1 Monday, 21 August 2006

2 [Open session]

3 [Prosecution Opening Statement]

4 [The accused entered court]

5 --- Upon commencing at 9.02 a.m.

6 JUDGE AGIUS: Good morning, Madam Registrar. Could you call the

7 case, please.

8 THE REGISTRAR: Good morning, Your Honours. This is the case

9 number IT-05-88-T, the Prosecutor versus Popovic et al.

10 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, madam. Good morning to you once more.

11 Mr. Popovic, can you follow the proceedings in a language that you

12 can understand?

13 THE ACCUSED POPOVIC: [Interpretation] Yes, I can.

14 JUDGE AGIUS: Thank you and good morning to you.

15 Mr. Beara, can you understand the proceedings in your own

16 language?

17 THE ACCUSED BEARA: [Interpretation] Yes, I can.

18 JUDGE AGIUS: Mr. Nikolic, can you follow the proceedings in your

19 own language?

20 THE ACCUSED NIKOLIC: [Interpretation] Yes, I can.

21 JUDGE AGIUS: Mr. Borovcanin, same question.

22 THE ACCUSED BOROVCANIN: [Interpretation] Yes.

23 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you.

24 Mr. Miletic, same question.

25 THE ACCUSED MILETIC: [Interpretation] I'm not receiving

1 interpretation. Yes, I can, but I'm not receiving interpretation.

2 JUDGE AGIUS: I will repeat the same question to you. Are you

3 receiving interpretation now?

4 THE ACCUSED MILETIC: [Interpretation] Yes, I am.

5 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you. And can you follow the proceedings in

6 your own language, in other words?

7 THE ACCUSED MILETIC: [Interpretation] Yes, I can.

8 JUDGE AGIUS: Thank you.

9 Mr. Gvero, same question to you.

10 THE ACCUSED GVERO: [Interpretation] I can.

11 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you.

12 And Mr. Pandurevic.

13 THE ACCUSED PANDUREVIC: [Interpretation] Good morning, Your

14 Honour. Yes, I can. Thank you.

15 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you all, and good morning to you all.

16 Appearances for the Prosecution.

17 MR. McCLOSKEY: Good morning, Mr. President, Your Honours. My

18 name is Peter McCloskey. Together with me today is Madam Prosecutor,

19 Carla Del Ponte; and the attorneys from the Srebrenica Zepa trial team,

20 Julian Nicholls, Nelson Thayer, Lada Soljan.

21 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Mr. McCloskey. And good morning to you

22 as well, Madam Del Ponte, and the rest of the team.

23 Appearances for Vujadin Popovic.

24 MR. ZIVANOVIC: Good morning, Your Honours. For Vujadin Popovic,

25 Zoran Zivanovic, lead counsel, Julie Condon, co-counsel, and Kelly

1 Pitcher, case manager.

2 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Mr. Zivanovic, and good morning to you

3 and your team.

4 Appearances for Ljubisa Beara.

5 MR. OSTOJIC: Good morning, Mr. President, Your Honours. My name

6 is John Ostojic. I'm here with my team members, Mr. Chris Meek and

7 Mr. Nebojsa Mrkic on behalf of Ljubisa Beara.

8 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Mr. Ostojic, and good morning to you

9 and your team.

10 Appearances for Drago Nikolic.

11 MS. NIKOLIC: [Interpretation] Good morning, Your Honours. My name

12 is Jelena Nikolic, and together with Mr. Stephane Bourgon and Bojan

13 Stefanovic, our case manager, we represent Mr. Drago Nikolic.

14 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Madam Nikolic, and good morning to you

15 and your team.

16 Appearances for accused Ljubomir Borovcanin.

17 MR. LAZAREVIC: Good morning, Your Honours. My name is Aleksandar

18 Lazarevic. By my side are Mr. Miodrag Stojanovic and Tatjana Cmeric. We

19 will represent Mr. Borovcanin.

20 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Mr. Lazarevic, and good morning to you

21 and your team.

22 Appearances for Radivoje Miletic.

23 MS. FAUVEAU: [Interpretation] Good morning, Your Honours. I'm

24 Natacha Fauveau-Ivanovic, and I represent Radivoje Miletic together with

25 my assistant, Mr. Nikolic.

1 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Madam Ivanovic, and good morning to you

2 and your team.

3 Milan Gvero.

4 MR. KRGOVIC: Good morning, Your Honours. Dragan Krgovic and

5 Natalie Wagner for General Gvero.

6 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Mr. Krgovic, and good morning to you

7 and your team.

8 And finally appearances for Vinko Pandurevic.

9 MR. HAYNES: Your Honour, I, Peter Haynes, appear together with

10 Mr. Djordje Sarapa for Vinko Pandurevic. We're assisted in court today by

11 our case manager, Helena Kaker.

12 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you and good morning to you and your team,

13 Mr. Haynes.

14 So before we move ahead with the opening statement, Prosecution,

15 are there any preliminaries?

16 Yes, Madam Faveau.

17 MS. FAUVEAU: [Interpretation] Your Honour, I would like to draw

18 your attention to the fact that the accused have not received the

19 operative indictment which was filed on the 4th of August, 2006, in B/C/S.

20 JUDGE AGIUS: What about the other accused? In other words, is

21 yours an exception or does -- does it apply to each and every one of the

22 accused? I see Mr. Krgovic, Mr. Zivanovic, Mr. Ostojic, and Mr. Nikolic,

23 and Mr. Lazarevic.

24 So Madam Registrar, what's the problem? Why haven't they received

25 a copy of the operative indictment in their own language?

1 THE REGISTRAR: Yes, it's being translation process. I will find

2 out and I will get back you, to the Trial Chamber.

3 JUDGE AGIUS: All right. We'll work on it, Madam Fauveau and

4 other counsel, and we'll see to it that it's distributed without any undue

5 delay.

6 Any further preliminary matters?

7 Yes, Mr. Bourgon.

8 MR. BOURGON: Good morning, Mr. President; good morning, Judges.

9 Mr. President, I would like at this time and before we proceed

10 with the opening statement of the Prosecutor -- Prosecution, to present an

11 oral joint motion for reconsideration of the decision issued by the Trial

12 Chamber on Friday, the 18th of August, 2006. We are of the view,

13 Mr. President, on behalf of all seven accused in this trial, that this

14 motion must be heard before we proceed with the Prosecution's opening

15 statement for a number of reasons, including the fact that the motion, of

16 course, deals with all seven accused in this case. Secondly, the motion

17 concerns the proceedings as a whole as well as the fairness of the

18 proceedings.

19 JUDGE AGIUS: One moment, Mr. Bourgon. If you're going to make

20 submissions, we'll give you a time limit within which to make your

21 submissions. We'll give equal time to the Prosecution to reply, and we

22 will hand down our oral decision soon after, as soon as practicable, and

23 then we can start. But if you're going to make submissions, you have five

24 minutes.

25 MR. BOURGON: Thank you very much, Mr. President. I will get

1 straight to the point.

2 MR. McCLOSKEY: Your Honour, may I heard?

3 JUDGE AGIUS: Yes, certainly.

4 MR. McCLOSKEY: This matter has been decided on in a written -- in

5 an oral -- excuse me, in a written decision, and we would object,

6 especially at this time, at this critical time, to any delay. If -- if

7 this matter, if you think it should be discussed in court, I would request

8 that any discussion be made at the end of the trial day and that we allow

9 the Prosecutor to make her statement and -- and that I make -- begin my

10 statement and then we handle this later. But this matter has been dealt

11 with.

12 JUDGE AGIUS: Yes, but there is an intimation that the joint

13 Defence teams would like to have the matter reconsidered. So let's hear

14 what they have to say. You will be given every opportunity to reply, and

15 then we'll hand down our decision soon after or as soon as practicable.

16 But I can assure you the matter will be dealt with in a final manner this

17 morning, within the next 20 minutes or so.

18 Yes, Mr. Bourgon.

19 MR. BOURGON: Thank you, Mr. President. As mentioned --

20 JUDGE AGIUS: Please restrict yourself to any submissions which

21 are new and not those that we have already decided upon.

22 MR. BOURGON: Will do, Mr. President.

23 Mr. President, the legal basis for this motion is the Appeals

24 Chamber decision of June 2006 in the Zigic case saying that a Trial

25 Chamber may and has the power to reconsider its decision on the basis of

1 either a change of circumstances or on the basis that the decision is

2 erroneous and has caused a prejudice to the Defence. All Defence

3 attorneys in this case, Mr. President, believe that both a delay of the

4 aspects of this test are met in this case.

5 Moving straight away to the situation of the change of

6 circumstances. In the decision, the Trial Chamber said, recognised that

7 the Prosecution had not fulfilled entirely its disclosure obligation.

8 However, it did recognise that or maybe it was not satisfied that the

9 partial non-disclosure by the Prosecution has denied the Defence the

10 ability to prepare adequately for trial. The order said we will -- the

11 Prosecution is to comply without delay with its disclosure obligation

12 pursuant to Rule 65 ter (E) (iii), and the Prosecution is to provide the

13 Defence before or by the commencement of trial proceedings with an update

14 of its witnesses for August and September, which shall include a list of

15 exhibits to be used with each.

16 Under the heading "change in circumstances," I respectfully submit

17 on behalf of all the accused the following: Firstly, the Prosecution has

18 not provided the Defence as it was ordered to do a revised list of

19 witnesses for August and September along with a list of exhibits to be

20 used.

21 Secondly, the Prosecution has not provided the Defence since the

22 decision with any further disclosure of exhibits that it intends to offer

23 at trial.

24 Thirdly, the Prosecution has failed as ordered by the Trial

25 Chamber on 30 June to file its proofing chart for all witnesses in this

1 case by 18 August 2006, last Friday, as it was ordered to do.

2 Fourthly, on 18 August the Prosecution filed a new motion, a new

3 motion for three additional witnesses as well as 360 new documents to be

4 added in this case.

5 For sure, Mr. President, the Prosecution knew when it responded to

6 the Defence motion that it was about to file 360 new documents and ask for

7 three more witnesses. For sure, Mr. President, the Prosecution knew that

8 it would not be able to file its proofing chart by Friday when it

9 responded to the Defence motion.

10 Fifthly, Mr. President, the Defence still has not received a full

11 index indicating the material that is necessary or that is relevant for

12 each of the witnesses in this case. Meaning that for each witness we have

13 consistently been asking the Prosecution to provide us with what is the

14 material, statements, interviews, prior testimonies, information reports,

15 and any documents which may have been provided by each of the witnesses.

16 This information, Mr. President, is required at this time, and it has not

17 yet been provided. It is not for the Defence to look for this

18 information. It is for the Prosecution to provide this information.

19 Sixthly, Mr. President, the Defence has not yet received the

20 information requested in order to make the Prosecution pre-trial brief a

21 meaningful document. This was brought to the attention of the Prosecution

22 in both some of the pre-trial briefs filed by the Defence as well as on

23 14 July during the pro forma beginning of this trial.

24 We believe, Mr. President, that all of this is a change of

25 circumstances that warrant a reconsideration of the motion.

1 Under the heading "prejudice to the Defence," I will make it short

2 and simply address two categories which need further emphasis; namely, the

3 issue of the intercept material. 150 at least intercept material which

4 have not yet been provided to the Defence in English. This material, Mr.

5 President, for sure must have been reviewed and analysed by the

6 Prosecution at some point, and in addition, it must have been reviewed by

7 the lead trial attorney from the Prosecution.

8 The Prosecution cannot deny that this material is important for

9 its case, yet the Defence does not have it in English in order to prepare

10 for this trial.

11 Secondly, Mr. President, the issue of the operational logs. Both

12 of these issues were addressed in our motion, and we are under the -- we

13 respectfully submit that they have not been addressed sufficiently or

14 considered in rendering the decision. These operational logs is a tool

15 that will be absolutely required by both the Defence and the Trial Chamber

16 alike, with a view to being able to understand better these witnesses.

17 Looking at the prejudice, Mr. President, when we look at the

18 missing material, when we look at the missing translations, when we look

19 at the fact that we do not have the proofing chart order for 18 August,

20 that we do not have a proper pre-trial brief, that we do not have an

21 updated witness list, that we do not have a list of material for each

22 witness, this, Mr. President, has hampered Defence preparations to a point

23 where it is necessary to postpone the proceedings in this case.

24 Now, we opened up in terms of our last submission, which was our

25 reply, we said we will proceed this week with those two first witnesses.

1 We will proceed with those -- with the opening statements if that is the

2 wish of the Trial Chamber. However, before any further meaningful or

3 witnesses which address a lot of exhibit testify before this Chamber, they

4 should, Mr. President, at least ten days before we get all the material

5 and the testimony of the first such witness.

6 This is my five minutes. I would have much more to say, but in

7 the gist, this is what the -- on behalf of all seven accused in this case

8 we believe that there is a prejudice to the Defence and that there is a

9 need to postpone the proceedings in this case. Maybe not for long, but

10 what is important is the Prosecution must be in a position or must be --

11 must have a way to fulfil its obligation so that we can have this trial

12 started on a firm and sound basis.

13 Thank you, Mr. President, on behalf of all the accused in this

14 case.

15 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Mr. Bourgon, also for staying within

16 the time limit.

17 Mr. McCloskey, you have five minutes.

18 MR. McCLOSKEY: Mr. President, first of all, having this thrown at

19 me like this I've tried to keep track of what he's saying, but it's

20 difficult because he says he hasn't received the proofing chart. The

21 proofing chart has been filed, and so I don't know what the problem is and

22 I don't know what else is a problem that really is not in what he said,

23 because the proofing chart is filed.

24 The updated exhibit and witness list we have a stack right here

25 ready to give to them. I had thought it had been given electronically, so

1 I'd asked my co-counsel not to pass it out right at the hour. Apparently

2 it's not been sent electronically but we have it, so it's here.

3 The other matter, on the over 300 new documents --

4 JUDGE AGIUS: That's the subject matter of an outstanding motion.

5 I mean, if you deal with it very briefly in the same way it has been

6 submitted or along the same lines it has been made reference to by

7 Mr. Bourgon, okay. Otherwise, please go on to the next point. I mean,

8 the idea is that -- this should -- the fact that there is this outstanding

9 motion in itself should delay the commencement of the -- of the case. Do

10 you agree to that?

11 MR. McCLOSKEY: Yes, I think that makes sense. If I could just

12 mention so Your Honour is aware that -- why there is 300 some-odd new

13 exhibits, very briefly.

14 The Miletic trial brief surprised us where he denied any

15 involvement in providing humanitarian aid. We had over 200 documents with

16 his name on it that are pro forma convoy-type documents, not all of which

17 have been translated. So out of an abundance of caution in response to

18 the pre-trial brief, we've got those to the Defence as soon as we could.

19 They're not all translated. So many of these documents are in response to

20 pre-trial brief issues that we now are -- understand will be contested at

21 trial.

22 We've tried to avoid dumping enormous numbers of documents on the

23 Defence early on in the exhibit list, and so we will hope to be adding as

24 issues come up, not in a huge bulk.

25 Frankly, the other issues he mentioned, the intercepts, the logs,

1 I could discuss those at length, but we've discussed those in our brief.

2 There's no need to, especially for the logs, to translate all the

3 information in all the logs. We have translated the part that is much

4 relevant.

5 The intercepts we're doing our best to translate as quick as we

6 can, and we've left the some 100, 150 as potentially relevant intercepts

7 and I hope to perhaps cut off some of those intercepts as I get the

8 translations. But our analyst said they appeared relevant, so out of an

9 abundance of caution we've put those on our list. And that's the group

10 we're talking about. I don't have any English translations that we're

11 holding back.

12 JUDGE AGIUS: How soon will you be making use or do you anticipate

13 you'll be making use of any of these intercepts or operational logs with

14 witnesses?

15 MR. McCLOSKEY: Months and months.

16 JUDGE AGIUS: All right. Okay. Go ahead.

17 MR. McCLOSKEY: The guts of this case, the documents and the

18 intercepts, it comes at the end of the case, and I think we've all tried

19 to examine how long this will take, but probably not between 6 and 9

20 months down the road.

21 JUDGE AGIUS: All right. Okay. Yes. Anything else?

22 MR. McCLOSKEY: I think that's the most of it, Your Honour.

23 JUDGE AGIUS: Okay. I thank you. So we will have a very short

24 break, three minutes, four minutes maximum, and we'll come back with a

25 decision.

1 Yes, I see both Mr. Bourgon and Madam Fauveau.

2 Mr. Bourgon.

3 MR. BOURGON: Mr. President, I can have, please with your

4 permission one minute to reply.

5 JUDGE AGIUS: Yes, go ahead.

6 MR. BOURGON: There has been no proofing chart filed. The

7 proofing chart, there was a proofing chart filed back in July but there

8 was one segment for 18 of August which has not been filed, unless it was

9 filed after hours on Friday, but we even checked with court management

10 this morning. It has not been filed.

11 The Miletic document deals with the Main Staff. This is joint

12 criminal enterprise case. All accused in this case must review these

13 documents. All we hear from the Prosecution is inadvertently abundance of

14 caution, eleventh hour, avoiding dumping. It's a matter, Mr. President,

15 of what message the Trial Chamber wants to send to the justice community

16 to the judicial community in terms of can we start this trial on a firm

17 basis, or do we just say time is the only thing that matters.

18 Prosecution, you can do what you want. It doesn't matter as long as we

19 get this trial going.

20 Thank you, Mr. President.

21 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Mr. Bourgon.

22 Madam Fauveau.

23 MS. FAUVEAU: [Interpretation] Your Honour, I would be very

24 grateful to the Prosecution if it could quote the brief I have filed,

25 because the terms used by the Prosecutor are not quite the terms which we

1 used in our pre-trial brief.

2 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you.

3 Do you have any further comments, Mr. McCloskey, before we retire

4 for our deliberations?

5 MR. McCLOSKEY: No, Mr. President.

6 JUDGE AGIUS: Okay. Thank you.

7 Yes, Mr. Krgovic.

8 MR. KRGOVIC: [Interpretation] Your Honour, there is a set of

9 documents that have just been submitted that applied to my client among

10 the 360. I'm not talking about documents that apply only to General

11 Miletic. There are other documents that apply to other accused as well.

12 JUDGE AGIUS: That is, from my experience here over the last five

13 years, that is something that continues, goes on and on and on throughout

14 the entire trial. Documents keep arriving as they come to the surface,

15 and we usually intervene when we are convinced that you need time to go

16 through them before -- before you can proceed with the case, but let's see

17 whether that's the case now.

18 We will retire for a few minutes. We'll come back with our oral

19 decision. Thank you.

20 --- Break taken at 9.27 a.m.

21 --- On resuming at 9.33 a.m.

22 JUDGE AGIUS: So the Trial Chamber is seized of a joint Defence

23 motion made this morning for reconsideration of its decision filed last

24 Friday on another joint Defence motion for postponement of the

25 commencement of the trial. This is our oral decision.

1 We have heard oral submissions by parties. We have confirmed that

2 the -- the proofing chart that was expected to be filed by last Friday was

3 indeed filed, although it seems it has not been distributed. We consider

4 the submission relating to the Prosecution request to add three witnesses

5 and about 360 fresh exhibits to be the subject matter of an outstanding

6 motion and should be dealt with as such in that motion and not as a reason

7 for delaying the commencement of -- or the -- for postponing the

8 commencement of the trial.

9 Equally, we have heard confirmation from the Prosecution that the

10 intercept material and operational logs will be made use of with witnesses

11 at a much later stage in the proceedings.

12 We do not consider any of the other so-called fresh circumstances

13 mentioned this morning by Mr. Bourgon and others such as to warrant a

14 postponement in the commencement of the trial. Consequently, we stand by

15 our decision of last Friday, which denied the joint Defence motion for

16 postponement -- for postponement of the commencement of proceedings, and

17 we order that the proceedings in this trial be proceeded with forthwith.

18 Thank you.

19 Any further preliminary matters? I hear none.

20 So, Madam Del Ponte, I take it you wanted the floor first before

21 Mr. McCloskey. Go ahead.

22 MS. DEL PONTE: Yes, Your Honours, Mr. President. Yes, indeed I

23 would like to make a few brief opening remarks before Senior Trial

24 Attorney Peter McCloskey addresses you.

25 For those of us gathered here today, over a decade and nearly

1 2.000 kilometres removed from the events of Srebrenica in July 1995, it is

2 difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend the scale of the horror

3 inflicted on the inhabitants of the Srebrenica enclave. Words cannot

4 convey the magnitude of the crimes committed and the suffering endured by

5 the victims.

6 For the survivors, the wounds have not yet heeled and the

7 suffering continues. For many of them, it still feels like only yesterday

8 that they were forcibly separated from their families and saw their loved

9 ones taken away by armed soldiers, never to see them again. In most

10 cases, never to learn what finally happened to them.

11 Before the war, Srebrenica was known mainly for the local mining

12 industry and for its health spas. The town was not particularly well

13 known outside of the former Yugoslavia. In 1991, the population was

14 approximately 75 per cent Muslim. Now, now, the name of Srebrenica is

15 infamous. Srebrenica is invariably associated with the most heinous of

16 crimes: Forcible transfer, mass murder, and genocide.

17 It is beyond reasonable dispute that genocide and other crimes

18 against humanity were committed in Srebrenica in July 1995. These

19 terrible facts have been proven, have been proven in other trials held

20 before this Tribunal. The facts of the forcible transfer of the

21 population and the mass executions have also been painstakingly

22 established by investigations and reports of the United Nations, human

23 rights organisations, and governments.

24 As just one example, let me read you a portion of the concluding

25 paragraph of the 15 November 1999 report of the Secretary-General pursuant

1 to General Assembly Resolution 53/35. The fall of Srebrenica, and I

2 quote: "The body of this report sets out in meticulous, systematic,

3 exhaustive and ultimately harrowing detail of the descent of Srebrenica

4 into a horror without parallel in the history of Europe since the Second

5 World War. I urge all concerned to study this report carefully and to let

6 the facts speak for themselves. The men who have been charged with these

7 crimes against humanity reminded the world, and in particular the United

8 Nations, that evil exists in the world."

9 Your Honours, the facts do indeed speak for themselves. Let me

10 quickly discuss some of the key facts which are before and will be proven

11 beyond reasonable doubt in this trial.

12 In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb army, or VRS, implemented the final

13 phase of a comprehensive criminal plan to permanently erase the Muslim

14 population of Srebrenica. As is well known, the enclave fell to the VRS

15 on 11 July 1995, after a brief military campaign. Within three days, in

16 an atmosphere of utter terror, tens of thousands of citizens, women,

17 children, and the elderly, were forcibly removed from the enclave by the

18 VRS and Bosnian Serb police forces. What little the victims could carry

19 they brought with them in bundles as they were loaded into overcrowded

20 buses in the village of Potocari near Srebrenica.

21 The separation of Potocari was captured by a Serb cameraman, and

22 you will see scenes of these poor terrified people being forced from their

23 homes. You will hear first-hand evidence of the fact that the men and

24 boys gathered in Potocari were prevented by armed soldiers from entering

25 the buses with their families. Instead, they were separated from their

1 wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters.

2 These men and boys, aged approximately 15 to 78, faced a far

3 grimmer fate. After being separated from their families, they were

4 confined in cramped detention facilities under brutal conditions. Their

5 meager belongings were taken away from them, piled up, and burned.

6 In the following weeks, VRS and police forces systematically

7 murdered over 7.000 Muslim men and boys from the Srebrenica enclave. The

8 victims included those separated from their families in Potocari, as well

9 as thousands of men and boys who either surrendered or were captured as

10 they tried to flee the enclave. These victims, civilians as well as

11 soldiers who had set down their arms, were detained, murdered in firing

12 squads and bulldozed into mass graves.

13 Where are the victims of these mass executions today? Most of

14 them remain together in mass primary or secondary graves hidden in the

15 woods and buried beneath the fields. They lie together, many of them

16 undoubtedly still bound by wire and blindfolds, for the evidence shows

17 that many victims were bound with ligatures and blindfolded in order to

18 make the murder easier for the executions. These were not, not deaths

19 sustained as has been argued, in combat. And that is what this case is

20 about, Your Honours. An entire population erased, women, children and the

21 elderly forced from their homes; defenseless men and boys executed by

22 firing squads, buried in mass graves, and then dug up and buried once

23 again in an effort to conceal the truth from the world.

24 But the lasting tragedy of Srebrenica, the leading legacy of this

25 atrocity is with the families left behind. The women and children forced

1 to live their lives deprived of their fathers, without their husbands,

2 their brothers, their sons, their neighbours, their community gone.

3 The continuing impact of these crimes on the Muslim population of

4 Srebrenica was evident most recently at the ceremony last month in

5 Potocari commemorating the 11th anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica.

6 Thousands of mourners, mainly women, gathered there for the burial of

7 still more victims at the memorial centre. At the ceremony, over 500 more

8 victims of genocide were buried. They joined some 2.000 other victims in

9 the ground of the cemetery at the memorial centre. However, all too many

10 victims still await a proper burial.

11 To date over 3.000 victims have been exhumed by the Office of the

12 Prosecutor and the international community. They are stored anonymously

13 in morgues, bearing tags, waiting for the identifications that in many

14 cases may never be realised.

15 For some of the survivors, a minority, there is at least the sense

16 of certainty that comes when a missing loved one is finally found and

17 identified. However, for far too many of the survivors there is not even

18 this small measure of relief. The questions remain: What happened to my

19 father, my husband, my son. Why was he killed? Where is he? What were

20 his last moments like? Why did this happen to us?

21 Let me review something said by one survivor, Witness DD, in

22 previous Srebrenica trial about the loss of a child and how she still felt

23 the pain years after he was taken from her in Potocari, and he remains

24 among the missing. I quote: "As a mother, I still have hope. I just

25 can't believe that this is true. How is it possible that a human being

1 could do something like this, could destroy everything, could kill so many

2 people? Just imagine this youngest boy I had, those little hands of his,

3 how could they be dead? I imagine those hands picking strawberries,

4 reading books, going to school, going on excursions. Every morning I wake

5 up, I cover my eyes not to look at other children going to school and

6 husbands going to work holding hands."

7 The pain expressed in those words is felt by every survivor who

8 still waits to learn of the fate of a loved one.

9 Justice. Your Honours, the ceremony of Potocari was, of course, a

10 ceremony of loss and grief, but it was also a ceremony of hope, hope for

11 justice. And with justice, the hope for reconciliation between peoples.

12 With justice comes the hope for a lasting peace. The surviving victims of

13 these crimes yearn for justice, not revenge.

14 There is a passage which the Grand Mufti of Bosnia and

15 Herzegovina, Mustafa Efendija Ceric, often states in his prayers and

16 appeals to people to remember the crimes of Srebrenica and pray that they

17 shall never be perpetrated again against any people. I would like to

18 repeat it to you: "Revenge is not a Bosnian tradition. Revenge is not a

19 Bosnian measure. The truth is our belief, and justice is our destiny."

20 This trial is the next phase in bringing to justice those men most

21 responsible for all of the crimes against humanity committed in Srebrenica

22 and Zepa. There have been other trials concerned with the crimes in

23 Srebrenica. These trials have exposed the truth and punished some of the

24 guilty, but all of those individuals most responsible for this genocide,

25 and indeed the other crimes committed in Srebrenica, have not yet been

1 brought to justice. This trial is an important step towards that goal.

2 These seven accused, Your Honours, officers, serving below Ratko

3 Mladic and Zdravko Tolimir are among those most responsible, most

4 responsible for the terrible crimes committed in Srebrenica as set forth

5 in the indictment. The crimes that are the subject of this indictment in

6 this case were committed with brutality, boldness, and impunity in equal

7 measure.

8 The separation of the women and children from the men and boys in

9 Potocari and their forcible expulsion while the men and boys were detained

10 awaiting execution took place in front of rolling television cameras. It

11 was broadcast around the world as the crimes occurred, and of course you

12 will see much of this video evidence during the course of the trial.

13 It is right to recall as we start this trial that the ICTY was

14 created in the face of continued and serious violation of international

15 humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia. This judicial institution is

16 the product of one of the most important measures taken by the Security

17 Council acting for all Member States of the United Nations to restore and

18 maintain international peace and security. That is our collective

19 mission, our responsibility and our contribution to peace and security, to

20 bring to justice those individuals responsible for the most serious crimes

21 known to humanity.

22 The crimes that are the subject of this trial, genocide, the

23 crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war are

24 set forth in the indictment, and indeed all the crimes within the

25 jurisdiction of the Tribunal are crimes of such a magnitude that they

1 injure us all. These crimes are offences against the victims and all of

2 human kind because they are of a scale that offend our deepest principle

3 of human rights and human dignity. The trials before this Tribunal have

4 proven that international law is not merely theory nor an abstract

5 concept. International law is and must be a fully functioning system to

6 protect our values and regulate behaviour in civilised society. To

7 achieve this goal, crimes which shocked the consciousness of humanity,

8 crimes against us all cannot be permitted to go unpunished.

9 I bring these accused before Your Honours to face the charges

10 against them. I do so on behalf of the international community and in the

11 name of all the Member States of the United Nations, and as with all

12 accused in this Tribunal they are brought before you to be tried for their

13 individual criminal responsibility. No state, no nationality, no

14 organisation is on trial for these crimes. Crimes are committed by

15 individual people, and individual people must be held responsible for

16 their criminal acts. There is no such thing as collective guilt before

17 this Tribunal.

18 The case against these accused will be difficult and will take

19 time. The very number of accused in this case will invariably result in

20 challenges for the Prosecution, Your Honours, and the Defence. However, I

21 know that each of the accused will receive a fair trial in accordance with

22 the highest standard of international justice. There can be no justice

23 without the utmost respect for the rights of the accused, and I'm certain

24 that this trial will reflect the absolute commitment of the Office of the

25 Prosecutor to upholding the rights of the accused as well as those of the

1 victims and witnesses.

2 As I said earlier, the surviving victims of the Srebrenica crimes

3 yearn for justice, not vengeance. They look towards this Tribunal to

4 provide justice, to prove the truth of what happened to them and to

5 convict the guilty. This trial is an important step towards and a cause

6 for hope. However, at the commencement of this trial, we must also

7 acknowledge with regret that the effort to bring to justice the most

8 responsible for the terrible crimes in the former Yugoslavia, including

9 the darkest chapter, the genocide in Srebrenica, is incomplete.

10 Unfortunately, two men who should be sitting as accused before Your

11 Honours right now in this courtroom are still at large. I refer, of

12 course, to Ratko Mladic and Zdravko Tolimir. It is absolutely scandalous

13 that these men, along with Radovan Karadzic, have not been arrested and

14 delivered to the Tribunal to face the charges brought against them. The

15 government of the Republic of Serbia is fully capable of arresting these

16 men. It has simply until now refused to do so.

17 Tolimir was, as you know, indicted and joined to the accused in

18 the case before you today. Now, because of the refusal of Serbia to

19 arrest him, his case must be severed from the indictment.

20 Mladic. Mladic should be on trial in this case. It was always

21 hoped and indeed expected that he would be delivered to the Tribunal in

22 time to have his case joined to this trial. Again, the inexcusable

23 refusal to arrest and transfer Mladic means that another Srebrenica trial

24 must be held in the future, when Mladic and Tolimir will be in custody.

25 And make no mistake: He, Mladic, Tolimir, Karadzic, and all the

1 remaining fugitives will be arrested. They will be brought to The Hague

2 and they will be tried for their crimes. This is our pledge to the

3 international community, to the women who mourn for their loss in

4 Potocari, and to all victims of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

5 Your Honours, Mr. President, I have said what I came before you to

6 say. I have absolute confidence that you will conduct this trial with

7 fairness to all parties and reach a just verdict.

8 With your authorisation, I give the floor now to Senior Trial

9 Attorney Peter McCloskey.

10 Thank you, Mr. President.

11 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you, Madam Del Ponte.

12 Mr. McCloskey. We'll have a break at 10.30. Thank you.

13 MR. McCLOSKEY: Mr. President, Your Honours, it's a great honour

14 and privilege to be here before you today to give you my opening

15 statement.

16 In 1992, Karadzic and Mladic had a plan for an ethnically pure

17 Bosnian state. For over three years their plan was brutally executed on a

18 massive scale by intimidation, terror -- excuse me. If I could ask the

19 discussion ...

20 This campaign began with the war in the spring of 1992 and

21 continued throughout the conflict, culminating of the removal of the

22 Muslim population from Eastern Bosnia in July 1995 and the Srebrenica

23 genocide. Karadzic and Mladic replied upon a few close associates and

24 political and military system perverted to carry out their war against the

25 Muslim and Croatian armies and the Muslim and Croatian people of Bosnia.

1 I'm not suggesting that the conduct of the entire war was criminal, but in

2 Eastern Bosnia and elsewhere each of the major military endeavours had two

3 objectives. First, beat the enemy. Fair enough. That's war. Second,

4 move out the Muslim population. That is the crime that brought us here.

5 The officers involved cannot separate themselves from this simple

6 truth. To get the job done, Mladic replied upon Generals Milovanovic,

7 Miletic, Gvero, and Tolimir. There were other generals in his Main Staff

8 but none of them were as close to Mladic and therefore not as powerful as

9 these four men. The Main Staff knew the horrors of forcing a people to

10 leave their homeland and yet they all did their part to achieve it. It is

11 unthinkable that in July 1995 any general in the Main Staff had not become

12 fully involved in Mladic's campaign to remove the Muslim population from

13 Eastern Bosnia. The facts of this case will make this abundantly clear.

14 In 1995, General Mladic and his Main Staff looked to their corps

15 and brigade commanders to command the troops in defeating the enemy and

16 removing the Muslim population from their homes. For the Srebrenica

17 genocide and the movement of the Muslim population, General Mladic and his

18 Main Staff replied principally on General Krstic. As you are aware,

19 General Krstic stands convicted by this court of aiding and abetting

20 genocide.

21 In turn, the Main Staff and General Krstic replied upon Colonel

22 Vinko Pandurevic, Vidoje Blagojevic, Major Dragan Obrenovic, Ljubomir

23 Borovcanin and other commanders to defeat the Muslim forces, remove the

24 Muslim population - I'll slow down - and murder the able-bodied men of

25 Srebrenica. Major Obrenovic has pled guilty in this court for doing just

1 that. Main Staff units, such as the 10th Sabotage Detachment, assisted in

2 this awful process. 10th Sabotage soldier Drazen Erdemovic has pled

3 guilty to his involvement in these crimes.

4 The majority of the work in supervising, organising, coordinating,

5 and facilitating the actual removal of the Muslim population from

6 Srebrenica and Zepa and the murder of the able-bodied men from Srebrenica

7 fell to the security officers. For the Main Staff, Ljubisa Beara. For

8 the command of the Drina Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Vujadin Popovic. For

9 the command of the Bratunac Brigade, Captain Momir Nikolic. For the

10 command of the Zvornik Brigade, Lieutenant Drago Nikolic and his associate

11 and assistant Milorad Trbic. Momir Nikolic has pled guilty to these

12 crimes.

13 For Zepa, General Tolimir himself was assigned by Mladic to

14 present and be involved in the attack and the removal of its Muslim

15 population. He was assisted in this briefly by Gvero, Pandurevic and

16 security officers Beara and Popovic and others.

17 We will begin the Prosecution by bringing into court a few of the

18 amazing men and boys that survived the mass executions. Without them, the

19 heart of this story cannot be told. We'll move on to the former chief of

20 the Srebrenica investigation, Jean-Rene Ruez, then to the Dutch Battalion

21 soldiers, experts, Bosnian Serb witnesses, and actual video footage, and

22 finally ending with a discussion of the guts of this case the

23 [indiscernible] of this case.

24 None of us will be left untouched by this trial. It will likely

25 be the most important case we will ever try. But the focus of the

1 Prosecution will not be the events and the crime base. These crimes are

2 etched into the terrible history of the Bosnian war. The crimes have

3 never been in serious dispute. We will therefore focus this case on the

4 evidence linking these accused to these crimes. The linkage evidence will

5 come largely from three main sources. The first being documents.

6 Most criminal orders in wartime are given orally, and most of the

7 important relevant military and MUP documents have been destroyed or

8 hidden. However, there are some crucial VRS and MUP documents that will

9 help expose this crime and each of the accused in this court room.

10 Number two, intercepts. You will also see the text of radio

11 intercepts taken down by the Muslim army as they eavesdropped on the VRS

12 and MUP conversations. You will hear all about the process used by the

13 BiH army and I'm confident you'll find this evidence reliable and

14 credible, and they should form an important part of your judgement.

15 Now, you will not be hearing audio of these conversations. Audio

16 does not exist for the vast majority of them. What you will see are

17 transcripts, and you'll hear about the process where the Muslim operators

18 listened carefully to conversations, and when they heard a conversation

19 they started taping it and they would usually get it right in the

20 beginning. They would tape several conversations like this, go to a side

21 room, and carefully transcribe that tape and listen to it over and over

22 again until they had the transcription written down. Then that want saved

23 in handwritten notebooks and then sent out over their intelligence e-mail

24 network and saved in transcripts. And the tapes were used over and over

25 again. They didn't have enough tapes. This will be evidence that will be

1 very important for this case.

2 And of course testimony. Now, some over -- 10 years after these

3 events, there's many more people, many more Serbs that are willing to talk

4 about the events, and many of the VRS and MUP witnesses will directly

5 implicate one or more of the accused with the crime. As you see at the

6 end of our witness list, long lists of VRS and MUP people. Each of these

7 are on that list because they go to the acts or conduct of the accused.

8 But a word of caution here. Many of these witnesses will be

9 adverse witnesses. Many of these witnesses will not be telling you the

10 full truth. Many of the witnesses will go back and forth. However, with

11 your knowledge of the case and your experience, I'm confident that you

12 will be able to glean the truth from these witnesses. And in fact, even

13 in lies you can find the truth. Let me give you one example.

14 You'll be hearing from one MUP supervisor under the command of

15 Mr. Borovcanin. He will acknowledge that he was in Potocari. He will

16 acknowledge he was under the command of Borovcanin. He will lay out the

17 command structure and largely the locations of where his troops were

18 situated. This is extremely valuable information for all of us. Yet at

19 the same time he will actually look at you from this chair and say that he

20 never saw anybody separated in Potocari, even though he was there for two

21 days.

22 Now, I think there is something to be had from this witness even

23 though he is a bold-faced liar and I think we glean something from his

24 bold-faced lie. Why can't he tell about the separations? Simple: It

25 was a crime.

1 All right. I want to talk a little bit about the charges.

2 Despite a massive indictment that got bigger and bigger, I tried to break

3 the basic indictment down into basically it's the two horrendous crimes

4 that the Prosecutor mentioned, the forced movement of the Muslim

5 population and the misery and death resulting from that, and two, the mass

6 murder of the thousands of Bosnia Muslim men and boys. Put those two

7 together and you get genocide.

8 Now, it's important to point out and something that you know but

9 that is a continuing theme with the witnesses especially, is that forced

10 movement is not just about moving the people out, that when done with the

11 knowledge that this is the eventual aim, it involves, one, strangling the

12 enclaves by limiting the crucial supplies; two, terrorising the civilian

13 population by sniping and shelling; three, attacking the civilian

14 population during the assault on the enclaves; and four, moving them out

15 on buses and trucks, or scaring them out by foot, boat, and as you will

16 see, wheelbarrows attached to logs. Substantial involvement in any one or

17 combination of these with the knowledge of the overall plan to remove the

18 population in our view makes an accused criminally responsible.

19 In addition, as set out clearly in the indictment, substantial

20 involvement in an otherwise legal act with the knowledge that such action

21 substantially assists the criminal objective and the intent to do so also

22 makes an accused criminally liable.

23 This is especially true at the high level we're talking about,

24 Generals Gvero and Miletic. For example, when Gvero and Miletic, as part

25 of the overall plan to remove the Muslim population, take part in

1 defeating UNPROFOR with the aim to getting at the population, that makes

2 them guilty because they're part -- It's an overall part and an integral,

3 connected link to the overall criminal objective.

4 Now, the attack on the enclave may not have to be completely

5 illegal, as we'll get into later. Clearly the Muslims were creating a

6 situation that would have allowed the Serbs to attack them and attack the

7 Muslim army. But that does not justify an attack directed towards

8 civilian targets with the overall additional objective to move out the

9 Muslim population.

10 Mass murder. It's crucial to understand that genocide and mass

11 murder is much more than just an order from Karadzic and Mladic and then

12 the people on the ground shooting. This is something that I'm sure the

13 Judges understand, but you'll see from the witnesses that they pretend

14 they don't in many respects.

15 When committed with the knowledge that victims would be killed,

16 the commission of mass murder involves all of the following in equal

17 measure, I'm talking about mass murder as developed in Europe at the end

18 of this century. It involves this: Capturing the Muslim men, detaining

19 the men, transporting the men to detention sites, detaining the men in

20 pre-execution detention sites, transporting the men to the execution

21 sites, executing the men, and disposing of the men. This is the crime of

22 mass murder. We're all familiar with the crime of drugs and the crime of

23 bank robbery and the other crimes and we know how those work, but when

24 someone takes part in any of these activities knowing it's leading to the

25 death and the murder of people, especially at the officer level, they are

1 part of the programme. Any person substantially participating in any of

2 these activities must be found responsible. As a member of a joint

3 criminal enterprise intending the outcome is one way, or as an aider and

4 abettor who has knowledge of the crime and substantially assists in its

5 commission.

6 To drive home the point that these crimes are not just about

7 shooters and Mladic or Karadzic or Milosevic, I want to read you the

8 testimony of a young survivor from the Petkovci dam executions. Witness O

9 from the Krstic trial. He's also a young kid. Remember the Prosecutor's

10 quote of the imam. This guy pulled himself out of beneath some thousand

11 people, 500 to a thousand people, and along with a colleague, even though

12 wounded, managed to survive in the woods and escaped. And when he

13 testified in the Krstic trial, this is what he said: "From all of

14 whatever I have said and what I saw, I could come to the conclusion that

15 this was extremely well organised. It was systematic killing and that the

16 organisers of that do not deserve to be at liberty. And if I had the

17 right and the courage in the name of all those innocents and all those

18 victims, I would forgive the actual perpetrators of the executions,

19 because they were misled."

20 Witness O's organisers, they're in court today with us. That's

21 the focus of this Tribunal. That's the focus of this case.

22 In order to understand Srebrenica and identify those responsible

23 for the crimes, I've always divided this case into roughly three chapters,

24 and I will spend the next few hours going over those chapters with you.

25 The first chapter I call the history leading up to the attack on

1 Srebrenica. It's important to understand the big picture, the historical

2 background, the people, the places, and the events leading up to the

3 attack on the Srebrenica and Zepa enclaves in July 1995. And as part of

4 the first chapter, I think we need to have a basic understanding of the

5 make-up and organisation of the army and police forces involved. I'm not

6 going to spend a lot of detail on that. I would refer you when we get

7 there to the reports of Rick Butler and the various officers as they

8 testify, the VRS officers included, but I'll go over a few of the -- what

9 I think are the important issues that you should bear in mind from the

10 beginning of the case.

11 Chapter 2, the fall in Srebrenica and Zepa. These are the events

12 largely from 10 July through roughly 19 July where the population is moved

13 out and the men and boys were killed.

14 Then chapter 3 is what I call direct linkage, and in that chapter

15 I will take documents and intercepts and some discussion of witnesses but

16 not many and discuss each of the accused and show you those documents that

17 when they finally do come into this case will point at each of the accused

18 and implicate the accused in a significant way, and I will go over those

19 with you at the end of my opening statement.

20 I notice we have a break in five minutes. Before we get into

21 chapter 1, might it be a good idea to take a break?

22 JUDGE AGIUS: Whenever it's convenient for you, Mr. McCloskey.

23 MR. McCLOSKEY: Thank you very much, Mr. President. Now would be

24 a convenient time.

25 JUDGE AGIUS: Okay. That's perfect.

1 So we'll have 20 minutes from now. Thank you.

2 --- Recess taken at 10.19 a.m.

3 --- On resuming at 10.43 a.m.

4 JUDGE AGIUS: Yes, Mr. McCloskey. The next break will be

5 scheduled for 12.30. Of course, you're free to ask to have the break

6 earlier or a little bit later, should you -- should it be more convenient

7 for you. Please go ahead.

8 MR. McCLOSKEY: Thank you. All right.

9 I will now get into the -- sort of the briefest history to the

10 lead-up of the events that are in question, and I think it's first

11 important for us to just take a look at the map of Bosnia, and that is --

12 should be on the screen right now.

13 As you can see, the area within the green is the BiH -- sorry,

14 this is a little fuzzy on my picture, but -- and it's important to note

15 Serbia off to the right of the screen, and the area in the pink is the

16 Drina Corps zone of responsibility where these events largely occurred.

17 It's important to see this area of -- I've referred to as Eastern

18 Bosnia. It's also referred to as the Podrinje area or the Drina River

19 valley, but it's an important area.

20 If you could keep that screen up for me.

21 It's an important strategic area for all sides. If we could

22 get -- did the screen go off on everyone's or just mine? Well, in any

23 event, the show must go on, so I'll continue.

24 In the spring of 1992, the tensions inside and outside Bosnia are

25 pretty extreme. The sides are beginning to form, and this particular area

1 is of important strategic value. And to get an idea of its importance,

2 both strategically and from an ethnic point of view, as this first and

3 foremost unfortunately began as an ethnic conflict, I want to go to an

4 exhibit from the 12th May, 1992, Bosnian Serb Assembly, called the six

5 strategic objectives and talk about them a bit.

6 These -- at this Assembly hearing matters were discussed about

7 moving populations and ethnic populations. And you can see from these --

8 this directive the ominous tone that this war would take. And if we could

9 blow it up to especially so we can see strategic number 1. And that is,

10 and I'll read it slowly: "Establish State borders separating the Serbian

11 people from the other two ethnic communities."

12 Now, this is an outrageous thing, to actually attempt to separate

13 ethnic communities, and we'll see just how difficult that was. But

14 they're right up front in this document, and they talk about it. So we

15 see very early on that this war was going to be a war with ethnic

16 motivations relying on old ethnic hatreds and fermenting them.

17 Now, look at number 3. It gives you an idea of how important this

18 area was: "Establish a corridor in the Drina River valley, that is,

19 eliminate the Drina as a border separating Serbian States."

20 Now, you saw the Drina River in the previous map. It was

21 bordering on the Podrinje or Drina River valley and so this would separate

22 that and make this part a part of Mother Serbia, indicating the strategic

23 nature of this area.

24 Now, to give you an idea of the ethnic make-up and the ethnic

25 foundation of this conflict, I want to quote you General Mladic's comments

1 very briefly that he made at this Assembly hearing that led to the

2 promulgation of the six strategic objectives. He says, and this is after

3 having some experience in the war of 1991 in Croatia: "People and peoples

4 are not pawns, nor are they keys in one's pocket that can be shifted from

5 here to there. It is something easily said but difficult to achieve."

6 And he goes on in another part: "Therefore, we cannot cleanse nor can we

7 have an sieve to sift so that only Serbs would stay or that the Serbs

8 would fall through and the rest leave." Then he goes on and says: "I

9 don't know how Mr. Krajisnik and Mr. Karadzic would explain this to the

10 world. People, that would be genocide."

11 General Mladic, of all people, forecasting the event but

12 recognising that moving people from their homeland, Bosnian people from

13 the villages that they've lived in for centuries, was not going to be

14 easy, was going to involve bloodshed.

15 Shortly after this meeting the war in Bosnia, especially in

16 Eastern Bosnia, broke out in earnest. It began in the north in the area

17 of Bijeljina, worked its way south through Zvornik, Bratunac. These

18 events in the spring of 1992 were events notable for their terror and

19 their attacks on civilian population. There were troops from Serbia,

20 paramilitary and others, that were involved in this. Not only were the

21 Muslim forces routed, but the civilians who largely outnumbered the Serbs

22 were shoved and pushed from their homes ever-south, down towards the area

23 of Srebrenica.

24 Now, the BiH in the early days fought back, led by Naser Oric and

25 his own particular brand of horror managed to make some inroads against

1 the -- the VRS. And in -- in November of 1992, Mladic, Karadzic made what

2 I refer to as a supreme act of arrogance and impunity and set out the plan

3 to deal with the Muslims in Eastern Bosnia.

4 And if we could go now to operational directive 4 of November

5 1992. And in particular, I'd like to -- to blow up section D, page 5 of

6 the English. And as we're doing that, I'll read it to you.

7 There were some nine directives done by Mladic and Karadzic

8 throughout the wartime period. They were important documents. They were

9 sent out to all the corps to outline their objectives, their strategies,

10 and provide them the basic tasks by which they were to work. And if we go

11 to page 5 here and look to the Drina Corps section, I will read the

12 appropriate -- the relevant part. "The Drina Corps: From its present

13 positions, its main forces shall persistently defend Visegrad (the dam)

14 Zvornik and the corridor, while the rest of its forces in the wider

15 Podrinje region shall exhaust the enemy, inflict the heaviest possible

16 losses on him and force him to leave Birac, Zepa, and the Gorazde

17 areas ..."

18 Now, that's war. That's fine. That's what war is all about;

19 inflict the heaviest losses possible on the enemy and drive them out. But

20 listen to this last sentence after they want to inflict the losses on the

21 enemy: " ... force him to leave the Birac, Zepa, and Gorazde areas

22 together with the Muslim population."

23 There it is, black and white, what Mladic had predicted in a

24 secret document. It's called what we now refer to as ethnic cleansing.

25 Move out the Muslim population. In black and white, there it is.

1 Unbelievable. Impunity.

2 Now, as we know from historical fact, the VRS came fighting back,

3 the Muslims forces were being beaten back, and in the spring of 1993 all

4 was practically lost for the Muslims. They had been herded down in the

5 area of Srebrenica, Zepa, and right as the VRS was coming in to make their

6 final attack, General Morillon stepped in with the United Nations and

7 somehow stopped the onslaught and the enclaves were created, for better or

8 for worse.

9 Now, the enclaves were supposed to be demilitarised. They never

10 really were. The meager UN forces that were sent there tried. They were

11 able to get, I think, a tank, the only tank that was known to have, some

12 of the heavier weapons, but the army, the structure remained intact inside

13 the enclave. They had some automatic weapons, a lot of hunting rifles,

14 and they were able to hold a ragtag military force together that led

15 attacks outside the enclave. And so for the next two years we have this

16 situation where from the Muslim side, Naser Oric and the BiH army, are

17 attacking outside the enclave largely in order to tie down troops from

18 other areas of the war and in part defeat themselves, because for the

19 Serb's side of it they were cutting off the enclaves and restricting their

20 humanitarian support. In the early years of this -- we're not going to

21 spend a lot of time in the case but you will hear from one or two Canadian

22 Battalion members to talk about this. But this is not where your

23 indictment starts, but it's important to have some understanding of that.

24 By the time we get to July 1995, we actually see a Muslim document

25 establishing the policy for the BiH army to attack the Serbs out of the

1 enclave in order to tie down the Serbs from going to the Sarajevo front,

2 which in 1995 was the major front for the Serbs, and that's precisely what

3 the BiH was doing. So there was some justification to go into Srebrenica

4 by the Serb army and take out this threat. We'll look at that a little

5 bit later. However, when we look at it in the overall objective, the

6 motive to move out the civilian population, it's a two-part plan, one that

7 may have some legitimacy, and the other that absolutely does not.

8 Now, I'd like to take you to another exhibit to take us a little

9 more into July 1994. It's a report to the members of the Bratunac

10 Brigade, which is stationed right to the north of the enclave, and it

11 basically sets out the strategy on dealing with the enclaves.

12 Now, remember, and we'll get into this in more detail, but you

13 have the Main Staff, the corps, and the brigades. When you see a strategy

14 like this from a brigade, it is not -- it's not coming out of the origin

15 of the brigade commander's head. This is the kind of thing that he will

16 receive direction from above, and he will pass it down to his troops

17 below. But in any event, the brigade that had most of the responsibility

18 for Srebrenica, and if we could go to page 3, it's the last paragraph in

19 paragraph 2 in the English, and as we get there I'll read it. If we can

20 blow it up so we can -- especially with eyes that are not as young as they

21 used to be, if we could blow it up a little more. But the relevant part

22 says: "There will be no retreat when it comes to the Srebrenica enclave,

23 we must advance. The enemy's life has to be made unbearable and their

24 temporary stay in the enclave impossible so that they leave the enclave

25 en masse as soon as possible, realising that they cannot survive there."

1 Again, we see the policy set out that will eventually lead to the

2 attack on the enclaves and gives us a foundation of why we see the sniping

3 and the shelling and the restriction of the material, all of which is

4 happening now but will happen when our case starts as well in March of

5 1995.

6 Okay. If we leave 1994 and we get into March of 1995,

7 specifically the 17th of March, I think at this point all sides can see

8 that the war won't be lasting forever, and if gains are going to be made

9 they best be made this year. The Croatians were looking to the Bosnian

10 Serb Krajina, and this was the major threat that everyone saw coming as a

11 massive Croatian front to the north. This is where General Milovanovic

12 was assigned for a good part of the year. So General Milovanovic is not

13 present during much of the time and, therefore, not on our radar screen,

14 although he is a very important figure in all of this. He was Mladic's

15 top guy, and when Mladic had a most serious threat, he sent Milovanovic

16 there. He did that with his other generals too. He would send Gvero to

17 Srebrenica to the forward command post. He sent Tolimir the Zepa forward

18 command post. This is how he commanded. Milovanovic was way off in the

19 Krajina during most of this, leaving General Miletic to be standing in for

20 the Chief of Staff.

21 In any event, by this time the Bosnian Serb Supreme Command and

22 military understood that it's now time to solve the issue with the

23 enclaves. If they were going to make them all Serbian, now is the time to

24 do it. So if we could go to operational directive 7 dated 17 March 1995.

25 Okay. And on that I'd like to go again to the Drina Corps

1 section. And by the way, as you'll see at the end of this document, it

2 was drafted by then Colonel Miletic, accused in this case. I'll get into

3 that in a little more detail later when I get to some of the documents

4 associated with General Miletic in particular.

5 But the part I want to particularly note to you in the middle of

6 the paragraph under the Drina Corps, it states: "... while in the

7 direction of Srebrenica and Zepa enclaves complete physical separation of

8 Srebrenica from Zepa should be carried out as soon as possible, preventing

9 even communication between individuals in the two enclaves."

10 Well, this is military. Zepa and the Srebrenica enclaves were

11 militarily supporting each other. Items were being flown in in secret

12 helicopter missions from the BiH army and creating havoc within the ranks

13 of the villages outside the enclaves and causing the VRS to tie down

14 hundreds of troops around those enclaves away from the Sarajevo front,

15 which was a crucial front. So this part of it is military and is

16 legitimate.

17 "By planned and well thought out combat operations, create an

18 unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival

19 or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica and Zepa."

20 Again, we're going directly to the civilian population. The

21 inhabitants. There can be no doubt what this means. Again, it's a

22 follow-up on what we see throughout the historical period that I've been

23 mentioning. Right there in black and white, drafted by General Miletic

24 himself.

25 Now, that gets us to where our indictment begins, but before I get

1 to those events, there's a few issues, military issues mostly, that I'd

2 like to discuss that I think you need to have in mind as you look at the

3 case.

4 I would first tell you that by 1995 the VRS was a professional

5 army. It was based on the rules and regulations of the JNA, which was one

6 of the best armies and most professional armies in eastern Europe. It had

7 clear foundations from the Geneva Conventions, the training its officers

8 received by all accounts in my review of it was excellent.

9 Mr. Pandurevic -- excuse me, General Pandurevic was trained in the Geneva

10 Conventions, as were the other professional officers in this group. They

11 knew the difference between right and wrong. They knew what they were

12 doing.

13 These rules of the former JNA were promulgated by the VRS early

14 on, and you can see those rules in Mr. Butler's report. They clearly set

15 out the Geneva Conventions. They actually anticipate an international

16 Tribunal and show respect towards that. They had some good lawyers in the

17 early days of the Main Staff. Unfortunately, that material, that

18 foundation of the honour of the Serb soldier, was never followed, was

19 cast aside. Once they took on the cloak of ethnic war, those that chose

20 to take part of it set aside their honour and began a war against the

21 populations of the Muslims.

22 Now, they had a military prosecutor back then as well, and they

23 promulgated guidelines for determining the criteria of criminal

24 Prosecution. If we could go to that. This is dated 1992, and the part I

25 want to show you in English is on page 7, the third paragraph down, and

1 I'll read it slowly. I think it's that important. It's under a paragraph

2 entitled "criminal offences against humanitarian and international law

3 pursuant chapter 16 of the Criminal Code."

4 "Crimes against humanity and international law can be committed by

5 individuals acting on their own, but by their nature these criminal

6 offences are usually committed in an organised fashion in the

7 implementation of the policy of the ruling circumstances."

8 Witness O's organisers.

9 "Most of these criminal offences are committed only during armed

10 conflicts or are in some way closely connected with armed conflicts, which

11 means that they are committed within the context of the broad military

12 operations and on orders from superior officers."

13 There's no way I could have or anyone else could have said it any

14 better. And this is coming from the Main Staff.

15 They go on to talk about the responsibility of a soldier,

16 especially those of commanders, and I go to the top of page 8.

17 "From this follows the explicit responsibility of the officer

18 corps of the army of Republika Srpska as the giver of orders in command of

19 the armed forces whose members could commit or are committing some of

20 these offences, to take uncompromising action and prevent such conduct.

21 This responsibility belongs by its nature particularly to high-ranking

22 individuals and officials in State military or public organisations or in

23 the concrete circumstances in a position to issue orders."

24 These are commanders. Commanders are the only ones that actually

25 issue or originate orders. In this case, General Vinko Pandurevic, Deputy

1 Commander Ljubomir Borovcanin.

2 I'll talk about the powers and ability to pass on orders and

3 originate orders of the others soon. And I will go on with this quote.

4 "If officers merely find out that units of the armed forces of the

5 Army of Republika Srpska or their members have committed or are committing

6 such acts and take no measures to prevent the consequences or the acts

7 themselves and expose perpetrators to criminal prosecution, this in itself

8 makes them answerable for these criminal offences."

9 They don't prevent it, they're responsible for those criminal

10 offences. Does that sound familiar? Article 7(3).

11 But this is much more than a failure to prevent case, and you'll

12 see this from the facts. When Vinko Pandurevic arrives back to his

13 brigade in the middle of the day on 15 July, there's still some 1.500

14 people left to murder. And when he comes back, he again is the man in

15 charge on the ground in total command. The people of the Zvornik Brigade

16 are acting under his command when he returns. Ljubisa Beara is there, but

17 he is not a commander. He has no power to command. He is who I've

18 referred to before as an empty vessel. He is only as good as he is filled

19 up by the orders of General Mladic, which he was, and he's carrying them

20 out. He and the other security officers have to get their authority

21 through their commander to obtain the troops and the other machinery

22 necessary to get this job done. But when Vinko Pandurevic returns, he

23 takes on command. He takes on the responsibility of what he absolutely

24 knows is going on, and he knows it.

25 The same holds true with Ljubomir Borovcanin, who has told us in a

1 statement to the ICTY that he was present at Kravica when the massacres

2 were going on and he did nothing. He took a man with burned hands --

3 MR. LAZAREVIC: Your Honours, I really hate to interrupt my

4 learned colleague in giving his opening statement, but we intend to object

5 to the admittance of Mr. Borovcanin's interview, and I believe it would be

6 unfair to quote this in the opening statement.

7 JUDGE AGIUS: Go ahead, and we will deal with the objection if and

8 when it arises. Thank you.

9 MR. McCLOSKEY: Mr. Borovcanin told the ICTY that he was at the

10 Kravica warehouse while the massacres were going on, and he did nothing

11 but take one of his officers who had burned hands to Bratunac. After

12 that, some 500 to 800, maybe more, men were murdered, and his group, his

13 troops were in control of that area and taking part in those murders.

14 Much more than a failure to prevent.

15 You have seen that we have charged in this indictment under a law

16 that requires a commander in an area that he controls to protect prisoners

17 of war, not just his own troops but from anyone that will do them harm.

18 He failed in his duty to do that. Therefore, he's criminally liable.

19 He's also part of the overall joint criminal enterprise and knew that this

20 was a mass murder that was part of an organised plan. You'll see his

21 discussions with Krstic after this fact. You'll see other massacres that

22 his troops were in. You'll see what his troops were doing in Potocari.

23 But I bring this particular section up because it's so important to these

24 two commanders, directly to them.

25 There's another significant rule that was promulgated by Karadzic

1 which had much more importance than the rule I just mentioned. It's

2 entitled "the interim provisions on the service of the army of the Serb

3 Republic, 18 August 1992." And it says: "Members the army shall carry

4 out orders of their superior without demure, in full, accurately, and

5 punctually."

6 This is what went out on the day. As I will discuss later on,

7 General Pandurevic and the rest had received training that they had

8 absolutely no obligation to follow criminal orders. In fact, it was a

9 direct violation of their duty, their honour as soldiers to follow such

10 orders. They knew what they were to do. They were to stand down.

11 All right. Now, if we could talk very briefly about the basic

12 command structure and if I could go to the exhibit chart for the Main

13 Staff. Again, I don't want to get into details at this time. I leave

14 that to the reports of Mr. Butler.

15 And if you could try to blow that up so that we see the top half

16 of it. Sorry, it -- we're left in the electronic age and -- basically

17 this is a chart that puts Ratko Mladic as the commander of the VRS on the

18 top. General Milovanovic is his Chief of Staff. Now, he is the person

19 that is in charge with coordinating the other areas of the command and

20 making sure that the orders of General Mladic get carried out and acting

21 as General Mladic's main advisor. He's Mladic's right-hand man. He's not

22 a commander, but he's close to it and I'll explain how that works.

23 The next boxes under the sheet, first of all on the right are the

24 assistant commanders. Now, assistant commanders are high-ranking officers

25 that are experts in particular fields. For example, the -- well, the

1 fields we're talking about, Tolimir is intelligence and security. Gvero,

2 legal, religious and moral. And there are others. Logistics. And then

3 there are the staff officers who are the staff of the Chief of Staff, and

4 there's various branches within that. In particular, we have the

5 operations department where during most of this time we had Colonel

6 Miletic and then General Miletic as the Chief of Operations. This job

7 also held the position of a deputy Chief of Staff, and so in the absence

8 of Milovanovic, Miletic would take over. And as I mentioned, Milovanovic

9 was in the Krajina for a good part of this, and so the documents that we

10 see throughout 1995 are largely in the hand of General Miletic, who is

11 standing in for the Chief of Staff.

12 Now, as I said, assistant commanders are experts in the field.

13 What they do is they make proposals for the commander regarding their

14 various fields. The commander reviews those proposals, makes his own

15 orders based on them, and then it's the job of the assistant commander to

16 facilitate the commander's orders, make sure they get done. Make sure

17 that it goes down through the chain and gets done.

18 And fundamentally while this is probably a very basic approach to

19 this subject, this is the way it worked in the corps and in the brigade.

20 The fundamental difference is that the Main Staff had very few people and

21 only had a couple of -- of units under arms, the 65th Protection Regiment

22 and the 10th Sabotage Detachment being the ones that are most relevant to

23 this case.

24 Now, an assistant commander may pass on the orders of his

25 commander, or he may issue -- not issue. That's the wrong word. If you

1 say that to a military man, he will grimace. He will make orders that are

2 consistent with his commander's orders originally, and they get passed

3 down through the ranks. He doesn't have the power to originate and issue

4 orders. Therefore, he doesn't have the power to prevent people from

5 committing crimes, because an order to do that that's not backed up. He

6 doesn't have that power. But he passes on the order of his commander, or

7 he makes an order consistent with the order of his commanders, and it has

8 the same effect as if a commander had made it, especially for the soldier

9 or the officer that's receiving it on the other said. And you will see

10 several examples of this happening.

11 Colonel Beara cannot originate orders, but when he wants troops,

12 he has to go, in this case, to General Krstic, asking General Krstic for

13 troops, even though Beara is from the Main Staff. And you'll see this

14 later on. Colonel Beara has to say, but Furtula, another brigade

15 commander is not following the general's orders, namely Mladic. So

16 he's -- Beara has power that is gained through his association and orders

17 provided him by his commander Mladic, and that's the way it works for all

18 these guys down the line.

19 Now, I mentioned briefly about General Miletic and his role. He

20 was the operations -- Chief of Operations. Now, the Chief of Operations

21 is the person that is a hands-on guy involved in the operation, the

22 military operations, of the corps and the brigade. So he is -- he is not

23 a logistician in the other, more technical aspects of it. He is a

24 hands-on guy and connected to these various operations, and so he is a key

25 player in any military organisation. And when he becomes standing in for

1 Milovanovic, I'll try to explain what that means. There is a couple of

2 different designations that the VRS had. They had acting, and they had

3 a -- you could be an acting Chief of Staff, or you could be standing in

4 for the Chief of Staff. Now, the basic difference to this is that when

5 someone becomes an acting Chief of Staff, he's taking on much more of the

6 cloak of that job, and that is in a situation not just in the mere absence

7 or unavailability of the Chief of Staff. It's normally when that Chief of

8 Staff is in the hospital or unavailable or has been dismissed or killed,

9 and this person is standing in -- or excuse me, this person is acting and

10 doesn't have all the aspects of the job itself because it's -- it's

11 assumed to be temporary. But it is much more so than standing in.

12 Standing in is when -- is something that happens in the absence of the

13 person, such as when Milovanovic is still in the army, still in Bosnia,

14 still in communications. He's just far away, engaged up to his eyeballs

15 with the Krajina. So that's the case where Miletic becomes standing in

16 for the Chief of Staff and takes on many of his duties. In fact, almost

17 all of his daily duties. Milovanovic can't do it. You'll see what those

18 are. So that's an important distinction to have in mind as you look at

19 this.

20 Now, commander. It's the same thing but it's a little different

21 in this situation. I'll use the Zvornik Brigade example. In the

22 commander that we see that there is first of all and foremost the

23 commander who is normally present in command, on duty. Then there is the

24 deputy commander who at the same time is the Chief of Staff. Milovanovic

25 was the deputy commander at the same time he was the Chief of Staff. But

1 he only became deputy commander when Mladic was absent or unavailable,

2 which was almost never, even when he was in Serbia. That was not absent.

3 So we don't see Milovanovic becoming deputy commander much.

4 But if we go to the Zvornik Brigade, we see that Vinko Pandurevic

5 frequently goes out on military assignments. His Drina Wolves are the

6 best attack group in the Drina Corps, and he's out on various duties, not

7 infrequently. And we see from the evidence two things happening.

8 Sometimes when he seems like he's gone on a more permanent basis or is

9 fully involved in something well outside the brigade, Dragan Obrenovic has

10 become the acting commander, meaning that he bears almost the entire cloak

11 of command, because Vinko Pandurevic is unavailable to a significant

12 degree. But in other situations such as when we see Vinko Pandurevic go

13 down to take part in the attack on Srebrenica or the attack on Zepa, we

14 see Dragan Obrenovic designated as the deputy commander. This is what he

15 takes on in the absence or the unavailability of the commander.

16 Now, this is an important distinction, because the deputy

17 commander while in command of the troops on the ground and responsible for

18 what's going on in his zone of responsibility, his commander is still in

19 command of him and still has command responsibility. So when Vinko

20 Pandurevic is in Srebrenica, he does not give up his complete

21 responsibility over his brigade. Basically a deputy commander is

22 enough -- is trusted enough, as Obrenovic was, to run the show and do the

23 policies and get the job done as his commander had set the tone. Because

24 this is temporary, that is possible. But the deputy commander is not one

25 to originate policy or originate commands. And if something comes up

1 where the deputy commander must originate or be creative or something

2 outside the -- the area of his command or something he knows his commander

3 did not agree with, he will call his commander and check with him to make

4 sure, and his commander is always available, always had a radio man with

5 him, can get to a post.

6 This war was not fought such that people were pinned down for days

7 at a time out of communication. It gets a little crazier on the 15th

8 and 16th and we'll get into that in detail. But Vinko Pandurevic was

9 always by a radio, always near a forward command post and always

10 reachable. And in the context of his deputy commander, his deputy

11 commander would be contacting him when he had to. That's the basic rules

12 that you'll see.

13 Okay. The security branch. The security branch is just one of

14 the expert branches under each of the -- whether it be the Main Staff, the

15 corps, or the brigade, and the security branch basically has two

16 responsibilities, and it works for each one of them. They have

17 responsibilities associated with law enforcement where they are dealing

18 with -- largely with the military police and enforcing the laws related to

19 military conduct. And practically a lot of this tended to deal with

20 soldiers that left the lines, deserters, and rounding them up and making

21 sure the military police dealt with this properly and that the military

22 police were organised and acting according to the rules.

23 Now, that's part of their job. They were not in command of the

24 military police. The military police were under the command of the

25 commander of the brigade or corps. The security officer was their

1 director and their -- and their supervisor and very clearly established

2 activities related to the military police, and the commanders would allow

3 them to do that with full knowledge of what they were doing. And critical

4 to this case is that military police are in charge of prisoners. So it's

5 very natural that the dealing with the prisoners fell to the military

6 police and the security officers. That's why you see all the security

7 officers sitting here today. They were in charge of dealing with the

8 prisoners. Now, they're not commanders, but they had orders from their

9 commanders, and they're able to give orders pursuant their commanders'

10 orders, and they were able to direct and supervise the military police in

11 carrying out those duties. And that's the way it worked.

12 Now, there's another side of the security branch that you need to

13 be aware of, because they have a two-part job. One, law enforcement.

14 Clearly they have to report everything to their commander. The commander

15 knows what's going on. It's just like any normal situation.

16 The second one is counter-intelligence, and this is unique to this

17 branch. A security officer is responsible for counter-intelligence. Now,

18 what does that mean? In this context, it mostly means threats from

19 within. Internal threats. Threats against the command, threats against

20 the army, soldiers being traitors, soldiers being -- dealing with the

21 other parts of the enemy, espionage. That's counter-intelligence.

22 Now, for counter intelligence there are no troops. There is no --

23 he has no men. It's him basically, the security officer. Sometimes he'll

24 get help from the intelligence officer. They work very closely in matters

25 of intelligence and counter-intelligence. That's why when you -- you'll

1 see that the intelligence officers are very closely related to the

2 security officers and are wrapped up in this thing quite a bit themselves.

3 But -- so one is counter-intelligence, and one is law enforcement.

4 Now, when -- what goes along with the counter-intelligence side

5 are certain privileges that make the security officer's job different than

6 anyone else's, and that is because the security officer has the right to

7 investigate the commander. He can receive information from his other

8 security officers, the ones up the professional chain of command,

9 secretly, and that's -- has been defined in the regulations. He is --

10 Drago Nikolic is allowed to get secret communications from Popovic or

11 Beara that he can read and Pandurevic cannot read. This drives commanders

12 crazy. It drove Pandurevic crazy, because commanders want to know and be

13 in control of what happens. But naturally when a security officer may be

14 investigating a commander or dealing with very sensitive information that

15 may, if it becomes known to the command staff, infringe upon a -- one of

16 his counter-intelligence jobs, then -- then there's a -- it's obviously a

17 need for some secrecy for that to be carried out.

18 Now, the regulations also clearly say -- they allow that. They

19 understand that, but they say that when it is appropriate, the security

20 officer must tell his commander what's going on. So the security officer

21 may have an operation to ferret out a traitor and he may not have to tell

22 the commander what he's doing, when he's going to go interview that

23 person, but after the interview, when the thing is sorted out he has got

24 to tell his commander what's going on. And he's got to tell his commander

25 he's going there. He can't just go to the front line to interview someone

1 and show up. That would mess up the commanders' ability to run a proper

2 service. So this is a tension that we see throughout -- throughout the

3 VRS. It's a normal tension.

4 Now, as we may see from the Defence, we have seen commanders

5 attempting to blame all the murders on the security branch and suggested

6 that they're running the show, that they're in command. Well, this is

7 impossible in the VRS regulatory scheme of things. There's only, what,

8 four or five security officers for the entire army, and they can't

9 possibly run anything by themselves. They need to rely on the commanders

10 for the men, the material, the troops, all that's involved in this mess.

11 But when we get into this give and take between commanders and security

12 officers, you'll need to have the basic understanding of how the system

13 works.

14 You'll hear that from the witnesses themselves. We'll go through

15 it to the degree that it is necessary. At this point, I can't glean much

16 from the Defence briefs to see if this is necessary. In the past it's

17 been an important topic.

18 As I mentioned, it's the job of the security officer to help

19 direct and supervise the military police. In this case, the -- under the

20 Main Staff, this unit of armed men, the 65th Protection Regiment, designed

21 to protect Main Staff assets had a military police contingent to it and,

22 as such, Beara had a responsibility over them. Not command responsibility

23 but supervisory responsibility.

24 However, going back to the practical aspect of this, you'll see a

25 Dutch soldier, Egbers, who was in Nova Kasaba on the 13th or 14th and was

1 introduced to Mr. -- to Colonel Beara by the commander of the military

2 police unit there in Nova Kasaba, and the commander Malonic introduced

3 Beara as -- here is my commander, Colonel Beara. Now, that's not

4 technically correct, but from Malonic's point of view, Beara -- what Beara

5 said went, and you'll see that in practice.

6 Popovic. There was a Drina Corps military police unit that he

7 directed, and the brigades generally got to know Popovic because he's not

8 far away in Vlasenica and he made visits to the brigades so the brigade

9 military police commanders knew him and of course listened to him when he

10 was working with their security officers.

11 In the case of Zvornik, Lieutenant Drago Nikolic had the Zvornik

12 Brigade military police company that he directed, and in Bratunac we had

13 Captain Momir Nikolic directing the military police company of the

14 Bratunac -- excuse me, platoon of the Bratunac Brigade. Platoon meaning

15 it's a smaller number of men. I believe in the area of 50. Company was

16 supposed to be more in the area of 200. I may have gotten those figures

17 not exact at this point.

18 Okay. Special police. An issue related to the special police

19 that you need to be aware of: The Ministry of Interior is divided --

20 well, roughly -- it has armed forces, first of all, and their first line

21 of armed forces were the special police, which were divided into regions.

22 And these were some of the top people they originally trained in riot

23 control and that kind of thing. This is where Mr. Borovcanin was as

24 deputy commander. Their units were basically combat units throughout the

25 war that were assigned to work in combat areas, and when they were

1 assigned with the army they came under the command of the army which I'll

2 get into a little bit later.

3 Additionally, the minister of the interior had other combat units

4 related to the police districts that were different than the special

5 police districts. These are the -- basically the civilian police

6 districts, what is referred to as CSBs. Now, the CSB we're talking about

7 is CSB Zvornik which included most of this broad area that we're talking

8 about. And the CSB Zvornik had many, many civilian police officers,

9 traffic officers, detectives, of course, and in time of war it was only

10 natural that those men were used as needed. So they had divided up the

11 CSB into six potential companies. These were call-up companies. They

12 were not always on the front line, but they usually were doing their job,

13 doing traffic control or whatever, but in certain situations they would

14 get called up and used by the army or the Ministry of Interior. And these

15 units we call the PJP units. So we have Borovcanin's special police units

16 and the CSB PJP units.

17 Now, the reason we use this -- these initials PJP is very

18 important, actually, which is why I bring it up. The word in Bosnian that

19 represents the letter P is translated in English as special, and so you'll

20 see many documents with the "special police" of the CSB, and then you'll

21 see "special police" of the Ministry of the Interior, and it can get

22 confusing, so -- and that's just a problem of translation. In

23 Bosnian, "special police," the word is something and, forgive me, but

24 something like "specijal." It sounds like "special." The word that

25 starts with a P, I've forgotten it, but it's different, and so this

1 distinction has to be made. It will drive the members of the MUP as

2 they're on the stand crazy if we mix this up. So we have to use those

3 initials PJP for the municipal police, and we use special police for the

4 special police.

5 Sorry for that long instruction, but with these witnesses it's

6 very important. They obviously take it very seriously, as I know

7 Mr. Borovcanin does.

8 Now, another important area related to this is when the special

9 police, or the PJP units, are assigned to a combat operation that the army

10 is in, the government of the Republika Srpska recognised that this created

11 a problem of command, and so early on they designated special rules that

12 when this happened that you had to get the approval of the minister of the

13 interior and president, and once that happened then the MUP officers and

14 MUP soldiers came under the command of the army that they were assigned

15 to.

16 Now, how did this work? This rule especially points this out so

17 when Borovcanin is assigned by the minister of the interior to go to

18 General Krstic and report to him in Bratunac on the 11th of July, he

19 becomes under the command of the army. Now, I don't have the president's

20 approval of that, but we do have the evidence to show you that that's

21 what's happened. And the way that works is Borovcanin takes his orders

22 from the army, but the rules also clearly set out that the command -- the

23 MUP commanders retain command and their command chain stays the same. So

24 you don't have an army guy going behind Borovcanin's back and giving an

25 order. The rules are Borovcanin gives the orders, they go down through

1 his chain of command, he receives them through the army. Now, of course

2 in the practical battle-field, things don't always work the way it's

3 planned, but that's the way the rules work. That's the way they tried to

4 make them work, and that's the way they did work.

5 It feels like you've been listening to me for a long time and this

6 information is not the easiest to listen to. I now -- it's time to go

7 into chapter 2. I don't know if you want me to keep talking or make a

8 break.

9 JUDGE AGIUS: It's up to you, Mr. McCloskey. We're certainly not

10 going to stop you. I previously told you that the next break was

11 scheduled for 12.30. In reality, I think if we are to stick to the hour

12 and a half schedule, it should be at 12.15 or thereabouts. So please

13 regulate yourself accordingly. I mean, I according to your exigencies.

14 Whenever you need to stop, I will give you the opportunity to do so.

15 MR. McCLOSKEY: Thank you. This is a natural stopping point, and

16 I don't think people should have to listen to me for more than 45 minutes

17 at a time.

18 JUDGE AGIUS: Then we'll have a 20-minute break starting from now.

19 Thank you.

20 --- Recess taken at 11.45 p.m.

21 --- On resuming at 12.12 p.m.

22 JUDGE AGIUS: Mr. McCloskey, I know that first 37, 38 minutes of

23 today's sitting was dedicated to something else, so you had 38 minutes

24 less. Do you think you would be able to finish your opening statement

25 today?

1 MR. McCLOSKEY: No, Mr. President. As I look at it, and as I

2 realise the pace I'm going, I don't think so. I would like, if possible,

3 to have at least a couple of hours tomorrow.

4 JUDGE AGIUS: Yes. And can I then kindly ask you to stop ten

5 minutes before the scheduled time of -- of 13.45 so that we'll deal --

6 we'll have some oral submissions on the outstanding motion on protective

7 measures so that we'll then proceed to decide that either later on today

8 or earlier -- or later on tomorrow.

9 MR. McCLOSKEY: Yes, Mr. President.

10 JUDGE AGIUS: Okay. Thank you. Yes, go ahead.

11 MR. McCLOSKEY: All right. Well, as I've stated, chapter 2,

12 entitled "the attack on the Srebrenica enclave, by May and June of 1995,"

13 the VRS had finally been able to engage itself to focus on the enclaves,

14 and they developed an attack plan to do just that, and it lays out the

15 attack and the purpose of the attack, and I would like to go to that plan

16 to just show you one part of it that is important to what I've been saying

17 in the theme of the case, and that is page 3 of what is entitled "the

18 command of the Drina Corps Military Secret Krivaja 95," and basically lays

19 out the situation, the military situation, and assigns the units that are

20 going to be taking part.

21 And I want to point out to you on page 3, the third paragraph from

22 the top. If we could go to that in English. And I'll read it slowly.:

23 "The Command of the Drina Corps, pursuant to Operations Directive no. 7

24 and 7/1 ..." Now, if you recall, directive 7 was the one that said make

25 life unbearable for the inhabitants of Srebrenica. So basically again,

1 and I'll quote: "... pursuant to Operations Directive no. 7 and 7/1 of

2 the VRS Main Staff and on the basis of the situation in the corps area of

3 responsibility, has the task of carrying out offensive activities with

4 three forces deep in the Drina Corps zone, as soon as possible, in order

5 to split apart the enclaves of Zepa and Srebrenica, and reduce them to

6 their urban areas."

7 Now, as we've said before, separate the enclaves is a legitimate

8 military concern, but look at this, the last part: "... reduce them to

9 their urban areas." Now, both enclaves are some 50 to 60 kilometres in

10 diameter, and the bulk of the population of Srebrenica, which is some

11 30.000 - perhaps even more - live outside the roughly 1 kilometre by 2

12 kilometre urban area. So if you attack that enclave and you reduce it to

13 the urban area, you are forcing some 15, 20.000 people into a tiny area

14 that would create an absolute humanitarian disaster. So it was the

15 purpose of this plan to do just that.

16 Now, if you look at the plan in more detail you'll see that it was

17 not the purpose of the plan to take the enclave at that time. It was the

18 purpose to reduce it to its urban area, to create this horrible situation,

19 and later in this document you'll see it says create a situation for the

20 elimination of the enclave, and something that -- be prepared to act when

21 given the opportunity. Something any good criminal -- sorry, any good

22 military commander would do in the situation. And so it's important to

23 note that while we see directive 7 at work here and we see the unlawful

24 aim, they're not at that point trying to take the enclave.

25 You'll see in other documents what they're worried about is the

1 United Nations and NATO. There are other documents that say when -- when

2 the UN leaves, then take the enclave. So like Morillon in 1993, with the

3 UN there they're worried about their view in the world and not prepared to

4 take it. It wasn't until a little later, as the events unfolded, they

5 became willing to, and we'll get into that.

6 All right. If we could go to -- can you get to the map with the

7 four S's. I'm going to skip to the end now and show you a map that was

8 found in the Drina Corps collection that we have the original of. You

9 won't get the full feel of it for -- on this -- on this screen. In fact,

10 if we could blow it up a bit more so we could try to read the English.

11 This -- this is a map, an actual JNA military map of the

12 Srebrenica enclave in the north - that looks pretty good - and the Zepa

13 enclave in the south. This was a map that was drawn after the operations

14 were over and were signed and stamped as an official military map, as you

15 can see, by Major General Radoslav Krstic.

16 And what is stated on them is interesting. "Srebrenica has been

17 Serbian and remains Serbian." Then it says, "12 July 1995." And then:

18 "Zepa is also Serbian. 27 July 1995." 12 July is the day they entered

19 Potocari and finally took the enclave, and 27 July is the date that they

20 took Zepa. And you can see they've -- they've drawn the basic attack

21 plan, and the red is the Serbs, the blue is the Muslims, and the little

22 initials are for the various brigades that were involved in the attack.

23 You'll see the Zvornik Brigade involved in both, Vinko Pandurevic and the

24 Drina Wolves playing a major role in those.

25 You may also notice, if you look at this map, over the top of this

1 map is written a big cross with four Cyrillic S's in it, and that, as you

2 likely know, is a Serbian national symbol. Nationalist symbol. It's not

3 just a national symbol. Had there been a flag on this map, a Serbian

4 flag, well, that's one thing. This is a -- is a symbol of Serb

5 nationalism, and those S's stand for "Only unity will save the Serbs."

6 Now, this -- this saying "Only unity will save the Serbs," is in

7 itself relatively harmless sounding, but it's based on the propaganda that

8 was used from the very beginning of this war that the Muslims were coming

9 to kill us all. They're coming to commit genocide on us. We must fight

10 for our survival. This is a theme you hear repeatedly in the speeches of

11 General Mladic, General Krstic, and others, and it's the very simple

12 propaganda as a rallying cry to not just fight, but when you believe that

13 the opposite forces are coming to commit genocide on you, that is your

14 first step towards the dark side.

15 And so what do we have here? Skip to the end. Srebrenica. You

16 can see look under that cross, those four S's, and think of the some 7.000

17 people that are dead and buried under them. A little farther north in

18 Zvornik, to be precise. And in Zepa, the people have been run out and the

19 top leadership murdered. Three, four, at least, people were murdered in

20 Zepa.

21 So we have as an official military map, General Krstic, who has

22 been convicted of aiding and abetting, putting his national symbol over

23 the top of the graves of Srebrenica. They are proud -- he is proud of

24 what he's done. It gives you an idea of the attitude of General Krstic

25 personally. But more than that, because, as you'll see over and over

1 again in this case, the theme that a commander leads by example. When a

2 commander exhibits this kind of nationalistic horror, he is signalling to

3 his troops that it's okay. When Mladic issues orders saying remove the

4 population, he's signalling to his generals and his troops that it's

5 okay. When a commander allows this and sells this and pushes this and

6 acts like this, this is what leads to the kind of tragedy that we had.

7 You'll hear Momir Nikolic. He stood up and testified that he

8 allowed the horror of Potocari to happen in front of him. The kickings

9 under the bus, the beatings, the people being taken off. And he said by

10 his very presence as an officer from the brigade, he contributed to what

11 was going on, and any other officers present that allowed this to happen

12 in front of them contributed to this. This is a very important command

13 concept that I know General Pandurevic has been taught and I know the

14 other people have been taught, and they've seen it happen, and a commander

15 leads by example. The examples set early on were this. Here a classic

16 example: Lead by genocide.

17 Okay. Now, let's chronologically go to the -- to the case itself.

18 Excuse me a minute. We'll get away from the machine for just a second. I

19 don't know if you can all see that. There's not a perfect place to put

20 it. Okay. If we can put it on the chair.

21 Thank you for helping with that. I hope you can get some idea of

22 that.

23 Now, the attack began in earnest on 6th July, and by 9 or 10 July

24 the Muslim forces were beginning to crumble. The UN, who had been the

25 focus of near attacks, they shot in and around the OPs, the posts that

1 were all around the enclave, they started moving back towards their base

2 in Potocari. At one point, I believe it was on the 7th or 8th of July, a

3 Muslim army person got very upset by this and tossed a hand grenade onto a

4 Dutch armoured personnel carrier and killed a Dutch soldier. After that,

5 the Dutch went to the Serb side and were taken by the -- by the VRS in a

6 humanitarian way and set up in the Hotel Fontana. However, they were not

7 allowed to return to their base a few short miles down the road to

8 Potocari. They were held there. And as you'll see from the evidence,

9 they will held there as hostages. So we have hostages on the 8th of July,

10 9th of July.

11 So by the 9th and 10th of July, the Muslim forces are crumbling.

12 For some reason the BiH forces had taken Naser Oric and his chief people

13 out of the enclave several weeks earlier, and so the people that were

14 there in command tried but got no help from NATO or the UN forces, and so

15 by the 10th of July it looked pretty grim for the people of the enclave.

16 The UN is trying to get NATO airstrikes approved through the UN

17 bureaucracy and that's not happening, and the Muslim army is crumbling

18 under the tough attack of Pandurevic and the other forces. And so if

19 discussion with Radovan Karadzic, Karadzic decides that it's time to -- to

20 take the enclave, that the position is right, that the UN is not putting

21 up any -- any resistance, and if they do, they have hostages. And so what

22 we find the next day, on the 11th of July, is when the NATO actually does

23 come in and as a last-ditch effort to try to bomb the Serb forces, and

24 they do drop a couple of bombs, the NATO -- the command of the Dutch

25 Battalion receives word from the Serb forces that we're going to kill the

1 men -- your men that we have unless that stops. So that stopped. No more

2 NATO Air Force, and the Serbs are free now to roll right in.

3 Now, we see the decision of President Karadzic on July 10th in a

4 document which I'll show you a little later when I get to the specific

5 evidence regarding General Gvero, because it's a letter from Tolimir who

6 is passing on the directions of the president saying it's now time to go

7 in and take the enclave. You'll also see the president ordering that

8 UNPROFOR not be touched and the civilians not be touched and the Geneva

9 Conventions be used. That's on the 10th. Of course, the very next day

10 the Serb authorities threaten to kill all the hostages. But the important

11 part about this letter is that it's directed personally to Generals Krstic

12 and Gvero who -- at the forward command post at Pribicevac. That shows

13 that General Gvero is at the command post with General Krstic who is

14 leading the attack. So this is a very typical Mladic command structure.

15 He's not Milovanovic in the Krajina, he's got Tolimir in the Zepa area,

16 and he's got Gvero at the key point during the key moment of Srebrenica.

17 And so on 11 July, Mladic marches triumphantly through the city of

18 Srebrenica with Vinko Pandurevic, with Krstic, with General Zivanovic who

19 was the then corps commander of the Drina Corps. Popovic is there.

20 You'll see this on video. It's an amazing -- amazing video of what

21 happened.

22 And if we could go to an exhibit. I'll just take a still just

23 give you a bit of flavour of the Mladic looking into the camera that is

24 purposefully being done. He looks into the camera and he says: "Finally,

25 after the rebellion against the Dahis, the time has come to take revenge

1 upon the Turks in this region."

2 This is again a foreshadowing of Mladic's intent, what he has in

3 mind.

4 Now, the rebellion against the Dahis occurred on the 13th of July

5 in 1817 and was an uprising of Serbs against Turkish mercenaries or rulers

6 of some sort. So we have Mladic going back well into history for Serb

7 television giving them this message, which was to foreshadow the events.

8 So on the 10th, the 11th of July, we -- in response to the Serbs

9 making it into the town of Srebrenica after shelling civilian targets,

10 dropping at least several mortars into a crowd of people around the Dutch

11 Battalion, the women and children and some men move towards Potocari,

12 which down here, as you can see, is just a few kilometres north of

13 Srebrenica and was where the main DutchBat compound is. They have a small

14 compound in Srebrenica, but it is, under shelling and pressure from the

15 Serbs, soon dismantled.

16 So by the evening of 11 July, Srebrenica has been taken. Some 20

17 to 30.000 women and children and military -- and roughly a thousand

18 military-aged men have moved into Potocari. At the same time, about

19 15.000 mostly military-aged men but some women and children start to move

20 towards the villages of Susnjari and Jaglici on the map as you can see

21 them, and where it has been decided that they are going to make a run for

22 it to go through what has been an established smuggling route towards the

23 territory of the BiH army, which is this grey line, towards the town of

24 Nezuk.

25 Now, this column is hard to estimate, but their best estimate has

1 been about 15.000, about a third of which were armed with automatic

2 weapons or rifles, hunting rifles, with some RPGs, shoulder-fired

3 grenades, and little else. You'll see an amazing video scene of these men

4 assembling, a few with rifles and many without. So they are gathering on

5 the evening of the 11th and late night of the 12th and begin to head

6 across the tough terrain from Jaglici northward.

7 At this point there's nothing really much stopping them but a

8 minefield and a few civilian soldiers in trenches that really aren't

9 prepared to handle that kind of event, and the area they go in is so rough

10 there's not even trenches down there.

11 But the night of the 11th of July, there are two famous meetings

12 between Mladic and the Dutch Battalion command at the Hotel Fontana in

13 Bratunac. The Dutch command, of course, was very concerned with the

14 situation, was not allowed to have any outside help from NATO or from --

15 Morillon was not allowed to come in, or Janvier would have been the person

16 that was present and in charge at the time, and so they were on their own.

17 And You'll see that, and you'll see how frightening this situation was.

18 So Karremans asked for a meeting and they had a meeting, and Mladic at

19 that meeting threatens Karremans, screams at him. You'll see the tape.

20 And then asks for a Muslim representative to come an hour later. The

21 Dutch go get a Muslim representative from the crowd, just a guy that was a

22 teacher, and he comes that night, and Mladic talks with him. Mladic is

23 obsessed with the military. Where are the military? Turn -- you know,

24 the military-aged men demanding their surrender and that everything will

25 be fine. And he looks at this man and you see it, and he says, "It's up

1 to you, sir, whether your people survive or disappear." That's the most

2 frightening genocidal talk imaginable. And then he sets up a meeting for

3 10.00 the next day where they will organise the transportation of the

4 Muslim population out of Potocari.

5 And so the morning of the 12th the column is -- has started moving

6 out, and at 10.00 they meet again at the Hotel Fontana. But that morning

7 the Serb forces, including Borovcanin's forces, come into Potocari, you'll

8 see this on the video, and take over control of the situation. This is

9 where crimes first start happening, where the soldiers are allowed to take

10 out their vengeance, their whatever on the civilian population. You'll

11 hear evidence of bodies, of assaults. We have tried to put that in --

12 most of it through 92 bis and other evidence, but it is a -- that's when

13 the horror of Potocari begins.

14 Now, the night of the 11th, Mladic was together with his main

15 commander, General Krstic, also with Zivanovic. He had an intel officer

16 from the Main Staff named Radoslav Jankovic. They were all there

17 together. Popovic was in the area, was at the meeting on the morning of

18 the 12th. It's very clear from the evidence that the plot, the plan to

19 absolutely kill and murder the Muslim men of Potocari was hatched that

20 night, the night of the 11th, the night of the 12th.

21 Now, it was clear from intelligence reports that there was roughly

22 a thousand military-aged men in the town of Potocari. So Mladic knew that

23 on the night of the 11th, and when they -- the army refused to surrender

24 and nothing was going to happen, clearly Mladic made the decision that

25 night that the -- that the men would be separated and killed. You'll see

1 as I discuss, you know, the various evidence that supports that, but

2 that's when the decision was made.

3 You first see it again in a televised -- well, not televised

4 but -- it's a video. Some of it is televised, but a video of portions of

5 that meeting. And one part that was cut out of the video was when Mladic

6 told the assembled people at this meeting, again with the Dutch Battalion,

7 civilian members of the Muslim community, and civilian members of the

8 Bratunac community, Mladic demanded that the able-bodied men 16 to 60 be

9 screened as war criminals. So Mladic had made the decision that night to

10 screen men as war criminals.

11 Okay. Now, shortly after that meeting, buses, trucks arrived, and

12 the first separations in Potocari began in the early afternoon. But what

13 we see is no screening. What's happening is a wholesale separation of

14 anybody from roughly 15 up to 78, as you heard the Prosecutor, and some

15 very young boys and some very old men and everyone. No screening. No

16 names. No interrogations to speak of, nothing that would have been

17 legitimate for them to go in and look for soldiers and take soldiers aside

18 or people suspected of being soldiers and keep them and -- keep them for

19 exchange. What was not legitimate was what they did: A wholesale

20 separation and transport out of the area of the men. So this is the first

21 indication that their intentions are not honourable. They had a lot of

22 intelligence they could have gained, a lot of value in having hundreds of

23 prisoners, because there were hundreds of Serb prisoners in Muslim

24 prisons, and these men could have been exchanged to get their own soldiers

25 back. But instead, wholesale screening, nobody is writing names down, and

1 most importantly, they're not given any food, any medical help. They're

2 put in horrendous conditions where they're jammed in buildings and

3 vehicles, and they're beaten and starved and killed over the two or three

4 days that the men from Potocari were stored there.

5 So when you put all that together and you see this happening on

6 the morning -- or the afternoon of the 12th, the evening of the 12th,

7 13th, continually it goes on, it's very clear that Mladic, what he had in

8 mind for these men of Potocari, that they were marked for death. There's

9 no question about that when you put all the evidence together.

10 There's a photograph we have of a huge, massive pile of IDs

11 burning on the side of the road in Potocari, I think on the 14th of July.

12 IDs, any documents in any military interest is a key thing to get when

13 interrogating someone so you know who they are, what unit they may be

14 from, that kind of material burned without a care in the world. They had

15 no idea that the international forces of NATO would be visiting them in

16 January of the next year, and the arrogance by which they perpetrated this

17 is amazing.

18 So in the afternoon of 12 July the forcible transfers and murders

19 begin. Just to give you the briefest look of a photo of Potocari so you

20 get a feel for this. You'll see the video. I don't want to take the time

21 to show you the video now, but if we have that photo of the thousands of

22 people in Potocari. I don't recall if this is the 12th or the 13th, but

23 it gives you an idea of just the masses of numbers of people. And in this

24 crowd you will see military-aged men, most of whom are now dead.

25 And if we go to the next photograph of the men separated. There's

1 another still, a photograph. It's hard to tell from this photograph, but

2 these are trucks, and the women are walking on one side of the trucks and

3 the men are walking on the other. They have been separated and directed.

4 And take a look at the men. Look at these old guys. They're not

5 interviewed, they're not interrogated, they're just separated out. And we

6 have -- several of these men have been identified and presumed dead. We

7 will have a booklet of these stills that identify the people that have

8 been killed. But this is the separation, the wholesale screening --

9 wholesale separation, non-screening, excuse me.

10 I think we have another one of Mr. Borovcanin. Again, this is 13

11 July of -- and Mr. Borovcanin, whose troops have been in and around

12 Potocari on the 12th and 13th taking part in the separations, this is a

13 United Nations military observer in the forefront, Mr. Kingori from Kenya,

14 and with a Dutch officer, and they're discussing the various events.

15 Kingori is very concerned about what is going on right across the street

16 from where they're standing. I don't know, do we have a picture now of

17 the white house?

18 Right across from where Mr. Borovcanin is standing, and this will

19 be made more clear in the video, is the famous white house where men,

20 after they were separated, were taken. Here is a shot of the balcony of

21 the white house some, I don't know, 40 metres, 30 metres from where

22 Borovcanin was standing, facing this. These are the Muslim men huddled in

23 -- in a mass, looking through the slats of the -- the balcony. All those

24 men are to be killed later down the road; two, three days later. And if

25 they're lucky, they're killed in Bratunac by a soldier with a gun.

1 Now, Momir Nikolic will tell you that he coordinated the

2 separations and the movement of the population out, and he did it with a

3 commander under Mr. Borovcanin's command named Dusko Jevic, known as

4 Stalin. He is the person I spoke of earlier who is pretty good with the

5 organisation and was present in Potocari but didn't see anybody separated.

6 Momir Nikolic will also tell you that on the morning of 12 July,

7 after the morning meeting at the Hotel Fontana, Vujadin Popovic and the

8 Drina Corps intelligence officer, Mr. Kosoric, came up to him and said

9 that the decision would be -- has been made to separate the military-aged

10 men and kill them, and we need you to help organise this and help get the

11 job done, and they ask him for locations to kill people. He provides them

12 with the locations of something called the brick factory, which you may

13 soon see. It's an area on the outskirts of Bratunac a lot like the

14 Kravica warehouse, perfect for storing people to be killed. And then

15 Momir Nikolic acknowledges that he took part in the separation and the

16 movement of the women and children and the men, knowing that the men were

17 all going to be killed.

18 Okay. On the 12th of July, in the evening, there is a meeting

19 with General Mladic, General Krstic, and the brigade commanders. After

20 Srebrenica fell on the 11th, most of the brigade commanders involved in

21 the assault stood down briefly. They weren't exactly where the forces of

22 Naser Oric were. They thought they were in the area called the Bandera

23 Triangle south of the enclave. But on the 12th Mladic called a meeting of

24 all the commanders. And it's important to note that at this point the

25 murder operation has been decided. There are probably 500 to a thousand

1 Muslim men separated and jammed into vehicles and schools at the Vuk

2 Karadzic school complex in Bratunac, and they're beginning to be preyed

3 upon; beaten, killed by their captors. So just down the road from that is

4 the meeting at the Bratunac Brigade headquarters, and clear that Vinko

5 Pandurevic is there with General Krstic, General Mladic. There are other

6 brigade commanders; Mirko Trivic, the commander of the 2nd Romanija

7 Brigade, will tell us some of about what happened at that meeting, I'm

8 sure not all, but it's inconceivable that that evening that Mladic and

9 Krstic did not inform Generals Pandurevic and others - Colonel Pandurevic

10 at the time - and others about what was going on and the plan.

11 Now, it's also important to note that at this time there had been

12 no plan to move any prisoners up to Zvornik. All they had and all they

13 really knew about were the thousand men from Potocari, and they were

14 looking to murder them around Bratunac in places that Momir Nikolic had

15 talked about, the brick factory. So -- but given that and the import of

16 that and the fact that they're all together in the command, it's beyond

17 belief that they did not discuss this. But what you will hear about is

18 that now Mladic had made the decision to take on Zepa, and so Mladic tells

19 his commanders at a brief meeting okay, on to Zepa. We've got Srebrenica,

20 on to Zepa. Some of the brigade commanders, Vinko Pandurevic being one of

21 them, stood up to Mladic and said, you know, that his troops were tired,

22 that they needed some rest, and perhaps there were other military reasons

23 that he had, and Mladic insisted, and the brigade commanders were able to

24 convince Mladic to come down to this area of Viogor where the troops were

25 established and give the troops a pep-talk and get them going, which is

1 what he did the next day.

2 Okay. That takes us to the 13th of July. Now, on the 13th of

3 July, we -- remember, we have the column moving out of Jaglici and

4 Susnjari on the night of the 11th, and on the 12th, a significant number

5 of them make it across this road, the Nova Kasaba-Konjevic Polje-Bratunac

6 road. A great flaw in the Serb intelligence is they don't realise at the

7 time that -- how many did. At least 5, 6, 7.000 Muslim men made it across

8 that road early on in this. But at least half the column got stuck back.

9 By the night of the 12th, with the help of Borovcanin's forces and other

10 forces coming in, the Serbs were able to seal off this road from

11 Nova Kasaba, Konjevic Polje, and to Kravica, the area where the Muslim

12 column were -- were advancing.

13 So by the morning of the 13th, there was an iron ring on that

14 road, and the -- some 6.000 Muslim men, 5, 6.000 Muslim men were trapped

15 up on the woods behind it, and the Serb forces went up and down that road

16 with megaphones and dressed in UN gear and with UN APCs calling them down

17 to surrender, that they would be safe, that the UN would look out for

18 them, and many did. Five, 6.000 under the Serb numbers on the 13th this

19 happened, and they were assembled at various places, Sandici, Nova Kasaba,

20 and sent to the warehouse in Kravica.

21 Now, it's the morning of the 13th, another watershed date and time

22 to remember, that the organised mass executions really begin. Before

23 that, we've seen isolated acts of brutality and death. Isolated in the

24 context of Srebrenica, that means a hundred people minimum, bodies piling

25 up in the Vuk Karadzic school complex, bodies in the woods in Potocari,

1 but we don't see the kind of organised mass executions that this case is

2 known for. But on the morning of 13 July, 16 men -- Muslims are assembled

3 at the intersection of Konjevic Polje and they're put on a bus and they're

4 taken up to an area just north of that along the river, the Jadar River

5 just about here. We'll get a better map of that so you can see that. And

6 they're taken down to the river and executed. We know that because a man

7 survived that. He was shot through the shoulder, fell into the river, and

8 the river had a pretty good current and it washed him away, and he managed

9 to survive and tell the story, and he's got a bullet hole in his shoulder

10 to prove it. But the important thing about this story is that they took a

11 bus.

12 Now, a bus at this time of day was a crucial item, because they

13 were really trying to get the women and children out of Potocari. So for

14 the military or the MUP to get a bus showed that there is some

15 organisation behind these killings and that killing 16 people and using a

16 bus is not something privates or sergeants are going to do on their own.

17 So that's our first indication that we have an organised mass execution

18 going on.

19 Then a little bit later, maybe 12.00, 1.00, we have a witness

20 that -- that sees three busloads of Muslims go down a little road towards

21 the Cerska valley, right here. He's in -- he's up in the woods looking

22 down, and he sees it followed by an APC with soldiers and then shortly

23 after by an excavator, and he hears all kinds of gunfire and shortly

24 thereafter the buses come back empty and the bulldozer comes back, as does

25 the APC. As he's trying to escape north, he comes across an area that

1 was -- had a horrible smell, and he showed us that area. And back in I

2 believe it was 1998, we excavated that and found 150 Muslim men with their

3 hands tied behind their back with wire ligatures and shell casings all

4 over the road and dirt that had obviously been moved by an excavator just

5 thrown on top of them. So that murder happened about 1.00 p.m.

6 Obviously, again the important part about this murder for our purposes is

7 it had three buses, an APC, and an excavator. Privates, sergeants, they

8 don't do that on their own. This mass execution is happening at this

9 point at the highest channels now. Cerska valley shows it.

10 But what perhaps the VRS didn't understand is the massive amount

11 of prisoners they would get. By the afternoon of 13 July, it's not just

12 150 men here or 16 men there. They literally have 5 or 6.000 people

13 assembled, and I believe it becomes clear to them they cannot kill all

14 these people in Bratunac, although you will hear testimony that Beara to.

15 He wanted to start doing it and was very angry when they didn't.

16 But on the evening of the 13th of July, most of the prisoners that

17 had been held in Nova Kasaba and Sandici, these big fields, had been

18 transported to Bratunac or the village of Kravica where they were stored.

19 About a thousand of them were put in this Kravica warehouse just outside

20 the little village area, and in the afternoon it was decided that they

21 should be murdered at the -- near the same time that buses were being

22 transported down the road. They parked buses in front of the warehouse

23 and they began killing people. And the killing lasted for hours and

24 hours. There was at least 800 to a thousand people in two sides of this

25 warehouse.

1 I'm going to go into that in more detail with you when I get to

2 Borovcanin, because this is a murder crime that you really need to

3 understand. The warehouse and what the witnesses are saying and what

4 Borovcanin is saying, it's a whole event within a trial itself, and

5 it's -- unlike most of these cases the detail of this event will be

6 important for your consideration.

7 Okay. Now, as I mentioned, there were so many prisoners on

8 the 13th they couldn't kill them all, and they made the decision to move

9 them up to Zvornik. We know this -- well, Momir Nikolic tell us this. In

10 fact, Momir Nikolic says that he goes and sees Drago Nikolic and provides

11 him the information about that. But we also have a survivor from a school

12 in Bratunac who was put in a vehicle along with 50 to a hundred others and

13 shipped up to the Zvornik area the night of the 13th and put in the

14 Orahovac school. Right here. Not far from the Zvornik Brigade

15 headquarters.

16 So we know that on the night of the 13th that they realised that

17 they cannot kill everyone in the Bratunac area. You'll hear a famous

18 intercept between Miroslav Deronjic, the head of the SDS party, and --

19 and Radovan Karadzic where Karadzic is told of the thousands in the

20 schools and says, "Yes, but get them into warehouses outside, outside,"

21 and Deronjic says, "Yes, yes." And Deronjic will testify about that.

22 So on the 13th, the Muslim men are beginning to be sent off to

23 Zvornik.

24 Now, on the 13th, Colonel Pandurevic was sent with his troops to

25 Zepa and was in the Zepa area of operations at the time this decision was

1 made, but he would have been in radio contact and been able to be

2 identified. And this is the kind of thing, as I go back to deputy

3 commander, that he would have been told about. And you'll hear about the

4 evidence that he was told about it. That he's on the radio -- he's

5 available and he's contactable by the radio. But the next day, on the

6 morning of the 14th, the attack begins and his troops are part of that

7 attack.

8 Anyway, back to the evening of the 13th. This is where the

9 Muslims are -- are held at the schools, some few hundred that night, but

10 then for whatever reason, under the darkness or the security situation

11 because the Muslim column is still out there, they stop their transporting

12 that night, and on the morning of the 14th they gather a massive convoy of

13 buses and trucks to load these some 5.000, perhaps 6.000 Muslim men and

14 boys that had been stored in Bratunac and Kravica, the surviving ones, and

15 ship them up to Zvornik. This column is led by Lieutenant Colonel Popovic

16 and the chief of the Bratunac Brigade military police and others.

17 On the afternoon of 14 of July, the organised murders begin at the

18 Orahovac school. Men are taken out of the school building, put on little

19 Zvornik Brigade trucks moved about -- less than a kilometre down the road,

20 unloaded and summarily executed by firing squad, members of the Zvornik

21 Brigade. All of this is done by members of the Zvornik Brigade, and

22 specifically the 4th Battalion are involved.

23 At the same time, there are people that had been moved to the

24 schools at Petkovci, Rocevic, and in the school at Kula in the area of

25 Pilica and the Pilica cultural centre. I will go in some more detail

1 about each of the accused, their whereabouts and their involvement at the

2 end, probably tomorrow.

3 The executions at Petkovci started late night, the 14th, after the

4 executions had finished at Orahovac, went all night, probably 800 to a

5 thousand persons murdered. We don't know who actually pulled the trigger

6 during that. We know that the battalion, I believe it's the 6th Battalion

7 of the Zvornik Brigade was involved in transporting people to be killed.

8 And the school was right across the street from the battalion command

9 post, and you'll hear testimony from the battalion commander and deputy

10 commander about Beara being present and organising these prisoners.

11 The next day, on the 15th, Pandurevic has been given an urgent

12 call from Obrenovic. The column is really beginning to threaten Zvornik

13 on the 14th. There's clashes here between the column and the Zvornik

14 Brigade forces. Zvornik Brigade realises that it's not the 2 or 300 that

15 they originally thought. It's more like 5.000 and Obrenovic is getting

16 really panicked. And so on the night of the 14th, he calls for urgent

17 help and asks for Vinko Pandurevic. But I left out a key point. I'm

18 sorry, I want to go back on Obrenovic.

19 As you know, Obrenovic pled guilty, and on the evening of

20 the 13th, Obrenovic will testify that while he's dealing with the column

21 he gets a phone call from Drago Nikolic who has been assigned to be at the

22 Zvornik Brigade forward command post up here in the woods, and roughly

23 what Drago Nikolic tells him is that thousands of prisoners are coming to

24 Zvornik. It's been ordered that they be detained and shot and that he

25 needs to be relieved from his duties at the forward command post to help

1 organise this and facilitate it. Obrenovic says, "Wait a minute. We've

2 got to have authority from our commander on this." And Nikolic says,

3 "It's coming from the top," and he's been contacted and -- by Popovic, I

4 believe, and that it's coming from the top, that the command is coming

5 from the commanders. At that point, Obrenovic, trusting his security

6 officer, and being part of what Obrenovic called the vortex of hatred,

7 relieved Drago Nikolic from his responsibility, authorised him to get

8 military police to begin the job of guarding and receiving these prisoners

9 and killing them and authorised the entire murder operation for that area

10 and pled guilty to that.

11 So -- but getting back to the 14th, he manages to get through to

12 the Drina Corps command, who gets through to Pandurevic. Pandurevic comes

13 back mid-morning, probably around noon on the 15th. Now, when Pandurevic

14 arrives, everyone at Orahovac is dead and the burying process is

15 continuing. That's roughly a thousand people. Everyone from Petkovci is

16 dead and the burying process is happening that day that he's coming back.

17 And this is Zvornik Brigade engineering officers and equipment that are

18 involved in this massive burial process. So when he comes back, everybody

19 from those two schools is dead. Roughly 2.000 people. But there are

20 still at least 1.500 located in Pilica, in the cultural centre, and the

21 school at Kula, and maybe 500, maybe 800 located in the school in Rocevic

22 who are in the process of being killed as he comes back.

23 Obrenovic reports all of this to him, fundamentally that they're

24 having problems guarding and killing -- excuse me, guarding and burying

25 all these people. There's no mention of problems killing them. It's

1 guarding them and burying them is a big problem, and Pandurevic's response

2 to Obrenovic on that point was civil protection was supposed to take care

3 of that. Now, civil protection is the outfit that does sanitation and

4 burials and had taken care of this in Bratunac. So this was an indication

5 to Obrenovic that Pandurevic had been informed and was probably not happy

6 about his units having to take part in this to take them away from their

7 duties and had been informed that civil protection would be doing that.

8 He's not concerned about the deaths of these men. He's concerned about

9 his units and men that would take them away from their military duties.

10 So after Pandurevic gets briefed, Obrenovic has other meetings at

11 the brigade command. He does what a good commander should do and he goes

12 out to the front and leads the -- leads the defence. He initially argued

13 with Obrenovic and the other folks who said, "We need to open this and let

14 these people through, because we're going to lose too many troops in the

15 process." We can't deal with the situation. The situation is thus:

16 The -- the front line is here. BiH troops are here north of Nezuk with

17 artillery, with men in trenches, with other equipment, and you've got

18 some 5, 6.000 partially armed men coming at them from their rear. And on

19 the night of the 15th, Zvornik is in trouble, and initially Pandurevic

20 disagrees and wants to take on this whole -- whole column, but when he

21 gets there there's a huge -- on the morning of the 16th and you'll read

22 about it in the intercepts, and there's a 19th century battle is the only

23 way I can describe it. Just hundreds of, many of them unarmed men,

24 swarming over trenches of the Zvornik Brigade, taking their heavy weapons

25 and turning them on the Zvornik Brigade. By the early morning hours of

1 the 16th, the Zvornik Brigade has lost some 50 people.

2 Now, in this war, 50 people in a morning battle is enormous

3 losses. And it's at that point that Pandurevic re-thinks his decision,

4 and eventually the decision is made to open up an area to allow the rest

5 of the people to go through. That stays open for a couple of days and

6 then it's closed. But it's done not out of humanitarian reasons but

7 because 50 Serb boys were killed because of Mladic's wonderful scheme to

8 take the Srebrenica enclave.

9 So also on the day of the 16th, the executions continue. Popovic

10 is involved and so is Beara in the killings up in Pilica where there's

11 some, I said, about a thousand people at the school, maybe 500 in the

12 cultural centre. You will see the specific evidence that shows their

13 involvement and the 10th Sabotage Detachment that was brought in to help

14 the killing process, but the killing occurred at the Branjevo Military

15 Farm. It's called the Branjevo Military Farm because it was just that.

16 It was a unit of the Zvornik Brigade that raised pigs and grew crops to

17 feed the troops, and it had -- it was lead by an officers and had soldiers

18 working there. And this was made available for this operation, and it was

19 Vinko Pandurevic's unit and Vinko Pandurevic's land, and it was his

20 soldiers that helped make all this happened. They were guarding the

21 people at the school. They were holding down the Branjevo farm. The

22 10th Sabotage came in to actually do most of the killing and then moved

23 down to the Pilica centre in the afternoon of the 16th to kill off the

24 people at the cultural centre.

25 On the 15th the executions had occurred at a place called Kozluk,

1 just so that sticks in your head. And it's not far from the Rocevic

2 school.

3 Now, after the murders in Pilica on 19th of July, we see many

4 Muslim groups are still caught in the woods and running around and a unit

5 from the Krajina Corps that was sent and resubordinated to Vinko

6 Pandurevic captured a group of people, about -- I think there were 10 of

7 them, and according to the survivor they got on the radio, talked to

8 someone on the radio, and after that everyone was -- except one was shot

9 and killed. Our survivor was shot in the back and rolled down a hill and

10 was able to escape to tell us this. But those men were under the command

11 of Vinko Pandurevic, resubordinated to his brigade. You'll see the order

12 by -- or the directive by General Miletic assigning that Krajina Corps

13 crew to Zvornik to help the -- help the situation, the combat situation

14 that was going on. So you can see from some amazing evidence the linkage

15 between -- between all these people.

16 I'm not going to go into the detail of all the other murders. You

17 will -- you will hear about the murder of some 16 patients that were

18 seriously injured near Milici, down in the south, and were sent to Zvornik

19 hospital, but instead of the ICRC being brought in, these seriously

20 injured people were sent to the Zvornik Brigade headquarters around

21 the 14th, 15th, something like that, and were held in their -- in their

22 area, in their medical area. And you'll hear from the doctors of the --

23 from the Zvornik hospital came and treated them, and Obrenovic went and

24 looked after them because there was issues related to the soldiers not

25 liking Muslims being in the command. And shortly after this, Popovic

1 arrived and those prisoners were taken out and they've never been seen

2 since. Why they needed to kill 16 people from Milici that were seriously

3 injured patients, I don't know, but they did. We have their names.

4 They're clearly on the missing list. And Mr. Popovic is related to that.

5 We also -- we know from a survivor of the Branjevo farm that he in

6 his escape from under the bodies on the 16th, he finds four other

7 survivors from the Branjevo farm, and he learns about what villages

8 they're from, and he sees the blood on them and hears their story. And

9 then a few days later, they were assisted by a couple of soldiers from the

10 Zvornik Brigade and given a sandwich and told where the front line was.

11 Those guys were farmers. I think they were helping -- helping their

12 family at the time and helped out these four pathetic Muslim guys.

13 Well, those four guys, the Muslims, got captured later on and were

14 interrogated by Drago Nikolic's MPs and admitted they were helped by some

15 Zvornik folks. The MPs, Nikolic was able to identify who the soldiers

16 were that helped them, and Vinko Pandurevic and Drago Nikolic prosecuted

17 those Serb soldiers that assisted these guys by giving them a sandwich and

18 telling them where the front line is. They prosecuted them for assisting

19 the enemy and punished them. And you'll see the documents that support

20 that. So we have the names of these four Muslim survivors. And you won't

21 be surprised to hear that all four of those names are on the ICRC missing

22 list, because after they were used as witnesses again the Serbs, they were

23 executed. Maybe some day their bones will be identified and their loved

24 ones will know that.

25 Okay. We've got a little time left, and I don't want to take too

1 much time tomorrow, so if you don't mind, I think I'll start with

2 chapter 3, and -- which I call the linkage material. And with the help of

3 Ms. Stewart, we'll go through that.

4 And the first linkage material I want to talk about -- or the

5 first person we'll talk about is General Miletic. And the first document

6 I want to go to is a document you've seen part of. It's directive 7, the

7 famous directive 7, where -- it was drafted by Miletic, where he wrote out

8 the part about make life unbearable. Well, there's also a part at the

9 very end which I believe Janet has marked for us regarding the logistic

10 support for this operation, and -- I'm sorry, if I could take just one

11 second to grab that. And I'm just read it briefly: "The relevant state

12 and military organs responsible for work with UNPROFOR and humanitarian

13 organisations shall, through a planned and unobtrusively restrictive

14 issuing of permits, reduce and limit the logistic support of UNPROFOR to

15 the enclaves and supply of material resources to the Muslim population,

16 making them dependent on our goodwill while at the same time avoiding

17 condemnation by the international community and international public

18 opinion."

19 They're making the Muslims dependent upon their goodwill, keeping

20 the supplies to a minimum, yet not so bad that the international community

21 is going to notice. You'll see the evidence to support exactly what they

22 did. So this goes along with making life unbearable. And General Miletic

23 played a major role in the convoys and what convoys went and what convoys

24 didn't.

25 And let's go now to an 18 June document. This is a June 18th

1 called -- it's called an open message under the name of General Miletic

2 from the Main Staff, and I'm not going to read it all to you, but it's

3 talking about supplying the various materials to the enclaves. And in the

4 end of it, General Miletic says, and this is -- you can see he's sending

5 it to the Zvornik Brigade and the various brigades that have to do with

6 the enclaves: "I demand a detailed check of all vehicles, including the

7 inspection of cargo. Pay special attention to the fuel in the fuel tanks

8 and the fuel being brought into the enclaves. Check the documents and the

9 identity of all persons on board. Make a list of their names and their ID

10 cards in order to ensure that the persons who enter the enclaves must

11 leave the enclaves upon the completion of the task."

12 Now, this shows that General Miletic is playing a very important

13 role in this. Now, on its face there is nothing criminal about this, but

14 it does indicate to us the role he's playing, and he can say to the

15 Zvornik Brigade, "I demand a detailed..." Now, is that an order from a

16 commander? No. Is it a directive you have to follow? Yes. This is

17 consistent with Mladic's overall order directive 7 and the other materials

18 that we've seen establishing the policy. And you'll see, speaking of

19 fuel, how fuel was restricted and strangled. So by the time DutchBat was

20 there in July when these events happened, they didn't have enough fuel to

21 run their air conditioning or their electrical and they couldn't go out in

22 vehicles. And this is all the Main Staff's doing through their corps,

23 through their brigades, as it was done with General Miletic.

24 Okay. One more, I think. The 13th July document. Now, this is

25 an amazing document that was found recently in the Drina Corps collection,

1 jammed in amongst a whole bunch of other telegrams and obviously missed by

2 anybody going through this material. It's a communication authored by

3 Lieutenant Colonel Milomir Savcic. Milomir Savcic is the commander of the

4 65th Protection Regiment. He is in a place called Borika, down by Zepa,

5 where Tolimir has been stationed to look after the Zepa attack. And

6 Savcic has received a proposal from Tolimir regarding all these massive

7 amounts of prisoners that are being caught in the area of Nova Kasaba and

8 Sandici, and so I want to look at every word on this one because we don't

9 see many documents like this.

10 It's entitled "Procedure for treatment of prisoners of war." "To

11 the commander of the GS VRS." That's the Main Staff. That's of course

12 Mladic, and for his information; assistant commander for religious and

13 legal affairs, and for his information. We know who that is. That's

14 Gvero. And the commander of the military police battalion of the 65th

15 Protection Regiment. That's this guy Malinic who I mentioned to you that

16 introduced a Dutchman to Beara. And it says: "Order. There are over

17 1.000 members of the former 28th Division of the so-called BiH army

18 captured in the area of Dusanovo (Kasaba). Prisoners are under the

19 control of the military police battalion of the 65th protection regiment."

20 They have a unit there in Nova Kasaba, so it's natural that they have been

21 the ones that have been dealing with all these prisoners.

22 "Assistant commander for security and intelligence affairs of the

23 Main Staff" - of course we know who that is; Tolimir - "proposes the

24 following measures:

25 "Prohibit access to all unauthorised individuals, filming and

1 photographing of prisoners.

2 "Prohibit traffic for all United Nations vehicles en route to

3 Zvornik, Vlasenica until further notice ...

4 "Commander of the military police battalion shall take measures to

5 remove war prisoners from the main Milici-Zvornik road, place them

6 somewhere indoors or in an area protected from observation from the

7 ground or the air."

8 Now, these hundreds of prisoners, as I said before, are a great

9 bargaining tool to receive for exchange, and the first thing you would

10 want to do in that situation is bring in the ICRC, get these people

11 registered, get them -- you can screen the ones that are military-aged men

12 and get them taken care of. Why in the world would you hide them unless

13 you had some nefarious activity? And let's look at who they're hiding

14 them from. Perhaps you hide them from the Bosnian Muslim army that might

15 try to break them out. But that's completely unrealistic. They are the

16 Bosnian Muslim army. They're nowhere near the 2nd Corps forces at this

17 point. There is no air force. There is no way that the Bosnian army can

18 do anything about these guys. So who are they keeping them from when

19 they're being observed from the ground or the air? The only people that

20 are in the air in July of 1995 are NATO. They don't want these guys seen

21 by NATO. They don't want the international community to know they exist.

22 This is a very strong indication that the murder operation is in play.

23 These people are to be hidden from the international community so they can

24 be killed.

25 Mr. Savcic was shown this document and wouldn't contest it but

1 wouldn't acknowledge it, and I asked him who -- who should be -- who are

2 they hiding these guys from, and he said, "Well, NATO." And I asked,

3 well, why are they hiding them from NATO? And he thought about that for a

4 bit and said, "Well, we would have been concerned that NATO mistook them

5 for being Serbs and would have bombed them." And again, you can tell from

6 an answer like that that he doesn't want to be anywhere near this, and it

7 really tells us what this document's about. But then let's go on in the

8 document.

9 "Once the commander of the military police battalion receives this

10 order, he shall contact General Miletic and receive from him additional

11 orders and verify if the proposal has been approved by the commander of

12 the Main Staff."

13 So we've got Tolimir involved in this, we've got Gvero involved in

14 this, we've got Miletic involved in this, we've got Mladic involved. One

15 document. We've got them all. So this is the line-up. This is the

16 line-up for genocide. And it importantly shows who the important players

17 are. Miletic is going to be issuing orders relating to these guys. This

18 is an extremely important document to show you who was important, who is

19 involved, and what they're up to.

20 And I think this is probably the place where I need to stop.

21 JUDGE AGIUS: I thank you so much, Mr. McCloskey. You may sit

22 down. You will continue tomorrow.

23 Okay. Earlier on I mentioned an outstanding motion that was filed

24 confidential and under seal relating to a request from the Prosecution for

25 protective measures for different persons. As far as possible, I would

1 like to have the debate in open session. However, if any names of

2 witnesses are going to be mentioned in particular, then obviously we will

3 need to go into private or closed session. I don't think there is a need

4 to mention witnesses by name. You can actually refer to them the same way

5 they have been referred in the motion itself, namely by reference to the

6 pseudonym that was used in each case, in either or both of the previous

7 cases, the Krstic and the Blagojevic one.

8 Who is going to address? Madam Nikolic.

9 MS. NIKOLIC: [Interpretation] Thank you, Your Honour.

10 JUDGE AGIUS: Is it going to be a joint submission, or is it only

11 on behalf of your client.

12 MS. NIKOLIC: [Interpretation] Yes, Your Honour.

13 JUDGE AGIUS: Go ahead.

14 MS. NIKOLIC: [Interpretation] This would be a joint submission on

15 our part to avoid unnecessary repetition. We shall briefly address the

16 Trial Chamber on the Defence's position relative to the Prosecution's

17 request for protective measures for the four witnesses who ought to be

18 heard in the first session.

19 All the Defence teams do not oppose the Prosecution request for

20 measures for the four witnesses, since these are witnesses who had been

21 accorded protective measures under Rule 75(F) earlier.

22 What the Defence wishes to tell the Trial Chamber is as follows.

23 That one of the witnesses marked L who testified in the Milosevic case as

24 B-1399, the matter of the fact is that in the Blagojevic this same witness

25 testified in an open session without any protective measures. This was a

1 session in the (redacted)

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4 JUDGE AGIUS: This way you have indirectly -- so we need to redact

5 this part of the --

6 MS. NIKOLIC: [Interpretation] I apologise.

7 JUDGE AGIUS: -- of the transcript. One moment, Madam Nikolic.

8 MS. NIKOLIC: [Interpretation] Could we move --

9 JUDGE AGIUS: Madam Registrar, we are transmitting with a

10 30-minute delay, I suppose. Yes, okay. So we need to redact from line --

11 yes, page 87, line 22. Yes. To 24. Thank you. Thank you, Judge Kwon.

12 Yes. Let's go into private session, and you're free to make any

13 comment you like, and when you finish, we can revert back to open session.

14 [Private session]

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9 [Open session]

10 JUDGE AGIUS: Any further submissions on the Prosecution motion?

11 Mr. Krgovic.

12 MR. KRGOVIC: [Interpretation] Yes, Your Honour. I wanted to seize

13 the opportunity to raise one matter in the context of procedural matters

14 which relates to the application of e-court in the courtroom.

15 In the pending cases before the Tribunal, in -- at the point the

16 Defence was to cross-examine a witness the Defence delivered the documents

17 that it was going to use in cross-examination at the time when the witness

18 was swearing in. We did not discuss these matters yet, and I move that

19 the Trial Chamber issue a decision applying the same procedure that was

20 applied in the Milutinovic et al. case, which is decision issued on the

21 16th of August, 2006; wherein it is stated that the Defence is duty-bound

22 to upload into e-court all the documents that it will be using in the

23 course of its cross-examination at the point when the witness is giving

24 his solemn declaration from which point the Prosecution can no longer get

25 in touch with the witness.

1 We -- I move that the same procedure be applied in this case. The

2 Prosecution in that other case was not opposed to such a course of

3 proceeding.

4 Thank you.

5 JUDGE AGIUS: I think we can safely take this up tomorrow or some

6 other time when it becomes necessary to decide. I see your point,

7 Mr. Krgovic, and I appreciate your submission.

8 I think we need to adjourn now. We will resume or reconvene

9 tomorrow morning at 9.00.

10 How long do you think you will require, Mr. McCloskey?

11 MR. McCLOSKEY: Hopefully one session but perhaps two. These --

12 these are documents and I will try to resist talking too much about them.

13 I know you will hear testimony about them.

14 JUDGE AGIUS: So far you've been, roughly speaking, three hours.

15 I thank you all. The sitting is adjourned. Tomorrow morning

16 at 9.00. Thank you.

17 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 1.42 p.m,

18 to be reconvened on Tuesday, the 22nd day

19 of August, 2006, at 9.00 a.m.

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