The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Securing Verdicts: The Misuse of Witness Testimony at The Hague
given that she had only started to work for Arkan in November 1994,
yet here she was testifying about things that happened in 1991 and
1992. Milosevic asked, “[S]ince you are testifying here about events covering
a period of almost four years before you started working, can you
tell me who assisted you in presenting all these facts in such—with such
apparent precision when you weren’t working for those four years?”
The woman replied: “No one assisted me. I think I was intelligent
enough, and if I was working for two years and if I had documents in
front of me that I had access to, I can put them in chronological order
myself in my mind.” 55 Yet the judges took this witness seriously, so seriously
in fact that in their rejection of the amicus curiae motion for partial
acquittal of Milosevic in 2004, they cited her as a key witness in
helping to build the prosecution’s case: “B-129 testified that, through
the DB [Serbia’s state security service], the Accused controlled and supported
the Red Berets and Arkan’s Tigers and knew of their activities in
Bosnia and Herzegovina.” 56
Another witness demonstrating extraordinary knowledge of specialized
matters was Xhevahire Syla, a Kosovo Albanian woman brought forward
during the Milosevic trial to testify that the refugee convoy that NATO
was eventually forced to admit to having bombed, had actually been
bombed by the Yugoslav air force! Yet, despite the embarrassing admission
by NATO, here she was bizarrely asserting that NATO’s original falsehood
was true. The obviously coached witness had amazingly detailed
technical knowledge at her fingertips: She mentioned that the Yugoslav
army was equipped with Gulinov automatic rifles. She also had remarkable
eyesight: She claimed that she knew that the planes bombing the column
belonged to the Yugoslav air force because they had the Yugoslav
flag, the tricolor painted on them. “This was the entire plan of the accused,”
she continued, “to do this sort of thing and blame NATO.” 57
Another instance of a prosecution-suggested narrative was the testimony
of Ali Gjogaj, a Kosovo Albanian gravedigger. His testimony during
the Milosevic trial afforded fascinating insight into the amount of
protection judges extend to prosecution witnesses who have trouble
keeping their stories straight. Gjogaj had made two statements, one in
February 2000 and one in June 2000. In his first statement, he recounted
that in April or May 1999, Serb police had forced him to exhume
bodies in Pusto Selo and to rebury them elsewhere in Kosovo. In
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