, Aferdita Hajrizi’s husband, 11 year-old son Ilir and mother-in-law were shot dead in their house in northern Kosovo. On 26 March 1999, in Kosovo’s capital Pristina, Emin Kabashi saw armed police forcing people like cattle onto trains leaving the city.

According to the Tribunal’s Prosecution, these are but three victims, among hundreds of thousands, who suffered because of Slobodan Milošević’s criminal plan to ethnically cleanse Kosovo.

The Crimes

The Prosecution alleged in its indictment against Slobodan Milošević, the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that he engineered a ferocious campaign of terror and violence in which about 800,000 Albanians from Kosovo were forcibly expelled from their homes between mid-March and June 1999. According to the Prosecution, in the process of these expulsions, forces under Milošević’s command murdered hundreds of Kosovo Albanians, tortured, physically and psychologically abused hundreds more, and sexually assaulted many Albanian women. In addition, the Prosecution alleged that these forces deliberately destroyed cultural and religious sites, as well as destroying and looting Kosovo Albanian property.

In the Prosecution phase of the trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Serbian Interior Ministry (MUP) units, Yugoslav Army (VJ), and other forces under Slobodan Milošević's command or control, including paramilitaries and local defence units, committed the crimes described above in a systematic manner in over a dozen municipalities across Kosovo.

Numerous prosecution witnesses testified that Serb and Yugoslav forces shelled their villages, and harassed, assaulted, and robbed them as they forced them to leave, as well as seizing and destroying their personal identity documents. Some Prosecution witnesses, like witnesses K14, K20 and K9—who testified with their names withheld from the public—related how Serb forces sexually assaulted and raped them. Others, like Shyrete Berisha, testified about how Serb forces killed her four children, aged just under two years old to 16, along with some 45 members of her extended family in a café in Suva Reka / Suharekë, a town in central Kosovo. These witnesses identified the perpetrators as members of MUP and VJ units, and other Serb forces.

One insider witness who corroborated these testimonies was protected witness K32, a Muslim from Montenegro who was in his early 20s in 1999 and serving as a driver in the VJ in Kosovo during the conflict. On 25 March 1999, his unit received orders to cleanse the village of Trnje, near Suva Reka / Suharekë. “The army started killing civilians who were in the village. I personally saw that,” said witness K32. The civilians were old men, women and children. K32 said that, in general, he did not see any young men there. In one house, K32 saw a baby and mother who had been killed by the same shot, which went through the baby’s head.

A number of Prosecution documents backed up these witness’ claims. For example, a document marked “Military Secret, Strictly Confidential,” from Yugoslav 3rd Army Commander Nebojša Pavković, whose area of responsibility covered Kosovo and who the Tribunal later also indicted for his role in crimes committed there, states that

…some MUP members and to a considerable extent entire smaller units, which “operate” independently on the ground are committing serious crimes against the Šiptar [derogatory term for Albanian] civilian population in settlements or refugee shelters – murder, rape, plunder, robbery aggravated, theft, etc...

Pavković also stated that MUP members “condone or openly permit evident criminal activities and plunder committed by their fellow MUP members, as well as civilians resulting in the misappropriation of a vast number of motor vehicles, technical goods and other resources from the territory of KiM.” (The term KiM is the short form for Kosovo and Metohija, which is the Serbian name for the province).

The cover-up

Several Prosecution witnesses, including Serbian police officers, testified about how Serb police and Yugoslav military forces engaged in a cover-up operation to hide evidence of these crimes from the Tribunal. The Prosecution presented evidence that these forces exhumed and transported over 800 Kosovo Albanian victims who were killed in massacres, such as that at Suva Reka / Suharekë in which Shyrete Berisha’s family was murdered, some 350 kilometers north to Serbia proper, where they reburied them in secret mass graves.

Boško Radojković, a Serbian Interior Ministry crime technician testified that he received a phone call between 12:00 and 13:00 on 5 April 1999, stating that a fisherman had seen what looked like a truck in the Danube River at a town called Tekija, near Kladovo in eastern Serbia. Radojković and a local policeman went to investigate, and called in a diver who reported that it was a Mercedes truck with a refrigerated compartment in the back. The next day, Radojković said that a crane extracted the truck from the river. On 7 April, through a crack in the truck’s right rear door, Radojković saw a human arm and two human legs. After a judge and prosecutor arrived, Radojković cut through a padlock and chain and opened the rear doors to reveal “a heap of corpses.”

Radojković testified that he received orders to cover the lettering on the back of the truck that identified it as coming from Prizren, in southern Kosovo. He stated that Časlav Golubović, chief of police in the nearby city of Bor, informed Radojkovoić that he and his colleagues were to remove the corpses from the refrigerator truck. During the night of 7 and 8 April 1999, they would unload 83 corpses and body parts of three more, including men, women, children and elderly. Most, Radojković said, showed signs of being killed by a blunt object or mechanical instrument with a sharp metal edge. On 8 and 9 April 1999, after receiving orders to destroy the truck, Radojković and a colleague torched it and blew up the burned skeletons.

Časlav Golubović, the Bor police chief, told the court that based on the fact that the truck was marked with the word “Prizren,” and the clothing on the victims’ bodies—there were women clothed in “djimije,” a kind of pantaloon characteristic of Albanian women—it was assumed that the bodies were from Kosovo.

Golubović testified that shortly after he learned about the refrigerator truck, he called his immediate supervisor, the Interior Ministry’s head of Public Security, Vlastimir Djordjević, who the Tribunal would later indict as one of Milošević’s co-perpetrators. Golubović said that Djordjević expressed surprise upon hearing about the truck and the bodies, and told him he would call back in 15 or 20 minutes. When he did, Djordjević told Golubović to transfer the corpses to a different vehicle, bury them somewhere near Kladovo, destroy the truck, and also not to give any statements to the press. Djordjević told Golubović that all of this, “was the order of the minister,” Vlajko Stojiljković, also indicted as one of Milošević’s co-perpetrators.

Two years later, in May 2001, a magazine published an article about a refrigerator truck containing human corpses being found in the Danube River near Kladovo. The new Interior Minister, appointed by the democratically-elected government that replaced Milošević, established a Working Group to investigate. Dragan Karleuša, then the Interior Ministry’s Deputy Head of Organized Crime, headed the Working Group’s investigation.

Karleuša testified before the Tribunal that the Working Group found that the bodies from the truck were transported to the Interior Ministry’s Exercise Center in Batajnica, a Belgrade suburb, with the assistance of a private company, and that the truck was destroyed in Petrovo Selo, near Kladovo. Karleuša testified that their investigation revealed that orders for these actions came from Vlastimir Djordjević. Those involved were paid out of the Serbian Interior Ministry’s treasury for special purposes. The Working Group also learned that the whole operation was codenamed Depth 2, and was deliberately concealed from the public by being classified as a state secret.

Karleuša told the court that the Working Group also learned of three meetings of high-level officials at which the removal of bodies was discussed. The first one occurred in March 1999, and was held in Slobodan Milošević’s office. In addition to Milošević, Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljković, his subordinates State Security Chief Radomir Marković and Public Security Chief Vlastimir Djordjević, and some others attended. As Karleuša testified, at the meeting, “[t]he need was discussed to conduct a clearing operation, as it [was] called, and also to eliminate any trace of anything that may fall within the interest of The Hague Tribunal.”

At the second meeting, which included Minister Stojiljković and Djordjević, Karleuša said “it was agreed how to carry out the instructions they had received at the office of then president Mr. Milošević.” Stojiljković gave Djordjević and another police general, Dragan Ilić, the direct task of carrying this out. Djordjević and Ilić held a third meeting to discuss sending experts to Kosovo to assist with “cleansing” the terrain.

Karleuša stated that the information about the first two meetings came from a statement that Radomir Marković made to the State Security Service on 2 June 2001. In his testimony before the Tribunal, Radomir Marković attempted to disavow this statement. The Prosecution called the State Security officer, Zoran Stijović, who took it, and State Security employee Olivera Antonić-Simić, who transcribed it. Stijović testified that Marković read the draft, made some changes, and signed the corrected version. Antonić-Simić backed up Stijović’s claims.

Karleuša testified that exhumations conducted in Batajnica from two out of its five sites, as well as in Petrovo Selo and Lake Peručac in western Serbia had unearthed 433 bodies (the total would later grow to some 800 bodies). Identity documents found at the first Batajnica location belonged to ethnic Albanians from Suva Reka, the city where Shyrete Berisha's family was murdered.

Milošević: The Leader of the Joint Criminal Enterprise

Prosecutors called evidence to show that Slobodan Milošević was at the apex of a joint enterprise to commit the crimes described in the indictment and to cover them up. The Prosecution contended that the joint criminal enterprise included numerous co-perpetrators in the highest echelons of the Serbian and Yugoslav state. The Office of the Prosecutor also indicted the following as Milošević’s accomplices: Serbian President Milan Milutinović, Army Chief of Staff Dragoljub Ojdanić, Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljković, Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Šainović, army commanders Nebojša Pavković and Vladimir Lazarević, and police commanders Sreten Lukić and Vlastimir Djordjević.

The Prosecution presented evidence that the forces committing crimes in Kosovo ultimately answered to Slobodan Milošević both in fact and in law. As the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, according to the Yugoslav Constitution and its laws, Milošević was the VJ’s commander-in-chief. The Prosecution also presented evidence that Slobodan Milošević had de facto control over MUP forces. General Aleksandar Vasiljević (named, but not indicted, as one of Milošević’s co-perpetrators for crimes committed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina), testified for the Prosecution that the “MUP was practically under the control of the accused along the vertical line that went through the Minister of the Interior of Serbia and then further on in-depth.” In addition, in his expert report, Prosecution military analyst Philip Coo showed the links between the MUP, VJ and local defence units to Slobodan Milošević.

The Prosecution also argued that Slobodan Milošević circumvented the regular chain of command whenever he saw fit, in order to implement his criminal ethnic cleansing plan. The Prosecution submitted a confidential letter dated July 1998 from then Yugoslav Army Chief of the General Staff Momčilo Perišić (whom the Tribunal indicted for crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia) to Milošević in which he accuses him of “[b]ypassing levels of command in official talks with VJ members.” He also accused Milošević of commanding individual VJ units directly, which he says has “no basis in law, no necessity and no logic,” and states that unauthorized persons, including Milošević’s co-accused federal Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Šainović attempted to command VJ units, among other accusations.

The Prosecution presented evidence of Milošević by-passing regular chains of command also during the time period when the military and police were committing crimes in Kosovo. For example, General Aleksandar Vasiljević testified that in mid-May 1999, the height of the Kosovo conflict, he and VJ Chief of the General Staff Dragoljub Ojdanić were heading into a meeting with Milošević. Before they entered, they saw General Nebojša Pavković, Ojdanić’s subordinate with responsibility for Kosovo operations, leave the building. Ojdanić was surprised, and commented that Pavković came to Milošević’s office all the time.

The Prosecution also showed that Milošević effectively controlled his co-accused who were political officials, Serbian President Milan Milutinović and federal Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Šainović. At the internationally-mediated negotiations in Rambouillet, France, in February 1999 to settle the Kosovo crisis, several witnesses testified that Milutinović and Šainović could not act without Milošević’s approval.

For example, Veton Surroi, a Kosovo Albanian newspaper publisher and member of the Albanian delegation to the talks, told the court that he asked American mediator Ambassador Christopher Hill why members of the Serb delegation were being allowed to go to Belgrade. Hill responded that Šainović had asked to consult with Milošević because in fact he would be the one to make decisions. Surroi related that Hill thought this might help as the negotiations were more or less paralysed. Similarly, at the Paris negotiations in March 1999, Surroi related that when it came to signing the agreement, Milutinović informed the three international mediators that “in fact his boss in Belgrade would have to make the decision and he could do nothing.”

The Plan

The Prosecution presented evidence that crimes committed in Kosovo were part of Slobodan Milošević’s plan to cleanse Kosovo of Albanians.

Insider witness and VJ driver K32 provided the court with evidence that such a plan existed. He testified that during the conflict, on one occasion he drove an officer’s deputy. From the conversation, K32 gathered that there was a “plan … to expel all the Albanians from Kosovo so that none of them should remain there,” a plan that he said his fellow soldiers also discussed.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence of a plan to permanently drive Albanians out of Kosovo was the fact that Serb forces systematically confiscated and destroyed Albanians’ identity documents, including personal identity cards, passports, driver’s licenses and vehicle number plates. A number of Prosecution witnesses testified about how police forces seized and destroyed their identity documents. Insider witness K32 corroborated their claims. He testified that police were under orders to seize documents from Albanians at the border and send them across, while the confiscated documents would be burned on the spot.

A document from a border police station also supports this: dated 27 March 1999, but days after the Serb forces’ onslaught began, a police lieutenant in the Vrbnica police station on the border with Albania informed police authorities that 94 Albanians turned up there wanting to cross over to Albania, but did not have any travel documents. The people stated that the Prizren police had already taken them. Ten minutes later, the Prizren police station and the Serbian Interior Ministry gave the Vrbnica border police station authorization to let them through.

The Prosecution argued that destroying Kosovo Albanians’ documents indicates that Serb and Yugoslav forces intended to permanently deprive Kosovo Albanians of residence and citizenship in Yugoslavia, and hence, of the means to return. In his report submitted to the court, expert witness on the police, Budimir Babović, describes legislation relating to personal identity documents, which shows that it was illegal under Yugoslav law to confiscate and destroy them in the way Serb forces were systematically doing. K32 testified that the reason Serb forces destroyed personal identity documents was “[s]o that in case these people came back, that they would have no proof of ever having lived there.”

The Prosecution argued that the widespread and systematic nature of the crimes demonstrated that they were not isolated incidents, but precisely that they were part of a plan. In his report, British military expert, General Sir Peter de la Billiere writes:

"I cannot support any claim which states that the events in Kosovo, as described in the indictment and other documents I have reviewed, were the products of misjudgements by junior commanders. The wide scale and the media coverage of the excesses undermine any such claim as does the failure to take adequate disciplinary measures."

“This was no rogue operation by a break-away company or even a break-away brigade,” he later testified. “This was a concerted policy…”

Milošević’s Criminal Intent

The Prosecution presented evidence that Slobodan Milošević intended to commit these crimes. Both American General Wesley Clark and German General Klaus Naumann, at the time NATO’s top two military officials, testified about a conversation they had with Milošević during a break in negotiations on 24 and 25 October 1998 to end the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. As General Clark related to the court, at one point, Milošević turned to him and said of the Kosovo Albanians, “We know how to handle these murderers, these rapists, these criminals. We've done this before.” When General Clark asked what he meant, Milošević said, “In Drenica in 1946.” General Clark asked Milošević what they did. Milošević responded “We killed them,” then repeated, “We killed them all.”

General Clark stated that he was stunned at the vehemence with which Milošević spoke. Both he and General Naumann just looked at him, and then Milošević qualified his statement. He said, “Of course we did not do it all at once. It took some time.”

The Prosecution presented evidence that Milošević’s alleged co-perpetrators were of a similar state of mind. Specifically, Zoran Lilić, at the time a federal deputy prime minister, testified that he attended a meeting on 13 June 1998 on the situation in Kosovo, which gathered a number of the highest-level military, police and political officials, including Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljković, one of Milošević’s alleged co-perpetrators. After hearing a report on the behaviour of certain reserve police units in Kosovo, Lilić cautioned Stojiljković about what was going on. “We had a heated dialogue,” Lilić testified, “and he said, in the final analysis, they should all be killed, but he was irritated by what I had said. And I said that because of what certain members of the reserve police force were doing, one day, we might be ashamed for being Serbs…”

Further evidence of Milošević’s intent to implement his plan to cleanse Kosovo of Albanians was provided by several witnesses who testified about the Rambouillet negotiations. Milošević did not attend those negotiations. However, several Prosecution witnesses who did, including EU Special Envoy Wolfgang Petritsch and Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova, told the court that Yugoslav officials were in constant communication with Belgrade. Ambassador Petritsch testified that Milan Milutinović indicated to him that Milošević did not like the Rambouillet agreement, and decided not to continue with negotiations.

Also revealing of Milošević’s state of mind, Norwegian Ambassador Knut Vollebaek, then the Chairman of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), testified about a telephone conversation that he had with Milošević on 24 March 1999, hours before the NATO bombing campaign began. Ambassador Vollebaek, whose organization was mandated to try to find a peaceful settlement to the Kosovo crisis, called Milošević in order to persuade him to accept a foreign military presence in Kosovo, and thus avert an armed conflict. Ambassador Vollebaek confronted Milošević with information that the OSCE had collected about refugee flows into Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Milošević responded that the refugees were “just picnicking”.

Failure to Prevent or Punish

According to international and domestic law, Slobodan Milošević had an obligation to ensure that forces under his legal or effective command took all reasonable measures to protect civilian life, to prevent his forces from committing crimes and to punish those among them who did. The Prosecution called witnesses, including a number from the international community, who testified that they informed Slobodan Milošević about the crimes that his forces were committing in Kosovo.

The Prosecution presented evidence that as early as September 1998, Milošević was put on notice of these crimes. British envoy Paddy Ashdown testified that he met Milošević on 29 September 1998 and handed him a letter from United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair informed Milošević that “the excessive and indiscriminate use of force by your security and armed forces is having an intolerable impact on innocent civilians who are being forced to flee their homes and whose livelihoods are being destroyed.” Ashdown stated that he made clear to Milošević that “he was personally responsible for any further continuation of these policies.”

OSCE Chairman Knut Vollebaek had several meetings with Milošević during 1998 and 1999, and testified that at each one he discussed crimes being committed in Kosovo that the OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission was collecting on the ground. In addition, Human Rights Watch researcher Fred Abrahams testified that his organization sent all 16 of its reports documenting serious human rights violations in Kosovo to Slobodan Milošević at his personal e-mail address, in addition to issuing them publicly.

Deputy Prime Minister Zoran Lilić, VJ General Aleksandar Vasiljević, and Serbian State Security head Radomir Marković all testified about the military and police channels of communication by which Milošević was kept informed of what was happening in Kosovo, including during the conflict in 1999.

On 17 May 1999, General Aleksandar Vasiljević and a group of VJ generals, including the Chief of the General Staff Dragoljub Ojdanić and 3rd Army Commander Nebojša Pavković presented Milošević with reports of crimes the VJ and volunteers in Kosovo committed. According to Vasiljević, during the meeting, Milošević stated that crimes needed to be sanctioned and volunteers brought under control.

Milošević did not submit any evidence during the trial that he personally took measures to see to it that the crimes alleged in the indictment were investigated and prosecuted, or that this was ever done. Prosecution military analyst Philip Coo testified that he saw no evidence that disciplinary measures were taken to hold commanders accountable for the types of crimes alleged in the indictment. Not only were most of the key VJ and MUP commanders retained in their organisations, but many were commended and promoted. The Prosecution presented evidence that army generals Nebojša Pavković and Vladimir Lazarević, and police general Sreten Lukić were all promoted soon after the Kosovo conflict ended.

A Preponderance of Evidence

In sum, the Prosecution presented a preponderance of evidence that led to the irrefutable conclusion designed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Slobodan Milošević was ultimately responsible for the crimes his forces committed against Reshit Salihi, Aferdita Hajrizi, Emin Kabashi, Shyrete Berisha, K14, and many hundreds of thousands of others.

Because Slobodan Milošević died before the end of his trial, the Trial Chamber terminated the proceedings and did not issue a final judgement. However, the Prosecution, in its pursuit of justice for Kosovo's victims, is trying cases against a number of the highest level Yugoslav officials, namely: Serbian President Milan Milutinović, Army Chief of Staff Dragoljub Ojdanić, Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Šainović, army commanders Nebojša Pavković and Vladimir Lazarević, police commander Sreten Lukić, and police general Vlastimir Djordjević.

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