1 Monday, 26 June 2000

2 [Open session]

3 [The accused entered court]

4 [The witness entered court]

5 --- Upon commencing at 9.40 a.m.

6 JUDGE MAY: Can I return this to the

7 registry. Thank you.

8 Mr. Sayers, and indeed Dr. Almond, I'm sorry

9 to have kept you waiting, but we had to consider the

10 circumstances of another case which we may have to deal

11 with. But we're now ready.

12 Let the witness take the declaration.

13 THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will

14 speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the

15 truth.

16 WITNESS: MARK ALMOND

17 JUDGE MAY: If you'd like to take a seat.

18 MR. SAYERS: One very brief preliminary

19 matter, Mr. President. The batting order for witnesses

20 this week is as stated in my letter of June 21st, the

21 most recent letter, with the exception of witness

22 number 4 on that list, who is not available. And with

23 the Court's permission, Mr. Browning will take the

24 direct examination of the first two witnesses on the

25 list, Mr. Almond and Dr. Mestrovic.

1 JUDGE MAY: Yes.

2 Examined by Mr. Browning:

3 Q. Mr. Almond, could I have you state your full

4 name for the record, please.

5 A. My name is Mark Padrais Almond.

6 Q. And Mr. Almond, do you have a copy of your

7 report that --

8 THE INTERPRETER: Could you please make a

9 pause between question and answer for the

10 interpreters.

11 A. I do have a copy of the report.

12 MR. BROWNING: May I ask you first of all --

13 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Browning, you're being asked

14 to make a pause between the question and answer, for

15 the benefit of the interpreters.

16 MR. BROWNING: I will do so, Mr. President.

17 JUDGE MAY: It needs to be remembered.

18 MR. BROWNING:

19 Q. Mr. Almond, if I could ask you to turn to

20 your curriculum vitae. And the Court has your

21 credentials before it, but there are a couple of brief

22 points that I would like you to clarify.

23 First of all with regard to the fourth line

24 on the first page of your curriculum vitae, if you

25 could explain to the Trial Chamber the time period that

1 you've been a lecturer in modern history at Oxford

2 University.

3 A. Unfortunately, I've missed out a dash which

4 would indicate that from 1986 until the present day I'm

5 a lecturer in modern history at Oriel College in

6 Oxford. I apologise for that, if that misleads

7 anybody.

8 Q. So you received your degree from Oxford

9 University in 1980 and have worked continuously, either

10 as a researcher or a lecturer, in the field of history?

11 A. Yes.

12 Q. And you have numerous publications listed in

13 your curriculum vitae dealing with the former

14 Yugoslavia and eastern Europe. Do you have any

15 publications currently in progress?

16 A. For the Hoover Institution, I have a project

17 which is essentially dealing with matters to do with

18 the American media, and one part of it will be dealing

19 with the relationship between interpretation of

20 international relations and political decision making.

21 That's the part that will be relevant to the former

22 Yugoslavia, in part, in part, although only in part.

23 Q. And I notice on the second page of your

24 curriculum vitae you've been a frequent commentator on

25 various television programmes, as well as radio, as

1 well as a frequent commentator on affairs of the former

2 Yugoslavia and various newspapers and other

3 publications. Could you give us an idea of the

4 frequency by which you've been referred to in

5 newspapers and appeared on television with regard to

6 the former Yugoslavia?

7 A. Depending upon the state of events in the

8 former Yugoslavia, or other areas where my views are

9 requested, the degree of frequency varies, but quite

10 often if there is a particular event or series of

11 events taking place, it may be not only once a week,

12 but several times even in a day, for the BBC's various

13 news channels but also for other channels like CNN, SKY

14 News, and Channel 4 News. Also I get asked to write in

15 newspapers. So there may be periods generally --

16 certainly, even in a relatively quiet period, I would

17 be asked once or so a month, and quite frequently, as I

18 say, several times a week or even a day.

19 Q. The report that you have before you that has

20 been filed with the Trial Chamber, is that a full and

21 accurate summary of your opinions and conclusions in

22 this matter?

23 A. Yes. The report expresses my opinions and

24 conclusions. There may be certain, I regret to say,

25 certain typographical errors as a result of the time

1 factor, which prevented me from revising the report

2 which I had to submit from Washington D.C., but the

3 text represents my interpretation of the matter as

4 fully and accurately as I could present it.

5 Q. And as set out in the first sentence of that

6 report, you agree with many of the historical facts

7 contained in the report of Robert Donia but disagree

8 with some of the conclusions and opinions that he has

9 reached?

10 A. Yes. Much of what Dr. Donia says is true,

11 and certainly much of the history is unimpeachable. On

12 the particular conclusions about the events really of

13 1991, 1992, the breakup of Yugoslavia and how that is

14 to be interpreted, in this particular area I diverge

15 from him.

16 Q. I believe you also diverge from him with

17 regard to the historical significance of the borders of

18 Bosnia-Herzegovina. Could you explain the historical

19 significance of those borders and how your opinions and

20 conclusions differ from Robert Donia?

21 A. I think that under the impact of the terrible

22 events in Bosnia-Herzegovina after 1992, when the Serbs

23 caused such suffering to primarily the Muslims, a lot

24 of people, including the smaller community, adopted a

25 myth, a benign myth, but nonetheless a myth, of the

1 historical continuity of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which I

2 myself concede is a very tempting idea.

3 And the apparent continuity of particularly

4 the northern and western borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina

5 over recent centuries is introduced in evidence I think

6 in this Court but also in public discussion, in books

7 and newspaper articles, that there was a natural

8 political civic entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina which ran

9 back through time. It seems to me that this overlooks

10 that the real reason why those borders existed between

11 the Habsburg or Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman

12 Empire was precisely great power politics, but there

13 may have been peculiar geographical features that led

14 to different states and political entities at different

15 times choosing those boundaries largely as the ones to

16 be the basis of their division. But that the interests

17 and the wishes of the populations on either side of

18 those boundaries were not in the minds of the diplomats

19 and politicians, whether in Istanbul or in

20 Vienna/Budapest, who devised those boundaries.

21 Q. And what significance do those boundaries

22 have when events transpire in 1990, 1991?

23 A. The boundaries of the internal republics of

24 the collapse in Federal Socialist Republic of

25 Yugoslavia of course cut across the ethnic lines. I

1 use "ethnic" here not necessarily to mean that there

2 was -- in the scientific sense, but I think it's common

3 parlance to describe Croats, Serbs, and Bosnian Muslims

4 as different ethic groups. So the cultural, economic

5 and a variety of other traditional links which cut

6 across these boundaries were not necessarily regarded

7 as natural by significant groups of people; Croat and

8 Serb on either side.

9 Also, I might add, Bosnian Muslims regarded

10 the Sandzak of Novi Pazar which lay outside of the

11 territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina either as part of

12 Yugoslavia before 1991, 1992 or as an independent state

13 since. They regarded that territory as being

14 inhabited largely as people who they saw as being of

15 common identity with themselves. So in short, although

16 there may be very good and desirable reasons for the

17 creation of a Bosnian-Herzegovinian on the basis of the

18 republican boundaries in 1991, it is not inherently

19 pernicious to question those boundaries and indeed

20 representatives of all three groups at different

21 times.

22 Q. Would you explain the historical significance

23 of the meeting in Karadjordjevo between President

24 Tudjman and President Milosevic and particularly the

25 events that one must consider subsequent to that

1 meeting in interpreting Karadjordjevo?

2 A. I think that the attention of this meeting is

3 out of proportion to its significance. If one judges

4 not what is rumoured and alleged to have been agreed of

5 subsequent events, then the allegations of some kind of

6 conspiracy plan to partition Bosnia-Herzegovina,

7 regardless of the wishes of its inhabitants between

8 Croatia and Serbia that such a plan was hatched and

9 prepared and this meeting is not borne out by

10 subsequent developments.

11 Q. What are the subsequent developments --

12 A. The subsequent developments are that

13 Croatia --

14 JUDGE BENNOUNA: [Interpretation] Pardon, Mr.

15 Browning. What you have just mentioned about the

16 meeting, you said that has not been confirmed or been

17 borne out [no interpretation]. Could you speak to the

18 meeting itself without mentioning as the events that

19 were to take place later on, because you seem to say

20 that the further developments failed to confirm that

21 there was a plan to partition Bosnia-Herzegovina, but

22 as to the meeting itself, was that kind of plan

23 mentioned at all, whatever the further developments may

24 have been? So this is the first question of primary

25 interest before we speak about the further

1 developments.

2 MR. BROWNING:

3 Q. Mr. Almond, if you could, please, explain

4 what you as a historian and historians in general know

5 with regard to the meeting in Karadjordjevo?

6 A. With regard to that meeting, there are --

7 various sources have appeared primarily on the part of

8 Croats. To the best of my knowledge, neither

9 Mr. Milosevic nor any of the Serbian participants have

10 given an account of this meeting. The problem with the

11 sources which are all in the public domain that I know

12 of from the Croatian side is that they are all from

13 sometime after the events, after the particular

14 meeting.

15 Even if we go back to the spring of 1991, in

16 addition to the meeting between President Tudjman and

17 Milosevic, there were also discussions about how the

18 future of Yugoslavia was to be developed on the part of

19 the heads of government and other political actors in

20 all the member states so that, for instance, President

21 Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia held discussions with

22 Milosevic, Slovenes too.

23 It was not self-evident at that time that the

24 republican boundaries of the then waning Federal

25 Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia would be treated as

1 sacrosanct by the International Community as one actor

2 so that discussions about the complex ethnic map and

3 how that might or might not affect the future

4 development of the individual republics either as part

5 of a reconstituted or reformed Yugoslavia or as

6 independent states. All of this was clear in March

7 1991 and was very much up for grabs.

8 I think it is very important to remember, and

9 this is a problem that historians always have that the

10 events that took place that we know about, though

11 specific details may be disputed, were not known at the

12 time, though nobody knew at the time what was to be --

13 JUDGE BENNOUNA: [Interpretation] No, but the

14 question that I asked you and you didn't answer my

15 question, the simple -- it was simple. As an expert,

16 as a historian who must have studied this period on the

17 basis of available documents, what do you think as an

18 expert at that meeting between Mr. Tudjman and

19 Mr. Milosevic? What happened during the course of that

20 meeting? Do you have any idea? You say you do not

21 have any idea, that is all right but you, yourself,

22 have you formed an opinion as to what happened and what

23 was said at that meeting?

24 A. My opinion is that there was an inconclusive

25 discussion which included the question of if Yugoslavia

1 was to breakup, would Bosnia be -- what would be the

2 future status of Bosnia and one aspect of that

3 discussion, I suspect, on the basis is would it be

4 divided between the Republic of Croatia and the

5 Republic of Serbia.

6 On the substantive point of whether any

7 conclusion was reached about how to do that, I think

8 that no evidence that such an agreement let alone plan

9 or timetable was developed and that if subsequent

10 events suggest to me that insofar as President

11 Milosevic of Serbia was entering into such a discussion

12 with Croatia, it was partly in the context of his own

13 internal difficulties in March of 1991.

14 There had been large-scale demonstrations

15 against the rule of the -- Serbian Socialist Party

16 and --

17 JUDGE BENNOUNA: [Interpretation] Thank you.

18 MR. BROWNING:

19 Q. Now, Mr. Almond, is it possible for you or

20 Robert Donia or any other historian to say with precise

21 absolute precision what was agreed to at Karadjordjevo?

22 A. It's not only possible to say with any

23 precision, I think, it is, in fact, impossible to say

24 that there was an agreement.

25 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Browning, of course

1 ultimately this is a matter which we are going to have

2 to determine or may be for the purposes of our

3 judgement as a matter of fact, as a finding of fact

4 whether there was an agreement or not. But I'm not

5 going to stop you asking the witness about his opinion

6 about it but we'll have to decide it on the evidence

7 such as it is, that is, put before us.

8 MR. BROWNING:

9 Q. As a historian and interpreting the events in

10 Karadjordjevo, you had referred to subsequent events

11 and how that must be considered as a historian in

12 evaluating whether there was a plan to partition

13 Bosnia-Herzegovina. Can you set out the subsequent

14 events that you are referring to?

15 A. The idea of collusion between Croatia and

16 Serbia seems to me to fall down on the fact that the

17 Croatian republic was a victim of an attack by the

18 Yugoslav People's Army, the JNA, and also local Serb

19 forces in the Krajina, Slavonia, and so on, I believe

20 organised to a great extent and directed by the

21 Belgrade government. And therefore, the idea that

22 there was a persistent cooperation between Zagreb and

23 Belgrade must fall down on the actual military

24 developments which included large-scale destruction of

25 property and ethnic cleansing of Croats.

1 I might make the point if I may, also, that

2 already in August of 1990, the certain Serb forces,

3 paramilitary forces in Krajina and parts of Slavonia

4 had been organised in -- to form an interaction against

5 the newly-elected government of Croatia, and I think

6 that many of the historians who might not necessarily

7 agree with me on every point would agree that that,

8 too, was largely steered from Belgrade.

9 Q. To what extent must one consider the

10 destruction of Vukovar in August 1991 and the attack on

11 [indiscernible]?

12 A. The destruction of Vukovar in the later part

13 of 1991 and also the bombardment of Dalmatian cities

14 and territory seems to me also to compound the problem

15 of the idea of collusion.

16 Most observers in the summer and autumn of

17 1991, I believe, concluded that the strategy both of

18 Belgrade, of the still existing federal authorities and

19 of Mr. Milosevic's government, the government of

20 Serbia, which was increasingly the dominant force, was

21 to effectively destroy the viability of the Croatian

22 republic as a nascent independent state by occupying

23 large place or territory, by creating economic

24 turbulence because of refugees, and the destruction of

25 infrastructure and destroying its tourist trade which

1 has never fully recovered from the onslaught on coastal

2 towns, and it was a very important part of the economy.

3 Q. In evaluating significant events, what

4 significance should be given to Croatia's recognition

5 of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the boundaries of

6 Bosnia-Herzegovina?

7 A. Croatia's recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina

8 is quite important because, first of all, Croatia was

9 the first state to do so at a time when, for instance,

10 the United States was still -- whose policy was still

11 very unclear. Furthermore it is worth remembering that

12 when Slovenia, then Croatia, declared their

13 independence from Yugoslavia at the end of June 1991,

14 Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was under a government

15 elected in 1990 led by Alija Izetbegovic, did not,

16 certainly not in the eyes of Croats, act in a way that

17 was sympathetic or helpful to the Croats in their

18 conflict with the JNA and with the local Serb

19 paramilitaries. So that this gesture of recognition

20 was not wholly reciprocal; it was in fact an unilateral

21 act, if you like, by Zagreb to recognise

22 Bosnia-Herzegovina though many Croats felt that the

23 Bosnians had not assisted them when they were under

24 attack by similar forces to those now attacking

25 Bosnia-Herzegovina.

1 Q. As a historical fact, Croatia also sent

2 ambassadors to Bosnia-Herzegovina?

3 A. Yes.

4 Q. In your report, you mentioned that Croats

5 saved Muslims at crucial times. Could you explain to

6 the Trial Chamber what you're referring to?

7 A. If we look at the -- I'm sure you're familiar

8 with the maps -- strategically the territory controlled

9 by the Bosnian government was dependent upon supplies

10 and assistance from the Croatian territory -- from the

11 territory of the Croatian republic. Without that flow

12 of humanitarian aid and other supplies through Croatia,

13 the Bosnia-Herzegovina government would have been

14 incapable of even the limited resistance that it was

15 able to put up to the attack by the Serbs.

16 More precisely, in the summer of 1995, when

17 the Bosnian Serb army launched its offensive against

18 the so-called UN protected safe areas, Zepce,

19 Srebrenica, moving on to Gorazde, and also Bihac, if

20 the Croatian army and also local Croatian forces within

21 Bosnia-Herzegovina had not intervened at a time when

22 the international community, NATO, did not act and only

23 acted subsequent to the actions of the army of the

24 Croatian republic, I believe that Bosnia-Herzegovina's

25 so-called Muslim government and its territories would

1 have been almost entirely overrun.

2 In the course of an interview with President

3 Izetbegovic in November of 1996, he was asked if he put

4 President Tudjman and President Milosevic on the same

5 level as aggressors against Bosnia-Herzegovina and he

6 explicitly said that though there had been very hard

7 times between the Bosnian government and the Croats

8 over the issues of obviously the basis of this trial,

9 the key point that he mentioned was that unlike

10 Milosevic, Tudjman had been in a position to strangle

11 Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Muslim government, and had not

12 done so.

13 I think this also reflects upon the idea that

14 there was a persistent conspiracy from 1991 onwards to

15 do that that the president of Bosnia-Herzegovina did

16 not feel that whatever difficulties he had had with the

17 Croats, that that was what was being done.

18 Q. The discussion that you just referred to was

19 actually a discussion that you personally attended?

20 A. Yes, with certainly --

21 Q. Describe the circumstances?

22 A. Along with a number of scholars and people

23 who had been interested in the war from 1991 to 1995

24 and who had written about the conflict, I was invited

25 to a conference in Sarajevo and at the conclusion of

1 the conference we were invited to meet President

2 Izetbegovic and held approximately an hour-long

3 discussion.

4 Q. With respect to Karadjordjevo, I believe in

5 your report you referred to it as a dog that did not

6 bark. Could you explain what you mean?

7 A. Dr. Donia expresses the opinion that

8 Karadjordjevo is symbolic of collusion between Croatia

9 and Serbia to partition Bosnia-Herzegovina. My

10 understanding of developments after that is that

11 whatever was discussed, it was not a plan for the

12 forcible partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina, because that

13 did not occur. And on the contrary; it was initially

14 Croatia that was threatened with either large-scale

15 territorial losses, or even destruction, within weeks

16 of this meeting. And I would put the meeting at

17 Karadjordjevo in the context of other meetings between

18 leaders and other political figures in Yugoslavia of

19 the different republics trying to come to some kind of

20 agreement about the future of Yugoslavia and sadly

21 failing. And out of that failure came the conflict,

22 which I believe was largely the result of the

23 aggression or the deliberate use of force by the Serbs

24 and the JNA, first of all in Slovenia, then in Croatia,

25 later in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

1 Q. And with respect to the conflict, I believe

2 that you refer in your report to the strain that

3 developed between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims as

4 a result of the position that was taken by Bosnian

5 Muslim leaders as the war began in Croatia. Can you

6 explain that concept, please.

7 A. When the fighting broke out in Slovenia, the

8 Slovenes said, "Why didn't the Croats come to our

9 aid?" When the fighting broke out in Croatia, despite

10 the precedent already in Slovenia, the government of

11 Bosnia-Herzegovina not only did not seek to frustrate

12 the military operations of the Yugoslav People's Army

13 and the Serb forces using its territory as a logistics

14 and other form of base for the attack upon Croatia, but

15 in certain regards it de facto cooperated with what

16 after all was still the army of the state of which it

17 was a constituent republic. So that, for instance, no

18 doubt with the intention of trying to forestall an

19 attack upon itself, or certainly to give no excuse for

20 such an attack, the arsenals, the weapons of the

21 Territorial Defence forces of Bosnia-Herzegovina were

22 instructed by the government to be handed over to the

23 JNA.

24 A concurrent problem that helped to foster

25 distrust between Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats and

1 Croats in general in the Bosnian government was that

2 several officers of the JNA who participated in the

3 conflict against Croatia very soon afterwards became

4 officers in the nascent army of Bosnia-Herzegovina or

5 military advisors to President Izetbegovic.

6 Q. Can you also explain the significance of the

7 uncertainty regarding independence and what you

8 described as the ambiguous public stand of President

9 Izetbegovic.

10 A. Not least because he and his colleagues had

11 witnessed the terrible violence, the onslaught on

12 Croatia, the ethnic cleansing in Vukovar and so on,

13 president Izetbegovic was anxious to avoid such

14 conflict, and he recognised that many of the

15 ingredients for such a conflict existed. However, his

16 efforts, which I believe were sincerely

17 well-intentioned to avoid such a conflict, nonetheless

18 naturally aroused fears amongst the Croatian community

19 in Bosnia-Herzegovina that their interests, and also

20 their sense of solidarity with fellow Croats in Croatia

21 itself, might be sacrificed in the course of

22 discussions, which, after all, were secret, behind

23 closed doors, or on telephone lines, between Sarajevo

24 and Belgrade. So that there was a climate of anxiety

25 fostered by this, not least because, as I say, at the

1 time when Croatia itself and many Croat civilians were

2 the subject of a very bitter onslaught by the JNA and

3 Serb forces, the Bosnian government was at best

4 passive, and at worst cooperated, from the point of

5 view of Croats, with their enemies.

6 Q. In your report you refer to Muslim forces

7 regarding Bosnian Croat areas as areas where they could

8 gain compensation for territory lost to Serbian

9 forces. Could you explain that concept.

10 A. Part of the underlying tragedy of this

11 conflict between Croats and Bosnian Muslims is

12 precisely the strategic goal of the Bosnian Serbs.

13 They had launched an onslaught which had caused intense

14 suffering and huge displacement of people, particularly

15 from eastern Bosnia but from other parts that they

16 controlled, and those people were funnelled into areas

17 which had been largely untouched by the conflict.

18 It is not the first time in history,

19 tragically, that people who are victims do not

20 necessarily feel obliged to behave entirely according

21 to what we might think of as the principles of natural

22 justice towards a third party. On the contrary; I'm

23 afraid it seems to me that not only having been driven

24 from their homes -- including, of course, the soldiers

25 of the army of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who were themselves

1 refugees very frequently, as well as their families,

2 many of whom they were not certain of their fate --

3 that having been driven from their homes and having no

4 reason to believe they would return home, particularly

5 given the repeated statements by the International

6 Community that it was not going to reverse ethnic

7 cleansing by force, in that situation there arose the

8 -- in a certain sense it is natural, but highly

9 undesirable response of saying, "Well, here is

10 relatively undefended territory in which we are now

11 coming as refugees which we should occupy for

12 ourselves."

13 And I think again historians probably would

14 agree that it's a common phenomenon in conflict that

15 those people who have been either directly in conflict

16 with soldiers or affected by it as civilians very

17 frequently have great resentment towards

18 non-combatants, behind the lines, who are not directly

19 affected by the war. And in this case the civilian

20 population of Central Bosnia, for instance, had been

21 mercifully immune to conflict compared with what had

22 happened either in parts of Croatia itself or in other

23 parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina largely inhabited -- or

24 where the victims were largely Bosnian Muslims. And

25 this phenomenon, as I say, I think is unfortunately an

1 undesirable but natural phenomenon.

2 It was part, however, of the Serbian strategy

3 to not only drive the Muslims and, in those places

4 where they lived, Croats, out of territory which the

5 Bosnian Serbs wished to control, but also to foster

6 conflict between those two groups. I note, for

7 instance, that Dr. Donia quotes from Tanjug at one

8 point on -- Tanjug, the Yugoslav Belgrade-based news

9 agency, as a source for the antagonism between Croats

10 and Muslims. That seems to me, arguably, to be a

11 deliberate source of propaganda designed to exacerbate

12 and promote conflict between Muslims and Croats.

13 JUDGE MAY: See if I can follow this. The

14 point you're saying is that it was part of Serb

15 strategy to foster a conflict between the Bosnian

16 Muslims and Bosnian Croats?

17 A. Yes. Because, first of all, if we remember

18 the context, although the principal government involved

19 with the UNPROFOR operation, Britain and France, their

20 public spokesman said they did not wish to become

21 involved in the conflict, there was a great deal of

22 public pressure, including from parliamentarians, from

23 people writing in the press -- I include myself in

24 that -- saying that the conflict was primarily one in

25 which Serb forces, steered largely from Belgrade, were

1 engaged in aggressive and criminal acts against the

2 civilian population of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

3 I quote some of this in my report. Public

4 demands by the leader of the labour opposition, in

5 Britain, for instance, are the politicians, including

6 occasionally conservative politicians, for military

7 intervention. In that context, the Serbian government

8 and Serbian forces had an interest in creating or

9 promoting a conflict between Croats and Muslims so that

10 the argument which had been raised from the very

11 beginning by people who tended to be sympathetic to

12 Belgrade that really all the people in the Balkans, in

13 the former Yugoslavia, were given to atrocities, were

14 given to aggressive ambitions, that this would come

15 about. And partly as a result simply of their own

16 conquest. The Serbs created the context in which there

17 would be conflict for resources, for accommodation,

18 between the largely Muslim refugees coming into

19 territories which they had not lived in before which

20 were, in particular places, largely Croatian inhabited.

21 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Browning.

22 MR. BROWNING:

23 Q. Along those lines, I believe your report also

24 addresses the concept or the assertion that Croatian

25 nationalists were the lineal successors of the Ustasha

1 collaborators. Could you elaborate upon that concept.

2 JUDGE MAY: I don't think it's been suggested

3 that that was so. What the suggestion has been that

4 what was being followed was the banovina plan of 1939.

5 Now, that point has been made.

6 Perhaps you'd like to comment on that, Mr.

7 Almond.

8 A. I think the agreement of 1939 was quite

9 widely regarded by Croats as being the basis of an

10 acceptable framework, that though because of the German

11 invasion of Yugoslavia, it collapsed very quickly. The

12 agreement between the constitutional parties of old

13 royal Yugoslavia to redraw the administrative

14 boundaries of the state in such a way that the vast

15 majority of Croats lived within one territorial space,

16 as I say, done under the constitutional arrangements of

17 the kingdom of Yugoslavia, was something that a lot of

18 Croats were nostalgic about, thought that would be a

19 good, acceptable idea, because it was a political

20 framework that had been based upon negotiation and --

21 THE INTERPRETER: Could the witness slow

22 down, please.

23 A. It was an acceptable framework based upon

24 negotiation in the context of the constitutional

25 arrangements of old Yugoslavia, royal Yugoslavia.

1 MR. BROWNING:

2 Q. A portion of your report addresses

3 stereotyping of Croats. Could you briefly summarise

4 that.

5 A. Yes. I think that in western Europe and also

6 in the United States, going back into the 19th Century,

7 Croats, as a nation, had been stereotyped as

8 reactionaries, because in the conflicts, particularly

9 surrounding the revolutions of 1848 to 1849, the

10 Hungarian liberals were -- tended to be sympathised

11 with by British/French/American liberal

12 constitutionalists as being their natural allies. They

13 seemed to be promoting a legislative framework based

14 upon elections and so on that seemed broadly in line

15 with what British, French liberals, constitutional

16 proponents accepted.

17 I think, myself, if we look at how the

18 Hungarian liberals were also very nationalistic and how

19 they treated the non-Hungarians within the territory of

20 the kingdom of Hungary, which included Croatia,

21 Vojvodina, and other parts of the former Yugoslavia at

22 this time, then we can see that this was a

23 misconception. But from that period in 1848, people

24 from Karl Marx through to British liberals

25 criticised --

1 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Almond, I'm getting a request

2 for you to slow down.

3 A. I'm sorry. From 1848 a spectrum of opinion

4 from liberals through to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

5 attacked the Croats as reactionary because Croatian

6 forces led by Ban Jelacic participated in the overthrow

7 of the Hungarian revolution.

8 Then in 1941, of course, the establishment of

9 the so-called Independent State of Croatia, under the

10 auspices of the German Nazi conquest of former

11 Yugoslavia, revived and compounded that perception of

12 the Croatians, as a nation, as being peculiarly

13 reactionary.

14 There is a particularly scholarly work from

15 people like Edward Said and so on the notion of

16 so-called Orientalism or the stereotyping of whole

17 nations, particularly where those of us who come from

18 fortunate countries, like Britain, where the

19 constitutional and democratic and rule of law processes

20 have not been interrupted, take a derogatory and often

21 rather crude view of other nations. And I think that

22 the Croatian case is an example of this.

23 By contrast, for instance, the Serbs very

24 frequently are classified as a nation, or at least were

25 until perhaps 1999, as essentially natural allies of

1 the West. They had fought in the First World War, and

2 apparently in the Second World War, on the side of the

3 West, and so had a good reputation to people who had

4 not taken any close interest in the actual

5 developments.

6 Q. As a historian, to what extent are those

7 stereotypes significant in evaluating information

8 relating to the conflict?

9 A. They don't necessarily help one to evaluate

10 the conflict. What they help one to do is to evaluate

11 how public policy, diplomats, personnel involved in the

12 conflict from outside, may have come to the conflict

13 with perceptions which were distorted by these

14 stereotypes. And in my experience, these sorts of

15 stereotypes were widely repeated in the training of

16 British military personnel, for instance.

17 Q. Turning to the Vance-Owen Plan and the

18 Owen-Stoltenberg plan, can you elaborate upon what you

19 describe as the device of the facts of those plans

20 within communities?

21 A. The question of so-called cantonisation of

22 Bosnia-Herzegovina as a solution to the conflict was

23 vitiated, I believe, particularly by the language used

24 to describe those cantons, not least in public

25 discourse, by Lord Owen, for instance, by his

1 spokesman, whom I quote, John Mills, who tended to talk

2 about them as ethnically controlled -- there would be

3 Serbian, Croatian, or Muslim cantons -- and tended, for

4 instance, to also describe the government of

5 Bosnia-Herzegovina as simply Muslim, which was, of

6 course, what Belgrade and local Serb forces also said.

7 So that the rhetoric associated with the peace plans

8 actually, instead of calming the inter-ethnic tensions,

9 confirmed them and I think even compounded them,

10 because international statesmen seemed to confirm this

11 way of looking at the conflict as legitimate.

12 Q. As a historian, would the various strains

13 that you've described in your report and in your

14 testimony be sufficient to explain the conflict between

15 Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats as opposed to a

16 grand plan to partition Bosnia-Herzegovina by the HDZ?

17 A. Yes. I think the contingent events, these

18 tragic and horrible events that had happened from the

19 spring of 1992 in eastern Bosnia, then around Sarajevo

20 and so on, had so destabilised and disrupted the

21 interior of Bosnia-Herzegovina, even in areas not

22 directly under the onslaught of the Bosnian Serbs, that

23 this could easily explain, without any reference to

24 what I regard as a chimerical conspiracy, how such

25 tensions arise. And we only have to think of analogous

1 conflicts, in Lebanon, for instance, where groups which

2 start out being together find themselves falling out

3 over resources, over accommodation, and so on, and the

4 brutalising effects of war.

5 Q. In your report, you address the theory or the

6 claim that there was a plan at Karadjordjevo as being a

7 statement that it was originated by opponents of

8 President Tudjman. Could you explain that concept,

9 please.

10 A. Well, I think although the fact of the

11 meeting itself was known very early on, the main

12 source, to my knowledge, for the claim that there had

13 been a collusive agreement to dismember

14 Bosnia-Herzegovina, against the wishes of its

15 inhabitants and with brutal consequences, was made by

16 Mr. Stipe Mesic, now president of Croatia.

17 What is problematic about Mr. Mesic's claims

18 is that, first of all, he wasn't present at the

19 meeting. Secondly, he made these claims only after --

20 in public, at any rate -- only after he had quarrelled

21 with President Tudjman and fallen from the high

22 positions that he held in the government of Croatia and

23 also in Mr. Tudjman's party.

24 The main source from the Tudjman side, his

25 principal private secretary advisor Sarinic gives an

1 account of the meeting which is inconclusive, and that

2 was published much more recently. Its precisely the

3 subsequent developments, the conflict between Serbs and

4 Croats, that makes me -- that convinces me that you

5 have to believe in the most abstruse, sophisticated,

6 and frankly absurd conspiracy theory to believe that

7 there was a persistent pattern of collusion going back

8 to that period, or at any date, and that in practice,

9 in 1995, I think a lot of military historians and

10 military analysts I've spoken to at the Pentagon

11 recently would say that it was Croatian army's

12 intervention that decisively reversed the Bosnian Serb

13 conquests and brought about the conditions for the

14 Dayton settlement, and that the NATO bombardment was an

15 important factor, but without the Croatian army's role,

16 that the defeat of the Bosnian Serbs and the

17 establishment of the Dayton arrangements could not have

18 arisen. I think that's the common view amongst

19 military historians, military analysts.

20 MR. BROWNING: Thank you, Mr. Almond. I have

21 no further questions.

22 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Mikulicic, is there anything

23 that you want to ask the witness?

24 MR. MIKULICIC: [Interpretation] No,

25 Mr. President, we have no questions.

1 JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

2 Cross-examined by Mr. Nice:

3 Q. Quite a good technique to avoid going to fast

4 where we speak the same language, just put the

5 headphones around your neck, turn them to channel 5

6 which is French, and if you turn the volume up

7 sufficient to hear it as a background noise, it's then

8 possible to know when we can start the next question or

9 answer?

10 A. I apologise to the interpreters, in

11 particular.

12 Q. It took us months to work it out.

13 Let me see if I understand where we are. So

14 far as Dr. Donia's report is concerned, you may

15 disagree with it as to certain nuances, but you're not

16 saying that it's in any sense wholly and obviously

17 wrong.

18 A. The thrust of his report with regard to the

19 charge of a collusion between Croatia and -- certainly

20 between the Croatian president and the Serbian

21 president seems to me to be wholly wrong. In fact,

22 Dr. Donia makes many points and quotes many facts and

23 so on which are true, but I differ quite fundamentally

24 on that conclusion.

25 Q. But that, as the Judges have indicated, is

1 ultimately a factual matter they've got to decide but

2 insofar as historians can have a view on this sort of

3 matter that is your principle disagreement, is it not?

4 A. There are also some points of interpretation

5 on the identity of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a state or

6 civic community. One of the problems is that, of

7 course, many facts which one agrees on can nonetheless

8 produce different conclusions. It's a common problem

9 with historians.

10 Q. But on the Bosnia-Herzegovina interpretation,

11 you're not suggesting that Dr. Donia's views are

12 outside the spectrum of accepted modern academic --

13 A. They're within the realm of debate, yes,

14 certainly.

15 Q. As indeed is his conclusion on what you

16 describe as the -- you don't describe as "the plan" but

17 the plan and so on. That's, again, something well

18 within the spectrum of respectable opinion?

19 A. I think that particularly I make the point in

20 my report that many people who might, in other regards,

21 agree with Dr. Donia's scholars, I quote Noel Malcolm

22 and Ivo Banac and so on, of this particular point,

23 suggests that it is an exaggeration to the point of

24 distortion to suggest or -- conclusion so that they may

25 be critical of Tudjman in other regards. They may be

1 critical of the Croats in regard to the events of 1993,

2 but that even scholars who, in other regards, would

3 tend to agree with Dr. Donia do not agree with this

4 thrust of argument that there was an underlying and

5 continuous scheme of partition.

6 Q. Right. Thank you. Have you also read Dr.

7 Allcock's report?

8 A. I've looked through it, yes.

9 Q. Looked through it. Just so I can understand

10 it, is there any particular comment you want to make on

11 that before you move on or are you happy to let that be

12 dealt with by the next witness?

13 A. I think the next witness is probably more

14 competent to deal with that.

15 Q. As to the next witness, Mestrovic, we'll hear

16 from him, of course, but part of what he seems to rely

17 on is cultural irreconcilabilities between various

18 parties and he seems to rely on a forthcoming conflict

19 between Islam and the west.

20 Do you think that's all terribly important?

21 A. A lot of commentators, academics, politicians

22 apparently from the public domain quoted

23 [indiscernible] regard the threat of conflict with

24 Islam very seriously. I, myself, though regarding such

25 people as having serious interests on the subject

1 perhaps think that it is less serious and it may be

2 that some of the potential conflict is not entirely the

3 product of Islam but also the product of western

4 actions or perceptions of western actions and

5 attitudes. But it doesn't seem to me to be inherently

6 unreasonable to fear that.

7 Q. And where he forecasts -- not where he

8 forecasts, where he relies on cultural differences

9 between people in western Europe and people in Bosnia

10 from whom much lower and lesser standards of

11 performance could be expected, do you agree with him on

12 that?

13 A. I have to say, by the way, that I have not

14 read his report. I know his academic work, so that it

15 would be improper of me to comment on specific aspects

16 of what the text says that I haven't read.

17 Q. Dealing now with a few questions about your

18 curriculum vitae. Did you type your report yourself?

19 A. Yes.

20 Q. So that when we look at the curriculum vitae,

21 this is your own formulation of your academic

22 background, the small correction you very helpfully

23 made in relation to the 1986 entry is something I was

24 going to ask you about, as His Honour Judge May will

25 know and others may not, at Oxford, of course, you are

1 a lecturer to the university and a fellow at a

2 college. You are presumably a fellow at Oriel College?

3 A. I am a lecturer at Oriel College, a member of

4 the history faculty, a member of the congregation.

5 They are layers of status or rank; professor, who would

6 also be a fellow of the college, a fellow, a lecturer.

7 Q. So you are not actually a fellow at Oriel nor

8 at any other college?

9 A. No.

10 Q. You are not a university lecturer?

11 A. No, I teach at the university. The

12 university, as you may know, organises the supervision

13 of graduate students, so when I supervise graduate

14 students for higher degrees, that is organised by the

15 University of Oxford. And then as a teacher of

16 undergraduates, I teach at Oriel College, but may also

17 teach and do from time to time undergraduates from

18 other colleges.

19 Q. So your lecturing is only with Oriel

20 College.

21 A. No. The position is the position at Oriel

22 College, but I teach, in addition to the Oriel

23 students, students from other colleges as requested and

24 as feasible within my --

25 Q. Yes, I understand. That's general policy of

1 farming out work.

2 A. Yes. And the graduate students, for

3 instance, are organised by the university.

4 Q. Yes, but you have no lectureship within the

5 university itself?

6 A. No. But I think this may be a confusion of

7 language. I say the position of university lecturer is

8 a position in the academic hierarchy. I may have given

9 lectures, seminars and so on in the university in the

10 sense of addressing either students or gatherings of

11 academics and anybody who cares to attend.

12 Q. You don't set out your formal

13 qualifications. No doctorate is listed.

14 A. I'm mister.

15 Q. No doctorate is listed?

16 A. No, as I say, I'm mister.

17 Q. Have you ever started a doctoral thesis?

18 A. Yes, I started my research on German

19 intellectual history in the middle 19th century with

20 particular reference to Richard Wagner and by extension

21 to Chopin and if it is of assistance to the Court, how

22 do I come to be interested in, particularly east

23 European Balkan developments, part of archival and

24 other research required for that took place in East

25 Germany and I also visited Czechoslovakia. I became

1 interested, as is not uncommon with young researchers,

2 in those societies and, by connection, contacts I made

3 in other societies in what was then called the

4 socialist world.

5 If I may be perhaps self-flattering. A well

6 known historian in Oxford, Timothy Garton-Ashe, I

7 think, in a sense, we followed the same path. He

8 started to do research on German history, didn't

9 complete a doctorate, has written extensively. Is a

10 fellow of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, for instance,

11 and has also, per chance, a visiting professor at the

12 Hoover Institution.

13 It's not an entirely uncommon phenomenon, no

14 less common, perhaps, than in the past.

15 Q. You started this doctorate when?

16 A. I started doing my research in -- after

17 completion of my degree in 1980 and then was diverted

18 into working on east European matters and teaching and

19 writing about other matters.

20 Q. Now just to finish the questions I wanted to

21 ask you on your curriculum vitae, of course, in England

22 and particularly at Oxford, but in England in

23 particular, the term "professor" is a very particular

24 term noting, as it does, that leading of a department,

25 holding of a chair and --

1 A. I think actually -- certainly, it is a very

2 distinguished title. In practice in Oxford, the

3 professors, regis professor, for instance, or whatever

4 do not actually run the department. The chairman of

5 the department is elected by the members of the history

6 faculty.

7 Q. And below the professor there might be the

8 next rank down who might be a reader?

9 A. Yes.

10 Q. But in America, a professor has a slightly

11 more general term referring to those who teach, but

12 when you cite yourself as a visiting professor at the

13 Hoover Institution, is that accurate or would that

14 perhaps be inaccurate?

15 A. Well, the Hoover Institution elected me to

16 what they call, I'm afraid I did not use the title a

17 "distinguished visiting professorship" which is a

18 position to enable me to pursue the research project

19 that had I proposed to them.

20 Q. Well, the proposed research is into the

21 editorial policies and content of four influential

22 American newspapers, isn't it, focussing on the impact

23 of those newspapers on foreign policy?

24 A. Amongst other issues, but particularly more

25 and more focussing on foreign policy.

1 Q. And when were you appointed?

2 A. I was appointed last August, no, formally

3 notified, if I remember correctly.

4 Q. Because isn't the reality that the title in

5 Hoover has always been, so far as you're concerned,

6 "distinguished visiting fellow" and the word professor

7 has never been used to cover your work at all? Perhaps

8 you'd like to look, please, at this piece of paper.

9 A. The commonplace -- certainly the members of

10 the Hoover Institution you just referred to as fellows,

11 if I have made a mistake, as I say, I have not wished

12 to appeal to this authority except that in

13 conversations on the telephone with people that have

14 routinely referred to me as professor, so when drafting

15 this curriculum vitae, if that is an error, I don't see

16 it as altering the signification, but I apologise.

17 Q. In America, there is a difference, again,

18 between professor, which is to teach, and fellow, which

19 may be to study, and you've got a grant to study, what,

20 for one year?

21 A. Yes.

22 Q. Thank you. Sticking with your curriculum

23 vitae, what is the date, please, of the first work

24 published by you concerning Yugoslavia?

25 A. It was in 1991.

1 Q. And that was?

2 A. I wrote a paper called the "Blundering in the

3 Balkans".

4 Q. It's a pamphlet effectively. And until then,

5 you had written nothing about Yugoslavia because your

6 interests had been elsewhere and in particular in

7 Romania?

8 A. Romania is a neighbouring state of Yugoslavia

9 and particularly in the late 1980s and after 1989, of

10 course, Yugoslavia represented a fascinating comparison

11 and counterexample with the collapse of the communist

12 regimes like the neighbouring states of Romania,

13 Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and so on.

14 Q. And, of course, it was an opportunity for

15 academics to work with a developing and unusual

16 situation?

17 A. Because of what I had been studying before

18 this period, I felt, first of all, that I was struck by

19 the lack of interest in what seemed to me to be the

20 potential of growing evidence of a likely violent

21 conflict and by some of the assumptions about it that

22 were disseminated.

23 Q. You've been described by counsel as a

24 historian. I put this question to you: A historian, I

25 think you would accept, is somebody who works with raw

1 material, the primary sources, correct?

2 A. Those resources are available. I think that

3 historians use all the available resources to them

4 including, as it were, reflection.

5 Q. There are, of course, in relation to the

6 former Yugoslavia, considerable quantities of primary

7 source material available, aren't there?

8 A. In almost every area of considerable quantity

9 of resources with regard to the breakup of Yugoslavia

10 and the reaction to it of the International Community

11 especially the west European states and the United

12 States, there are relatively few primary sources in the

13 sense of publicly-available government documents.

14 Q. You don't speak the language, I think.

15 A. I read it badly.

16 Q. Since when?

17 A. I have -- having had some experience with --

18 I started to try to teach myself from 1991 and through

19 the period and I regret that my abilities as a linguist

20 are not greater than they are.

21 Q. No one, certainly an English speaker, will

22 complain about limitations on linguistic ability, but

23 the reality is that your publications on Yugoslavia, I

24 think, cite no primary source material written in

25 Croatian or B/C/S, do they?

1 A. I don't think that's entirely to the point.

2 Most of what I've been writing about uses the sources

3 in the languages of the international mediators or the

4 foreign policy -- but there are my, as I say, torturous

5 reading of my dictionary or whatever certain resources

6 to confirm things, but I wouldn't claim to be, for

7 instance, a cultural historian or literary historian of

8 Serbo-Croatian; that would be absurd.

9 Q. I think the simple answer, correct me if I am

10 wrong, is that neither in your earlier writings nor in

11 your report for this Tribunal have you been able to or

12 have you referred to any primary source material in

13 Serbo-Croatian, to use its old title?

14 A. There may be a few instances, but the task of

15 my report was to write about the perception of these

16 events with particular relationship to the breakup of

17 Yugoslavia and the international negotiations. I have,

18 I think, cited one or two cases where I have checked

19 sources to the best of my ability, limited ability.

20 Q. And, for example, just to take one example,

21 Tudjman, the historian, the books, are they translated

22 into English for you to read or have they been, as it

23 were, not available to you because they are in

24 Serbo-Croat?

25 A. I don't know how far all of President

1 Tudjman's voluminous works have been translated. Many

2 of them have been and many of them have been widely

3 discussed in a scholarly literature. As well as I

4 possess several of them.

5 Q. You aren't able to turn to them when you want

6 to check on the history of Tudjman's views on --

7 A. As I say, my reading knowledge is not as good

8 as it should be, and I have occasionally checked

9 because, of course, it's a matter of controversy and

10 quite often in reviews of these works, individual words

11 or whatever will be cited or discussed and debated.

12 Q. What I think will be helpful and most

13 efficient in our use of time is if I will go through

14 your report with you asking a comparatively number of

15 questions which I have to ask and which I have written

16 marginal notes and stopping at particular topics in due

17 course reviewing additional materials you've told us

18 about this morning. So if you would be so good enough

19 to take your report, please, and turn to the top right

20 hand corner which is page three and in the fourth

21 paragraph, you make an observation on statements by

22 President Tudjman, decrying the perceived danger of

23 Islamic fundamentalism, and you say that several SDA

24 leaders have been educated radical Arab states. The

25 next sentence: If we recall how many US commentators

1 -- incidently I should pause, I trust that the

2 interpreters have all got the report before them -- and

3 even the CIA has warned about the potential influence

4 of Islamic fundamentalists in Bosnia and other parts of

5 the Balkans -- a fear that I regard as greatly

6 exaggerated -- then Tudjman's attitude does not appear

7 abnormal or particularly sinister.

8 Do you think that it was then acceptable at

9 the time and not in itself dangerous to be expressing

10 what might be described as racist views about Muslims?

11 A. I'm not sure that these were racist views

12 about Muslims quo Bosnian Muslims or racist in that

13 they are about religious views. The -- particularly if

14 we go back to the -- late 1980, 1990s with the Iranian

15 revolution and the developments in Lebanon, it was a

16 commonplace fear expressed, as I say, by western policy

17 makers and statesmen as published from the CIA that

18 there would be the penetration of radical Islamic

19 ideology into the territories which had Muslim

20 populations and one has to distinguish between the fear

21 of a radical Muslim ideology radicalising people of

22 Muslim origin and being against them as a group per

23 se.

24 Q. The question still remains, if you would like

25 to add to your answer, was it not dangerous given the

1 composition of Bosnia, in the early 1990s, to express

2 views adverse to an entire religious group represented

3 in that state?

4 A. To express that view might well be dangerous

5 if that was the view expressed. Certainly it might be

6 understood that way.

7 Q. And of course -- sorry, it would -- it's

8 danger would lie in the fact that it would whip up

9 emotions nascent or even nonexistent in the minds of,

10 in this case, Croats, wouldn't it?

11 A. It might have that effect, but I think one

12 has to remember that this was a fear expressed widely.

13 As I say, I think myself, it was exaggerated and that,

14 for instance, in so far as Iranian and other -- several

15 Mujahedin influence has developed in

16 Bosnia-Herzegovina, it would appear to be in reaction

17 to the war, the Bosnian Serb onslaught and also perhaps

18 to disappointment with the post-1995 settlement. It's

19 not unknown for people to become more religious, who

20 were quite secular, under the impact of terrible

21 pressure and events.

22 Q. Before I move from that point, one last

23 question. The Chamber here has heard evidence that

24 Mujahedin fighters, insofar as they are shown to have

25 been taking part, either all or most had to cross

1 Croatia to get to Bosnia, therefore had to be given

2 passes, I suppose, to do so. How does that fit, in

3 your judgement -- if that's what the Chamber finds, and

4 these are all factual matters, of course -- how does

5 that fit with Tudjman expressing genuine concerns about

6 global developments as opposed to his simply having a

7 rather more local ambition?

8 A. Well, I think it fits with a slightly

9 different point, that the Croatian government, whatever

10 its fears or whatever its resentment about previous

11 attitudes on the part of Bosnia in the run-up to the

12 war when itself was in war in 1991, permitted

13 assistance to the Bosnian government's side.

14 Q. It certainly doesn't fit, does it, with, as

15 it were, genuine concern about a forthcoming Islam

16 Christian divide?

17 A. Well, it seems to me that it fits with a

18 genuine fear, priority of fear, that the victory of the

19 Bosnian Serbs presented a greater threat than any other

20 threat, including an Islamic fundamentalist threat, to

21 Croatia. It seems as though that if -- the line would

22 be that Croatia was permitting assistance to go to

23 Bosnia even from people that in other circumstances it

24 might not be very happy about.

25 Q. Go to page 4 next. The central paragraph

1 reads as follows.

2 Yes, I'm grateful. The point -- just to

3 close that last discussion. The Mujahedin, on the

4 evidence, came post-Graz, so does that affect your

5 answer at all?

6 A. No. As I say, it seems -- I don't know

7 whether -- you may want to ask me about Graz at another

8 occasion.

9 Q. I will do, yes. We'll come back to it,

10 then.

11 Page 4, the central paragraph:

12 "Bosnian Croat preparations for self-defence

13 take on a different appearance when it is remembered

14 that President Izetbegovic's authorities had not

15 attempted to inhibit the operations of the JNA from

16 Bosnian territory against Croatia in 1991 and that they

17 had cooperated with the JNA by ordering the Territorial

18 Defence to hand in weapons to it."

19 Then you say, "Such confidence-building

20 measures failed to appease Belgrade." Isn't the

21 reality at the time that both the Croats and the

22 Muslims together were attempting to stall Milosevic's

23 mobilisation of reservists?

24 A. That is a different point. Many --

25 Q. First of all, isn't that correct, that all

1 the --

2 A. I believe it to be correct that ordinary

3 Muslims and Croats, and also people in positions of

4 authority, did not wish them to go and fight against

5 Croatia, but that several quite prominent officers in

6 the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina subsequently did so.

7 Q. Yes.

8 A. But there are variations -- as I suggested, I

9 think, earlier in my testimony, President Izetbegovic

10 was very anxious to avoid a conflict.

11 Q. You don't blame him for that, do you?

12 A. Not at all.

13 Q. And this paragraph doesn't lead to any

14 particularly significant conclusion, does it, as to

15 what happened between Croats and Muslims in due

16 course? At this stage they were pursuing a common line

17 of resisting Milosevic.

18 A. I think one has to distinguish between

19 resistance and a dislike of what Milosevic is doing.

20 The Bosnian -- first of all, the number of Bosnian

21 Croats, of course, went to Croatia to fight on the side

22 of their fellow Croats in the army. The situation in

23 the late summer, autumn and summer of 1991 was that it

24 was not inconceivable that, and certainly it would be

25 quite probable, that the policy of the Serbs was to

1 split the Muslims from the Croats, and that evidence of

2 what you call resistance as opposed to passive

3 non-cooperation and unenthusiastic agreement to certain

4 JNA demands on the part of the Bosnian government side,

5 that there was therefore a split in the response of the

6 Bosnian government side, for the sake of argument, the

7 Muslims, and of the Bosnian Croats, who were aware of

8 what was happening to their fellow Croats in Croatia

9 and might reasonably fear that they would be the next

10 target if such a war broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina,

11 in which, for whatever reason, the Muslim community had

12 been neutralised or had stood aside or taken -- perhaps

13 even in some sense accepted continued Yugoslav

14 authority.

15 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Nice, I'm going to

16 interrupt. It's just after 11.00. Is that a

17 convenient moment?

18 MR. NICE: Yes, Your Honour.

19 JUDGE MAY: We'll adjourn now. Mr. Almond, I

20 must warn you, as I do all witnesses: Don't speak to

21 anybody, please, about your evidence until it's over

22 and don't let anybody speak to you about it.

23 We'll adjourn for half an hour.

24 --- Recess taken at 11.04 a.m.

25 --- On resuming at 11.38 a.m.

1 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Almond, I've a request from

2 the court reporters; if you would speak slowly and

3 distinctly, they would be grateful.

4 THE WITNESS: I'm sorry. I mumble in any

5 language I know or don't know.

6 MR. NICE:

7 Q. Just one last point on the mobilisation

8 issue, which you had dealt with at page 4. Now, I'm

9 going to come back to the sources available to you in

10 particular in a minute, but who do you say it was who

11 decided against mobilisation? Who made that decision?

12 A. As I understand it -- you mean mobilisation

13 to oppose the JNA's activities with regard to the war

14 going on in Croatia?

15 Q. Yes.

16 A. As I understand it, the government in

17 Sarajevo.

18 Q. What do you mean by "the government in

19 Sarajevo"?

20 A. President Izetbegovic and his colleagues.

21 Q. You see, it's quite important to be precise

22 on these matters, isn't it? Do you accept that?

23 A. Of course.

24 Q. Now, do you mean President Izetbegovic or do

25 you mean the presidency? Who was it who made that

1 non-mobilisation decision, or don't you know?

2 A. It would have been made under the authority

3 of the presidency, but I haven't got the exact document

4 in front of me.

5 Q. But of course you will have read, no doubt,

6 Susan Woodward's book -- that's in English -- Balkan

7 Tragedy, and she sets out quite clearly at page 260

8 that it was the presidency that made that order. So

9 the presidency, of course, included Croat members,

10 didn't it?

11 A. Yes.

12 Q. Do you think that your paragraph here, where

13 you say, "where it is remembered that President

14 Izetbegovic's authorities," and so on, do you think

15 that's being entirely fair?

16 A. Well, as I said first of all earlier on, I

17 didn't mean necessarily that one should impugn the

18 intentions or the desire to avoid conflict on the part

19 of either President Izetbegovic or members of his party

20 or people who cooperated with him in Sarajevo. But if

21 we look at the context, I think there is a lot of

22 evidence that people in the predominantly Croatian

23 areas, the activists who were sympathetic to the cause

24 of Croatia which was at war, felt that perhaps the

25 government in Sarajevo, including even Croat members of

1 it, were not aware of -- or not fully aware of the

2 threat that they believed the JNA posed. I think, for

3 instance --

4 Q. I'm sorry. I'm going to cut you off, because

5 we don't have, unfortunately, limitless time. My

6 question to you simply is this: In your expert report,

7 do you think focusing on President Izetbegovic, when

8 the available material to you showed that this was a

9 decision of the presidency that included Croats, do you

10 think that was entirely fair in your report, or should

11 we really think that this ought to be slightly revised?

12 A. It may be slightly revised to take into

13 account that people who were of Croatian origin in the

14 presidency who were participants in these decisions,

15 but I'm not sure that taking all the evidence available

16 to me from the sources that I have, ranging from the

17 sort of books that you quote through to the summaries,

18 the BBC summaries of world broadcasts and FBIS and so

19 on, that one wouldn't find that if we look at the

20 perception, certainly, the perception of many Bosnian

21 Croats was that the initiative for this was primarily

22 one for the sake of the Muslims.

23 Q. I'm not going to debate that further with

24 you.

25 Before I come to the next major topic and the

1 only one that's going to take any significant -- a

2 great period of time, just back again to your

3 function. As you've told us, I think, you were dealing

4 with available English predominant sources in order to

5 give perceptions or give an account of the perceptions

6 outside Bosnia of what was happening within. Now, if

7 that's right, how does that enable you to express

8 opinions on what was happening at Karadjordjevo and so

9 on?

10 A. Well, I don't believe that any of the

11 so-called expert witnesses were present at the event.

12 The discussions of Karadjordjevo have been widely

13 discussions promoted by claims about what happened by,

14 for instance, Mr. Mesic, have been widely distributed

15 in various languages and are available. My point was

16 that one doesn't have to impugn the honesty of the

17 motives of people who believe, I believe, mistakenly in

18 a collusive, persistent pattern of collusion between

19 Zagreb and Belgrade to see that from what I would

20 normally regard as the commonly accepted record of

21 events. It is very difficult to interpret this process

22 of conflict and the disintegration of Yugoslavia in

23 that way.

24 And, for instance, if I may direct one source

25 which is available of one of the people who was a

1 participant, Sarinic, if you like who was the closest

2 advisor to President Tudjman, he makes the point to

3 August 1995 that there was a telephone conversation

4 with Milosevic. Milosevic complains that the Croatian

5 army is serving, is destroying the Bosnian Serb

6 position, is creating the disaster of the Bosnian Serbs

7 and why is Tudjman pushing through such an aggressive

8 policy which is only going to help the Muslims. In

9 other words, that Tudjman is not pursuing a purely

10 Croatian policy, as I remember.

11 Q. Well, if we go back, you see, if I may say

12 so, the beginning of this long answer, you make the

13 point --

14 A. I'm afraid I don't have the text in front of

15 me.

16 Q. If you press "transcript" on your button, the

17 English transcript will come before you. You make it

18 plain that you believe it to be a mistake that there

19 was any pattern of collusion. You are prepared to

20 express an opinion on what happened at this meeting.

21 Let's just deal with your answer.

22 The man, Sarinic, has written a book but it's

23 in Croatian, of course, isn't it?

24 A. It is in Croatian. I happen to have a copy

25 of it in Croatian and I also have --

1 Q. Have you managed to read all of it?

2 A. I haven't read the whole of it in Croatian.

3 I have checked partly with the Croatian text some of

4 the translations which have made by various services,

5 but I primarily read what I know of it in English.

6 Q. Do you remember the passage in that book

7 where Sarinic refers to a conversation that he and

8 Tudjman had flying over Bolovocelo [phoen]?

9 A. Do you have the text in front of you?

10 Q. I don't think I have it. I didn't know you

11 were going to mention it just then. I just wondered if

12 you remembered that particular passage, perhaps you

13 don't.

14 A. I don't, I'm afraid.

15 Q. Are you now aware that there's now been a

16 book published by Milos Milic which puts together

17 either all or a very great amount of the evidence about

18 the Karadjordjevo meeting?

19 A. I've not seen it, no.

20 Q. Again, it's not in English but you haven't

21 even seen it?

22 A. No.

23 Q. Well, let's look at some of the material that

24 might have been available to you, but before we do,

25 remind me, I may have made a note and I'm sorry if I'm

1 asking you to repeat yourself, but remind me, what do

2 you say happened, in your opinion, at that meeting?

3 A. In my opinion, there was a discussion between

4 the two presidents, Milosevic of Serbia and Tudjman of

5 Croatia, about if Yugoslavia was going to disappear,

6 which was certainly a reasonable prospect, what would

7 succeed it?

8 Part of the tragedy, particularly of the

9 Bosnian Muslims but of the whole population of

10 Bosnia-Hercegovina was, of course, that it was not a

11 republic with a homogenous population as of Slovenia or

12 a large majority of individual group of population as

13 perhaps in Croatia or in Serbia. So that a discussion

14 about what would happen to the Serbs of Serbia, Serbs

15 of Bosnia, I should say, and the Croats of Bosnia and

16 how that might be, as a result, I think, undoubtedly

17 took place.

18 Q. So no question of annexation?

19 A. It depends how -- what you mean by

20 "annexation". I don't -- presumably if two sovereign

21 states, Serbia and Croatia, were created, and

22 Bosnia-Herzegovina either did not become a fully

23 sovereign state or was divided, not necessarily solely

24 between the two states, then part of it would have

25 passed to each of those republics. I do not know

1 whether, as I say, the -- it seems to me that

2 discussion may have taken place, but whether there was

3 planning and certainly whether there was agreement, I

4 find the subsequent developments made highly

5 implausible.

6 Q. There's no reason, therefore, to discuss,

7 especially in the absence of a representative in the

8 Muslim community, any partition of the former

9 Bosnia-Herzegovina, in your opinion?

10 A. Well, if I personally think that the

11 dissolution of Bosnia-Herzegovina could have been

12 vastly better arranged, I don't think that anybody

13 would have said that the developments of 1991 were

14 beneficial, in fact, even to the Serbs let alone to

15 Muslims or Croats.

16 Q. No, the question is that we're looking at

17 your opinions. You've given your opinion and we've got

18 to try to evaluate it.

19 A. Yes, of course.

20 Q. In your opinion, would there be any way that

21 these two men could have been discussing a tripartite

22 or bipartite division of the former Bosnia-Herzegovina

23 at that meeting?

24 A. It seems perfectly possible at that meeting

25 and certainly, in my view, likely that the idea that

1 Bosnia-Herzegovina would not become an independent,

2 republic, sovereign state in its boundaries as

3 established under Yugoslav constitution was absolutely

4 part of the discussion.

5 Q. Please, could you deal with the question.

6 Would there be any grounds then without the Muslims

7 present to be discussing partition, whether into two or

8 into three?

9 A. If a plan had been formulated and adopted and

10 acted upon to divide another republic without

11 consultation, that would be, I think, a different

12 matter ethically irreprehensible from a discussion

13 about a discussion about what might -- and my

14 understanding is that this is a discussion about what

15 might have been.

16 As you know, I think, from things that I've

17 published in the past, my own personal preference would

18 have been for a Bosnian-Herzegovinian republic, but I'm

19 not sure in this state of flux between the effective

20 collapse of the monopoly of the Yugoslav League of

21 Communists which had held federal Yugoslavia together

22 and the outbreak of conflict, it is necessarily

23 evidence of criminal intent to discuss alterations to

24 the internal boundaries which subsequently the

25 International Community chose to recognise as the

1 boundaries of sovereign states.

2 Q. As an English reader you would have, of

3 course, count as your sources, English newspaper

4 articles, English television programmes?

5 A. Among them, yes.

6 Q. Therefore, you are presumably familiar with a

7 comparatively recent, was it 1995, 1994, sorry,

8 dispatches programme that dealt with this particular

9 meeting containing some eyewitness account of it?

10 A. I'm trying to remember, there are so many of

11 it.

12 Q. Let's have a look at it, Exhibit 1682,

13 please. If you push the second button down.

14 A. "Video evidence"?

15 Q. "Video", I think, the top one, you'll get

16 it.

17 A. Certainly.

18 [Videotape played]

19 MR. NICE:

20 Q. That is plainly material that you perhaps

21 should be aware of. Had you ever seen it before?

22 A. I think in retrospect I did see the

23 programme, yes. On the point -- I don't -- there were

24 two points, if I may make, I'll come back to the second

25 in a second. The actual contents are broadly similar

1 to what I have suggested there were these discussions

2 including possible partition, possibly into three

3 parts, I think I said, but that came to no active

4 conclusion.

5 On the second point, the programme itself --

6 with music and also the pictures of the two presidents

7 with their wine creates an impression which you could

8 for instance show pictures of Richard Halbrooke or Lord

9 Owen in the same context and dramatise it so on the

10 content --

11 Q. I'm sure I can cut you short, the drama isn't

12 going to affect the Judges. It's what the two

13 witnesses Bilandzic and Letica say. It's not people

14 who you've turned --

15 A. But I know Letica is a well-known figure in

16 Croatia.

17 Q. They are not people to whom you've turned to

18 for assistance?

19 A. Not directly. I have seen interviews.

20 Q. They make it quite plain that there was an

21 official denial, that means a denial, including to the

22 Muslims of the content of these talks. Why, if it was

23 just concerned with the ultimate security and safety

24 and future of this state, can you think of any reason

25 why there should be just bilateral talks to the

1 exclusion of the third party, please.

2 A. Precisely because the Serb leadership had

3 already made various claims to territory in Croatia and

4 in Bosnia which was in their view either wholly or

5 predominantly inhabited by Serbs. There was a question

6 of how to avoid a conflict. I have made the point

7 already that I don't believe that contacts between

8 Bosnian Muslims and the Serb authorities are

9 necessarily to be seen as reprehensible because they

10 sought to avoid conflict.

11 I think the relations between Tudjman and

12 Milosevic were also not inherently reprehensible and

13 I'm not sure -- clearly apart from anything else, I

14 think if one looks at many international discussions

15 including between leaders who are universally accepted

16 as democratic and legitimate, they often involve

17 denials of what has been discussed because they do not

18 wish to be embarrassed over points which are not

19 necessarily going -- criminal or conspiratorial.

20 Q. I'm going to go back to the question once and

21 then move on to the next piece of evidence. Can you

22 think of any reason why, if they were deciding on the

23 future of this state generally, they were bilateral and

24 why the Muslims were excluded, any good reason?

25 A. Yes. In the context of violence by Serbs in

1 Croatia and the need to, from the point of view of the

2 Croatian government, to calm that conflict and also the

3 need to avoid further conflicts, Tudjman had to talk to

4 somebody who was already widely regarded as Milosevic

5 as deeply reprehensible and unpopular.

6 It would be very foolish of any diplomat, I

7 would suggest, to put all his cards straight on the

8 table. There were, after all, alternatives being

9 discussed and it seems to me that these alternatives,

10 which are not ones that I would necessarily or need --

11 not ones that I would support, nonetheless were part of

12 a broader picture.

13 Q. Well, two points emerge from that, since you

14 raise that as an answer. I'm sorry I'm making a

15 mistake of not leaving a gap. The first point is this,

16 if that was Tudjman's motivation then he should, of

17 course, immediately have gone and discussed things with

18 Izetbegovic explaining what he was doing in the general

19 interest, shouldn't he? And there is no evidence that

20 he ever did.

21 A. That might have been wiser, but it would have

22 been, of course, essential if an agreement had been

23 reached, but your own television interviews suggest

24 that options were discussed not an agreement made.

25 Q. It is a short step -- sorry. My mistake

1 again. It is a short step from any discussion about

2 partition to consideration of annexation; correct?

3 A. Not necessarily.

4 Q. Can we then now please look at the next piece

5 of evidence that you have referred to.

6 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Nice, before you move

7 on, I wanted to ask Mr. Almond this general question.

8 What impact does your conclusion that there

9 was no plan between Croatia and Serbia to partition

10 Bosnia-Herzegovina have on how one looks at the actual

11 conflict between the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian

12 Croats?

13 A. I see that conflict as being more produced by

14 contingent events in -- after the war breaks out in

15 Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992, and not the product of a

16 conscious plan by the Croatian government to promote a

17 conflict between Muslims and Serbs, for instance. I

18 have not seen any evidence of that.

19 And as I suggested in response to an earlier

20 question, I think -- I'm not obviously competent, as

21 I'm sure the Prosecution would agree, to comment on the

22 specific events in question with regard to who murdered

23 whom and why in April 1993. But if we look at the

24 context of how this conflict arose, it seems to me that

25 to isolate it from the Serb Muslim conflict and also

1 from the general conflicts that have broken out from

2 June 1991, and in the case of Croatia, even with the

3 quasi-secession of Krajina from August 1990, to isolate

4 the conflicts that broke out in Central Bosnia from

5 that context, I feel -- I believe to be misleading. It

6 is perhaps comforting to feel that there was a

7 structure, a nice neat pattern leading to that

8 conflict. I feel myself that it is a tragic

9 consequence of the Bosnian Serb onslaught against, in

10 this case, primarily the Bosnian Muslims, and how that

11 interacts with the territory that they're pushed into.

12 JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you.

13 MR. NICE:

14 Q. So before I part from what you've just been

15 saying, in a sentence, the conflict emerges because

16 it's produced by contingent events after the war breaks

17 out. I want to come back to this. But that's your

18 analysis: Produced by contingent events after the war

19 breaks out?

20 A. Yes.

21 MR. NICE: Can we now, please, look at

22 Exhibit 2717, if the witness could have that. And it's

23 an English document, so I think because the Judges

24 don't have their own copies and it's quite a large

25 document, it will be helpful if we simply lay it on the

1 ELMO and look at it.

2 Q. I'm going to ask you to go through various

3 passages of this document and tell me how you say it

4 fits with your theory. It's a document with which

5 you're familiar. It's the record of the meeting on the

6 27th of December of 1991 in Tudjman's office.

7 So if we look at page -- and I'm going to

8 deal with the content of the meeting by topics. If we

9 look at page 8, please. Can I take it, Mr. Almond,

10 that you have in fact looked at and considered the

11 totality of this document?

12 A. Yes.

13 Q. In which case, I'll deal with passages

14 shortly. If you believe that there's a question of

15 context, I'd ask you to tell me.

16 On page 8, we see the president interrupting

17 Kljuic, saying, "Tell me, in these talks about

18 partition, did you get to the heart of the matter?"

19 Kljuic says, "No. They would not commit themselves.

20 We were trying to take them at their word." And then

21 at the top of the next page the president says, "No.

22 It is about partition."

23 If we look at page 21, this is the president

24 speaking, and a long passage. And two lines, three

25 lines down from the top, he says this, as one of the

1 arising questions:

2 "It seems to me, therefore, that just as we

3 have taken advantage of this historic moment to

4 establish an independent internationally recognised

5 Croatia ..."

6 A. Excuse me. I have a different text in front

7 of me.

8 Q. It's higher on the page. Sorry. Right at

9 the top of the page. There we go. Two lines down from

10 the top.

11 "It seems to me, therefore, that just as we

12 have taken advantage of this historic moment to

13 establish an independent internationally recognised

14 Croatia, I believe that it is time that we take the

15 opportunity to gather the Croatian people inside the

16 widest possible borders."

17 And then at the bottom of the same page,

18 after an intervention by Mr. Boban or, a contribution

19 by Mr. Boban:

20 "Let me finish," says the president, "so the

21 discussion can go on. It seems to me, therefore, that

22 with a prudent policy, a clever demarcation and

23 agreement with the Serbs in Bosnia, we can even achieve

24 that instead of war, which is threatening, because of

25 this unresolved issue, the army buildup, that the army

1 will serve as a guarantee for the implementation of

2 such a demarcation."

3 Before I look at the next passages, do none

4 of these passages even suggest to you that Tudjman had

5 partition and annexation in mind?

6 A. It seems, for instance, from the passage

7 you've just quoted, that there was no agreement with

8 the Serbs. That's one point. That he thinks that if

9 the agreement with the Serbs could be achieved -- and

10 we are, of course, talking still at a time when it is

11 not clear that Bosnia-Herzegovina will become an

12 independent state --

13 Q. The question is: Did he --

14 A. And -- sorry.

15 Q. Carry on. Did he not have partition and

16 annexation in mind? What's your opinion?

17 A. A partition was a possibility that had been

18 discussed or was widely touted, because I think a point

19 of common agreement amongst the various people who have

20 been asked to testify on the aspects of whether Croatia

21 regarded -- Croats, sorry, regarded Croats abroad as

22 being foreigners, of course there was this dilemma.

23 People had lived in a common state for a long time. If

24 you were to create borders between them, would you

25 divide populations who had lived together? And we have

1 to remember that the armed conflict in Croatia itself

2 was, to put it at best, on ice at this stage.

3 Q. Could we look at page 55, over to 56, just

4 picking it up for context at the foot of 55. At the

5 bottom of 55, he asks -- the president asks if anybody

6 else wants to speak. And it says that the discussion

7 has shown that this meeting is not necessary -- was

8 necessary and that differences surfacing are not

9 accidental, conditioned by the problem of Bosnia and

10 Herzegovina itself.

11 And then over to page 56, he says:

12 "All of history has shown that Bosnia and

13 Herzegovina is no solution for the Croatian people.

14 First of all, gentlemen, let us not forget that it,

15 Bosnia, was created in the colonial conquest of an

16 Asian power at the expense of the Croatian people and

17 Croatian territories between the 15th and 18th

18 centuries. All colonial creations throughout history

19 fell, both in Africa and Asia. Bosnia and Herzegovina

20 did not exist between the two world wars. The

21 communists invented it, put it back on the map after

22 World War II, even declared the Muslims to be a nation,

23 in order to supposedly resolve the differences between

24 the Serbian and Croatian people. Did they succeed?

25 No. On the contrary. Therefore, Bosnia and

1 Herzegovina should not be taken as something God-given,

2 which must be preserved, and we must especially not

3 forget how harmful it is."

4 What do you say to that passage?

5 A. I think if you read the next paragraph, you

6 can see that he makes the point that the existence of

7 Bosnia-Herzegovina creates what he calls an impossible

8 situation with regard -- regarding its territory,

9 regarding administration, not to mention defence: "We

10 cannot establish an independent Croatia such as it

11 is." Part of the problem of anybody looking at the map

12 would be to say that the territorial shape of Croatia

13 is problematic in all sorts of aspects, and

14 particularly, as I say, in this context where we have

15 had the war with Serbia which has made use of

16 Bosnia-Herzegovina.

17 Q. Precisely so, Mr. Almond. What the president

18 was saying was, "We need a chunk of Bosnia to make

19 ourselves more viable," simple as that.

20 A. I'm not sure it's quite so simple as that at

21 all. If we look at the various proposals at different

22 times, the Croatian leadership had talked as though the

23 integration of the Croats into Bosnia was the only

24 solution because of the war situation. At other times

25 they looked to a common state.

1 I remember, for instance, discussing with

2 Muhamed Sacirbeg the various times -- the Bosnian

3 government ambassador to the United Nations, at a

4 conference in Crans, Montana in 1996, and he made a

5 point which was that the Croats had proposed various

6 integrations between Bosnia and Croatia which would

7 render -- would, for instance, have a common currency.

8 He took the view, as I remember him, that this would of

9 course mean that there would be complete integration of

10 the two states. Whether that is necessarily malign is

11 a different point.

12 On your -- sorry.

13 Q. Let's just look over at page 57, because we

14 want to deal with it as swiftly as we can while giving

15 you a chance to comment on all the passages that I'm

16 going to suggest to you show your theory to be wholly

17 groundless. Page 57, about eight lines up from the

18 bottom, but start at a fresh paragraph. The president

19 is still speaking.

20 "The Croatian Democratic Union ..." Shall

21 we put it on the ELMO? "The Croatian Democratic Union

22 and the state leadership of Croatia have not changed.

23 There have been no changes. No. But because we -- I

24 shall not repeat what all you said -- we said that for

25 tactical reasons we were in favour of a sovereign

1 Bosnia, so long as it existed, but there is no longer a

2 sovereign Bosnia."

3 What does that say to you, please,

4 Mr. Almond, about partition being in the president's

5 mind, and annexation?

6 A. Well, he carries on to say, "The Serbs have

7 split off. You have no authority. The Bosnian

8 government has no authority over the Serbian

9 sections." And above the paragraph you quote, I

10 believe he makes the point that he has spoken with

11 Izetbegovic in private talks with Milosevic, in talks

12 with both of them. There was discussion of how to find

13 a solution -- such a solution which would satisfy both

14 the Croatian and Serbian people as well as the

15 Muslims. It was discussed.

16 So I think the picture in the document that

17 you cite, or the Prosecution cites, is somewhat more

18 complex, and particularly if we remember this point,

19 which seems to come out of the direct citations you

20 make, that the authority of the government in Sarajevo

21 over the territory of the Republic of

22 Bosnia-Herzegovina was collapsing. Until this stage --

23 and there are many more lawyers. Although I'm not a

24 lawyer, there are lawyers here. Usually in

25 international law the British government would

1 recognise the government only if it controlled the

2 territory of its state. That may have changed after

3 the event, but not at this time, and therefore I think

4 the connotation you put upon these words, particularly

5 taken away from the context on either side, makes them

6 more aggressive than in fact they need to be seen as.

7 Q. Surely, surely, Mr. Almond, the words I've

8 read out to you, and I'm happy that you put them in

9 their context indeed, the words make it quite clear

10 that whatever was being said in public in favour of a

11 sovereign Bosnia no longer applied and Tudjman had a

12 different object in mind, don't they?

13 A. I think Tudjman was not in charge of events,

14 so that observing the developments, the hope, which it

15 seems implicit in what he says, that a sovereign Bosnia

16 breaking away from Yugoslavia would not therefore be a

17 launching pad for Serbian power, also vis-a-vis

18 Croatia, that at this stage in late December no longer

19 seems to be viable.

20 Q. Last on this topic and this run-through of

21 the document, although I shall take you to some other

22 pages, page 66. The whole of what the president says

23 in this short passage, so that there's context:

24 "That is what it's about. Therefore, what is

25 being said in some circles, that they created

1 Herceg-Bosna of their own will, or at my instructions,

2 is not true. It is not true. They and you both, and

3 each in a somewhat one-sided way, without sufficient

4 coordination, implemented the general policy, and the

5 general policy was to preserve sovereignty until a

6 certain moment so long as it was convenient for

7 Croatia. Now it is no longer convenient. So what they

8 did is exactly what you are saying. The Croats do not

9 want to join Serboslavia; therefore, this is the road

10 we need to take to achieve a Croatian state which will

11 be better in every respect."

12 Can you fit that to anything other than a

13 clear expression of intent to take some of the spoils

14 of Bosnia-Herzegovina?

15 A. It seems to me to be making the point that

16 Serboslavia, which was a common term for the idea of a

17 continued Belgrade-dominated state led presumably by

18 Mr. Milosevic, was something that Croats would not wish

19 to join, and therefore, in the context of the apparent

20 imminent breakdown of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a republic

21 and its unlikelihood of it becoming a sovereign state,

22 that those parts which were predominantly inhabited by

23 Croats would naturally, in his view, wish to join

24 Croatia.

25 Q. So at last, you accept that there is in his

1 mind the question of parts of Bosnia being linked to

2 Croatia?

3 A. I make the point that if the choice is

4 between a Bosnian-Herzegovinian republic that remains

5 part of a Yugoslav state dominated, after all,

6 politically and militarily by the people who have just

7 attacked Dubrovnik and Vukovar, it would not be either

8 desirable or acceptable to the Croats there, or to

9 Croats in general, that that state should come about,

10 because a glance at the map would show that the threat

11 to the remaining -- the independence of the remaining

12 Croatian states, 30 per cent approximately, occupied by

13 Serbs, would be mortal. I think that Serboslavia in

14 this context is a very important term. It is not,

15 after all, saying they don't want to be in

16 Bosnia-Herzegovina necessarily.

17 Q. Are you now accepting that it is clear that

18 the possibility of a bit of Bosnia joining Croatia is

19 under discussion?

20 A. In the context of the collapse of

21 Bosnia-Herzegovina into -- under the control of the

22 still existing Yugoslav state which I think that is, I

23 imagine, what he meant by Serboslavia.

24 Q. And why do you first set out in writing your

25 acknowledgment that this form of annexation was first

1 considered in your writing or in your report?

2 A. I'm not sure that it's a form of annexation

3 in that my understanding of this potential process is

4 that the inhabitants, the Croatia inhabitants primarily

5 of Bosnia-Herzegovina would not wish to live -- would

6 not wish to live in such a state and would seek the

7 obvious protection of their obvious protector which

8 would be Croatia. He takes that for granted.

9 Q. The answer to my question, please --

10 reformulate the question as you like -- where in your

11 writings do you ever acknowledge that there was going

12 to be joinder or that there might have been joinder of

13 part of Bosnia-Herzegovina to Croatia? First of all,

14 is it in your report?

15 A. It's not explicitly in the report, because

16 the report deals with the relevant sections of why

17 there were tensions between Croats -- why Croats might

18 fear the preservation of a Yugoslav state, even a

19 diminishing one containing Bosnia-Herzegovina.

20 Q. You've read all this document which I've

21 taken you through, or some bits of it. It's clear that

22 however we use the word "annexation" or "joinder" was

23 being considered, you've now given an explanation for

24 how that comes about in the discussions. Didn't you

25 think it important, given your divergence from

1 Dr. Donia's views, to give your full understanding of

2 how these topics came to be discussed?

3 A. Well, I presume, for instance, that this

4 document was available to the Court.

5 Q. But the Court is prepared to accept or listen

6 to your opinions on these matters, for that's the

7 reason you're here.

8 A. But I -- given --

9 Q. May I take it, and we'll move on, that

10 nowhere in writing have you ever recorded your opinion

11 that there could have been the joinder of part of

12 Bosnia to Croatia?

13 A. I'm not certain that I've never discussed,

14 either in writing or in some verbal interview, that

15 this prospect, at various times, might have been

16 discussed. I think that's perfectly possible. But my

17 key point is: I was asked specifically with regard to

18 the allegation that from Karadjordjevo onwards there

19 was a consistent policy, and it seems to me that even

20 the document that you cite at length shows that this is

21 a discussion in the dilemma in the late part of 1991,

22 when the war between Serbia and Croatia had not stopped

23 and the establishment of a sovereign independent

24 Bosnia-Herzegovina is still, by no means, clearly going

25 to take place.

1 Q. You've taken into account, have you, that

2 this was five days after the presidency had decided to

3 seek independence?

4 A. But I think further back in this document,

5 you will see, one of the participants in the meeting

6 nonetheless says he doesn't really believe they will.

7 You yourself have drawn attention, or the Prosecution

8 has drawn attention, to the disparity between public

9 statements and private intentions. And I'm afraid if

10 we also remember the international context, it was not

11 at all clear that either the European Community states,

12 and certainly not the United States, would necessarily

13 recognise Bosnia-Herzegovina. The lack of such

14 recognition which was not, as I say, at all clear would

15 mean that the viability of the republic as a state

16 would be even more in question, sadly, than it was

17 because of the operations of the Bosnian Serb forces

18 already in development.

19 Q. Well, I'm going to stick with the immediate

20 topic, with one more piece of evidence. And I may come

21 back to that document, so we won't take it away for the

22 time being. No doubt one of your sources of

23 information is what's said in these trials.

24 A. I have read some press reports, but apart

25 from looking up Dr. Donia's contribution, which I've

1 subsequently received in text form, I haven't had

2 access to the transcripts of the trial, so it -- my

3 sources are press reports.

4 Q. Very well. Some of the events in these

5 trials have gained a little publicity, and perhaps now

6 the witness could see Exhibit 2486. You will remember,

7 probably while it's coming to you, that evidence has

8 been given by Paddy Ashdown about his banquet on the

9 6th of May, and this is straight from the hand of

10 Tudjman and it's about as clear a diagram as you could

11 have.

12 The next page, please, the page that

13 conveniently dates the banquet at which he drew this

14 diagram, and if you'll look at it. Have you seen it

15 before?

16 A. In the press, I think The Times published it.

17 Q. Have a look at it, because it's not entirely

18 straightforward. The present Bosnia-Herzegovina

19 border, obviously very much an approximation, has the

20 lines with the criss-crosses around it, and the future

21 Serbian-Croatian border, an "S" shape, is revealed, as

22 are the present front lines and Sarajevo. Simple case

23 of annexation even more generous to Croatia than the

24 banovina; correct?

25 A. The territorial division on this very

1 approximate map might be, but I disagree with your

2 argument simple case of annexation, because we would

3 need to know the explanation given for the map. And if

4 I may draw the attention of the Court to the context,

5 in May of 1995 the Bosnian Serb forces seemed to be in

6 an even stronger strategic position than they had been

7 before.

8 The elimination, which I regard in whole the

9 prospect, but it was a prospect that the remaining

10 territory controlled by the Bosnian government in

11 Sarajevo would be overrun. As you will remember, in

12 July of 1995, Zepce, Srebrenica were overrun with

13 generally accepted horrific consequences.

14 Therefore, the designation of this very

15 approximate territorial division seems to me to

16 indicate possibly, since I wasn't present at the

17 conversation, unless you have evidence of what was

18 said, that Tudjman may have been already envisaging his

19 military operations which took place to reverse the

20 Serb control of Krajina and Slavonia, and ultimately

21 his intervention on the side of the Bosnian government

22 in the context where it seems the International

23 Community, despite its recognition of

24 Bosnia-Herzegovina, had abandoned it to its fate.

25 Q. But you haven't actually considered what

1 Mr. Ashdown had said.

2 THE INTERPRETER: Microphone for the counsel,

3 please.

4 A. There were certain press reports of what he

5 said.

6 THE INTERPRETER: Microphone for the

7 counsel. Microphone for the counsel, please.

8 MR. NICE:

9 Q. What did he say -- you're making your

10 opinions, you see, on the basis of sources available to

11 you. Here is as close a source to Tudjman's mind as

12 you can get.

13 A. Well, I'm afraid the force --

14 MR. SAYERS: Mr. President, if I may, some of

15 that testimony was given in closed session, and that

16 should be borne in mind as the answer to this question

17 is being given.

18 A. The source has been --

19 JUDGE MAY: I'm not sure that we are

20 assisted, Mr. Nice, by the witness' comments on

21 what -- or his recollection of what Mr. Ashdown may or

22 may not have said.

23 MR. NICE: Very well.

24 JUDGE MAY: The point of the matter is that

25 we have the evidence of Mr. Ashdown in transcript form

1 and we've had -- we've got the plan, and we've got the

2 witness' comments on it.

3 MR. NICE: Very well.

4 Q. Can we move then, without prejudice, to the

5 fact that I may come back to the meeting in December

6 1991 to Graz. Just tell us, please: What do you know

7 about that, so you can tell us what your understanding

8 is?

9 A. I -- as I understand it, Boban and Karadzic

10 met and had discussions, which do not seem to have

11 reached an agreement, on the future shape of

12 Bosnia-Herzegovina.

13 Q. Well, what, if anything, did they agree on?

14 A. I am not certain.

15 Q. Your approach, or am I wrong, doesn't really

16 allow for there to be any bilateral agreements between

17 Serbia and Croatia at that time, does it?

18 A. Well, these are not between Serbia and

19 Croatia but between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats,

20 but also that there were contacts, either direct

21 meetings or telephonic contacts, between various

22 leaders, including the Bosnian government side and

23 opponents, I think, is generally accepted.

24 Q. But please stick with the question. Your

25 approach, your analysis of events doesn't really allow

1 for any concluded agreements, secret or otherwise,

2 between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats?

3 A. It doesn't allow for the implementation and

4 consistent collaboration, because I do not believe that

5 took place, and I believe the evidence on the ground

6 suggests that that didn't take place.

7 Q. 92.1, please, Exhibit 92.1. This starts off

8 next -- well, it starts off with a fax message to

9 Sarajevo all within the monitoring mission, and we go

10 on to the next page from Cutilliero to a colleague

11 Colm:

12 "Could you, in your conference capacity, try

13 to elucidate with the principals the exact terms and

14 meaning of their alleged agreement and Muslim views on

15 the matter? We have not been able to speak on the

16 telephone for a few days. Warmest congratulations on

17 your work from Lord Carrington and from me."

18 And the next page is dated the 7th of May and

19 says:

20 "Boban and Karadzic have reached an

21 agreement at a meeting concerning the resolution of all

22 the differences between the two nations through

23 conciliatory means, including the territorial

24 delimitation under the auspices of the European

25 Community. They reassured firmly the agreement of the

1 principles defined in the conference in Lisbon. There

2 is no further reason for the continuation of armed

3 conflicts between the Serbs and the Croats. The

4 territorial delimitation between the nations will be

5 made until the 15th of May. Cease-fire will be decreed

6 from today."

7 And if you turn over, please, the next page

8 is the agreement:

9 "Our intention being to resolve peacefully,

10 and by agreement, all outstanding issues, including the

11 border line between our two constituent units."

12 Then to save time, (1) is the Neretva River

13 in Mostar; (2), the area delineated in 1939; (3), both

14 sides agree that in defining the border line between

15 the two units, accounts should be taken of compactness

16 of areas; (4), both sides resolved in their adherence

17 to the principles adopted in the conference; (5), the

18 agreement makes invalid the reasons for the suspension

19 of the EC conference, insists that the demarcation

20 under arbitration be implemented by agreed-upon date of

21 May 15th; (6), in view of the agreement outline above,

22 no more reasons obtained for an armed conflict between

23 the Croatians and the Serbs in the entire territory of

24 Bosnia-Herzegovina.

25 Obviously not a document you've seen before.

1 A. Well, I made -- in the answer to the previous

2 question, the point I was making was that were these

3 agreements implemented and carried out. You see, you

4 have raised -- or the Prosecution raises a different

5 point. An agreement, to me, and if this can clarify

6 it, means something that is implemented. Was the --

7 this agreement implemented? Was it persistently abided

8 by?

9 Q. I'll try and find my question. I can't deal

10 with it -- the machine is too complicated -- but I

11 think I asked you quite specifically: Was there any

12 ground for these people making this agreement? Is this

13 not an agreement that's been made?

14 A. It was the document side of an agreement, but

15 it was an agreement, if I remember correctly, that was

16 a dead duck.

17 Q. It's not an agreement which you had any

18 recollection when I asked you about it.

19 A. I have not read the -- I have not recollected

20 the details of the text with, as you say, the specific

21 points about the --

22 Q. Have you ever seen this document before?

23 A. I had seen a report of the agreement. I

24 didn't say I had seen this direct text.

25 Q. Let's go over, just again, to save time --

1 the two sheets are headed "Press Release." At a

2 meeting late on -- this comes from just a press

3 release, Ian Greer Associates.

4 A. Indeed.

5 Q. "At a meeting late Wednesday in the town of

6 Graz, the leader of the Bosnian Serbian Democratic

7 Party, Mr. Karadzic, signed a peace agreement." It

8 goes on to set out "with cease-fire," and so on. This

9 was a well-reported -- or a report, in any event,

10 concluded agreement. What does that tell you about the

11 attitude of the Croats to the Bosnian Muslims at that

12 time?

13 A. Part of the agreement which you yourself

14 created is the adherence to the European Community

15 principles, and even Mr. Greer's press statement refers

16 to three separate states, or, in other words,

17 implicitly not a clear partition between Serbs and

18 Croats. I haven't, of course, seen Mr. Greer's press

19 release before. Mr. Greer, of course, a figure of some

20 controversy because of his activities as a public

21 relations consultant, but only for the Bosnian Serbs.

22 Q. I can't show you these documents in English

23 because we've only just obtained them and they aren't

24 yet translated, I'm afraid, but you're aware, aren't

25 you, that Zagreb is turning over quite a lot of

1 documents at the moment?

2 A. I'm aware of press reports about this matter.

3 Q. If there are documents in due course, and in

4 1993 from a man called Rajic in Kiseljak, making it

5 absolutely clear that he is negotiating directly with

6 the Serbs over the supply of the weapons with even a

7 price list, what do you say about that? How does that

8 fit with your overall theories?

9 A. As you say, I haven't had the opportunity to

10 see these documents and I would not comment. I think

11 in my book I make the point that war is very corrupt,

12 and you will find examples on all sides of

13 cross-conflict cooperation, sadly, and not just in this

14 war, but without these documents are completely unknown

15 to me, you -- the source of them, the verification of

16 them, is something which I know nothing, so it would be

17 very foolish to waste the time of the Court to comment.

18 Q. Well, I'm going to ask you to, in any event,

19 because they are documents, as we understand it, that

20 have been provided by Zagreb to the Defence and the

21 Prosecution and, in fact, to all parties. They will

22 therefore be understood by the native speakers in the

23 Defence, even though they have to be translated for

24 some of those working on the Prosecution. The Judges

25 may, in due course, see them and they may or may not

1 make their mind up.

2 But if, in 1993, we find Rajic in Kiseljak

3 negotiating directly with the Serbs over the supply of

4 weapons, what does that do to your theory, please?

5 Does it harm it?

6 A. Well, as I say, I have no knowledge of these

7 documents. That individual's -- clearly the whole

8 point of this trial is that somebody did dastardly

9 things. But for me to comment on these documents

10 whose, as I say, selection and provision is something

11 and authenticity is something about which I know

12 nothing, would be, I think, wrong.

13 MR. SAYERS: In addition, Your Honour, if I

14 may object. We haven't received any such documents

15 along the line that the Prosecution is talking about,

16 and I don't think it's right to put propositions based

17 upon documents which may or may not exist and certainly

18 which have not been translated yet and not been

19 provided to us.

20 JUDGE MAY: Yes. Let's go on.

21 MR. NICE: Your Honour, my plan is to ask a

22 few more questions before 1.00. I'll then regroup,

23 tidy up, and deal with the outstanding matters as

24 quickly as I can after the break.

25 I've discussed with Mr. Sayers the next

1 witness can probably be taken in chief this afternoon,

2 if that's convenient.

3 JUDGE MAY: I think, Mr. Nice, there is a

4 problem about these documents which nobody's seen which

5 are not in the language of the Tribunal, and normally,

6 of course, one would want a document to be in the

7 language of the Tribunal before a witness is invited to

8 comment on it.

9 MR. NICE: Yes.

10 JUDGE MAY: And also, the other side should

11 have a copy of it. So unless the circumstances are

12 exceptional, the better way for dealing with it would

13 be for the matter to be dealt with by way of rebuttal

14 evidence, unless there's a particular point for a

15 witness, in which case, of course, you can apply to the

16 Court for leave to put it to him. But I think it would

17 be better for you, in future, to apply for leave so we

18 can have it discussed first.

19 MR. NICE: Yes. And my concern, of course,

20 is to give the expert witnesses, in particular, an

21 opportunity to comment on documents if it's helpful for

22 them to do so, but there it is.

23 Q. Can I come --

24 [Trial Chamber confers]

25 MR. NICE:

1 Q. In what remains before the lunch adjournment,

2 can you please take your report and go to page 31. You

3 say in this paragraph, in this page, on the penultimate

4 paragraph: "It has been alleged that the

5 interpreters," plural --

6 A. This is page 31?

7 Q. Thirty-one of your report.

8 A. I'm sorry. Yes, I found it.

9 Q. "... that the interpreters and local

10 personnel employed by BritBat, as well as other

11 international agencies and NGOs in the area, came

12 predominantly from a Muslim background. Emotional

13 entanglements between male officers and female locally

14 employed staff from one group could well have distorted

15 perceptions of developments."

16 Is that seriously your proposition?

17 A. Yes. I think the House of Commons Defence

18 Committee has reported inter alia on the so-called

19 problem of overstretch, and it has said that one of the

20 problems for the British army, both in recruiting and

21 retaining people, is caused by long periods of

22 separation from families, the breakdown of marriage.

23 That is one aspect of it.

24 Secondly, it is a general problem, not so --

25 I'm not suggesting that this is some peculiar vice or

1 flaw of members of BritBat, but it is an observable,

2 sociological phenomenon of deployment in foreign

3 territories abroad.

4 Q. And you're seriously suggesting, are you,

5 that the whole reporting of this war by professional

6 soldiers, whatever their consistency, before this

7 Tribunal may have been infected by their emotional

8 entanglements?

9 A. I'm not suggesting their whole reporting,

10 because, as you will have read, I make the point that

11 other aspects of the briefing material that, as far as

12 I know, was provided to them, would tend to encourage

13 them to take a more hostile view of the Croats than of

14 the Muslims. I made the point that, for instance, I

15 addressed -- I had a lecture at the staff college at

16 Camberley, and the nature of the questions and the

17 comments was suggestive to me of people who had, since

18 they had no necessary reason to be interested in the

19 area, apart from what they were being trained to be

20 deployed, that part of the problem was that there was a

21 bias against the Croats, and secondarily. So these

22 sorts of problems might encourage.

23 But the perception -- you see, I think the

24 great problem is people can be honestly biased. There

25 are two types of bias, if you like. There is somebody

1 who is deliberately making a propagandistic point, and

2 then there are people who honestly believe what they

3 believe but may be mistaken, and that certain factors

4 go together to create their perceptions.

5 Q. How are you -- just help us with this, from

6 your -- was it a single briefing at Camberley? How

7 were you able to say that that was, however

8 unintentionally, biased? In what way was it biased?

9 How are you right and they wrong?

10 A. Because the expression -- I mentioned earlier

11 in answer to a previous question the kind of attitudes

12 towards the Croats, weren't they all fascist during the

13 war and so on, asking about the historical context,

14 suggested to me that that was the kind of assumption

15 that was there.

16 Q. Tell us, please, so that we can have chapter

17 and verse and, if necessary, explore it. Who was

18 saying this?

19 A. There were both -- I gave a talk, there were

20 questions and answers, and also there were brief

21 private conversations.

22 Q. You gave a talk and were able to put the

23 record straight to those who asked you questions that

24 were, in a sense, ill-conceived, if they were.

25 A. Yes. Whether I put the record straight is

1 obviously a matter of judgement.

2 Q. Back to the interpreters, because you've used

3 plural, who are these interpreters? What's their

4 names? Who are the officers whose perception may have

5 been affected?

6 MR. BROWNING: Your Honour, if we are going

7 to be discussing a topic like this --

8 JUDGE MAY: I'm sorry. I can't -- can you

9 speak more clearly?

10 MR. BROWNING: If a matter such as this is

11 going to be probed by Mr. Nice, perhaps it would make

12 sense to go into closed session briefly.

13 JUDGE MAY: Why?

14 MR. BROWNING: I'm sorry. Private session.

15 JUDGE MAY: Why?

16 MR. BROWNING: To the extent that he's asked

17 specifics about specific individuals, specific British

18 officers.

19 JUDGE MAY: I can't see there's any

20 embarrassment about that, unless the witness feels

21 it -- if the witness thinks that it's an embarrassing

22 matter, of course we'll consider it, but it doesn't

23 seem to me that it's immediately a matter for a private

24 session.

25 But Mr. Almond, can you answer the question

1 or not?

2 A. In the press reports about this matter, in,

3 for instance, the so-called documentary drama broadcast

4 by the BBC Warriors.

5 MR. NICE:

6 Q. It's Warriors.

7 A. No, it isn't. There are widely reported -- I

8 am also, as the Prosecution has pointed out, because I

9 too use interpreters and observe people using

10 interpreters, not only in the former Yugoslavia but in

11 other places, that there is simply a professional

12 difficulty that arises of objectivity. And that seems

13 to me to be reasonable without going into the question

14 of individuals.

15 JUDGE MAY: Yes. I think we've taken this as

16 far as we can. Anything more on this topic, Mr. Nice?

17 MR. NICE: Not at that particular topic, no.

18 That's a convenient moment.

19 JUDGE MAY: Half past 2.00.

20 --- Luncheon recess taken at 1.00 p.m.

21

22

23

24

25

1 --- On resuming at 2.36 p.m.

2 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Nice.

3 MR. NICE:

4 Q. Mr. Almond, I think it's a reality, is it

5 not, that you have very strong views of your own

6 regardless of your views on current affairs that you

7 analyse, but you have strong views of your own about,

8 for example, British involvement in the former

9 Yugoslavia?

10 A. I have views of my own, yes.

11 Q. You, I suspect, think that it was entirely

12 wrong for the British to be led into what they did via

13 the European union; would that be right?

14 A. Few people, I think, today, would say that

15 the consequences were beneficial.

16 Q. No, I think --

17 A. So I think it was wrong to --

18 Q. Quite specifically, you are against the

19 British involvement with the European union, for

20 example.

21 A. In Yugoslavia?

22 Q. Yes.

23 A. I think that Britain, of course, played a

24 leading role and the policies were mistaken, yes.

25 Q. You now, I think, take firmly the view that

1 Croatia is unwise in selling itself out to the European

2 union; is that right?

3 A. I think the -- whether this is relevant to

4 the case in hand along with other applicants state

5 during the European union the conditions required to be

6 met create a great deal of economic hardship and are

7 not advantageous to the populations of almost all the

8 applicant states, if this is relevant to the case.

9 Q. You also take the view personally, and I'm

10 simply putting, as you would probably guess, some of

11 the comments that you think you made earlier this year

12 with Hrvatska Sloba in April?

13 A. Mm-hmm.

14 Q. I think you also take the view that with the

15 demise of communism, the west has become a less

16 tolerant and liberal place and that there's some

17 preponderance of socialist mentality permeating Europe?

18 A. I think it is a great irony of the post cold

19 war period that there is less diversity and debate

20 about a range of issues including foreign policy

21 issues.

22 Q. In short, no complaint about this, of course,

23 but in short, you are fundamentally a fairly

24 right-wing --

25 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Nice, I don't think this is

1 going to help us.

2 MR. NICE: Can I explain why because I've

3 just come to it.

4 Q. Your book, as long ago as what, 1994, had a

5 particular acknowledgment to Maja Freundlich, didn't

6 it?

7 A. Yes.

8 Q. And she was in the HDZ as its vice-president?

9 A. Was she then its vice-president?

10 Q. If not then, she has been.

11 A. As far as I know, she has only recently

12 become active in the politics of the HDZ within fact

13 literally the last few weeks or two or three months.

14 Q. And she is again perhaps on an extreme wing;

15 would you accept that?

16 A. I think you can have a minority position

17 without, perhaps, being extreme. Extreme implies that

18 you are anti-democratic or something rather than simply

19 one disagrees with, perhaps, the majority position.

20 Q. Have you, in fact, since the beginning of

21 your work on Yugoslavia had rather close connections

22 with the HDZ, because you actually share some of their

23 political ideology?

24 A. I have no connections formally speaking with

25 any political party. I've talked with a variety of

1 people from all political parties.

2 Q. Because I want to you look, please, at one

3 part of your report towards the end where you express,

4 it may be, views that are critical of England or

5 English people. If you go right to the end of your

6 report, 31, I think, will start us off.

7 A. Mm-hmm.

8 Q. Well, we've already dealt with the report so

9 we can probably go to page 32. Incidentally, just

10 before we go to part or finally from the report as at

11 issue, would you accept that at important meetings

12 wherever possible, the British army used where possible

13 its own interpreters?

14 A. It had, I believe, two native speakers of

15 Serbo-Croat, a certain Islamic who has written his

16 memoirs, as you probably know, or the Court will be

17 aware, Milos Stankovic.

18 Q. And would you accept that one of the most

19 loyal interpreters who was tragically shot was not a

20 Muslim at all, and he was one of the senior

21 interpreters.

22 A. Yes. I don't think I've said that all --

23 Q. Thank you. Page 32, you start dealing with

24 Ahmici. Now, from what you've told us already, there

25 is nothing you can tell us about the events at Ahmici

1 yourself; is that right?

2 A. Precisely what my report is about is how this

3 was -- this terrible event was presented in the media.

4 Q. But you have no, and you don't wish to offer

5 us any personal view on what may have happened there?

6 A. I think the Court has got vast amounts of

7 evidence from people who are infinitely better

8 qualified than I am to say what happened to cause the

9 horrible amount of murders.

10 Q. Well, if we look at the middle of the page,

11 there's this paragraph:

12 "In the days running up to the discovery and

13 the publicity circus surrounding the Ahmici massacre,

14 the Serb offensive around Srebrenica had put reluctant

15 western governments, especially the British one, under

16 pressure to use military force to prevent Serb gains.

17 It was certainly convenient that more than one village

18 should appear on stage to muddy the Bosnian waters."

19 What does that mean?

20 A. It means what it says. The British

21 government and other governments who had contributed

22 forces to UNPROFOR, whereas the ministers and so on had

23 publicly stated they did not wish to be drawn into a

24 conflict, no doubt for the reason they did not wish for

25 there to be lightly armed British and other soldiers to

1 be subject to the risks of conflict.

2 At the same time, as I quote further on in

3 the text, because of the Bosnian Serb offensive at

4 Srebrenica, there was a very considerable clamour in

5 the British parliament and in other places, in other

6 governments, and also in the British press. It clearly

7 was not to the advantage of the Bosnian Serbs to face

8 an intervention by NATO forces which might -- those

9 forces on the ground might be lightly armed and

10 ill-equipped, but others might be drawn in who were

11 much heavily armed and better equipped.

12 I simply mean that this horrible massacre was

13 something that caused, despite, no doubt, their dislike

14 or horror at the actual events, certain relief that

15 that public pressure would be relieved.

16 Q. We must look at what follows. The rest of

17 page 32, page 33, and over to 34, sets out all about

18 the revelations. You may not have got it accurate, but

19 it sets out what you know about the revelations of

20 Ahmici and when it came to be broadcast and

21 publicised. You're suggesting there a delay in

22 publication. What is true as opposed to the unstated

23 nature of your allegation, please?

24 A. [Indiscernible] -- that there was a delay.

25 Q. Yes. But what's --

1 A. Well, that, for instance, the press were then

2 taken to the site and that the reading of the

3 consequences of this massacre from the point of view of

4 the global conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, that

5 involving the Bosnian Serbs, was now converted because

6 this became the main issue in the media; and other

7 issues, particularly the Bosnian Serb offensive around

8 Srebrenica was pushed onto the back burner.

9 Q. I dare say. But what I want to know is:

10 What are you seeking to say about any underlying

11 pulling of strings, if this is your case, that led to a

12 delay in reporting?

13 A. I'm not sure -- I think -- the point was that

14 although the event had taken place, as far as I can

15 tell, several days before the media had access to the

16 site with, presumably, their various satellite dishes

17 and other things to directly report it, that the

18 British government, as I say, in a sense, because it

19 confirmed their argument -- they have, of course, had

20 this argument, you know. It was to some extent a

21 confirmation of their argument that one could not

22 regard a particular party to the conflict in

23 Bosnia-Herzegovina as being overwhelmingly responsible

24 and therefore perhaps a suitable subject for

25 international intervention against it.

1 Q. But that would not favour delay in -- sorry.

2 I'll just wait. But that's not going to favour delay

3 in reporting. And because I don't want to take too

4 long over this, will you please go on page 34 to the

5 first fresh paragraph, which begins: "Even Lord

6 Owen ..." And the last four lines of that paragraph

7 says as follows:

8 "The coincidence of the discovery of the

9 Ahmici massacre, with the crescendo of international

10 concern about the fate of Srebrenica and the dilemma

11 posed especially to the British government as the major

12 force provider for UNPROFOR, along with France, was

13 painfully obvious at the time."

14 Well, now, I want to know, please, first of

15 all, obvious to whom? Second, you've spent whatever it

16 is, a couple of pages, and more, setting out simply a

17 history of observations and then saying that the

18 discovery is painfully obvious and is a coincidence.

19 What are you really saying here? Anything?

20 A. What I'm saying is that in April of 1993 the

21 governments who provided the forces to UNPROFOR felt

22 themselves under a great deal of pressure to intervene

23 militarily, which they did not wish to do. Until the

24 outbreak of conflict between the Croats and the Bosnian

25 Muslims, and until particularly this crime in Ahmici,

1 the argument which had been repeatedly put forward by

2 government spokesmen in Britain, ministers and others,

3 that all sides in the Balkans were much of a muchness

4 and equally responsible, was increasingly fraying

5 precisely because there had not been an atrocity of the

6 sort that occurred.

7 Now, you might say to me, therefore, I am

8 proven wrong to say that the Serbs are primarily

9 responsible. What I'm saying is that this tragic and

10 horrible event was certainly used and presented in the

11 media as an explanation as to why those people who felt

12 that intervention to stop the conflict were wrong.

13 I quote, I think, Sir Malcolm Refkin making

14 the point that those who said, "Raise the arms embargo

15 to assist the Muslims" would now find themselves

16 providing weapons to people fighting as if via a

17 secondary civil war.

18 And with regard to the delay, I imagine that

19 that revolved around technical issues, but you could

20 say that it was obviously an important point, and

21 certainly the event was horrible, that the British

22 armed forces facilitated the exposure of this event,

23 this evidence, televisual evidence, in the media.

24 Q. It may be, would you accept this, that but

25 for people like Martin Bell and Bob Stewart, the Croats

1 would never have divulged what happened in Ahmici at

2 all?

3 JUDGE MAY: I think that's a matter of

4 comment.

5 MR. NICE:

6 Q. Could you go please, then, to the last

7 paragraph on page 34 and help us with that. I'm going

8 to come back to what you said above about coincidence.

9 "Any understanding of the tragic events of

10 mid-April cannot take at face value the assertions of

11 any of the participants. All of them," and you then

12 say this, "including quite clearly the British military

13 participants in UNPROFOR, had, and may well still have,

14 political agendas of their own. Bias there was,

15 certainly enough, on all sides. To privilege the

16 testimony of any one set of participants as ex officio

17 reliable and to fly in the face of the evidence."

18 Well, please, what are you suggesting there?

19 And in particular, what, if anything, are you

20 suggesting about either the reliability of British

21 UNPROFOR witnesses or the British who reported Ahmici?

22 A. As I explained earlier, I think there are --

23 bias is not necessarily a conscious form of dishonesty,

24 that is the first point. Secondly, as I've just

25 explained, it was the official line, not only of the

1 British government but, by extension, expected of

2 British military participants that they should not say

3 or do anything that obviously went against British

4 policy.

5 In a free society it's perfectly reasonable

6 for me, for citizens to criticise a policy. Obviously,

7 military personnel are put in a difficult position if

8 they do not necessarily agree with it.

9 Q. You no more have a shred of evidence to

10 suggest bias by military observers than you have a

11 shred of evidence to suggest, in some way, distortion

12 by interpreters, do you? You don't have a shred of

13 evidence of either?

14 A. I think I've said earlier that I -- there is

15 evidence, for instance, in Colonel Stewart's book, his

16 understanding of the background of the conflict as

17 opposed to his description of events. I think the

18 result is simplistic and in that sense biased, but I'm

19 not impugning His Honour. It seems to me it is

20 possible to be patriotic and not necessarily agree with

21 the government policy.

22 Q. I'm going to press you once more because of

23 what you've said in your report.

24 A. Yes.

25 Q. You don't have a shred of evidence to suggest

1 bias by the observers in what they reported any more

2 than you have a shred of evidence to suggest the effect

3 or affect by the interpreters, do you?

4 A. There is the implication that in certain of

5 his statements to the press after the event, Colonel

6 Stewart says that he's not sure who's done it, then he

7 becomes sure. But since, I'm glad to say, none of

8 these participants are -- have been accused of

9 anything, then my opinion about their -- how they form

10 their opinions may be less than relevant.

11 Q. Finally, before I turn to the next topic, is

12 this the high point of your case, because an officer

13 who was contemporaneously investigating events may have

14 changed from uncertainty to certainty as his

15 investigation unfolded? That's the high point of your

16 case, is it, on bias?

17 A. There is a great deal of evidence of, as I

18 said, about how the forces went to Bosnia-Herzegovina

19 were briefed, what sort of information they would be

20 given, including by a subsequent member of the

21 government in Pale. That created an atmosphere of

22 bias. There was then the problem that it was quite

23 clear that the British government did not wish to see

24 any kind of active military intervention and was very

25 critical of anybody who proposed this.

1 In a small army like the British army, it

2 would be evident to anybody what the political masters,

3 who were, of course, the elected government, wished and

4 did not wish to be promoted as a policy.

5 Q. I'm not going to deal with that any further,

6 thank you. What was the HZ HB, please?

7 A. The -- the -- of Herceg-Bosna.

8 Q. Sorry, what was it?

9 A. I'm sorry, I'm struggling to find the correct

10 word.

11 Q. I've got something to read so let me catch

12 up. Take your time.

13 Sorry. You write about the HZ HB so I wonder

14 if you could tell us what it is.

15 A. Sorry, I have suffered a mental blank. Would

16 you draw my attention to the page?

17 Q. Oh yes, of course. You can see it on page

18 28.

19 A. I was talking about the Croatian Community as

20 I think it's generally translated. These were these

21 institutions that were created at the point I was

22 making.

23 Q. Well, just let's see what they were, first,

24 and when they were created. Now, you didn't know, when

25 I initially asked you. You couldn't remember. Can we

1 look at page 20, as well keeping our fingers in page

2 28.

3 A. Yes.

4 Q. You set out at the foot of page 20 an

5 extended quotation from the passage from Dr. --

6 A. Malcolm.

7 Q. Well, it's actually an account of somebody

8 else but it sets out what Dr. Malcolm -- and it then

9 says at the foot of that page, "The Croat counterpart,

10 the Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna, was not

11 proclaimed until July 1992 after three months of

12 Serbian military offensive in Bosnia." Malcolm

13 continues, "The Croats of Herzegovina have some reason

14 to be more hard-lined." And you then say in your next

15 paragraph, "Furthermore, even Dr. Malcolm, whom I

16 regard as the best-informed and most eloquent of the

17 proponents of Bosnian statehood admits that after they

18 had been joined," and so on. So that's something that

19 was created in July 1992 and on page 28, you're

20 referring to HZ Herceg-Bosna created on the 18th of

21 November 1991.

22 A. Yes. As I understand it, there were these

23 preliminary Croatian communities in 1991, but that the,

24 if you like, subpolitical entity that linked the Croats

25 within Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is conventionally

1 referred to as Herceg-Bosna which would include the

2 area of discussion that then formed later.

3 Q. I see. So what was the purpose and the

4 function of this earlier body that you describe as a

5 subpolitical entity, please?

6 A. As I understand it, the event -- in these

7 events in November 1991, when the Serbian forces were

8 still besieging Vukovar and so on, as a preparation for

9 a potential conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose

10 future status was not resolved and Croatian groups

11 organise themselves at a political and at a

12 preparatory, military level.

13 Q. And have you any knowledge of, and have you

14 taken account of meetings in June of 1991 which

15 preceded the creation of these subpolitical entities,

16 what it is, the 16th and 20th of June? Do you know

17 anything about those meetings at all?

18 A. No, but from the dates you give, they follow

19 the Serb union of municipalities.

20 Q. But if these were meetings in Zagreb where

21 different factions of the local HDZ, the Bosnian HDZ

22 were being sounded out by Tudjman, they might be very

23 important, mightn't they? You know nothing about them

24 at all.

25 A. I have seen no documentation on them, no.

1 Q. And this subpolitical entity, if it was an

2 HDZ entity should, of course, have been presided over,

3 for example, Kljuic, shouldn't it?

4 A. It might have been. I don't know necessarily

5 if it should have been.

6 Q. And you can't help the Chamber at all with

7 how it might have come about that Kljuic was kept

8 unaware of the creation of this event?

9 A. I do not know if he was.

10 Q. Well, can we look, please, very briefly, I'm

11 sorry that it's been taken away, but Exhibit 2717 which

12 is a document we know you've reviewed in full. And we

13 can just literally put page 13 on the ELMO, although --

14 no, perhaps better look at the page 12 for its

15 context.

16 Mr. Almond, this is the same meeting with

17 Tudjman and Kljuic and all sorts of others, and what

18 happens is as you can see on page 12, that Kostroman

19 took the minutes of -- let me make sure I've got this

20 right myself -- took the minutes and went through

21 them.

22 And then over the page at page 13, this is

23 the minutes of an earlier meeting of something called

24 Herceg-Bosna, and here there are two passages that may

25 be interesting. "Item 2, the Croatian Community of

1 Herceg-Bosna has once again confirmed the will of the

2 entire Croatian people of Herceg-Bosna expressed on 18

3 November 1991 in Grude, taking the historic decision to

4 establish the Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna which

5 serves as a legal basis for the entry of these

6 territories into the Republic of Croatia."

7 Now, what on earth do you make of that,

8 please?

9 A. That these decision in November of 1991 were

10 based upon the situation that then existed, that is to

11 say, of a conflict between the Serbs and the Croats,

12 large parts of Croatia being occupied, and the lack of

13 clarity about the future status of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

14 And that for many Croats, particularly those who were

15 no doubt supporters of the HDZ, that in the event of

16 the breakup of Bosnia-Herzegovina, that there should be

17 an unification and that seemed to be happening.

18 What is striking is that it doesn't happen

19 afterwards. There isn't, in fact, an annexation or

20 integration, whatever the aspiration is to that.

21 Q. Well let's just, before we part from this,

22 remind you through the Chamber, Karadjordjevo, two

23 meetings with Tudjman and the factions of the HDZ of

24 which you are unaware, and then this meeting shortly

25 after the creation of this subpolitical group where the

1 subpolitical group speaks in terms of serving as a

2 basis for entry into the territories of the Republic of

3 Croatia.

4 Would you look at item three as well? "The

5 Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna recognises the full

6 legitimacy of Dr. Franjo Tudjman ..." cut a few words,

7 "... to promote the interests of the Croatian

8 community both among international factors and during

9 interparty and interrepublic agreements on the

10 establishment of the final borders of the Republic of

11 Croatia."

12 You don't, by any chance, think that this

13 reflects an understanding by parties on all sides that

14 partition or annexation, were it to have happened,

15 could be entrusted to Dr. Tudjman?

16 A. The representation of their interests,

17 because as you slightly omitted, he's a leader of the

18 political party, Dr. Tudjman as with Milosevic, as head

19 of state of one country, was, of course, repeatedly

20 invited to negotiations and ultimately acted as the

21 representative at Dayton so that in the -- in this

22 particular context, this anticipates a role that was

23 later to become explicit in relation to the

24 International Community, and it refers to interparty

25 and interrepublic agreements.

1 Q. Just so I understand it, you not having

2 looked at this in detail before, but your, as it were,

3 off-the-cuff explanation is that we should not now

4 interpret this because Dr. Tudjman is head of the party

5 not because he's head of state; is that it?

6 A. He's head of Croatia but, of course, there

7 was a political party as was the case with several

8 other instances which cut across boundaries. The HDZ

9 was not unique in this factor and I think the

10 construction that you are putting on it or the

11 prosecution is putting a construction that this

12 necessarily implies a partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina

13 against the will of its inhabitants as opposed to an

14 argument that if Bosnia-Herzegovina is not going to

15 survive, primarily as a result of the Serb actions, was

16 it not normal and reasonable that Croatians,

17 particularly those who belong to the same political

18 party, looked to Tudjman as their leader and

19 respective?

20 And as I say, in a variety of international

21 mediation efforts and at Dayton, Tudjman was treated in

22 that way as Milosevic was treated as the representative

23 of Serbs; not always.

24 Q. And you have no further explanation to give

25 as between what was created in November 1991 and what

1 was created in July 1992. You have no further

2 knowledge beyond what you've already given us?

3 A. Nothing that would further my argument --

4 alter my argument.

5 Q. And so on the same page, you will have

6 noticed -- just draw it to your attention and the

7 Judges through you, "Item 4, President Boban and

8 vice-presidents Rajic and Kordic and secretary

9 Kostroman authorised to represent, with full

10 legitimacy, a Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna at the

11 meeting in Zagreb on the 27th of December."

12 What do you say to all that? Does that help

13 you with understanding what you're dealing with here?

14 A. They are authorised by that meeting to be --

15 sorry, that they are authorised to be the

16 representatives.

17 Q. In Zagreb. Very well, I'm going to move on

18 because I want to know the answer to the next

19 question.

20 Now, you said this morning in answer to a

21 question by His Honour, Judge Robinson, I think, that

22 the fighting was produced by contingent events after

23 the war broke out. When did the war break out on your

24 analysis?

25 A. War between the Bosnian Serbs and the

1 Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina?

2 Q. No, I think --

3 A. Do you mean the war between --

4 Q. In relation to the fighting between the

5 Croats and the Muslims. I may be wrong. I've tried

6 to --

7 A. My point was that the -- in the lead up and

8 the intensification of bad relations from the winter of

9 1992 to the events which are the subject of this trial

10 primary, the growing pressure of refugees and also

11 Bosnian army units to have been displaced produced

12 these tensions which then led to conflicts including --

13 where the context of the particular events.

14 Q. These are the contingent events, are they,

15 refugees, matters of that sort and displaced army

16 units?

17 A. Competition for space, for lodging, for food,

18 for supply lines. The fears of what had happened.

19 Q. None of this excludes the necessity for there

20 being a mind behind a controlling mind or minds behind

21 the military actions that took place, does it?

22 A. There were minds behind the military actions

23 on both sides. It's clear why they took the decisions

24 they did. I, myself, find it difficult to take the

25 view of -- that this conflict was carefully planned

1 over -- by this time, approximately two years, because

2 of the surrounding events, and the surrounding

3 geopolitical strategic position of the Croats and also

4 of the Bosnian Muslims. It is really to the advantage

5 of neither to have this conflict.

6 Q. So it may have turned out, but your -- you've

7 got to go back in time. You can't help us, one way or

8 another, with whether it was planned, how long it was

9 planned, by whom it was planned, by whom it was

10 executed, can you, on either side?

11 A. There are better witnesses, including the

12 active participants than me, quite obviously.

13 Q. But more than that, just to finish with this

14 point, as someone whose expertise, as you have told us,

15 is only concerned with the external assessment by

16 Europeans and others of events, of course, you can't

17 help us with what actually happened inside, can you?

18 A. My primary focus was on the external events

19 and the intervention of the International Community,

20 but of course one would have to try as best one could

21 to follow the events and they were extremely confusing

22 and I think remain still unclarified. That is the

23 point, surely, of this trial.

24 Q. You don't suggest that you have any

25 expertise, just to be quite sure, you don't suggest you

1 have any expertise to unravel that list of things I

2 suggested to you, whether it was planned, when, by

3 whom, and who executed it. You don't have any

4 expertise in that area at all, do you?

5 A. I have nothing to offer, no.

6 Q. Thank you.

7 Would you please -- if you've still got that

8 document if the usher would be good enough, turn it to

9 page 10. On page 10, I'm sorry. Your Honour, would

10 you give me one moment?

11 My mistake. Will you just give me one

12 moment, please. Can we go to page 60 of this report.

13 I'm sorry if I was in error.

14 A. May I keep page 10?

15 Q. Yes.

16 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Nice, the Chamber is

17 becoming concerned at the length of the

18 cross-examination. We believe you have gone on

19 sufficiently long and you should bring it to an end.

20 MR. NICE: I was bringing it to a close in

21 any event. This is either my last or penultimate

22 topic?

23 A. May I just draw the attention of The Bench to

24 the paragraph -- the second paragraph of Mate Boban's

25 intervention which I think supports the tenure of my

1 interpretation, but I don't want to drag out the

2 proceedings.

3 JUDGE MAY: Since you've made the point,

4 let's see where it is.

5 A. He says, half way through that paragraph, as

6 reported, "Should Bosnia-Herzegovina remain an

7 independent state without any ties with the former

8 disintegrating or future -- or should Bosnia itself

9 disintegrate.

10 JUDGE MAY: Hold on. Can we go up on the

11 ELMO. There we are. Yes.

12 A. "The area where about 650.000 Croats live

13 would implement internationally recognised democratic

14 methods proclaiming this to be independent Croatian

15 territory."

16 MR. NICE:

17 Q. And then the next sentence as well, or next

18 phrase.

19 A. "Which will exceed the state of Croatia but

20 only at such time as the Croatian leadership, in whom

21 our people until now have placed their complete trust

22 should decide the moment and the time had come."

23 But in this presumably private meeting, there

24 is a reference to democratic methods and

25 disintegration.

1 Q. Now go to page 60.

2 Here we have President Tudjman addressing

3 Kljuic, and I'm going to go straight to the first --

4 the next complete, very short paragraph. He says this:

5 "Therefore, we finally wanted, and it was no

6 accident, that in the preamble to the Croatian

7 constitution we also mention the banovina of Croatia."

8 And if, with that passage in mind, you'd turn

9 to page 10 of your report. In the middle of the page

10 you set this out:

11 "The August '39 agreement between the leading

12 Croat politician Madzek [phoen] and the Serbian prime

13 minister, which effectively conceded a large part of

14 Bosnia to a new Croatian unit within a reformed

15 Yugoslavia has a special significance because the

16 boundaries delineated then played such a role in the

17 thinking behind the Vance-Owen Plan and debates about

18 it in the spring of 1993."

19 The banovina was critically important as Lord

20 Owen said, and it's quoted in Dr. Donia's report, had

21 crucial significance so far as Tudjman was concerned

22 and other Croats, because that's what they were aiming

23 for. Would you accept that?

24 A. As I mentioned earlier in my oral evidence, I

25 believe that a large number of Croats regarded that

1 settlement, which was a constitutional deal, not the

2 product of force, as being, from the point of view of

3 their nation, an ideal solution. I don't think that to

4 say that Tudjman or other Croats necessarily wished to

5 revert to that model implies the conspiracy, the

6 collusion, the persistent, as it were, cooperation with

7 the Serbs.

8 MR. NICE: Your Honour, I do have, since this

9 morning --

10 THE INTERPRETER: Microphone for the counsel,

11 please. Microphone for the counsel.

12 MR. NICE: I do have since this morning a

13 draft translation of the Kiseljak documents to which I

14 referred and of course which have only come into our

15 possession recently. I'm pretty well neutral as to

16 whether I put them to this witness, although I've asked

17 him about them, or whether I put them to another

18 witness or introduce them in rebuttal.

19 JUDGE MAY: I think the matter has been taken

20 far enough for today. You can deal with it at a future

21 date.

22 Yes. Any re-examination?

23 MR. BROWNING: Yes, Mr. President.

24 Re-examined by Mr. Browning:

25 Q. Mr. Almond, let me first of all start where

1 the Prosecution left off, with Prosecution Exhibit

2 2717A, which you should have in front of you. Let's

3 put this in its appropriate historical context. That

4 document is dated December 27th, or refers to a meeting

5 of December 27th, 1991.

6 A. Yes.

7 Q. And the referendum for independence in

8 Bosnia-Herzegovina would have been February 29th and

9 March 1, 1992?

10 A. It took place later, yes.

11 Q. So this document, this meeting, was roughly

12 three months before the fate of Bosnia-Herzegovina had

13 been determined?

14 A. Yes. And the pace of events, of course,

15 meant that those periods seemed no doubt like a

16 lifetime to many people.

17 Q. At the time of this meeting, what would

18 happen with regard to Bosnia-Herzegovina was very much

19 up in the air, both within the country as well as in

20 the eyes of the International Community?

21 A. Yes. The United States, for instance, had

22 not followed the majority of European Community states

23 in recognising either Slovenia or Croatia at this

24 stage, and therefore the acceptance of

25 Bosnia-Herzegovina into the International Community as

1 a normally recognised sovereign state was, I believe,

2 far from clear-cut.

3 Q. After the referendum of March 1, 1992, was

4 there any indication that President Tudjman and

5 President Milosevic ever met to discuss a possible

6 partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina?

7 A. I don't know of any meeting to discuss that.

8 Of course, they met frequently, relatively frequently,

9 under the auspices of various international mediation

10 efforts. They may also have spoken on the telephone,

11 as did other leaders.

12 Q. There was certainly no indication of a

13 discussion concerning partition after the referendum?

14 A. No. And as I emphasise in my report, the

15 criticism of Tudjman made at home was that he was

16 failing to resist or to reverse the occupation of

17 Croatian territory, let alone the Serbs in Bosnia.

18 Q. Prior to the referendum of February 29th and

19 March 1, 1992, was it certain that Bosnia-Herzegovina

20 would opt for independence?

21 A. It was not certain, no, and nor necessarily

22 was it welcome to the International Community.

23 Q. Have you seen any indication that President

24 Tudjman at any point ever advocated the use of force to

25 partition Bosnia-Herzegovina?

1 A. No. The evidence of actions is that

2 eventually he used force to prevent the overrunning of

3 the Bosnian Muslim side and also Bosnian Croats in the

4 summer of 1995.

5 Q. It was put to you that Karadjordjevo involved

6 discussions about what would happen to the state of

7 Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the time of Karadjordjevo, of

8 the meeting in Karadjordjevo, was Bosnia-Herzegovina a

9 state, as put to you by the Prosecution?

10 A. It was a constituent republic of the Yugoslav

11 Socialist Federal Republic.

12 Q. And in terms of whether it would become an

13 independent state, that was very much an open question

14 at the time of Karadjordjevo?

15 A. It was an open question, and also both

16 European Community political leaders and the United

17 States vigorously discouraged the independence of any

18 of these republics, or the seeking of independence.

19 Q. With respect to Karadjordjevo, shortly after

20 Karadjordjevo, in August of 1991, there was a

21 full-scale attack by Serbia upon the Republic of

22 Croatia, was there not?

23 A. Starting even before then, yes, in July.

24 Q. And what does that -- what should one take

25 from that with respect to whether there was an

1 agreement that had been reached at Karadjordjevo?

2 A. It would be a most peculiar deal whereby

3 Croatia did not gain any territory in Bosnia but lost

4 about 30 per cent of its own territory.

5 Q. You've been shown a map from a banquet at the

6 meeting between Paddy Ashdown and President Tudjman.

7 Did that -- were the words of President Tudjman, his

8 description that this is what Bosnia-Herzegovina might

9 look like in ten years, was that what was reported or

10 made available in the press?

11 A. President Tudjman, to the best of my

12 knowledge, his comments, to the best of my knowledge,

13 whatever they may have been, have only been reported

14 indirectly through the recollection of Paddy Ashdown.

15 The map itself is interesting, because of course the

16 writing on it is obviously, however accurate,

17 subsequent. But if you look at the map itself, it, for

18 instance, leaves no space for the Krajina Serb military

19 forces, and I think therefore my suggestion that

20 President Tudjman presumably, as commander-in-chief of

21 the Croatian army at that time, was anticipating what

22 we know was to happen within a few weeks -- within a

23 few days, I should say, in Slovenia, western Slovenia,

24 and then in the Krajina, a military operation against

25 the Serbs, which culminated in the assistance to the

1 army of Bosnia-Herzegovina against the Bosnian Serbs in

2 August and afterwards of 1995.

3 Q. Croatia was the first country to recognise

4 the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina?

5 A. Yes.

6 Q. And after that step of recognising the

7 independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was there any

8 effort made by Croatia in any way to annex a portion of

9 Bosnia-Herzegovina?

10 A. There was no annexation of territory, even

11 when the powerless military position of the Bosnian

12 government forces would have made it very easy.

13 Q. I want to wrap up very quickly, but I do want

14 to ask you about another Prosecution Exhibit that you

15 were shown, Z92.1, which was -- and I think it's

16 referred to as an alleged agreement of May 7th, 1992.

17 Shortly after that meeting, did Serbs attack Bosnian

18 Croats in Mostar?

19 A. Yes. I think this agreement was like, sadly,

20 even those agreements mediated by the International

21 Community, a dead letter, and indeed that's why I could

22 not imagine that there was any cooperation very

23 frequently. Not least, the Bosnian Serbs agreed to

24 agree to make -- score points in the media, score

25 points with public opinion.

1 Q. And you refer to it as an agreement, but do

2 you have any reason to believe it's anything more than

3 an alleged agreement?

4 A. It's certainly not an agreement that had any

5 effect.

6 Q. You were subjected to an extensive amount of

7 questions during cross-examination and shown several

8 pieces of paper, but have any of your opinions changed

9 as a result of any of the material that you were shown

10 here in Court today?

11 A. No. I still -- the evidence seems to me to

12 reinforce the point that in this tragic situation, as

13 Yugoslavia broke up and the Serb government and forces

14 pursued their own goals by military force, that various

15 options were open to discussion, but nothing that I

16 would regard as criminal or conspiratorial was ever

17 implemented.

18 MR. BROWNING: Thank you, Mr. Almond. I have

19 no further questions.

20 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Almond, that concludes your

21 evidence. Thank you for coming to the International

22 Tribunal to give it. You are free to go.

23 THE WITNESS: Thank you.

24 [The witness withdrew]

25 JUDGE MAY: Have you the next witness?

1 MR. SAYERS: Yes, Your Honour. Dr. Stjepan

2 Mestrovic is available. He's an expert witness

3 addressing the sociological opinions produced by the

4 Prosecution. And with the Court's permission, as I've

5 stated, Mr. Browning will lead his evidence too.

6 JUDGE MAY: Very well. We'll sit till 4.15

7 and see if we can finish his examination-in-chief.

8 MR. NICE: Your Honour -- oh, he's coming

9 in. I was just going to raise a couple of timetable

10 matters. I can do them at the end of the day.

11 JUDGE MAY: Let the witness in.

12 [The witness entered court]

13 JUDGE MAY: Yes. Let the witness take the

14 declaration.

15 THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will

16 speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the

17 truth.

18 WITNESS: STJEPAN MESTROVIC

19 JUDGE MAY: Let the witness take a seat.

20 THE WITNESS: Pardon me?

21 JUDGE MAY: Take a seat.

22 THE WITNESS: Yes, thank you.

23 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Browning, can you speak into

24 the microphone more? I have trouble hearing you, but I

25 understand that others are.

1 MR. BROWNING: Your Honour, I will do my best

2 to speak up, and I'll do my best to pause as well.

3 I've been sufficiently warned by co-counsel.

4 Examined by Mr. Browning:

5 Q. Dr. Mestrovic, could I have you state your

6 full name, please?

7 A. Stjepan Gabriel Mestrovic.

8 Q. And I don't want to dwell on your experience

9 and background, but there are a few points that I would

10 like to highlight briefly. You have three degrees from

11 Harvard University?

12 A. Yes, and one of them is a master's in

13 theological studies which dealt with the world's

14 religions and their import and their meaning.

15 Q. And you also have a Ph.D. from Syracuse?

16 A. In sociology, yes.

17 Q. And you are a series editor on eastern

18 Europe?

19 A. Yes. It's a series on eastern Europe at

20 Texas A & M University Press. At the time we

21 established it in 1992, it was one of only a handful of

22 such series. The other major one was Duke University

23 Press and we published over 15 treatises on communist

24 and post-communist developments in eastern Europe

25 ranging from Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, and so on.

1 Q. And you're a full-write scholar?

2 A. Yes. I was one of the first full-write

3 scholars in newly established Croatia in 1992.

4 Q. How many books have you published?

5 A. A total of 14 books that I published or

6 edited, and of these I believe about four or five have

7 to do in some way with the Balkans or this current war.

8 Q. You've also published a number of prestigious

9 journals?

10 A. Yes.

11 Q. Could you give us a flavour for those

12 publications?

13 A. In "The Chronicle of Higher Education," I

14 talked about why eastern Europe's upheavals caught

15 people off guard when communism began to collapse. In

16 "The International Journal of Law and Psychiatry," I

17 discussed issues of the dangerousness standard.

18 Q. And you have --

19 JUDGE BENNOUNA: Mr. Browning, I think you

20 have to change the place of your microphone, because if

21 you manage to -- no. Like Mr. Nice, you know. It has

22 to be just in front of you, otherwise you cannot --

23 otherwise we don't hear you very well. That's better.

24 MR. BROWNING: Thank you very much.

25 JUDGE BENNOUNA: Thank you.

1 MR. BROWNING:

2 Q. Dr. Mestrovic, you have appeared on CNN as

3 well as national public radio. I'd like for you to

4 describe those appearances, but first of all could you

5 explain what national public radio is?

6 A. It is a prestigious non-profit national radio

7 network in the United States, something in the order of

8 the prestige of the BBC, and I've discussed on it my

9 books, ranging from "Habits of the Balkan Heart" to --

10 there was one appearance about the significance of the

11 death of Milovan Djilas.

12 Q. What is your place of birth?

13 A. Zagreb.

14 Q. And you currently live in the United States?

15 A. Yes.

16 Q. With citizenship in the United States?

17 A. Yes. I'm a United States citizen.

18 Q. When did you move from Zagreb?

19 A. In 1963, when I was 8 years old, I moved to

20 the United States.

21 Q. The report that you have prepared and filed

22 in this matter, is that report a full and accurate

23 summary of your opinions and conclusions in this

24 matter?

25 A. Yes.

1 Q. And you actually prepared that report

2 yourself, did you not?

3 A. Yes.

4 Q. Could you explain to the Trial Chamber the

5 concept of ethnic distance as a sociological term?

6 A. It is a concept that was invented in the

7 1920s at the University of Chicago Department of

8 Sociology and it has been used in research all over the

9 world since then. And basically it measures the degree

10 to which ordinary people feel close or distant to

11 people of other ethnic groups and is measured by

12 questions asked them: Well, would you want the person

13 of a different ethnic group as your neighbour or as a

14 friend or someone to marry, and other questions of that

15 sort. So it's a very good indicator of tolerance or

16 intolerance.

17 Q. And can you explain specifically how that is

18 measured? I take it it's some sort of survey that is

19 conducted to measure ethnic distance.

20 A. Yes. It's a quantitative scale and it is

21 administered and carefully designed random samples so

22 that social scientists are able to make valid and

23 accurate generalisations from it, and it is used in

24 conjunction with other variables in quantitative

25 analysis.

1 Q. And can you explain how ethnic distance

2 changed in Croatia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina prior to

3 the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

4 A. I cannot explain it in terms of

5 Bosnia-Herzegovina, but certainly Croatia. There was

6 research conducted using the ethnic distance scale in

7 Croatia in 1984, and then repeated throughout

8 Yugoslavia, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1989. So

9 a point of comparison is only for Croatia in terms of

10 the two time periods, 1984 and 1989.

11 What that aspect of the research shows, and

12 it's been published by various collaborators who were

13 in this consortium, and they include Dusko Sekulic,

14 Mladen Lazic, and Vjeran Katunaric, among others, but

15 what it shows is that ethnic distance did rise in

16 Croatia between those two time points, 1984 and 1989,

17 and the significance of that, I think, is that it arose

18 prior to the rise of Franjo Tudjman to power, political

19 power, and it arose during the communist era.

20 Q. And is that empirical data something that you

21 would expect a sociologist to look to and to turn to

22 and to rely upon in evaluating the conflict in the

23 former Yugoslavia?

24 A. Yes, because I think first of all it speaks

25 directly to the issues that are before this Tribunal.

1 Second, the research that has been published by Dusko

2 Sekulic was published in the three most prestigious

3 journals in the United States in sociology -- namely,

4 the American Journal of Sociology in 1994, the American

5 Sociological Review in 1994, and Social Forces in 1999

6 -- which the fact that these are highly prestigious

7 journals, the fact they went through a peer review

8 process, the fact that we can be certain that they

9 would not have been published unless they had gone

10 through rigorous examinations, does lend a great amount

11 of validity to their findings.

12 Q. And what does this empirical data show you,

13 as a sociologist, about the rise of nationalism in

14 Croatia?

15 A. Well, contrary to the assertions made by

16 Dr. Allcock in his expert report, who claimed that

17 there was a process which he calls ethnogenesis, by

18 which he means that Franjo Tudjman somehow

19 single-handedly engineered or produced ethnic tension

20 in Croatia, what the data suggests is that prior to

21 Franjo Tudjman even being on the scene, the sense of

22 ethnic distance arose of its own accord, from the

23 bottom up, and whatever factors led to it certainly

24 they were not and cannot be attributed to Franjo

25 Tudjman.

1 Q. Prior to agreeing to serve as an expert

2 witness in this case, had you had any knowledge or

3 interaction with Dr. Allcock?

4 A. No, I had not heard of him before this.

5 Q. Can you summarise for the Trial Chamber the

6 differences between the conclusions that you reached

7 and those of Dr. Allcock?

8 A. Well, Dr. Allcock does not cite the studies

9 that I've cited, which are empirical. He does not cite

10 very many studies at all. So his report really

11 contains many assertions that are unsubstantiated. So

12 the major difference between us is that he asserts but

13 does not substantiate the claim that Franjo Tudjman

14 engaged in what he calls ethnogenesis, whereas I seek

15 to suggest, using empirical data, that whatever may

16 have occurred in the former Yugoslavia, it had to do

17 with social structures and social forces that came from

18 the bottom up and were independent of Franjo Tudjman.

19 JUDGE BENNOUNA: [Interpretation] I should

20 like to ask the witness. He said "from the bottom

21 up." What does he mean by saying social forces which

22 came from the bottom up? Historically speaking, could

23 you tell us what does he take as his point of

24 departure? When is it that this ethnic opposition

25 began to emerge? Could he give us any dates? Because

1 there must be a certain historical period to which one

2 could -- with which one could associate this ethnic

3 opposition that you believe to be independent from

4 Mr. Tudjman.

5 A. Yes, Your Honour, there will be several

6 dimensions to these social structures. One is a

7 history in which the various ethnic communities lived

8 together physically, socially in worlds apart,

9 segregated in the worlds unto themselves. There was a

10 certain amount of tolerance but there was not

11 understanding, there was not compassion. So one

12 structural factor is a state in which you have ethnic

13 groups living side by side but not interpenetrating

14 each other.

15 Another structural factor would be, and this

16 is brought out correctly by Dr. Allcock in some of his

17 other writings, namely that the communist regime

18 simultaneously promoted ethnic divisions at the same

19 time that it tried to obliterate them. So in the name

20 of brotherhood and unity, one was supposed to think of

21 oneself as a Yugoslav and not as a Croat or Serb or

22 Bosnian Muslim. At the same time they allowed,

23 condoned, and even promoted such ethnic divisions.

24 So these ethnic divisions were present in the

25 consciousness of the people. And third, what I mean by

1 "bottom up", is that in every day interaction, despite

2 the repression of the Tito regime, people noticed, as

3 this research showed, people noticed that in Croatia,

4 for example, the Serbs were getting the most

5 prestigious and largest apartments. They noticed that

6 the Serbs in Croatia were being promoted in the rank of

7 general, and in the JNA, and Croats tended not to be.

8 People noticed that the size of apartments, jobs, other

9 factors among themselves; talking, gossiping, this was

10 occurring.

11 So despite the official party line of

12 brotherhood and unity, there were perceptions, and I

13 think this research shows that when you asked ordinary

14 people what they thought and what they felt, these

15 perceptions came through regardless of the official

16 propaganda line from the capital of Yugoslavia. So I

17 hope that answers your question.

18 JUDGE BENNOUNA: [Interpretation] Not quite.

19 That question was not whether there was social, and I

20 think the difference is we know that they did, but

21 whether new nationalism which emerged with the end of

22 the cold war and this new nationalism and nationalism,

23 the nationalism Croat or rather the renaissance of this

24 nationalism, did it rely on this ethnic differentiation

25 and then imposed itself and tried to impose a new

1 state. Because this is the thesis which was profounded

2 here, that it was -- this nationalism was the factor

3 which reactivated because it was reactivated because it

4 was dormant and, in a way, incited or promoted in other

5 ways in order to then be used politically and to be

6 imposed politically in a different state structure.

7 What do you think about that?

8 A. Your Honour, I think that the data shows and

9 not just in the former Yugoslavia, but in general, that

10 nationalism wrecked or helped to tear down communism.

11 Communism did not fall apart from its own accord.

12 The nationalism arose partly sociologically

13 speaking because the nations that had communism did not

14 have a tradition such as we have in the west of the

15 reformation of the Bill of Rights, of other traditions

16 that promote human rights and individual rights.

17 They were much more traditional societies

18 that, for the most part, did not undergo these

19 developments. Therefore, structurally speaking, as

20 people began to notice inconsistencies, hypocrisies and

21 exploitation in communism, the only fall back position

22 that they had, given that they did not have these

23 western traditions, was nationalism.

24 Furthermore, at the same time that this was

25 occurring, the west was undergoing a sort of chaotic

1 state of its own. It was caught off guard by the

2 developments. The west wanted to preserve, in 1991,

3 the integrity of the Soviet Union out of its own fears

4 of nuclear weapons and so forth, and the west did not

5 know what to offer these new emerging republics.

6 So a vacuum was created in which formerly

7 communist nations were looking to the west that was not

8 prepared to give them guidance and nationalism was, so

9 to speak, the logical alternative. But my point is

10 that this nationalism arose from a bottom up as a way

11 to fill this vacuum precisely because there was no top

12 down or centre guidance not only within these nations

13 but also in the west which was reacting in a very

14 confused timid manner.

15 JUDGE BENNOUNA: [Interpretation] Thank you.

16 Could one then say, sir, that you associate yourself

17 with a doctrine or a sociological school of thought

18 which is called structuralism; do you associate with

19 it?

20 A. Yes. I have used it. In that sense, I

21 belong to it. I certainly have used other sociological

22 theories as well but it's fair to characterise me as a

23 structuralist, functionalist, yes.

24 JUDGE BENNOUNA: [Interpretation] And this

25 doctrine, does it attach less importance to the

1 individual's will and leaders and much more to the

2 social structure; is that so?

3 A. Yes, it is. In fact, this theory tends to

4 say that so-called leaders are produced by the group on

5 the spur of the moment as opposed to a doctrine that

6 says that the leader is the one that is producing

7 changes in the social group.

8 JUDGE BENNOUNA: [Interpretation] Thank you.

9 MR. BROWNING:

10 Q. Dr. Mestrovic, is it, if I could ask you to

11 turn to the conclusions of Dr. Donia, and if you could

12 summarise the opinions and conclusions that you reach

13 that differ from those of Dr. Donia.

14 A. Well, Dr. Donia's central assertion seems to

15 be that Bosnia-Herzegovina was a peaceful and

16 multi-ethnic nation for centuries, many centuries, and

17 again, prior to the rise of Franjo Tudjman. Moreover,

18 he asserts that there was no violence that could be

19 attributed to ethnic differences in the history of

20 Bosnia-Herzegovina. And what I point out in my report

21 goes contrary to Dr. Donia, is that even in his

22 writings, which are not used in his report, he does

23 cite ethnic violence in the history of

24 Bosnia-Herzegovina. Moreover, other historians and

25 experts on this region point to a history replete with

1 insurrections and with ethnic conflict.

2 So contrary to Dr. Donia's assertions, I

3 would claim that the history of Bosnia-Herzegovina is

4 one of recurrent ethnic tensions and wars and

5 insurrections, and in this way I differ very sharply

6 with his conclusions.

7 Q. Now, Dr. Donia is a historian and you are a

8 sociologist. Why is it that you address the opinions

9 and conclusions of a historian?

10 A. Well, in his -- I believe it's page four of

11 his book with Dr. Fine, he says that he's not doing

12 conventional history in the sense of offering a

13 chronology or analysing events; that he's making

14 generalisations, generalisations that are not

15 characteristic of historians. So in that sense, he is

16 entering the domain or the purview of sociologists, and

17 I take him up to the extent that he enters the

18 sociological domain.

19 For example, I note in my report that in his

20 report he condenses a lot of history, contemporary

21 history, in 1991, 1992, in just a few pages, when the

22 chronology as I use in the Carnegie Commission and

23 draws out some of those events, things that happened,

24 that really would have been more appropriate for a

25 historian.

1 So to answer your question, it is because I

2 think he deviates from conventional history.

3 Q. Forgive me for oversimplifying, but I believe

4 your report also addresses the way the world is viewed

5 or the events are viewed by the culture in the United

6 States and western Europe versus the way the world is

7 viewed within the Balkans. Could you elaborate upon

8 that concept, please?

9 A. Yes. Sociologists are very sensitive to

10 perceptions and particularly how western perceptions

11 sometimes impinge upon or obscure how non-western

12 cultures see themselves or see the world. And one of

13 the things that I would note as a sociologist is that

14 in the Prosecutor's pre-trial brief, as well as in the

15 expert testimonies of Dr. Allcock and Dr. Donia, there

16 is a constant reliance upon the theme of planning,

17 coordination, being systematic, and things of that sort

18 that really bespeak a certain rational mindset that is

19 taken for granted in the west but that is less likely

20 or is more problematic in non-western cultures. So I

21 accentuate a source of cultural bias in approaching

22 this problem.

23 Q. Dr. Mestrovic, if I could ask you to very

24 briefly summarise the conclusions that you've come to

25 based upon sociological principles and the empirical

1 data that you've relied upon as set out in your

2 report.

3 A. Yes. I rely upon empirical research

4 conducted by Dusko Sekulic, Mladen Lazic, Vjeran

5 Katunaric, and others from this consortium to which I

6 referred to earlier, which suggests that ethnic

7 distance rose in Croatia between 1984 and 1989 from the

8 bottom up, if you will, certainly prior to the rise of

9 Franjo Tudjman.

10 I cite sources that are not cited by

11 Dr. Donia, including some of his own writings, which

12 suggest there was plenty of ethnic conflict in

13 Bosnia-Herzegovina. And I bring up research again by

14 Sekulic which suggests that intolerance and violence

15 are not necessarily related, that the most intolerant

16 republics in the former Yugoslavia were Kosovo and

17 Slovenia, which escaped, at that time, anyway, most of

18 the violence, but the most tolerant republic was

19 Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was plunged into the most

20 brutal violence. So that one has to carefully examine

21 the situation concepts, which seem to be taken for

22 granted and not substantiated by the expert witnesses

23 for the Prosecution.

24 MR. BROWNING: Thank you, Dr. Mestrovic. I

25 have no further questions.

1 MR. MIKULICIC: [Interpretation] We have no

2 questions.

3 MR. NICE: Your Honour, I would prefer to

4 start tomorrow, but I'm entirely in the Court's hands.

5 JUDGE MAY: Perhaps you can make a start to

6 save some time tomorrow, Mr. Nice.

7 MR. NICE: Yes. I'm not sure whether there

8 are any witnesses tomorrow, but in any event.

9 Cross-examined by Mr. Nice:

10 Q. Dr. Mestrovic, what is the significance for

11 the findings of a court looking at the actions of

12 individuals in 1993 of the findings that you say you

13 made?

14 A. The significance is that your expert

15 witnesses have not proved that these individuals could

16 have engineered the so-called ethnogenesis which is

17 attributed to them in the light of generally accepted

18 sociological principles.

19 Q. Well, what people prove is ultimately a

20 matter for the Judges. Are you saying that by reason

21 of these cultural differences and by reason of the

22 bottom-up potential for nationalism and so on to arise,

23 these individuals aren't capable of planning, aren't

24 capable of organising? Is that what you're saying?

25 A. No.

1 Q. Well, explain then how, to recast your

2 answer, these sociological or cultural differences are

3 likely to impede the process and proof of planning,

4 please.

5 A. Well, I'm responding to the arguments made by

6 your expert witnesses, and I'm saying that the way they

7 set forth the argument that Franjo Tudjman could have

8 engineered this ethnogenesis is not substantiated by

9 research that shows that the ethnic distance had arose

10 prior to his being on the scene.

11 Q. We'll explore tomorrow, in more detail, what

12 the particular propositions that we are advancing or

13 that the witnesses are advancing are. I come back to

14 the first question.

15 What you offer in your report doesn't, in any

16 sense, render it impossible for people to have planned

17 the things as part of the Prosecution's case said were

18 planned?

19 A. Impossible, no.

20 Q. Are you saying that by reason of cultural

21 differences, in some way it's less likely for people

22 like Tudjman to plan something because he's culturally

23 incapable of doing it?

24 A. Not quite in that way, because you're talking

25 about him as an individual. What I am saying is that

1 the culture in the entire former Yugoslavia would make

2 the level of systemisation, coordination, planning, and

3 so forth which you an attribute to any of the actors

4 more problematic.

5 Q. Well, then, I think I'd like some more help

6 on that, because it's all my ignorance of your

7 particular area, but there's a difficulty -- you're

8 really asserting that as one crosses from Austria into

9 the former Yugoslavia, or from one bit of the former

10 Yugoslavia into another, we are passing from a

11 population that can easily plan wars and deceptions and

12 so on into a population that is less able to do that?

13 A. No, Mr. Nice. What I'm claiming is that

14 there are standard books in sociology, such as Zygmunt

15 Bauman's "Modernity and the Holocaust" which claim, for

16 example, that the German people could and did engage in

17 widespread and systematic genocide because they had

18 already had a cultural proclivity and a structure that

19 was suited towards bureaucracy, efficiency,

20 rationalisation, coordination.

21 And we do know, for example, that the

22 Holocaust continued as a very systematic

23 pace regardless of other events that were occurring

24 around them. And that when one goes further to the

25 east, yes, of course there will be mass killings, there

1 will be planning, there will be actions taken, but they

2 will not be able to take on that same degree of

3 coordination, planning, and efficiency, or it will be

4 more difficult for them to achieve that.

5 Q. To take a quite specific point, then, are you

6 saying that for a political leader, it would be more

7 difficult for a political leader, say, to be devious in

8 Bosnia to the extent of doing one thing in public and

9 another thing in private?

10 A. I have to say that sociology has nothing to

11 say on being devious, so I cannot answer that.

12 Q. And we've mercifully not had to deal in

13 detail with the organisation of camps and so on in this

14 particular case. This is not a matter in issue. Are

15 you saying that really the camps would be less capable

16 or less liable to be well organised in this territory

17 than they could be well organised as places of

18 punishment or of execution in Germany?

19 A. Mr. Nice, I always want to rely on empirical

20 evidence. The only one book in English is called "The

21 Tenth Circle of Hell," by Hakunovic, in which he

22 experienced at Omarska. And Eli Wiesel, in the preface

23 to this book, says that despite the horrors that

24 occurred in Omarska, Omarska was not Auschwitz. And

25 the descriptions in this book, "The Tenth Circle of

1 Hell," do suggest that the way the brutalities were

2 carried on by the Serbs were not in the same style of

3 efficiency and coordination which you describe.

4 For example, the descriptions by the

5 survivors suggest that the Serbs got drunk at night,

6 they would drink a lot of slivovitz, they would

7 randomly pick certain inmates who they would beat that

8 night. But there was not a rational systematic quota

9 of how many deaths would occur night after night.

10 So all I'm saying is when one goes by the

11 empirical evidence that's out there -- and I submit to

12 you "The Tenth Circle of Hell," it's a very important

13 document for giving us insight into the how the Serbs

14 actually conducted one of these camps -- it does

15 suggest differences, cultural differences, in how

16 murder is carried out.

17 Q. I think we can all understand how, for

18 example, any culture with alcohol consumption,

19 particularly if it's permitted to operate in this

20 environment, might play havoc on efficiency. But if we

21 omit alcohol and we are dealing with people of

22 intelligence, is there any reason why those people

23 shouldn't be able to plan and organise events much the

24 same way as soldiers or politician in other countries?

25 A. Well, Mr. Nice, the very fact that such huge

1 amounts of alcohol were encouraged and allowed bespeaks

2 a difference culturally in that intemperance is allowed

3 in these camps among the guards and the inmates.

4 Q. I'm sorry. My mistake. Let's move from the

5 camps, because we've dealt with that, and come back to

6 the circumstances of the individual politician and the

7 individual military leader. If there's no evidence

8 that one or other of those is subject to alcohol

9 excess, is there any cultural reason why either one of

10 such hypothetical figures is going to be less capable

11 of organising, planning, executing plans than people in

12 Britain or America?

13 A. Mr. Nice, the individual leader will not be

14 biologically nor innately different from any other

15 leader in the world. What will be different are the

16 cultural and structural resources available to that

17 leader. That is what a sociologist will immediately

18 point out.

19 Q. Now, you say that, I think, there's a

20 suggestion from somewhere on the Prosecution side -- it

21 may be from me, I don't know, one of our witnesses, or

22 from Mr. Allcock. You say that we are suggesting that

23 ethnic tension was deliberately engineered by the late

24 President Tudjman. Where do you find that?

25 A. It is in the section in which Dr. Allcock

1 introduces the concept of ethnogenesis and then later

2 on links it to the actions in his report of Franjo

3 Tudjman.

4 Q. Have you got his report with you so that we

5 can see that? Have you got his report there?

6 A. No.

7 MR. NICE: May he have a copy, if you've got

8 one.

9 MR. SAYERS: Mr. President, all we have is a

10 marked-up version, but we're more than happy to show it

11 to --

12 JUDGE MAY: Yes. Let the witness have that.

13 THE WITNESS: Am I supposed to answer at this

14 point?

15 MR. NICE: Yes. If you'd just take me to the

16 passage so that I can see it.

17 A. Well, on page 2, top paragraph:

18 "Ethnic cleansing is not a spontaneous

19 manifestation of the grass roots traditions of ethnic

20 communities as much as an instrument of policy. In the

21 present, as in the past, inter-ethnic hostility and

22 ethnic cleansing have been top-down manipulative

23 features of the policies of political leaders in

24 relation to the building of states rather than

25 bottom-up expressions of sentiment on the part of

1 peoples of the region."

2 And then towards the bottom of that same

3 page: "President Tudjman is explicitly linked as

4 having appeared to have created structures --"

5 THE INTERPRETER: Could the witness either

6 slow down or have the document on the ELMO, please?

7 A. "-- those formerly associated with the

8 former federal President Tito, namely, top down and

9 very controlling." And the rest of the report really

10 follows along those lines.

11 MR. NICE:

12 Q. What's being dealt with at the top of the

13 page, unless I've misunderstood it myself, which is

14 always possible, is that we're dealing with

15 inter-ethnic hostility and ethnic cleansing, aren't

16 we? Those are actions. Isn't that what we're dealing

17 with?

18 A. Well, hostility does not necessarily have to

19 be an action. It can certainly be an attitude.

20 Q. It could be, but in the context of this

21 report.

22 A. I'm not prepared to agree with you on that.

23 Q. I see. And of course, for things like ethnic

24 cleansing, things that people do one to another, you do

25 need someone to make the decision, don't you? You're

1 not suggesting, are you, that there was a spontaneous,

2 bottom-up, self-arising exercise of ethnic cleansing

3 going on in any part of this breakup?

4 A. Correct.

5 Q. It was all, where it happened, led by a

6 political or a military leader, or both?

7 A. In addition to other mitigating factors.

8 Q. So that if -- I note your disagreement for

9 the time being and I'll deal with it more fully perhaps

10 tomorrow. But if hostility could more easily be

11 understood -- I don't say there's anything wrong with

12 the way it's written -- be more easily understood by

13 inter-ethnic hostilities, in the plural, denoting acts

14 of aggression leading indeed to warfare, and there's

15 nothing in this paragraph of Dr. Allcock's report that

16 says that Tudjman is generating, expressly and

17 exclusively, ethnic tension and unhappiness, is there?

18 A. Not in this paragraph, but in my report I

19 certainly find passages, when put together, it's very

20 clear that Dr. Allcock is blaming the top, the top

21 being for him Franjo Tudjman, for ethnogenesis. I

22 think this is a very clear point.

23 MR. NICE: I'm not in a position to accept

24 that, so we're going to have to disagree on that

25 topic.

1 JUDGE MAY: Is that a convenient moment?

2 MR. NICE: Yes, Your Honour. I've got one

3 minute of administration as well.

4 JUDGE MAY: Very well.

5 Dr. Mestrovic, we've got to adjourn now.

6 Could you be back, please, tomorrow at half past 9.00.

7 THE WITNESS: Yes.

8 JUDGE MAY: And I must warn you, as I must

9 warn all witnesses, not to speak to anybody about your

10 evidence until it's over, and that includes members of

11 the Defence team.

12 THE WITNESS: Yes.

13 JUDGE MAY: If you'd like to go now, please,

14 and be back at half past 9.00.

15 THE WITNESS: Thank you.

16 [The witness withdrew]

17 [Trial Chamber confers]

18 MR. NICE: Just a couple of matters of

19 information, really, and to some degree one request.

20 The information is that in relation to Dr. Pavlovic,

21 you'll remember that he's coming along to deal with

22 certain medical issues, and we were asked last week if

23 we could accommodate him today. I made every effort

24 over the weekend and was able to write to Mr. Sayers

25 saying that I couldn't make it today, but I would be

1 able, I think, with luck, to deal with him tomorrow.

2 In the event -- I certainly am in a position to deal

3 with him tomorrow, but I understand now that he won't

4 be coming in till Wednesday, so that can we deal with

5 him then? But it would be inconvenient for it to be

6 beyond Wednesday, because the efforts that I've made to

7 advance my position are such that Wednesday would be

8 about the latest, I think.

9 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Sayers.

10 MR. SAYERS: Very simply, Mr. President, we

11 were led to believe by the Prosecution that they would

12 not be through with even Dr. -- with even Mr. Almond

13 before tomorrow, so it's true that Dr. Pavlovic we had

14 anticipated bringing on Wednesday morning. He doesn't

15 have a cell phone, but we'll try to get him available,

16 I assume, by tomorrow afternoon, if the Prosecution is

17 through by then, if we can get hold of him, and we'll

18 make every effort to do so.

19 MR. NICE: I'm grateful for that.

20 JUDGE MAY: Is he here?

21 MR. SAYERS: Yes, Your Honour. I think he

22 arrived on Saturday.

23 JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

24 MR. NICE: The second thing relates to next

25 Monday, when the audiotape expert for the Defence is to

1 be called. Although I'm not sure about it, I think the

2 Dutch expert will be available to assist on that day.

3 He had two other commitments, one another court hearing

4 which he forecast might very well get cancelled. I

5 haven't yet heard that it has. And second, a travel

6 arrangement to a conference which he was prepared to

7 put off in order to assist this Tribunal.

8 I've informed Mr. Sayers of that, at least

9 I've informed him that he's going to be available, and

10 I had asked Mr. Sayers to consider whether, in the

11 circumstances, the possibility of calling both

12 witnesses next Monday, if the Court case is cancelled

13 and if he is available, is something that they could

14 accommodate. Of course, I understand that they have

15 got other witnesses already scheduled and so on, but if

16 I find out this afternoon that the man is available on

17 Monday, I'd like at least consideration to be given to

18 that, because it would be a tidier and more efficient

19 use of time.

20 JUDGE MAY: Yes. We'll make the inquiries

21 and then consider the timetable for next week.

22 MR. SAYERS: With respect to that particular

23 issue, Your Honour, I may be mistaken about this, but I

24 thought we had already addressed this, and the

25 resolution was that in view of the 21-day rule and the

1 fact that Mr. Koenig is going to be testifying well

2 within the 21-day rule, that July the 24th was reserved

3 as the day upon which the Rijswijk laboratory witnesses

4 would testify, and we've made our plans accordingly.

5 In fact, I think that was what the Court suggested over

6 a week ago.

7 JUDGE MAY: I don't recollect that at the

8 moment. We can look into it. And in any event, we can

9 consider it later in the week when we know what the

10 position is.

11 Are there any other matters? Half past 9.00

12 tomorrow, please.

13 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned

14 at 4.19 p.m., to be reconvened on

15 Tuesday, the 27^th day of June, 2000,

16 at 9.30 a.m.

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