Page 28849
1 Tuesday, 16 October 2012
2 [Defence Rule 84 bis Statement]
3 [Open session]
4 [The accused entered court]
5 --- Upon commencing at 9.02 a.m.
6 JUDGE KWON: Good morning, everyone.
7 The Chamber has allowed the accused to make a statement pursuant
8 to Rule 84 bis today during the first session.
9 Yes, Mr. Karadzic, you have the floor.
10 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Good morning, Your Excellencies.
11 Good morning, everyone.
12 Today I will be addressing you as the accused, not as a
13 self-represented defendant as before. I am a physician, a psychiatrist,
14 psychotherapist, group analyst, and a literary man. Instead of being
15 accused for the events in our civil war, I should have been rewarded for
16 all the good things I've done; namely, that I did everything in human
17 power to avoid the war; that I succeeded in reducing the suffering of all
18 civilians; that the number of victims in our war was three to four times
19 less than the numbers reported in the public; that I proclaimed numerous
20 unilateral cease-fires and military containment and I stopped our army
21 many times when they were close to victory; that I constantly sought
22 peace and accepted four out of five peace agreements; that I advocated,
23 initiated, and implemented the humanisation of the conflict by applying
24 all measures of humanitarian nature; that in addition to my many
25 presidential duties, I personally supervised a supply of humanitarian
Page 28850
1 aid, cease-fires, and the honouring of international law of warfare, and
2 thus I was the address for many successes of humanitarian actions; also,
3 I proclaimed and implemented many acts of mercy.
4 As time passes, this truth will be stronger and stronger and the
5 accusations and the propaganda, the lies and hatred, will get weaker and
6 weaker. I never had anything against Muslims or Croats; on the contrary,
7 I became a Sarajevo man of my own choice. I arrived in Sarajevo when I
8 was 15, although all my countrymen went to Belgrade, and although in
9 Belgrade I had my father's sister and other family. I chose Sarajevo of
10 my own will. I got married there. My wife Ljiljana and my children
11 Sonia and Aleksandar were born there. I was friends with the people of
12 Sarajevo, making no distinctions, and I was friends with them deeply and
13 sincerely. All my colleagues in psychiatry, my friends, my dentists, my
14 tradesmen, my lawyers, all of them were Muslims. I never made any
15 discrimination. My hairdresser of many years, Meho Sabic, is a man I
16 visited a few days before the war started, hoping that there would never
17 be a war, and I was always faithful to my choices. I never allowed for
18 the possibility of even the smallest individual crimes, and especially
19 not crimes on a mass scale, nor the possibility that any of the
20 communities would be permanently removed from the Serb territories.
21 Neither I nor anyone I know could ever think there could be a genocide
22 against any people that we believed to be the same as us, Serbs, although
23 of a different confession.
24 My other occupation is literature. I authored several books of
25 poetry, including one of poetry for children. These books have been
Page 28851
1 awarded by many prominent awards and my poems have been translated into
2 several great languages. After leaving my presidential duties, I also
3 wrote one comedy and one novel called: "The Wondrous Chronicle of the
4 Night." I was active in politics until 1968 -- from 1968, in fact, and
5 after that for decades I was a dissident, and beginning with 1990 until
6 1996 I was also active as a founder and the president of the Serbian
7 Democratic Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina and also as a member of the
8 Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. And then I
9 was president of Republika Srpska.
10 My wife and I were also active in a political movement led by a
11 prominent Muslim woman. If it hadn't been for the creation of political
12 parties, I would still be in that movement today because I was otherwise
13 not interested in politics. I was born on 19 June 1945 in a village
14 called Petnijca, not far from Savnik in present-day Montenegro. Until
15 the Berlin Congress, it was Herzegovina, and that's why we felt so close
16 to Bosnia-Herzegovina because we thought of ourselves as Herzegovinians.
17 My father was a tradesman. My mother was a housewife. My family on my
18 father's side had monarchistic sympathies, whereas my mother was more on
19 Tito's side. My father was active in the so-called Liberation Movement
20 when the war started, but then the communists killed off the prominent
21 elders in our family, those are the well-known leftist inclinations. And
22 at that time my father chose the royalist army which was later suppressed
23 by Tito. And then my father came home.
24 My father was very fond of Russian [as interpreted] culture and
25 Russian [as interpreted] monarchy and parliamentarianism. When -- after
Page 28852
1 1968 I stopped believing Tito, I was then 32. I was then 23, in fact. I
2 came to see the rightness of my father's views, and until then we argued
3 a lot. I see in the transcript that he was fond of Russian culture, in
4 fact it was British culture and parliamentarianism. In that army, the
5 royalist army which was referred to as Chetniks, these Chetniks in my
6 area did not have any conflict with other ethnic communities. They only
7 had an idealogical conflict with communists. In Montenegro in my region
8 in Niksic, there are Muslims who live there, even very close to my home
9 and they were very close also to my parents and our family. The Muslims
10 of Niksic are very renowned people, very prominent athletes, physicians,
11 et cetera, and there had never been any interethnic conflict or any bad
12 sentiment between communities. The Catholic church was very close to my
13 school and there I came to love Bach listening to the organ music.
14 Therefore, my experience with the so-called others were more than
15 good and favourable, and my father had a friend as close as a brother who
16 was a Muslim, who was an Albanian. And I never had any bad experience of
17 that sort, and that's why I chose to live in Sarajevo. In the 1990s, the
18 Serb community in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 became very anxious when the
19 HDZ appeared in Croatia and when the Izetbegovic made his announcement in
20 Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbs were frightened of the Ustasha rhetoric
21 and there were also suspicions that Mr. Izetbegovic, the author of the
22 Islamic Declaration, would apply this Islamic Declaration as a political
23 platform of his party. There is not a single Serb or any man anywhere in
24 the world who could convince Serbs that there is or isn't a threat of
25 genocide. It is only when they saw where things were going in Yugoslavia
Page 28853
1 that they understood what's the writing on the wall before I even said a
2 word. The Serb party was established only after those two other
3 political parties, the HDZ and the SDA, had been founded already with
4 their very strong anti-Serb political orientation.
5 I was neighbours with Mr. Izetbegovic. We met very often and my
6 literary friends defended him in the former regime. They did not agree
7 with the Islamic Declaration, but they didn't think that he should be in
8 prison either. I often queried him about what his party was going to be
9 like and I had the most favourable impression of him, and I told my
10 friends that this man could not possibly do anything that is written in
11 the Islamic Declaration. And when it became clear that the Serb party
12 had to be established, I informed Mr. Izetbegovic, but he already knew
13 that from a certain Mr. Srebrovac, who had been in jail with him. And
14 when I said that Srebrovo and myself would be together, he was kind of
15 down-cast. I don't know why. But he seemed glad that the Serbs would
16 also have their own political party. He asked me that the Serbs should
17 not vote for communists among their community because it was customary
18 for people in one community to vote for the worst people in the other
19 community. So he asked me that Serbs should not vote for Muslim
20 communists.
21 Mr. Izetbegovic was very concerned that the communists would
22 remain in power and that he and his group would perhaps end up in jail
23 for the third or fourth time. I agreed and we did not vote in the way he
24 feared. We voted honourably. And my agreement with Mr. Izetbegovic was
25 that if we win, at the next elections every community could vote from any
Page 28854
1 of the four ethnic lists; and that still applies in the Federation, one
2 voter can vote either from the Croatian and Muslim list. And if it had
3 been so, there would be no problem. Mrs. Plavsic received many votes
4 from Muslim women; we were able to see that. Quite simply, those Muslim
5 women were happy to see a woman on the Presidency and we saw a light at
6 the end of the tunnel, a possibility to live well together. However,
7 despite all the resistance that I felt I had to become part of the
8 Presidency, although I had been refusing to be nominated to the
9 parliament or the Presidency, and I said that after the elections I would
10 return to my profession which is physician first and author next and I
11 would not be politically active.
12 I'm afraid the interpretation is not correct. I refused to be
13 nominated and I did not become member of the Presidency or the
14 parliament. My determination was to remain physician and author.
15 Everybody who knows me know that I am not an autocrat, that I am
16 not aggressive, that I am not intolerant. On the contrary, I'm a mild
17 man, a tolerant man with a great capacity to understand others. But it
18 is true that I was strict towards myself and others in implementing
19 democratic decisions. I did not abuse the great powers given me by the
20 status in the party or the great parties given me later by the
21 Constitution in Republika Srpska.
22 Immediately after the elections, tensions rose in
23 Bosnia-Herzegovina and our pre-electoral ideal was ruined because the
24 Party of Democratic Action, the SDA, which represented the Muslim
25 community, changed its main orientation in favour of Yugoslavia. Already
Page 28855
1 in the end of January, in mid-January we established the authorities and
2 in end January the SDA chose secession. In establishing the authorities,
3 the Serb side, the SDS and myself, made many concessions to keep peace in
4 the house. In numbers we were almost equal to Muslims if we take Serbs
5 who declared themselves as Yugoslavs; however, Croats and Muslims got the
6 most prominent posts. The Muslims got the post of president of
7 Presidency, a Croat became the prime minister, and the Serbs had to
8 satisfy themselves with getting speaker in the Assembly. However, there
9 were also ministries of power, the Ministry of the Interior and the
10 Ministry of Defence were given to Croats and Muslims. Even the foreign
11 ministry came under the control of a Muslim, namely a man whom we knew
12 would take Bosnia in the direction of fundamentalist regimes instead of
13 the direction of Europe.
14 Then came a period of underhand dealings and blockages in
15 establishing the authorities. The Serbs could not get the posts that
16 they were promised. A Serb could not become the head of MUP.
17 Marginalisation started. A period of peace time, underhand dealings, and
18 trickery, and we could live with all that still but we were very
19 concerned about manipulations with the MUP. The MUP became one with the
20 Party of Democratic Action. The SDA sent its members for military
21 training in Croatia with the intention that these people upon return be
22 integrated into the MUP and into that army of the republic that was in
23 the making already on the 30th of March. On the 10th of June, the
24 National Council for the Defence of Muslims was already established.
25 Some people who were convicted were also included in this, people
Page 28856
1 who had been convicted many times before and all of that presented a
2 great danger to us. What the Serbs had lived through in areas where
3 there were less than 50 per cent, such as Visegrad for instance, for the
4 entire year not a single community in Europe would put up with that, with
5 the humiliation, even rapes, even murders. If I tell you that on his
6 patron saint's day a Serb would invite a Muslim and play good host, you
7 know what the patron saint's day means for a Serb, and after that the
8 same man kills him on the door-step of his own home, it is not individual
9 pathology. This man obviously thought that it could be done, that was
10 the case with the killing of the member of the wedding party on the 1st
11 of March, 1992. The father of the groom was killed and some other people
12 were killed, but this was not done by one of those Celos. He said it on
13 television. He said that that goes nowadays.
14 In every municipality, in every area where we lived together, the
15 military organising of Croats and Muslims was no secret to anyone. We
16 could see it, it was obvious. Arming and the similar problems, when I
17 discussed that with Mr. Izetbegovic, what was happening among the people,
18 he would simply shrug his shoulders and say, "Well, everybody's arming
19 themselves." It was clear we were heading towards a catastrophe. We
20 simply made political movements. We were relying on the Constitution, on
21 the local self-government, and we were aiming for regionalisation.
22 Mr. Izetbegovic - of whom I still think positively because I believe that
23 he was pushed into the war - he suggested to us at the end of May 1992 to
24 split Bosnia. We were shocked. He gave that proposal to
25 Mr. Zulfikarpasic as well, he did it at least twice, and
Page 28857
1 Mr. Zulfikarpasic wrote about that. We clearly stated we were against
2 the division of Yugoslavia, against the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina;
3 the Croats accepted the idea, and then somebody came up with an idea to
4 exchange populations. We branded that a nightmare and rejected that idea
5 as well. Following that, the Zagreb daily Vecernji List published an
6 idea of cantonisation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Mrs. Plavsic on behalf of
7 the Serb community stated that it was an interesting idea, letting them
8 know that we did not reject outright such peaceful suggestions.
9 So all of the political movements we made at the time were made
10 in, so to speak, dire straights, when we were pushed into a corner. We
11 were pushed into a corner by the movements of our partners in government
12 and by our neighbours of other ethnic communities and we were forced to
13 do that. Those were the things we had to do from the founding of the
14 party until the war broke out and until the end of the war. Throughout
15 that time our reactions and my personal reactions were aimed at
16 minimising the damage and doing what we had to do under the
17 circumstances.
18 The president of the Muslim-Bosnian organisation, the second
19 Muslim party, Mr. Zulfikarpasic, one day in the summer of 1992 called me
20 on the phone. I was about to go on a trip when he told me that we had to
21 get together to save Bosnia and conclude historical Muslim-Serb
22 agreement. I cancelled all of my other engagements and gladly accepted
23 to meet with him, gladly expected the idea presented to me, and it seemed
24 to me at the time that Mr. Izetbegovic also genuinely accepted that idea.
25 We were expected to give up on the idea of regionalisation and to keep
Page 28858
1 Bosnia in itself entirety in Yugoslavia. Upon return from America,
2 Mr. Izetbegovic discontinued his further support to that project. And
3 starting in the end of August there was an increase in tensions. And it
4 was only then that we founded the Autonomous Region of Krajina. It was
5 done by the local population and nobody could really take it against them
6 because there were several Muslim municipalities being established at the
7 time, and the people in that region did not want to accept the domination
8 of Sarajevo, and neither did they want to accept the domination of Pale
9 throughout the war. They really wanted to have a sort of local
10 self-government which they wanted to ensure for themselves.
11 Mr. Izetbegovic once came back from Germany and he looked quite
12 beaten and discouraged, and he said to me and Mr. Koljevic that he was
13 being pushed into fighting for independence and that he had no other
14 choice. Those were really, really difficult moments, and at the time it
15 really seemed as though somebody was pushing him to fight for the
16 independence. Throughout that period, even though we could observe that
17 the Muslims and the Croats were organising themselves in the military
18 sense, the entire Serb elite, the intellectuals, members of the party,
19 the leadership of the party, were against the SDS establishing a
20 paramilitary formation. And the SDS never really had one. In all of the
21 foreign intelligence services, there was speculations to the effect that
22 perhaps Captain Dragan was a member of the SDS, but they could never
23 claim with certainty that that was the SDS paramilitary formation. I
24 myself and the entire Serbian political leadership didn't really know
25 what attitude the JNA would take. At the time the JNA had an identical
Page 28859
1 attitude towards national parties. It was an ideological conflict, if I
2 can call it that, and we had a great dilemma as to what to do should the
3 war broke out. Our young men were serving in the JNA, whereas their
4 young men were under their control and under their command.
5 So during that time I was faced with a lot of pressure from the
6 ground. Local authorities were quite concerned - justifiably
7 concerned - because they felt abandoned by the federal government, they
8 felt abandoned by their own leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They
9 were left to themselves to resolve a multitude of big and small problems.
10 So in turn, they pressured us. The only means they had at their disposal
11 that nobody could take away from them was the Territorial Defence, which
12 according to the law belonged to each local commune. And everybody not
13 only could but had to under the law defend their country once it was
14 attacked. There was no way to betray that people, nor could I have
15 accepted something that they would not have accepted themselves because
16 it would have lasted for a very short time, only two hours. This is the
17 nation that had a long memory, that remembered everything that had
18 happened to them in the past, and there was no way one could dictate to
19 the Serbs what they should be doing. So we had enormous pressure exerted
20 on us because the people were afraid that they would all be massacred,
21 and during that time the Serbs were being killed. It is a terrible
22 misconception and it is a great injustice, this portrayal of the Serbs as
23 those who started the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
24 The Serbs were exposed to the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina even
25 before the 4th and 6th of April. A member of the wedding party was
Page 28860
1 killed on the 1st of March, and then there were -- on the 25th and 26th
2 of March there was a terrible massacre in Brod and then in Sijekovac. On
3 the 5th of April, or rather, on the 4th of April already in Sarajevo, the
4 Green Berets attacked the barracks, Serb communities, and they occupied
5 all tall buildings, skyscrapers, put their snipers there, they killed
6 policemen, they killed young people who tried to cross into Grbavica
7 which was already under Serb control. So that was a night of terrible
8 terror in Sarajevo.
9 So the beginning of fighting and the beginning of the war in
10 various municipalities have nothing to do with me. At the time when
11 these killings were committed in Brod, Bijeljina, Kupres, we still had
12 the common state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Mrs. Plavsic, Mr. Koljevic,
13 Mr. Simovic and others, Mr. Ostojic, they went to those hot spots on a
14 task given by joint authorities to calm the situation. They were not
15 sent there by the SDS. Simovic was on our list, but he was not a member
16 of the SDS. These people were tasked by the Government of
17 Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina had among its
18 members some Serbs, as there were Serbs in the Presidency and people were
19 sent on these tasks as representatives of the common joint government.
20 On the 1st of March, 1992, a member of the Serb party was killed
21 in Sarajevo the day after the referendum. Mr. Koljevic and I were in
22 Belgrade at the time, so we were not responsible for the barricades. The
23 barricades were a spontaneous, a chaotic reaction to the possibility that
24 somebody could dare to kill a Serb in front of an Orthodox church, that
25 somebody could dare shoot at the wedding party without there being any
Page 28861
1 protection for that wedding party. We had no influence over the joint
2 police. The police was controlled by the Muslims, by the Muslim SDA, by
3 their extremists. And before our very eyes it was transforming itself
4 into the illegal army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We ourselves were
5 completely powerless.
6 My escorts who were policemen in the joint MUP escorted my family
7 in the 11th hour on the 5th of April outside of Sarajevo under fire. I
8 was still myself in the Holiday Inn hotel in Sarajevo, and from there
9 together with two other national leaders I went to the TV station where
10 we had -- we were guests in a live TV show. We were trying to give our
11 views to the audience. In front of that time -- at that time there were
12 50.000 protesters in front of Holiday Inn. Some of them were armed, and
13 this is why my escorts did not allow me to go back to the hotel even
14 though I wanted to do that. However, two of my body-guards remained
15 there. They ended up being taken prisoner, mistreated, they barely
16 managed to stay alive. We were also very concerned for the fate of
17 Professor Buha, however it seemed that some smart people managed to get
18 him outside before that enraged crowd broke into the hotel and started
19 firing. So the only issue that I should be put on trial for is the
20 social and political stupidity which came as a result of excessive trust
21 that I had in people, and we and the Serb community in Bosnia-Herzegovina
22 could have paid a very high price for this stupidity of mine.
23 The first manifestation of war was the expulsion of Serbs from
24 the towns where Croats and Muslims were in majority. In the parts of
25 Bosnia and Herzegovina where the Serbs were a minority, they were fair
Page 28862
1 game, perfect targets, and they never took to arms to defend themselves.
2 And until September 1992 there was not a single Serb settlement in the
3 Muslim and Croat Federation that was left intact. Everything had been
4 cleansed, killed, set on fire.
5 Quite to the contrary, in Republika Srpska in the -- in what is
6 today Republika Srpska and at the time was part of Bosnia-Herzegovina
7 where we were in majority, there were no traces of war there at the time.
8 Your Excellencies, there was no pattern of behaviour in the Serb
9 municipalities. If we look at the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in
10 Sarajevo and in the predominantly Muslim areas, we see that it was raging
11 starting on the 5th of April, whereas in the neighbouring Serb Rogatica
12 the war didn't start until the 20th of May. So it is clear that in the
13 areas that were under Serb control there was no war. The Serb side
14 didn't start a war and no war was started until the Muslims initiated it.
15 Most of the municipalities in Republika Srpska saw war at the end of May,
16 those were the municipalities of Bratunac and Vlasenica, which already
17 had reached an agreement on creating two municipalities and having a
18 peaceful coexistence there. Mrs. Rabija Subakovic, an eminent Muslim,
19 wrote an open letter to Izetbegovic asking him to support this sort of a
20 project. In other municipalities as well. And instead of supporting
21 her, an order came out ordering the Muslims in Bratunac and Vlasenica to
22 start shooting, and those two municipalities were turned into a
23 slaughter-house, and it was not the result of any will of mine, I did not
24 know about this. This came as a result of negotiations and the attack of
25 arrogant extremists from the SDA party.
Page 28863
1 This is how it was in the Krajina municipalities also, where
2 despite the fact that there was a war in other Bosnian municipalities, no
3 war broke out in Krajina municipalities until it was initiated by the
4 extremists. Until that time they had their own police, they had their
5 own co-operation, and life was going on similar to how it is regulated
6 nowadays in the European Union. And the co-operation ended at the end of
7 May at the order of the SDA, which we could hear from one witness. Based
8 on their strategic interest, to ensure that the left bank of the Sana
9 River were annexed to Cazin and Bihac. So they started from the Sana
10 River and its left bank.
11 I didn't know anything about that. I learned about all that only
12 later. We did not have any reliable communication lines with Krajina for
13 a few months, not only because there was no corridor or the corridor was
14 broken off. The corridor was actually stabilised towards the end of the
15 year, but that was not the only reason. Another reason was the fact that
16 we didn't have even telephone lines. The valley of the Sana is comprised
17 of Kljuc, Sanski Most, Prijedor, and Bosanski Novi. Those four
18 municipalities were torched towards the end of May and the beginning of
19 June, and that was all based on the strategic interest which was for that
20 area on the left bank of the Sana River to be annexed to the
21 Cazin Krajina. Although we did not have any communication lines over
22 there, we didn't have any contacts there, the Autonomous Region of
23 Krajina had its parliament, its government, its ministers, they tried
24 hard. The Krajina people had always been of autonomous views. The Serbs
25 want to be autonomous wherever they are. We had our reliable people over
Page 28864
1 there; for example, the president of the Assembly Mr. Kupresanin, on my
2 behalf and on his own behalf toured in Vega -- remand prisons, he helped
3 the prisoners there, he co-operated with the UNHCR, the International Red
4 Cross, the local Red Cross. He alarmed the general public about the
5 possible peril that threatens the civilians. He went to Manjaca, he went
6 to the prison in Prijedor. He wanted to help. He wanted to diminish the
7 sufferings. However, there were no prisons anywhere before Prijedor came
8 under attack. The prison was an investigative centre because the remand
9 unit or the detention unit could only hold up to ten people, not more.
10 And then on the 30th of May there was a large-scale attack on Prijedor
11 which resulted in the arrest of a large number of people. 59 per cent of
12 those people were released immediately after the triage process was
13 completed. Those prisons were not camps. Those prisoned existed only
14 for as long as the investigative judges were there and the investigators,
15 and they worked every day, they worked hard. As soon as all the
16 investigative actions and the triage were over, 41 per cent of the people
17 were sent to Manjaca because they had participated in fighting and some
18 were also subject to criminal proceedings and the rest were released. In
19 other words, there were no prisons before the war, before the clashes,
20 and there were no clashes before the end of May. However, we didn't know
21 even that, we didn't have any insight, we didn't have any way to learn
22 about all that or make our mark. Srdjo Srdic from Prijedor, he was the
23 president of the Red Cross in -- at Prijedor, also an MP. Whenever he
24 could, he informed us what was going on, what was happening. He tried
25 hard to inform us, and he gave me firm guarantees that there was no
Page 28865
1 barbed wire around Trnopolje, but I could only see that for myself
2 subsequently. At that time I was in London, at the conference there. I
3 personally invited a British journalist to come. I spoke to Penny
4 Marshall and her team and I even transported them on our government's
5 aircraft. I opened Republika Srpska for them. I told them they could
6 visit anything that they wanted to see. I encouraged them to take
7 escorts where they wanted. If they didn't want, they didn't have to take
8 escorts. I didn't want to hide anything. That was my first motive. And
9 the second underlying cause was to have the presence of the journalists
10 to curb the influence of some of the renegade elements amongst us. That
11 was another one of my stupidities because there is no country in the
12 world who would let the journalists to the front line.
13 But I can tell you that the journalists who introduced themselves
14 as journalists to us did a lot more damage to us than NATO's shells. For
15 example, they would stage a scene where a man would be put next to the
16 barbed wire, although he was not there previously, and then they took a
17 picture of that and sent off that image to the world. Thomas Deichmann
18 exposed that and now it is very clear; however, at that time this was --
19 this could not be denied. Every reader had seen that. So you could not
20 go to every reader to explain that things were not what they seemed. We
21 continued to attend conferences to discuss Bosnia and Herzegovina. All
22 of our moves at that time were reactions to the Muslim's side moves. It
23 was only on the 16th of April that we set up our own Territorial Defence
24 because the Muslims had expelled us from their own Territorial Defence
25 and they removed a Serb general. On the 22nd of April, I launched a
Page 28866
1 platform and I suggested that nothing that had been taken by force should
2 be recognised because any further fighting from that would have been
3 pointless. And all that time we participated in the conference on
4 Bosnia-Herzegovina under the -- chairmanship of Lord Cutileiro and Lord
5 Carrington and then the chairs became Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen. That
6 was the continuation of that same conference. However, the war raged
7 against our will. There was no way to influence the events. We took the
8 decision on the setting up of our army on the 12th of May, but it was
9 only on the 15th of June that we actually organised it or made a decision
10 on its organisation. We spent the entire year of 1992 in trying to
11 structure the Army of Republika Srpska, and we went into great pains to
12 turn common people into soldiers, and they fought only in the territory
13 of Republika Srpska. And it was defence, all the time we defended
14 ourselves. We never embarked on trying to conquer Muslim territories
15 because it was abundantly clear that there would be a division, i.e., the
16 reorganisation of Bosnia and Herzegovina into three different republics
17 and we had under our control over 60 per cent. So I knew that it would
18 be crazy to take even more territory that we would eventually have to
19 give back. This put us into a very difficult situation where we had to
20 passively defend ourselves, we suffered a lot of casualties, especially
21 during the so-called truces when we suffered more losses than at the time
22 when we were actively engaged in fighting.
23 The events in the municipalities followed a certain logic. Apart
24 from Foca and Zvornik, everywhere else - and of course Bratunac - were
25 already -- at the beginning of May Zekic was killed, but that was four
Page 28867
1 weeks after the 8th of May, after the war had broke out in Zvornik. So
2 apart from Zvornik and Foca, and we did not know anything about these
3 two, in all the other municipalities war broke out much later. In
4 Zvornik, we didn't know what was going on there, we didn't have a clue.
5 Nobody ever invited Arkan there. I don't think that he was ever there.
6 Maybe some of his men were there. There were a lot of paramilitaries
7 there. However, on the 16th of April, our police didn't know who was in
8 control of Zvornik and our police, the secretary from the ministry called
9 Arkan on the phone and asked him who was in control of Zvornik. The same
10 applied to Foca. The late Mr. Koljevic went there with Jeremy
11 Braden [phoen] in April to assist, to see what was going on with the
12 Serbs who were left at the elements' mercy and they almost killed them
13 there. So that had nothing whatsoever to do with us. We could not
14 influence any of those events.
15 Now that I have mentioned my participation in conferences,
16 Your Excellencies, many events, many incidents happened while I was
17 abroad attending negotiations or meetings. I knew that things were not
18 happening was because I was not there, but because those incidents were
19 staged during the conferences in order for the conferences to fall
20 through.
21 On the 20th of May, there was an explosion in Vase Miskin street.
22 It is no longer in my indictment but it is a very significant model. The
23 ambassador Cutileiro called me on phone and he told me that he had to
24 interrupt the conference, we were in Lisbon at the time, because a shell,
25 a mortar shell, had killed people in a bread line. I took an hour's
Page 28868
1 break in order to inquire with our army and the police as to what had
2 happened and they told me it was a nonsense. They told me we did not
3 fire any shells. It was impossible to fire a shell in such a narrow
4 street. They told me that the media had already been there prepared to
5 film an event, and then I was very certain that we didn't do it and I
6 told Mr. Cutileiro that and that he shouldn't buy that rubbish. That was
7 a model that was followed when the other incidents in Sarajevo happened.
8 Unfortunately there were also crimes. For example, Koricanske Stijene,
9 which was not staged my Muslims, it was done -- it was committed by
10 criminals. And I was also at a conference at that time. The army
11 informed the state leadership, they informed me, I was shocked, I was
12 angry, and I asked that the two presidents of the municipalities shed
13 some light on the crime, to take measures. I shouted at some innocent
14 people, especially the leadership of Skender Vakuf which is today's
15 Knezevo. We ended the conference on the 27th of August. On the 28th I
16 flew to Belgrade. On the 29th I was in Pale. And on the 30th
17 Minister Subotic was dispatched to the spot of the crime. (redacted
18 (redacted)
19 (redacted)
20 (redacted)
21 (redacted)
22 (redacted)
23 (redacted)
24 (redacted)
25 (redacted)
Page 28869
1 At the end of September 1992, Muslims from Srebrenica killed a
2 lot of civilians and soldiers between Srebrenica and Milici, and in
3 Vlasenica there was a mass burial. Also as -- on my way to next round of
4 negotiations I stopped by and I attended the burial and I delivered a sad
5 and humble speech which we had an occasion to hear in the this courtroom.
6 It was a terrible scene. Between Srebrenica and Vlasenica and Bratunac
7 and Zvornik, we were in a large room. There were about 20.000 armed
8 Muslims there. We sent them messages that they shouldn't fight, that
9 that area would be given to Muslims. However, we suffered losses.
10 Workers were being killed, farmers in their fields, miners in the mines,
11 they were all being killed. And we used all the round-about ways across
12 Sekovici and Sapardici [phoen]. But they would come even there. They
13 would set up ambushes, they would kill civilians, they would stop buses
14 and kill all the civilians there. They prevented us from having any sort
15 of communication, and they rendered impossible the survival of
16 Republika Srpska and the people in that area. For an entire year up to
17 the spring of 1993 we suffered all that, we didn't do anything, but then
18 we had to launch a counter-offensive in order to neutralise them.
19 Then we took Cerska, Konjevic Polje, and so on and so forth, and
20 it was then that we saw an unprecedented campaign about blood flowing in
21 Cerska, about a huge number of people having been killed, although what
22 we found there was houses torched and Serbs crucified after having been
23 kidnapped. We found all sorts of things there. However, this story
24 about the Serb crimes in Cerska was just a cry wolf and one couldn't
25 match that in the international media. If General Morillon had not gone
Page 28870
1 there to inspect the situation, the story would have held and it would go
2 down in history as a genocide that had been committed by the Serbs. And
3 then the families went to Tuzla, whereas the able-bodied men went to
4 Srebrenica. It was their choice. They went to Srebrenica to fight
5 there.
6 We continued with our activities, we proceeded with our actions.
7 I stopped our army. Some of my generals understood that. Some were very
8 angry. Common soldiers, foot soldiers, were very angry when I stopped
9 our army at the very entrance into Srebrenica in 1993 because I knew up
10 to then that 1300 Serbs, mostly civilians, had been killed, and the
11 soldiers were from those families, the families that had been killed.
12 And the Ministry of Defence from some more big countries published their
13 communiques, saying that we had entered Srebrenica and that there were
14 again flows of blood on the street. That candidate of lies and
15 propaganda about the crimes that had been committed is similar to what
16 happened after the fall of Srebrenica in 1995. The rhetorics was the
17 same, the way things were represented were the same. And again, it was
18 another cry wolf situation, but nobody could believe that.
19 Your Excellencies, I trust the international community. I often
20 came at odds with our army. I attacked our officers for having done
21 things which they didn't do, as a matter of fact. It turned out that I
22 tended to believe rumours more than my own officers, and they were in
23 dire straits. They were between a rock and a hard place, and so was I
24 because I tended to accuse them, attack them, because I believed the
25 allegations and most of them were simply not correct.
Page 28871
1 One of the most common such misunderstandings, or rather, the
2 sources of misunderstandings between the civilian authorities and the
3 army was the issue of convoys. I had thousands of other concerns and
4 worries. I had almost 2.000 kilometres of front line and if I --
5 although I was not engaged in technical command, I was still concerned
6 with the supplies for the army, the food supplied to them, people who
7 lived along the front line and how they lived. However, despite of all
8 that and despite of my engagement in the negotiations with the
9 international community, I found time every time somebody asked me to
10 help with the passage of a convoy.
11 We have heard - and I assure you - that at any given moment there
12 were about 700 trucks on the roads of Republika Srpska. There were times
13 when Croats stopped humanitarian aid for Muslims and the only way
14 sometimes for the humanitarian aid to reach Muslims was through Serb
15 territory. However, there were many problems with the convoys. The
16 problems arose due to the great number of trucks or goods that had not
17 been declared or because these transports appeared at check-points where
18 they had not been announced and the soldiers there did not know anything
19 of these convoys, and still in all those situations we did our utmost so
20 that civilians on the other end of the line would get the aid. This kind
21 of assistance is a tradition that Serbs introduced from the
22 Serb-Bulgarian war and Henry Dunant, the founder of the International Red
23 Cross, was aware of that. Every time aid came for poor people in
24 Bulgaria, the Serbs stopped the fighting to let the aid through.
25 Professor Koljevic, one of the greatest humanitarians and one of
Page 28872
1 the best men I have ever known, was made ill by all his efforts to get
2 the convoys through. And in those contexts too I often accused unfairly
3 our local commanders because the Muslims, together with the humanitarian
4 aid, received all the military equipment they needed. After every
5 humanitarian convoy we suffered many more losses because they received
6 weapons, ammunition, and fuel along with the aid. And I had terrible
7 difficulties trying to neutralise the rage of our people who saw for
8 themselves that it was not humanitarian aid, it was military equipment.
9 And despite my busy schedule, it never happened that I was too busy to
10 respond to any invitation, any suggestion, that we tried to alleviate the
11 situation and the suffering.
12 Let's take Sarajevo. We were almost 200.000 in Sarajevo before
13 we were expelled and between 50- and 70.000 Serbs remained in Sarajevo;
14 they were not allowed to leave. Sarajevo is my city. And any story that
15 we would shell Sarajevo without any reason is absolutely untrue. Every
16 shell that fell on Sarajevo hurt me personally. That was a city where I
17 knew every square foot, but that city had over 2.000 legitimate military
18 targets and I proposed that Sarajevo be demilitarised. That was
19 rejected. I suggested that it be placed under UN administration; that
20 was rejected. They wanted and they managed to keep Sarajevo militarised
21 to the maximum with 50- to 70.000 troops inside, three divisions, one
22 inside the city and two around the city, and they managed to ruin every
23 cease-fire and to create incidents to feed the media, at the same time
24 demonising Serbs, and keeping alive the hope of the Muslim leadership
25 that somebody from the international community would get sucked into the
Page 28873
1 war, involved in it, on their side.
2 Examples of this are incidents in Sarajevo. Mass killings and
3 the suffering of people, including women and children, in lines for water
4 and especially Markale I and II. It is shameless propaganda and tricks
5 that produced the desired result during the war, but it is unimaginable
6 that this is appearing now in the courtroom and that the Court is
7 verifying it as real events. The first incident, Markale I, was staged
8 after the 4th of February, when this attempt to orchestrate an incident
9 with the humanitarian aid queue failed and already some days later in
10 February at an empty market-place where there are no goods on sale, 500,
11 600 people are suddenly there and this massacre is staged.
12 I always asked our army to keep me informed, and you will see it
13 in all the documents. I always said, "Please admit to it if it's our
14 work. It will do less damage if we admit it because we have to be
15 credible. If we say something it has to be true." And the army
16 convinced me that it was not possible to hit such a place with one shell,
17 there was no visual contact, and it was impossible. It was not even
18 believable that 500, 600 people would be in such a small space - they had
19 no reason to be there. And it was, on top of everything, impossible to
20 create such damage in view of all the stalls and tables. It is a
21 shameless orchestration. Obviously some people got killed by that
22 explosion, but we also saw android mannequins being thrown onto trucks
23 creating this show for the world. We resolutely rejected that and we
24 said that we would not accept any investigation unless the Serb side is
25 somehow involved in it. The investigation was completed without us and
Page 28874
1 we were not allowed to do our own investigation.
2 Now, as for Markale II, Markale II was orchestrated in an attempt
3 to take the crisis to its peak in May, and that attempt failed. And the
4 strategic bombing that was supposed to change the balance of powers and
5 to make us sign a surrender also failed. However, another opportunity
6 was taken in end August 1995 by this orchestrated event known as
7 Markale II. Our side could not have fired that shell nor could that
8 shell hit that spot in that way. However, again we were not allowed to
9 take part in the investigation. Some investigating authorities from the
10 international community co-operated with the Muslim police and harmonised
11 their findings, although they should not have done that.
12 So we were in a situation when there was nobody unbiased there
13 who would be able to say what was actually going on. Muslims enjoyed
14 such support in this trickery but we were helpless. We could just stand
15 by and watch this catastrophe in the making without being able to do
16 anything. Markale II is a glaring example. Again, there was an
17 explosion there. Some people were killed. But there were also bodies
18 there that had never been on the market before the explosion. Some were
19 brought from the front line and also some bodies of people who had died
20 of natural causes were brought from the morgue and added to the number of
21 casualties. All of this was done to create this image of catastrophe and
22 suffering.
23 Now, speaking of sniping, I was always horrified by sniping
24 because I believe it to be inhumane, although it is a legitimate military
25 technique of eliminating important personalities on the side of the
Page 28875
1 adversary. We in Sarajevo were not able to distinguish by appearance who
2 were Serb, who were Muslim; we are of the same race and there was no
3 reason to engage in any intense sniping activity. I myself worked on
4 many anti-sniping agreements, some of which were signed, but not many
5 were implemented, not many were honoured. Along the front line in the
6 city of Sarajevo itself, Muslims were in a more favourable position in
7 terms of range than us. They had positions on top of the highest
8 buildings. They hit and sniped wherever they liked. They killed our
9 young girls and women. They also shot people. And they employed
10 champions in marksmanship to do this. Incidents around the Vrbanja
11 bridge they presented as Serb activities, although that was automatic
12 fire that went on all day.
13 They engaged in this kind of trickery and crime that could be
14 exposed only by a totally unbiased, impartial observer group, but that
15 was sadly missing because all members of the international community
16 there came with enormous prejudice against the Serbs and there was no way
17 for us to get our truth across, to make it see the light of day. We were
18 completely trapped. Nothing that we did around Sarajevo was ever
19 accepted. We never cut off any water, electricity, or gas. It was they
20 who fired at the transformer station and cut off water, but they never
21 had any shortages of water. They only had shortages of power. Water was
22 in our hands. They sold water on the black market and those who were
23 engaged in this trade simply did not want water to be available free of
24 charge.
25 Concerning modified air bombs, I heard very vaguely that they are
Page 28876
1 being researched, that they are being fitted with engines from some
2 rockets, and that they were being tested at the grounds of the Army of
3 Yugoslavia to make new firing tables for them. Nobody was required to
4 ask me for permission for any innovations or modifications in the army
5 and nobody asked me. But this is another aspect of command, the military
6 technical aspect into which I never interfered -- with which I never
7 interfered. But I never heard that such a bomb was ever used in a
8 populated area. I heard it was used to crush bunkers in mountains or
9 perhaps somewhere in the military industry, but not that it was ever used
10 in a populated area. There was never any piece of news believable to any
11 degree about that.
12 As for Srebrenica 1995, I was not involved in tactical and
13 operative command or control, but whenever I passed through a place where
14 there was some sort of command, especially a corps command, I stopped by
15 to greet those people. And that's how I stopped by Vlasenica before the
16 operation in Srebrenica, sometime on the 25th, the 26th of June, and by
17 that time we were several days into the horrific Muslim offensive around
18 Sarajevo and Naser Oric's forces stretched our forces thin and
19 co-operated with the forces in Srebrenica. I need not remind you what
20 this protected area looked like. It was a military ground for excursions
21 of Naser Oric's forces who avoided conflict with the VRS. They
22 terrorised civilians. They gouged their eyes out and tore off their
23 ears, only to come back to the safety of the protected area after that.
24 I gave my approval to a small-scale operation to separate Srebrenica and
25 Zepa, to narrow it down to the urban core, as agreed. And that operation
Page 28877
1 was supposed to separate and cut off this corridor between Srebrenica and
2 Zepa that was used for the transport of military equipment and weapons.
3 On the 9th, on the morning of the 9th, the Muslims decided not to defend
4 Srebrenica and the local leadership asked Sarajevo to let them surrender
5 Srebrenica and let the population evacuate. The same day General Krstic
6 asked for instructions because he was able to enter Srebrenica and he
7 wanted the opinion of the superiors. I gave our approval. By that time
8 I had stopped our army many times. Our army was called stop-and-go. We
9 did not want to win; they wanted to win. They wanted to have all of
10 Bosnia for Croats and Muslims. We did not want that kind of victory. We
11 didn't want all of Bosnia for ourselves and that's why we were not in
12 favour of war, war was not in our interest.
13 I gave approval to enter Srebrenica. The only civilians we
14 expected to find in Srebrenica were Muslims. There was not a single Serb
15 there. I ordered that these Muslims be protected, that all the
16 facilities be protected, I ordered that a police force be established
17 immediately to protect civilians. I knew that some of the refugees would
18 probably want to go elsewhere, but it never crossed my mind that the
19 entire population would want to leave Srebrenica; to us it came as a
20 complete surprise. Ambassador Akashi told me that the place was packed,
21 that they were not allowed to leave, that they were not allowed to leave,
22 but it was because their leadership didn't let them leave. It was not
23 us. We did not receive any information about mistreatment of civilians.
24 I did not receive any information of even individual murders in
25 Srebrenica. I got reports of high tensions in Bratunac, where there were
Page 28878
1 a lot of prisoners and very few troops because Bratunac Brigade was
2 outside of Bratunac. And elderly military conscripts and young boys were
3 guarding a lot of prisoners. It was not the only time when we had a lot
4 of prisoners. There were many situations during the war when we had
5 prisoners under our control. It was the usual procedure: Capture,
6 triage, and separation of those who were not subject to prosecution and
7 who are sent to exchanges and the others who were subject to prosecution.
8 We sometimes effected exchanges directly on the front line or we would
9 send prisoners, the second group, to camps such as in Batkovic or prisons
10 and then on they would be exchanged.
11 Never once during the war was there any situation where we would
12 interfere in a normal situation where prisoners were treated normally,
13 and as soon as they reached Batkovic or another prison they were
14 available to the International Red Cross and everything was all right.
15 Those were neighbours taking each other prisoners and there were
16 sometimes exchanges even before they ever reached Manjaca or Batkovic.
17 Personal contacts were used to organise these exchanges
18 immediately, and the usual procedure was to send prisoners to Batkovic
19 and then organise large-scale exchanges. Very frequently I showed -- I
20 pardoned numerous such individuals and the rest were intended for
21 exchange. They were never subject to any criminal prosecution. There
22 was no indication that anybody was killed in Srebrenica or after that. I
23 never once received any piece of information concerning that, be it
24 verbal or in writing. Those were the same types of rumours that we
25 experienced in 1993 in relation to Cerska and later on in relation to
Page 28879
1 Srebrenica, and one did not need to trust that or to verify that because
2 I would have once again come into conflict with the army, having accused
3 it groundlessly for the umpteenth time. When Mrs. Albright came across a
4 body on a surface, on a flat surface, I ordered that it be investigated.
5 I went on the 22nd or the 23rd of March to the Main Staff and I told the
6 Main Staff that we should not put up with that propaganda any longer and
7 that the Presidency and I myself would order that the most detailed
8 investigation of every single death in and around Srebrenica be
9 investigated. Nobody from the Main Staff opposed that idea. Everybody
10 agreed with me and accepted it. And after that I issued an order to the
11 army, to the police, to the military prosecutor, and everybody else
12 concerned to investigate every single death in and around Srebrenica.
13 Unfortunately, in mid-May, that is to say five weeks later, I transferred
14 my authorities to Mrs. Plavsic and I could no longer follow the situation
15 concerning those events.
16 At the same time, in addition to those existing 2.000 kilometres
17 of front, I was given an addition in the mileage with the addition of the
18 front in Western Slavonia. There were numerous municipalities falling
19 one after one, Bosansko Grahovo, Glamoc, Drvar, and Bosanski Petrovac
20 were at risk which were almost entirely Serb municipalities, also
21 Mrkonjic Grad with a dominant Serb majority, and there was no reason or
22 anything else to raise the flag indicating that something else had
23 happened. What we saw were the fireworks, were the rumours that we had
24 witnessed back in 1993. So at the time there was no information about
25 it. I did not learn about it until I came here, where I learned about
Page 28880
1 things that happened.
2 Your Excellencies, the Serb local authorities are the model of
3 caring authorities. Nobody was ever armed in those municipalities until
4 there was an attack. The Serbs always offered that there be two parallel
5 structures of authorities, that everybody take care of their own people
6 until there was a final solution. Why would you want to expel somebody
7 if you gave them a premises to have their own police, to have their own
8 municipality authorities in a building right next to you? It never
9 occurred to us to do that. Nor did we want to recognise any
10 fait accompli. We expected that there would be final negotiations at the
11 end. On the 24th and the 25th of January, 1992, I said in the parliament
12 of Bosnia and Herzegovina: If we continue down this road, we will have a
13 religious and ethnical war. The Serbs will go to Serb municipalities,
14 the Croats to theirs, the Muslims to theirs. There would be mass murder,
15 there would be blood flowing, and in the end we will have to sign an
16 agreement and have three homogenous ethnic communities, and this is
17 exactly what happened. I offered that we wait with holding a referendum,
18 to wait for the government to be restructured, Cengic accepted that, and
19 the Serbs were supposed to go to the referendum and to legitimatise it.
20 We were in an impossible situation. I personally was in an impossible
21 situation, because I was exposing my community to danger because of the
22 concessions that I gave to the other side, because of my peace-loving
23 policies.
24 There was no such example of any other side going to war under so
25 much pressure, faced with so many lies under -- against enemy who was
Page 28881
1 much stronger. In Bosnia and Herzegovina the mobilisation ratio was 2:1
2 in favour of Muslims and Croats. And once the NATO and everybody else
3 got involved, the ratio was even much, much worse. There is no such
4 example anywhere in the world of that and nobody ever thought of saying:
5 Let us hear the other side.
6 Gentlemen, the truth is on our side and it will only grow
7 stronger. We did everything in our power to avoid the war and to
8 minimise the consequences and the damages. There is no statute of
9 limitations that will run out on that and lies are subject to statute of
10 limitations and we will live to see it. Thank you.
11 JUDGE KWON: Thank you, Mr. Karadzic.
12 We'll have a break for half an hour.
13 --- Recess taken at 10.30 a.m.
14 [The witness entered court]
15 --- On resuming at 11.24 a.m.
16 JUDGE KWON: I apologise for the delay. The Chamber had to have
17 a discussion.
18 Good morning, Colonel. If you could take the solemn declaration,
19 please.
20 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I solemnly declare that I will
21 speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
22 WITNESS: ANDREY DEMURENKO
23 [Witness answered through interpreter]
24 JUDGE KWON: Thank you. Please make yourself comfortable.
25 My understanding is that we have Russian translation, and I'm
Page 28882
1 happy to know that my colleague Judge Lattanzi would not need any
2 interpretation today.
3 Yes, Mr. Tieger.
4 MR. TIEGER: Thank you, Mr. President. I know it's difficult to
5 necessarily see, given the configuration of the courtroom, but I
6 definitely wanted to note that we are joined today by Ms. Vega Iodice,
7 sitting behind me. I also wanted to note a brief discussion I had with
8 the Defence concerning some markings to the documents. I understand that
9 those were made in anticipation of the possibility of bringing those to
10 the witness's attention during the course of presentation and to make it
11 more efficient, but the Defence has of course agreed that whether or not
12 that takes place those markings should be removed from the documents
13 before they're tendered into evidence.
14 JUDGE KWON: Yes, Mr. Robinson.
15 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, that's correct, Mr. President, and that will
16 be done.
17 JUDGE KWON: Thank you.
18 Yes, now, Mr. Karadzic.
19 Examination by Mr. Karadzic:
20 Q. [Interpretation] Good morning, Colonel.
21 A. Good morning.
22 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I would like to call up 1D6029,
23 please. I would like to make sure that the Colonel can actually see the
24 e-court.
25 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Yes, it's there.
Page 28883
1 JUDGE KWON: No. Yes.
2 MR. KARADZIC: [Interpretation]
3 Q. Colonel, is this your statement, the statement that you provided
4 to the representatives of the Defence?
5 A. Yes, it is.
6 Q. Thank you. Did you have an opportunity to review your statement
7 and to sign it?
8 A. I did.
9 Q. Thank you. Is it correct? Is it accurate?
10 A. Yes, I can confirm that.
11 Q. Thank you. Colonel, does your statement reflect what you would
12 answer if I were to put those same questions to you today in the
13 courtroom?
14 A. Yes, I would answer exactly the same.
15 Q. Thank you.
16 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Your Excellencies, I would like to
17 tender the statement pursuant to 92 ter rule as well as all the
18 associated documents.
19 JUDGE KWON: We'll deal with the associated exhibits at the end
20 of your examination-in-chief.
21 But is there any objection to the Rule 92 ter statement,
22 Mr. Tieger?
23 MR. TIEGER: No, Mr. President.
24 JUDGE KWON: 1D6029 will be admitted.
25 THE REGISTRAR: As Exhibit D2270, Your Honours.
Page 28884
1 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] When it comes to the associated
2 exhibits, we have given up on those. And now, with your leave, I would
3 like to read the summary of --
4 JUDGE KWON: I do not follow what you just said. You are giving
5 up the associated exhibit?
6 Yes, Mr. Robinson.
7 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, I think he was referring to the additional
8 exhibits.
9 JUDGE KWON: Yes, please go on, Mr. Karadzic.
10 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] The interpretation was wrong. I
11 said "additional." I didn't say "associated."
12 With your leave, I would like to read a summary of the statement
13 provided by Colonel Demurenko. In order to be economical with time, I am
14 going to read in English and I am alerting the interpreters to that fact.
15 [Microphone not activated]
16 THE INTERPRETER: Microphone for the accused, please.
17 JUDGE KWON: Just a second.
18 Microphone, please.
19 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Andrey Demurenko is a retired --
20 [In English] Sorry, I do it in English. Andrey Demurenko is a retired
21 colonel in the Russian army. In January 1995 he joined the UNPROFOR
22 mission in Sarajevo and served there until December 1995 as Chief of
23 Staff for the Sarajevo sector. Colonel Demurenko participated in
24 investigating the shelling of the Markale market on 28th of August, 1995.
25 He went to sites -- to the sites two hours after the shelling. Upon
Page 28885
1 arriving there he observed a crater of the impact. He saw that the
2 experts were there working at the site. Following that, he gave
3 instructions to the UNPROFOR members working at the site and then went
4 back to the headquarters in order to prepare appropriate orders.
5 Upon his return to the headquarters, he learned that the
6 spokesperson of UNPROFOR in Bosnia and Herzegovina had quickly organised
7 a press conference. The spokesman said that this was just another
8 example of an atrocity and a crime committed by Serbian army and that
9 they need to be punished and condemned as the enemies of humanity. There
10 were absolutely no grounds for the spokesman to state something like that
11 because the investigation was not concluded. Colonel Demurenko believed
12 that the UN spokesman did -- what the UN spokesman did was an act of
13 provocation. Colonel Demurenko received two reports that day. The first
14 one was the report made by a Dutch officer who was a ballistics
15 trajectory expert. The second report was produced by a ballistics expert
16 who was either a Croat or a Bosniak. They established the angle of
17 approach of descent at the time the shell reached the surface. It was a
18 very important document which allowed Colonel Demurenko and his team to
19 proceed with the investigation.
20 Colonel Demurenko gathered a group of experts. Their first task
21 was to make ballistics calculation in order to either confirm or deny the
22 information given by the first expert on the angle of impact of the shell
23 upon the surface. Second, to calculate the angle of the shell and draw
24 the line of descent on the map. Further, the investigation was supposed
25 to include personal inspection of all possible fire positions of that
Page 28886
1 particular shell, including photo documentation of those locations. They
2 worked for three days on 28th, 30th, and 31st of August. On 1st of
3 September, they had the results of investigation together with
4 appropriate conclusions. When he came with the results to the
5 investigation -- of the investigation and showed the conclusion to the
6 assistant of the commander and the assistant realised that their
7 conclusions differed from those prepared for the public by the UNPROFOR
8 spokesman, Colonel Demurenko was told: There will be no publishing of
9 your report. It will be impossible to publish it, announce it, or to
10 give this report to the commander. The result of Colonel Demurenko's
11 investigation indicated that the Serbs would not have fired the shell in
12 that incident.
13 Colonel Demurenko visited all possible firing locations of the
14 Serb side and concluded that those locations were either not suitable for
15 mortar use or that there were no traces of mortar. Neither of the
16 locations visited on the Serb side of the confrontation line nor the
17 terrain encompassed with the possible mortar margins of deviation radius
18 that he saw with his own eyes were occupied by mortars on 28th of August,
19 1995. In other words, the terrain was either not suitable for the use of
20 mortars or the location was not used because otherwise he or his team
21 would have seen the traces of the mortar firing or mortar positions since
22 120-millimetre mortars are very heavy and leave traces and impressions in
23 the ground. The terrain east of the direction of his investigation, east
24 of 170 degrees plus/minus 5, was rocky and full of slopes, therefore not
25 suitable for the mortars. This would apply to all bearings less than 170
Page 28887
1 degrees.
2 Colonel Demurenko also concluded that there was a one in million
3 chance that the shell would hit the Markale Market from the distance
4 where Serb positions were located, bearing in mind the size of the street
5 between the building at Markale and the distance from the Serb positions.
6 At that point in time, Colonel Demurenko believed that he had two choices
7 regarding the conclusions of the -- his investigation. The first avenue
8 was to cease any activity and not to do anything else to promote the
9 investigation and truth. Second avenue was not quite appropriate when
10 from the point of view of military ethics and subordination, but he had
11 to resort to it. Through the liaison officer for public relations he got
12 in touch with a media company in order to publicise the report.
13 Colonel Demurenko had been waiting a long time for somebody from the
14 UNPROFOR, from the Sarajevo sector, from the BH command, UN command, for
15 the UN in general to ask him while he was still in Sarajevo: Colonel,
16 could you produce documents to confirm or to corroborate the information
17 that you gave to the Associated Press. But nobody uttered a word about
18 it. Instead, he heard from them only two things: We will throw you out
19 or we will kill you. That was the only argument. Nobody asked a thing.
20 It was undesirable information for everyone.
21 Colonel Demurenko was rejected as a source of information leading
22 in an unwanted direction. It was apparent to him that no one from the
23 UNPROFOR command wanted the truth. Having publicly declared the findings
24 of his investigation, Colonel Demurenko was threatened by
25 Captain Salajdzic, liaison officer between the BH command and the Sector
Page 28888
1 Sarajevo, who told him you have one day of life to live, Colonel. You
2 have no chance of leaving the headquarters. At any intersection you can
3 be killed. An order was issued to kill you.
4 Colonel Demurenko suspected that the attack on Markale II was a
5 terrorist attack from within the city, although a shell can explode only
6 by being fired from a mortar. And if one throws it from the roof, it
7 will not explode. To simulate an explosion of a shell using a different
8 explosive device, however, is not difficult because the crater is the
9 same. Taking the shell and fixing it using screws or whatever else and
10 exploding it with a different detonator will make the crater look the
11 same. These are the factors that make Colonel Demurenko believe that it
12 could not have been a mortar shell.
13 Colonel Demurenko believes that other UN members, such as
14 Lieutenant Colonel Konings, instead of conducting an investigation
15 professionally, focused their information on proving that the Serb side
16 was to blame than rather than simply establish the facts and objective
17 conclusions based on those facts. The UNMOs and the Bosnian police had
18 meetings where they agreed about the method that should be employed in
19 the investigation of the incidents about the type of the projectile, the
20 direction from which it had been fired, and other facts.
21 Colonel Demurenko believed that this was unacceptable and unusual. The
22 UNMOs should have worked independently and in an unbiased manner.
23 One of the main conclusions of the UNPROFOR documents was that a
24 mortar fired from a middle to long range would have a lower trajectory
25 accurate to a firing position in the Serb territory. A lower trajectory
Page 28889
1 round would have passed under the Cymbaline radar's beam.
2 Colonel Demurenko believes this was the wrong basis to conclude that the
3 Serbs fired the mortar shell at Markale II. According to
4 Colonel Demurenko, mortars fired from middle to long range would have had
5 a higher trajectory, not lower, and consequently would not have passed
6 under the Cymbaline radar's beam. Colonel Demurenko believes that the
7 conclusion made in this document was unprofessional and amateur and
8 against the law of physics in the case of mortar fire. This conclusion
9 was made by a G2 officer, a position which was always held by the US army
10 intelligence officer.
11 Colonel Demurenko believes that mass media, journalists,
12 reporters, and his Western colleagues from the UNPROFOR and UNMO were
13 spreading rumours that the Serbs were aggressors and that they wanted to
14 destroy the whole of Bosnia. This idea was unrealistic when he compared
15 it to the situation in the field. Some 60 per cent of the UNPROFOR
16 personnel supported the idea that the Serbs were aggressors because they
17 were presented by their commanders and media with only selected facts,
18 but they were not shown what the other Bosnian Muslim side was doing.
19 The remaining 40 per cent of the UN personnel had their own opinion, but
20 kept quiet about it and only privately dared to express their own
21 different opinion. This correct opinion was always expressed in UNPROFOR
22 reports that tended to blame the Serbs for the situation in Sarajevo.
23 Colonel Demurenko observed that although the UNMO and UNPROFOR
24 were two different forces in Sarajevo with two different chains of
25 command, in practice they were the same people. The task of the UNMO
Page 28890
1 observers was that they were supposed to differ from different types of
2 fire and weapons and to recognise all types of military activities,
3 whether it was an offensive or defensive activity. Many UNMO observers
4 were partial to the Bosnian Muslim side and they informed only about the
5 incoming fire but not about the outgoing fire by the Bosnian Muslims,
6 thereby portraying the fighting in Sarajevo as a Serb aggression and
7 shelling.
8 Colonel Demurenko met twice with the CNN journalist
9 Christiane Amanpour at the Holiday Inn hotel, and he asked her why she
10 always propogated against the Serbs, and she told him that it wasn't his
11 business. Many times those in UNPROFOR had the impression that the
12 Bosnian Muslims were sniping their own population, but it was difficult
13 to prove this because the higher command told them that they should stop
14 this kind of investigation.
15 Colonel Demurenko was aware that the Bosnian Muslim army in
16 Sarajevo was sniping and shelling own civilians. On 8th of June, 1995,
17 Colonel Demurenko released a report stating that the Bosnian civilian was
18 wounded by sniping from a position near the BH parliament which was held
19 by the Bosnian Muslim army. On 30th of July, 1995, Colonel Demurenko
20 released another report stating that Bosnian Muslim forces from the
21 Presidency area were sniping Muslim civilians in Skenderija. On 7th
22 August 1995, Colonel Demurenko released a report stating that mortar
23 shells were fired from Bosnian Muslim positions towards the Skenderija
24 area, which was also in the Bosnian Muslim part of the city.
25 Colonel Demurenko was all ready for war when he arrived in Sarajevo, but
Page 28891
1 there was just occasional exchange of fire and most often by drunk
2 soldiers firing into the sky tracer bullets and so on. He also saw a lot
3 of couples walking in the street which surprised him. It was clear to
4 him that Sarajevo was under the blockade by the Serb forces but also that
5 within the town there were AB -- army -- BH army Muslim -- Bosnian Muslim
6 troops. The Serb troops around Sarajevo were also encircled by the
7 Bosnian Muslim troops from the outer ring. It was also clear to him that
8 the VRS did not want to destroy either the town or the population in the
9 town or even enemy troops, although there was a clear possibility to do
10 so. Colonel Demurenko believes that the Serb forces around Sarajevo did
11 not want to terrorise the civilian population in Sarajevo under the
12 Muslim control. There were 250.000 Serb civilians in the city and the
13 Serb soldiers could not identify the nationality of people by sight. On
14 the other hand, there were individual cases where Serb soldiers who lost
15 their family members acted aggressively. He is 100 per cent sure that
16 the Bosnian Muslim soldiers were sniping and shelling Serb civilians. He
17 went to the Serb side of the city. The life in the Serb side of Sarajevo
18 was exactly the same as in the Muslim part of city. There were problems
19 with food, water, likewise he also -- he was also 100 per cent sure that
20 the humanitarian aid to the Muslim side was ending at the black markets
21 in Sarajevo. This is why they tried to organise direct delivery to the
22 humanitarian aid to the civilians.
23 Colonel Demurenko was aware of BH army offensives from Sarajevo
24 to deblock the city. The biggest part of BH army units was located in
25 civilian buildings. They had some 20 tanks, five to six mortar
Page 28892
1 batteries, either battery some five to six mortars 92 -- 82 and the
2 120-millimetres, heavy machine-gunners, and so on -- guns, and so on. He
3 saw that the BH army units provoked the Serb forces to respond by opening
4 fire and then moving to other locations. The only incident between the
5 Serb forces and the UNPROFOR in Sarajevo after the NATO bombing of the
6 Serb positions that Colonel Demurenko remembers was the fighting at the
7 brotherhood and unity bridge in Sarajevo. There were two check-points
8 from both Serb and Muslim sides of the bridge and the Serbs and Muslims
9 were shooting against each other. The Serb soldiers then went to an
10 offensive and captured the Bosnian Muslim trenches. The Bosnian Muslims
11 informed the French UNPROFOR about this and the French commander ordered
12 its French troops to attack the Serb unit at the occupied check-point.
13 The French soldiers attacked the Serbs and both French and Serb soldiers
14 got killed in this attack.
15 Both the Serb army and the UNPROFOR took each other's soldiers as
16 prisoners of war. It is obvious that in this case the BH army started
17 the offensive, that the Serbs responded and were bombed, which was unjust
18 and partial action by the so-called impartial third countries. As a
19 result, the Serbs took those UNPROFOR soldiers from the countries that
20 participated in the bombing as prisoners of war. It was a critical point
21 of the war, at which point the Muslim side got the help from the bombing
22 countries. So it was an adequate response from the Bosnian Serbs to
23 respond in this way. The term "hostages" is unacceptable in this
24 situation. The word "hostages" were put between inverted commas because
25 the term "hostage" is not a proper term. Colonel Demurenko did not use
Page 28893
1 the term "prisoners of war" because formally the UN was impartial in
2 accordance with the Geneva Convention and he could not therefore use the
3 term "prisoners of war" for the detained UNPROFOR troops. There was no
4 proper term for the situation so the UNPROFOR used the term "hostages."
5 On 30th of May, 1995, General Smith wrote a message stating that
6 the Serb soldiers captured the UNPROFOR are de facto prisoners of war,
7 that they were captured by French forces in a fight, and that he had
8 ordered command of Sector Sarajevo to hold and secure them. For
9 Colonel Demurenko, it is clear that General Smith and General Gobillard
10 showed their involvement in the war when they actively supported the
11 Bosnian Muslim side. They did not have the right to write this
12 information in the letter, but it was an emotional outburst of
13 General Smith who showed his real intentions. Also various national
14 units within the UNPROFOR fought together with the Bosnian Muslims
15 against the Bosnian Serbs.
16 In June 1995 as a result of a BH army attack, a Russian
17 observation post was occupied. On that occasion the Bosnian Muslim
18 troops took 12 Russian UN soldiers and a Russian lieutenant as a
19 prisoner, but the Russian troops had been ordered not to shoot against
20 any side but they also had the instruction not to let any side use their
21 weapons. As soon as the Russian lieutenant understood that the APC could
22 fall in the Bosnian Muslim hands, he blew it up with a hand-grenade and
23 destroyed the engine of the APC. However, the Russian soldiers were
24 captured and he got information that they would be killed by the Bosnian
25 Muslims. Colonel Demurenko told his French commander that they should
Page 28894
1 organise immediate negotiations because he could not go to the area
2 without the Muslim -- Bosnian Muslims' permission because they would
3 shoot him as well. The general called the Bosnian minister of defence
4 who arranged the permission for him to go and to collect the bodies of
5 his dead soldiers. As the Muslims put it, he ran on foot through the
6 minefield to get his soldiers and told them to follow in his foot steps
7 back to the other side and then to the PTT building, thus casualties were
8 avoided on this occasion.
9 Approximately once a week or once in two weeks UNHCR people were
10 held by BH troops because BH needed the resources, for example, say 200
11 litres of gasoline. So they detained them and released them upon the
12 delivery of fuel it was, for example. They will stop the UNHCR convoy
13 and ask for the materials the BH would need. If the UN people refused to
14 give, the BH would detain them and take the materials anyway. Pursuant
15 to an agreement between the sides and the UNPROFOR, the city of Sarajevo
16 was supposed to be a demilitarised zone, free of weapons, but that was
17 the case only in theory. Sarajevo under the Bosniaks 'control was full
18 of weapons. Both the military people and so-called civilians had
19 weapons. The notion of uniform was vague, and only for the reasons of
20 not killing each other by friendly fire, the BH people were wearing
21 ribbons, belts, or other signs to recognise each other.
22 Serbian civilians suffered in the Muslim part of Sarajevo.
23 Serbs -- Serb males -- male civilians tried to hide or escape because
24 they were subject to imprisonment and camps. The information about the
25 camps for Serbs was kept away from the UNPROFOR by Bosnian Muslim
Page 28895
1 authorities. UNPROFOR heard about the camps from different sources
2 including Sarajevo citizens. Colonel Demurenko took up a position at
3 NATO headquarters in Mons, Belgium, in 1995 and retired from the Russian
4 army in 1997.
5 THE INTERPRETER: May it be noted that Mr. Karadzic has just
6 stopped reading a very long text which was not provided to the
7 interpreters in advance.
8 JUDGE KWON: I just heard the intervention from the interpreters
9 that you read a long text without offering the interpreters text in
10 advance, and I think -- now you completed your reading out the summary?
11 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Yes, I just wanted to show a short
12 video-clip to the Colonel and I wanted to ask him --
13 JUDGE KWON: Just a second, just a second, Mr. Karadzic.
14 If my memory is correct that you have spent almost half an hour
15 for your summary. Given that this is the first witness, the Chamber has
16 given you a bit of leeway. But speaking for myself, I think it's a bit
17 too long. Can I remind you that the summary is only for the purpose of
18 informing the public about the written evidence which is just admitted
19 and this does not constitute evidence at all. And I would also like to
20 remind you that this time for reading out the summary will be taken out
21 from the Defence time. So it may be in your interest to make it short in
22 the future.
23 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Excellency, this is an exception
24 because Colonel Demurenko's statement is also very long, about a hundred
25 pages long, and it is very difficult to provide a short summary on one or
Page 28896
1 two pages only. In the future my summaries are going to be much shorter.
2 JUDGE KWON: And it may be in the interests of justice to deal
3 with the associated exhibits now before you examine the witness.
4 Do you have the list with you? I will deal with some specific
5 items first.
6 1D08692, which seems to be Mr. -- Colonel Demurenko's testimony
7 in the Milosevic trial. Are you tendering that transcript as an
8 associated exhibit? Mr. Robinson.
9 MR. ROBINSON: No, Mr. President, that shouldn't be there.
10 JUDGE KWON: No. Thank you.
11 Before I deal with these issues, I need to hear from the
12 Prosecution first.
13 Yes, Mr. Tieger, do you have any objections to any item of the
14 associated exhibits?
15 MR. TIEGER: No, Mr. President.
16 JUDGE KWON: Very well.
17 And then 1D8695, this is just a picture of Colonel Demurenko
18 holding the firing table and we -- I think that claim is already in the
19 evidence. What's the relevance of this? Just -- we can get -- we can do
20 without it.
21 MR. ROBINSON: We can.
22 JUDGE KWON: Yes, thank you.
23 And 1D20275, this seems to be an SRK security and intelligence
24 department report. Given that Prosecution does not challenge the
25 authenticity or the relevance, the Chamber will admit it.
Page 28897
1 Is that the case, Mr. Tieger?
2 [Prosecution counsel confer]
3 MR. TIEGER: That's correct, Mr. President.
4 JUDGE KWON: 65 ter numbers 28118, 21 -- I'm sorry 28120, 28180,
5 in relation to these three documents, all that Colonel Demurenko said is
6 that he agreed. The Chamber finds that word -- that term "to agree" a
7 bit vague and it does not pass the threshold to admit those documents as
8 an associated exhibit. So if you would like to tender those documents,
9 you have to deal with the witness in more specific terms. Likewise, in
10 relation to the following documents, which is 28112, 28113, 28123, 28125,
11 28134, 28178, 28179, 28184, 28185, Colonel Demurenko made no comment at
12 all or he didn't make any substantial comments; as such, we cannot admit
13 them as associated exhibits.
14 Likewise, the 28124, 28144, 28149, 28167 are not - in the opinion
15 of the Chamber - form indispensable or inseparable documents from the
16 92 ter statement of Colonel Demurenko. So those items were not admitted
17 as associated exhibits.
18 And more -- and the Chamber has a question, whether -- let's take
19 a look at 20274. This is an UNPROFOR Sector Sarajevo sitrep and
20 Colonel Demurenko dealt with certain part of this sitrep. So is it the
21 Defence's intention to tender that document in its entirety or only those
22 parts which were dealt by the witness? Yes, Mr. Robinson.
23 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. President, a document of this length we
24 would tender it in its entirety, unless the Prosecution has any objection
25 to that.
Page 28898
1 JUDGE KWON: The same applies to 28117?
2 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. President.
3 JUDGE KWON: Mr. Tieger.
4 MR. TIEGER: I think I've already indicated my position vis-a-vis
5 those documents, Mr. President. Thank you.
6 JUDGE KWON: So all the documents -- other documents would be
7 admitted as part of 92 ter package and will be given exhibit numbers in
8 due course by the Registry.
9 But, Mr. Karadzic, I also expected you to tell us the reason why
10 those documents were not included in your earlier 65 ter list as well as
11 the reason for that.
12 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. President, I can address that. Most of
13 these documents were disclosed to us after the 65 -- after the statement
14 was prepared, and so we included at the time we -- on the 15th of
15 September, we submitted our 65 ter list. We actually received this
16 disclosure on the 14th of September and Colonel Demurenko was not able to
17 be asked about these documents until he arrived here over the weekend.
18 So as a result of that, they were not on our list.
19 JUDGE KWON: So it's the result of recent 66(B) request?
20 MR. ROBINSON: Not a recent request. It was actually -- a
21 request was made a long time ago. You gave a dead-line to the
22 Prosecution to produce this material by the 10th of May. Unfortunately,
23 through a clerical error, the Prosecution informed us on the 16th -- on
24 the 14th of September that they had just located those documents and
25 disclosed it to us at that time. So that's why they're not on our 65 ter
Page 28899
1 list.
2 JUDGE KWON: Thank you.
3 Yes, Mr. Karadzic, please carry on.
4 [Defence counsel confer]
5 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I would like to call up D1010,
6 which is a video-clip. It has already been admitted into evidence, but I
7 would like Colonel Demurenko to see it and to tell us whether the
8 video-clip is what we think it is.
9 [Video-clip played]
10 "First of all, I want to introduce myself. I am
11 Colonel Demurenko, Chief of Staff Sector Sarajevo. But really today it's
12 not important because I am like -- only not like Chief of Staff but like
13 citizen of my country and like professional military man, colonel. I
14 won't explain any details of investigation which was provided UN --
15 so-called UN expertise. About very terrible events which were a few days
16 ago. As you know, there was a massacre in down-town when after explosion
17 of mortar, mortar shell, on one of the central street of the city, is it
18 after what was approximately 35 people died and more than 80 in
19 accordance with report wounded.
20 And as a professional man, I cannot agree with argument of UN
21 specialist about reasons and sources of this shelling. It's absolutely
22 unacceptable for me and for my military friends in this area consent of
23 this argument. And therefore, I will try explained any new details which
24 I know.
25 "Firstly, if you know the main serious facts for us is following.
Page 28900
1 This is the material, maybe one portion of whole material of UN
2 specialist about the shelling. This is a short report with -- it's
3 entered on French language but with a very strange conclusion. This is a
4 conclusion include idea about the shelling was from Serbian side, I mean
5 Bosnian Serbs. This is a small picture which explained angle on the
6 street, Marsal Tito, and angle which was between ground and shell, mortar
7 shell. It's very important for us. I will explain it following,
8 afterwards. This is a copy of photo pictures of this place. This is the
9 street. This is a place where it is exploded of the shell. This is a
10 very important for us, same picture. As you can see, this is a direction
11 of fire. This is place of explosion. And in accordance with
12 investigation, direction of fire was 176 degrees or in accordance with
13 French custom 2976 mils. Really, this is a south-east area. It's very
14 important for us also. This is a picture about -- it's very interesting,
15 this material of Bosnian police, I mean government Bosnian police, about
16 angle between ground and shell. As you can see, 70 degrees. And the
17 last paper is really -- this is a small slice of copy from map and this
18 is my idea which I can explain on this paper.
19 "In accordance with this material, I believe that specialist
20 which was participated in this investigation was very professional and
21 honest people. And therefore, in accordance once again with this
22 official investigation and material, we have any picture. It's symbolic,
23 you know, this is Sarajevo. This is confrontation line, green. This is
24 two buildings and place where it is exposed this shelling. In accordance
25 with this material, direction of fire was 100 -- 106 degrees. In
Page 28901
1 accordance with another material, it's once again very interesting
2 question why in UN we have two different material of investigations, but
3 not different and one conclusion. But in accordance with another
4 material of investigation, they said about another angle.
5 About first, in accordance -- once again, we know what was used,
6 and so 120-millimetres mortar shell. It's really former Yugoslavian
7 weapon and before it, it was Soviet system. I know it very well because
8 I am a field commander like a professional soldier. Many times I
9 participated in real practical shelling and managed them, I mean by
10 artillery officers. In accordance with the main documents for this
11 system, this is a table with whole data about characteristics of this
12 system. We can see that for the system normally used six standard
13 charge -- charges. And in accordance with this angle, 70 degrees, and
14 this is a direction 176, we can - after comparison with standard
15 data - see on following map. First explosion, it could be in accordance
16 with this, once again, this degrees and this degrees. In this area, 900
17 metres. Next in this area, this is really 1.400. Next on 2.000. Really
18 this is on confrontation line. Theoretically it could be from Serbia,
19 theoretically, I will once again explain it. And the next three are the
20 2.700, 3.400, and the last charge they can use for 3.600.
21 "Today, personally, with my special -- not special, very small
22 investigation group including artillery officers, we was on this place,
23 this place, this, this, and this really by my foot. And I can affirm
24 absolutely without or behind any doubts, this is place unacceptable or
25 unsuitable for firing position mortar shell. No perspective stay on this
Page 28902
1 position and shell to this area. And therefore, conclusion of material
2 of investigation was wrong.
3 "Now I said only about terrain where is located Serbian troops
4 and special without my proposals about this area. This is not my job. I
5 am a soldier, I am a colonel, and this is a business for special group
6 like maybe for this group necessary include criminal prosecutors, members
7 of court-martial, I don't know, maybe it's a ballistics personnel and so
8 on, and so on. But really for us it's necessary understand it that it
9 was wrong.
10 "About another direction, this is a distance between place of
11 explosion and place of fire position was 2.100 metres. Same, I was here
12 today, absolutely no perspective locate firing battery or platoon or even
13 one mortar for this area because this is a really rock slope and forest
14 and no perspective fired from this position. I can affirm it and I will
15 have today a photo picture about each of these places.
16 "I can show for you also map with exactly direction, one this
17 direction and another alternative direction. And I think the most
18 problem for official investigation group was following. They investigate
19 only angles and directions and automatically thinking about Serbian
20 so-called aggressions against civil population in Sarajevo, but I think
21 it's not correct. You agree with me. It's necessary more deep
22 investigation. We can organise ballistics expertise, for example, from
23 this place or from all places on this area and we can use the smoke shell
24 for identification place where is exactly can locate this firing
25 position. And maybe now not necessary more detailed explanation because
Page 28903
1 I have not time enough for this, but once again I want statement that it
2 was wrong material, it was absolutely bad conclusion, not correct, and
3 some subsequences or consequences of this event is very bad because this
4 is Sarajevo. Around Sarajevo you can listen sound of shelling and
5 yesterday we had air-strikes around this area. Every hour civilian
6 people and military personnel is wounded and died. I think it's
7 absolutely unacceptable, especially unacceptable for professional
8 military personnel. We cannot agree when we following after the any
9 strong group and no chance explain our separate point of view. We have
10 it, separate point of view. And once again, I am not like a citizen of
11 my country. I must say: Let's stop them, stop false and falsehood lie
12 about Serbian aggression in this area, and specially - specially I
13 stressed on that, I don't speak about Bosnian terrain, it's not my
14 business. I don't want accuse against somebody or anybody. This is a
15 problem for professional criminalists, not for us. But for us necessary
16 every time repeat, please, or investigate it absolutely correctly with
17 full argumentation, or stop it and stop all type of action, I mean UN,
18 NATO, and so on against this country.
19 "And also I want to speak on few words on my native language
20 because I think it's necessary explain why more preferable for me.
21 American mass media and mass media of Russia. In USA I had few years ago
22 my military education. I love really this country and I believe that
23 this country can support all type of activity and activity military
24 peacekeeping in this country."
25 MR. KARADZIC: [Interpretation]
Page 28904
1 Q. Thank you for your patience. Colonel, the positions that you
2 presented then, would you still confirm them today? Would this be the
3 same thing that you would say to the general public today?
4 A. Yes, absolutely the same.
5 Q. Thank you. And now, in view of the importance of the document,
6 can we quickly go through the documents that you already saw. Can we
7 look at 1D28118 in e-court.
8 THE INTERPRETER: Could Mr. Karadzic repeat the numbers, please.
9 JUDGE KWON: I think he referred to 1D28118.
10 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] That's what I said. I believe it
11 has been interpreted correctly.
12 MR. KARADZIC: [Interpretation]
13 Q. Colonel, were you shown this document before? Are you familiar
14 with it?
15 A. Yes, of course. It is assigned report from the institution, a
16 sitrep.
17 Q. Colonel, is this document authentic? Does this document reflect
18 what the United Nations concluded at the time?
19 A. Yes, that's correct.
20 Q. Thank you.
21 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I would like to tender the
22 document.
23 MR. KARADZIC: [Interpretation]
24 Q. You were the releasing officer? You signed that document in what
25 capacity, please?
Page 28905
1 A. I was Chief of Staff and it was my duty to sign off the sitreps
2 that were made on a daily basis.
3 JUDGE KWON: Mr. Karadzic, in -- on the part of the Chamber in
4 examining whether or not a certain document can be admitted as an
5 associated exhibit, the Chamber examines whether that specific document
6 forms an inseparable and indispensable part of the document. In the
7 Colonel's statement all he said is that he agreed with the contents of
8 this report, without mentioning that either he was the releasing officer
9 or he signed this document, whether it is consistent with his observation
10 at the time, et cetera. So please bear that in mind.
11 Yes, we'll admit this document. Shall we give the number.
12 THE REGISTRAR: Exhibit D2271, Your Honours.
13 MR. ROBINSON: Excuse me, Mr. President. If you look at page 85
14 of the statement, we can see after the 1D number 28118 it says:
15 "Releasing officer Colonel Demurenko ..."
16 I wonder if in light of that, and that's repeated throughout
17 these documents, if the Chamber might allow us to dispense with showing
18 him each of these documents, knowing now that he was the releasing
19 officer for each of these reports?
20 JUDGE KWON: So all of these documents I mentioned earlier on
21 were released by Colonel Demurenko? Can you confirm, Mr. Robinson?
22 MR. ROBINSON: Except for 28179.
23 JUDGE KWON: So why don't you deal with the latest document 28179
24 and then the Chamber will consider the remainder.
25 [Defence counsel confer]
Page 28906
1 JUDGE KWON: Yes, Mr. Robinson.
2 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. President, we won't pursue 28179.
3 JUDGE KWON: Very well. Then all the documents which bears the
4 subtitle which reads to the effect that Colonel Demurenko was the
5 releasing officer will be admitted into evidence and will be given
6 numbers in due course likewise.
7 Yes, Mr. Karadzic.
8 [Defence counsel confer]
9 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. President. We just want to check to see
10 if some of the other reasons the Chamber gave for excluding some of these
11 documents are such that we should address them. I wonder if we could
12 take our lunch break now and we would be able to do that over the break
13 and conclude the direct examination afterwards.
14 JUDGE KWON: Fair enough, given the time. We'll break for 45
15 minutes and resume at quarter past 1.00.
16 --- Luncheon recess taken at 12.26 p.m.
17 --- On resuming at 1.19 p.m.
18 JUDGE KWON: Yes, Mr. Harvey.
19 MR. HARVEY: Good afternoon, Your Honours. I would just like, if
20 I may, to introduce Mr. Sam Shnider, who is a Californian attorney who's
21 been working with my team since April and has just given me the good news
22 that he can give me a couple more months and he's been an invaluable aid
23 to our work. Thank you.
24 JUDGE KWON: Yes, Mr. Karadzic.
25 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. President, we have checked the exhibits
Page 28907
1 that you indicated the Chamber had a problem with, and we've noticed that
2 they also were authored by Colonel Demurenko. So we don't have any
3 further questions of this witness.
4 JUDGE KWON: And if you could be more meticulous in the future in
5 producing the 65 ter list as well as the 92 ter statement.
6 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, we will.
7 JUDGE KWON: So does it mean that the Defence concluded its
8 examination-in-chief of Mr. Demurenko?
9 MR. ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. President.
10 JUDGE KWON: Very well.
11 Yes, Mr. Tieger --
12 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] If I may just thank the Colonel for
13 the efforts invested into coming to testify here. Thank you.
14 JUDGE KWON: Probably you will have the opportunity to re-examine
15 the witness.
16 Yes, Mr. Tieger.
17 MR. TIEGER: Thank you, Mr. President. And good afternoon to
18 everyone in the courtroom.
19 Cross-examination by Mr. Tieger:
20 Q. Including you, Colonel. Can I begin with a couple of preliminary
21 matters before I ask you some questions focused on some of the things you
22 said previously. I noted that in your amalgamated witness statement you
23 appended a couple of articles that is of interviews you gave to the
24 media, and I had occasion to see another one that you gave in May of 1996
25 to Komsomolskaya Pravda and I just wanted to ask you a couple of quick
Page 28908
1 questions about this those.
2 MR. TIEGER: So if we could call up 23 --
3 JUDGE KWON: Just a second, Mr. Tieger, sorry to interrupt you.
4 You reminded me of one thing that I forgot. One of the exhibits that was
5 admitted as associated exhibit is 1D28164. Can you upload that, 28164.
6 Can we see the next page. I don't think we have a translation of this.
7 Could you confirm that?
8 [Defence counsel confer]
9 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Your Excellencies, I believe we do
10 not. The summary of that could be on the previous page, so we can ask
11 the Colonel to read it out and we'll get the interpretation. The summary
12 of this document is on the previous page, I believe.
13 JUDGE KWON: If the Prosecution is fine, given that this passage
14 is very short we can do that.
15 MR. TIEGER: That's fine, Your Honour.
16 JUDGE KWON: So, Mr. Demurenko, could you be kind enough so as to
17 be -- read out this passage for our benefit.
18 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] With pleasure. The text reads as
19 follows:
20 "The Bosnian Serbs are withdrawing their heavy weaponry outside
21 of Sarajevo in accordance with the dead-lines as specified by the
22 ultimatum of the UN and NATO. This was stated today by Chief of Staff
23 Colonel Andrey Demurenko," that is to say me. "Based on his assessment,
24 the larger part of the equipment and armaments and units (156 units on
25 today's count) have already been dislocated 20 kilometres outside of the
Page 28909
1 exclusion zone. There is no doubt that the requirements that were put
2 forward to the Serbian side will be carried out and that the Serbs will
3 pull out all of their heavy weaponry except for the tanks and APCs which
4 are currently out of order."
5 JUDGE KWON: Whose handwriting is this, Colonel?
6 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] This is not my handwriting. I see
7 here that there is reference made to -- I apologise. This is not my
8 handwriting. I see that there is reference to the reporter of
9 Itar Tacc [phoen] agency by the name of Nireskin [phoen]. I knew the
10 man.
11 JUDGE KWON: Thank you. So again I would like to emphasize again
12 the Defence be more meticulous in preparing the 65 ter list.
13 Yes, Mr. Tieger, back to you.
14 MR. TIEGER: Thank you.
15 Q. Colonel, we commence again. I had referred your attention to a
16 May 1996 interview you gave to Komsomolskaya Pravda. I just wanted to
17 ask you -- call that up and ask you a couple of quick questions about
18 that. It seems from your nodding of the head that you remember the
19 article?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. I noted that there's a reference in the article to
22 General Gobillard. I had also noted that in your amalgamated witness
23 statement you refer to your great respect for the French generals under
24 whom you served, and in this particular article there is a reference
25 to -- and that appears basically in the third column of the document - I
Page 28910
1 don't know if we have that up in front of you or not -- you may remember
2 it anyway, so I'll have it called up if necessary. But you refer to his
3 runs or jogs through Sarajevo and the firing on him that took place. And
4 I just wanted to know if that was intended as any criticism of the
5 general or an expression of admiration for the general or just a comment
6 about the nature of the war?
7 A. Let me respond. This was an emotional comment which on the one
8 hand said that the general, upon arriving in the area of responsibility,
9 had no idea what was going on in Sarajevo. He wanted to run around in a
10 demonstrative way like he did in his previous tours, but on the first day
11 he was shot at. And he didn't think that it was the Serbian side firing
12 at him from up there. It was most likely that people within the conflict
13 area within Sarajevo itself were protesting against his actions. And he
14 declined to protest against this publicly under pressure of his own
15 superiors. And he refused to have body-guards, which was very strange to
16 me.
17 Q. That's fine. I also noted a reference to the -- to Mr. Petrovic,
18 whom you also refer to in your amalgamated statement. Do you recall that
19 you're referring to Mr. Petrovic also in this article and identifying
20 when it was that you first met him?
21 A. I have to admit that I don't remember all of the details and all
22 of the interviews and the meetings I had with thousands of officers and
23 soldiers at the time. I remember that there was a Major Petrovic
24 battalion commander who was placed not far from Grbavica close to the PTT
25 building where the headquarters of the peacekeeping forces was. It would
Page 28911
1 be difficult for me to say anything more than this.
2 Q. If this refreshes your memory, you had referred and referred
3 earlier today, in fact, or I think it was referred to in the summary that
4 was read, about retrieving your men by running through the minefield and
5 I believe you explained in the article that you first encountered
6 Petrovic who saw you running through that path and that you then made
7 contact with him. Is that correct?
8 A. Yes, the mike is working now. I apologise.
9 I have memories which are different somewhat. The most vivid
10 moment of the war for me, given that I had to save 12 soldiers, was when
11 I had to run across a minefield. However, I could not have met Petrovic
12 there. This must have been either a mistake in your information or in
13 the interpretation I received. Petrovic was further away from the place
14 where I was saving the soldiers. I was going back towards the area where
15 the first trenches of the Bosnian battalion were. The first UNPROFOR
16 soldiers that I came across were either from Slovenia or from Slovakia
17 who were very pleased - just like our soldiers were - to be freed and to
18 avoid death.
19 Q. Okay. Thank you, Colonel. I also wanted to ask you one question
20 about your expertise in artillery and mortars, particularly in relation
21 to the men you commanded. As I understood your amalgamated witness
22 statement - and indeed what you said in the video that we saw - you --
23 your expertise developed as a general army commander whose responsibility
24 it was to command subordinate units and know enough about the weapons and
25 the weapons systems that they specialised in in order to do so. Is that
Page 28912
1 basically correct?
2 A. Yes, absolutely, correct.
3 Q. And I presume that's also why when you began the effort to
4 investigate into the shelling that you discussed earlier, you gathered
5 specialists and experts in those fields; is that right?
6 A. Yes, precisely so. I invited specialists in artillery systems,
7 yes.
8 Q. Okay. Colonel, then I'd like to turn to some of the elements of
9 what you discussed briefly today and what was discussed more extensively
10 in the video and obviously in great detail in your amalgamated witness
11 statement. First of all, you explained on the video that you followed a
12 line of direction, a bearing of 176 degrees from Markale; correct?
13 A. Yes. I used the material -- I relied on the material which had
14 been recommended up until that time by the experts. I relied on the
15 material that initially looked reliable.
16 Q. And the - as we'll discuss a bit later - the particular locations
17 of potential firing that you went to were based then on the angle of
18 descent of the mortar, checked against the number of charges in the
19 firing cable; is that basically right?
20 A. I will once again try to explain to the best of my abilities. A
21 mortar is a very peculiar kind of a weapon because it is basically a tube
22 without grooves --
23 Q. I don't -- I want to give you a full opportunity to explain the
24 things that you need to to answer the questions, but it really will be
25 much more efficient if we move through step by step rather than pausing
Page 28913
1 at various junctures for more elaborate explanations. So I just wanted
2 to indicate the difference between the line of direction which you've
3 just discussed and the particular potential firing points that you
4 identified in the video, which were based on the angle of descent and the
5 number of possible charges. That's correct, isn't it?
6 A. Yes, there are three factors. There are only six standard
7 charges in mortar rounds, and based on the ballistics expertise
8 discussing 70 degrees of angle of descent - I could be wrong but I think
9 this is not disputed - and 170 degrees southward of the shelling. So the
10 investigation focused on those factors.
11 Q. Did you just say 170 degrees? That's what the transcript
12 indicates. You were previously talking about 176 degrees.
13 A. Yes. Yes. I looked at the documents a number of times. I
14 listened to the comments or to the translation and the figures 170 and
15 176 were frequently confused, interchanged. And I would like to
16 underline that it doesn't really matter whether it's 170 or 176 because
17 in my interview I said that a margin of error of 5, plus/minus 5, is
18 quite normal. So it could be 175, 165. So that's the first thing. The
19 second thing is when I gave a task to my officer to establish where the
20 firing points could have been, I explored a much broader belt than the
21 one applying to 170 or 176 degrees. I basically photographed all of the
22 slopes on that mountain.
23 Q. Well, Colonel, we're going to talk in a moment about the areas
24 that you indicated during your previous testimony and during the course
25 of the video that you explored, and we'll also discuss that photographs.
Page 28914
1 But for the moment I want to take it step by step and talk about your
2 identification of line of direction. And so do I understand you to say
3 that in your view it didn't matter and you didn't care whether you chose
4 a line of direction of 176 or 165 or anything else?
5 A. Precisely so, because the reconnaissance of the ground was
6 conducted on a much broader area than the one shown on the sketch. The
7 entire area to the right and to the left, much greater than 5 degrees,
8 was explored so that we wouldn't later be accused of not being thorough
9 enough.
10 Q. Let's -- I want to look at what you said at the time and what you
11 represented that you were doing on the particular day that you -- day or
12 days you conducted your examination of the area. It may well be that the
13 fact that you now say it didn't matter what line of direction you chose
14 affected your consistency in identifying those factors, but I want to
15 check that consistency first. So you -- to begin with, you testified or
16 that is your amalgamated witness statement states at paragraph 122 that
17 UNPROFOR found that the line of direction was 171 plus or minus 5. Is
18 that correct?
19 A. Well, I think that's close to the truth. Yes, it sounds right.
20 Q. Okay. Well at any point you're welcome to check your statement
21 if you --
22 A. I take you at your word. I believe it.
23 Q. And as we noted before, on the video it says you followed the
24 line of direction of 176 degrees. So that means, Colonel, that you took
25 one of the extremes of the margin of deviation and used that as your line
Page 28915
1 of direction rather than the line of direction actually found by the
2 French UNPROFOR investigation; isn't that right?
3 A. First of all, we need to begin from the fact that there was no
4 French investigation at the time when this statement about the Serb
5 aggression was made. There was no investigation at all. There was just
6 this angle of descent and some approximate line of direction leading to
7 the front line, and that's all. That's when the statement was made.
8 Only later when I started my own investigation did the French and others
9 appear with some investigative efforts when it was all pointless, when it
10 was all of it too little too late, as we say.
11 Q. Colonel, let me say two things. First of all, I want to avoid
12 semantic games with you and I want to remind you that Judge Robinson also
13 pointed out your criticism of the particular term he used during his
14 questioning of you in the Dragomir Milosevic case and defended his
15 terminology. So I don't really want to get caught up in whether it was
16 an investigation or a conclusion or preliminary efforts.
17 Secondly, you seem to be suggesting here that there was nothing
18 from the French until after your investigation was underway. And I want
19 to remind you that during the course of the video, that is, the
20 conference or the filming of your statement to the media, that you showed
21 the -- a French document reflecting the number of mils for the line of
22 direction; right?
23 A. Nevertheless, I still insist that it was not a proper document.
24 It was a piece of paper. It was not an investigation. An investigation
25 means a thorough investigation of all possibilities, all leads. There
Page 28916
1 was no -- there were no various options taken into account here. There
2 was just this angle and one line of direction.
3 Q. Colonel, I -- I think everyone here understands that you take the
4 position that further steps needed to be implemented before you would
5 consider an investigation to be complete, but I'm just focusing now on
6 the materials that you had at the time of the video that was made and
7 that, in fact, you referred to as having relied upon because you consider
8 them to be professional and honest efforts. So we're in agreement on
9 that much; correct?
10 A. Yes, I agree that I took that into account. Yes, that's true.
11 Q. For the moment I'm looking at the methodology that you used and
12 just talk to you about the plus or minus aspect. Now I want to talk to
13 you about where the figure 171 degrees came from. Now, Colonel, are you
14 aware that the French did not find that the line of direction - as you
15 stated in paragraph 122 of your amalgamated witness statement - was 171
16 degrees plus or minus 5?
17 A. Yes, I fully agree.
18 Q. Do you know what line of direction they found?
19 A. Of course I don't remember, but I remember that line that went
20 left that was on the sketch, but I don't remember the figure. It doesn't
21 matter anyway.
22 Q. Well, I'm going to suggest we will be looking at the distances
23 represented by those different lines at some point, but let me focus on
24 it at the moment in terms of methodology rather than overall
25 consequences. So I take it then that -- and I can show you the document,
Page 28917
1 for example, that shows that what the French found was 160 degrees line
2 of direction. So I take it you don't dispute that? You're welcome to
3 see the document if you wish.
4 A. No, no, I believe it. No problem.
5 Q. Now, 160 degrees in the French system is 2850 mils. Are you
6 aware of that?
7 A. (No verbal response)
8 Q. And you're nodding your head, yes?
9 A. Right, yes.
10 Q. Just for the benefit of the Judges, although they may well be
11 aware of this already, mils is a unit of angular measurement used in
12 artillery in particular and that has quite a number depending on the
13 particular system used; right?
14 A. I don't quite understand the question. Is it something you're
15 asking me?
16 Q. In the Russian system is it correct that 6.000 mils is the system
17 used and a single mil is equal to 1/6000th of a revolution, or do you
18 know that?
19 A. No, there is a system of calculation in thousandth part and the
20 system of calculation in degrees, one and the same system. It doesn't
21 change anything. I'm not talking about millimetres. I'm talking about
22 thousandth parts which is mils.
23 Q. Colonel, I just heard you say it's one and the same system, but
24 are you not aware that the Russian system uses 6.000 mils for a complete
25 revolution and the NATO countries use 6400 mils. Do you know that or
Page 28918
1 not?
2 A. No.
3 Q. Well, let me just call up the simplest thing I can. We'll get
4 more testimony on that, but if we could look at 65 ter 23896, just a
5 Wikipedia article, something anybody can look up. We're also going to
6 see some firing tables, I believe, that reflect the different system of
7 mils. If we could just scroll down quickly.
8 Okay. You can see in this first paragraph it indicates that
9 France began with mils at 6400, the Red Army expanded that to 6.000 mil
10 one. And if we continue with the article, we'll see that difference
11 reflected again and confirmed. I don't want to get us too deeply into
12 these sorts of details, as I say we'll see them further in the firing
13 tables, but are you satisfied, Colonel, that there is a difference
14 between the Russian system and the system that NATO countries use in
15 terms of mils?
16 A. I don't mind that every country and every bloc has its own system
17 of measurement.
18 Q. Now, the reason I raise this is not for idle academic purposes,
19 Colonel. This is the reason, that, as I say, the -- you have the
20 translation of mils to degrees is obviously done by dividing the mils by
21 360 degrees and if you then get in the French system a figure of 17.777
22 for each mil, and if you divide 2850, which is the mils the French found,
23 you get 160. So that's their figure of 160. And you can see in one of
24 the documents in evidence that 2850 mils equals 160 degrees in the French
25 system. However, Colonel, if you mistakenly use the mils that the French
Page 28919
1 came up with, 2850, and then apply the Russian standard to that, that is,
2 you divide 6.000 instead of 6400 by 360, you get a figure of 16.666 for
3 each mil. And then if you divide 2850 mils, the figure reached by the
4 French, with the Russian system of mils, you get the number 171 degrees.
5 And isn't that, in fact, Colonel, how you came up with the figure 171 as
6 reflected in your amalgamated witness statement at paragraph 122 because
7 that 171 is reflected in no other finding by any other investigation?
8 MR. ROBINSON: Excuse me, Mr. President, I object to that and I
9 don't think that is correct to be put to the witness in that way, and
10 perhaps if you want to hear more about that we could excuse the witness
11 and I can explain, but there's a very misleading element to that
12 statement that I think not fair to put to the witness.
13 JUDGE KWON: Why is the Prosecution not able to put something to
14 the witness, which the witness, I'm confident, is able to deal with the
15 issue.
16 MR. ROBINSON: Well, he's just made a statement of fact to the
17 witness that's not correct.
18 MR. TIEGER: Let's leave it -- if Mr. Robinson is concerned with
19 the last phrase I used, I can drop that, and I just want the witness's
20 response about the actual data that was used and how he arrived at that
21 figure. So I'll deal with the question of what other investigations came
22 up with in a moment if that's the problem.
23 JUDGE KWON: Very well.
24 MR. TIEGER:
25 Q. Colonel, I'm sorry about that exchange. Do I need to repeat the
Page 28920
1 question? Because the point is this: That by mixing and matching or by
2 mixing up the two systems, that's how you come to the figure of 170
3 degrees. It's not the figure that was found by the French, it's not the
4 figure that's represented by the -- that's reflected in the document you
5 were showing the media on September 2nd when you held the conference?
6 A. Once again, this is my point of view. First of all, I agree with
7 you, that this kind of conversion from our mils tables to the firing
8 tables of NATO we did not do that, we didn't need to. The calculations
9 were very simple and even more primitive than you suppose. I didn't even
10 need to determine what 160 degrees was. We simply see the line drawn on
11 the map - it doesn't matter at how many degrees - the line drawn by the
12 French. And we see on the map what landmark on the ground this line
13 reaches. We go to the ground, we go to those landmarks - there are ten
14 on the road or whatever - and we investigate those points, those
15 locations. We don't care how many degrees the French investigation
16 reached; it doesn't matter. It is the old military principle of
17 landmarks that has not been replaced by anything. There were no GPS
18 systems then, at least we didn't have them.
19 Q. When you talked to the media on September 2nd, you did not hold
20 up a document that said here's the line on the map drawn by the French
21 which I followed today. You held up a document that said: I know the
22 angle of descent and I know the line -- from the Bosnian investigation
23 and I know the line of direction from the French investigation. And
24 that's what you represented your line of direction was based on; correct?
25 A. You know, 17 years ago it was difficult to imagine that we will
Page 28921
1 be discussing this now, in legal terms, mind you, not military terms, not
2 against the backdrop of shooting behind my back - and remember, there was
3 a war going on then. I couldn't imagine that I would be in court 17
4 years later discussing in legal terms how we are to combine two different
5 tables. I have to present briefly my arguments, what, why, and what
6 needs to be done. At that time, of course, I wasn't thinking why I
7 wasn't showing this or another document or the table, why didn't I
8 comment on it? It's difficult to think 17 years ahead; just try it.
9 Q. Colonel, you may well have done things a little bit different at
10 the time if you knew you'd be in court 17 years ago, but I'm simply
11 focusing on what you did at the time and what you said at the time. Let
12 me turn to another issue that was raised in your amalgamated witness
13 statement, and that is that assuming that you had followed the right line
14 of direction, where you looked when you got to the spot that you
15 considered the angle of descent and the number of charges indicated was a
16 potential firing point. Now, there's a paragraph in your amalgamated
17 witness statement devoted to the alleged confusion by the Trial Chamber
18 between two margins of error. So let me turn first, since you impliedly
19 refer to what the Dragomir Milosevic Chamber said, to what they did find
20 about your conclusions and where you looked. And that's found at
21 paragraph 722 of the Dragomir Milosevic judgement, and I think we can
22 find that at 65 ter 23899 at page 7.
23 It begins, and this is paragraph 722, after a discussion -- this
24 follows a fairly lengthy discussion of the evidence you gave. It says
25 that you testified about the mortar, went to the possible firing
Page 28922
1 locations, concluded for each of the locations it was either not possible
2 to fire or there were no visible traces. It goes on you could not
3 testify as to exactly which bearing you used when you visited the
4 possible firing locations. It talks about a satellite photograph that
5 you were shown indicating the difference in the bearings, that you said
6 the bearing was one from UNPROFOR. And then it goes on:
7 "Colonel Demurenko testified he could calculate the possible
8 firing locations with a margin of deviation of ten to 15 metres and that
9 enabled him to search the location within those points. The
10 Trial Chamber recalls the evidence that any bearing calculated by
11 UNPROFOR or the Bosnia-Herzegovina police had a margin of error of
12 approximately 10 degrees confirmed by QMS Higgs. It is clear that this
13 margin of error covered a wider area than was covered by the locations
14 visited by Colonel Demurenko on the basis of a margin of deviation of no
15 more than 10 to 15 metres. The Trial Chamber therefore has a difficulty
16 accepting Colonel Demurenko's conclusions, dismissing any possibility
17 that the shell was fired from SRK-held territory. This determination is
18 consistent with the Prosecution's line of cross-examination, that
19 Colonel Demurenko confined himself to too narrow an area in seeking to
20 identify the possible launching sights. It is significant that Colonel
21 Demurenko never answered the Prosecution's questions on this point with
22 any clarity. In fact, the Trial Chamber characterises his responses as
23 vague and evasive."
24 Now, that's what the Trial Chamber said. And in your amalgamated
25 witness statement at paragraph 22, you stated that:
Page 28923
1 "It seems that the Dragomir Milosevic confused these two margins
2 of error ..."
3 And by that you meant --
4 JUDGE KWON: Just a second. Could you give the para number
5 again.
6 MR. TIEGER: 122 I believe, Mr. President.
7 JUDGE KWON: Yes, it's noted as -- you said -- just 22.
8 MR. TIEGER: I'm sorry.
9 JUDGE KWON: Why don't we show that paragraph to the witness as
10 well. This is on page 55 end of that paragraph just before the next
11 para. Next page.
12 MR. TIEGER: If you scroll down slightly we will see at the end
13 of that paragraph the quote I --
14 JUDGE KWON: Further, further.
15 MR. TIEGER:
16 Q. Now, Colonel, we could read the entirety of 122 along with
17 paragraph 121, which is also relevant, but the two margins of error that
18 you're referring to here are, one, the margin of error between -- margin
19 of error for the difference between where a mortar is aimed and where it
20 may actually land, that's on the one hand; and on the other hand, the
21 deviation of error - I'll call it that - in assessing where a potential
22 firing site was based on the firing tables, the number of charges, and
23 the angle of descent. Correct? You're asserting that the
24 Dragomir Milosevic Chamber confused those two?
25 A. Is that a question?
Page 28924
1 Q. Yeah, that's actually a statement to which I wish you to either
2 affirm or deny. Is that true or not?
3 A. I can't tell you anything against the previous Chamber. I have
4 full respect to this Court and I came here for the second time, so how
5 could I doubt their conclusions or anything of the sort? I trust the
6 Court.
7 Q. Well, Colonel, if you -- I agree with you and if you're willing
8 to rely on the findings of the Dragomir Milosevic Chamber and retract
9 your testimony, we can end this cross-examination right now. But I
10 understand you to be saying in paragraph 122 that the Dragomir Milosevic
11 Chamber was confused about the two kinds of margins of error. So you
12 tell me if I should proceed or not.
13 A. I don't understand what is your dilemma now. What are you
14 actually asking me now?
15 JUDGE KWON: Just a second. Shall we show the witness the
16 previous page.
17 So here in para 122 you first explained the table 1 we see here.
18 And next page. And then you explain another set of a margin of error.
19 And after that - no, further down - in the last sentence just below the
20 table 2 you said:
21 "It seems that the Dragomir Milosevic Chamber confused these two
22 margin or errors (table 1 and table 2)."
23 Could you clarify what you meant by this statement.
24 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] May I ask that the witness be given
25 a hard copy of his statement.
Page 28925
1 JUDGE KWON: I see no problem. Do you have it with you?
2 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Yes.
3 JUDGE KWON: It's on page 54 and 55.
4 MR. TIEGER: There seem to be some documents inadvertently
5 appended. I'll remove them and hand them back to the Defence.
6 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I have something to tell you
7 regarding this.
8 JUDGE KWON: Yes, please proceed.
9 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I have a feeling that if we are
10 going to go into the depth of the artillery science, we won't get closer
11 to the end - not only today but we won't get to it this year. Once it --
12 again, let me tell you, when the firing tables are prepared, there is a
13 full set of facts and a partial one. So the deviation can depend not on
14 two, like shown here, but dozens of tables. For example, in order to
15 understand the deviation of a round, one needs not only to take the
16 temperature of the charge but also the temperature of the lower level of
17 the air where the shell landed and in the upper levels of air of the
18 trajectory and additional dozens of --
19 JUDGE KWON: Sorry to interrupt you. Let's make it simple. Do
20 you see the sentence where you said:
21 "It seems that Dragomir Milosevic Chamber confused these two
22 margin or errors ..."
23 Do you stand by that statement?
24 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I agree with the statement, that
25 those two tables were absolutely not sufficient in order to establish the
Page 28926
1 truth.
2 JUDGE KWON: Yes, I'll leave it to you, Mr. Tieger.
3 MR. TIEGER:
4 Q. Well, then I'll follow-up on the Trial Chamber's question. That
5 was not the question. The question was simply whether or not you stand
6 by the statement that they confused those two kinds of deviations or
7 margins of error?
8 A. No, I cannot blame somebody who made conclusions some time ago,
9 five years ago. In order to do that, I would need to go into an in-depth
10 study of their facts and conclusions and I'm not prepared to do that
11 right now.
12 MR. TIEGER: Well, like you, Mr. President, I will leave it there
13 for the moment.
14 Q. Now, Colonel, you do not explain in your statement how it was, in
15 your view, the Trial Chamber confused these two margins of error since
16 there was no discussion during your testimony that I'm aware of about the
17 margin of error representing the difference between where a mortar is
18 aimed and where it lands, that that wasn't relevant to or addressed in
19 your testimony at all. Isn't that right? That wasn't the subject of
20 your testimony, you weren't asked about that, and the Trial Chamber
21 wasn't interested in the -- how far a mortar may deviate from its
22 intended target once fired?
23 A. I agree that we didn't discuss it in detail for a very clear
24 reason. As I said in my initial statement and also when I testified in
25 court, I have a very clear belief that there was no mortar shelling at
Page 28927
1 all. This was a terrorist act carried out in the streets of Sarajevo.
2 This is the first thing I wanted to say. The second thing is if I were
3 to be given a sheet of paper or a screen where I could show you
4 graphically the areas that we investigated, it would become clear to
5 everybody that we not only explored the possible locations shown on the
6 map; we explored the gigantic area, the entire slope of that mountain,
7 thousands of square metres. And it was only after doing that that we
8 concluded that no mortars could have been placed there because there was
9 simply no location suitable for mortars to be put there.
10 Q. Well, Colonel, I understand that's what you're saying now in the
11 face of the Dragomir Milosevic testimony, but let's take a look then at
12 what you said to the Chamber at the time about the nature of your
13 examination to determine whether or not it was possible to have fired a
14 mortar from the areas that you identified as potential firing spots. So
15 first I'm going to run you through a number of things that you said to
16 the Milosevic Chamber. First, at page -- transcript page 7780 you
17 referred to specialists visiting location, marking the spot:
18 " ... the very spot from which this shell was allegedly fired."
19 And the same page you refer to:
20 "I have on record photographs which show me pointing my finger on
21 the location," that's 7780.
22 At 7777 you said you and the others looked at firing tables in
23 order to establish "with a margin of error of 1 to 2 metres the exact
24 location ..."
25 At 7781 you again refer to:
Page 28928
1 " ... the exact locations of fire points ..."
2 Again at --
3 THE INTERPRETER: Could you please slow down when reading. Thank
4 you.
5 MR. TIEGER: I'm sorry, thank you for that admonition.
6 Q. Again at 8992 you talk about pointing at a "precise" location,
7 and indicate that: Each photograph was made in a particular location
8 which "had been identified in advance with a margin of error of 5
9 metres." That's at 8992. And then again a bit later you stated that --
10 asked whether you could see any traces that a 120-millimetre mortar was
11 placed in that area, and that is this exact location to which you had
12 been referring, you said certainly:
13 "And we observed the entire area around this spot, and had I seen
14 10 to 20 metres away from this spot a possible firing position" then that
15 could have been something that would have prompted you to draw some other
16 conclusions.
17 So, Colonel, I put it to you that the Dragomir Milosevic
18 Trial Chamber was not confused about the two different kinds of margins
19 of error reflected in the tables you put into your amalgamated witness
20 statement, but they understood you to be saying exactly what you were
21 saying, that you were focused on very precise locations. That is the
22 testimony you gave to the Dragomir Milosevic Chamber, isn't it?
23 A. Let me respond. That's right, because otherwise had I covered
24 the map with my hand and said I investigated this entire area, it would
25 not have sound convincing. One needs to be precise in the artillery
Page 28929
1 sense precise and show everything that is open for calculation, that is,
2 that can be calculated. So what we investigated were specific locations
3 and I covered -- I spoke about all of them in quite precise terms because
4 we had to show that we knew how to make calculations using the known
5 angles in order to define the possible firing points. However, let me
6 draw your attention to the fact that that doesn't exclude the possibility
7 that not only 10 to 15 metres further, but 150 metres further and 200
8 metres further, everything was thoroughly investigated and photographed.
9 And one doesn't contradict the other. Have I answered your question?
10 Q. No, but you have provided some additional information I want to
11 follow-up on. So your suggestion is that this -- you -- as you said
12 before, you went to all these areas but you were just showing the
13 Trial Chamber how precise you -- your calculations were. And I put it to
14 you, Colonel, that you had an opportunity in the Milosevic case to tell
15 the Chamber that you covered all the terrain you now say you did because
16 you -- the Trial Chamber confronted you about just this issue and asked
17 about the precise nature of the locations you said you were focusing on.
18 And you didn't tell them: No, no, no, no, it's true, it's -- it can't
19 be -- you can't be that precise and I covered much more ground to make
20 certain.
21 Here's what you told them, Colonel, and let me describe to you
22 the question that you were asked in the face of all this emphasis on
23 precise locations that you made and then the answer that you gave. And
24 this is at transcript 7705 through 06 in the Dragomir Milosevic testimony
25 and indeed at paragraph 97 of your amalgamated witness statement. So
Page 28930
1 Judge Harhoff asked you:
2 "But Colonel, would there not be quite a large margin around each
3 of these six firing points, and even so the farther out you get the
4 larger the margin within which the fire could have been shot is
5 increased. So if you take the example with the six charges, I mean, if
6 it was fired from there, it could have been fired, I suppose, quite a
7 large area. It did not necessarily have to be fired from the position
8 where you were and where you took this photograph. If, for instance, a
9 couple of hundred metres away there would have been a road or something
10 else, the shot could have come from there. So are you able really to
11 exclude that the mortar could not have been fired even from an area
12 adjacent to the place where you were?"
13 And your --
14 A. I'm ready to answer.
15 Q. Well, I'm -- you may be but I want to tell you the answer that
16 you gave at the time. Because at that time you didn't say what you're
17 saying today, that you covered a tremendous amount of ground. Here's
18 what you said:
19 "I have to emphasis one thing once again. I know this weapon
20 very, very well. Maybe the interpretation of the word 'charge' was
21 misleading. There are no different shells, six shells there. There are
22 six charges. And it's charged manually. You put the shell inside the
23 tube and it flies up.
24 "So the firing tables for mortars that you saw in that video
25 footage show that in that direction only six charges are possible, either
Page 28931
1 one, two, three, all the six were taken into account."
2 And then you said:
3 "Margins of deviation are measured in metres, like 10 to 15
4 metres, the size of this room, but the margin of deviation cannot be a
5 hundred metres. We took into account ballistic trajectories. It's the
6 science of physics. We cannot go beyond that. If you take a certain
7 line of fire, only six possible firing points exist depending on the
8 charges used. We photographed an area of 20, 30 square metres. We
9 always proceeded from a certain surface on which the mortar had to rely.
10 It cannot hang in the air. It cannot be suspended on a tree. We showed
11 the photographs and we saw the ground was pure and clear. No mortar had
12 stood there."
13 So with an opportunity to tell the Dragomir Milosevic Chamber,
14 indeed not just an opportunity but an obligation because the Judge was
15 asking you that very question, you didn't say that you went -- you
16 covered the entire area for thousands and thousands of metres around.
17 You said: Look, we looked at the precise spot and the 20 to 30 metres
18 around it in order to determine that the mortar couldn't have been fired
19 from there, and that's why the Milosevic Chamber reached the conclusion
20 it did; isn't that right?
21 A. I'll answer that. Concerning the first part, at least I thought
22 it was a question, it's necessary to answer the question about the road.
23 Yes, in theory a road could be a relatively good place to place an
24 artillery weapon. But in that place where we were there were -- there
25 had never been any asphalt roads. There were just dirt tracks fit for
Page 28932
1 horses. And on the ground, even on the dirt track like that, there would
2 have been traces, traces of the base plate, traces of the cases of
3 ammunition, and even if you tried to hide them to remove them, it would
4 hardly be possible. That's as far as the road is concerned.
5 The second thing: Why I didn't talk more about the area we
6 covered. As a professional - not in geology but in another area of
7 expertise - it's difficult for me to explain why I didn't speak about it.
8 Perhaps they didn't ask me. They probably didn't ask me. But I have to
9 say that in the interview on the video I said that we explored the
10 locality. I didn't say a particular location or point. We explored the
11 locality, and that means that we explored a large area lest we later be
12 accused of a biased conclusion. That's all I have to say.
13 Q. Well, let's be a little more concrete then because in fact you
14 persist in saying that nobody -- let me see if I have that right.
15 "They probably didn't ask me."
16 Okay. Well, let's call up -- we've just -- I've just read to you
17 in detail what Judge Harhoff indeed asked you and you were clearing
18 talking about a meadow. So let's call up 1D08701. Now, in your
19 testimony you referred to a pristine meadow, and this was -- I take it
20 this is the meadow you were talking about because I can only recall one
21 picture of a meadow among the four you showed in court.
22 A. Yes, this one included. But there was a huge number of
23 photographs. We took loads of them, but yes this picture shows that my
24 words are consistent with the first.
25 Q. Judge Harhoff clearly said you're pointing to an area that you
Page 28933
1 looked at, but if there was a road adjacent maybe a couple of hundred of
2 metres away, wouldn't that invalidate your conclusions? And you didn't
3 say: No, it wouldn't because as you can see here there's a house and a
4 road near it and I looked at that road. You said: I looked at the 20
5 to 30 square metres around the point that I identified as being the
6 firing location. Isn't that right?
7 MR. ROBINSON: Mr. President, we would ask that Mr. Tieger read
8 from the transcript as to exactly what the witness said.
9 MR. TIEGER: I read it just a few moments ago. Does Mr. Robinson
10 really want to have that read again.
11 MR. ROBINSON: Well, just looking at paragraph 97 of the
12 amalgamated statement which quotes from that portion, and I hesitate
13 whether I should say this in the presence of the witness, but in any
14 event, in the last -- second-to-last sentence it says that:
15 " ... we photographed an area of 20 to 30 metres."
16 It doesn't say we looked at an area of 20 to 30 square metres.
17 MR. TIEGER: And it --
18 JUDGE KWON: Very well.
19 MR. TIEGER:
20 Q. And it also states, Mr. Demurenko, that the margin of deviation
21 cannot be what the Judge said it was. You shouldn't worry about a road a
22 couple of hundred metres away because margins of deviation are measured
23 in metres like 10 to 15 metres, but the margin of deviation cannot be 100
24 metres. That's what you told the Milosevic Chamber; correct?
25 A. I'm not going to deny anything I said to a previous Chamber and
Page 28934
1 I'm not going to deny anything I've said today. Everything I said I said
2 perfectly sincerely and honestly. It's a different matter that somebody
3 would like to catch me out in an inconsistency between what I said before
4 and later. Perhaps there is such a strategy, but I repeat I am not a
5 legal expert. I'm a soldier and everything I could say I've already
6 said, and the rest is up to specialists in other areas of a different
7 level.
8 Q. Colonel, in respect of leaving -- let's leave that aside for a
9 different moment --
10 JUDGE KWON: Let me try it for the last time. Why don't we show
11 the last paragraph in para 122 of the witness's statement.
12 You understand English, Mr. Demurenko?
13 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Yes, I understand it but I have
14 misgivings because over the past few years I've had no practice. And if
15 I can understand English in colloquial speech or perhaps enough to read a
16 simpler book -- but in a serious discussion when every word - and not
17 only every word but every full stop and comma is important - I would not
18 rely on my English.
19 JUDGE KWON: Next page. And let's zoom in a bit.
20 Could you kindly read two lines, one sentence, which appears
21 immediately above paragraph 123. Could you read aloud. I will read it
22 for your benefit so that you can hear the translation.
23 "It seems that the Dragomir Milosevic Chamber confused these two
24 margins or errors" and you refer to table 1 and table 2.
25 This is your statement that you stated you would stand by. What
Page 28935
1 did you mean by saying this?
2 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] It's difficult for me to recall my
3 state of mind and level of understanding from five years ago. But in
4 that specific case I meant that not all elements of artillery science
5 were taken account. As I said 15 years ago there are not two tables that
6 are relevant but 20 or 30, and it is not appropriate to compare one table
7 with another and confine yourself to that. We should either limit
8 ourselves to a margin of several centimetres or take into account
9 properly all the 30 tables that are relevant. That's I think what I
10 meant.
11 JUDGE KWON: But this is the statement you made recently, not
12 five years ago. So could you clarify that, what you meant. Why did
13 you -- do you think the Milosevic Chamber was confused?
14 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] It's difficult for me to judge the
15 basis on which this high court made its conclusions. I believe it was
16 done the way it was done simply because we should not look at the
17 accessories on a suit, on an outfit, but the whole suit, the main thing,
18 not second-rate or third-rate details.
19 JUDGE KWON: Very well.
20 Mr. Tieger.
21 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Would it help, Your Excellency, if
22 the witness had read out to him paragraphs 122 and 123 so they be
23 interpreted into Russian so that he should realise it refers to the
24 judgement in the Dragomir Milosevic case. If we could read to him both
25 these paragraphs, 122 and 123.
Page 28936
1 JUDGE KWON: I think Mr. Tieger did it, but it may be a subject
2 for you to take up at your re-examination if necessary.
3 Yes, Mr. Tieger, please continue.
4 MR. TIEGER: Thank you, Mr. President.
5 Q. All right. In the remaining time before I move on to an entirely
6 different area, let me just address this. Let me just focus on your
7 assertion that you were looking for various traces that a mortar had been
8 fired. First of all, can we agree that there is likely to be a
9 difference between the traces of a fixed mortar position that has been in
10 a particular place for a period of time and the traces left by a mortar
11 that assumes a temporary firing position for one shot and then departs?
12 A. Yes, yes, certainly. Firing positions that have been occupied
13 for years certainly leave more traces or deeper traces. But
14 nevertheless, even a temporarily-placed mortar would inevitably leave a
15 trace, especially if it has been fired. If it has been just placed there
16 without firing and then evacuated somehow by a crane, there would be
17 minimal trace. But if it has been fired, the crew would never be able to
18 remove all the traces of the gun charge that has been fired but does not
19 depart with the shell. But the main argument for all artillery
20 specialists is that there is one in a million chance that one single
21 mortar would manage to hit one single street occupied by a huge crowd of
22 people. And let me remind you that two years earlier there had been an
23 identical terrorist act in the same street, killing 88 people and
24 wounding 200. The chance that a mortar shell would hit such a small
25 street of 6, 8 metres in length distance between those two buildings is
Page 28937
1 one in a million. It's virtually impossible.
2 Q. Is the chance slightly higher that a mortar will land in a
3 broader area rather than the precise spot on which it lands? And are you
4 asserting here that your judgement about whether -- about where the
5 mortar was fired from and whether it was a mortar at all is based on your
6 conclusion that that exact spot, right there, was the target rather than,
7 for example, the market at large?
8 MR. ROBINSON: Excuse me, Mr. President, Mr. Tieger is putting
9 multiple questions to the witness which is something that he criticised
10 Dr. Karadzic for. So I think if he can break it up and just take an
11 answer to his first question then he can follow it up with the next one.
12 MR. TIEGER: Fair enough.
13 Q. So I'll ask the question. Are you asserting here that your
14 conclusions are based upon your insistence that the mortar was fired at
15 the exact spot it landed -- that the mortar was targeted at the exact
16 spot it landed rather than, for example, the market at large?
17 A. No, no. That is not so. Moreover, I insist that there was no
18 mortar fire. That's what I insist on. But even if we accept for the
19 moment the fantastic idea that one mortar was firing at the city with
20 minimal chances of hitting a very small, densely populated area, I'm
21 saying the chance is one in a million. I want to remind this honourable
22 Court and everybody that on that day it was not the one explosion
23 registered by UN representatives. I believe there were six detonations,
24 six explosions in that area. And after the first five mortar shells or
25 so-called mortar shells, only five people were wounded. And from this
Page 28938
1 particular shell allegedly killed 88 and wounded 200. That doesn't
2 happen. It just doesn't happen that a shell chooses on its own a point
3 where it would do the most damage and the greatest casualties. There
4 were so many details of that kind presented in the statement made to the
5 public and the image created that just doesn't -- don't hold water.
6 Q. So I understand you to be saying that you scoured thousands of
7 metres of territory in order to look for the traces of a mortar shell
8 that you believed had not been fired?
9 A. Yes.
10 Q. So you went out there, you say, thinking that you would -- that
11 there was nothing to be found; right?
12 A. No, no. I wanted to either confirm what the speaker -- what the
13 spokesman said - that it was from Serb territory - I wanted to confirm it
14 if I was able to by photographs and finding traces, but in the end my
15 inquiry, my investigation, showed it to be a lie. The objective was
16 reached. My objective was not to refute it. My objective was to find
17 the facts.
18 Q. Did you consider that you might be allegedly looking for the
19 trace of a mortar that was fired from a temporary position, that is,
20 which someone had just driven up, taken the mortar off in about a minute
21 or two, fired it maybe from sandbags, and then departed? Did you
22 consider that possibility and is that what you say you were looking for
23 in-depth?
24 A. We were looking for any object, any clue, any lead that would
25 indicate an unnatural change in the area. Sand would seep to the ground
Page 28939
1 from those sandbags. Nobody travelled there with sandbags anyway. There
2 would be some trace of the charge, there would be fragments from the
3 shells. We were looking for anything that would stand out and anything
4 we found could be in support of the UN theory. But we didn't find
5 anything like that. And I believe what we found was true, you have to --
6 I have to remind you, the slope is very steep, 70 degrees or so. Nobody
7 fired from there.
8 Q. 70 degrees, just enough to clear the building and land right in
9 the street?
10 A. Yes, it is a hypocritical way of looking at it. If the shell had
11 flown over the roofs, it would be just a few centimetres over the roofs.
12 And in massive artillery attacks, that's what happens. The shells land
13 in the street over the roofs, but that's in massive artillery attacks,
14 using just one shot from a mortar the chances are one in a million that
15 would happen.
16 Q. Thank you, Colonel.
17 MR. TIEGER: We're obviously done for the day, Mr. President.
18 JUDGE KWON: You will continue tomorrow, Mr. Tieger?
19 MR. TIEGER: Yes.
20 JUDGE KWON: Yes. We'll adjourn soon, but, Mr. Demurenko, can I
21 remind you that you're not supposed to discuss about your testimony with
22 anybody else, including the parties, Defence, and Prosecution. Do you
23 understand that, sir?
24 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Exactly.
25 JUDGE KWON: We'll resume tomorrow at 9.00.
Page 28940
1 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 2.45 p.m.,
2 to be reconvened on Wednesday, the 17th day of
3 October, 2012, at 9.00 a.m.
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