A Serb driver called in as a prosecution witness on Monday refused to testify against Slobodan Milosevic, changing his mind about cooperating in the former Yugoslav president’s trial on war crimes charges in Kosovo.
In an apparent setback for prosecutors, the visibly shaken driver, whose image was blurred on the courtroom monitors, was excused by the judges after only a few minutes of stumbling and nervous testimony.
”I cannot testify anymore and that is the truth,” said the witness after a few seemingly innocuous questions from prosecutor Geoffrey Nice.
When Nice asked whether ”some men came into your home in 1999 and demanded you to do something,” the witness faltered, his voice broke and he said he could not answer.
”Why are you so stubborn? Don’t you understand I don’t want to cooperate?” said the witness, identified in court records as K-12.
Earlier, the man spoke in closed session for about 30 minutes before the trial was reopened for listening by the public gallery.
In open session, he told the court he had completed military service and was a driver, but he then refused to answer further questions.
Reports in the Serb media had said prosecutors had intended to call a driver involved in the exhumation and removal of ethnic Albanians’ bodies from mass graves in Kosovo in an attempt to cover up evidence of atrocities by Milosevic’s troops. This occurred before the troops were forced to withdraw from Kosovo under the pressure of a prolonged Nato bombardment.
But there was no confirmation that K-12 was such a driver, since court officials are under strict orders against releasing information on witnesses who testify under a cloak of secrecy for their own protection.
Before his testimony, K-12 had been billed as an ”insider” ? a witness who was in a position to obtain first-hand knowledge of the way Milosevic and his chain of command worked.
Meanwhile, a researcher for the New York-based Human Rights Watch testified that his organisation had documented 96 cases of rape or sexual violence against ethnic Albanians by Serb forces in Kosovo during the 11 weeks of Nato bombing.
”These 96 cases in no way represent the whole magnitude of this problem,” said Abrahams, who compiled a 500-page report, published last October on human rights violations in Kosovo.
Facing the stigma of rape, most women keep silent, he said.
”Albanian women might not be able to find a husband if it is known that they have been a victim of sexual crime. It is clear to us that many women did not want to come forward and those who did requested anonymity,” he said.
Milosevic, acting as his own defence attorney, challenged Abraham?s objectivity, charging that he ignored atrocities against civilians committed by Nato during its bombing campaign of Yugoslavia in 1999.
Abrahams said Nato also had violated international humanitarian law, but that the Western alliance had not committed war crimes.
The difference was the ”notion of criminal intent,” he said. ”We did not have conclusive evidence that Nato specifically and purposely targeted civilians.”
Responding to criticism of Nato by human rights bodies, chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte’s office examined several incidents of civilian casualties and destruction, but decided in 2000 against opening war crimes cases against Nato or its commanders. – Sapa-AP