1 Wednesday, 28th January 1998
2 (10.10 am)
3 JUDGE JORDA: Mr Registrar, please have the
4 accused brought in.
5 (Accused brought in)
6 JUDGE JORDA: We are going to resume work
7 now. I wish to see whether the interpreters' booths
8 are ready, our faithful interpreters. Very well, can
9 everyone hear me, the Prosecution, the Defence, General
10 Blaskic, my colleagues, can you hear me? Very well, in
11 that case, we are ready. Mr. Prosecutor, it is up to
12 you now to bring your witness. Let me look at our
13 list.
14 MR. HARMON: Good morning, Mr. President and
15 your Honours, good morning counsel. Mr. President and
16 your Honours, the next witness we will call is Charles
17 McLeod. Mr. McLeod will testify about a report which he
18 prepared for ECMM in May 1993. First of all, let me
19 give you some background about Mr. McLeod.
20 Mr. McLeod was appointed to ECMM as a Monitor
21 and spent a year as a member of the United Kingdom
22 delegation to the ECMM which was based in Zagreb and
23 that was in 1992. In December 1992, Mr. McLeod was sent
24 to General Morrillon's headquarters in Kiseljak where
25 he was an ECMM liaison officer between ECMM and
1 UNPROFOR.
2 Following the events in the Lasva Valley in
3 April 1993, Ambassador Jean-Pierre Thebault, who was
4 head of the Regional Centre for ECMM in Zenica, and Ole
5 Brix-Andersen, who was deputy head of mission,
6 political section, sent Mr. McLeod to make an appraisal
7 of what had occurred in the Lasva Valley in April 1993.
8 Mr. McLeod then travelled to Zenica on 3rd May
9 and remained in the area until 12th May, during which
10 time he interviewed a variety of people, including
11 various members of the parties, political, military and
12 religious leaders. He also visited the villages of
13 Ahmici and Loncari. He prepared a report on
14 inter-ethnic violence in Vitez, Busovaca and Zenica in
15 April 1993 on behalf of the ECMM humanitarian section.
16 His report was then distributed to each of the member
17 states of the European Community, amongst others.
18 In July 1993, he joined the international
19 conference on the former Yugoslavia as a political
20 advisor and worked in that capacity to Mr. Stoltenberg's
21 deputies, Ambassador Knut Vollebaek and Ambassador Kai
22 Eide. We will present his report to your Honours and
23 his testimony will concentrate on various aspects of
24 that report and on interviews which he conducted,
25 including interviews with Ivica Santic, Pero Skopljak,
1 the accused Tihomir Blaskic, and Zlatko Aleksovski and
2 others.
3 Finally, Mr. President and your Honours, he
4 will testify about his conclusions regarding the events
5 in the Lasva Valley in April 1993. In respect of the
6 indictment, your Honours, his testimony relates to
7 virtually all counts contained in the indictment. That
8 concludes my summary, Mr. President.
9 JUDGE JORDA: Very well, thank you very
10 much. This report that you mentioned which he
11 submitted, has it been communicated to the Defence?
12 MR. HARMON: Yes, it has.
13 JUDGE JORDA: Very well. In that case all
14 the conditions having been established for an
15 adversarial debate.
16 Please have Mr. McLeod brought in,
17 Mr. Registrar.
18 MR. HAYMAN: For the record, Mr. President, we
19 wish to preserve our hearsay objection as to apparently
20 interviews of other individuals that this witness is
21 going to be recounting wholesale. Obviously we are not
22 going to have the opportunity to cross-examine those
23 other individuals.
24 (Witness entered court)
25 JUDGE JORDA: Yes, but the Chamber has made a
1 ruling about hearsay, I wish to remind you. You cannot
2 continue to insist on your objection, except if you
3 wish it to enter the transcript, is it just a moral
4 protest? If it only has a moral meaning, then it is
5 all right. Thank you.
6 Can you hear me, Mr. McLeod?
7 THE WITNESS: Yes, sir.
8 JUDGE JORDA: Would you please confirm your
9 name and first name, please?
10 THE WITNESS: My name is Charles McLeod.
11 JUDGE JORDA: McLeod. Please read the solemn
12 declaration that is being given to you by the usher,
13 standing.
14 MR. CHARLES McLEOD (sworn)
15 JUDGE JORDA: Please be seated. The Tribunal
16 thanks you for having accepted to come and appear in
17 the trial against General Blaskic, who is here
18 present. The Prosecutor has outlined the general
19 framework of your testimony, and for an expert such as
20 you, I will not reiterate what has already been said,
21 so we are waiting for your testimony which will focus
22 on the particular points underlined by the Prosecution
23 in connection with the case against General Blaskic.
24 Please feel free to present your testimony after which
25 the Prosecutor will have some additional questions for
1 you. Thank you.
2 Examined by MR. HARMON
3 Q. Mr. McLeod, I am going to be asking you a
4 number of questions in respect of your report on
5 inter-ethnic violence in Vitez, Busovaca and Zenica in
6 April 1993 and as I ask you these questions if you
7 would pause after the conclusion of my question to give
8 time for the interpreters to interpret my question
9 before answering, otherwise my questions will merge
10 with your answers and it will not be an effective
11 presentation.
12 A. Certainly.
13 Q. Before turning to the substance of the
14 report, Mr. McLeod, can you please tell the judges about
15 your background and training, with particular emphasis
16 on your training as a military officer and your
17 experiences as a member of the ECMM in the former
18 Yugoslavia.
19 A. Certainly. I was born in London in 1963, and
20 educated in England, and I joined the British army in
21 1982. I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the
22 infantry in 1983 and I served with my unit in Germany,
23 I did a four month tour in west Belfast in Northern
24 Ireland.
25 While I was in the army, I then went to
1 London University and read a Bachelor's degree in
2 German for three years, and rejoined my unit in
3 England, went back to Northern Ireland for a further
4 two year tour, attended a junior command and staff
5 course and my final job in the army was as adjutant of
6 a training depot. As adjutant, amongst other things
7 I was responsible for military discipline within the
8 unit and I had experience of prosecuting at court's
9 martial, prosecuting at about a dozen court's martial
10 over a 18 month period.
11 I left the army in 1992 and immediately
12 joined the ECMM as a member of the UK delegation. With
13 the ECMM, I was on two month contracts and completed a
14 total of six contracts. Following my time with ECMM,
15 I will come back and talk in some detail about what
16 I was doing with ECMM in a moment, I spent a further
17 year in the former Yugoslavia working for an
18 international conference for the former Yugoslavia,
19 working as political advisor to Mr. Stoltenberg's
20 deputies, initially Ambassador Knut Volebaek and then
21 Ambassador Kai Eide, and we were responsible for the
22 negotiations which we were attempting to conduct
23 between the Croatian government and the Serbs who
24 occupied the Krajina region of Croatia at that time, so
25 that was for a further year.
1 At the end of that, I then did a Master's
2 degree in business administration back in England, so
3 turning with a bit more detail to what I was doing as a
4 member of ECMM, initially I was a member of the
5 Regional Centre in Zagreb, working as a Monitor,
6 working on the separation of forces within Croatia on
7 both sides of the internal contact line inside Croatia,
8 so this is Serbs and Croats, and I was responsible for
9 ensuring that troops had been withdrawn from the
10 front-line and then that heavy weapons were being stored
11 in the correct areas, and this meant liaising with
12 military forces on both sides within Croatia.
13 Fairly soon, I was then moved to the
14 headquarters of the ECMM within the humanitarian
15 section, and as a member of the humanitarian section,
16 I was responsible for attempting to implement
17 humanitarian policies such as there was. ECMM did not
18 have great resources to carry out humanitarian works,
19 but we did have teams deployed on the ground who
20 observed things and who had information about
21 humanitarian problems and issues, so one of the things
22 I did was attempt to improve the information flow from
23 our teams on the ground by then calculating a weekly
24 humanitarian activity report, which we then
25 disseminated to the international humanitarian agencies
1 based in Zagreb, so they would have the benefit of the
2 information we had from Croatia and Bosnia and this
3 seemed to be fairly effective and well received.
4 As a member of the humanitarian section,
5 I was involved in ECMM's attempts to regain a position
6 in northern Bosnia, Serb-controlled Bosnia, and so this
7 took me on a couple of trips to Banja Luka, which was
8 the headquarters of the Serb-controlled area in
9 northern Bosnia. As a result of this, the ECMM was
10 then approached by John Thompson, who was the head of
11 what was then CSCE, Conference on Security and the
12 Co-operation in Europe, a rapporteur mission which was
13 sent to the camps of Manjaca and Trnopolje in northern
14 Bosnia. Because ECMM had some limited access to Banja
15 Luka, we were asked by John Thompson to take his
16 rapporteur mission in, so I accompanied him to Manjaca
17 and Trnopolje.
18 Because of the liaison we had with the ICRC,
19 we were then invited by the ICRC to accompany them as
20 an international presence when they were removing
21 detainees from these camps, which was an interesting
22 experience.
23 In Christmas 1992, I was at
24 General Morrillon's headquarters in Kiseljak outside
25 Sarajevo as the liaison officer for a four week period
1 and during that time, I travelled from Kiseljak to
2 Zenica and so saw what conditions were like on the road
3 from Kiseljak through Busovaca to Zenica over the
4 Christmas period in 1992. During March 1993, one of my
5 key activities was attempting to, I think successfully,
6 to set up a process of negotiation between the Croats
7 and the Serbs in the Krajina to facilitate the
8 collection of bodies who were stuck on the
9 confrontation line near the Maslenica bridge in Croatia
10 where there had been a fight in the January of that
11 year. The fact there were dead bodies lying up in
12 no-man's land was causing great concern, so with the
13 headquarters, the Danish management of the ECMM
14 established a programme and then negotiated with the
15 Croats and the Serbs to facilitate the collection of
16 these dead bodies and their repatriation across an UN
17 controlled checkpoint which was I think of some
18 benefit, because people were getting very concerned
19 about this.
20 Then in April of that year, the events which
21 are all quite familiar took place in the Vitez area,
22 and immediately after the events of 16th, 17th,
23 18th April, Jean-Pierre Thebault, who was a French
24 Ambassador working for the ECMM as head of the region
25 centre based in Zenica, came to Zagreb to the
1 headquarters and met with Ole Brix-Andersen who was
2 deputy head of the mission on the political side, so a
3 Danish diplomat, to discuss the events, to discuss his
4 concern about what was going on and he suggested that
5 somebody should go and attempt to establish as clearly
6 as possible what had actually taken place. He said
7 that he could spare somebody to do this, but most of
8 his teams were working flat out with bilateral meetings
9 and trilateral meetings between the parties to try and
10 stabilise the situation.
11 At the same time, Thomas Osario, who was
12 working for the UN Centre for Human Rights, also
13 approached the headquarters of ECMM, said he was going
14 down specifically to Ahmici to see what had gone on,
15 and asked if somebody could go, so the decision was
16 taken by the headquarters at ECMM that I, as somebody
17 who had been working in the humanitarian section,
18 should go to the Regional Centre in Zenica, very
19 briefly try to establish what had gone on, and to come
20 back and report.
21 MR. HARMON: Thank you very much for that
22 information. Could I have Prosecutor's Exhibit 242,
23 Mr. Dubuisson, distributed to the various persons in the
24 courtroom?
25 Mr. President, Prosecutor's Exhibit 242 is a
1 copy of Mr. McLeod's report on inter-ethnic violence in
2 Vitez, Busovaca and Zenica in April 1993. There is an
3 English and a French version of this report.
4 Before turning our attention to that report,
5 Mr. McLeod, let me ask you ultimately to whom was this
6 report disseminated?
7 A. Once the report was written, it was passed to
8 the heads of each of the delegations of the ECMM, who
9 then sent it on to their capitals, so each of the
10 European Union capitals and various others.
11 Q. Mr. McLeod, can you inform the judges the
12 dates that you actually went down to Central Bosnia to
13 prepare this report?
14 A. Certainly. I travelled into Zenica via Split
15 on 3rd May and I left again on 12th May 1993.
16 Q. In preparing your report, did you consult
17 with ECMM monitors who were in the region and UNPROFOR
18 personnel as well?
19 A. Certainly. When I arrived, my first action
20 was to gather together all of the reports which had
21 been written by ECMM and UNPROFOR and I sat down and
22 spent a day or two days reading through all the reports
23 and producing a digest of the events as they were
24 reported, which is actually contained at the back of
25 this report, plotted out all of the locations on the
1 map so that I could build up a picture in my own mind
2 of what we had seen, what the UN had seen, before
3 I started talking to people so that I would have as
4 clear an idea as possible, in advance, of what we
5 thought had happened as a background against which I
6 could then hear other people's versions of events.
7 Q. In the preparation of this report, did you
8 travel on the ground to villages that had been
9 essentially destroyed?
10 A. Yes, on 4th May I travelled with Jean-Pierre
11 Thebault, Ambassador Thebault, to visit the British
12 battalion headquarters in Vitez and then accompanied
13 Colonel Bob Stewart on a visit that he was making to
14 the village of Ahmici, amongst others.
15 Q. Did you also visit the village of Loncari?
16 A. Yes, we did, we went to Ahmici and then up to
17 Loncari.
18 Q. In the course of preparing this report,
19 Mr. McLeod, did you also interview political, military
20 and religious leaders from the Muslim side and from the
21 HVO side?
22 A. Yes, my objective had been as far as possible
23 to get a balanced view and therefore to speak to the
24 political -- in other words the mayors -- military
25 commanders on both sides and also in order to be able
1 to meet people who would be civic leaders on sides
2 controlled by the opposition in each case, I met
3 religious leaders because on both sides the religious
4 leaders were the only people in territory controlled by
5 the opposing parties whom I could find to build up as
6 clear a view and as balanced a view as possible of what
7 had happened.
8 Q. Your report contains the interview statements
9 of various persons whom you interviewed from the
10 parties, is that correct?
11 A. That is right. I wrote up detailed notes as
12 I was actually meeting people and talking to people and
13 then at the end of the period in Zenica and immediately
14 on returning to Zagreb typed up those notes into the
15 report and in almost every case attached them as an
16 appendix to the report.
17 Q. Could you summarise, very briefly, the
18 identities of the parties you interviewed? How many
19 were there and who were they?
20 A. Certainly. I will do that by simply turning
21 to the report and reading down the contents page, which
22 is the second page in the report, and you can see there
23 the dates of the meetings and who I was talking to.
24 You can see that I met the mayor of Zenica,
25 Father Stjepan, who was a Croatian priest, Catholic
1 priest in Zenica; the head of the ICRC in Zenica,
2 because I felt it was important to liaise with them as
3 well; the commander of III Corps BiH in Zenica, so he
4 was the Muslim military commander in the area and then
5 the following day meeting with Father --
6 JUDGE JORDA: Excuse me for a minute. It
7 seems to me that in the French version I am missing the
8 first two pages .
9 MR. HARMON: Mr. President, that is absolutely
10 right.
11 JUDGE JORDA: Microphone, please, Mr. Harmon.
12 I have a report which begins with a statement of the
13 mayor of Zenica and Vitez, so I suppose a report must
14 start with an introduction, but I do not know --
15 MR. HARMON: Mr. President, I apologise, I was
16 informed that this whole report had been translated
17 into French and it was given to me and it appears the
18 table of contents in the French version is not
19 included.
20 JUDGE JORDA: Maybe what is important is the
21 actual introduction, these two pages. Perhaps the
22 witness in that introduction explains his mission.
23 MR. HARMON: It appears, Mr. President, that
24 your report, the French translation is not in the
25 correct order. I do not see a table of contents.
1 A. I have found it.
2 MR. HARMON: Can you direct Judge Jorda to
3 where it is in the French translation? That would be
4 helpful, Mr. McLeod. Apparently it is in there,
5 apparently this has been assembled in the wrong order,
6 Mr. President, I apologise. Mr. McLeod has found the
7 index he is referring to and he can direct your Honour
8 to it.
9 JUDGE JORDA: Yes, that is better now.
10 I have a schematic attitude, which may be a bit
11 archaic, but this is much better now. I wish to thank
12 the witness for helping me out. I apologise for not
13 listening very carefully to your last answer, so could
14 you please repeat it? Thank you.
15 A. Certainly, sir.
16 MR. HARMON: Mr. McLeod, would you please then
17 continue -- just start at the beginning of your answer,
18 if you would. Identify please again the parties who
19 you interviewed and whose reports are contained in the
20 report itself.
21 A. Certainly, sir. As Mr. President can see on
22 the table of contents, we have the dates down the
23 left-hand side and then the details of the people that
24 I met. You can see that I met with the mayor of
25 Zenica, Father Stjepan, who was a Catholic priest, a
1 Croat living in Zenica; the head of the ICRC mission in
2 Zenica; the commander of III Corps of the BiH Army, so
3 he was the senior Muslim military commander in the
4 area, Father Bozo, who was another Croat Catholic
5 priest in a village Cajdras just outside Zenica in an
6 area controlled by the Muslims; the mayor of Vitez;
7 General Blaskic, who was commander of the operational
8 zone of Vitez, Colonel at that time; the deputy
9 commander of the Kruscica brigade, which was a BiH Army
10 brigade just outside Vitez; various members of
11 BritBat. I actually noted the meeting I had with the
12 second in command, Enver Hodza, who was the Imam of
13 Busovaca, so clearly a Muslim living in Busovaca; the
14 chief of police and a number of other policemen in
15 Busovaca; the mayor of Zenica again; various people at
16 the Centre for Human Rights in Zenica. I had a visit
17 to Kaonik Prison which was the Croatian prison just
18 outside Busovaca; a gentleman called Hasan Sadibasic
19 who was a Muslim living in Vitez; and then finally
20 another meeting with the deputy commander of III Corps
21 of the BiH Army, a man named Dugalic.
22 MR. HARMON: Mr. McLeod, before turning to the
23 substance of those interviews, could you please explain
24 your method of interviewing each of these people, what
25 you did, what you said before the interview started?
1 A. Certainly. Because my aim had been to try
2 and gather as clear a view as possible of what had
3 happened, having initially armed myself with our own
4 view of events as we had seen them and reported them,
5 when I met each person, I explained to them that I had
6 come from Zagreb, that the international community was
7 extremely concerned about the events that had just
8 taken place, that I had been sent here to meet
9 everybody, to talk to them, that I was having this
10 series of meetings balanced on both sides of the two
11 parties, and I invited everybody to explain to me in
12 their own words what they thought had happened.
13 In order to facilitate this, I had a
14 photocopied map of the area and a set of coloured pens
15 and I would put the map in front of them and say
16 "please show me on the map", which made life a lot
17 easier, because otherwise they would talk about areas
18 and places which would mean nothing to me, but when
19 they pointed them out on the map, it was clear what
20 they were talking about. As far as possible I tended
21 not to contradict what they were saying when they were
22 saying something I thought was wrong, but allow them to
23 explain their point of view. My hope was that by
24 hearing the points of view of the parties at different
25 levels, the military, political and religious, at the
1 end of it I would be able to build up a picture of what
2 they thought had happened and then cross-reference that
3 with what we had actually seen or what we believed had
4 happened and that way, get as clear a view as possible
5 of the events that had taken place.
6 I also explained that our intention was to
7 establish what had happened and then if possible work
8 out ways of preventing it from happening again, but
9 that was an ambition which at the time I think one
10 would have admitted was slightly ambitious and probably
11 was over ambitious.
12 Q. Were you accompanied by an interpreter and
13 was another third party present with you during the
14 conduct of these interviews?
15 A. Yes, it was the normal policy of ECMM that we
16 would work in two-man teams, almost exclusively two
17 people of different nationalities and so for each of
18 the meetings that I had here, I was accompanied either
19 by Ambassador Thebault or by a Danish Monitor called
20 Erik Friis-Pedersen, who was a member of the Regional
21 Centre in Zenica. Again, because my linguistic ability
22 in Serbo-Croat by the end of two years meant that
23 I could understand conversations, at this point, about
24 ten months into my tour, I was certainly not in a
25 position to be able to have a conversation with
1 anybody, so all of the meetings were held working
2 through interpreters. For most of them, I was using an
3 interpreter who was provided by the Regional Centre.
4 For some of them, I was using interpreters provided by
5 the parties.
6 Q. Mr. McLeod, I would like to focus your
7 attention on certain of the interviews that are
8 contained in your report. Let me start with the
9 interview with Besim Spahic, who was mayor of Zenica.
10 Could you please inform the judges about that
11 particular interview.
12 A. Certainly. To help your Honours, this is
13 summarised at annex A to the report, I am not quite
14 sure where this will be in the French version.
15 MR. HARMON: Mr. McLeod, I am not sure for
16 Judge Jorda's purposes whether or not this is in the
17 right order, so Mr. President, do you have the interview
18 before you of Mr. Spahic?
19 JUDGE JORDA: Yes, I found it. I found it,
20 thank you very much for your concern. This is the
21 Exhibit 609.
22 MR. HARMON: Please proceed then, Mr. McLeod.
23 A. Certainly. I met Mr. Spahic, who was the
24 mayor of Zenica, on a couple of occasions, but he was
25 initially the first person that I met in Zenica once
1 I had started actually meeting the parties. I was
2 accompanied by Erik Friis-Pedersen during the meeting.
3 The mayor, Mr. Spahic, spoke for some time about the
4 events and you can see the notes that I wrote as the
5 interpreter spoke at the time and you can see certainly
6 in the English version -- I am not sure my French is
7 good enough to check the French version -- in the
8 English version you can see the way the grammar moves
9 slightly as the interpreter was speaking and I was
10 simply scribbling notes as we went.
11 He said basically that they had had this
12 conflict, that the situation had deteriorated
13 dramatically, that they had attempted to stabilise the
14 situation within Zenica, he acknowledged that on the
15 Muslim side in Zenica, various things had been done to
16 the Croatian population and people had been arrested,
17 people had been displaced, houses had been burnt, but
18 what he was trying to stress was that they were
19 attempting as far as possible to stabilise the
20 situation, to get the Croatian population back to their
21 houses where they had left their houses, and that where
22 people were being victimised or had been evicted that
23 the military and police -- the Muslim military and
24 police formations were instructed to protect them, to
25 provide local protection and that as far as possible,
1 they were also trying to integrate the Croatian
2 military formations who had been in Zenica anyway
3 beforehand back into this "joint patrol", was the way
4 it was described. So he quite clearly acknowledged
5 that things had not been perfect, but that they were
6 doing their very best to get back to some sort of
7 normality.
8 He said that on the other side, there was a
9 lack of information about what was going on. He was
10 particularly concerned about what was going on in
11 Vitez, they knew that terrible things had happened in
12 Ahmici because they had some refugees from Ahmici.
13 During the conversation, he gave me a list of names of
14 people that they understood had been arrested or were
15 missing in Vitez. That list of names is attached as an
16 annex to the report. In my copy of the French version,
17 it occurs immediately afterwards as annex 2A. He gave
18 me this piece of paper and said, "in your travels,
19 McLeod, if you can find out anything about these
20 people, we would be very grateful".
21 He struck me as somebody who was trying to be
22 fairly reasonable under very difficult circumstances
23 and I think he acknowledged quite clearly that life was
24 not perfect, but he was attempting to get to a stable
25 integrated mixed, an ethnically mixed community. That
1 seemed to be his aspiration, at any rate.
2 Q. Mr. McLeod, did he tell you what had happened
3 to 2,000 Croats who had lived in south west Zenica?
4 A. Yes, he said that at the outbreak of
5 hostilities, again on 16th April, a large proportion of
6 the Croatian population had, for whatever reasons,
7 decided they wanted to leave. I think that there had
8 been a lot of propaganda -- I do not know if
9 "propaganda" is the right word, there had been strong
10 suggestions on the Croatian media from Vitez that these
11 people ought to leave, so a lot of them had left their
12 houses and moved across to Vitez. Some of them were
13 now attempting to come back, but were being prevented
14 from coming back to their houses, not by the Muslims,
15 they were in Croatian-controlled territory and not able
16 to get back to their houses in Zenica, so there had
17 been quite a lot of displacement of people.
18 Q. Mr. McLeod, who did he say was preventing the
19 Croats who had been displaced from coming back into the
20 Zenica municipality?
21 A. His understanding was that the Croats were
22 not allowing these people to leave Croatian-controlled
23 territory to come back into the Zenica area.
24 Q. Okay. Now you said, Mr. McLeod, that he was
25 attempting to make sure that the population, the Croat
1 population was safe in Zenica. Did he also give you
2 copies of two decrees that were to the effect that
3 those populations should be protected?
4 A. Yes, and you can see -- I think we are going
5 to have trouble finding them again in the French copy.
6 JUDGE JORDA: Do not look for it, please
7 continue with your statement. I will try and find it.
8 In case I have a problem, I will tell you, but please
9 go on with your statement.
10 A. Certainly, sir. We are looking for
11 appendix 1 to the report, which is, "records for the
12 return of refugees to Zenica". He gave me two
13 documents, the first one dated 17th April, which is a
14 decree on the establishment of the War Presidency of
15 Zenica, and this document was basically saying that
16 joint checkpoints -- in this case "joint" means joint
17 Muslim and Croat within Zenica -- checkpoints and
18 patrols should be set up to prevent atrocities being
19 committed against minority population; that barricades
20 which had been set up within the town preventing
21 movement within the town should be taken down;
22 investigation of crimes by the civil police; the
23 provision of security by the civil police and the ABiH
24 for all civilians within Zenica, both parts of the
25 population; free access to hospitals; security of
1 hospitals to be taken over by mixed civil police, mixed
2 being Croat and Muslim; orders for a cease-fire and
3 cessation of digging of trenches and filling in of
4 trenches.
5 Again, this is internally within Zenica, so
6 on both sides, Muslim and Croat, within Zenica to stop
7 digging trenches around their houses, and a Joint
8 Commission consisting of the Civil Defence, the HVO, so
9 the Croat military formation within Zenica, and ECMM,
10 to go to the village Dobriljeno and stop the fighting.
11 This is a reference to -- ECMM to a very large extent
12 had tried to set up Joint Commissions where they would
13 take military commanders from both sides, bring them
14 together and share a meeting between them and get them
15 to agree in a village if there was a problem, what the
16 problem was and then get them to agree to stop, then
17 the military commanders on both sides would persuade
18 the local military commanders they had to stop whatever
19 they were doing.
20 This had been first tried in January of that
21 year, when the conflict first started in Busovaca, and
22 we were attempting to replicate the same thing, so this
23 was a reference to a commission of that sort, to go to
24 this village and stabilise the situation.
25 The second document that he gave me, dated
1 18th April, again simply says that there should be an
2 unconditional cease-fire and withdrawal of units from
3 the contact line, and that the civil police and Civil
4 Defence were obliged to provide security for people and
5 property, and that conditions should be established for
6 everybody who had left their houses to return to their
7 houses, and that residents' committees should organise
8 duty rosters, in other words security but without
9 weapons, to ensure the security of houses and blocks of
10 flats and so on.
11 MR. HARMON: Lastly, Mr. McLeod, did the mayor
12 give you a list of 13 men who were missing from Vitez?
13 A. Yes, as I mentioned earlier, he gave me this
14 list of people. In my copy of the report what you can
15 see at appendix 2 is the original list that he gave me
16 and then a translation in English and -- yes, I then
17 took that with me when I went to Vitez and spoke to
18 people.
19 Q. Now turning to another set of interviews,
20 Mr. McLeod, interviews with two Catholic priests who
21 were Croats obviously, from the Zenica parish; can you
22 tell the judges about those interviews?
23 A. Certainly. Here we started annex B to the
24 report, which was a meeting I had with Father Stjepan.
25 I believe he was the senior Catholic priest within
1 Zenica, I met him in his house, accompanied by
2 Ambassador Thebault. I again explained who I was, what
3 I was doing there and asked him to tell me what, in his
4 view, was going on. He was clearly a man who was
5 working under a lot of pressure. He was very concerned
6 about the welfare of his parishioners. He described
7 the situation, as you can see in the report, listing in
8 some detail things which had been done to the Croatian
9 population in Zenica, the fact that some people had had
10 their houses burnt, the fact some people had been
11 robbed and some people killed, but overall what he was
12 stressing was that there was an attempt being made with
13 the authorities, this is the Muslim authorities, to
14 engage with him to stabilise the situation, that his
15 good offices were being used to try and bring back as
16 far as possible a feeling of calm, that he had access
17 to his parishioners, that he had some access to people
18 who were in prison -- not complete access, this is one
19 of the things which he raised with us; that quite a lot
20 of people had left, this is Croats, had left Zenica,
21 but that actually what people wanted to do now was to
22 come back, the majority of them, to their houses, and
23 this was being facilitated as far as possible.
24 So he described a situation which was not
25 pleasant, but where he gave the impression that the
1 local authorities were doing their best under very
2 difficult circumstances to return to the situation as
3 it had been beforehand.
4 Q. And in fact did he not say that all of the
5 authorities:
6 "... all of them, except MOS, are doing
7 their job very well and are very correct."
8 That is on the third page, B3, top paragraph.
9 A. Thank you. Yes, he was talking about the
10 joint patrols and he said that in critical positions or
11 critical situations, they needed to have these joint
12 patrols because there was a risk of panic and he said
13 that people did not trust the BiH, this is the army, or
14 the MUP, who were the police, the civilian police. The
15 note that I have of what he said is:
16 "All I have to say is that all of them,
17 except for MOS, are doing their job very well and are
18 very correct."
19 This is him sitting at his dining room table
20 in his house in the middle of Zenica.
21 Q. Mr. McLeod, in your opinion, did Father
22 Stjepan appear to you to be a moderate who advocated
23 ethnic reconciliation not ethnic division?
24 A. Absolutely, he was under immense pressure, as
25 one can imagine -- we cannot imagine, but he was under
1 immense pressure, but he was trying as far as possible
2 to allow his people, his parishioners to live in their
3 houses and to, if possible, to return to the way they
4 had been working before, which was an integrated ethnic
5 city.
6 Q. Could you also turn your attention to the
7 interview you had with Father Bozo?
8 A. My note of the meeting with Father Bozo is at
9 annex E to the report. Father Bozo was another
10 Catholic priest in the village of Cajdras, which was
11 south west of Zenica going up the road across the
12 direct road from Zenica to Vitez. I met with him on
13 the morning of 8th May, accompanied by Erik
14 Friis-Pedersen. This meeting started off again with a
15 meeting with him in his house, we then went on a tour
16 of a village further up the road where a number of
17 houses had been burnt and he wanted to show me this.
18 We then returned back down to his house and the church
19 and he stood on the steps of the church and a number of
20 his parishioners, Croats -- it was a sort of public
21 meeting and he read out a list of issues or complaints
22 or concerns which he had.
23 I believe that he was also of the team of
24 Catholic priests working in the Zenica area, he was the
25 priest who had responsible for visiting prisoners, so
1 this is Croatian prisoners -- Croats being held in
2 Muslim prisons. I think that because he was out on the
3 edge of the town, closer to the confrontation line, the
4 contact line, his perspective was slightly more
5 extreme, because his parishioners had been exposed to
6 more direct fighting up at the top of the contact line,
7 on the high ground. He again felt that, and listed in
8 detail, quite a lot of things had been done against his
9 parishioners, the Croatian population. He listed in
10 detail houses that had been burnt, people who had been
11 robbed, people who had been attacked, a number of
12 people who had been killed. There seemed to be quite a
13 lot of consistency about the details of a number of
14 incidents which were mentioned by people on all sides,
15 so clearly there had been a series of incidents which
16 had built up to this.
17 One of the points which he made quite clearly
18 was that when the confrontation initially started very
19 few houses had been burnt, but then in the intervening
20 couple of weeks, I think he said about 40 houses had
21 been burnt, so clearly as people had moved out of their
22 houses, Muslims or whoever, I assume it was Muslims,
23 had come in and burnt the houses, so there was now an
24 issue about people being able to return to their
25 houses. But he was quite clear that at the very
1 beginning there had been relatively little. He talked
2 about four or five houses that had been burnt, when
3 this particular confrontation had actually started. He
4 said that he had initially had some access to Croats
5 being held in Muslim jails. He indicated that there
6 were some prisons to which he did not have access, and
7 he said that at this stage, he did not have access to
8 everybody, so he was again giving a pretty clear and
9 frank exposition of what he thought was going on.
10 It was a very strange experience standing on
11 the steps with him, with his parishioners standing in
12 front of us as he went through the list of issues and
13 then a number of then said, "what about this and
14 that?", talking about friends and relatives who were
15 missing, a very strange experience.
16 Q. Thank you, Mr. McLeod, now let us turn our
17 attention to the interviews that are found -- sorry,
18 your interviews with Mr. Santic and Mr. Skopljak. Those
19 are found at annex F in your report. First of all, can
20 you identify how they identified themselves to you and
21 inform the court who they were and the circumstances of
22 that interview?
23 A. Certainly. Having been to Cajdras and had
24 the meeting with Father Bozo, we then drove over the
25 hill down into Vitez, and the first meeting which had
1 been set up was with the political and civil
2 authorities -- this is now the Croat authorities in
3 Vitez -- and I met the mayor and Mr. Skopljak, who was
4 introduced to me as the chief of police. I have
5 written his title down as commander of police in Vitez,
6 I understand there may be some discrepancy about his
7 precise title, but my understanding was that he was a
8 senior policeman in Vitez.
9 This meeting took place in the late morning
10 up towards lunch-time on 8th May. It was quite a long
11 meeting, because Mr. Santic seemed to be quite keen to
12 keep talking to me and to explain to me in ever
13 increasing detail his political views. He started off
14 by explaining that I ought to read a novel, I have
15 never actually got my hands on it, but he said if
16 I read this novel this would explain everything to me
17 in some detail.
18 He started off by explaining that the Croats
19 and the Muslims in Vitez actually had no reason to
20 fight, there was no particular justification for them
21 having a conflict, because actually the Croats had all
22 the positions of power in Vitez anyway, so there was
23 no -- his initial position was there was no particular
24 justification for this. He then went on to explain in
25 his view -- the view of events which he wanted to give
1 to me, anyway -- what had happened on 16th April. He
2 explained that in his view the Muslims had attacked and
3 that the Croats in Vitez and the surrounding villages
4 had been taken completely by surprise. They had
5 managed to rally their forces and mount a defence.
6 He also explained that incidentally to this,
7 a number of Muslims in Vitez had been arrested.
8 I cannot remember exactly how many he said, if he gave
9 a number, but he did say that all the Muslims had now
10 been released apart from 13 who were being held in
11 Kaonik Prison for questioning and that now the
12 situation was being stabilised and by the end of this
13 fairly long meeting, he explained in his view what
14 ought to happen next was the international community,
15 so he is saying, "you, the international community,
16 UNPROFOR, need to create a buffer between us and the
17 Muslims in Zenica, as opposed to just allowing the
18 fighting to continue. So it is the international
19 community's obligation to establish a buffer. We can
20 then allow the population to move", and he said quite
21 clearly that he did not see this as being ethnic
22 cleansing, it would be the will of the people that they
23 wanted to move, so all the Muslims would leave Vitez
24 and all the Croats would leave Zenica. Than he
25 concluded by saying, "once we have done this, once
1 there has been this population movement, which would
2 not be ethnic cleansing, his view, then we could
3 proceed to implement the Vance plan, then we could have
4 democracy". But it was a precondition of elections and
5 democracy and all the rest of it that first of all
6 there was a buffer and then a movement of population.
7 During the course of the conversation, again
8 they marked a map for me to explain the tactical
9 situation on the ground. Unfortunately I no longer
10 have that particular map, but yes, it was quite an
11 interesting conversation that we had.
12 Q. Mr. McLeod, on the second page of your annex
13 at the bottom of that page, the last sentence, is there
14 an error in your report? Could you read the sentence
15 as it is in the report in English and then inform the
16 court of the correction?
17 A. Yes. This is down at the bottom of page F2,
18 where he was talking about the need to provide
19 protection for local civilian population. In the
20 report, what I actually typed up was:
21 "There is a problem with some people who come
22 into people's houses, so Blaskic has ordered his forces
23 not to enter Muslim's houses."
24 When I went through and checked the actual
25 scribbled note --
1 JUDGE JORDA: Where is it, please, in the
2 French version, could you tell me? So we have managed
3 to find that paragraph. Could you please tell me which
4 is the correct version in French? Could you tell me
5 about the correction? Is it the paragraph starting:
6 "They made some plans to avoid genocide."
7 Is that it, Mr. McLeod?
8 A. Yes.
9 JUDGE JORDA: In that case, could you tell me
10 what is the correct wording now?
11 A. I am just attempting to find my note.
12 JUDGE JORDA: I will try and help you now.
13 So in the French version, it is marked 626, and now
14 I would really like to know which is the correction
15 that has been made, so it is the one but last
16 paragraph in the French version and the numbers are 573
17 to 626, and according to Mr. Dubuisson, the
18 paragraph starts:
19 "They really made some plan to avoid
20 genocide, but did obtain the same results and the
21 government insists the military police makes important
22 changes ..."
23 And so on, and saying that the situation in
24 Vitez is going to improve and later on that, "Blaskic
25 ordered his forces not to enter the Muslim houses".
1 Could you please tell me what is the
2 correction that has to be made? "Blaskic ordered his
3 forces not to enter Muslim houses"; is there a
4 correction that has to be made about that?
5 A. Yes. The note that I actually wrote was
6 that, "Blaskic has to order his forces not to enter
7 Muslim houses".
8 JUDGE JORDA: I have got the correct
9 version. Could you tell me what is the bottom line?
10 What do I have to read here, that Blaskic has to or
11 that he had already ordered?
12 A. In this version in my report, I said that he
13 had, but in the note that I wrote at the time, that he
14 has to.
15 JUDGE JORDA: All right, so the remark should
16 be -- your comment was that Blaskic had to order, still
17 has to do it. That is what I would like to hear, what
18 is your feeling about it in the end, what your
19 conclusion was.
20 A. That this was something which he still had to
21 do.
22 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you. I have understood.
23 Thank you very much.
24 JUDGE RIAD: Excuse me, which means that he
25 had not ordered?
1 A. Yes, was the note that I wrote at the time of
2 what I was told at that meeting.
3 MR. HARMON: Mr. McLeod, let us continue now
4 with your examination, in particular, can you now
5 indicate whether or not Mr. Santic and Mr. Skopljak
6 informed you whether the Muslim population and the
7 Croat populations could live together; in other words,
8 were they advocating polarisation as opposed to
9 reconciliation?
10 A. Yes, the view which was being expressed
11 started off fairly moderately but became, in my view,
12 rather extreme, just my opinion, and Mr. Santic was
13 saying that the Muslim population, initially he was
14 saying, "we have no reason to fight them because we
15 have all the positions of power", he said their
16 headquarters was on the rubbish tip, for example, so he
17 was attempting to -- maybe it was, but the impression
18 I had was that he was trying to suggest the Muslim
19 population were lesser.
20 Then, as part of his explanation of why
21 tension had developed, he said that the -- as the war
22 had broken out with the Serbs initially in Bosnia, the
23 Croats had had to form themselves into a defence force,
24 many of the Muslims had left and so I think he was
25 implying that they had run away to go and do business
1 in Zagreb, as opposed to staying to fight. He then
2 made references to the Muslim population having become
3 somewhat extreme in their religious views. He said
4 that he felt that the Muslims were trying to take them
5 back 200 years to the time of the Turks.
6 He said that the wives of leading Muslims
7 within Vitez had started to wear head scarves -- been
8 obliged to wear head scarves. He made reference to the
9 fact they had been driving through the streets speaking
10 with loud speakers and making statements about Allah
11 from the backs of trucks, so he was trying to build a
12 picture of the Muslim population becoming polarised and
13 extreme in their religious views and suggested this was
14 an intolerable situation from the Croats' point of
15 view, and that this was partially seen as a
16 justification for anything which then took place
17 vis-à-vis the Muslim population.
18 I formed the view from the whole feeling of
19 his conversation as he developed his political thoughts
20 over an hour or so that he did not see any particular
21 place for the Muslims within his community, and this
22 was summarised right at the end by saying, "what we
23 need is the international community to set up this
24 buffer zone for us and then we will move the population
25 and then we can be democratic just like you", but he
1 did not see any room for democracy until he had an
2 ethnically pure state, was the impression that
3 I formed.
4 MR. HARMON: Mr. McLeod, after the population
5 was removed and the Vance-Owen Peace Plan could be
6 implemented, is that what he said?
7 A. Exactly. I no longer have a copy of the
8 Vance-Owen Plan as it was at that particular time, but
9 from recollection, what was being suggested I think was
10 that the country would be broken into cantons and that
11 the military and political leadership of each canton
12 would be based on the ethnic composition of the canton
13 at that time, so clearly if one had a mixed canton then
14 the military and political leadership would be mixed,
15 whereas if one had a bias in one direction or the
16 other, the political and military leadership would be
17 biased in favour of Muslim or Serb or Croat, whichever
18 controlled that canton. His aspiration was to achieve
19 a locally balanced, in his view, situation and then
20 immediately to implement the Vance-Owen Plan before the
21 conditions throughout Bosnia were right. That was what
22 he told me.
23 Q. Mr. McLeod, he also gave you three documents,
24 did he not? Can I direct your attention to those three
25 documents that are attached to the interviews of Messrs
1 Santic and Skopljak. The first document is a document
2 that was signed by Dr. Muhamed Mujezinovic and Ivan
3 Santic, is that correct?
4 A. Yes, that is correct.
5 Q. It lists five separate points.
6 A. Yes, and again I am checking to see where the
7 French version is and I have lost it.
8 MR. HARMON: Mr. President, we during the
9 recess will put this French version in the correct
10 order, I apologise and it will facilitate your review
11 of this portion of the evidence.
12 JUDGE JORDA: Yes, I would like it to be in
13 proper order, but the documents we are talking about
14 just now, are they annexed to this report? Do they
15 appear in this version?
16 MR. HARMON: They do, Mr. President.
17 JUDGE JORDA: And they come under which
18 number?
19 MR. HARMON: They should follow the interviews
20 of Messrs Santic and Skopljak. There should be three
21 documents.
22 JUDGE JORDA: Very well, I propose since it
23 is 11.15, I give my copy to the Registrar and I hope --
24 I think we will have a break now and we will resume
25 work in 20 minutes.
1 (11.15 am)
2 (A short break)
3 (11.35 am)
4 JUDGE JORDA: The hearing is resumed, bring
5 in the accused, please.
6 (Accused brought in)
7 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Prosecutor, you have
8 reassembled my document, thank you very much.
9 MR. HARMON: Mr. President, the deck that was
10 shuffled improperly has now been shuffled in the
11 correct order. I would like to direct your attention
12 first of all, Mr. President, I have taken the liberty of
13 placing a yellow tab at a point in the French
14 translation. Mr. McLeod and I, as we were going through
15 these and putting them into the right order, noticed
16 that there was an incomplete translation, and we would
17 like to direct your attention to it. I have marked II
18 in the French version and that last sentence in II is
19 missing in the French translation. If I could have
20 Mr. McLeod read for your Honour the last sentence in II,
21 then you will be fully informed as to this particular
22 exhibit. Mr. McLeod, could you please read --
23 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you very much. For my
24 personal benefit, Mr. McLeod, can you tell me that last
25 sentence?
1 A. Certainly sir. In fact it is the last
2 sentence of I leading on after Zenica and it says:
3 "The municipal Civil Defence headquarters is
4 also obliged to provide return of refugees" --
5 JUDGE JORDA: Slowly please. "The
6 headquarters of the Civil Defence"?
7 A. "... is also obliged to provide return of
8 refugees from Vardiste to Bilivode".
9 JUDGE JORDA: Very well, thank you. We can
10 continue now.
11 MR. HARMON: Mr. McLeod, when we stopped at the
12 recess, I was directing your attention to three
13 documents that were provided to you by Mr. Santic and
14 Mr. Skopljak. Can we start with the first document
15 which is a joint statement, it is appendix 1 to
16 annex F? Without spending too much time on this
17 particular document, because this has previously been
18 introduced into evidence, can you just inform the court
19 how you received this particular document?
20 A. Certainly. Mr. Santic gave me these documents
21 as he was attempting to build his case to explain to me
22 how what he wanted was to have a return to normal life
23 in Vitez, so the first document he gave me was a signed
24 document and he presented this as proof that the Muslim
25 and Croat authorities in Vitez had already decided they
1 wanted to return to a state of normality. If you are
2 already familiar with the document then I will not
3 bother to go through it.
4 Q. Fine, Mr. McLeod. Then can you turn to the
5 next document and identify which document it is and
6 inform the court about that particular document.
7 A. Certainly. So the second document is
8 appendix 2, and this is a draft document which he gave
9 me. He said this was a draft which he had produced
10 which he had sent to his opposite number, the mayor of
11 Zenica, suggesting that they should sign this together
12 and he presented me this document and he also presented
13 me the third document, which was a reply from the mayor
14 of Zenica explaining why this first document which had
15 been drafted in Vitez could not be signed immediately
16 and suggesting some changes.
17 So just to run very briefly through the seven
18 points which had been proposed by Vitez to be signed
19 jointly by Vitez and Zenica, it starts off with a joint
20 declaration that the conflict between the Muslims and
21 the Croats in Central Bosnia was not the desire or the
22 will of these two nations, but actually it was all
23 provoked by the Serbs, so it is a Serb plot to
24 destabilise them. He invites the Muslims and the
25 Croats to cease all hostility and immediately to go to
1 peace and that there should be an investigation and
2 punishment of all those who have committed crimes by
3 the regular courts.
4 There is a request, a suggestion that there
5 should be treatment and assistance given to the large
6 number of refugees, a suggestion that the regular
7 police should be used intensively to stop further
8 atrocities being committed, which this declaration
9 suggests are being wrongly attributed to regular forces
10 of the HVO and ABiH. Because there is a complete
11 blockade of the area in terms of supplies getting up
12 from the coast from Split, there is then a joint treaty
13 to the governments, this is the Croat and the Muslim
14 governments, the armies of the ABiH and the HVO, to
15 allow free passage of goods and supplies from the coast
16 up to this area in Central Bosnia.
17 The sixth point says that in order to
18 stabilise the cessation of hostilities, it is a demand
19 from the media, the information media, that in every
20 case they should report only completely confirmed
21 information without personal commentary; in other
22 words, he wants to have complete control over what
23 information is being disseminated to prevent rumours
24 being started or information being incorrectly
25 broadcast, and then finally it is a declaration that as
1 fast as possible, they should implement the Vance-Owen
2 Plan, which as I explained earlier on I think was
3 implementing government and military forces, the
4 control of those to be based on the ethnic make-up of
5 the areas in question.
6 There was also a joint statement by
7 Izetbegovic and Boban of April 25th. Unfortunately
8 I no longer have a copy of that, so I am not sure what
9 the statement was saying.
10 Q. Now can you turn to the reply of the mayor of
11 Zenica to that proposed draft statement.
12 A. Certainly. So at the same time I was handed
13 this reply as well as I was handed the unsigned copy of
14 the proposal from Vitez. The mayor of Zenica was
15 basically saying, "yes, certainly we should make a
16 joint statement, but we should make a joint statement
17 which recognises the actual facts as they have occurred
18 as opposed to what has not occurred". So he was
19 suggesting that in practice, there were HVO troops in
20 various villages, Ahmici, Gacice, Veceriska and others,
21 and that the statement, if they were to issue a joint
22 statement, should condemn crimes and should suggest
23 that investigation of crimes should be carried out by a
24 neutral third party as opposed to the local police
25 forces, and that they should work out exactly who was
1 going to be responsible for this, rather than just
2 saying the regular forces should do it; that there
3 should not be a suggestion in the joint declaration
4 that whatever had taken place had been carried out by
5 people who were out of control, but that whatever had
6 taken place had actually been organised by regular
7 forces on both sides.
8 His fifth point I find somewhat confused in
9 terms of exactly what he is suggesting, but basically
10 it is reiterating the fact that there needs to be
11 investigation before there can be reconciliation,
12 I think. The sixth point, again he is coming back to
13 say that he finds it inconceivable that the crimes
14 which were referred to in the joint statement, which he
15 has not signed, were committed by extremists. It ends
16 up by welcoming the initiative and saying that they
17 should do as much as they can to resolve the conflict.
18 Q. Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Mr. McLeod, after the
19 conclusion of your interviews with Messrs Santic and
20 Skopljak, where did you go?
21 A. We left the office where we had been having
22 that meeting, walked down the stairs into Vitez, walked
23 about 200 yards to the Hotel Vitez, where my next
24 meeting was with then Colonel Blaskic, so what I had
25 been attempting to do was meet the political leadership
1 in Vitez and then the military leadership in Vitez, so
2 I could build up their view of what had happened.
3 Q. Mr. McLeod, could you explain the
4 circumstances of the meeting with Colonel Blaskic and
5 what Colonel Blaskic told you had happened, the events?
6 A. Certainly. When I met Colonel Blaskic,
7 General Blaskic now, as I made my general introduction
8 as I had done on each occasion. With him I emphasised
9 the fact I had been in the army, we discussed the fact
10 that he had been in the JNA previously, so we had what
11 at the time felt like a very business-like meeting
12 between two soldiers discussing the military situation,
13 was effectively what it was. My interpreter did the
14 initial part of the meeting and then I think she was
15 having difficulty with the military jargon that we were
16 using, so she stopped and his interpreter took over for
17 the latter, probably two-thirds of the meeting that we
18 had. His interpreter, of course, being more used to
19 the military jargon that was being discussed.
20 Colonel Blaskic struck me as being a fairly
21 straightforward sort of person. It seemed to be a good
22 meeting, his explanation of the tactical situation
23 matched almost exactly the explanation and description
24 that I had had from officers in BritBat. When he
25 marked on the map for me where the forces were and
1 described what he thought the likely outcome of a
2 continuation of the fighting would be, that again
3 matched almost precisely the description I had had from
4 BritBat, so as I suggested the -- he suggested to me
5 that the conflict had only been prevented from getting
6 a lot worse by the intervention of UNPROFOR and he
7 suggested to me that, I cannot remember the exact
8 dates, but soon after 16th April, the Muslim action or
9 reaction, depending on your point of view, but the
10 Muslim attack to cut off Vitez would have been
11 successful if UNPROFOR had not actually been successful
12 in arranging a cease-fire, and this bore out exactly
13 what I had heard earlier from UNPROFOR.
14 So all of those parts of the conversation
15 seemed to make sense. In terms of the precise detail
16 of what had happened on the 16th, you can see exactly
17 what I have written down in terms of the notes that
18 I wrote, but to summarise it, he said that there had
19 been an increasing tension up to the 16th, he said
20 there had been attempts to move Muslim troops on the
21 day preceding this, on 15th April, so tensions had been
22 quite high. On the 16th, he said that he had been
23 woken early in the morning, 5.15, I think, by gunfire
24 and his immediate reaction had been to phone his
25 headquarters and he had spoken to his headquarters and
1 said, "what is going on?", and the duty officer had
2 said that he did not know what was going on, so Blaskic
3 had then said, "well, find out from the local brigade
4 commander what is going on". The brigade headquarters
5 had been phoned and the reply had been the brigade
6 commander is not here, presumably he is asleep in bed,
7 so he suggested they had been completely caught by
8 surprise by what had been going on.
9 He then said that they had rallied their
10 forces as fast as possible and during that morning,
11 they had initially attempted to secure the main
12 government buildings in Vitez and then to carry out the
13 defence of Vitez and the defence of the villages
14 surrounding Vitez, and that eventually the situation
15 had stabilised and the war had been stopped or that
16 localised confrontation had been stopped eventually by
17 the intervention of UNPROFOR arranging a cease-fire.
18 But he was quite clear in his view that if that had not
19 happened then the Muslims would have been successful in
20 cutting the roads on both sides of Vitez and possibly
21 even separating the -- cutting the road between Vitez
22 and Busovaca.
23 At the conclusion of our meeting, he said
24 that as far as he was concerned, it ought to be
25 possible to live together, this is the two parties to
1 live together, but if we were not successful in having
2 an UN buffer of some sort, then he could not actually
3 see much prospect of that and he expected the war to
4 carry on again.
5 Immediately after the meeting, he then had to
6 go off to, I am not sure how -- he had a second meeting
7 and I saw Mr. Santic come down, so Mr. Santic was then
8 joining him in a further meeting to discuss whatever
9 they were discussing.
10 Q. So Mr. McLeod, what he told you in fact was
11 that on the morning of the 16th at 5.15, he was taken
12 completely by surprise, he was awakened by shells and
13 he woke up and it surprised him that there was
14 essentially a conflict going on in Vitez?
15 A. Yes, he was quite clear that what had
16 happened is the Muslims had launched a co-ordinated
17 attack against a number of positions in Vitez and the
18 outlying villages and that his troops had been caught
19 on the hop and had reacted as well as they could and
20 mounted a defence.
21 Q. Let me turn your attention to a couple of
22 portions of your interview with Colonel Blaskic. Did
23 he tell you how many professional soldiers were in the
24 Vitez brigade?
25 A. Yes, he said that they had between 300 and
1 350 professional soldiers and that the rest of the
2 Vitez brigade was made up of reservists and that these
3 were spread through the various villages, where the
4 villages still existed.
5 Q. Did you ask Colonel Blaskic to mark a map?
6 A. Yes, I did. As I had done in most of my
7 meetings, I gave him a blank photocopied map and a set
8 of coloured pens and invited him to mark on it the
9 tactical situation as he saw it.
10 Q. Did you ask him to mark the identity of
11 particular villages that were occupied by the parties,
12 Muslim, Croat or mixed?
13 A. Yes, what he did was he marked the map with
14 these highlighter pens with different colours for the
15 different ethnic breakdown or composition of the
16 villages.
17 Q. Did he mark the village of Ahmici?
18 A. It was of interest afterwards when I actually
19 sat down and looked at it to see what he had done, but
20 he missed out the villages of Ahmici, Nadioci and
21 Loncari, and these were the villages which had been the
22 subject of bitter fighting.
23 Q. And which were not marked by Colonel Blaskic?
24 A. No.
25 Q. Let me turn your attention to a comment that
1 Colonel Blaskic made about the events in Busovaca.
2 Could you tell the judges what he said about Busovaca?
3 A. Certainly. He described what had happened in
4 Busovaca -- this is, for reference, the third
5 paragraph from the end of this particular annex. He
6 was describing what had happened back in January when
7 the violence had first flared up. He said on
8 21st January the Busovaca to Kiseljak road was cut and
9 he said that Busovaca had been occupied and ethnically
10 cleansed. He said then, leading on from that, that if
11 the UN did not separate the forces, it was clear there
12 would be further conflict.
13 Q. You said that that particular interview with
14 Colonel Blaskic lasted approximately an hour, is that
15 right?
16 A. It was probably 45 minutes to an hour.
17 Q. Your report accurately reflects then the
18 substance of that interview, is that correct?
19 A. Yes, I have a detailed note of those parts of
20 the interview where I was actually taking notes and
21 I have made a couple of comments about those parts of
22 interview where we were having more a dialogue as
23 opposed to his explanation of events, so fairly shortly
24 thereafter I made a note of what my thoughts were.
25 Q. At the conclusion of the interview, what was
1 your opinion as to whether Colonel Blaskic was telling
2 you the truth?
3 A. I was fairly sure that his description of the
4 tactical situation, because it seemed to match almost
5 exactly what I had been told by UNPROFOR officers, had
6 been accurate. By the time that I had finished
7 speaking to everybody and seen everything that I saw,
8 I cannot actually imagine how, if he was the person
9 that I thought that he was, in other words the military
10 commander of the area, he could have been fast asleep
11 at that point in the morning, because that just did not
12 tally with all the other things which I heard and saw.
13 Q. Let me just clarify one point of your
14 examination. You have referenced "tactical
15 situation". Could you just tell us what you mean by
16 the term "tactical situation", so the record is
17 perfectly clear?
18 A. Certainly. The explanation which he gave me
19 of the events following 16th April and his description
20 of the locations of Muslim forces and Croat forces, his
21 view, his opinion that the Muslim forces would have
22 been successful in cutting the various key roads around
23 Vitez, had they not been stopped by UNPROFOR,
24 matched -- it was almost exactly the same explanation
25 as I had been given by UNPROFOR officers, so by the
1 tactical situation, that is what I am referring to.
2 Q. Lastly, can I direct your attention to part
3 of the interview you had with Colonel Blaskic and that
4 is any reference to outside forces being a problem?
5 A. Yes, he said that -- his view was that the
6 Muslims did not want to separate forces, in other words
7 that they wanted to carry on the conflict. He said
8 that there was no clear dividing line between the two
9 sides and that it was a war of neighbours against each
10 other. He said the greatest problem was forces brought
11 in from outside. He said if they were only local
12 forces, then they could have peace. I infer from this
13 that by the forces brought in from outside he is
14 referring to Mujahedin or other Muslim forces brought
15 in on the Muslim side and it was these extremists who
16 had been brought in that were causing the problems.
17 That was my understanding of what he was getting at.
18 Q. Thank you very much, Mr. McLeod. Now can we
19 turn our attention to an interview you had with Ramiz
20 Dugalic. Can you tell the judges who he is and the
21 circumstances of that particular interview?
22 A. Certainly. It is -- "Dugalic" is the
23 pronunciation. Again, on the Muslim side I had been
24 attempting to meet the military command structure so we
25 could get their view of what had happened. With
1 Ambassador Thebault I had already had a meeting with
2 the corps commander of III Corps, who suggested the
3 best person to talk to was one of his deputy
4 commanders, Ramiz Dugalic, I am not sure what rank he
5 had either then or now. He had again set out his view
6 of what the Muslim army, what the Muslim forces thought
7 was the tactical situation, and he described in some
8 detail what he understood had happened or was happening
9 in and around Vitez.
10 I am not quite sure how much detail you would
11 like, but he described various incidents which had
12 taken place with a degree of -- with some detail.
13 Amongst other things, he said that they had caught a
14 couple of Croat prisoners who had been involved in
15 Ahmici. I, of course, said I would be very delighted
16 if I could meet these people and eventually a couple of
17 days later when we came back to this particular issue,
18 he said those two individuals had been exchanged in a
19 prisoner exchange, unofficially, which was rather
20 unfortunate because it would have shed quite a lot of
21 light on what may or may not have happened.
22 Q. Mr. McLeod, if I can direct your attention to
23 the second page of your report in the English version.
24 Did he also describe units that were part of the HVO
25 and can you tell the judges what he told you?
1 A. Certainly. I use the language which comes
2 straight out of the notes which I wrote at the time.
3 He said the HVO had two formations -- it may well have
4 had more than that, but he was talking about two of
5 them. He said they had one legal one which was doing
6 "dirty jobs" as he described it. He said a chap
7 called Darko Kraljevic, now colonel, was in command.
8 He said he had previously been a member of HOS, which
9 was a Croatian military formation.
10 He then showed me a licence which he said had
11 been given to a Muslim to allow the Muslim to leave
12 their home, and I have got a copy of that, there is a
13 copy attached to the report. He then also said that
14 there was another organisation called "Joker" and he
15 said that the leader of this group called Joker was a
16 man called Anto Furundzija, I am sorry if my
17 pronunciation is not right.
18 Q. Mr. McLeod, did he make any reference to the
19 truck bomb that had occurred in Vitez itself? Can you
20 tell the judges what he told you about that?
21 A. Yes, he mentioned that there had been a car
22 bomb in Vitez and he said to me that Blaskic had given
23 the order to put the man who drove the bomb into the
24 truck and Darko Kraljevic had carried out the attack.
25 He said his intelligence suggested the HVO wanted to
1 put three tonnes of explosives into the truck, but in
2 the end they only used 700 kilograms. He said the
3 driver had not been a local man but had come back to
4 drive humanitarian aid. They had told him to deliver a
5 message with the truck but had not told him about the
6 explosives.
7 MR. HAYMAN: I would like to note for the
8 record, Mr. President, sorry to interrupt the witness,
9 that the court having made its hearsay rule, the
10 Prosecution is now driving trucks of hearsay through
11 the door that the court has opened. This type of
12 double or even triple hearsay is exactly what should
13 not be the evidence in this case of allegations
14 directly involving our client. I simply wanted to put
15 our further objection on the record.
16 JUDGE JORDA: Yes, this will be in the
17 transcript. Please, Mr. McLeod, go on.
18 MR. HARMON: Mr. McLeod, you indicated that
19 Mr. Dugalic gave you a document which is appendix 1 to
20 annex I. Can you identify that as being the document
21 which was provided to you by Mr. Dugalic?
22 A. Yes, it is a one page, very short document.
23 Q. It is from whom?
24 A. I am working off the English translation
25 which I have because I can read that and the original
1 is also part of the report. It is titled "certificate
2 for transfer of ownership of property" and the address
3 group at the top of the document is "the Republic of
4 Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatian Community Herceg-Bosna,
5 Department for Defence, Unit Vitezovi, Vitez", and it
6 is dated 24th April 1993. Then the substance of the
7 document is that it:
8 "... confirms that the flat address: M Tita
9 Lamela A5-A9, Ulaz 2, second floor, is given for
10 temporary use to Krizanac Jako by this unit. The
11 former owner of this flat was Ekmescic Faruk."
12 It is signed, "by order, Colonel Darko
13 Kraljevic".
14 Q. All right, Mr. McLeod. Now let me turn if
15 I can to your next interview. I would like to draw
16 your attention to your interview with the Imam of
17 Busovaca. Could you tell the judges when that
18 interview took place, the circumstances of that
19 interview and the substance of that particular
20 interview.
21 A. On 9th May, having by now had two meetings
22 with Croat Catholic priests in the Zenica area,
23 I wanted to try and balance their view with the view of
24 a Muslim religious leader, so I went to Busovaca where
25 I understood that the Imam was still there.
1 I eventually found Enver Hodza in his house, he was
2 just in his back yard, having initially looked at the
3 mosque and he was not there. To start with, he refused
4 to speak to me, but having explained who I was and
5 where I had come from, he eventually decided that yes,
6 he would actually talk to me. So we went into his
7 house and I sat in his front room with him and his wife
8 and his two children, a young girl and a young boy.
9 I went through my usual routine of explaining who
10 I was, where I had come from and what I would like from
11 him. He then explained in some detail his view of what
12 life was like for him and his whatever the equivalent
13 of parishioners is, I suppose, his people in Busovaca.
14 All the time that he was talking, he started
15 off by explaining how there was very little food and so
16 on. His wife was cooking a meal which was then
17 presented to me and Erik Friis-Pedersen who was
18 accompanying me, and we were invited to eat and I said,
19 "I will not eat unless I am joining you in a meal", so
20 I then had to eat a meal with him and Erik while his
21 wife and children watched, which was an extremely
22 uncomfortable experience.
23 At the end of the meeting, as we were just
24 about ready to leave, the Croatian police arrived and
25 came into the house. Presumably they had seen our
1 vehicle parked outside and they wanted to know what we
2 were doing there and wanted to have a conversation
3 there. I suggested that actually since I had finished
4 having my conversation with Enver Hodza but would be
5 delighted to talk to them, we would be delighted to go
6 to the police station, so that is what we did.
7 In terms of the description of what was going
8 on that I was given by this gentleman, he said they
9 were completely isolated, they were quite cut off, they
10 had no communications with Zenica, said that supplies
11 of food were quite short. He said they were unable to
12 leave their houses without permission. He showed me a
13 permit which allowed him to move around. I do not have
14 a copy of that, but I made a note of the details on it
15 in my book. He said they were unable to worship, which
16 was borne out I suppose in part by the fact that the
17 mosque was locked and appeared to be quite deserted.
18 He said that he was, however, allowed to bury the dead
19 and he then went into, I think because it was fresh in
20 his mind, a list of people that he had just buried.
21 As part of his explanation, he explained that
22 a woman had been raped the night before and this was
23 clearly at the forefront of his mind. That particular
24 incident was then carried on, was part of the
25 discussion with the Croatian policeman later on. He
1 said that a number of Muslim families, quite a large
2 number of Muslim families had had to leave their houses
3 and had gone to Zenica. I described the fighting in
4 some of the villages to the north of Busovaca, and he
5 described how the Croats had burnt houses and the
6 Muslims had also burnt houses, so the Muslims had burnt
7 Croat houses and the Croats had burnt Muslim houses.
8 He did not attempt to describe the fact that the
9 Muslims had also been up on the front-line burning
10 people's houses, which is not particularly pleasant.
11 Yes, it was a very strange meeting, sitting
12 with his family in their front room, hearing about
13 events which were a million miles away from these even
14 back in Zagreb, let alone back in England.
15 Q. Mr. McLeod, let me ask you, did he tell you
16 that Muslims younger than 60 years old had to dig
17 trenches for the HVO?
18 A. He said amongst other things that they had to
19 go and dig trenches around Busovaca.
20 Q. Did he also tell you that Muslims were not
21 allowed to go out of their houses and some had to leave
22 because of HVO violence?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. Referring to the third paragraph from the
25 top?
1 A. Yes, verbatim from my notes, he said they
2 were totally isolated in Busovaca. He said:
3 "There is an information blockade. The
4 Muslims younger than 60 years old have to dig trenches
5 for the HVO. They cannot pray in Busovaca. Muslims
6 are not allowed to go out of their houses and some have
7 had to leave because of HVO violence. He is allowed to
8 bury the dead."
9 Q. Two paragraphs down, what did he say in
10 respect of the Muslim houses that had been vacated?
11 A. This was in the context of the meeting which
12 he had had with the president of Busovaca, a man called
13 Zoran Marinic, apparently, and he said he had had a
14 meeting with this gentleman the day before. He had
15 asked for some protection, he had asked for a telephone
16 line so they could have contact outside, in other words
17 back to Zenica. This had been promised, apparently.
18 He then went on to say that all the Muslim houses that
19 were empty had been taken over by Croats and they had
20 all been robbed. Obviously there was a refugee
21 problem, so empty houses were being taken over by Croat
22 refugees who had been moved out of Zenica.
23 Q. Lastly, did he tell you that civilians who
24 had been taken to dig trenches, some of them had been
25 killed?
1 A. Yes, I think he described a particular
2 incident.
3 Q. I am referring to the second page of your
4 report, Mr. McLeod, second paragraph.
5 A. He said that a man by the name of Skandro
6 Kemal had been buried on 24th April, he had been a
7 driver who was arrested between Vitez and Travnik, one
8 of 90 drivers who had been arrested and he had been
9 killed by a sniper digging trenches. He then mentioned
10 another man by the name of Lugonjic Omer who had been
11 buried the day I was there and he said he was also a
12 driver who was killed.
13 Q. Thank you. Let me direct your attention to
14 the paragraph three down below that, there is a
15 statement that says:
16 "Kordic seems to be the man calling the
17 shots."
18 Is that a quote from the Imam?
19 A. No, this was in the context, he showed me
20 this pass which he had and I wrote down in my book the
21 details which are then here --
22 Q. This was a pass to pass through from one
23 point in Busovaca municipality to another point, is
24 that correct?
25 A. It is my understanding that it allowed him to
1 move around the town. So the pass was dated 1st May
2 and it was signed by Drsko Grubersic, who was commander
3 of the HVO brigade and Zoran Marinic, President of HVO
4 in Busovaca and Dario Kordic of HDZ and then I wrote in
5 my note, in light of the conversation around this, that
6 Dario Kordic seemed to be the man calling the shots.
7 Clearly that is my jargon as opposed to the jargon of
8 the Imam. I think I had formed the impression at that
9 point that he was clearly the political boss in
10 Busovaca who was directing what was going on.
11 MR. HARMON: Can you tell the judges the
12 demeanour of the Imam and his family once the HVO
13 police arrived.
14 JUDGE JORDA: Excuse me, Mr. Harmon. Just
15 about something that I have just heard. I have got a
16 French translation at the end of the paragraph, the
17 reference is 642:
18 "Kordic seems to be the man of the
19 shootings."
20 Is this exactly what you said, Mr. McLeod? In
21 the transcript that I have just had, it says:
22 "Kordic seems to be the man which called the
23 shots."
24 Here in French it says:
25 "Kordic seems to be the man of the
1 shootings."
2 I do not know what is the correct
3 translation? Could somebody give me the answer?
4 MR. HARMON: Mr. President, I think that is a
5 literal or perhaps incorrect translation. It is not
6 what is intended and perhaps Mr. McLeod could explain
7 again his reference to that statement. That was a
8 statement to by McLeod using English jargon and
9 grammar.
10 JUDGE JORDA: In French you order to shoot.
11 It seems to be an idiomatic expression. All right,
12 excuse me, I have been surprised but I thank my
13 colleagues for enlightening me. For now I will know
14 that when somebody speaks about the shootings, I will
15 know that that means that person has got the situation
16 under control. Thank you very much, please proceed.
17 MR. HARMON: Mr. McLeod, I had asked you to
18 describe to the judges the demeanour of the Imam and
19 his family upon the arrival of the HVO police?
20 A. I think as one can possibly imagine, they
21 were rather frightened to have their -- I think it is
22 worth clarifying, from memory I do not think they were
23 HVO police, I think they were civil police, they were
24 wearing blue uniforms as opposed to military uniform.
25 I think they were, as anybody would be, slightly upset
1 to have a couple of policemen come into their living
2 room. They were rather frightened.
3 Q. What happened next?
4 A. I did not feel particularly comfortable
5 having a second meeting with the Imam and the policemen
6 in his front room so since I had finished my
7 conversation with the Imam anyway, I said to the
8 policemen that I would be delighted to talk to them,
9 but suggested I should come with them back to the
10 police station. So that is exactly what happened, they
11 went back into their police car, we went back into our
12 vehicle, followed them down the road to the police
13 station and immediately afterwards had a meeting with
14 three policemen in the police station in Busovaca.
15 Q. Can you identify the three policemen and the
16 units to which they belonged?
17 A. Yes, I made a note having asked them exactly
18 who they were. I believe I was talking to Nikica
19 Petrovic, who was introduced as the chief of the civil
20 police in Busovaca, Zeljko Lastro of the regional
21 police, I do not know what his title was, but he was
22 described as being of the region police as opposed to
23 any other form of police, and a man called Zoran
24 Vareskovic, who was introduced as deputy chief of the
25 military police. So I had a civil policeman, a
1 military policeman and a member of the regional police,
2 I am not sure what the difference was between the
3 regional police and any of the other organisations.
4 Q. Can you describe the circumstances of that
5 meeting?
6 A. We were sitting upstairs in the police
7 station in what I assume was a conference room or
8 something like that. They were explaining to me from
9 their point of view what was going on in terms of
10 police matters and they started off by saying that they
11 had problems with a military policeman had just been
12 shot by a sniper, presumably a Muslim sniper.
13 We then rapidly got into discussing the case
14 of the girl who had been raped the night before. I was
15 quite interested and attempted to tease out through the
16 conversation some of the details about what the
17 judicial system was like. I explained to them my
18 previous experience of prosecuting at courts martial
19 and said, "I have some understanding of what might go
20 on", so was attempting to get them to explain the
21 likely sentence for somebody -- they said they had a
22 couple of suspects. I said, "what will happen to these
23 suspects, where will they be tried; if they go to
24 prison, where will they go to prison, how long for?",
25 and they explained what they thought would go on. They
1 said that at that time, the only court which was in
2 operation was the military court in Travnik, and they
3 said that as like as not, the only operating prison was
4 the military prison at Kaonik.
5 They took some pains to distance themselves,
6 or certainly the civilian policeman took plains to
7 distance himself from the prison at Kaonik. He said it
8 was run by Mr. Aleksovski, so he named him as the man
9 who was running it, and said it is a military prison,
10 it is not a civilian prison.
11 We also talked about various other things
12 which were going on, yes. It was a fairly technical
13 meeting with the policemen talking about police
14 issues. Towards the end of the meeting, I said that
15 I had had a meeting with Father Stjepan and Father
16 Bozo, because clearly they were interested to know what
17 was going on on the other side, so I said, "I have had
18 these meetings". I explained the circumstances and the
19 situation of the Croats in Zenica as had been portrayed
20 to me by the two Catholic priests I had met. They said
21 that Bozo, because he brought Croats back to their
22 houses, and the Croats had then been tortured, is what
23 they said, that Bozo, so this is the Catholic priest in
24 Zenica, should be seen as a criminal. He had
25 facilitated the beating up of Croats by bringing them
1 back to their houses in Zenica, and that he was clearly
2 thinking according to his heart and the church by
3 bringing people back to their houses, rather than being
4 in step with the politics, was the note I wrote of the
5 comments they were making.
6 Q. Mr. McLeod, when these police officers were
7 talking to you about the HVO prison at Kaonik, did they
8 also tell you that Kaonik Prison was under the
9 jurisdiction of the military court in Travnik?
10 A. Yes, they said that Zlatko Aleksovski was
11 responsible for the prison, they said it was an HVO
12 prison, not run by the police, and that it was under
13 the jurisdiction of the military court in Travnik.
14 Q. After those interviews, Mr. McLeod, did you
15 have occasion to go to the Kaonik Prison itself and
16 meet with Zlatko Aleksovski?
17 A. Yes, the following day I accompanied
18 Ambassador Thebault and we went to Kaonik and while we
19 were there, we had a long conversation -- yes, a long
20 meeting with Mr. Aleksovski, the details of which are at
21 annex O, so leafing through a little bit.
22 Mr. Aleksovski explained in some detail the
23 difficulties that he had running the prison, what he
24 was doing with the prisoners. He then took me for a
25 tour of the prison block and we then continued the
1 conversation back in his office again. It was quite a
2 bizarre meeting. He discussed the problems that he
3 had, or he explained the problems that he had providing
4 security for prisoners. He said that -- he invited us
5 to understand that because people had lost relatives
6 and then would get drunk, perhaps they would come up
7 and want to beat up a prisoner. As a rhetorical
8 question, he asked whether we would want to shoot
9 someone who had lost a brother to prevent them from
10 beating up a prisoner.
11 His view of that was obviously no, so he
12 explained that we would see none of the jailers in
13 contact with prisoners were carrying weapons, so they
14 would not be put in this difficult position of having
15 to shoot somebody to prevent them from beating somebody
16 up.
17 He talked in some detail about the
18 difficulties of the defence of Busovaca and the fact
19 that there were not enough people to dig trenches and
20 so the fact that prisoners had to go and dig trenches.
21 He said that he knew that this was wrong according to
22 Geneva Conventions but that given the alternative of
23 being overrun by the Muslims, he thought it was
24 justified. He explained that he knew that it was wrong
25 and that one of the ICRC delegates had actually been
1 and explained to him that it was wrong, and that he had
2 gone with her to the local brigade commander in
3 Busovaca where she had remonstrated with the brigade
4 commander.
5 He described an incident where they had been
6 digging trenches and a fire fight had broken out. Once
7 the shooting had stopped they realised two of the
8 prisoners had run away or disappeared, they lost them
9 during the fire fight.
10 All the time that we were having the first
11 part of the conversation, he was attempting to produce
12 a list of prisoners, because he had initially explained
13 that he had a computer with records of who the
14 prisoners were and I said it would be very useful if we
15 could have a copy of this list, so a list was produced
16 and once the list had been printed off, we then went a
17 met a number of people walking -- going into each of
18 the prison cells. In most of the cells there were six
19 or eight people. I had a conversation with some of
20 them. In each of the cells at least one prisoner piped
21 up and asked if they could make a statement about how
22 well they were being treated.
23 In one of the cells, an elderly man asked if
24 he could ask us a question, and I said certainly he
25 could, so through the interpreter, he asked what he was
1 doing there. I, of course, said, "I have no idea what
2 you are doing here". Aleksovski said he knew because
3 he had been speaking to the people who had brought this
4 prisoner in the night before and he had been brought
5 there for his own protection. He had been found
6 wandering around on the contact line, so he was here
7 for his protection. I said, rather quietly, that if
8 I had wanted to protect this person and that was the
9 only reason I had for bringing him to prison, what
10 I would have done was send him to Zenica, say "do not
11 be stupid, walking around in the middle of a front-line,
12 go to Zenica and do not come back again".
13 Aleksovski's reaction to this was to say,
14 "yes, clearly that is right, this is an old man, he
15 can go". Initially he said he could come back with us
16 and then he said in fact he would simply arrange for
17 him to be taken and dropped back at the point where he
18 was picked up. So the man picked up his coat, shook
19 hands with everybody else in the cell and left and
20 there was some toing and froing while they arranged for
21 somebody to take him away. At the end when we left the
22 prison, Aleksovski did not know what the man's name was
23 and I do not know if he was taken back to where he was
24 picked up or taken round the block and back into his
25 cell, but it was a fairly bizarre indication of the
1 degree of control over prisoners which Aleksovski
2 appeared to have, because he appeared to be able to
3 summarily decide that somebody could just leave. Very
4 strange.
5 Q. Mr. McLeod -- so in essence, in fact,
6 Mr. McLeod, he acknowledged the following things; number
7 one that the prison at Kaonik was an HVO prison, is
8 that correct?
9 A. Yes, it was quite clearly an HVO prison.
10 During his explanation of what was going on,
11 Mr. Aleksovski had explained that he did not select
12 people to come in, the selection was made by the HVO,
13 that he was actually under the orders of the two
14 brigade commanders in Vitez and Busovaca, so they were
15 responsible for giving him prisoners. We had quite a
16 long debate following the release of this one
17 individual, the apparent release of this one
18 individual, about whether all civilian prisoners should
19 be released or not. We debated the definition of a
20 civilian as opposed to a soldier. Aleksovski put
21 forward the view that a civilian was clearly a
22 civilian, but any man aged between 16 and 60 or
23 thereabouts under these circumstances was a soldier and
24 therefore all the men we had seen were soldiers and
25 therefore by definition could not be released.
1 He eventually said that the decision as to
2 the definition of who was civilians and who was
3 soldiers would have to be taken by the police, as
4 opposed to by him.
5 Q. Mr. Aleksovski also acknowledged that sending
6 prisoners out to dig trenches was in violation of the
7 Geneva Conventions, is that correct, that he knew that
8 was the case?
9 A. Yes, he said quite clearly that he knew that
10 it was wrong, but that under the circumstances, he felt
11 he had no choice, because the alternative was not to
12 have the trenches dug and if the trenches were not dug,
13 then the Muslims would have overrun Busovaca and he
14 said, "what would happen to us if that happened?".
15 Given that he explained that he knew it was wrong, he
16 knew that the ICRC had told him it was wrong, I am not
17 sure he knew chapter and verse what the Geneva
18 Convention said in every respect, but he knew that was
19 wrong.
20 Q. He also referenced a specific instance where
21 the ICRC accompanied Aleksovski to Busovaca to talk to
22 the Busovaca brigade commander and inform the Busovaca
23 brigade commander that the use of civilians to dig
24 trenches was in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
25 A. Yes.
1 Q. Mr. McLeod, did he tell you how many Muslim
2 prisoners had been in the Kaonik camp in January 1993?
3 A. Yes, he said that in January of this year, he
4 had been in the prison when 400 Muslims were arrested.
5 Q. Did he tell you how many prisoners had been
6 then in the prison at the time you were visiting and
7 the time in and around the time you had visited?
8 A. Yes, he said that at that point there were 79
9 Muslim prisoners. There had been more. He said on
10 16th April they had 107 prisoners, on 6th May they had
11 109 prisoners and on 9th May they also had 109
12 prisoners. I am not sure that their statistics were
13 completely precise, because they had some difficulty
14 reconciling the list he produced with the people we
15 actually saw, but there or thereabouts I am sure he
16 knew more or less how many he had.
17 Q. Your visit to the Kaonik camp had been
18 prearranged, had it not?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. You did not just appear at the gates of the
21 of the camp, knock on the door and say, "I would like
22 to see the commander of the prison camp", did you?
23 A. No. I am not sure exactly what the route was
24 by which the message was passed, but we had certainly
25 passed a message, or ECMM had passed a message saying
1 that we would like to visit.
2 Q. Okay. When you arrived at the camp, you were
3 given an opportunity to inspect the cells, were you
4 not; some of the cells?
5 A. We went into one building and we looked into
6 most, if not all of the cells. We saw all the cells
7 that had people in them in that one building. At the
8 time I had the -- I understood that there were more --
9 a further facility or another building or buildings
10 further down the road. We would have had the
11 opportunity to look at these buildings if we had wanted
12 to, we certainly were not prevented from doing that,
13 but by the end of our visit, we were making some
14 progress around the issue of whether or not civilian
15 prisoners could be released, so we decided we would
16 actually go back to Zenica to try and make progress
17 with that, as opposed to inspecting the rest of the
18 facility.
19 Q. You said that there were usually six to eight
20 people inside an individual cell: you are talking about
21 six to eight Muslims inside a cell?
22 A. Yes, I imagine that the cells were probably
23 designed for one or two people. I would guess they are
24 designed for about that. I cannot remember precisely
25 how many people were in each cell, but it was in that
1 sort of range. There was certainly one cell that we
2 went into off the same corridor which had two Croatian
3 military prisoners. I do not know what they had been
4 charged with, but they were there and there was a stark
5 contrast between them and their circumstances and the
6 circumstances of the other people that we had seen,
7 Muslims we had seen. Possibly they would have put more
8 Croats into a cell if there had been more of them, I do
9 not know, but these two characters had a significant
10 amount of what appeared to be personal possessions.
11 The room was full of bags and rucksacks and bits and
12 pieces which clearly belonged to them, whereas the
13 other people we had seen did not seem to have anything
14 with them and there was certainly a lot more of them in
15 each room.
16 Q. Aleksovski did, in fact, inform you that the
17 civilians that were being kept in the conditions that
18 you have described were being kept there for their own
19 protection, is that not right?
20 A. Yes. The basic explanation for having
21 civilians there -- although as I have said, we had this
22 debate about whether they were civilians or soldiers,
23 and they seemed to be either civilians or soldiers
24 depending on how the debate was going, but civilians
25 were there for their protection. It was rather
1 bizarre.
2 Q. So the conditions in which you saw the two
3 Croat soldiers, who presumably had been charged with a
4 crime, were considerably better than the conditions in
5 which the Muslims were being kept for their own
6 protection, is that correct?
7 A. On the basis of the number of people in the
8 cell and the amount of personal possessions which they
9 had, then yes, there was a difference. It may well
10 have been that the Muslims did not have any possessions
11 with them at the time they were brought to the prison,
12 but yes, there was very clearly a difference.
13 Q. Did it appear to you that the Muslim
14 prisoners in the Kaonik Prison that you saw were
15 civilians?
16 A. Yes, the people that I saw were all wearing
17 civilian clothes. There may have been some people
18 wearing a mix, I do not have any particular memory of
19 people wearing mixed uniform and civilian clothes, I am
20 pretty sure I did not see any Muslims wearing uniform.
21 There may have been one or two, but I certainly do not
22 remember them.
23 Q. Did you have an opportunity to talk to any of
24 those prisoners and identify them as people who had
25 been previously identified to you by the Muslim
1 authorities as being in custody in Kaonik camp, some of
2 the 13 civilians?
3 A. Yes. As I was going into each of the cells,
4 after a while -- rather stupidly, only after a while --
5 it occurred to me that I ought to make a mark on the
6 list that I had of the people I had actually seen, and
7 so I did eventually realise that I should make a little
8 mark on the list and did so. Certainly there were a
9 couple of people whose names occurred on the list of
10 prisoners which I was given by Mr. Aleksovski which
11 tallied with the list of names I had been given by the
12 mayor of Zenica.
13 Q. Did Mr. Aleksovski also talk to you about the
14 removal of the population from the village of Jelinak?
15 I am referring to page 4 of your report, approximately
16 middle of the page?
17 A. Yes, he described to me how in Jelinak, they
18 had gathered all the women and children into one house
19 to protect them from the men who had lost brothers, so
20 presumably this is protecting them from the Croatian
21 men who had lost brothers, and he said:
22 "Then we told them to go to Zenica. They
23 escorted them on foot to the petrol station, then told
24 them to go to Zenica."
25 The petrol station he was referring to was
1 near the Busovaca T junction, so quite close to the
2 prison; also quite close to the no-man's land between
3 the Croats and the Muslims on that road.
4 Q. What did he tell you about the village of
5 Jelinak and when it was burned?
6 A. He said that the BiH now controlled Jelinak,
7 he said the village had been burnt at the very
8 beginning, on the second day of fighting. He said that
9 we were on one side, the Croats were on one side and
10 they, the Muslims, were on the other side. They, the
11 Muslims, had started shelling and the Croats had
12 withdrawn from their positions. Then they, presumably
13 the Muslims had burnt the houses and all of them had
14 been burnt.
15 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Harmon, have you completed?
16 MR. HARMON: I am sorry, Mr. President.
17 JUDGE JORDA: Yes, I was going to suggest, if
18 you have completed this section on Aleksovski, we could
19 have the break, except if you have more questions on
20 Aleksovski. Of course, let me note that this is the
21 Blaskic trial, not the Aleksovski trial.
22 MR. HARMON: I understand, Mr. President.
23 I have a couple more questions and then I will
24 conclude --
25 JUDGE JORDA: Still on Aleksovski?
1 MR. HARMON: Related briefly to the Kaonik
2 Prison, however.
3 JUDGE JORDA: I realise that, you have done
4 well to remind me of that. I know that the Kaonik
5 Prison is part of the indictment. I am seeking to
6 ensure efficiency of the proceedings and I notice that
7 sometimes we repeat things that have already been said
8 in the report. But this is just a comment in passing.
9 I should like us to adjourn now and resume at 3.00 pm.
10 (12.45 pm)
11 (Adjourned until 3.00 pm)
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
1 (3.10 pm)
2 JUDGE JORDA: We will resume now. Please
3 have the accused brought in.
4 (Accused brought in)
5 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Prosecutor, we will continue
6 with the statement by Mr. McLeod.
7 MR. HARMON: Thank you, Mr. President and
8 your Honours.
9 Mr. McLeod, before we continue with your
10 testimony, I would just like you to clarify one portion
11 of one of the parts of your report that you referenced
12 earlier this morning, and that is a joint statement
13 that is attached to the materials that were given to
14 you by Mr. Santic and Skopljak and I am referring to
15 appendix 2 to annex F. Specifically, I am referring to
16 the first paragraph in that proposed draft joint
17 statement, and there is a reference on the
18 fourth line down in paragraph 1, the letters "KOS" and
19 I am referring to the sentence that says as follows:
20 "The conflict was provoked by the extreme
21 forces aided by the members of KOS with the purpose of
22 weakening the resistance toward the Serbo-Chetnik
23 aggressor."
24 Can you please tell the judges what you
25 understand to be "KOS", what it means?
1 A. Certainly. I am afraid I do not know exactly
2 what KOS stands for. My understanding in this context
3 is that it might be a Serbian intelligence agency, but
4 I am not certain.
5 Q. Thank you for that clarification, Mr. McLeod.
6 Now let me turn to your conclusions in this, based on
7 your experiences on the ground in Central Bosnia, based
8 on your interviews with people from ECMM, from UNPROFOR
9 and from the parties themselves, could you tell the
10 court what conclusions you reached?
11 A. Certainly. It is worth starting by saying
12 that the report was written at the time for people who
13 were already thoroughly immersed in the situation as it
14 was there and who had access to and were constantly
15 reading a lot of material reporting what was going on,
16 so it was assumed that people understood exactly what
17 the background was, and the conclusions that I wrote
18 were kept deliberately extremely short with all of the
19 other detailed notes of the meeting I had had appended
20 to it.
21 The conclusion that I reached was that on
22 16th April, the Croatian forces in the Lasva Valley had
23 launched a series of attacks on Muslim positions in
24 Vitez and the villages in the Lasva Valley. At the
25 same time, they had arrested a number of prominent
1 Muslims within Vitez early in the morning of 16th April
2 and I had met some of those people then in Kaonik
3 Prison, I had actually seen them with my own eyes.
4 The most violent attack which they had
5 carried out appeared to be in the village of Ahmici,
6 where as I saw, the majority of the houses which as far
7 as I could tell had been occupied by Muslims had been
8 burnt. I was told that a lot of people had been killed
9 in the village, and I think that was the general
10 understanding at the time, but I certainly saw the
11 village had been razed to the ground and what appeared
12 to have been a fairly serious and a co-ordinated
13 attack. It certainly was not a couple of isolated
14 incidents in the village, it was thoroughly razed.
15 At the same time, there appeared to have been
16 moves to move the Croatian population out of Zenica and
17 there was evidence of this, I was told this, I could
18 see some of the houses that had been burnt after people
19 had moved out and I had the impression that this had
20 been done at least as much at the instigation of the
21 Croats in Vitez in order to justify what they were then
22 doing as a result of fear or intimidation on the part
23 of the Muslims, so it struck me that this movement of
24 Muslim population out of Zenica had been on a different
25 basis, if you like, to that of the Muslim population
1 out of Vitez.
2 MR. HARMON: Mr. McLeod, let me just correct
3 you, you said movement on the part of the Muslims out
4 of Zenica. Did you mean movement on the part of Croats
5 out of Zenica?
6 A. Yes, I apologise. It is movement of the
7 Croatian population, Croats living in the Zenica area.
8 Thank you for the correction.
9 By the time that I was in the area in the
10 second week of May, so some three weeks later, it
11 seemed that quite a lot of the Croatian population had
12 been able to return to their houses and there seemed to
13 be evidence -- I was shown things by the Muslim
14 officials but the Croatian priests in Zenica gave the
15 impression that there were steps being taken which
16 while not perfect, they were content that steps were
17 being taken to try and allow Croats to come back to
18 their houses and to allow some semblance of normality
19 to be returned slowly. It was not perfect, but there
20 was progress in that direction.
21 Again, by the time that I got there in the
22 second week of May, in Vitez the Muslim population were
23 concentrated or certainly appeared to be concentrated
24 either in villages which were isolated on the edge of
25 Vitez or in Stari Vitez, old Vitez, in the middle of
1 town, and as far as I could see, there was no freedom
2 of movement, either out of these villages or out of the
3 old sector of town and I went into old Vitez once and
4 there was clearly a degree of fear and people were not
5 able to move out and in, they were not getting supplies
6 of food. I was certainly told about various attacks
7 which were continuing, although while I was actually
8 there there was no artillery fire or sniping against
9 us, probably because we were actually in that part of
10 the town.
11 As far as I could see, and this is based on
12 both what Colonel Blaskic had told me and what UNPROFOR
13 and the ECMM monitors had told me, the Muslim reaction
14 to the attacks on the 16th April had been to try and
15 counterattack, to cut the roads on both sides of Vitez,
16 so as to isolate Vitez and Busovaca, and I think that
17 they had been successful in their counterattacks up to
18 the point when the international community intervened
19 and arranged a cease-fire. I am not quite sure how far
20 things would have got, but I think Colonel Blaskic's
21 appreciation of what might have happened thereafter was
22 probably quite accurate, that the Muslim counterattack
23 would have been quite effective and would have isolated
24 the Croats in Vitez.
25 It struck me, as I sat back at the end of my
1 visit and as I returned back to Zagreb and wrote my
2 conclusions, that on the one hand the Croats that I had
3 met, they left me with the clear impression that what
4 they had been trying to do was to establish a Croatian
5 state in Central Bosnia linked to the Croatian areas
6 further to the west up towards the coast, that what
7 they wanted was to have a largely Croatian or majority
8 Croatian state which they controlled, that they had
9 attempted to force the Muslim population to move out of
10 the area that they wanted to control, that they had
11 been using fairly extreme methods. As a modest
12 Englishman, that is how I would put it, they had been
13 using fairly extreme methods to try and encourage the
14 Muslim population to move. I do not know whether
15 Ahmici was a one-off and it was intended as an example
16 to terrorise people or whether they would have
17 replicated that degree of burning of houses throughout
18 other villages had they been able to. I just do not
19 know, but quite clearly in one particular village they
20 had caused very extreme damage, with the result that
21 the majority of the Muslim population were then either
22 cooped up in a couple of completely surrounded areas or
23 had moved, so by that token, I think they were
24 achieving what they were trying to do.
25 I think they were only prevented from being
1 completely successful by the reaction of the Muslim
2 army, and then intervention of the international
3 community, which stabilised the position in the terms
4 in which I found it some three weeks later, and by the
5 time that I was writing my report, I think it was fair
6 to say -- it would be fair to say that what I would
7 seen in a microcosm in Vitez, Busovaca and Zenica was
8 being played out throughout Central Bosnia and indeed
9 down to Mostar by then, where again, from my point of
10 view, the impression that I formed in light of the
11 information which I could see and all the reporting
12 that I was reading in ECMM was that the same pattern
13 was being replicated, with extreme violence or terror,
14 however you want to describe it, being used to try and
15 move the Muslim population in order to create an
16 one-party state, with only one particular type of
17 people with one religion.
18 So that I think is probably the substance of
19 the conclusions I reached. It is worth noting that the
20 report, the brief one page at the front which I wrote
21 was vetted by headquarters of ECMM, because clearly
22 what I was saying was not to be taken lightly, having
23 been down there, and the deputy head of the mission on
24 the political side, Ole Brix-Andersen, read this and we
25 actually changed the precise detail of some of the
1 elements of what I had written, in fact in order to
2 tone it down. They said, "you could be seen as a young
3 man who has been here, who has witnessed something
4 which is quite terrible and is painting a slightly more
5 extreme view than is necessary", so we actually toned
6 down what I had written a little bit and then they were
7 quite -- by the time we had finished revising it, very
8 rapidly on 15th May, they were content that what we had
9 was as balanced a view as the ECMM could get, and at
10 that point it was published and disseminated as I have
11 described earlier on.
12 MR. HARMON: Thank you very much, Mr. McLeod.
13 Mr. President, I would move Prosecutor's
14 Exhibit 242 into evidence and I have concluded then
15 with my direct examination of Mr. McLeod.
16 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you very much. So we
17 have ended now the examination-in-chief, is it
18 Mr. Hayman who is going to do the cross-examination?
19 Cross-examined by MR. HAYMAN
20 Q. Yes, Mr. President, and we have no additional
21 objections to the report other than those previously
22 reserved.
23 Good afternoon. Let me ask you, how many
24 days were you on the ground in the Lasva Valley
25 gathering the data for your report?
1 A. I travelled in on 3rd May and I left on
2 12th May, so that is nine days.
3 Q. Were you working all nine days?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. In that time, you received a briefing from --
6 one or more briefings from BritBat, is that right?
7 A. Yes, that is correct.
8 Q. And a briefing from your ECMM colleagues,
9 I presume?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Any other briefings from international
12 organisations that you received?
13 A. I also had conversations with members of the
14 ICRC and also a conversation with a member of UNHCR.
15 Q. In addition to the interviews you have
16 recounted, and the documents attached as annexes, did
17 you receive any other documents or have access to any
18 other documents from either of the warring parties?
19 A. As I think I said earlier on, there were also
20 maps which were marked by people in the other
21 interviews, but unfortunately I have lost those
22 subsequently. But in terms of documents that were
23 given to me, I think I have actually managed to keep
24 everything which I was given, they are included in the
25 report.
1 Q. So you received no other military records
2 other than what we have here in Exhibit 242, is that
3 right?
4 A. I am pretty sure I managed to hold on to
5 everything and include it in the report.
6 Q. Were you able to interview any BiH army
7 soldiers or commanders in the Vitez municipality as
8 part of your study?
9 A. Yes, and as I think you can see there is a
10 report of a meeting that I had.
11 Q. Is that with a commander in Kruscica?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. Any others?
14 A. No, I did not talk to any of them. The only
15 other people I could have spoken to I think would have
16 been in Stari Vitez and I did not speak to anybody
17 there.
18 Q. Other than what you have said in your report,
19 did you gather any additional information concerning
20 the placement or existence of BiH army or Territorial
21 Defence Forces in the Lasva Valley in April 1993?
22 A. Could you explain exactly what you are after
23 there in terms of, "did I gather"?
24 Q. You have said you visited the BiH army command
25 post in Kruscica.
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. And you visited Stari Vitez.
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. Was there a BiH army presence in Stari Vitez
5 when you visited that position?
6 A. There were certainly -- mm. I am trying to
7 remember seeing people with guns. I think there must
8 have been some people with guns, because otherwise they
9 would have been overrun.
10 Q. It seems like a reasonable assumption to me.
11 Tell us what you recall.
12 A. I am attempting to recall precisely what
13 I saw. On the occasion we went into Stari Vitez, there
14 was a meeting taking place and Ambassador Thebault,
15 I think, went to that meeting, but I did not go to the
16 meeting, I sat on top of the vehicle and looked at what
17 was going on.
18 Q. Did you meet an individual called Sefkija
19 Dzidic during your visit to Stari Vitez?
20 A. No, I do not think so.
21 Q. My question a moment ago was in addition to
22 those experiences, in the course of your study, did you
23 learn, for example, whether there was an Armija or
24 Territorial Defence position or group in, for example,
25 Donje Veceriska at or about the time it was attacked in
1 mid April 1993? Did you gather any information on that
2 subject, for example?
3 A. Can I just work out where Donje Veceriska is
4 and then maybe I can answer you.
5 Q. Certainly. Do you have something that would
6 assist you in that regard?
7 A. Yes, I have a map at the back of my report,
8 so perhaps I can find it.
9 Q. If you know where it is, perhaps you could
10 point it out for me.
11 A. To the south west of Vitez.
12 Q. We have better maps if that would be helpful
13 Donje Veceriska is directly west of Vitez. Gacice is
14 south west of Vitez.
15 A. To aid me, I am actually using the map marked
16 by Colonel Blaskic, so I see where Veceriska and Gacice
17 are. If I use the information which he gave me, he
18 marked it as being a mixed village and therefore
19 I would assume that there would have been units from
20 both sides in that village, but I am not sure if that
21 is a suitable answer for you.
22 Q. That is an assumption, I am glad you have
23 stated it. Can you tell us, as part of your study, did
24 you attempt to gather any more specific information
25 about which of the villages that were the subject of
1 conflict in mid April 1993 had BiH army or Territorial
2 Defence units in them at the time of those conflicts?
3 A. No.
4 Q. Now I would like to direct your attention to
5 your interview with Mayor Spahic, which is found in
6 your report, beginning at page A-1, if you would like
7 to have that available for reference.
8 A. Certainly.
9 MR. HAYMAN: You told us that you learned in
10 the course of your study --
11 JUDGE JORDA: Excuse me, which annex? Is it
12 annex A?
13 MR. HAYMAN: I believe it is beginning on
14 page A-1, Besim Spahic, mayor of Zenica.
15 A. The French version does not have the
16 page numbers at the bottom of it.
17 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you.
18 MR. HAYMAN: You learned in this interview or
19 in another that some 2,000 Bosnian Croats had fled the
20 Zenica municipality during the conflict in mid April
21 1993, is that correct?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. Did someone tell you that that was due
24 principally to propaganda disseminated by Bosnian
25 Croats themselves?
1 A. That was the impression that I was given,
2 yes.
3 Q. Who gave you that impression?
4 A. I think I probably formed that impression
5 based on my meetings and conversations with people in
6 Zenica, a combination of the Muslim officials I spoke
7 to and then also the priest that I spoke to, as well as
8 what I was told by members of ECMM.
9 Q. Did anyone tell you that any such propaganda
10 emanated from then Colonel Blaskic?
11 A. Nobody was being precise about exactly who
12 was disseminating that information, no.
13 Q. Did anyone suggest that any such propaganda
14 emanated from the operative zone level of the HVO
15 command in Central Bosnia; that is Colonel Blaskic's
16 headquarters?
17 A. Nobody was saying precisely where the
18 propaganda was being generated.
19 Q. Did you interview any of the 2,000 displaced
20 persons to determine from them why they fled the Zenica
21 municipality?
22 A. No, I did not have that opportunity.
23 Q. Did you learn from your interviews whether
24 during this period of time in the middle of April 1993,
25 whether the Zenica municipality, was it a safe or was
1 it an unsafe locale, generally speaking, for Bosnian
2 Croats?
3 A. During the period leading up to the middle of
4 April?
5 Q. From the 16th on, beginning on 15th or
6 16th April and in the following days.
7 A. I think it was probably relatively unsafe in
8 comparison with the way it had been immediately before
9 that and I would evidence that by the fact that people
10 were taking steps to make it safe again.
11 Q. You described one meeting with Father Stjepan
12 and a meeting with Father Bozo. I would like to ask
13 you about apparently a second meeting you had with
14 Father Stjepan, which is recounted, and again
15 I apologise, Mr. President, the best way for me to find
16 pages is to use the alpha-numeric designation at the
17 bottom of the page. This is on page E-2, and that is
18 the second page in the English version of your notes or
19 write-up of your meeting with Father Bozo of Cajdras.
20 A. I see what you are referring to, it is the
21 second and third paragraphs on that page.
22 Q. Let me ask you, in connection with your
23 meetings on this day, did you also meet with
24 Father Stjepan and did he present you with a list of
25 problems and difficulties that the Croat population in
1 the Zenica municipality had been facing or was facing?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. Did those include the statement by
4 Father Stjepan that:
5 "We are now in danger."
6 And:
7 "MOS come at night to their homes", referring
8 to the homes of Bosnian Croats or HVO soldiers, "and
9 take them."
10 Did he make that statement to you, in writing
11 or orally?
12 A. Yes, and I think that if we turn to appendix
13 1 to that annex, then you can see the English
14 translation and the original typed report as I was
15 given it.
16 Q. Did he also tell you, two paragraphs further
17 down in your statement of your meeting with Father Bozo
18 that:
19 "They shoot pigs and steal cows and they take
20 food day and [something]. Criminals take everything
21 and destroy everything."
22 Was that also a statement he made to you,
23 Father Stjepan?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. Did he say a couple of paragraphs further
1 down in your report that to date, and that would have
2 been as of 8th May, 65 or 70 homes have been burnt; did
3 he make that representation to you?
4 A. Yes, he said only one house was burnt during
5 the conflict and now, so presumably that is in the
6 intervening three weeks, 65 or 70 houses have been
7 burnt.
8 Q. In the aftermath of 16th April 1993, some 65
9 or 70 homes of Bosnian Croats in the Zenica
10 municipality have been burned; was that your
11 understanding of what you were being told?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. He summed up two paragraphs later by stating:
14 "Increasingly there is no security so people
15 leave."
16 Is that correct?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. Later on, over on the next page, he recited
19 various statistics of the number of dead, houses burned
20 and robbed, including a total of 12 civilians killed in
21 the conflict, is that right?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. You said earlier I believe that
24 Father Stjepan, he was a moderate who advocated ethnic
25 reconciliation, is that correct?
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. In your interview with Mayor Spahic, did he
3 tell you in substance that he was doing everything he
4 could to prevent violence and attacks against Croats in
5 the municipality of Zenica?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Did you believe him?
8 A. I think when I took what he said in context
9 with what other people were saying as well, that seemed
10 to be what they were trying to do. I think as I said
11 earlier on, the circumstances were fairly difficult.
12 Q. They were very difficult, so despite the best
13 efforts of the authorities in the Zenica municipality,
14 some 70 Bosnian Croat houses had been burned, 12
15 civilians had been killed and there was a general state
16 of lawlessness and lack of security, is that correct?
17 A. That is what one can deduce by taking this at
18 face value, yes.
19 Q. That is a fair inference, would you agree?
20 A. Yes.
21 MR. HAYMAN: Please give us an audible answer,
22 that would help for purposes of the transcript.
23 Now Mayor Spahic also showed you a decree,
24 did he not, which he issued on 18th April 1993 and
25 which is found in your report at page A1-1.
1 For purposes of the French version,
2 Mr. President, that is appendix 1 following the
3 statement of Besim Spahic titled, "orders for the
4 return of refugees to Zenica".
5 In that decree or statement, directing your
6 attention to I, did the mayor call for the
7 establishment of joint checkpoints and joint patrols to
8 include both Armija and HVO forces?
9 A. Yes.
10 Q. Did you learn from your study that at the
11 time this was issued -- and I apologise, this is dated
12 April 17th 1993, not 18th -- did you learn from your
13 study that at this time in fact the BiH army had
14 attacked the HVO in Zenica and there was ongoing armed
15 confrontation between the two?
16 A. Yes, that was the case and so what they were
17 trying to do was to stop that. My recollection is not
18 perfect, but I think that there was an area of Zenica
19 where there was still a fight going on, or had been
20 going on, but I think there were other areas which were
21 returning to calm and they were probably, this is my
22 inference, suggesting that in those areas where there
23 was not a fight going on, they ought to have joint
24 patrols.
25 Q. Although at this time, would you agree in
1 those areas where the Armija and the HVO was not in
2 actual conflict, that was because the HVO had been
3 captured and they were locked up?
4 A. I am not sure if all of them had been locked
5 up, but yes, certainly a number of them had been, as
6 evidenced by the priest that I spoke to, who talked
7 about the people in those circumstances.
8 Q. Turning to the next page, I think it is a
9 different decree, although there is no real title, it
10 is title, "Conclusions", I and II, and it is dated
11 April 18th 1993. Let me first direct your attention to
12 that. Have you found it? In the bottom numbering in
13 the English it is A1-2.
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. In this document, Mayor Spahic called, in I,
16 for the respective headquarters of the warring parties
17 to "immediately give orders for unconditional
18 cease-fire"; do you see that?
19 A. Yes.
20 MR. HAYMAN: If Exhibit D76, Mr. Registrar, if
21 D76 could be retrieved to be provided to the witness.
22 While that is being retrieved, let me ask
23 you, in the course of conducting your study, did you
24 learn that in fact Colonel Blaskic issued an order on
25 this day, 18th April 1993, calling for a cease-fire on
1 the part of the HVO? If you would provide it to the
2 witness, please? Specifically I would direct you to
3 paragraph 1 of that order. Did you learn that in the
4 course of your study, that Colonel Blaskic ordered a
5 cease-fire on the date Mayor Spahic called for it,
6 18th April 1993?
7 A. No, but it sounds as if they were working
8 quite closely in co-operation and looking at the
9 addresses on this, I imagine that this was the product
10 of one of the Joint Commissions which was being run at
11 that time by Colonel Stewart and Ambassador Thebault,
12 so the fact we have the two things at the same time is
13 probably on both sides the result of the same meeting,
14 I suspect.
15 MR. HAYMAN: Do you know whether the BiH army
16 command issued a similar order?
17 JUDGE JORDA: Can we put the exhibit on the
18 ELMO, please?
19 MR. HAYMAN: Yes, please, Mr. President. My
20 mental lapse.
21 JUDGE JORDA: Because this dialogue between
22 the Defence and the witness is something that the
23 judges would like to participate in. I think this is
24 an exhibit that you have already offered? Yes, I think
25 I remember that.
1 MR. HAYMAN: Yes. There is a French written
2 translation available. I was calling the witness's
3 attention to paragraph 1.
4 JUDGE JORDA: I still do not see it.
5 MR. HAYMAN: Yes, if we could zoom in on the
6 order, please? If we could enlarge the middle portion
7 of the text of the order, please. Thank you.
8 Calling the witness's attention, I was,
9 Mr. President, to paragraph 1 and I will read it so we
10 can obtain a sight translation:
11 "I command 1. All the subordinate HVO units
12 are to stop immediately all combat actions against the
13 units of the ABiH."
14 I was posing a follow-up question and that
15 is: did you learn in the course of your study whether
16 the BiH army command issued a similar call or order for
17 a cease-fire on 18th April 1993, or do you not know?
18 A. On the English translation of the document
19 dated 18th April, you do not see the address list, but
20 if you turn to the original, which is a few pages on,
21 it is A1-6, then down at the bottom I think we can see
22 the address list.
23 Q. So a copy of this document, the decree, if
24 you will, of 18th April 1993, we can tell from this
25 copy which is part of your report that it went to the
1 HVO in Zenica.
2 A. Yes, so it goes to III Corps of the ABiH --
3 shall I put this on the projector as well, sir?
4 Q. Please. You are directing your attention to
5 the lower left-hand corner which is the distribution
6 list in Serbo-Croat, correct?
7 A. Yes. I think what we can see here is -- this
8 is the document signed by the president, by the mayor
9 of Zenica, it is going to III Corps of the ABiH and
10 then is also going to the HVO in Zenica, so he is
11 disseminating the same order in the area that he
12 controls and I assume that the original document you
13 would have shown me would have been disseminated on the
14 Vitez side.
15 Q. This document, would you agree, this is a
16 conclusion of the mayor that the respective
17 headquarters are requested to give an order for a
18 cease-fire; that is the contents of Mayor Spahic's
19 document in I, correct?
20 A. Yes, I would infer that what was happening
21 was that the political control was saying, "stop
22 fighting", and then I imagine, but I do not have a copy
23 of, an order which would then have been disseminated
24 from III Corps.
25 Q. You would expect that III Corps would have
1 issued a similar cease-fire order on 18th April 1993,
2 is that right?
3 A. I would assume so. If, as I imagine, there
4 was a tripartite meeting, a Joint Commission, they
5 would have agreed they were going to do it and what we
6 see on both sides is that information being
7 disseminated.
8 Q. They would have done so if they were working
9 with the political forces and the HVO to achieve a
10 cease-fire in the same way that the HVO command was,
11 correct?
12 A. That is what I would assume, although I do
13 not have that piece of paper.
14 MR. HAYMAN: Let me turn your attention to
15 your interview with Father Stjepan which begins on
16 page B-1 of the English version and that is annex B,
17 Mr. President. In paragraph 4 of this statement, it
18 appears Father Stjepan described a process of
19 action/reaction that he stated was occurring within
20 Central Bosnia and he described, for example, a family
21 expelled from Vitez causes a reaction here, meaning in
22 Zenica. Did you hear this concept described by others,
23 such as when the Imam of Busovaca described threats
24 being made to Muslim residents of Busovaca by Croat
25 refugees from surrounding villages who had been
1 expelled and were in Busovaca?
2 A. Yes, I think that despite the breakdown in
3 communications, in practice people could communicate
4 and there were a number of examples both in terms of
5 what was happening to people in their houses and also
6 what was happening to prisoners to suggest yes, there
7 was a degree of tit for tat, if you like.
8 Q. On the next page of your report, again this
9 same interview with Father Stjepan, did he complain of
10 a problem of discrimination against Bosnian Croats in
11 Zenica in that, for example, former steelworkers who
12 were of Croatian ethnicity, or at least those who had
13 been said to have joined the HVO, were not given food
14 rations which were at the time a substitute for salary
15 or pension?
16 A. Yes, I think that the justification -- not
17 justification, the explanation which he gave was that,
18 or that he had been given was that these people were
19 now in prison, and because they were in prison, they
20 were not working and therefore not getting their food
21 ration, but the substance is exactly that, yes.
22 Q. Because others similarly situated, fighting,
23 otherwise not employed, they were getting a food ration
24 as you understood it?
25 A. Correct.
1 Q. Let me direct you to the next interview you
2 document in your report, the head of ICRC Zenica,
3 I will not use his name in case there is an issue, but
4 you met with the head of ICRC Zenica on 7th May 1993,
5 is that right?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Did you ask him what access ICRC had to
8 Bosnian Croat prisoners who were being held in Zenica?
9 A. Yes, in light of my previous experience
10 working in the humanitarian section, I was aware of the
11 need to be in close co-operation with the ICRC and so
12 one of the things that I did, as you can see fairly
13 early I wanted to go and meet them and say, "we are
14 taking various steps as best we can" and to make sure
15 we did not tread on their toes.
16 Q. Did he tell you how many prisons there were
17 in Zenica holding Bosnian Croat prisoners at the time,
18 7th May 1993? Paragraph 2 I would direct your
19 attention to.
20 A. He alluded to three prisons, one of which
21 they had access to and two of which they did not.
22 Q. Can you name them, please?
23 A. Certainly. He said they had access to the
24 main prison, I do not know what the main prison was
25 called other than being the main prison, and then he
1 said not to the MUP, which I assume is the police
2 prison, or the music school.
3 Q. The MUP is the Ministry of State Security?
4 A. Yes, I am not sure if that is exactly what
5 the initials stand for, but that is what I understand.
6 Q. The music school, did you understand that was
7 the headquarters of 7th Muslim Brigade?
8 A. I did not know it was the headquarters of the
9 7th Muslim Brigade, but I did understand it was a
10 facility controlled by that entity.
11 Q. Now let me direct your attention to your
12 interview with Father Bozo, which is in Appendix E of
13 your report. I take it when you spoke to him, was this
14 the meeting at which you were on the steps of a church
15 or a building, and there were a number of parishioners
16 surrounding you and the Father?
17 A. Yes, as I said earlier on, we started off in
18 his house, we then went for a tour to a village at the
19 top of the hill, and then came back to the church, yes.
20 Q. Did he describe, as set forth in paragraph 2
21 of your report, that parishioners in his area, the
22 Cajdras area, left their homes after they were
23 subjected to pressure and houses were burned?
24 A. Yes, so my note is that he said that
25 80 per cent of people stayed in their homes and after
1 that there was high pressure and burning of houses and
2 threats, so after that, all of them ran away.
3 Q. Then two paragraphs later, does he describe
4 an incident of looting in which the looters had
5 military uniforms, and when the military police from
6 the III Corps of the Armija arrived, they let the
7 robbers escape but they took into custody an Australian
8 TV crew that was trying to film these events; did he
9 relate that to you?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Can you describe the state, if there was a
12 state of anxiety and agitation among the parishioners
13 around you at the time; what was their state?
14 A. They were extremely concerned to know what
15 was going on, they were extremely concerned to know
16 what had happened to individual members of their
17 families, and they wanted to know what was going to
18 happen next.
19 Q. Did you view their concerns as real?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. Let me direct your attention forward in your
22 report to appendix F, your interview with Santic and
23 Skopljak. At the bottom of page 1 of your report,
24 there appears to be an allusion, I assume by Mr. Santic,
25 to information of an impending attack on 15th April
1 1993. Can you elaborate on that for us? What was the
2 information that Mr. Santic gave you in that regard?
3 A. What we have here is precisely what I wrote
4 down, there may have been some more detail which
5 I missed. What he was saying was that on 15th April,
6 so the day before everything broke down, that there was
7 a rumour of an attack from Zenica to Vitez, so people
8 were agitated. I think that would be how I would
9 characterise that.
10 Q. Did you learn in your study of any other
11 events on 15th April 1993 that might have lent credence
12 to that type of a report, such as any attacks on HVO
13 commanders, or did you not?
14 A. I do not think so, no.
15 Q. Would you agree that at the time the Armija
16 was certainly capable of launching a significant attack
17 on Vitez from Zenica, with the forces available to it
18 in Zenica?
19 A. Yes, I think so and I think that one can see
20 from what happened a few days later; we will not say it
21 is an attack or a counterattack, but certainly they
22 proved themselves capable of making ground.
23 Q. In that such a military action took place?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. Turning to the next page of this statement,
1 did Mr. Santic also tell you that because there was an
2 explosives factory in Vitez, I believe he said "every
3 tenth man has too much explosives", or explosives in
4 his private custody; did he tell you that?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. Did you determine from your study or
7 investigation whether in fact there was an explosives
8 factory in the immediate vicinity of Vitez?
9 A. I believe there was, yes.
10 Q. Now let me direct your attention to the
11 bottom of page F-1 in the English report. This is the
12 statement of Mr. Santic which you have advised is
13 inconsistent with your notes, namely the statement
14 concerning whether Blaskic had ordered his forces not
15 to enter Muslim homes or has to order, has to make such
16 an order. Do you find that passage?
17 A. Bottom of F-2, yes.
18 Q. When you prepared your report initially from
19 your notes, did you base it solely on your notes or did
20 you also use your actual recollection of these
21 interviews and what was said at the interviews?
22 A. For the most part, I just sat and typed the
23 hand-written notes straight up as you see here, which is
24 why the grammar is less than perfect, and then also as
25 you can see, I interspersed with comments, bits based
1 on what I could remember, as opposed to that which
2 I had written down.
3 Q. After you typed it up, your notes, did you
4 read over it to determine whether your notes were
5 consistent with your actual recollection of the
6 meetings?
7 A. Yes, which is why I was able then to add
8 comments. I started off by typing the basic text from
9 my notebook, then ran through it and added in the
10 comments and interspersed comment so people could tell
11 the difference between a note and my own thoughts,
12 recollections.
13 Q. The comments aside, when you were writing up
14 the actual statements of the interviews, did you also
15 call upon your recollection of the interviews in
16 checking, if you will, the accuracy of what you were
17 writing, or did you not?
18 A. I certainly did in places where what I wrote
19 tailed off or was incomplete. In this particular case,
20 and I could show you the note in the original if you
21 are interested, but I think the original is fairly
22 clear, I was working quite fast and made a mistake.
23 Q. As you sit here today, do you recall what was
24 said on this subject in the interview, or are you
25 totally dependent on your notes?
1 A. I think for precision I would go back to my
2 notes.
3 Q. Do you have a recollection as you sit here on
4 what was said in the interview on this issue yourself?
5 It was four years ago.
6 A. No, I would not be able to say with any
7 degree of certainty, that specific element, whether it
8 was in one tense or the other tense.
9 MR. HAYMAN: If Exhibit D43 could be obtained,
10 Mr. President, and placed before the witness. The ELMO
11 could assist, I think, all of us.
12 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Registrar, do you have D43?
13 MR. HAYMAN: If we could zoom in on the text,
14 particularly the preamble and paragraph 1, that would
15 be helpful. Thank you. This is an order dated
16 22nd April 1993 which in part reads, from then
17 Colonel Blaskic, which reads:
18 "In order to prevent incidents in which
19 houses and other commercial facilities are set on fire
20 and looted, I hereby issue the following order.
21 "1. I strictly prohibit the torching of
22 houses and other commercial facilities and looting in
23 the zone of responsibility of the command of the
24 Central Bosnia operation zone controlled by HVO units."
25 Do you see that?
1 A. Yes, I do.
2 Q. My question is: does that refresh your
3 recollection as to any discussion you may have had with
4 Mr. Santic concerning the fact that such an order had
5 been issued by Colonel Blaskic concerning the
6 protection of Muslim homes and businesses?
7 A. I think if one takes into context the
8 preceding sentences before the precise sentence where
9 we think we have a potential misunderstanding or
10 inaccuracy, and if I read the preceding sentence:
11 "The government insists that local military
12 police in Vitez must be larger and it was done
13 yesterday. I think that the situation in Vitez will be
14 better from day-to-day."
15 I think in that context, clearly the
16 situation was still not perfect, so clearly this is an
17 order dated before my meeting with him. I can quite
18 easily imagine a situation where the order was given,
19 the order is quite clear and explicit, the order may
20 either not have been carried out properly or there may
21 have been a subsequent reason why things had broken
22 down again, but at the time I was having this
23 conversation with the mayor, I think what he was
24 telling me was, "we still need to make things better."
25 Q. What kind of an order did you understand
1 Mr. Santic to be suggesting; that is, do you think an
2 order could have been issued stating, "no soldier shall
3 enter a Muslim home for any purposes, including if the
4 home is a source of fire", that is rifle or sniper fire
5 or something like that; is that the kind of order that
6 you thought Mr. Santic was actually referring to, or did
7 it not make sense to you at the time?
8 A. In context, I think he was referring to
9 soldiers going into people's houses and beating them
10 up.
11 Q. To attack them or loot them or burn their
12 house, is that correct?
13 A. As opposed to military action because they
14 thought somebody was shooting at them. In the context
15 I think there is a difference.
16 JUDGE JORDA: Try to make a small break
17 between the question and answer, please, for the
18 benefit of the interpreters. Could you please answer
19 the previous question? Could you repeat the previous
20 question, please?
21 MR. HAYMAN: Yes, my question was: did you
22 understand in essence what Mr. Santic was referring to,
23 was suggesting that an order would be appropriate that
24 would prevent HVO soldiers from attacking Muslims in
25 their homes or looting their homes or seeking to burn
1 or damage their homes?
2 A. My understanding in the context of my notes
3 was that he was saying that HVO soldiers should be told
4 not to go into Muslim houses to beat them up or loot
5 them, as opposed to an order to prevent HVO soldiers
6 from firing on a Muslim house where they were being
7 fired on, from which they were being fired on.
8 Q. Thank you. Tell me, what caused you to
9 compare your report with your notes on this subject?
10 A. As you can imagine before coming here, I was
11 refreshing my memory and going through and checking and
12 this is a detail where there was a difference, and
13 I think that it is reasonable to say that as far as one
14 can, let us be as accurate as possible.
15 Q. So you were reading your notes to further
16 refresh your recollection before testifying?
17 A. It was nearly five years ago, so yes.
18 Q. Let me direct your attention forward,
19 although it is actually appendix D, and that is your
20 report of interview with Mr., or General Hadzihasanovic,
21 appendix D to your report. His position at the time
22 was commander of the Armija III Corps, correct?
23 A. Yes, that is what I understood.
24 Q. You met with him and had an interview with
25 him, is that right?
1 A. I was there during a very brief meeting which
2 was actually being run by Ambassador Thebault at which
3 Ambassador Thebault effectively had a brief de marche
4 and one element of that was, "that this chap McLeod is
5 here from Zagreb, he needs to speak to somebody, could
6 you recommend the appropriate person for him to speak
7 to?"
8 Q. I take it in the course of that encounter,
9 there was a substantive discussion on a certain number
10 of points and you have memorialised those in your
11 report?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. Did you conclude from your interview with
14 General Hadzihasanovic that he had been truthful and
15 candid with you in all respects?
16 A. Given that it was a very brief meeting, as
17 far as I could tell he was telling us what he thought.
18 I have very little on which to base the judgement as to
19 whether he was telling the truth or not.
20 Q. Among the things that he told you, he told
21 you that although he was the commander of the III
22 Corps, he had no knowledge of any prison in the MUP or
23 state security or any prison in the music school; is
24 that correct?
25 A. Yes.
1 Q. Did you find that credible?
2 A. I think looking at the notes, there is a
3 discrepancy, if I may be allowed to correct myself,
4 between what he has got there and then the fact that
5 access to the music school was not a probable, but he
6 would have to make a phone call first. In practice
7 I think he did have knowledge of it, yes.
8 Q. Could one not read -- excuse me, did you want
9 to continue?
10 A. I am not sure that I actually noted this
11 meeting in much detail, so I think what we have here is
12 me working from memory as opposed to working from a
13 verbatim account, which is why it is such a short note.
14 Q. I am not suggesting that General
15 Hadzihasanovic said to you in this meeting that he did
16 not know there was a music school, I am asking whether
17 his statement that he had no knowledge that there was a
18 prison or a location where Croats were being held
19 prisoner in the music school, whether you found that
20 credible?
21 A. I think that if one looks down to the next
22 line where he is talking about access to the music
23 school, I am quite confident from what I wrote there
24 that what he was talking about was access to a prison
25 there as opposed to simply being able to go into the
1 school. There is an inconsistency between what I wrote
2 in the second paragraph and what I wrote in the third
3 paragraph, for which I apologise, but this was five
4 years ago.
5 Q. If he said that he had no knowledge of a
6 prison in the music school, would it not be natural for
7 him to say, "but you can go look, access is no
8 problem". Would that not be entirely consistent?
9 A. That would be quite possible.
10 Q. General Hadzihasanovic also said that he had
11 to go slowly because he wanted to have the 7th Muslim
12 Brigade under control rather than not; did he say that?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. Then did he go on to say, "the Mujahedin are
15 not under control and there are many elements who are
16 not controlled"; did he make those statements?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. And did you believe him?
19 A. I was not clear by the time that I finished
20 exactly what the chain of command was with the
21 7th Muslim Brigade, so I did not really have a view on
22 that. Clearly this entity existed, the 7th Muslim
23 Brigade. Precisely what the chain of command was, I am
24 not sure.
25 Q. Now let me direct your attention to
1 appendix I, your interview with Commander Dugalic. You
2 have written in your report that Ramiz Dugalic was the
3 deputy commander of the III Corps Armija; do you know
4 what his responsibilities were in the III Corps?
5 A. I believe he was an intelligence officer or
6 something like that.
7 Q. At the top of the second page in the English
8 version, he told you that an HVO formation doing the
9 dirty work was Darko Kraljevic's unit, is that correct?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. He added that Mr. Kraljevic was an illicit
12 drug user?
13 A. That is what he said.
14 Q. And in connection with that discussion, he
15 gave you a document which is attached to your report,
16 correct?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. If you will turn to that document which is
19 I1-1 in the report, you will see that it is signed and
20 the title of the individual signing the ratification is
21 "Colonel Darko Kraljevic". Did you also understand
22 from your study that Tihomir Blaskic at the time was a
23 colonel?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. Did you learn as a result of your study what
1 the relationship was of Colonel Blaskic to Colonel
2 Kraljevic within the HVO chain of command?
3 A. No.
4 Q. From your knowledge of military structures,
5 is it possible to have two colonels on the same terrain
6 in the same chain of command?
7 A. Yes, in the -- to complicate things slightly,
8 in the British army you can have two people both called
9 a colonel and one is a full colonel and one is a
10 lieutenant colonel. I am not sure if there was any
11 difference in rank with apparently the same sounding
12 title and I can imagine having two people of the same
13 rank. It certainly exists in the UK right now in the
14 home command, where you have two people of the same
15 rank one being superior to the other, which does not
16 help anything.
17 Q. When you say, "within the home command", what
18 do you mean by that?
19 A. I have been out of the army for five years,
20 nearly six years now, but I understand right now in the
21 UK the way the army is structured, there are people of
22 the same rank, one of whom is in charge of the other
23 one.
24 Q. Would that be within a central command
25 location, or would that also be true out in the field
1 during wartime, for example, or do you not know?
2 A. I am not sure. As you asked the question
3 I thought of an example a friend of mine told me a few
4 weeks ago, where he found it strange when he found two
5 people of the same rank and described the difficulties
6 they were having getting on with that, but in response
7 to your question is it possible, yes, it is happening
8 right now in the UK.
9 Q. With respect to this situation where we had
10 apparently Colonel Blaskic and Colonel Kraljevic, did
11 you learn what their relationship was in fact in the
12 HVO chain of command as a result of your study or
13 otherwise?
14 A. No.
15 MR. HAYMAN: In the upper left-hand corner of
16 this ratification or order, we see the titles and
17 I assume -- may I enquire, Mr. President, does the court
18 have this? If not we can put it on the ELMO. This is
19 the attachment to appendix --
20 JUDGE JORDA: Which document?
21 MR. HAYMAN: The attachment to appendix I. It
22 is the order signed by Kraljevic.
23 JUDGE JORDA: The certificate? Yes, I have
24 it.
25 MR. HAYMAN: Do you see the title at the upper
1 left-hand corner, "Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
2 Croatian Community Herceg-Bosna, Department for
3 Defence, Unit Vitezovi, Vitez"; do you see that?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Do you know where the Department for Defence
6 was located within the Croatian Community of
7 Herceg-Bosna?
8 A. No.
9 Q. Was it in Vitez, or was it somewhere else or
10 do you know?
11 A. I do not know. Without being an expert,
12 I think the Department for Defence -- I infer from that
13 address group that we are simply talking about the HVO,
14 as opposed to as you or I would have the Department for
15 Defence as a separate entity in Washington or London.
16 Q. So you would expect to see the same title on
17 other orders issued, for example, by Colonel Blaskic or
18 brigade commanders within the central operative zone of
19 the HVO, correct?
20 A. Something like that, yes.
21 Q. Let me ask you, the seal on the original
22 version of this order has not been translated on the
23 English copy, I do not know, Mr. President, if it is
24 translated on the French, but you said you had
25 developed some facility in the language during your
1 duties in the former Yugoslavia. Can you help us, if
2 you are comfortable doing it, translate the seal?
3 A. I think if you look closely, you will see
4 that the words on the seal are exactly the same as the
5 words on the address group, it is fairly clear in the
6 version that I have. I am not sure how many times
7 yours has been copied.
8 MR. HAYMAN: Let me ask my colleague whose
9 pronunciation is much better than mine, let me ask him
10 to lead the phrases in the seal, starting with the
11 uppermost outer ring, progressing down to the middle
12 and then the bottom rings, going from inside to the
13 outer portion of the circle.
14 MR. NOBILO: So the upper circle, "Republic of
15 Bosnia-Herzegovina". Below that, "Croatian Community"
16 and then the following line, "Herceg-Bosna". In the
17 bottom part, it is first written down" Vitez, then the
18 "Unit PN", which means for special activities, and
19 then -- special purpose -- and in the end, "the
20 Department for Defence".
21 A. I think it is the same words as the address
22 group.
23 MR. HAYMAN: So that confirms, if you heard
24 the translation that the booth was kind enough to give
25 us, that confirms that the seal replicates the various
1 titles of the upper left-hand portion of this order or
2 certificate, correct?
3 A. Yes.
4 MR. HAYMAN: May I ask that Exhibit D74 be
5 placed before the witness?. This, I think,
6 Mr. President, we will need to put on the ELMO. By way
7 of background, this is a joint order and I would like
8 the seal to be put on the ELMO, this is on the back of
9 the document. This is a joint order of the HVO and the
10 BiH army, also countersigned by Jeremy Fleming, the
11 chairman of the Joint Commission, ECMM, and I would
12 like to direct your attention, and perhaps we could
13 zoom in on the two seals. Thank you. Again, let me
14 ask my colleague to read in the same fashion the HVO
15 seal, that is the written elements of that seal.
16 MR. NOBILO: On the left-hand side, where the
17 signature of Colonel Blaskic is, there is a seal and in
18 the first line it says, "Republic of
19 Bosnia-Herzegovina"; below that, "Croatian Community",
20 third line, "Herceg-Bosna". The bottom part has number
21 1, first line "Travnik", below "Travnik" it is written
22 "Operational Zone Central Bosnia", and below that,
23 "Department for Defence".
24 MR. HAYMAN: So can we conclude that the seal
25 on the Kraljevic order differs from the seal on Exhibit
1 D74 in that D74 refers to the Operative Zone Central
2 Bosnia, while the seal on page I1-1 of Exhibit 242
3 refers to the special purposes unit, Vitezovi?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Did you discuss with Commander Dugalic in any
6 more detail to whom this Vitezovi unit and Colonel
7 Kraljevic answered, who their commander was in a chain
8 of command?
9 A. No, not at all.
10 Q. Let me return to the substance and text of
11 the Dugalic interview. Is it fair to say that
12 Mr. Dugalic attempted to persuade you that he had proof
13 that the HVO had attacked Ahmici on 16th April 1993?
14 A. Yes, as I said earlier, he claimed that he
15 had two HVO prisoners who had been present at Ahmici
16 and as I said earlier, as you can imagine I was quite
17 keen to meet these two chaps and unfortunately by the
18 time that I was able to push him on the point, it
19 seemed that they had been released. He showed me
20 uniform patches, shoulder titles or something which he
21 claimed proved the point and I said, "thanks very much,
22 but you could have got these from anywhere."
23 Q. Did he show you the two HVO patches before he
24 had even made the claim to you that he had two HVO
25 soldiers in custody, who had been apprehended in the
1 course of the conflict in Ahmici in mid April 1993?
2 I will refer you to your comment on page 2 of your
3 meeting narrative.
4 A. I am fairly sure that he talked about the
5 people first, then he produced what he was trying to
6 suggest was evidence and I said, this was one of the
7 occasions that I was actually quite forceful with
8 somebody who in my view was giving me something which
9 was complete rubbish, and I said, "thank you very much,
10 this proves nothing, you could have got these from
11 anywhere. Let me see the people", and, of course,
12 I could not see them.
13 Q. Let me ask you if your comment is accurate or
14 not. Your comment on this page of the report says:
15 "After some persuasion Dugalic first said
16 that they knew that the HVO had been there because they
17 had badges taken from them. He produced HVO and MUP
18 badges, which I rejected because they could have come
19 from anywhere. Then he said that they had captured two
20 HVO. I am not sure whether this was a complex
21 deception, because he never actually let me see the
22 men."
23 Does that refresh your recollection as to
24 whether he first offered these patches and only you
25 rejected that as proof? Did he mention or assert that
1 he had two prisoners?
2 A. Because this was typed so soon after the
3 actual meeting, then I imagine that yes, that is
4 probably the order in which it happened. At this
5 point, looking back on it, I cannot remember which was
6 produced first.
7 Q. You did express interest on 9th May 1993, did
8 you not, in seeing the men, but he told you that you
9 could not see them at that time, correct?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. On 11th May, two days later, you went back
12 and saw Commander Dugalic a second time, correct?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. That meeting is memorialised in appendix Q of
15 your report. At that meeting, did you again press your
16 request to see these two alleged HVO prisoners arrested
17 in the act, if you will, in the village of Ahmici?
18 A. Yes, because again as you can imagine it
19 struck me as being very important if one could actually
20 get to see people who had been there to meet them and
21 ask them for their view as to what was going on.
22 Q. He told you he had set them free in an
23 exchange, correct?
24 A. He said that they had been set free, not that
25 he had set them free, but the essence was that they had
1 gone so I could not see them.
2 Q. At this same period of time, various
3 authorities, including military authorities in Zenica,
4 were pressing a demand for some more information about
5 what exactly had occurred in Ahmici, correct?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Do you find it credible that if there had
8 been two men captured in Ahmici in the course of that
9 conflict, suspected of participating in the massacre,
10 that they would have been released as part of some
11 exchange in the Lasva Valley; did you find that
12 credible?
13 A. I could imagine how that could have
14 happened. As you can see from the comment that I made
15 in the previous meeting, because of the circumstances,
16 I was not sure whether he ever actually had any people
17 at all and I was not sure whether he was simply trying
18 to lead me up the garden path by saying, "yes, we have
19 some people who were there" or not, so particularly
20 with this level of distance from the events, I have no
21 idea whether those two people actually existed. He did
22 give me the names of people he said had been there,
23 I am not sure whether they exist, whether one would be
24 able to track them down to find out. All I can do at
25 this stage is offer you the notes that I wrote and my
1 memory as best it is.
2 MR. HAYMAN: So I take it in the end you were
3 left not knowing --
4 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Hayman, I suppose that there
5 are quite a number of questions that you have to ask,
6 maybe it would be a good moment for a break now. In
7 that case, we will have a break and we will start again
8 at 4.45.
9 (4.25 pm)
10 (A short break)
11 (4.50 pm)
12 JUDGE JORDA: The hearing is resumed. Please
13 have the accused brought in.
14 (Accused brought in)
15 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Hayman, you may continue
16 with your cross-examination.
17 MR. HAYMAN: Thank you, Mr. President.
18 I expect to conclude in perhaps 15 minutes time, with
19 the court's permission.
20 Let me direct your attention to your
21 interview with Colonel Blaskic. Other than
22 Mr. Friis-Pedersen and the interpreters, was anyone else
23 present?
24 A. I cannot remember.
25 JUDGE JORDA: Which annex are you referring
1 to please, Mr. Hayman?
2 MR. HAYMAN: Annex G, Mr. President.
3 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you.
4 MR. HAYMAN: At any point in the interview,
5 did Colonel Blaskic express any ethnic animosity
6 towards any ethnic group?
7 A. No, I think that he was saying to me that he
8 felt that people ought to be able to live together.
9 I am not sure if what he was saying and what was
10 happening were consistent, but that is what he was
11 saying.
12 Q. That is what he was saying he wanted or
13 wished would happen.
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Did he make any comments suggesting that
16 populations needed to be moved or that population
17 movement was part of a solution that he saw? I can
18 tell you there is nothing in your statement to that
19 effect. Is there anything else you recall to that
20 effect from your interview with him?
21 A. No, he certainly said that there was a need
22 to withdraw forces or separate forces. I am not sure
23 if he would have gone as far thereafter to say we then
24 need to have the same population displacement as we had
25 very clearly from the mayor of Vitez. The mayor was
1 extremely explicit. Colonel Blaskic was not explicit.
2 Q. Colonel Blaskic, he was not even implicit,
3 was he? He said Croats and Muslims needed to live
4 together in peace and that there needed to be a
5 separation of military forces; that is what he said,
6 correct?
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. In that regard, I take it his comments on
9 this subject were different from those of Mr. Santic
10 and/or Mr. Skopljak, is that right?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. Markedly different?
13 A. Yes, I think I even have a note to the effect
14 that I commented on the fact that what he was saying
15 seemed to be slightly out of step with what I had just
16 heard.
17 Q. He responded, did he not, that there was a
18 difference between his view, the view of the military
19 in Vitez, and the politicians, correct?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. You asked him to mark a map.
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. Do you have that map with you?
24 A. I do, in fact I have the original copy and it
25 is here, I can put it on the machine.
1 MR. HAYMAN: If you would and if we could
2 activate the ELMO? Mr. President, I have spoken to
3 Mr. Harmon and I think we can agree that we would ask
4 that a colour photograph of this map be taken so that
5 it can be used as the map in the exhibit and we need
6 not rely on a handmade replica of the map to constitute
7 the map that is the part of Exhibit 242.
8 Again, if we could call up the map on the
9 ELMO, please? Thank you.
10 Can you tell us as specifically as you can
11 what is you asked Colonel Blaskic to do with respect to
12 this map?
13 A. I would have put the map on the table with
14 the pens and asked him to illustrate his explanation of
15 what was going on on the map. I cannot remember
16 whether he actually drew a second map which had arrows
17 indicating the various lines of attack. He may have
18 done, but I am not sure. Certainly what is represented
19 on this map was his understanding of the ethnic makeup
20 of the villages around Vitez. If I move the map down
21 briefly so one can see the key which I have added, you
22 can see that they are colour coded, orange for mainly
23 Croatian villages or centres of population, green for
24 mainly Muslim villages or centres of population and
25 pink for mixed areas.
1 Q. If you could move the map up now to the
2 middle and if we could move in slightly please on the
3 villages that have been marked in colour. Thank you.
4 If you look at this map, it is difficult to
5 see on the ELMO, but are there two villages which are
6 not yellow, they are not pink and they are not green,
7 they are some other colour?
8 A. Yes, as you can see I have indicated here on
9 the map the villages of Ahmici and Nadioci are coloured
10 in yellow and blue. This is the only marking on the
11 map which was made subsequent to my meeting with
12 Colonel Blaskic. I highlighted those two villages to
13 make the point that he had omitted to put any colour on
14 them during our meeting and there is a note to that
15 effect in the text of the report, as you will have
16 seen.
17 Q. Other than those two villages, the coloured
18 markings on the map were made by him, is that right?
19 A. That is correct.
20 Q. In the interview, he referred to a build-up of
21 BiH army forces in Travnik in the week or so prior to
22 and including April 15th 1993, is that correct?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. Was that consistent with other information
25 you received in the course of your study?
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. Directing your attention down that first
3 page, he also described for you the location of certain
4 BiH army brigades. Specifically in Zenica, there were
5 three BiH army brigades, as well as the 7th Muslim
6 brigade, correct?
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. And there was a battalion of the
9 305th BiH army Brigade in Busovaca, he also told you
10 that?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. Were those facts consistent with what you
13 learned from other sources in the course of your study?
14 A. I did not actually cross-reference with
15 anybody else to find out what brigade or battalion
16 numbers were and precisely what troop deployments were,
17 so the fact that there were troops in those places or
18 near those places is not inconsistent, but in terms of
19 those particular units as numbered by him, I do not
20 know.
21 Q. You did not check the brigade numbers?
22 A. No.
23 Q. Let me direct your attention to the third
24 paragraph from the end, beginning with the phrase, "on
25 23rd January, the Busovaca to Kiseljak road was cut."
1 Do you find that paragraph?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. The next sentence is:
4 "Busovaca was occupied and ethnically
5 cleansed."
6 When he made that statement to you, first of
7 all, did you understand him to be referring to the fact
8 that the road from Busovaca to Kiseljak was cut and
9 taken by the BiH army between Kacuni and Bilalovac on or
10 about 23rd January 1993?
11 A. I would not be as precise as you have been in
12 terms of the villages where it was cut, but
13 I understood it was cut between the two main centres of
14 Busovaca and Kiseljak.
15 Q. Did you also understand him to be saying that
16 that portion of the Busovaca municipality that had been
17 taken and occupied by the BiH army in the course of the
18 January 1993 conflict, that that territory had been
19 ethnically cleansed of Croats; is that what you
20 understood him to be telling you in that paragraph, or
21 did you have an understanding as to what he was telling
22 you?
23 A. Given the context and my understanding of
24 what was happening in Busovaca, the town itself, either
25 there was a misinterpretation or he must have been
1 referring to the territory which was taken by the ABiH,
2 because I do not think that he would have been telling
3 me that the HVO had ethnically cleansed Busovaca.
4 Q. So you did understand at the time that he was
5 referring to ethnic cleansing by the BiH army forces?
6 A. I am not sure at the time that I reached a
7 conclusion. Sitting here, logically it has -- I think
8 it has to be either one of those two conclusions, that
9 there was a misinterpretation at the time, a
10 mis-translation, so that I wrote down something other
11 than what he said, or that he was referring to
12 territory which the ABiH had ethnically cleansed,
13 because I assume that he was not saying that the HVO
14 had ethnically cleansed Busovaca.
15 Q. Thank you. Let me ask you to return to your
16 notes and write-up of the interview of Commander
17 Dugalic, which is appendix I. You have told us, and
18 this is towards the latter part of your statement, that
19 you discussed with Commander Dugalic, the intelligence
20 officer or commander attached to the III Corps, the
21 issue of the truck bomb which exploded in Stari Vitez
22 on or about April 18th 1993, correct?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. Dugalic asserted to you that while Kraljevic
25 had carried out the attack, Blaskic, he asserted, had
1 ordered it, correct?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. You had previously met with General
4 Halilovic, correct?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. Had he made that assertion to you, that
7 Blaskic had ordered the truck bomb?
8 A. No, that subject had not come up at all in
9 the conversation.
10 Q. You had previously met with Hadzihasanovic,
11 correct?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. Did he assert to you in your meeting with him
14 that Blaskic had ordered the truck bomb?
15 A. Not that I can remember, no.
16 Q. Did Commander Dugalic, the intelligence
17 officer attached to III Corps, did he provide any
18 source for this allegation?
19 A. No.
20 Q. Did you ask him for his source, or a source?
21 A. No, as with everything else, I was simply
22 taking a note of what people were telling me without
23 challenging them in most cases for exactly what they
24 were saying, so I was not coming back to them and
25 saying, "this is preposterous, please tell me more", or
1 indeed "how do you know?", with the exception of him
2 claiming to have two Croatian soldiers, which I thought
3 was particularly interesting.
4 Q. So to summarise, in your interview you did
5 not cross-examine or challenge him at all with respect
6 to his source or basis of knowledge for this
7 allegation, correct?
8 A. Correct.
9 Q. Have you been told whether the Office of the
10 Prosecutor or their investigators have sought to
11 interview Commander Dugalic to confirm or deny or
12 discover any basis, whether there is any basis for this
13 allegation; have you been told anything pertaining to
14 that subject?
15 A. No.
16 Q. In the course of the rest of your study, did
17 you make any efforts to try and confirm, deny,
18 corroborate or whatever this allegation?
19 A. No.
20 Q. In the course of your study, did you obtain
21 any evidence from any other source tending to support
22 this allegation, the allegation that Colonel Blaskic
23 ordered a truck bomb, that a truck bomb be deployed and
24 detonated within Stari Vitez?
25 A. No.
1 Q. So this allegation is the only item of
2 information that you collected in the course of your
3 nine day study on this subject pertaining to Colonel
4 Blaskic, correct?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. To this day, have you heard any evidence from
7 any source whatsoever that would tend to support or
8 corroborate that allegation?
9 A. Since then, I have taken absolutely no
10 interest in following it up, so no.
11 Q. I take it at the end of your interviews with
12 Commander Dugalic you were not in a position to
13 evaluate the worth, credibility or lack thereof of that
14 item of information he had given you, his allegation
15 that Colonel Blaskic ordered a truck bomb, is that
16 correct?
17 A. Yes, as I have said earlier on, in each case,
18 all I was attempting to do was write down what people
19 wanted to tell me.
20 Q. Now let me direct your attention to your
21 interview with the Imam of Busovaca, which is
22 appendix K. He told you, I take it, that he had had
23 certain contacts with Zoran Maric who was an HVO
24 civilian authority; was that your understanding?
25 A. If we look at the fourth paragraph, I have
1 the description I was given which is that he was with
2 the president of Busovaca, currently Zoran Maric, of
3 HVO, so I am not clear whether the president of HVO
4 would be a civilian or a military person, HVO normally
5 being a military entity.
6 Q. I will refrain from commenting and simply
7 accept your answer. Is it correct to say that the Imam
8 told you in your interview that Zoran Maric had
9 promised protection to the Muslim community, that is in
10 paragraph 5, and then on the second page that:
11 "Maric really wants to help but thinks that
12 he cannot."
13 Did the Imam say those things to you?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Did he say, and this is in the third
16 paragraph from the bottom on the first page, that
17 specifically refugees, Croat refugees were coming to
18 Busovaca and were threatening Muslims.
19 A. I am sorry, I am looking at the third
20 paragraph from the end.
21 Q. Third paragraph from the end of the first
22 page, the bottom line of the third paragraph from the
23 end on page 1.
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. Two paragraphs above that, he provides a
1 little detail, did he not, when he recited and
2 described how a family made homeless comes into town,
3 Croat houses having been burned in outlying villages in
4 the Busovaca municipality and then that family takes
5 over a Muslim house.
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Directing your attention to the next page,
8 you commented on the statement on this page that,
9 "Kordic seems to be the man calling the shots", again
10 repeating that idiomatic expression. Now I want to ask
11 you again, in light of your explanation of when you
12 used a comment and the word "comment" to indicate your
13 own insights and material versus the text of these
14 statements which you have indicated represents what the
15 witnesses said, I want to ask you again, this statement
16 regarding Mr. Kordic, is that something that the Imam
17 said, or is it your own side comment, or do you know?
18 A. It is certainly written in my notes, so it is
19 a note made at the time and we could look at it if you
20 want to and see how it fits into the flow of the
21 conversation. It was a note written at the time of the
22 meeting. Because of where it fits into the flow of the
23 conversation where he was showing me his pass and we
24 were having -- I was making a note of who had signed
25 the pass, I am not sure whether we had clearly -- I had
1 broken from writing detailed notes and was looking at
2 this thing. Given the language which is used, I cannot
3 imagine that is actually the language which the Imam
4 would have used, so I think that is my picking up the
5 flow of my notes again by saying what I said.
6 At this point, looking back, I think it is
7 probably my summary of the situation that I was hearing
8 as opposed to my writing town precisely what the Imam
9 had said. Four and a half years on it is quite
10 difficult to remember precisely.
11 Q. Do you say that in part because you believe
12 that the idiomatic expression "calling the shots" does
13 not exist in the Bosnian language?
14 A. I have no idea whether it exists or not.
15 I am sure they have something similar. It may be that
16 the interpreter had taken a Bosnian idiom and
17 translated it as "calling the shots". At this stage,
18 I just do not know.
19 Q. Did you check your notes to see whether they
20 reflect that this was a comment by you?
21 A. I can do it again now if you would like me
22 to, but I did check my notes and it is written into the
23 flow of the notes as I was taking them, which suggests
24 that it was either me picking up the flow of the
25 conversation, or it was something which was actually
1 said. We can go round this as many times as we like,
2 but I am not sure we can add much clarity to it, I am
3 afraid.
4 Q. I do not want to belabour it. Turning your
5 attention to your next interview with the chief of
6 police in Busovaca, appendix L, I take it he told you
7 that the suspects in this rape case would have to be
8 tried in the only court that existed at the time, which
9 was in Travnik?
10 A. Yes, as I explained earlier, I was attempting
11 to establish what the judicial process was and was
12 asking them questions about what they would do with a
13 suspect if they arrested them, where would they try
14 them, would they be in prison, where would they be in
15 prison, and so on.
16 Q. Now let me direct your attention to your
17 overall conclusions which are set forth on pages 1
18 and 2 of your report. You wrote in paragraph 5 that:
19 "The Muslim reaction from Zenica", to the
20 events of April 16th, "was to attack the key road
21 junctions east of Vitez and north of Busovaca."
22 When you wrote that, are you referring to two
23 different pieces of road?
24 A. I think what I am referring to is what is
25 known as the Busovaca T junction, so the road from
1 Zenica to Vitez which then has a T junction and goes
2 south to Busovaca, and I think they were attempting to
3 cut off the road at that point, either on both sides of
4 the T junction or at the T junction itself.
5 Q. I ask because you used the word junctions,
6 plural, in your report. Is it your testimony now you
7 are referring to one junction or more than one
8 junction?
9 A. There is one junction. At this point
10 I cannot remember exactly what I was thinking, or
11 exactly what the tactical situation had been as it was
12 described, but what they were fundamentally trying to
13 do was cut the road, thus isolating Busovaca and Vitez,
14 and I am quite clear about that as the intention of
15 what they were doing.
16 Q. Do you mean isolating Vitez and Busovaca from
17 Zenica, or isolating Vitez and Busovaca from each
18 other?
19 A. From each other. At that point it was
20 possible to move from one to the other along the road
21 and my understanding of what the ABiH were trying to do
22 was to cut that communications link, thus having two
23 pockets as opposed to one pocket.
24 Q. So the Vitez-Busovaca pocket had already been
25 cut off from the Kiseljak enclave, correct? It was cut
1 off in January 1993?
2 A. I think that road had been reopened,
3 actually. I cannot remember precisely. When I left,
4 I drove down the road -- I cannot remember who was in
5 control of the central part of it. I think actually it
6 was under Croatian control all the way along, but I may
7 be wrong.
8 Q. The record is clear on that point and I do
9 not need to debate it with you.
10 With respect to the Vitez-Busovaca spinal
11 road, are you saying that the Muslim strategy was, in
12 their attack, was to cut the spinal road between Vitez
13 and Busovaca?
14 A. Yes, that is my understanding of what they
15 were trying to do.
16 Q. Is that an obvious military strategy, a
17 strategy of -- a well thought out military strategy,
18 would you agree?
19 A. I am not sure it is for me to comment on high
20 level military strategy. If what they were attempting
21 to do was to defeat the Croatian army, then by dividing
22 the territory controlled by the Croats into small
23 chunks, that would seem to make sense.
24 Q. And indeed, if you cut the spinal road
25 between Vitez and Busovaca, would you agree that the
1 HVO would no longer be able to marshall troops at any
2 point in a defensive position by running those troops
3 back and forth, up and down the spinal road in order to
4 concentrate them at a point of defence?
5 A. Yes, if that is what they were doing by
6 moving troops from one end of the pocket to the other,
7 yes.
8 Q. You said there was a co-ordinated attack on
9 16th April.
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Was that at about 5.30 in the morning?
12 A. I think it is fair to say that attacks --
13 conflict broke out, I would certainly say that conflict
14 broke out early in the morning, 5.30, 6.30, the reports
15 were different in different places, but the quality of
16 the information differed depending on where there were
17 international observers, but early on the morning of
18 the 16th, fighting broke out in a number of places.
19 Q. Although not in all the villages of the area,
20 correct? In Gacice, there was no open conflict for
21 several days?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. Were you able to determine what HVO units
24 participated in the conflict at any certain geographic
25 point?
1 A. No.
2 Q. Were you able to determine what orders were
3 given at different levels of the HVO with respect to
4 military actions on 16th April 1993?
5 A. No.
6 Q. Were you able to determine what reports
7 during the course of that conflict were given up,
8 whatever chains of command existed within the HVO
9 concerning that conflict?
10 A. No.
11 Q. Were those issues beyond the scope of your
12 study?
13 A. Quite clearly I think so.
14 Q. Can you state again the purpose of your
15 study?
16 A. What I was trying to do was to meet with
17 people in a balanced way on both sides, with both
18 parties, with the political, the military and the
19 religious leaders, to find out from them what their
20 view of what had happened was, to cross-reference that
21 with what the international community, UNPROFOR and
22 ECMM specifically, thought had happened and as a result
23 of this process of meeting people and hearing what they
24 said had happened, to attempt to draw some
25 conclusions.
1 Given the situation at the time and the
2 length of time that I had been given to be there, and
3 the fact that this was an attempt to get an overview as
4 opposed to a very detailed and precise investigation,
5 I did not feel that it was appropriate even to ask for
6 things like the orders that had been given or the
7 reports that were being made by the parties. Obviously
8 I was seeing the reports that we were making ourselves.
9 Q. Did you circulate your report and solicit
10 comments?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. Did you circulate it to the army of BH?
13 A. No.
14 MR. HAYMAN: If I could be assisted in
15 providing the witness and counsel with an exhibit? If
16 a copy could be given to the witness, and there are
17 copies for counsel and the court as well. I have
18 provided you with the cover page of your report which
19 is not a part of Exhibit 242 and my question is
20 simple. Under, "distribution external", the third
21 party is listed as "HQ BH COMD". Can you tell us who
22 that refers to?
23 A. That I think you would find would be the
24 UNPROFOR headquarters in Kiseljak. There is certainly
25 no intention to pass it to the ABiH.
1 Q. Very well. In a similar vein I take it it
2 was not given to Colonel Blaskic?
3 A. No.
4 Q. Nor was it given to anyone else in the HVO?
5 A. No.
6 MR. HAYMAN: Thank you, I have no further
7 questions, Mr. President.
8 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you, Mr. Hayman.
9 Mr. Harmon, you have perhaps some complementary
10 questions within the framework of the
11 cross-examination.
12 MR. HARMON: Thank you, Mr. President, I have a
13 few points of clarification.
14 JUDGE JORDA: Before that, I would like to
15 ask Mr. Hayman whether he wants this to be admitted into
16 evidence, the cover page of Mr. McLeod's report.
17 I suppose you do? It needs to be identified by the
18 witness, because it is the cover page of his own
19 report.
20 MR. HAYMAN: Yes, we would ask that it be
21 admitted, Mr. President.
22 JUDGE JORDA: Very well. What number is it
23 going to have, Mr. Registrar?
24 THE REGISTRAR: D84.
25 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you. It is your turn,
1 Mr. Prosecutor.
2 Re-examined by MR. HARMON
3 Q. Mr. McLeod, I would like to turn your
4 attention to annex E, which is your meeting with Father
5 Bozo of Cajdras. You were asked a number of questions
6 in respect of your meeting with Father Bozo and in fact
7 testified that Father Bozo and then Father Stjepan had
8 informed you that a number of houses belonging to
9 Bosnian Croats had been burned, damaged; is that
10 correct?
11 A. That is right, yes.
12 Q. Let me also reference you to the last
13 page and your comment, which is found on E-3. Father
14 Bozo also gave you a copy of a letter, did he not, to
15 III Corps in Zenica in which he stated that the
16 situation had stabilised, is that correct?
17 A. That is right, yes.
18 Q. Can you explain what he meant by that, what
19 he said to you in respect of that situation being
20 stabilised?
21 A. As you can see by looking at the appendix 1,
22 which is the translation of the letter which he gave
23 me, which is also attached, he started off by saying
24 that, "we are glad that some less" -- the English is
25 not particularly precise, I am not sure the original is
1 particularly precise:
2 "We are glad some less good people have
3 stopped with burning and mining of houses. The last
4 number is: 15 burned houses and 4 stables and 2 mined
5 houses.
6 "We thank God and good people for no further
7 killings, and our gratitude we direct to the
8 above-mentioned titles", who are the ABiH.
9 So what he was saying was that the situation
10 has been stabilised by the intervention of the ABiH and
11 the police. He then went on to list in detail what had
12 already happened.
13 Q. Now let me focus your attention to your
14 interview with Ramiz Dugalic which is found at
15 annex I. Specifically, Mr. McLeod, I am directing your
16 attention to the second page of the English
17 translation, which focuses on Darko Kraljevic who was a
18 colonel of one of the HVO formations, specifically the
19 legal formation doing the dirty jobs for the HVO; do
20 you see that particular paragraph?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. In respect of your conversations with Ramiz
23 Dugalic, he then gave you a ratification which we have
24 had considerable testimony about, and it is signed by
25 order of Colonel Darko Kraljevic, is that correct?
1 A. That is correct, yes.
2 Q. In the address block on the upper left-hand
3 corner of that document, it indicates from which unit
4 this order emanated; is that correct?
5 A. That is right.
6 Q. The unit is indicated as the Unit Vitezovi,
7 is that correct?
8 A. Correct.
9 MR. HARMON: I would like to have, with the
10 assistance of the usher, I would like to have D42 and
11 D42A placed on the ELMO -- if we could have all three
12 orders given on the usher, Mr. Registrar. Defence
13 Exhibit D42A, D77 and D43A. Now if we could have
14 placed, Mr. Usher, Defence Exhibit 42A on the ELMO, can
15 we focus in please on the right-hand side, upper
16 right-hand side, the address block? That is fine,
17 thank you.
18 First of all, you were asked a number of
19 questions about the chain of command between Colonel
20 Blaskic and Darko Kraljevic, do you remember those
21 questions?
22 A. Yes, I do.
23 Q. Referring to Defence Exhibit 42A, does this
24 appear to you to be an order signed by Colonel
25 Blaskic? You have to turn it over.
1 A. Yes, it is signed by him.
2 Q. Could you turn that over, please, Mr. McLeod?
3 Do you see to whom the orders were issued? Do you see
4 "Vitezovi special task force" in that particular list
5 of units to which this order was issued?
6 A. Yes, it is clearly for the attention of the
7 brigades and also the Vitezovi special task force.
8 Q. What is the date of this order, sir?
9 17th March 1993?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Mr. Usher, if I could have Defence Exhibit 77
12 placed on the ELMO, does this also, Mr. McLeod, appear
13 to you to be an order issued by Tihomir Blaskic?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Again, referencing the units to which this
16 order was issued, do you see in there any reference to
17 the Vitezovi special task force?
18 A. Yes, it is listed down there as well.
19 Q. The date of this order is 21st April 1993, is
20 that correct?
21 A. That is right.
22 Q. Lastly, let me refer you to Defence Exhibit
23 43A, if that could be placed on the ELMO please. This
24 order is in French, I see.
25 A. I can read it.
1 JUDGE JORDA: This is not a defect,
2 Mr. Harmon.
3 MR. HARMON: No, it is a virtue. I was
4 thinking of the witness, Mr. President.
5 Can you see that particular order, does that
6 appear to be an order that is issued by -- purportedly
7 issued by Tihomir Blaskic?
8 A. Yes, so we have the signature block here.
9 Q. Now if we could go to the front page of that
10 and place that on the ELMO as well. Do you see whether
11 that order was issued to the Vitezovi special
12 task force?
13 A. Yes, again we can see it there.
14 Q. All right. Considering those three
15 particular orders that you have just seen, in your
16 opinion as a military man, under whose chain of command
17 were the Vitezovi special task force?
18 A. If these are genuine, they quite clearly seem
19 to state that Colonel Blaskic was giving orders to that
20 unit, amongst others.
21 Q. The unit that was -- the unit of Colonel
22 Darko Kraljevic, is that correct?
23 A. Yes.
24 MR. HARMON: I have no further questions,
25 Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. McLeod.
1 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you. I turn now to Judge
2 Riad.
3 JUDGE RIAD: Thank you, Mr. President.
4 Good afternoon, Mr. McLeod.
5 A. Good afternoon, sir.
6 Q. You mentioned that on 16th April, Croatian
7 forces, I am just summing up what you said several
8 times, Croatian forces attacked Muslim positions in the
9 Lasva Valley. Among other things, they arrested
10 prominent Muslims, civilians were killed, houses were
11 razed to the ground. Was this required by any military
12 necessity or was it provoked in such a way that it had
13 to be done?
14 A. I could see no -- depending on precisely what
15 the objectives of the Croatian army were, I can see no
16 reason, unless they particularly wanted to drive out
17 the Muslim population and terrorise them, why they
18 needed to do certainly some of the things which they
19 were doing. If their objective was a military offence,
20 I can see no particular reason why they would need to
21 raze a village to the ground as they did at Ahmici, for
22 example.
23 Q. I think in your meeting with Santic, he
24 mentioned to you that, "there is no room for Muslims
25 and they had to leave, so that a democracy can be
1 created like the ones you have in Western Europe". You
2 mentioned something like that.
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. That was on 15th April?
5 A. My meeting with him was on 10th May,
6 I think. He was describing the situation as he saw it
7 and he was expanding on his, what I believe were his
8 political views and his view of how things ought to
9 happen. I understand that he was saying that, "in
10 order to have democracy, in order to implement the
11 Vance plan, we need to be sure that the majority vote
12 will go the way we want to have it"; this is me
13 paraphrasing what he said.
14 Q. In your report at page 1, you mentioned that
15 categorically the Croats, it is something like the
16 third paragraph from below, that the Croats, the last
17 three lines:
18 "They are using extreme methods of terror and
19 genocide to remove the Muslim population and were only
20 prevented from total success by their miscalculation of
21 the Muslim military."
22 Then in the last paragraph you say:
23 "Events throughout the rest of Central
24 Bosnia-Herzegovina and latterly in Mostar appear to
25 follow the same pattern that emerged in the Vitez
1 area. It is hard to believe that in each case the
2 events are the acts of isolated extremists or agents
3 provocateurs working for the Serbs."
4 So you think it was a scheme aiming at, you
5 described categorically, at genocide and the removal of
6 the Muslim population?
7 A. Yes, that is the conclusion that I reached.
8 Q. That was the conclusion of your assessment?
9 A. Yes.
10 Q. You mentioned also that General Blaskic gave
11 an order prohibiting any, in a few words, trespassing
12 on the Muslim houses, beating or looting or torching
13 Muslim houses, and this did not stop, this looting and
14 burning and that sort of thing. Was not General
15 Blaskic the official and legitimate commander of the
16 area?
17 A. I certainly understood when I met him that he
18 was the military commander for the operational zone.
19 I have been shown the order, I have no reason to doubt
20 that it is a genuine order but certainly at the time
21 that I was there, I understand that these things were
22 still going on and so the order had either not been
23 implemented or events had deteriorated again since the
24 order had been implemented, yes.
25 Q. Was his authority disputed by the lower
1 commanders in the area, according to your knowledge?
2 A. No.
3 Q. Was it challenged?
4 A. I have no reason to suspect that it was and
5 I approached him because I was told by my colleagues in
6 ECMM that he was their interlocutor in the meetings
7 that they were having trying to stabilise the
8 situation, so in their view, he was the military
9 commander, he was presented as such at the meetings
10 they were having with him on a daily basis.
11 Q. So his orders were supposed to be obeyed?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. And if not obeyed, he was supposed to take
14 action?
15 A. I would assume so, yes.
16 Q. You spoke of the prison under the provision
17 of Aleksovski and you said it was an HVO prison. Was
18 that right?
19 A. Yes, it was a military prison, HVO.
20 Q. It was a military prison, the Kaonik Prison.
21 Aleksovski told you that he did not select the
22 prisoners?
23 A. No, sir, he explained that prisoners were
24 sent to him and that he had no ability to either accept
25 or reject somebody who was delivered to his front door.
1 Q. And they were civilians?
2 A. Certainly the Muslims that I saw appeared to
3 be civilians and some of them described their jobs and
4 they were people who sounded like civilians to me.
5 Q. It was under the HVO command, the prison?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. You said there were 68 Muslims inside
8 individual cells. How many were in a cell?
9 A. I think that there were between six and eight
10 people in each of the cells. I cannot remember
11 precisely, but there were quite a lot of them. It was
12 very tight inside the rooms when we went into each
13 room.
14 Q. Very tight?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. What was the MOS? You mentioned that all
17 authorities joint patrols were doing their best to
18 stabilise the situation, except the MOS. You have an
19 idea who they were?
20 A. I think that they were one of the irregular
21 units. I am not sure precisely what MOS stands for.
22 Perhaps somebody could help. I am not sure exactly
23 which unit they were.
24 Q. Were they a powerful group?
25 A. I have no idea, I am afraid.
1 JUDGE RIAD: Thank you very much. Can I say
2 "Lieutenant"?
3 A. I have been a civilian for five and a half
4 years now.
5 JUDGE RIAD: Thank you, Mr. McLeod.
6 A. Thank you, sir.
7 JUDGE JORDA: Judge Shahabuddeen now.
8 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Mr. McLeod, I am
9 referring to that part of your summary of the meeting
10 between you and Mr. Santic, and Mr. Skopljak, and in
11 particular to the sentence which you say that as
12 written here, it does not reflect what you intended to
13 say. It is at F-2. The sentence reads:
14 "There is a problem with some people who come
15 into people's houses, so Blaskic has ordered his forces
16 not to enter Muslims' houses."
17 I take it you were recording there what was
18 said to you.
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. In answer to Judge Riad, you said that
21 Colonel Blaskic had the authority to issue orders which
22 you would expect would be carried out.
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. Had Colonel Blaskic already issued orders
25 prohibiting his own forces from entering the houses of
1 Muslims? Would you expect that the speaker would still
2 say to you that "there is a problem" or that "there
3 used to be a problem"?
4 A. If he had given an order and the order had
5 been carried out, then I think the speaker would have
6 been saying that, "there had been a problem".
7 Q. Yes, but then you said you would expect that
8 any orders issued by Colonel Blaskic would be carried
9 out?
10 A. I would imagine they should be, yes.
11 Q. Thank you. Also, was it your impression that
12 the speaker was saying to you, one way or another, that
13 Colonel Blaskic had the authority to issue such orders
14 of prohibition?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. When you were reporting your conversation
17 with Mr. Santic and Mr. Skopljak, you ended with a last
18 paragraph at F-4, in which you gave your final
19 comment. In referring to what they had said you
20 stated:
21 "All of this was said with a straight, if
22 slightly smug face. The suggestion that as a result of
23 a Muslim attack there was a chaotic defence of Vitez in
24 which the Muslims were displaced from their villages
25 around Vitez is incredible."
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. That represented your concluding impression
3 of that interview?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. When reporting your conversation with Colonel
6 Blaskic, it is my recollection that you said you formed
7 the impression that he was being straightforward with
8 you?
9 A. During those parts of the conversation where
10 we were discussing the military situation and he was
11 describing what had happened after 16th April, the
12 description which he gave matched almost exactly the
13 description which I had been given of those events by
14 members of UNPROFOR, so all of those parts of the
15 conversation fitted into place and seemed to make
16 sense. The point at which I had difficulty believing
17 what he was saying was just to do with his description
18 of what had happened on the morning of 16th April.
19 Q. Of the 16th. In other words, your reference
20 to his manners being straightforward related to his
21 depicting of the military situation consequent on the
22 counterattack by the BiH army and the cutting or the
23 attempt to cut the two roads and so on.
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. Right. Let us then go back to the morning of
1 the 16th where he said he was surprised early in the
2 morning by the sounds which he heard and he woke up and
3 so on and issued orders. He was the officer who
4 commanded the operational zone in the area inclusive of
5 Vitez and Ahmici?
6 A. That was my understanding, yes.
7 Q. In Vitez alone, I think if I look at G-1, the
8 Vitez brigade has 300 to 350 professionals, so you
9 state there.
10 A. That is what he told me, yes.
11 Q. And the rest are reservists.
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. As a military officer, would you expect that
14 a commanding officer who has 300 to 350 professionals
15 under his immediate control would be surprised to learn
16 that an event of this kind was taking place in Vitez
17 and Ahmici?
18 A. I think that if as he was suggesting there
19 had been a surprise attack by the ABiH just before
20 first light or at first light that morning then
21 conceivably he would have been taken by surprise. The
22 reason why I eventually draw the conclusion that I have
23 difficulty believing that is that there were a number
24 of events which were taking place at the same time,
25 most notably the arrest of a number of key people in
1 Vitez, and I cannot reconcile in my own logic how a
2 number of 13 or 14 people, prominent Muslims, were
3 being arrested in their own homes first thing in the
4 morning on the 16th in what in my view, based on my
5 experience of Northern Ireland, must have been a
6 co-ordinated operation to pick them up. I simply
7 cannot reconcile that -- and I actually saw some of
8 them in prison, so that happened -- with a chaotic
9 defence in response to a surprise attack. If there had
10 been a surprise attack, I cannot imagine how a large
11 number of people in a co-ordinated manner could have
12 been running around Vitez arresting people. It just
13 does not tie together.
14 Q. I see. When you refer to a large number of
15 people mounting a co-ordinated attack, you would be
16 speaking about how many people in respect of
17 Stari Vitez and in respect of Ahmici?
18 A. I am not sure exactly how many people they
19 would have used. If I had been doing -- I probably
20 would have used almost all the troops which he has, on
21 the basis that I would want to have, as a rule of
22 thumb, a multiple of three times more people attacking
23 than were defending.
24 Q. That is normal military wisdom, is it?
25 A. In the British army, yes.
1 Q. The words which you wrote down to report the
2 interview which you had with Colonel Blaskic were
3 these:
4 "Later we found" -- I take it there you are
5 reporting him in the first person, at G-1?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Fourth paragraph from the bottom:
8 "Later we found heavy fighting in Vitez and
9 in the villages round Vitez."
10 Did he say who were engaged in this heavy
11 fighting?
12 A. My inference was that it was the ABiH and the
13 HVO who were fighting. What I have written is as
14 I scribbled my note, as my interpreter translated what
15 he was saying, and so he would have said "later in the
16 morning, we found heavy fighting going on and were
17 reacting to it".
18 Q. Did he actually say that, that the fighting
19 was between the BiH Army and others?
20 A. At that point I am not sure if he was being
21 specific about the units, but I think we would all have
22 assumed that those were the people he was talking
23 about.
24 Q. Did you ask him any questions as to the
25 identity of the forces which were confronting each
1 other?
2 A. I think that I was quite clear and I think he
3 was also quite clear that this was predominantly the
4 ABiH versus HVO.
5 Q. So to conclude this likely inquiry of mine,
6 when you described him as giving you the impression of
7 being straightforward, you were not referring to the
8 positions which he took with you in respect of the
9 events which occurred on 16th April 1993?
10 A. No.
11 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Thank you.
12 JUDGE JORDA: I have only one question, about
13 your report, was it commented upon by the people to
14 whom it was addressed, the people who read it, were
15 there any critics, any comments?
16 A. The only significant comment which we
17 received was from the German delegation who objected to
18 my use of the word "totalitarian". They felt they
19 understood better than others what totalitarian meant.
20 But that was the only comment of any significance
21 within ECMM.
22 Q. But in all the comments that are diplomatic
23 and strategic, you have covered very many fields by
24 your comments, sometimes you had a very global
25 perception of what was going on. So what were the
1 remarks by your bosses, your superiors, those people
2 who sent you in that mission? What were your
3 procedures? Did they think that you maybe made hasty
4 conclusions or that you have properly judged it? How
5 did they assess your report?
6 A. As soon as we had finished producing and
7 disseminating this report, I was immediately involved
8 with the deputy head of the mission and his political
9 advisor writing a briefing based, amongst other things,
10 on this report which was passed to an EU diplomatic
11 mission, who I believe were convening then at a meeting
12 in Mostar where events had also broken down. I think
13 it is safe to say that the conclusions I had reached
14 were then immediately adopted by the causes of ECMM and
15 incorporated into their further reporting up the chain
16 of command above the ECMM.
17 Q. Is it your impression that the people you
18 spoke to are the political or military high in rank,
19 that you met some people, or there were some people you
20 were not able to meet that you regret not having been
21 able to meet?
22 A. The only person who was missing from the list
23 that I had drawn up at the beginning in consultation
24 with Ambassador Thebault that I would have liked to
25 have met was Dario Kordic, because we had the
1 impression that he was a significant player. I would
2 have met him at the end of my series of meetings, but
3 events and the timetable were against me and so
4 unfortunately I had to leave him out, but between my
5 view and that of Ambassador Thebault, he would have
6 been a useful person to have had a conversation with.
7 Q. My last question: one of the people you
8 talked to, I do not know whether it was Santic or
9 Skopljak or maybe somebody else, somebody said that
10 maybe could the Vance-Owen Plan be implemented, that
11 that could have improved the situation. It was not one
12 of your comments, it was somebody you talked to who
13 said that, but certainly it is in your report.
14 I cannot remember who told you, I think it was Santic,
15 maybe Skopljak, Santic I would say. How do you feel
16 about that?
17 A. It was Santic who was suggesting that we
18 should -- that they should implement the Vance-Owen
19 Plan immediately for that area of Central Bosnia.
20 I think that the reason why he was advocating that was
21 that the Vance-Owen Plan would have allowed the
22 establishment of military and political structures
23 based on the ethnic composition of the territory, and
24 so I think that he felt that if the ethnic composition
25 of the territory suited him, in other words if it was
1 Croat dominated, then they would be able to, with some
2 legitimacy, establish a military and political
3 structure which reflected that; in other words a
4 military and political structure which was Croat
5 dominated.
6 Q. Could you conclude from that that in a way
7 the players that you met were pushing in a very strong
8 way, not to say even more, to the implementation of
9 that Vance-Owen Plan? Maybe they applied methods that
10 could anticipate in a way that that was the way of
11 maybe an ethnic cleansing that was almost officialised
12 by the international community, or maybe you did not
13 have that impression?
14 A. My understanding of the aim of the Vance-Owen
15 Plan was to reflect the original ethnic makeup as
16 opposed to any ethnic makeup which may have been
17 achieved as a result of the war as it raged back and
18 forth across Bosnia. So I think what one had was a
19 partial interpretation of the spirit of the Vance-Owen
20 Plan, which was then being assisted by a little bit of
21 extreme violence.
22 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you, I have no more
23 questions. My colleagues, no further questions. Your
24 statement has ended, thank you very much for that.
25 Now we are going to adjourn and tomorrow we
1 will resume, this will be the last day of our two week
2 period of the Blaskic trial. So we will resume
3 tomorrow at 10.00.
4 (6.00 pm)
5 (Hearing adjourned until 10.00 am the following day)
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25