The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Securing Verdicts: The Misuse of Witness Testimony at The Hague
to Rule 69, “the Prosecutor may apply to a Judge or Trial Chamber to
order the non-disclosure of the identity of a victim or witness who may
be in danger or at risk until such person is brought under the protection
of the Tribunal.” Non-disclosure of a witness’s identity protects the
ICTY more than the witness. Cross-examination becomes extremely
difficult when any question threatens to disclose a witness’s identity,
and the ICTY punishes such disclosure severely. Defendants find it hard
to investigate a witness’s background. The public is unable to judge the
credibility of a witness if all information about his or her background
or motives is kept secret. Moreover, ICTY prosecutors frequently introduce
as evidence in one trial witness evidence from another trial,
wholesale and without cross-examination.
In addition, the ICTY offers witnesses the option of testifying anonymously.
In any trial, witnesses with pseudonyms easily outnumber
named witnesses. Pages and pages of transcripts are redacted, allegedly
to conceal the identity of a witness or the identity of people named during
testimony. Significantly, witnesses are actually encouraged to testify
anonymously. Captain Dragan Vasiljkovic, a Serbian expatriate living in
Australia who had trained the forces of the Republika Srpska Krajina in
the early 1990s and a prosecution witness in the Milosevic trial—he
was originally listed as witness B-073—revealed that he explicitly had
to ask not to testify anonymously. Dragan also revealed that the Office
of the Prosecutor (OTP) had asked him to sign a paper “to confirm a
commitment of the part of a Prosecutor that any conversation or statement
you will make during the course of your preparation to testify as
a witness in the case of Prosecutor versus Milosevic will not be used
against you.” 51 An agreement like this is tantamount to an encouragement
of perjury.
Witnesses also have the luxury of revealing their identity in one trial,
but testifying anonymously in another trial. Former Croatian President
Stjepan Mesic, for instance, has testified both anonymously and nonanonymously.
Mesic—a man instrumental in the breakup of Yugoslavia,
who, several weeks after resigning as the last president of the unitary
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in October 1991, famously
boasted before the Croatian Assembly in Zagreb, “I have fulfilled my
duty. Yugoslavia no longer exists.“ 52 —is a regular ICTY prosecution
standby. In addition, prosecution witnesses are permitted to impose re-
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