Page 34936
1 Tuesday, 25 November 2008
2 [Open session]
3 [The accused entered court]
4 --- Upon commencing at 9.04 a.m.
5 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Mr. Registrar, kindly call the
6 case.
7 THE REGISTRAR: Good morning, Your Honours. Good morning to
8 everyone in and around the courtroom.
9 This is case number IT-04-74-T, the Prosecutor versus Prlic
10 et al.
11 Thank you, Your Honours.
12 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Thank you, Mr. Registrar.
13 Today is Tuesday, 25th of November, 2008. Good morning to the
14 four accused present today; two are ill. Good morning to the Defence
15 counsel. Good morning, Mr. Stringer. Good morning, Ms. West, and good
16 morning to your team and all the people assisting us.
17 Mr. Registrar, you have an IC number for us.
18 THE REGISTRAR: Yes, Your Honour.
19 The Prlic Defence has issued its objections to Prosecution
20 exhibits tendered through Witness Tomic, Neven. This list shall be given
21 Exhibit number IC 00894.
22 Thank you, Your Honours.
23 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Thank you.
24 I'm going to read out an oral ruling which is rather lengthy,
25 but, first of all, I'll ask Mr. Registrar to give us the number again,
Page 34937
1 because it's not been recorded properly.
2 THE REGISTRAR: Your Honour, I said the Prlic Defence objections
3 to Prosecution exhibits tendered through Witness Tomic, Neven, shall be
4 given Exhibit number IC 00894. IC 00894.
5 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] We've got it now; that's
6 correct.
7 The position of the Trial Chamber regarding the scope of the
8 temporal jurisdiction of the second amended indictment.
9 At the hearing of the 4th of November, 2008, Mr. Kovacic and
10 Mr. Karnavas raised an issue regarding the interpretation of the temporal
11 scope of the second amended indictment, and requested a hearing to be
12 held that would be devoted to the issue. Such request, which was not
13 expressed in a very precise manner, was made during cross-examination of
14 Witness Neven Tomic by the Prosecutor with regard to facts about the
15 period following the Washington Agreement. The Trial Chamber understands
16 that the application by Mr. Kovacic and Mr. Karnavas deals both with the
17 temporal jurisdiction of the second amended indictment and the
18 admissibility of evidence related to facts following the period covered
19 by the second amended indictment.
20 With regard to the scope, the temporal scope of the second
21 amended indictment, the Trial Chamber recalls that the relevant part of
22 paragraph 15 of the second amended indictment reads as follows, I quote:
23 "Between the 18th of November, 1991, or before that date, and
24 April 1994, approximately or thereafter, various individuals set up a
25 joint criminal enterprise and took part in it in order to subject,
Page 34938
1 politically and militarily, Bosnian Muslims and other non-Croats living
2 in areas of the territory of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina that
3 were claimed as being part of the Croatian Community Future Republic
4 Herceg-Bosna, and to expel them, to ethnically cleanse the area or areas,
5 and to gather within a short or long term these areas within a Greater
6 Croatia
7 the short term or over time, and whether as part of the Republic of
8 Croatia
9 force, persecution, imprisonment and detention, forcible transfer and
10 deportation, appropriation and destruction of property, and other means
11 which constituted or involved the commission of crimes which are
12 punishable under Articles 2, 3, and 5 of the Tribunal Statute."
13 The Trial Chamber understands that the period covered by the
14 second amended indictment starts on the 18th of November, 1991, and goes
15 until April 1994, and that the accused are indicted for crimes alleged in
16 the second amended indictment, alleged to have been committed during that
17 period. Therefore, the second amended indictment does not, in the view
18 of the Trial Chamber, hold accused responsible for crimes that would have
19 been committed before or after that period of time.
20 With respect to the admissibility of evidence on facts that would
21 have occurred before or after that period of time, if such evidence is
22 relevant, has probative value, and meet the requirements for
23 admissibility of documents, as set forth by the Trial Chamber's decision
24 in this respect, the Trial Chamber may admit such documents if they aim
25 at proving the evidence that do not relate to a punishable behaviour by
Page 34939
1 the accused, but to a general requirement for their responsibility,
2 including the existence of a joint criminal enterprise which, in and of
3 itself, would not be a crime.
4 For the above reasons, the Trial Chamber considers that it is not
5 necessary to hold a hearing devoted to such issues. This is the Trial
6 Chamber's decision as to the temporal jurisdiction of the second amended
7 indictment.
8 I invite you to read it again later on, because it was a lengthy
9 oral decision which is very clear for the Judges of the Trial Chamber.
10 Let's have the witness brought in for the cross-examination to
11 continue. I believe Mr. Praljak is ready. He's going to start.
12 Mr. Kovacic, Mr. Praljak is going to take the floor, since we are
13 dealing with military-related issues?
14 MR. KOVACIC: [Interpretation] That's correct, Mr. President.
15 I would just like to remind the Court that according to the
16 unanimous decision of the Chamber before the Appeals Chamber rendered its
17 decision extending the right of the accused to cross-examine, that even
18 at that time the Trial Chamber had decided unanimously that Mr. Praljak
19 is qualified to examine the expert witness of the Prosecution,
20 Dr. Ewa Tabeau. Since this expert testimony is directly linked to that
21 evidence, I don't think that I have to repeat the arguments that were
22 presented before.
23 [The witness entered court]
24 THE WITNESS: Good morning.
25 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Good morning, Witness.
Page 34940
1 General Praljak is going to cross-examine you. He may proceed.
2 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation] Good morning, Your
3 Honours.
4 WITNESS: SVETLANA RADOVANOVIC [Resumed]
5 [The witness answered through interpreter]
6 Cross-examination by Mr. Praljak:
7 Q. Good morning, Professor Radovanovic.
8 A. Good morning.
9 Q. So, as you can see from where I sit, I am an accused in this
10 trial. But for the purposes of you and your examination, I am a
11 professor of Sociology. I have a degree in Sociology, so I feel that I
12 am able and qualified enough to go through some of the issues that you
13 addressed yesterday in your testimony.
14 I would kindly ask you, as I guide you through this process, not
15 to use scientific terms, such as creating a group, matching keys, and so
16 on, before I ask you to do so. I would like us to go through those tiny
17 elements first.
18 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation]
19 Also, Your Honours, I ask you to interrupt me if at any point you
20 want to ask any questions to clarify issues. Of course, this should not
21 be deducted from my time.
22 The year is 1991, and now I have to apologise to Mr. Karnavas for
23 repeating and going through some areas that he's already dealt with in
24 his examination. But at any rate, I hope you'll excuse me for that.
25 Q. In 1991, there was this census. You made a plan, decisions were
Page 34941
1 made, the methodology was put in place, and then some people got together
2 and you trained them.
3 They are the census-takers; is that correct?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. And since the census is to be taken in a relatively short period
6 of time, and there is a lot of stuff to take census of, there are many of
7 those census-takers; is that correct?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. The census-takers are human beings. As they go from household to
10 household, errors are made in asking questions, perhaps suggestions are
11 made, and the job is not done as it should be done.
12 As a scientific, do you assume or do you know that even at that
13 stage, we already have a certain number of errors and incorrect data?
14 A. Well, this is a rather complex question. All the instructors
15 training the people that will be doing the census try to train the
16 census-takers or interviewers how to do the proper methodology. They
17 receive instructions that they have to comply with. So even if they are
18 unable to memorise the instructions, they receive those instructions in
19 written form as an aid memoir.
20 In the course of the interview, an instructor monitors the
21 interviewer, by primarily checking whether any systemic errors are made;
22 for instance, if a question is asked in a different way, is
23 misinterpreted, or is skipped. But it is a fact there may be an
24 influence of the interviewer to a smaller or greater extent.
25 Q. Thank you very much?
Page 34942
1 A. But if I may, I would just like to add --
2 Q. Professor Radovanovic, if I had three or four hours to deal with
3 this issue, I think it would be enough for us to deal with everything
4 quite specifically, but my time is very limited and I have some major
5 issues that I need to deal with. So let us address those.
6 We know that errors are there, corrections, samples that are then
7 controlled -- undergo additional controls, but I'm sure you're familiar
8 with that. Let us move on.
9 When those papers are all put together in the same place, it's in
10 the Institute of Statistics
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. Yes, they will.
13 A. First, they go to the municipal commissions, the census
14 commissions, and then they are sent to the Institute of Statistics
15 Q. Let us see what is being recorded and why. We want to know the
16 first and the last name of a person, male or female. Then we want to
17 know how many men we have, how many women. We want to know the ethnic
18 affiliation, which is voluntary. You can decide what you want to put in
19 there. Then we want to know the age, children up until the age of three,
20 five, and how many elderly people. We want to know how -- the number of
21 livestock, sheep, cows. We want to know how much of the housing is
22 privately owned and how much is socially owned. We want to know how many
23 refrigerators we have in the state. Is that correct?
24 A. For the most part, yes. Statistics do not want to know the first
25 and last name. It's not interested in that.
Page 34943
1 Q. Yes, precisely. So, for instance, if we have a census in France
2 and we say that we will have an increase in the number of old people,
3 then if we determine that, then the president says, "Well, who is going
4 to feed all those old people? We don't have enough young people. So let
5 us increase the pensionable age"; would that be so?
6 A. Yes, more or less.
7 Q. Then we see the qualification of those people, how many people
8 graduated from high school, university, and so on; is that so?
9 A. Yes.
10 Q. Now we come to the important point. All these data will be
11 separated from the first and the last name?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. That's important. All the data, the acreage of land, the number
14 of refrigerators, these are all sets of data, separate sets of data; and
15 once they're processed, they have nothing to do with the first and the
16 last name; is that correct?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. Those papers that come to Sarajevo
19 scanner; is that correct?
20 A. In 1991, yes, that is correct. Before that, it did not happen.
21 Q. We speak about 1991. So the optical scanner, it scans, let's
22 say, Croats and then enters the value "1." I'm simplifying things. I'm
23 trying to simplify things so that they're extremely clear. Yugoslav
24 Croat 1, Croat 1, yet another Croat. In the end, we will get the total
25 of Yugoslav, of Timbuktuan?
Page 34944
1 A. I have to clarify this. All the questions that are asked in the
2 form are given a numerical form. The interviewer asks the question about
3 the national affiliation. He has to put down the word "Croat, Serb,
4 Muslim, Turk," and so on. Before statistical data are processed, they
5 have to be encoded. There are code books and nomenclatures which clearly
6 state, if it's a Croat, you have to write down "1"; if it's a Serb, you
7 have to write down "2"; if it's a Montenegrin, you have to write down
8 "3"; if it's an Englishman, "9"; if it's a Frenchman, "10"; Yugoslav, and
9 so on.
10 Q. Very well. Thank you. That's the point I was driving at.
11 First of all, the interviewers write in their own hand, and their
12 handwriting may differ. And as far as I know, there can be errors there,
13 because it may be misread; is that correct?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Thank you.
16 A. I would just like to give you an example.
17 In 1991, the optical scanner, not only in Bosnia but in many
18 republics, turned out to be quite impractical, because it requires you to
19 write down a figure very clearly. I was in charge of the 1991 census,
20 and it happened to us, after the optical scanning was done, that we had a
21 village of Velika Drenova, and we had all the population of Velika
22 Drenova turned out to be English people speaking Danish as their mother
23 tongue.
24 It's a small village. The problem was that the optical scanner
25 could not read the figure correctly: "9" was interpreted as 0, "6" was
Page 34945
1 interpreted as 0. I wrote a paper which was published about the problems
2 encountered in the 1991 census.
3 Q. That's what I wanted to hear from you. So at that time, when you
4 could see that the optical scanner caused mistakes, then you will get a
5 sample of, let's say, 100 forms; and then you process them manually to
6 see how many mistakes this optical scanner did?
7 A. No, we did not do that.
8 Q. How did you do it?
9 A. In the course of the processing, when you enter some data into
10 the optical scanner, and it turns out that they are wrong, you have to
11 consult the original source, the form, and check the suspicious data.
12 That's the first level of verification. People who are entering data at
13 the first stage do that.
14 After that, you have a number of other checks, logical and so on.
15 THE INTERPRETER: Interpreter's note: Could the speakers please
16 slow down and not overlap.
17 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation]
18 Q. Now, what I want to know is this: Let's say we have the
19 municipality of "A," and Judge Trechsel, His Honour Judge Trechsel, goes
20 there and he meets Praljak. We sit down and have a little chat, drink
21 some wine, and His Honour Judge Trechsel wants to know my ethnic
22 background. If he is allowed, and statistical processing is not done
23 because of the tax, the internal revenue system, or for the purposes of
24 the intelligence services, he cannot go to the database and learn from
25 the database whether I was a Croat, a Muslim, or what; is that correct?
Page 34946
1 A. Yes. He cannot get any individual data ... [No interpretation]
2 Q. So this is very important. We separated those sets, and we know,
3 for that locality, that there is a certain number of Croats, Bosniaks,
4 Serbs, Yugoslavs, and that a certain percentage of housing is privately
5 owned, social owned, and so on and so forth. But we do not know -- we
6 cannot establish a link between the first name and the last name and all
7 the other data; is that correct?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. This brings that point to an end. Let's move on.
10 This was 1991, and now we come to the war.
11 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] In light of what
12 General Praljak just said and your answer, I would like to refer to the
13 encoding process.
14 In my understanding of what you said, ma'am, the forms are filled
15 out by those people who are asked questions in the census, and then the
16 person is charged of encoding, in other words, given a figure. For
17 instance, if it's Muslim ethnicity, then a given figure will be given.
18 So I wonder, I have questions about those who actually performed the
19 encoding.
20 Could there be political belongings of these people and,
21 therefore, they would tend to say there are more Muslims than Croats?
22 You have been involved. I would like to know whether these
23 people who are performing the encoding were actually controlled, in a
24 way, or supervised.
25 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] We are talking about encoding; not
Page 34947
1 decoding, but encoding. There are special code books for every area;
2 ethnic background, profession, the line of work, education, gender,
3 marital status, and so on and so forth. All this is expressed in
4 figures, and the figures are in code books. Encoding is done by
5 professionals. This is a major task, and, again, there is a competition
6 for temporary employment. People who are selected are educated,
7 literate, capable of performing a task. They are provided with a set of
8 instructions, and they have a controller.
9 I personally believe that whoever has done that job was good, and
10 it has nothing to do with politics. It is not just one person who
11 encodes the one village. We're talking about census regions which can be
12 part of a settlement. For instance, Mostar can be divided into several
13 regions, and when you put them together, you end up with the whole
14 picture.
15 I believe when it comes to people who encode data, there is such
16 a possibility, but there has never been any abuse. However, this has
17 never been investigated, and it's very hard for me to claim with any
18 certainty that there, indeed, has not been abuse at any time.
19 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Mr. Praljak, you may proceed.
20 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation]
21 Q. Professor, now we come to the war. Let's not go into the genesis
22 of the conflict, because this is not what we're here for. All sorts of
23 things happened to people. They move, they leave their place of
24 residence, they're expelled, they're ethnically cleansed. Whether they
25 are refugees or displaced persons is a legal issue, not a demographic
Page 34948
1 issue; wouldn't that be correct?
2 A. Yes, it is correct. And if you look at the instruction for the
3 registration of voters, OSC provides its explanation, which says
4 displaced persons are all the persons who have voluntarily or forcibly
5 moved out of their place of origin. The legal definition is something
6 else. The statistics don't have its definition. But if we were to
7 embark on a research, we would rely on the legal definition thereof.
8 Q. That's an entirely different story.
9 In 1997 or 1998, OSC says to Bosnia-Herzegovina and its state
10 organs, "You will not have nothing to do with the elections, it will be
11 our job"; is that correct?
12 A. I don't know.
13 Q. You don't know. Very well. Let's move on, then.
14 However, at that moment in 1997 and 1998, according to you and
15 the data known to you, how many people of all ethnic affiliations had
16 changed their place of residence? How many went to Germany, Hungary
17 Finland
18 you and the data available to you, was that figure over two million?
19 A. I have read different authors, originating from different states
20 of the former Yugoslavia
21 millions.
22 Q. It has been noted as anything between two million upwards. OSC
23 says, "Now you have to vote. Register to vote." You can register from
24 any place of residence where you reside now. You can vote anywhere in
25 Bosnia-Herzegovina; is that correct?
Page 34949
1 A. Not exactly, but there is such a possibility. OSC, according to
2 the instruction that I am aware of, says the following: All citizens of
3 Bosnia and Herzegovina over the age of 18 can register to vote. They
4 have to be on the 1991 census. However, a precedent is made here and it
5 is said, if you're not on the 1991 census, you can still prove that
6 you're citizens. If you don't have a single document to prove you're
7 citizenship, you can, in the presence of a judge, in the presence of a
8 religious leader, in the presence of two witnesses who will testify on
9 your behalf and are registered in the census, and they can all say that
10 you are a citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina. And based on that, you will be
11 given the right to vote because you are, indeed, a citizen of
12 Bosnia-Herzegovina.
13 Q. All right. Let's assume that all of us sitting in this room were
14 residents of the Municipality A; and for various reasons that are
15 explained by Lee, by the law, sociology, and politology, we moved out.
16 For example, His Honour Judge Trechsel lives in [indiscernible] and deals
17 with [indiscernible] equation; His Honour Judge Antonetti is admiring
18 Rodin's sculptures in Paris
19 is drinking Tokaj on Balaton Lake
20 municipality; and from the representative offices of Bosnia-Herzegovina
21 in the respective states, they get forms to register for votes?
22 A. If they're citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina, that is possible.
23 Q. They all say, "We will vote in the Municipality A that we're
24 talking about." Wouldn't that be the situation?
25 A. It is a recommendation for them to vote in the municipality where
Page 34950
1 they resided in 1991, but there is again a precedent.
2 Q. Very well.
3 A. And it says, due to the number of displaced persons, irrespective
4 of the motives for which they were dispelled, it is also possible for
5 them to vote in their current place of residence if you can prove that
6 you arrived before April 1996. I can't give you the exact date. You can
7 even vote in a municipality where you want to vote, if you reside abroad,
8 if you have valid prove why you want to vote there. In other words,
9 there are precedents, and you can vote even in your future place of
10 residence or your future municipality.
11 Q. I understand that, but let's talk about the most important point,
12 which is the following: There's voluntarism involved there. Everybody
13 has the right to vote of their free will?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. And after that, when we come up with the sum of those who voted,
16 it is an arbitrary sum?
17 A. With respect to the census, yes, that will be the case.
18 Q. Yes, with respect to the census. That depends on people's way of
19 thinking. Some will say, "I've had enough of the state, of the war, of
20 politics, and I don't want to vote"?
21 A. To this very day, in peace time, you have people who don't want
22 to come to vote; they don't want to come to the polling station.
23 Q. According to the data available to you at the recent elections in
24 Bosnia and Herzegovina which took place a couple of months ago, of
25 anything between 800.000 and a million people residing outside of
Page 34951
1 Bosnia-Herzegovina and are still residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina, only
2 30.000 registered for local elections?
3 A. I wouldn't be able to talk about figures, but, yes, the figure is
4 low. I know that.
5 Q. Yes, the figure is low. Now we have ended up with a sum which is
6 very important for us to be able to see what is the turnout of voters,
7 but we don't know what else to do with that, in terms of scientific
8 approach?
9 A. Yes, more or less, that will be the case.
10 Q. Let's go on and move a step forward.
11 Ms. Tabeau says, "I don't have any money. There was no money at
12 the time for a new census. We can't go to the same municipality and do
13 the exercise all over again. There's no money." Then she says the
14 following, "I'm going to take this sum that I have received, and I'll try
15 and see what had happened there in migration terms." She says as
16 following, "First of all, we have to say, from the people who registered,
17 who is of what ethnic background, because they don't have to declare that
18 when they vote. They don't have to say, 'I am going to register as a
19 Croat'"?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. And then --
22 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation] I am speeding because of
23 the damn time.
24 Q. Then on the list in Municipality A, she finds the name
25 "Karnavas," and she doesn't know what to do with that family name,
Page 34952
1 whether that person is an American, a Greek, or something else. Then she
2 refers to the database in the census, but there she can only check
3 whether "Karnavas" was registered in that municipality. Again, she can't
4 find his ethnic background?
5 A. Yes, she can, because in a census, in what Bosnia and Herzegovina
6 has at the time, there are names. Dr. Tabeau will find the material of
7 the entire census of Bosnia-Herzegovina by names. First, there is name,
8 then data for the municipality, for the census district, males, females,
9 and so on and so forth. Whether the name is transcribed accurately or
10 not is a different story.
11 Q. Are you saying that she has papers rather than sets?
12 A. No. Dr. Tabeau will have that in electronic form. In an
13 electronic form, she will have the entire census of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
14 and she will have individual data. Everything has been scanned, so the
15 first datum is name. If you photocopy once in the list, it will start
16 with a name which is composed differently. First of all, you will have
17 "Svetlana Radovanovic, gender," but it will start with the municipality
18 and the electoral district. Everybody who is -- who knows what they're
19 talking about will know what figures stand for. So she will end up with
20 computer codes where she will be able to find the name. But the number
21 of mistakes in the names was absolutely incredible and beyond belief.
22 Q. Let's take, for example, if you want to learn Petkovic's ethnic
23 background through their name, how many Petkovics are there in Serbia
24 A. I don't know, but I know how many Kovacevics there are in Croatia
25 because it was recently on a pop quiz.
Page 34953
1 Q. Croatian and Serbian family names are very frequent and they're
2 very common, and it is almost impossible to determine the ethnic
3 background of a person sharing a certain family name?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. For example, Slobodan Praljak, if we are trying to assess the
6 situation, Slobodan Praljak would be a Serb sooner than a Croat; wouldn't
7 that be correct?
8 A. Yes. If that's the methodology you want to use, then, yes, I
9 would be tempted to say "yes."
10 Q. Very well. So, in this way, the lady in question arrived at a
11 certain number of data on the people who voluntarily voted. That figure
12 is not big. It has to be augmented. Did she join to that number the
13 person's family members?
14 A. I don't know, and it does not say anything about that in the
15 report. I can only tell you what I think.
16 In the case that we are discussing, and we are discussing the
17 census compared to the electoral rolls, she does not have joint family
18 members if she is certain about the name. But Dr. Tabeau says something
19 else in her report -- or, rather, her testimony that I listened to. She
20 says, "When I'm not certain -- when I wasn't certain about a name, a
21 family name or a personal name, I used the household method." That
22 method is absolutely nonexistent in statistics, but it exists in the
23 computer code. Members of a household are added to a certain name.
24 "Household" is an economic category which can be complex. It can be a
25 family or it does not have to be a family. "Household" can be composed
Page 34954
1 of people who are related, but it doesn't have to be. Living in a
2 household does not mean that everybody has to share the same family name.
3 In the former Yugoslavia
4 share one household. For example, you had parents living with their
5 married daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren; and, automatically, you
6 have two family names. For example, I could be living with my son-in-law
7 and my daughter. We would still be one household with two different
8 family names, because my son-in-law, my daughter, and my grandchildren
9 would bear a different family name than me.
10 Q. And Mrs. Tabeau, for the lack of any better elements, used
11 something that you called a "key," and she added that to the basic
12 person; and then she would say this is a Croat, a Serb, or a Muslim,
13 without going into the issue of mixed marriages and so forth. Is that
14 true?
15 A. No, it's not. When you say "key," this is the way how you can
16 match things. My key would be the name, the family name, and so on and
17 so forth. This key, the name, the family name and the year of birth, is
18 something that I migrate into the census, and I look for the matches.
19 Whatever is matched, I can then say, "Yes, now I have a match between
20 Svetlana Radovanovic, on the one hand, but I have three
21 Svetlana Radovanovics in the census." Under the assumption that her name
22 is in the electoral roll, Dr. Tabeau will end up with three
23 Svetlana Radovanovics of different ages, and then she will say, "I have
24 this as a match, I will take her, and I will discard the other two."
25 Maybe she can say it can be any of the three. But I think the fact that
Page 34955
1 you're not absolutely certain must have an effect on the number of
2 matched cases.
3 Q. And we will be finished with this topic soon. Let us assume that
4 we have Municipality A and that in Municipality A there live a certain
5 number of Croats and Serbs, but there are no Muslims. There used to be
6 Muslims, but there are no Muslims anymore.
7 A. When?
8 Q. In 1997. In the census, you had a certain number of Serbs,
9 Croats and Muslims; and now, for some reason, Muslims left, and Serbs and
10 Croats remain there in a certain proportion. But for some reason, Croats
11 and Serbs say, "We don't want to get involved in politics. We don't want
12 to register to vote. There are no parties that we want to vote for. We
13 don't care ," and Muslims, who are no longer living there, register to
14 vote. What would we get then? According to Ms. Tabeau, what kind of a
15 set would we have?
16 A. Well, all those people who did not register, you could not get a
17 match.
18 THE INTERPRETER: Interpreter's note: The speakers are kindly
19 asked to not overlap because it is impossible to interpret.
20 A. So if you don't have people who registered, then you cannot match
21 them. But if they are in one set, you will find them in the other set,
22 too.
23 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation]
24 Q. I asked you a quite specific question. So those two groups,
25 Croats and Serbs, did not register to vote. Will this result in a fact
Page 34956
1 that with the application of Ms. Tabeau's method, there will be no Croats
2 in that place because they did not register to vote?
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. That's what I wanted you to say, but now we can have the whole
5 situation --
6 A. But, please, let me just -- I apologise. I did not give you an
7 accurate answer.
8 There will be Croats as they existed in 1991, but there will be
9 no Croats as recorded in 1997. So you could see that there were a
10 certain number of Croats in that place in 1991, according to the census;
11 but if they did not register to vote, they do not exist on the voters'
12 lists. If they do not exist in the voters' list, you cannot find them in
13 the census in order to be able to say, well, this is a Croat, so you
14 cannot achieve a match. Then in 1997, you will say, "I did not find, or
15 I found three, or I found five." So they cannot appear there unless they
16 are registered.
17 Q. Mrs. Radovanovic, that's what I wanted you to say. So it's
18 possible, it's a possible scenario, creating such sets can lead to stuff
19 situation, where in reality we have only Croats living in that area, or
20 only Croats and Serbs; yet, because they did not register to vote, they
21 disappear from Ewa Tabeau's tables; is that correct?
22 A. Yes. For 1997, that would be correct.
23 Q. Thank you very much. Now we can make all kinds of permutations.
24 JUDGE PRANDLER: I kept silent so far, but I have to say again,
25 please, don't torture the translators. It is really very difficult to
Page 34957
1 follow you. You speak, both of you, in your mother tongue, and that is
2 why you have to take care to stop after a question and after an answer
3 and then continue. Please be so kind to be kind the interpreters.
4 Thank you.
5 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation] Your Honour, we are really
6 trying. Please believe us when we say that. But it always ends up this
7 way. I have to apologise both to the interpreters and to you.
8 Q. So that's what I wanted to hear from you, this conclusion.
9 By the application of this method that we now explained step by
10 step, what Ewa Tabeau obtained in this way is a virtual world, a
11 nonexistent world that may contain a number of errors and, therefore, may
12 not have anything to do with the actual situation in the field in 1997;
13 is that correct?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. So, when His Honour Judge Antonetti, referring to the table
16 yesterday, makes the calculation, and His Honour Judge Antonetti is very
17 good with his sums, is it true that he is making a total of virtual
18 figures and that they may correspond, but because of the application of
19 this method, you indicated that the margin of error is up to 60 per cent
20 in relation to the actual situation in the field in 1997; is that
21 correct?
22 A. Well, I couldn't really say "yes," because there's another
23 element here. The figures that you're looking at, that Dr. Ewa Tabeau
24 obtained, are figures where she says -- she says, "I claim that these are
25 the persons," but we do not know how reliability the figures are. We
Page 34958
1 know that the figures are not full because of all the people who did not
2 register to vote. We know for sure that there were modifications in the
3 application of the matching method. We don't know to what extent and
4 what they were.
5 We know that for this -- for the figures that she's showing
6 there, that there must be some people that we can claim with some
7 reliability that they really exist. But now as to what part and what
8 proportion of people, we can say that they possibly existed, but there is
9 a high degree of doubt. I cannot tell you that. This is what I was
10 talking about yesterday, that the Prosecution expert provided the
11 statistics of the matching process, and she said that, "This matching key
12 is reliability and, that is how I managed to obtain a 50 per cent match.
13 I have a high degree of acceptability -- I can claim with a high degree
14 of acceptability that these are the same persons. And as for the rest, I
15 used a different key. The probability that these people are one and the
16 same people, that they're properly identified, is lower ."
17 This is very important. So I cannot claim what is accurate and
18 what is not accurate. What I can claim is that data are unreliable.
19 Q. Mrs. Radovanovic, this is what I wanted to ask you, but let us go
20 a little bit deeper into that and we'll leave it at that.
21 If you had a student and if you gave him this as an exercise,
22 would you ask them, at any -- every step of the matching process, to
23 calculate the margin of error; is that correct, would you do that?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. And in that manner --
Page 34959
1 A. Yes, but they cannot calculate the margin of error.
2 Q. Yes, reliability.
3 A. The degree of reliability, in light of the matching key, is high.
4 Q. Yes, I misspoke. The degree of reliability.
5 But now you tell me -- or, rather, you told us yesterday that the
6 degree of reliability of these data -- or, rather, the degree of
7 unreliability was between 30 and 60 per cent; is that correct?
8 A. In light of the data sources that have the margin of error
9 between 30 and 60 per cent, I cannot say that the reliability of data is
10 greater than that. With reference to the data sources, I can say that
11 the reliability is doubtful to that degree, at least. Let me underline,
12 for statisticians and demographers, the non-existence of data, which is,
13 in fact, then when you invent the data, it is an error.
14 Q. If you create data in a scientifically unacceptable manner?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. Now, with reference to something that Mr. Karnavas asked you, in
17 every other aspect, did she apply the same or similar methodology?
18 A. Could you please be more specific? What do you mean, "every
19 other aspect"?
20 Q. What she says about the people killed, wounded. In other words,
21 when she created the sets, did she apply the same unreliable methodology
22 as she did here. So we don't know what area was covered, we have a
23 smaller set, and the results are transferred to a larger set without any
24 critical approach, as she did when it came to the killed and the wounded,
25 as you told us yesterday?
Page 34960
1 A. Well, we cannot generalise. When it comes to the ethnic
2 background and refugees, the area that Dr. Tabeau is analysing is quite
3 clearly defined. It's the eight municipalities. So we know the area.
4 But the methodology that she uses to determine the ethnic background and
5 the number of refugees and displaced persons is completely wrong and
6 scientifically unacceptable.
7 You asked me to tell you whether it is the same. In the two
8 analyses that she also conducted, we don't know the area. The area is
9 not defined. There is East Mostar, but we don't know what that is, to
10 the left of the Neretva River
11 Another thing that is quite interesting: The methodology used to
12 determine the ethnic background is not the same. So Dr. Tabeau did not
13 take the first name, the last name, and year of birth from the register
14 and then compare it to the census and then determine ethnic background,
15 but what she said is, "I'm going to take the first name and last name,
16 and then I will take the frequency of the name."
17 So we're not talking about matching. We're now talking about the
18 frequency method. "I will determine the ethnic background." So if there
19 are more Svetlanas among Serbs and Svetlana is a Serb, and if there are
20 more Svetlanas among Croats and she is a Croat, so it is not a matching
21 method, but frequency. But when it came to the war hospital books, the
22 frequency method is not used by her, but she says, "I have experts
23 assisting us to determine, on the basis of the first name and the last
24 name, who these people are."
25 So we are talking about two methods: The frequency method and
Page 34961
1 experts who determine the ethnic background. So it's a new method, as
2 opposed to the determination of the ethnic background on the basis of the
3 census results.
4 Q. Is this scientifically acceptable anywhere in the world?
5 A. I have never encountered anything of the sort, but what I find
6 more interesting here is why the same method that Dr. Ewa Tabeau claims
7 is a good one, and that is matching, is not applied in both reports,
8 because the same data exists in both cases; first name, last name, year
9 of birth, year of death.
10 So I think --
11 Q. Mrs. Radovanovic, among Muslims and Serbs, and even among Croats,
12 is "Zoran" a very frequent name?
13 A. Well, I did not really study the frequency of names, but I know
14 Muslims, Croats and Serbs alike whose first name is "Zoran." I don't
15 know the frequency of the name.
16 Q. Let's say "Jasmin," "Jasmina," and so on and so forth. Can we
17 consider this method to be unreliable to a high degree; is that correct?
18 A. Well, it's not scientific method at all; it's just a coffeehouse
19 debate.
20 Q. Could you please look at 3D 03259.
21 A. Well, I can't really find my way around, because I don't have the
22 numbers.
23 Q. 3259. Somebody will assist you.
24 A. Oh, yes, I'm sorry.
25 Q. Could you please look at page 446. You have a table here.
Page 34962
1 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Mr. Praljak, who authored this
2 document?
3 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation] The author of this
4 document is General Drekovic. It's a photocopy. General Drekovic became
5 the commander of the 4th Corps after General Pasalic. In his book, he
6 provides some tables, and I would just like us to look at them very
7 briefly.
8 So this is the information provided by General Drekovic, who in
9 late 1993 became the commander of the 4th Corps, and that's the BH army
10 corps that defended Mostar, as they say.
11 Q. So, madam, in this table - we will say that, well, Their Honours
12 know that, but you don't know that - we see that there is the 6th Corps.
13 The Judges know where it was and so on.
14 But now I would like you to look at page 475. Have you been able
15 to find it?
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. Now, let us just look at those figures, and could you please
18 memorise them? Mr. Drekovic says that in that corps, which in the
19 previous -- but I will explain that later, probably, that by the 19th of
20 January, 1994, so in 1993 and in the 19 days of the year 1994, 579
21 soldiers were killed in his corps, and that he had 1.168 wounded.
22 We can simply say that; is that right?
23 A. Yes, that's what it says here.
24 Q. Yes, that's what it says here. Now, if, for any reason
25 whatsoever, but we will not do that because it is not proper, if we were
Page 34963
1 to accept Ewa Tabeau's information about some 500 people who were killed
2 in Mostar between May 1993 and April 1994, could we then say, "But these
3 are all soldiers who were killed," because Drekovic says here that he had
4 579 men killed and 1.000 and so on wounded. 579, yes.
5 So there's no civilians killed, it's all clean, there were more
6 soldiers who got killed than were listed as killed in the war hospital
7 books or in the register of births. So if we were to play her game,
8 would we conclude that?
9 I'm sorry, I'm sorry. So if we were to play this matching game,
10 could we then say, "Well, Your Honours, Ewa Tabeau claims that there are
11 500 people who are dead, and Mr. Drekovic says, 'I have 579 dead
12 soldiers,' so all the people who are dead are soldiers"?
13 A. With all due respect, Mr. Praljak, I would not like to play this
14 game. This is really guesswork, and I would not like to engage in that.
15 Q. Yes. We will not engage in that, because we know for sure that
16 civilians were killed, too. But then it should not be calculated using
17 Ms. Ewa Tabeau's method, but you will agree with me that the forensic
18 medical documents are the basis for the determination of who got killed
19 or who died where, when, why?
20 A. I will agree with you then, and I can challenge, from the
21 scientific point of view, the figure that is given, the 539 people, but
22 it has nothing to do with this document. I can draw your attention to
23 the following thing:
24 Dr. Tabeau, as you saw, does mention the cause of death in her
25 report. In the register of deaths, no cause of death is recorded. There
Page 34964
1 is another thing which is called a death certificate. A death
2 certificate is a document that is issued by the coroner, and this death
3 certificate is taken to the registry and it is kept there in permanence.
4 But the information from the death certificate is not recorded in the
5 register of deaths.
6 Dr. Tabeau does not refer to the death certificates as her data
7 source, but she takes the cause of death from the register of deaths.
8 That's what she says.
9 Q. So, very quickly, you already spoke about the term "siege" that
10 is used by Ms. Tabeau. Did you find anywhere that she defined what a
11 siege was?
12 A. Yes, that's what I said yesterday. There is no definition of
13 "siege."
14 Q. Moreover, we're given a military map to depict the places where
15 HVO units in Mostar, the BiH Army, and the units of VRS; did you see
16 that?
17 A. I received some maps, I can't say they were military maps, and
18 they depicted the division of Neretva into West and East Mostar, by the
19 Neretva. I never asked for military maps. I never received military
20 them. I probably wouldn't be able to use them. If Dr. Tabeau had used
21 them herself, then I would certainly study any such maps very carefully.
22 Q. Madam, I would now kindly ask you to take -- I'm just looking for
23 the number. I'm talking about her two reports. I'll probably have the
24 time only for the first one, and the number is P09837. These are
25 Ms. Tabeau's reports, firstly.
Page 34965
1 A. I need assistance. I can't --
2 Q. P9837.
3 A. What report?
4 Q. About the people who were killed. And while you're looking for
5 it, let me ask you this: The term "killed" and "fallen" in the Serbian,
6 is it one and the same thing? Is it true that soldiers fall and killing
7 is a criminal act?
8 A. A fallen person does not have to refer to just a soldier. You
9 can fall in a traffic accident. The causes of death are separate, and
10 we're talking about violent deaths. For example, violent deaths may be
11 due to an accident, a murder, and so on and so forth. So there is a very
12 exact division, because all violent deaths do not imply only people who
13 fall in the war. There are also people who were killed in accidents even
14 during the war.
15 Q. In this part that speaks about the deaths in East Mostar, did you
16 ever come across any suicides, that persons were killed in traffic
17 accidents, that they were killed from mishandling of arms?
18 A. Dr. Tabeau did draw a table with 497 persons. I may not be
19 correct, but if you allow me to refer to the material --
20 Q. Be my guest, of course.
21 This is table 16. In B/C/S, it is the 26th of 32 pages, table 6.
22 A. No, I'm not talking about any tables. I'm talking about a list
23 of the persons who were registered as dead in the death certificate or
24 death registry and people who died in the war hospital. According to the
25 military hospital book, 474; and according to the death registry, there
Page 34966
1 were 400 and something.
2 If you look at the lists, you will come across a number of
3 persons who were killed in traffic accidents or other sorts of accidents,
4 and I believe that there is one person who committed suicide, and I quote
5 their names in my report. I'll try and find them and tell you exactly
6 which persons I am referring to when I speak about these cases.
7 Q. Ms. Radovanovic, I apologise. I don't really have an interest in
8 those people.
9 A. I apologise. I just came across it. It says "Gemma, Handzo,
10 born in 1959, was killed in a traffic accident near Tekija," and there
11 are other such cases and persons.
12 Q. Could you please now open table number 3 for me on page 10. This
13 is Ms. Tabeau's report about deaths in East Mostar.
14 A. Yes, I've got it in front of me.
15 Q. Please, this is what Ms. Tabeau says here. The table is here;
16 and for Mostar, we have "Unknown, 135," yes, "389," "524"; and then she
17 says, and I quote: "The total number ..." --
18 This is an overview of valid cases for municipalities, and for
19 relevance for the siege of East Mostar. Ms. Tabeau says that this is
20 relevant for the siege of East Mostar.
21 Then, further on at the bottom, she says this: "The total number
22 for Mostar municipality is 524 records, see tables 3 and 4, out of
23 which," pay attention, "out of which only 373 records fall under the
24 strict requirement of being relevant to the siege of Mostar." In
25 brackets: "I.E., death occurred in East Mostar during the period May
Page 34967
1 1993 to May 1994." Closed brackets.
2 Ms. Radovanovic, if somebody says scientifically that this is the
3 number that fall under the strict scientific criteria, how would you go
4 about augmenting that number? The augmentation of that number, wouldn't
5 that be a game of adding apples to pears to mice and so on and so forth?
6 A. I wouldn't go about augmenting the number. However, the
7 explanation itself speaks about all sorts of combinations, speculations
8 that went into the figure. That fact that it falls under the strict
9 requirement of relevance, and you still don't know what the criteria are,
10 but I believe this is based strictly on dates, i.e., on years.
11 Q. Madam, please open the following page, and you will find table 4
12 on it, and everything is repeated there, and Ms. Tabeau also repeats
13 here: The number of 373 records, recorded in East Mostar during the
14 siege, is considered relevant and valid for the purposes of the analysis
15 of the victims of the siege.
16 Please, I would like to hear your comment.
17 A. I don't have any comment, sir. Again, how shall I put it? This
18 is Dr. Tabeau's position, which is not based on the reliability of the
19 data that she has. If you don't know, what area are you dealing with?
20 If you don't know, I really can't comment upon this. This is another
21 speculation, another statistical speculation on her part.
22 Q. That's one problem. However, a second problem is this: When she
23 established the figure of 373, without talking about soldiers or anybody
24 else, and she says, about that figure, that it is relevant and valid, how
25 would it occur to you to augment it, and what would you then do with that
Page 34968
1 augmented figure?
2 A. Dr. Tabeau has two sources for reliable and valid data. One
3 source is the book of births, and that's what she looks at; and the
4 second one is the war hospital. Then she is combining and says, "This is
5 what I'm going to take from the register. I'm going to add to that what
6 I found at the war hospital. This is what I saw in the document called
7 "Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina," and this is what I saw in the Croatian
8 Army. Then I am going to put all that together and end up with 529."
9 Now, when you look at all these tables that you have in front of
10 you in the report, and when you then look at the table that -- table that
11 gives you the grand total that refers to all victims, and their number is
12 539, then you will see all sorts of combinations that went into coming up
13 with that figure.
14 Just let me -- bear with me for a moment. I'm trying to find the
15 table. I've marked it in my Serbian version -- or, rather, I did not.
16 Please bear with me. I would like to show you what sources she used and
17 how they contradict each other.
18 Look at table 13, please. These are grand totals of Ms. Tabeau's
19 findings. This is an overview of accepted records of the sources, when
20 she looked at the death register, the war hospital. I'm not going into
21 the method of how she segregated cases. She said that there are 539
22 cases of whom she identified 370 in the death registry, and I accepted
23 this. To the 134 from the war hospital, I added the 370 because they
24 were taken from the war hospital as accepted.
25 However, in the documents of the army, in a document entitled
Page 34969
1 "Dead Soldiers" or "Fallen Soldiers of the BiH Army," which comprises all
2 soldiers from 1992 to 1995, I found 29, and they were not in any of my
3 two previous sources. I found them, and based on the date, they died
4 from April 1992, and I added them as well, and in the same source, I
5 found the fallen soldiers. So that would be the grand total.
6 All the tables in front and most of the story, with all due
7 respect to Dr. Tabeau, are actually the analysis of the sources based on
8 the method what would happen if that was the case, and the result is a
9 product of a number of statistical speculations found in the previous
10 tables.
11 Q. Thank you very much. Ms. Radovanovic, could you please look at
12 table 5 for me. It says here, and I'm going to ask you something: "The
13 number of deaths as a result of the siege, as recorded in the books of
14 the Mostar war hospital." In your science, and particularly in sociology
15 and sociological-psychology, there is something that is known under the
16 name of correlation, putting two variables together. Are you familiar
17 with that?
18 A. Of course I am.
19 Q. According to what you know, Ms. Radovanovic, the existence of
20 correlation, can you automatically say that one is the cause of the
21 other?
22 A. You are talking about science, but there's no science here.
23 There's no correlation here. This is just an arithmetic exercise. She
24 says, "I took this from here, that from there and I'm going to give you
25 what the result of the math exercise is."
Page 34970
1 Q. I'm going to assume even further. Even if we assume that we will
2 accept Ms. Tabeau's numbers and figures, would it be admissible to write
3 that this was the result of the siege? A siege would be a variable in
4 this case. What would be the correlation between that variable and this,
5 and can that first variable be proclaimed the cause without analysing
6 every single thing that went into each death individually?
7 A. If you don't know the cause, you can't proclaim any correlation,
8 as such. If you don't know, that goes into that correlation. Maybe
9 Dr. Tabeau knows, but she does not give us a definition. Maybe she
10 should explain the correlation between the cases and the siege that she
11 mentions.
12 Q. And here, then, we would have to know - and we don't know - who
13 was firing, from what side fire was opened, to what place, whether the
14 fact that fire was opened, was it opened on a military or a civilian
15 target. This should have been documented, photographed, and then we
16 would come to the cause. Would that be a valid method; maybe very
17 general, but this would be the cause for a possible correlation, wouldn't
18 it?
19 A. Yes. Yesterday, I spoke about the three methodological steps
20 that Dr. Tabeau makes mistakes in. One is analysis, and the second is
21 causal research. "Causal research" means establishing cause and
22 consequences. If you don't know the cause, you can't explain
23 consequences, or you can explain it any way you want.
24 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation] Your Honours, how much
25 time do I still have left?
Page 34971
1 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] I think you have used one hour
2 and six minutes, so you must have, at most, four minutes left, since you
3 said yesterday that you needed one hour and ten minutes.
4 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation] Very well.
5 Q. Then let me go back to the table that you, Ms. Radovanovic,
6 looked at yesterday, and that's table -- I have it here. Just a moment,
7 please bear with me. Table 16. We looked at it yesterday. Please,
8 table 16. This is the one that I want to look at with you. It's the
9 same document, table 16, page 26.
10 A. I have it.
11 Q. Again, in point four, Ms. Tabeau says the causes of death of the
12 victims of siege, there is no doubt in her mind that these were the
13 victims of the siege. But let's go on. It says in table 16, the
14 distribution of the victims of the siege according to the cause of death,
15 and yesterday you stated, Ms. Radovanovic, that 76 fell victim to
16 shelling, 34 were killed in some way; gunshots, 18, wounding, 6;
17 murder, 1.
18 It seems that "killed" and "murdered" is not the same. When it
19 says "murdered," that would be homicide, and "killed" would be just
20 fallen in action or something like that?
21 A. I don't know. In my view, murdered and killed are one and the
22 same, but there are also instances of suicide. So I really don't know
23 what Dr. Tabeau meant when she says "murdered."
24 Q. And, now, when we added all that up, we ended up with 135 people
25 altogether, and Ms. Tabeau says, and I quote:
Page 34972
1 "It is clear that a large number of deaths were reported without
2 mentioning any cause of death at all (404)."
3 The doctors or whoever was there looking at those bodies did not
4 mention anything. They were ignorant. In 404 cases, they didn't mention
5 anything. But let's go on:
6 "This doesn't mean that the unknown causes were unrelated to the
7 siege."
8 For God's sake, Ms. Radovanovic, my brain has stopped working
9 when I was reading Ms. Tabeau's report. Can you understand what she's
10 saying?
11 A. She's just speculating, Ms. Tabeau is.
12 MS. WEST: This is beyond the pale. Those comments are not
13 needed here.
14 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Are you done, Mr. Praljak?
15 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation] Just a second.
16 Q. Now, Ms. Tabeau says, "I have a set of 135 units. That's not
17 sufficient." Then she says, it is probable, it doesn't mean that it
18 isn't. So if it means that it doesn't mean that it isn't, it means that
19 it may be. Then she says, "On the basis of the assumption," "on the
20 basis of the assumption," please read that closely, that unknown causes
21 may have the same distribution as the well-established causes. A fuller
22 estimate was made and presented in table 6.
23 So could you please tell me, Ms. Radovanovic, what assumptions
24 must exist in science in order for you to be able to go from a smaller
25 set to the larger set, claiming that you are applying proper scientific
Page 34973
1 methodology?
2 A. Well, I don't really know what assumptions these are in
3 scientific work.
4 Q. Let me tell you. For instance, in physics, as a science, we can
5 say that the space, the universe, is amorphous. We can say that if in an
6 area we have a density which is such-and-such and it has been proven that
7 the universe is amorphous in every direction, then this density that we
8 managed to calculate as such in a smaller area, we can extrapolate that
9 to every other area, assuming that the universe is amorphous. Can you
10 agree with me?
11 A. Yes, I can, although I'm not a physicist.
12 Q. But do we have that here?
13 A. NO.
14 THE ACCUSED PRALJAK: [Interpretation] Thank you very much, Your
15 Honours. This completes my examination.
16 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] All right. We're going to
17 take a 20-minute break, after which Ms. Alaburic will have the floor for
18 the cross-examination.
19 --- Recess taken at 10.34 a.m.
20 --- On resuming at 10.55 a.m.
21 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] It's time to resume. I think
22 that Mr. Stringer wanted to take the floor.
23 MR. STRINGER: Thank you, Mr. President.
24 Good morning, Your Honours and counsel.
25 Just a very brief request. I'm being told that we have about 138
Page 34974
1 documentary exhibits that the various Defence teams are tendering into
2 evidence through the previous witness, Mr. Tomic, in the various IC lists
3 that have been filed, and one of which I think was the 1D -- or the Prlic
4 team filed their IC list yesterday afternoon at the beginning of the
5 court, which is what the Rule requires. But because of the number of
6 documents involved and the quick turnaround time, we're asking to have a
7 very short extension of time until tomorrow morning for the Prosecution
8 to file its response to the Defence IC documents.
9 [Trial Chamber confers]
10 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] All right. The Chamber has
11 just deliberated and grants this request, if there are 138 documents that
12 require some time for you to consider them, and, therefore, you are given
13 time until tomorrow morning.
14 Madam Alaburic, you have the floor now.
15 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation], Your Honours, good morning. Good
16 morning to everyone in the courtroom.
17 Cross-examination by Ms. Alaburic:
18 Q. First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Vesna
19 Alaburic. I am an attorney from Zagreb
20 General Milivoj Petkovic. You won't have many problems with me in my
21 cross-examination, because, as you know, statistics was always the most
22 difficult exam for most of the lawyers in the former Yugoslavia, so we're
23 not that good with figures. My questions will be fairly simple, and I
24 hope that you will be able to help me clarify some details.
25 First of all, I would like to ask you this: I would like to ask
Page 34975
1 you about causes of death, as information that is listed in the protocols
2 of the war hospital. Let me remind you that Prosecution expert indicated
3 that according to the data from the war hospital, for 44.4 of the cases,
4 the cause of death was unknown. That's 209 out of a total of 472
5 persons. The Prosecution expert concluded that unknown cause of death
6 from the war hospital mostly pertained to persons who were killed,
7 persons who were killed.
8 And on the basis of this claim in the expert witness's report,
9 His Honour Judge Antonetti asked her what led her to conclude that
10 unknown cause of death could be considered as death caused by -- that
11 those people were actually killed, that this was the cause of death.
12 Prosecution expert Tabeau said that the war hospital was not a regular
13 hospital which treated persons who had other conditions, that this was a
14 war hospital treating only victims or casualties of war.
15 After that, His Honour Antonetti asked about the treatment of
16 civilians, because from an earlier testimony, we were aware of a pregnant
17 woman who, on the 9th of May, 1993
18 answered, "For most of the deaths, the cause is not listed, but we had
19 reason to believe that those were victims of the siege." I quoted this
20 from pages 21.879 of the transcript -- 21.872, I apologise, and 21.873.
21 Now, Ms. Radovanovic, as you analyse the expert report produced
22 by Ewa Tabeau, listed -- all the causes of death listed in the protocols
23 of the war hospital in East Mostar were as violent deaths?
24 A. Yes. She, in fact, stresses that, highlights that in her report.
25 She says these were all violent deaths and that they were caused by war,
Page 34976
1 a result of the war; although, as I tried to show from some examples, in
2 the examples and the list of persons that Ms. Tabeau put together that I
3 obtained from the Demographic Unit, you can find some cases that have
4 nothing to do with that: A traffic accident or a suicide. I did list
5 some of those examples in my report. So I don't know what reason
6 justified Dr. Tabeau to consider all the causes of death as she did,
7 because nowhere in her report does she say why she does it.
8 Q. Fine. Let me now tell you what Dr. Rajko said in his evidence.
9 During the war, he worked as a doctor in the war hospital in East Mostar
10 He said that in the war hospital, all surgical cases were taken in,
11 regardless of whether those were hernias or inflammation of the bowels.
12 That's recorded as page 12.911 of the transcript.
13 It is also important to note what he said about the records kept
14 in the war hospital. He said that up until the 15th of June, 1993
15 was a single -- single records were kept for all the patients, peacetime
16 and wartime, as they were called. And on day, a new recording system was
17 set up, separating the records of those who were casualties of war;
18 whereas, in the old records, continued to record the so-called peacetime
19 cases. This is recorded at transcript page 12.934.
20 Now, Professor Radovanovic, on the basis of this evidence given
21 by a doctor who actually worked on -- in the hospital, would an expert of
22 your kind conclude that the records of the war hospital also include
23 records of the peacetime and wartime cases alike; or would there be a
24 basis to reach some other kind of conclusion?
25 A. If the scientists knew that, knew about this statement, then they
Page 34977
1 would know that these deaths were of a different kind.
2 Q. Would it then be justified to conclude that had Expert Tabeau had
3 this information about the contents of the protocol of the war hospital,
4 would it be difficult to imagine that she would disregard the data about
5 the peacetime cases and would treat all the cases as violent causes --
6 caused by violence?
7 A. Well, I don't know what other sources she used from other sides,
8 because Dr. Tabeau does not indicate that in her report, but she notes
9 that she considered only the cases from the war hospital that were the
10 result of the siege. So I assume that she may have been able to look at
11 all those materials, or had she been able, that her opinion would be
12 different. But that's just my opinion. I don't know what Dr. Tabeau
13 actually did.
14 Q. Let me now ask you some questions about the distribution of the
15 unknown causes of death, proportionate to the number of known causes.
16 You testified about that, and I think that you explained that in such a
17 way that it was crystal clear. But in this context, I would like to draw
18 your attention to this: In Ewa Tabeau's report, and that's document
19 P9837 - you can see it in the Prlic Defence binder - in paragraph 23,
20 registers of death are mentioned. It is noted here that out of 1.387
21 cases, the cause of death is known -- out of 1.383 cases, 132 cases are
22 known.
23 Let me correct the number -- yes, it's okay now. So for 1.383
24 cases, 132 cases the cause was known. Out of that, 89 deaths were
25 violent deaths, and 37 natural causes. So if we look at those absolute
Page 34978
1 figures and turn them into percentages, it turns out that about
2 28 per cent of the known causes were actually natural causes of death.
3 Professor Radovanovic, could you tell us whether the percentage,
4 the 28 per cent, is something that would be statistically relevant as a
5 value?
6 A. Well, in relation to what?
7 Q. In relation to 100?
8 A. Well, I couldn't really be very specific here, because we're
9 talking about 1.383 cases that are taken out of 10 registers of deaths
10 from certain areas. In those cases -- or in those registers, you have
11 cases recording people who died in Vienna
12 registers where they had permanent residence. Now, whether 28 per cent
13 of the 10 registers is relevant, I really can't tell you with any
14 reliability, because you have to look at the overall picture, at the
15 whole.
16 Q. I will rephrase the question. But before I do that, let me ask
17 you this question: As we continue -- or as Ewa Tabeau continued
18 analysing the causes of death, she decided to take all the deaths that
19 were caused by natural causes, whether the result of accidents or
20 suicide, to rule them out, to exclude them from her data, and she
21 disregarded them. She disregarded at least 28 per cent of known causes
22 of death as something that might be relevant for her further analysis.
23 Those were so-called natural causes of death.
24 And in this manner, by eliminating natural causes of death, she
25 increased the percentage of violent deaths in cases where cause of death
Page 34979
1 was known; is that so?
2 A. Dr. Tabeau believes that there were no natural deaths during the
3 siege of Mostar, and she only dealt with violent causes. That, of
4 course, is not a comprehensive approach, and it is not professionally
5 proper.
6 JUDGE TRECHSEL: Maybe you wanted to make the same point,
7 Ms. Alaburic. But I see in the paragraph 2.3 on page 5, English version
8 of the Tabeau report, that she speaks of the natural causes, "(37)," are
9 the second largest. So, obviously, she was aware of the fact that they
10 were natural causes. Ms. Alaburic has as the subject of her question the
11 fact that she then puts those aside, but she has not ignored them. She
12 just didn't take them into account. What is the effect of that, I think
13 that was your question, if I interpret you correctly, Ms. Alaburic.
14 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] Your Honour, if you allow me to
15 ask just one more question, it will become clear why the elimination of
16 natural causes of death is important to me.
17 Q. So it is not controversial that Ewa Tabeau was aware of the
18 natural causes of death. We see that she eliminated them from her
19 analysis and that she focused only on violent deaths; and, thereby, the
20 percentage of the ratios of the violent deaths, in fact, was increased,
21 because natural deaths were eliminated.
22 Now let us look at what happened when 404 cases, where the cause
23 of death is unknown, are distributed proportionately to all the known
24 unknown.
25 THE INTERPRETER: Interpreter's note: Could all microphones be
Page 34980
1 switched off.
2 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation]
3 Q. Now, Professor Radovanovic, could you please tell us, among the
4 criteria for distribution, do we have natural causes of death in, let's
5 say, about 30 per cent of the cases? And if we had that, would the
6 distribution of the unknown causes be different, given the situation --
7 or, rather, if we compare it to the situation where we have eliminated
8 natural causes?
9 A. I think I have to give you a more comprehensive answer, because
10 I think there is some confusion here.
11 Dr. Tabeau states, on the basis of the ten registers of deaths,
12 that there are violent and natural causes. Then she says, "But out of
13 that set that encompasses natural and violent deaths, I will not be
14 dealing with violent deaths," and violent deaths thus becomes the set
15 that becomes 100 per cent. This is not a comprehensive approach, because
16 you could give the overall death rate and then you could say
17 such-and-such percentage is the natural death and the rest is violent
18 death. But an expert can do that. It's perhaps not entirely proper, but
19 it can be done. So she says, "I will deal only with violent causes."
20 Table 16 shows you this distribution for violent deaths, but I
21 don't know what criteria were applied to distribute all the unknown --
22 or, rather, to classify all the unknown causes as violent deaths. She
23 assumes this, that given the nature of the times, they had to be violent
24 deaths. So out of a total number of deaths, she takes out only the
25 violent deaths and establishes a different set, but the quantity is
Page 34981
1 smaller, the numerical basis smaller. And on the basis of this numerical
2 base, you get a different set of percentages.
3 So if you were to calculate or to add the 135 or 137, whatever it
4 is, to those numbers, you would not have 539 or 639. Then you would say,
5 out of those 600 and whatever, 50 per cent are unknown causes,
6 10 per cent is natural causes, shelling is 3 per cent. So by dividing up
7 this set and by classifying unknown causes as violent deaths, we get a
8 different set of assumptions for a group, a different group that
9 Dr. Tabeau declares to be a group of violent deaths.
10 Why does she say so? She doesn't say that, but I would like to
11 stress that she has the right to create a separate group that she wants
12 to study; although, I think it would be proper to present the figures for
13 the overall mortality on the basis of the register of deaths and the
14 mortality that she ascribes to violent causes.
15 Q. Professor Radovanovic, I think there is a mistake in the
16 transcript.
17 JUDGE TRECHSEL: You have been overlapping. You started asking
18 the question long before the translation was done, so perhaps you start
19 again.
20 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] Before we continue, I wanted to
21 correct the error of the transcript.
22 Q. Page 44, lines 13 and 14, Professor Radovanovic, it was recorded
23 that you said: "I will not deal with violent deaths," and I think that
24 your sentence was actually: "I will deal only with violent deaths."
25 Is that so?
Page 34982
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. What you have just told us at great length, I believe everybody
3 understands, and it is an answer to my question, and an answer that I
4 actually expected. But if we were to put things in very simple terms,
5 then we would say that in table 16, there was also a category of natural
6 death; then the total number of deaths would be higher, but the
7 distribution of unknown would be different, i.e., there would be a lower
8 percentage of those that were killed by shelling, because you would have
9 entered a different variable for distribution?
10 A. All the distributions would be different.
11 Q. Very well. I wanted to emphasise that.
12 JUDGE TRECHSEL: Excuse me.
13 Ms. Radovanovic, you doubt the assumption of the expert, Tabeau,
14 that unknown deaths there means deaths as a result of violence. Do you
15 take into account, when concluding this, that originally she had 37 cases
16 of what she calls natural deaths, which I presume are illnesses, sepsis
17 in operations, and so forth. So is it not sort of natural to conclude
18 that as these have been eliminated already, that the others are violent
19 or, in other words, non-natural deaths, letting aside from the moment the
20 cause, of course, which can be, as you rightly say, accident, suicide,
21 and so on?
22 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] Your Honour, if you allow me, I
23 would like to draw your attention to the figure 37. Expert Tabeau deals
24 with very precise data. According to her, 89 persons suffered violent
25 deaths. So she knows the causes of death for 132 persons. This is in
Page 34983
1 paragraph 2.3 of her expert report. The causes of death are known for
2 132 cases. She says violent death, 89, which is 67 per cent; and she
3 says natural death, 37, which is 28 per cent.
4 I believe that we cannot assume that from 37 to the total number
5 of 1.330 dead, we can apply a valid conclusion that their death was
6 violent.
7 I would like to correct the figure on the page that we have on
8 the screen. The figure is 1.383. The data that we are aware of is 37
9 and 89.
10 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Am I supposed to answer His Honour
11 Judge Trechsel?
12 JUDGE TRECHSEL: I think so, yes.
13 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] An unknown cause of death, as the
14 name has it, means that nobody knows the cause of death. If you don't
15 know the cause of death, you don't know whether it's a natural or violent
16 death. There are two possibilities here for something to be expressed as
17 an unknown cause of death. The first would be totally unknown
18 information, no diagnosis or anything. The second would be something
19 that is done in the demographic statistics. For example, you can suffer
20 from a disease, but your cause of death may be a totally different thing,
21 a totally different illness.
22 I, for example, God forbid, may be taken to hospital for cancer;
23 however, in the course of that same night, I may die of a heart attack.
24 In my death certificate, the cause of death would be "heart attack." The
25 underlying cause, something that helped the cause, is a different story.
Page 34984
1 That's why death certificates are issued by the physician, coroner. Then
2 he's the one who has to investigate what illnesses the patient suffered
3 from, how much influence that had on the death, and, finally, enters the
4 cause of death.
5 If physician, in normal situations, and I believe that in the war
6 he may not be 100 per cent sure because somebody may have been wounded,
7 somebody may have undergone a surgical procedure which failed, if he's
8 not absolutely certain what the cause of death is, then the most common
9 entry would be "Unknown." In the category of unknown causes of death,
10 you cannot assume that all the deaths in there are violent.
11 There may be other reasons why the cause of death is unknown.
12 These deaths may be the consequence of different situations. For
13 example, there may be the condemnation of the wound due to the poor
14 conditions in the hospital. So the cause of death of a wounded person
15 does not have to be the wound itself. If the wound becomes septic, then
16 the cause of death would be a sepsis, not the wound.
17 Since the expert worked on the basis of the war hospital book, I
18 wouldn't be able to tell you who was it who entered the causes of death
19 in the war hospital in Mostar.
20 JUDGE TRECHSEL: I'm aware of all that, of course. The question
21 is probably one of terminology. I would have put most of what you have
22 now mentioned, in particular the heart attack, under the heading of
23 "Natural causes," and we have no bases, really, to know what the criteria
24 were. So would you agree that this is, all in all, it is rather in the
25 vague?
Page 34985
1 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Yes, particularly the war hospitals
2 and their books and their registers.
3 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation]
4 Q. Ms. Radovanovic, you have tried to explain to everybody here in
5 the courtroom that Ewa Tabeau's expert report is not an analysis but,
6 rather, a presentation of her own databases and her own conclusion, if I
7 understand you properly.
8 You're saying that this is not an analysis because her report
9 does not provide any comparisons with anything else, so that, for
10 example, the information on 539 victims does not mean much if we don't
11 know the share of the population that that was at the moment in East
12 Mostar.
13 Did I understand properly your general assessment of the expert's
14 work?
15 A. Yes, and I answered it properly. But I would like to underline
16 that Dr. Tabeau does not call her second expert report the statistical or
17 demographic analysis of mortality due to the siege of Mostar. She calls
18 it an analysis of death registries and books of the war hospital.
19 Q. Very well. With regard to the second analysis that you've just
20 mentioned, Expert Tabeau, in her conclusions, states that among the
21 victims of the siege, and we will not dwell upon the term of "siege" at
22 the moment, there were 49.5 civilians and 50.5 soldiers. We're talking
23 about percentages here.
24 We all know how Ewa Tabeau established the status of the
25 military. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that during
Page 34986
1 the hearing of Ms. Tabeau, His Honour Judge Antonetti put a very
2 important question to Ms. Tabeau. The question was whether analysis had
3 been made of all the available data according to the criteria of the age
4 structure of the male population, in light of the fact that it is a
5 generally-known fact that the regulations on defence in the former
6 Yugoslavia
7 of military age, between 16 and 65 years of age, have certain obligations
8 in the defence of the population, and that a huge number of those who
9 left the country had been of military age.
10 The data is on the men of military age and their obligation
11 towards the defence of the country and the doctrine of the General
12 People's Defence, are you aware with all of that as a citizen of the
13 former Yugoslavia
14 A. The data that may be drawn from the census can tell you how many
15 men are of military age. You can then talk about military doctrine and
16 say whether they are fall under the obligation of serving in the army.
17 But what you don't have is where East Mostar is, how many live there, how
18 many men, how old were they.
19 So you don't have those types of analysis. If you don't have the
20 specific territory, then you have a problem, because this does not lend
21 itself to analysis.
22 Q. Despite all these shortcomings and disadvantages in the analysis
23 of Expert Tabeau, I propose that we take her data on 539 victims and that
24 we also accept her data on the gender and age structure of the victims,
25 which is given in table 18. Then I would kindly ask you to analyse the
Page 34987
1 documents that have already been admitted in evidence and to try and come
2 up with a simulation of the share of victims in the population of the
3 same gender, same age, and to see how this would reflect in proportions
4 when it comes to victims.
5 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] I'm going to be using the document
6 in my set of documents which is under seal. Your Honour Judge Antonetti,
7 I don't know if we have to go into private session or we will simply not
8 transmit the document in e-court. Very well. It won't be transmitted.
9 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Be quick, Ms. Alaburic,
10 because you've already used up your time.
11 We're not going to broadcast this.
12 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] Now, I would kindly allow you
13 to -- I would kindly ask you to allow me to do this simulation and deduct
14 any time that is the surplus from the overall time of General Petkovic's
15 case.
16 You will find the document as the last in my binder without any
17 number, because it is not going to be in evidence. I would kindly ask
18 the usher to put the simulation on the ELMO for everybody's benefit in
19 the courtroom.
20 The document that I said was under seal --
21 MS. WEST: Your Honour, I'm sorry to object.
22 I understand that this document was under seal, and I'm wondering
23 if it may be more advantageous to go into closed session.
24 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] Your Honours, I would like to draw
25 your attention to the fact that before you render your decision, I'm
Page 34988
1 going to use just one page of that document, which is page 7.
2 Just a moment, please. It's page 7 --
3 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Ms. Alaburic, just say that on
4 page 7 of the document that you're not going to disclose the origin of,
5 we have some statistical figure, and then you can put your question.
6 Furthermore, the Registry is not going to display this document outside
7 the courtroom, so it's not going to be seen.
8 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] This is Exhibit P09851. The page
9 in B/C/S is number 7; and in English, it is ERN number, in the upper
10 right-hand side corner, 137344. I'm going to be using only that one
11 table.
12 We also have another document which is 4D 01277. This is the
13 population of BiH according to the census from 1971, 1981, and 1991,
14 sorted by age and gender. We're going to be using the data from those
15 censuses, and I would like to repeat the number of the document in the
16 English. I correct the 4D number. It is 4D 1277. All the relevant data
17 are in the document that has just been put on the ELMO for us.
18 It arises from the document on -- it's page 7 with the
19 aforementioned ERN number. Actually, this is a list of neighbourhoods in
20 the municipality of Mostar
21 to exclude neighbourhoods under numbers 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 because
22 these are not in East Mostar, in the narrow sense of the word.
23 I'm going to be dealing only with the data that we receive if we
24 total the figures of neighbourhoods from 1 to 7. If we look at the
25 figures, we will see that there were 10.161 locals and 17.066 refugees,
Page 34989
1 or a total of 27.277. The figure of 55.000 refers to the entire
2 municipality of Mostar.
3 As far as the refugees are concerned, I'm going to be using a
4 claim from the same document, in paragraph 2.10, where it says that those
5 were mostly the families of detainees or smaller groups of detainees who
6 had been released from prisons. Those were all elderly persons and
7 infirm, in a poor physical condition. Based on that claim, I shall
8 consider that the data, about 17.066 refugees, is the data that concerns
9 women, children, and people above the age of 65.
10 In document 4D 1277, you can see the breakdown of the BH
11 population segregated by gender and age, and the total population of
12 4.373.033. The men --
13 I'm repeating the number, 4.377.033.
14 The share of men of the military age between ages of 15 and 64 is
15 1.500.373, which account for 34 per cent. If that percentage of
16 34 per cent is applied to the data on the local population of East
17 Mostar, i.e., if we're looking for 34 per cent of 10.161, we will see
18 that in East Mostar there were 3.455 men of military age, and that the
19 remainder of the local population, together with the displaced persons,
20 accounted for 23.772 inhabitants.
21 If these absolute figures are converted into percentages, it
22 arises that the number of -- or, rather, the percentage of men of
23 military age was 12.69 per cent, and that the remainder of the population
24 accounted for 87.31 per cent of the total population.
25 If such a population structure is then correlated with the
Page 34990
1 victims, there are a total of 539 of those, according to Expert Tabeau.
2 Among the victims, men of military age would total 37 -- 375, and others
3 accounted for 164.
4 375 would be men of military age, and others would be 164.
5 If we try to establish the share of victims in the population of
6 the same kind, i.e., the share of victims among male of military age, in
7 the population of males of military age, it arises that 10.85 per cent of
8 that same population were victims, and that in the remainder of the
9 population, 0.69 per cent were victims.
10 If we now correlate the percentages in their relative
11 relationship, it arises that men of military age did get killed during
12 the siege of Mostar, or the so-called siege of Mostar, five times more
13 often than -- 15 times more often than the other population.
14 Q. Ms. Radovanovic, I hope that you've been able to follow me. I
15 tried to simplify things. Based on all the data that I've just presented
16 to illustrate the significance of analysis and establishing of ratio,
17 wouldn't this be a fair representation, a mathematical representation,
18 and whether such a mathematical representation would be relevant for an
19 analysis that Ms. Tabeau should have taken and, at the end of the day,
20 for your analysis as well?
21 A. Calculating shares within the general population is always
22 relevant; but, with all due respect, I have to say that this calculation,
23 according to -- that you did this calculation in accordance with the
24 method used by Ms. Ewa Tabeau. This is the distribution method. You say
25 East Mostar had such-and-such a number, and so on; and then we assume if
Page 34991
1 the overall population of Bosnia
2 that to East Mostar, too. The method you applied, in other words, is not
3 reliable. You can do this kind of calculation. This is a figure that
4 might point you to something, but I personally would never engage in
5 this.
6 Q. If I may just tell you right at the start, that is why, right at
7 the beginning, I said that I wanted to show this to you to illustrate the
8 point. I'm perfectly aware of the fact that it would be the same method.
9 I'm perfectly aware of the fact that the distribution of the male
10 population in East Mostar at that time may have been completely
11 different.
12 But I told you that on the basis of the information from one
13 document that is already admitted into evidence in this trial, we tried
14 to illustrate the relevance of such information. So it's simply to
15 illustrate, not to prove that my calculation is right. Would you
16 consider that this is a statistically relevant indicator?
17 A. As an illustration or as an example, it is significant to see
18 what real statistical and demographic indicators have to offer to those
19 who know about statistics and those who don't, because it gives us a
20 qualitative evaluation of a situation in a given moment, in a given
21 population.
22 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] Thank you very much. This was
23 precisely what I wanted to achieve.
24 JUDGE TRECHSEL: Hold it for a minute, because there's a question
25 I want to ask you.
Page 34992
1 On the top of this paper, top left, we have the number "P09851,"
2 which suggests that this is part of a document that was admitted. In
3 fact, Ms. Alaburic, I got the impression, and please tell me whether I'm
4 right or wrong, that the expert who established these figures is
5 Ms. Alaburic, is that right, or your Defence team?
6 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] Your Honour, if you look at the
7 upper part, you will see that this is information from document P9851, if
8 you look at page 7 in the B/C/S version. That's the ERN number that I've
9 given you in the English version.
10 The second segment of this document that is on the ELMO now is
11 the information about the displaced persons, and the conclusion about who
12 those displaced persons are is based on the statement in paragraph 2.10
13 of the very same document, P9851.
14 Your Honour Judge Trechsel, this is, of course, something that I
15 did on the basis of the information that is known, because I thought that
16 I had to illustrate to you that the conclusion of Ewa Tabeau that
17 soldiers and civilians were killed in similar -- that they had the
18 similar shares in the overall number of those killed, 49.5 were civilians
19 and 50.5 per cent for the soldiers, because it is statistically
20 insignificant because it warps the situation as it was in East Mostar
21 I think this is an indication enough that this is where we have
22 to look at the truth about the victims in East Mostar. We should follow
23 this path.
24 JUDGE TRECHSEL: That is what I had assumed, and I thought it
25 would be good to have it clearly in the record. You took figures
Page 34993
1 actually from what is called Attachment 4 of the document with a number,
2 and then all the calculations you made on the basis of a selection of the
3 relevant quarters of Mostar that you selected.
4 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] Your Honour, as far as the
5 relevant parts of Mostar, I don't think that there is any doubt about
6 where Blagaj is and that Blagaj is not in East Mostar. I thought
7 everybody in this courtroom knew that and that there was no need for us
8 to elaborate.
9 Q. Professor Radovanovic, thank you very much.
10 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] There will be 15 minutes taken
11 out of your overall time, because you've used 15 extra minutes for your
12 cross-examination. It is now on the record.
13 What do we do? Do we have a break now or you can start?
14 Whatever.
15 MS. WEST: Good morning, Mr. President.
16 We're ready to start.
17 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] So go ahead.
18 Cross-examination by Ms. West:
19 Q. Good morning, Professor.
20 A. Good morning.
21 Q. My name is Kimberley West, and I'm a lawyer with the OTP.
22 In front of you, is that your report?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. [Previous translation continues]... have available the OTP report
25 as well?
Page 34994
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. Here on the floor, and it will be brought up to you, are three
3 binders, and there are documents inside that I will refer you to. You'll
4 note on top that there are little red tabs. Those tabs are actually on
5 the B/C/S pages.
6 THE INTERPRETER: Could all other microphones please be switched
7 off. Thank you.
8 MS. WEST:
9 Q. So I think, Professor, it may be easiest if you just keep your
10 report close by. Thank you.
11 Professor, I noted on your CV that in less than 20 years, you've
12 published over 20 scientific reports, and that includes your ICTY
13 reports. In this list of selected works, have you published more than is
14 noted on your CV?
15 A. This list is not exhaustive. It does not include only reports
16 concerning the court appearances. These are papers published in
17 scientific journals. So the papers that are listed here are not reports
18 that I did for court. There is a paper that deals with Srebrenica, but
19 it was published in a compendium of papers of the School of Geography
20 which is considered a scientific publication.
21 Q. Thank you. You just indicated that the works on your CV are the
22 ones that are published in journals; is that correct?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. I assume you're familiar with the concept of peer review.
25 A. Absolutely. No work can be published in any scientific journal,
Page 34995
1 at least where I live, unless it has been reviewed and unless the review
2 was positive. Then it's published.
3 Q. Thank you. And one of the important notions of peer review is to
4 ensure that the work is objective, it's unbiased; is that correct?
5 A. Well, every reviewer, undertaking any kind of review for the
6 purposes of the publication of a paper in a journal, definitely risks his
7 own or their own authority and will not allow the publication of anything
8 that is not proper and accurate.
9 Q. When you say "proper and accurate," would you also agree with me
10 that it would also have to be objective and unbiased?
11 A. Every scientific works should be objective and unbiased, because
12 science strives for reaching objective truth. Of course, I do not claim
13 that each and every paper is objective and unbiased, but that is the
14 desire, and that is why we have reviewers to assess that.
15 Q. And I assume you, yourself, have been a reviewer.
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. Have any of the works listed on your CV been the subject of
18 international peer review ?
19 A. No. They were not subject of international peer review, because
20 all the journals that I listed are published in Serbia, in journals that
21 are significant -- scientifically significant at national level. So they
22 did not undergo international peer review, but they were reviewed by
23 relevant scholars in the area where I live.
24 I would just like to note this: It is not an author who appoints
25 the reviewers. There is a number of scientific papers. The procedure
Page 34996
1 goes as follows: I write a paper and I offer it for publication to a
2 journal, and then the journal appoints the reviewers.
3 Q. So, then, you would agree with me that you've never published in
4 an international journal, you've only published in Serbian journals?
5 A. Well, not only in Serbian, but could you please define
6 "international"? Does it include the army of the former Yugoslavia
7 globally?
8 Q. Globally, a journal that is published outside the area of the
9 former Yugoslavia
10 A. Well, I did work for the European Centre and the Centre for Peace
11 at the United Nations. These were huge studies. I really don't know, I
12 didn't ask about it, but I do believe it was published internationally,
13 because the president of that body was --
14 Q. Thank you. I'm going to move on. I assume, Professor, that
15 you're familiar with the concept of complex humanitarian emergencies.
16 A. Could you please define it? Could you please define whether I'm
17 familiar with the concept of complex humanitarian emergencies?
18 Q. Look to your left and grab binder number 2, and please turn to
19 P10729. The B/C/S is the red tab on top. Do you see that?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. I think you have to go one more page. There you go.
22 I'm going to read an excerpt from this exhibit, and then you can
23 give me an answer with regard to whether you're familiar with this
24 concept.
25 This is from "Force the Migration and Mortality," and it reads:
Page 34997
1 "The term 'complex humanitarian emergency' is widely used to
2 described ..." --
3 THE INTERPRETER: Can we have the page, please?
4 MS. WEST: I'll start again. It's page 1 of the English, and
5 page 1 of the B/C/S:
6 "The term 'complex humanitarian emergency' is widely used to
7 describe a particular type of disaster: A situation in which a large
8 civilian population ..." --
9 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] I can't follow because it doesn't
10 say that in Serbian. Perhaps I have the wrong document in front of me.
11 Is it --
12 MS. WEST:
13 Q. Professor Radovanovic, if you can actually listen to the
14 interpretation, that might be the easiest way.
15 A. Well, the interpreter is interpreting this differently, and the
16 different word that is used gives a completely different sense. So if I
17 listen to the interpreter and if I read the translation, these are
18 completely different things.
19 If I'm looking at the right document, it says "complex
20 humanitarian dangers." But, please, I mean, we have to agree in order
21 for me to be able to follow. Can I read what it says, and then we will
22 agree whether this is proper or not; or perhaps you can give me a
23 translation that contains the same -- that is conceptually the same.
24 If I look at the right document --
25 Q. I'm going to read it out loud in English. It's going to be
Page 34998
1 interpreted in your ear. Listen to that interpretation. If, afterwards,
2 you want to dispute the actual interpretation, you can to that on
3 redirect. I'm now going to read it in English, and you can listen.
4 MR. KARNAVAS: It's not a matter of disputing. It's not a matter
5 of disputing. First of all, I only have one page. I don't have the
6 whole document. I'm not making a stink. My colleague should know
7 better. I'm entitled to the whole document, not just one page. That's
8 number 1.
9 Number 2, they've taken the time, I assume, to translate it. One
10 of the reasons is so the witness can read it. Now, apparently, she's
11 getting two different versions. She's being asked to give an opinion,
12 and now she's being cornered to one version versus the other.
13 Now, she can pick or choose; but in my opinion, the witness has
14 indicated she would like to read the version that was translated for her.
15 She can read it, at least, and then she can hear whatever the translated
16 version is. But I think we have to be fair to the witness.
17 MS. WEST: I think Mr. Karnavas has a good point. If she can
18 just read the B/C/S translation, and then --
19 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Yes. The best would be for
20 her to read the text in her language loudly, and then the interpreters
21 will translate. This way, we can check the English translation; and if
22 there is a dispute, we'll realise right away.
23 All right. Madam Radovanovic, can you please read the first
24 paragraph loudly.
25 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] "The term 'complex humanitarian
Page 34999
1 dangers' is often used to describe certain kinds of large-scale
2 accidents, a situation where a large portion of the population is at risk
3 from a combination of a civil or international war, or efforts to
4 rearrange the state or society, such as, for instance, genocide, which
5 lead to mass movements of the population, with the concomitant
6 deterioration of the conditions of life; for instance, food, water that
7 can be carried with oneself, shelter and sanitation, creating conditions
8 for a substantial increase in the mortality normally through a limited
9 time period, but sometimes over longer time periods."
10 I have a footnote saying that this definition was taken from
11 Tool and Waldman, 1997. It has been changed to a certain degree in order
12 to be able to encompass several kinds of complex humanitarian
13 organisations.
14 The text goes on to say:
15 "People always created complex humanitarian dangers. A simple
16 and arbitrary example of this would be the attack of the Romans on
17 Carthage
18 Islamic and Crusaders forces. The complex humanitarian dangers in the
19 20th century includes the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe
20 famine in Bengal
21 from Indonesia
22 dangers over the past few years are wars, ethnic cleansings forced
23 migrations, and genocide that occurred in wildly different areas, such
24 as, for instance, Somalia
25 Timor
Page 35000
1 MS. WEST:
2 Q. Professor, my question to you is whether this is a concept in
3 which you're familiar.
4 A. If you're asking me whether I'm familiar with the concept that is
5 expounded by Messrs. Tool and Waldman which was later expanded, no, I'm
6 not. This is the first I've heard about it. Now, if you ask me if I
7 know what humanitarian crises are, then I do know that, and what
8 humanitarian danger is.
9 Q. Okay. I'm going to go back to the Galic testimony in which you
10 testified here in the Galic case in March 17, 2003, and you were read the
11 same extract.
12 When asked whether you were aware of it, you indicated on page
13 21.390, line 17, that you were currently involved in a project in Serbia
14 addressing the same subject. You went on to say that you had heard about
15 it.
16 So my question to you, Professor, is whether this is a concept
17 with which you're familiar and upon which you have worked.
18 A. Madam, the problem is that I wanted to read it, instead of having
19 it read to me. It is possible that the Prosecutor may have read out the
20 concept to me and asked me if I was familiar with it, if I knew what it
21 was, but I don't recall having said that I worked in accordance with this
22 concept. But I did work in many situations that could be considered as
23 humanitarian dangers or emergencies. So what you are quoting for me from
24 Delic -- from Galic, somebody read it out to me and I agreed that I was
25 familiar with it.
Page 35001
1 You have transcripts here. I don't know whether anyone named the
2 authors of the concept; although, if I can remember, there was a name
3 that was given of an author that has nothing to do --
4 MS. ALABURIC: [Interpretation] Your Honours and my learned
5 friend, I think that we could perhaps solve a problem here.
6 To me, the term "complex humanitarian danger" is quite
7 unfamiliar. I tried to find this term in our languages on the internet.
8 This term does not exist. We use the term "crisis," and this is the term
9 that Professor Radovanovic used. Perhaps we have this communication
10 background because we use a different term than what the literal
11 translation of the term "emergency" might be. So if we could ask the
12 witness about humanitarian crises and projects that relate to that,
13 perhaps then we could get the proper answer.
14 I do apologise for standing up, but I think that this was a
15 useful intervention.
16 MS. WEST:
17 Q. Professor, would you consider the war in the former Yugoslavia as
18 a scenario that fits within the parameters of complex humanitarian crisis
19 or danger, however you may want to call it?
20 A. Well, now you want to take me away from the area of demography,
21 but I do think that every war, every large-scale event that can affect
22 the population could be considered that; a tsunami, war, storms,
23 earthquakes. It's just a question of scale.
24 Q. My question is very exact in this matter: Would you consider the
25 war in the former Yugoslavia
Page 35002
1 crisis?
2 A. Well, you have to tell me, what is a complex humanitarian crisis?
3 If you think that a complex humanitarian crisis is what is given here as
4 a definition, then I would tell you yes. But everything is complex. You
5 have a war zone where the situation is very complex, and areas where it
6 is less complex. But if you want to generalise, it is a crisis, at any
7 rate.
8 Q. Let me, again, direct your attention to your Galic testimony. On
9 page 21.392, you were asked whether, in that case, whether you would
10 consider the circumstances between 1992 and 1994 in Sarajevo to be a
11 situation of a complex humanitarian emergency, and there you said, "Yes,
12 you could put it that way."
13 So bearing that in mind, again I'll ask you one more time: Would
14 you consider the situation in Western Herzegovina to also be a complex
15 humanitarian crisis?
16 A. Well, please define the whole of Western Herzegovina. I'm sure
17 that parts of Western Herzegovina did have -- did face complex
18 humanitarian crises, just as Sarajevo
19 Western Herzegovina where the crisis existed, but it was not as complex.
20 You cannot generalise things; or, rather, I do not accept this kind of
21 generalisation, because these are very serious matters and they are very
22 complex.
23 So if you give me the specific localities --
24 Q. Thank you. Fair enough. The eight municipalities that were the
25 subject of the OTP report, those municipalities, do you consider that to
Page 35003
1 be a complex humanitarian crisis?
2 A. In what period, Madam.
3 Q. In the period it was studied. So in the period, specifically in
4 Mostar, let's talk about 1993.
5 A. I could not study that, because there's no data from the
6 demographic point of view. I could not study it from the demographic
7 point of view, and I did not deal with history, or politics, or any other
8 such thing. There are no sources -- no demographic sources which would
9 lend themselves to such a study.
10 Q. Thank you. Professor, I'm going to turn now to your Popovic
11 report -- the Beara report, and that's P10724. That's in the first
12 binder, the other binder.
13 THE INTERPRETER: Interpreters would be grateful if figures,
14 numbers, and quotations could be read out more slowly. Thank you.
15 MS. WEST: Thank you. It's 10724. It's at page 10 of the
16 English, and page 9 of the B/C/S.
17 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Binder 01724, you're saying, and
18 page?
19 MS. WEST: Page 9 of the B/C/S.
20 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] 9, okay.
21 MS. WEST:
22 Q. Do you have that in front of you? It's the red tab.
23 A. No, no. Now I have it, yes.
24 Q. And, so, this is the report you wrote in the Beara case; correct?
25 A. I suppose. I can't see the whole report. I can see just page 9,
Page 35004
1 so I suppose that that has been my report taken by you.
2 MR. KARNAVAS: I don't have the English version, one provided to
3 the Defence. I don't know if the Judges have the English version, but I
4 surely would like to follow it.
5 MS. WEST: I'm going to read out the second paragraph and then
6 I'm going to ask a question. In this, you wrote:
7 "The fact is, however, that in abnormal situations like war,
8 there is usually no verified official statistical data for particular
9 time periods and occurrences; and, thus, some international organisations
10 recommend the use of data sources which do not satisfy basic statistical
11 standards and procedures. If we accept the use of such sources, then we
12 must particularly stress the need for a very conservative, objective, and
13 skillful approach to working with them."
14 Professor, in this paragraph, when you talk about "abnormal
15 situations like war," what you are talking about is a complex
16 humanitarian crisis; right?
17 A. As a matter of fact, I support Dr. Tabeau, because in my
18 footnote, it says that in her report, Dr. Tabeau mentions that some
19 sources originated from the humanitarian crisis. However, when you read
20 the whole text, I'm saying what a demographer is duty-bound to do when
21 using such sources, and I give the example of the Red Cross. The Red
22 Cross is an organisation that I don't want did contest or deny. It's a
23 humanitarian organisation which collected data on missing persons, but it
24 is.
25 Q. That is not --
Page 35005
1 A. I am not finished. I have not finished, Madam. I have not
2 finished. Allow me.
3 Q. [Previous translation continues]... and you can answer the
4 question, and that was not my question. So the question now is to move
5 down to the third paragraph, right about in the middle, where you wrote:
6 "This does not mean that these sources cannot, at least
7 partially, be processed by statistical specialists and sorted to ensure
8 that they are objectively usable to the greatest possible extent."
9 Professor, so would you agree that it is possible to use such
10 sources, and these are these sources that you referred to in paragraph 2,
11 that don't typically satisfy, where you wrote, "basic statistical
12 standards and procedure"? Is that possible?
13 A. Only if, as a demographer and statistician, you do it
14 professionally. If you adapt them in order to be able to obtain reliable
15 data, if you're dealing with new methodologies, if you don't show how and
16 to what extent you arrange that source, then I can't accept that.
17 There's no source of data that a good expert, a demographer or
18 statistician, cannot use and deal with it. It's a notorious fact.
19 Q. Thank you. We will talk about methodology, but right now let's
20 again just focus on sources. I'm going to ask that you turn to P10730.
21 It's in the second binder in front of you.
22 You have the first binder, so, yeah, it's in the second one.
23 A. I'm just saying that my first binder is falling apart. Can I ask
24 somebody's assistance to help me; otherwise, I'm going to lose all the
25 pages.
Page 35006
1 Q. Yes. So you're in the second binder, P10730.
2 Professor, are you familiar with the Iraq Body Count?
3 A. No.
4 Q. So if we look at the very first page, it says:
5 "The Iraq Body Count records the violent civilian deaths that
6 have resulted from the 2003 military intervention in Iraq. Its public
7 database includes deaths caused by US-led coalition forces and
8 paramilitary or criminal attacks by others.
9 "The Iraq Body Count's documentary evidence is drawn from
10 cross-checked media sources of violent events leading to the death of
11 civilians, or of bodies being found, and is supplemented by the careful
12 review and integration of hospitals, morgues, NGOs, and official
13 figures."
14 Professor, you have indicated that you are not familiar with
15 this, but I would like to turn to what would be the third --
16 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Mr. Karnavas.
17 MR. KARNAVAS: Just based on what was read, unless there's some
18 linkage between the manner in which this body count was taken, which is
19 very controversial -- if you ask the Bush administration, they have a
20 very low body count. If you ask others, there is a very large body
21 count. I'm talking about the Iraqis, not the Americans. The Americans,
22 well, Bush is quite capable of counting American deaths. But when it
23 comes to the Iraqis, that's another story.
24 But when you look at how it was compiled, there is no linkage
25 between this methodology and the one that was used in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Page 35007
1 at the time and particularly in Mostar; and, therefore, I think, to use
2 this document to piggyback a question, to somehow boot-strap it in order
3 to give validation to Ewa Tabeau's methodology is totally improper.
4 There has to be a foundation, and one has not been led by Ewa Tabeau
5 herself. These are incompatible.
6 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Mr. Karnavas, I think you can
7 trust that the Judges will appreciate all the various facts presented
8 before them.
9 Madam West, you may proceed.
10 MS. WEST: Thank you.
11 Q. Professor, as I said before, we're going to focus on sources
12 right now, and not methodology.
13 So if you go to the next part of your B/C/S, in English it's
14 number 5 and it's entitled "Media Reports are a Vital Source of Casualty
15 Data."
16 If you read this --
17 A. [No interpretation]
18 THE INTERPRETER: Could all the microphones that are not in use
19 please be switched off.
20 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Thank you. I've got it, yes.
21 What is your question, Madam?
22 MS. WEST:
23 Q. I'm going to read this small part and then ask you a question:
24 "Press and media reports are too rich and valuable a source to be
25 disregarded. Media coverage of casualty information has been
Page 35008
1 significantly enhanced by recent and emerging developments in technology,
2 as has the ability to integrate this information. The IBC project
3 exploits these developments and points to what may be possible as they
4 evolve further."
5 So my question, Professor, is: As you indicated in your Popovic
6 report, would you consider media sources to be sources that could be, I
7 quote, "processed by statistical specialists and sorted to ensure that
8 they are objectively usable"?
9 A. If this goes to court and if, in court, with a minimum, those of
10 professional and expert reliability, then the journal or magazine is not
11 a reliability source of data that can be used as registration. But
12 whether newspapers or television are a source of data that somebody can
13 arrange and use, this is a very big issue. This is not just a
14 discussion, a roundtable pannel discussion as to what happened. We are
15 trying to arrive at a scientific conclusion in order to clarify some
16 things.
17 Journals, magazines, newspapers, and media stories are not a
18 scientific source of data.
19 Q. Okay. You've indicated that they're not scientific sources, but
20 let's go to the next page in English, at the bottom of the B/C/S, to see
21 if it has been used by others.
22 This is entitled "How has the Iraq Body Count work been used by
23 others."
24 If you go down, and you'll see it right in the B/C/S, it lists a
25 number of categories, one being governments, inter-government agencies,
Page 35009
1 lawyers, NGOs. Particularly, it lists the United States' CRS
2 United Kingdom. It goes on to list the EU, the ICC, and the WHO; and,
3 finally, it lists the Brookings Institute and the Iraq Commission.
4 Professor, would you concede that in some situations, and
5 particularly in complex humanitarian crisis, like we're talking about
6 right now, it is the norm to use unusual sources?
7 A. First of all, I can't follow you because I don't see the
8 Brookings Institute anywhere. I can see media, governments,
9 inter-governmental organisations, and so on and so forth. It's very
10 difficult for me to follow you. You're reading one thing, I'm receiving
11 a different translation, and in terms of what it's written, it's a third
12 thing. In the meantime, I've forgotten your question.
13 I apologise. Could you please repeat it? I really apologise.
14 I've forgotten your question.
15 Q. [Previous translation continues]... Popovic report, in which you
16 said there were situations where you could use unusual sources, and my
17 question was: Do you now concede, after looking at this Iraq Body Count
18 information and people and organisations who used it, that at least in
19 this, the Iraq
20 talking about in Popovic?
21 A. I don't agree. You are asking me something that does not
22 correspond to what I said in the Popovic case; not that I said it, I
23 wrote it. What I am saying is that there are situations when you can use
24 sources of data that were created in a humanitarian crisis, and I also
25 quote what sources of data Dr. Tabeau lists as her sources of data that
Page 35010
1 were compiled in humanitarian crises, and she also refers to certain
2 authors.
3 Dr. Tabeau -- this applies also to Srebrenica, and I'm also
4 talking about the Red Cross, and about how these sources should be used,
5 if they are used, then how a statistician can adapt them. This primarily
6 concerned the International Organisation of the Red Cross.
7 In this report that we are discussing at the moment and which
8 refers to Herceg-Bosna, Dr. Tabeau uses the census which is not a
9 humanitarian organisation source.
10 I want to finish, please.
11 Q. You're not answering my question.
12 A. She uses a census list -- yes, I'm answering. You're asking me
13 as if I were the one who wrote about how one should use sources that
14 originated from humanitarian crises.
15 I accept that Dr. Tabeau is right and that you can use them; but
16 as a demographer, you have a duty to arrange them. In this report, there
17 are no humanitarian data sources. The books of the war hospital might be
18 implied as being humanitarian data sources.
19 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Witness, yesterday I did not
20 know what the Prosecutor's questions were going to be, and I asked you
21 what the best ideal situation would be for Ms. Tabeau to provide figures,
22 and for independence, figures that would be certain. I had mentioned
23 some files that she could have looked into, which she failed to do,
24 obviously. Now we discover that there was an organisation that counted
25 bodies in Iraq
Page 35011
1 Iraq
2 based on media reports, hospital reports, mortuaries, NGOs, and other
3 figures.
4 Now, as to this cross-checking technique, is it not a technique
5 that a demographer is bound to use before he or she reaches any safe and
6 irrefutable conclusions?
7 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] One should check, one should
8 compare everything. It's not just a technique, but a duty. If you're
9 choosing, and when you're choosing your source of data, as a demographer,
10 you have to look at all its advantages and disadvantages. You have to
11 verify everything. You have to arrange it so as to -- for the document
12 to give you the guarantee of a minimum reliability of the data that you
13 will -- you're going to obtain from that source.
14 MS. WEST: Thank you, Mr. President.
15 Q. Professor, we're just going to continue talking about sources.
16 So, in this report, the OTP used the OSCE voter registry and the 1991
17 census as sources. Is it your testimony that the OSCE voters registry
18 was unreliable?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. And you don't have to look through your report, but you can just
21 tell me. I've gone through your report, and one of your concerns is that
22 the OSCE doesn't have the father's name listed; right?
23 A. No, I'm not concerned about that. I'm a demographer. I know
24 what method Dr. Ewa Tabeau used to prove, based on the electoral rolls,
25 that these people exist in the census and take over their ethnic
Page 35012
1 structure. So this is not my --
2 Q. I understand. And if you could just listen to my questions and
3 provide the responsive answer, that will be helpful. So, again, we're
4 talking about sources. We're not talking about methodology. So let's
5 keep it to sources.
6 You have mentioned many times in your report, but more clearly
7 yesterday you said several times, that nowhere in the world, in expert
8 and scientific research, are voters' registrations taken in this type of
9 analysis. Do you remember that testimony?
10 A. Well, I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I said that I'm not
11 aware of any scientific or professional circles ever having used
12 electoral rolls, especially if you want to base your national structure
13 on the data that these electoral rolls do not contain.
14 Q. Okay. Thank you. Then, to be more exact, let me go to your
15 report. On page 15 of your report, and this is page 14 in the B/C/S.
16 You wrote:
17 "Nowhere in the world, in expert and scientific research, are
18 voters' registers taken as a starting point to make an assessment of the
19 number of refugees."
20 That's what you wrote; correct?
21 A. If you will allow me, I would like to consult what I have
22 written, because you have taken one sentence out of the context, after
23 all. Give me the page, please, and which report are you referring to.
24 Q. Your report.
25 A. The first or the second?
Page 35013
1 Q. The report entitled "A Critical Analysis of OTP Expert Reports,"
2 and then the introductory page is entitled "A Critical Analysis of OTP
3 Expert Report, Ethnic Composition, IDPs, and Refugees." It's page 14 of
4 that report.
5 A. That's the title of the report. Now, which page were you quoting
6 from?
7 Q. Page 14 of the B/C/S, page 15 of the English for everyone else.
8 A. On page 14 in B/C/S, I can't see this. Please assist me. The
9 page starts with --
10 MS. WEST: If I could have the usher's assistance, we can just
11 give her a copy of the report in case she's lost.
12 Q. Do you see the middle of that page, page 14?
13 A. In my copy, it's page 13, and I apologise to you.
14 Q. Okay. Do you see in the middle where you've bolded it?
15 MS. WEST: If I may just take my copy.
16 Q. Professor, can you read the sentence in B/C/S that begins with
17 the word "Nowhere"?
18 A. I'm lost again. I can't find it. Are you referring to the part
19 which starts with: "The methodological confusion ..."? I really -- I'm
20 lost.
21 Q. Professor --
22 A. Can I read from your copy? I really can't find it in mine. Can
23 somebody assist me, because what is marked in red is not the same thing
24 here.
25 Q. So if you can read out that bolded sentence.
Page 35014
1 A. It says:
2 "It is unacceptable for economic migrants to be proclaimed
3 refugees, and it is also impermissible to make an assessment of refugees
4 to be done on the basis of voters' registers. Nowhere in the world, in
5 expert and scientific research, are voters' registers taken as a starting
6 point to make an assessment of the number of refugees."
7 MS. WEST: Mr. President, would this be a good place to stop?
8 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Quite. Let's break for 20
9 minutes.
10 --- Recess taken at 12.31 p.m.
11 --- On resuming at 12.52 p.m.
12 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Ms. West, you may proceed.
13 MS. WEST: Thank you, Mr. President.
14 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Mr. Scott is with us. Good
15 afternoon. We hadn't seen you in a long time. Glad to see you.
16 Please proceed.
17 MS. WEST:
18 Q. Professor, when we stopped for the break, we were talking about
19 sources, and you had read a portion of your report in which you wrote:
20 "Nowhere in the world, in expert and scientific research, are
21 voters' registers taken as a starting point to make an assessment of the
22 number of refugees."
23 So, Professor, still talking about sources, please go to P10731.
24 It's in the second binder. That's P10731, and the B/C/S is tab 3.
25 This is an article from Population Studies, and it's about
Page 35015
1 counting the dead in Cambodia
2 through 1979. I'm just going to read you the abstract and then ask you a
3 question.
4 Under "Abstract," it says:
5 "Estimates of mortality in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge
6 regime, 1975 to 1979, range from 20.000 deaths according to former Khmer
7 Rouge sources, to over three million victims according to Vietnamese
8 government sources. This paper uses an unusual data source, the 1992
9 electoral lists registered by the United Nations, to estimate the
10 population size after the Khmer Rouge regime and the extent of excess
11 mortality in the 1970s. These data also provide first a breakdown of
12 population by single year of age which allows analysis of the age
13 structure and excess mortality and inference of the relative importance
14 of violence as a cause of death in that period. The estimates derived
15 here are more comparable with the higher estimates made in the past.
16 "In addition, the analysis of likely causes of death that could
17 have generated the age pattern of excess mortality clearly shows a larger
18 contribution of direct or violent mortality than has been previously
19 recognised."
20 Professor, would you agree, and I'm asking this based on only
21 what I've just read, just the abstract - I understand you've not read the
22 article - but would you agree that the source used here, electoral lists,
23 in this respect might also provide a good source for population analysis?
24 A. First of all, I did not read the full paper. Secondly, I don't
25 know who wrote it. I don't know what the qualifications are of the
Page 35016
1 person who wrote it, whether it's a journalist or a demographer.
2 Secondly, you are here comparing mortality to the electoral
3 lists. I repeat, once again, that I've never heard of electoral lists
4 being used in scientific reports as a starting point for the estimate of
5 the number of refugees. I underline "refugees."
6 Really, if I had the whole paper here in front of me and if I
7 could see what the value was of the electoral list, if I could see what
8 is the mortality base, what data they are comparing, then I could give
9 you my judgement. As it stands, I can either accept it or not accept it.
10 It is a fact that this was the way in which it was done. But as
11 to the degree of reliability of the data obtained in this way, I cannot
12 give you my judgement. I repeat that I am not aware of anyone ever doing
13 the estimate of the number of refugees on the basis of electoral lists or
14 rolls.
15 Q. This article is from a journal called "Population Studies" out of
16 Great Britain. Have you ever heard of it?
17 A. I heard about several journals by that name, but I would like to
18 hear who the author is. Perhaps I know the author, because there are --
19 sociologists can write about a phenomenon, a historian can write about
20 the phenomenon. In science, everybody has the right to decide on the
21 data sources, to select data sources. But when it's demography, then
22 I can tell, as a demographer, what is acceptable and what is not
23 acceptable as a minimum of reliability, minimal degree of reliability.
24 Q. The author's name is Patrick Heuveline; and at the time that he
25 wrote this, he was a demographer with the Population Studies Centre at
Page 35017
1 the University of Pennsylvania
2 Chicago
3 Have you ever heard of him?
4 A. No, I've never heard of him.
5 Q. Thank you. Let's continue to talk about the issue of electoral
6 records or OSCE records being used as a source.
7 Now, you testified here at the Tribunal in June 2004 in the
8 Blagojevic case. Do you remember that?
9 A. Yes, I do.
10 Q. And that was a case that involved the events of Srebrenica;
11 correct?
12 A. That's correct.
13 Q. So, for example, let's just go directly to, excuse me, your
14 testimony, and that's going to be at page 10.990.
15 And on that occasion, you had been asked by Mr. Karnavas whether,
16 in the circumstances of Srebrenica, what would be the ideal source, and
17 here you testified that the ideal source would be doing a census. And
18 the next question was, well, in the event that you couldn't do a census,
19 then what would you do.
20 So the question was:
21 "Well, let's assume that a census was not a choice for whatever
22 reason; they had no money, they weren't interested, they couldn't carry
23 it out, there was no political will. Whatever the situation was, what
24 would be the next approach ..." --
25 THE INTERPRETER: Could counsel please slow down.
Page 35018
1 MS. WEST: My apologies, yes.
2 Q. Moving on to the next page, page 10.991, your answer was:
3 "First of all, you have to tap all the information sources that
4 you have available. Among existing sources of information, you can make
5 particularly good use of OSCE voter registers. We used the 1997-1998
6 here, but there are those that were compiled in 2000. And you can also
7 use, as a basis or even as a guideline, the census of 1991."
8 Do you remember that testimony?
9 A. Well, if you're reading from the transcript, then probably that's
10 what I said, but you can use -- you can apply that in particular for
11 Srebrenica. I didn't think and I still don't think that this is a data
12 source that was created in the conditions of a humanitarian crisis, but I
13 do not consider it to be a good data source; however, you can use it.
14 But the sense of it was that an effort to establish the number of
15 survivors was conducted by the Prosecution expert by using only the 1997
16 voters' list, and at that time we also had the 2000 voters' list. The
17 purpose or the goal was to check whether a person that is listed as
18 missing registered to vote, and the expert was able to ascertain that
19 nine of them were registered to vote.
20 It is in this context that I say the method is not good. But I
21 felt that it would be good to use not only the 1997-1998 voters' list but
22 also the 2000 voters' list. So I'm not saying that the voters' list are
23 ideal for the situation, but that it would have been better had the other
24 one been used. Given that he used the 1997-1998 one, why didn't he also
25 check the 2001, since it also existed?
Page 35019
1 Q. Your concern here is not that OSCE voters' lists are unreliable;
2 you just thought they should use a different one?
3 A. No, Madam. These are completely different things. In that
4 situation, you are checking whether somebody is alive. The data are not
5 reliable, but you are trying to use the matching method to find the
6 survivors. So you are not trying to calculate on the basis of the
7 voters' list whether somebody became a refugee or a displaced person.
8 You are trying to see whether, in such a limited voters' list, you're
9 able to find any survivors. So these are different approaches used for
10 different purposes. The voters' lists are used for different purposes.
11 Q. So in that case --
12 MR. KARNAVAS: I would want to make one comment.
13 I would appreciate if she's not interrupted. Either the
14 questions should be narrower -- but if she's trying to extract somebody
15 from a previous case, then the witness should be allowed to put it into
16 perspective, because the Trial Chamber may not be aware of the facts in
17 Srebrenica. So I would appreciate the witness being given some latitude
18 in providing the context. Or the questions be narrower.
19 MS. WEST:
20 Q. Professor, in the context --
21 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Ms. West, yes, per se the
22 Trial Chamber is not supposed to be aware of the facts in the three cases
23 in which this witness testified to search for the truth. So, please, in
24 your preliminary question, do recall the context.
25 MS. WEST:
Page 35020
1 Q. So, Professor, in the case of Blagojevic, that was about
2 Srebrenica, and that was a search for the missing or the dead. So in
3 that case, if you had used what you suggested in your testimony, the
4 census and the voters' registration, what you would have done was
5 compared names on the census with the names on the voters' registration.
6 The assumption is if somebody did not register in 1997, or later as you
7 said would be better, then they were either missing or dead. Now, that's
8 the Srebrenica case.
9 In our case --
10 MR. KARNAVAS: No, that's not what she said. That's not what she
11 said. That's not what the report says. You can mischaracterise the
12 facts all you want. That is not what her testimony was or what she wrote
13 as far as Blagojevic, and I should know because I tried the case and this
14 was my witness. So either quote from the report or quote the entire
15 passage from the record.
16 Let's be fair to the witness.
17 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Ms. West, you were able to
18 access the Blagojevic transcript. It would be easier to tell the
19 witness, "In answering Mr. Karnavas' question on page this and this, this
20 is what you said. Now, what do you add or what do you take out?" You
21 have to make an exact reference to the Blagojevic transcript.
22 MS. WEST: Thank you, Mr. President. I did make an exact
23 reference to the Blagojevic transcript, but I think we can move on to our
24 case.
25 Q. Professor, in our case, if you were applying the 1991 census and
Page 35021
1 the OSCE records, the analysis would be to find out who registered in the
2 census -- rather, who was recorded in the census, to who registered in
3 1997, the idea being you would see if that person was still in Bosnia
4 Herzegovina
5 Now, in this case, we've taken the extra step, haven't we? It's
6 that we're looking at their address?
7 A. This is the first time that I hear that an address was sought.
8 But before I answer this question, which is a "what if" question, I would
9 like to tell you that in the Blagojevic report, I devote a whole chapter
10 to the critique of the electoral rolls or voters' lists as a data source.
11 And if I were to answer the question, "If you didn't have anything, what
12 would you have used in addition to the 1997-1998 list," now if you ask me
13 if I were a Prosecution expert, if I would have used the voters' list as
14 a data source and census, as Ewa Tabeau did, then my answer would be
15 "no," for a simple reason; or if I would have used them, my report would
16 have contained a very specific designation as to what data were
17 acceptable and what were not.
18 The matching methodology applied to two incongruent data sources
19 is something that I do not consider as guaranteeing that reliable data
20 sources would be obtained in such a matching process. But I stress, once
21 again, a demographer has the right to select data sources, to edit them,
22 and to apply all scientifically approved methods and stages of work or
23 steps, and to distance themselves and to say these data sources are
24 dubious, but I do not have any other data sources. I can obtain this and
25 that with a certain degree of reliability.
Page 35022
1 I'm sorry, I'm not finished yet.
2 Q. Professor --
3 A. It is very important here -- it is very important here, from my
4 point of view --
5 Q. The question was: Is that what we're looking at, at their
6 address? Then your answer was not responsive.
7 So, again, I would ask you to listen to my question and try to
8 respond with a responsive answer.
9 We're now talking about methodology, so I would like to go to
10 your report to see what you've written about the issue of methodology.
11 Now, this is page 22 of the English and page 20 of the B/C/S.
12 A. I'm sorry, I didn't understand you. I didn't understand you when
13 you say -- I really didn't understand you. I have to understand you in
14 order to be able to answer your questions. When you say, did we look for
15 the address, are you saying the Prosecution, in the matching process,
16 look for the address? Is that what mean?
17 I don't know what you're question. What is it that you are
18 asking me.
19 Q. Professor, we're going to go on to page 20 in B/C/S of your
20 report, and I'm going to read what you wrote in regard to matching.
21 There you wrote:
22 "The matching method means identifying or matching absolutely
23 corresponding units from different sources of data; in this case, the
24 census and voters' registers. Comparison is carried out in a way that a
25 single identification key is first identified, according to which data
Page 35023
1 from one source are let into the other source to find their identical
2 counterparts. The matching method is not a problem if there is an exact
3 and single identification key. The identification key consists of a
4 number of elements of digits and letters, and the level of correctness of
5 matching depends on correctness of each of these elements.
6 "For example, personal identification number is a good key for
7 matching, provided it is correct. It contains 13 digits, and each of
8 them is an element necessary for a precise identification of a person.
9 Its advantage is that it is unique, which means that two or more persons
10 cannot have the same identification number, and, therefore, duplication
11 in matching is impossible. Matching with the correct personal
12 identification number eliminates any subjective influence on end
13 results."
14 So, Professor --
15 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Ms. West, please slow down,
16 because the interpreters find it hard to follow you. You are a very fast
17 speaker.
18 MS. WEST: Thank you, Mr. President.
19 Q. Professor, my question is whether, in your view of matching,
20 would a match of the personal identification number be the ideal matching
21 method?
22 A. The best, most reliable method; not ideal, but provided that the
23 personal ID number is unique and correct. It is unique, as the very name
24 suggests, but it also needs to be correct. It is the most reliable key
25 for matching. In this case, I said when you're using a cash card, you
Page 35024
1 have again a numerical key, but of a different kind.
2 Q. Thank you. Had OTP used the personal identification key only,
3 and that was the only method they used, would you disagree with the
4 results, if it was based on that and just that entirely?
5 A. The matching method, now we have a problem with the key. If the
6 personal ID number had been used as the key and if they had reliable and
7 correct numbers, then the data would definitely be much more reliable.
8 Q. Thank you. However, you go on to write, and this is at page 21
9 of the B/C/S, that the identification key has to be unchangeable through
10 the matching process. Is this a view that is shared by others in the
11 field of statistics?
12 A. Well, that's not a matter of opinion. There are whole services,
13 procedures, that are done in this manner. The census, the form is
14 matched with the household using certain codes that are again the same
15 for the form and for the household, and that is how you know how many
16 members per household. The population in the countries where there are
17 population registers, they do all those matching exercises using the
18 personal numbers. There are states and institutions that have an
19 established operational system for the matching process or procedure. I
20 now cannot tell you whether there are any errors there or not, but this
21 is the most reliable way to do it. You have to have in place an
22 established operational system.
23 Q. Thank you. Let's look to some of those states and institution.
24 If you can go to P10734, that's in the second binder.
25 A. P10 ... [In English] 734, yes?
Page 35025
1 Q. Correct.
2 A. Okay.
3 Q. This is an article published by the US Bureau of Census, and it's
4 entitled "Quality of Very Large Database."
5 If you go to the --
6 MR. KARNAVAS: Your Honour, I'm going to object to the use of
7 this document as well. This has nothing to do with Bosnia-Herzegovina.
8 It certainly has nothing to do with her previous line of questioning,
9 which had to do with the personal identification number, the 13 digits,
10 and why those numbers should be unchangeable. It's not up to somebody to
11 change those numbers. Those are given to individuals, they're unique, so
12 what does this document have to do and what does the United States
13 Statistical Bureau have to do with what's happening in
14 Bosnia-Herzegovina?
15 So I do object, unless lay a foundation as to the relevance.
16 JUDGE TRECHSEL: I think the Chamber overrules. Ms. West has not
17 even indicated what she wants to do with the document. It's premature to
18 object.
19 MS. WEST: Thank you, Your Honour.
20 Q. Professor, we were talking about methodology, and you were
21 indicating that, in your view, a methodology that would use this personal
22 identification number that would be unchangeable was, as you said, the
23 best and most reliable way to do it. This is an article from the US
24 Census Bureau, and I'm just going to read the abstract part of it and ask
25 you a question. The abstract is:
Page 35026
1 "Analysis and data-mining of large computer files are affected by
2 the quality of the information in the files. For large population
3 registers and for files that are ..." --
4 THE INTERPRETER: The interpreters don't have the text in
5 English. Thank you.
6 MS. WEST: I believe it's on the screen now, so if we can start
7 again.
8 Q. "Analysis and data-mining of large computer files are affected by
9 the quality of the information in the files. For large population
10 registers and for files that are created by creating two or more files,
11 duplicate entries must be identified. Duplicate identification can
12 depend on record-linkage software that can deal with name, address, and
13 date of birth data containing many typographical errors.
14 "Quantitative and qualitative data must be edited to ensure that
15 usually contradictory or missing items are changed automatically and
16 quickly. This paper describes computational methods and software that
17 are suitable for groups of files where individual files contain between
18 one million and four billion records."
19 Professor, the 1991 census indicated that Bosnia-Herzegovina had
20 approximately 4.4 people -- million people?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. [Interpretation] And the OSCE, 1997 plus 1998 voter records, were
23 approximately 2.5 million people; correct?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. Now, what I've just read out in the abstract, would you agree
Page 35027
1 with me that software that could computate a linkage between very large
2 databases is something that at least the US Census Bureau advocates?
3 A. First of all, I'm not familiar with software at all, but America
4 has the unique register in such a way that it merges several databases,
5 two up to 50. So different states that are part of the USA are provided
6 databases and then they are merged, and there must be duplicates.
7 I can't tell you what the situation is, but the state of Serbia
8 is doing the same thing. It is trying to set up the database, but it
9 cannot check for duplicates because it only has that particular census.
10 It is not able to check it, and Dr. Tabeau can check it partially. For
11 instance, if she took the JMBGs in the census and the JMBGs in the
12 voters' list, and if she were to merge it --
13 Please, allow me finish.
14 So if she were to merge those two databases--
15 Q. [Previous translation continues]... my question. My question
16 regarded linkage between software bases and the US census. Now you're
17 talking about the Tabeau report. If you can continue on in your B/C/S
18 version, we can exactly read about the linkage --
19 A. Please, please. I'm talking about merging. It says here
20 "Merging the ..." --
21 JUDGE TRECHSEL: I'm sorry. You are in an unpleasant situation.
22 We all know this, and you are not the first and not the last. But the
23 rules of the game are that in cross-examination, you can be asked
24 questions that boil down to "yes," "no," "I don't remember," "I don't
25 know."
Page 35028
1 It is understandable that often you will have a desire to explain
2 broadly. But as the time is very limited, as everyone in this courtroom
3 will confirm to you, we must ask you to stick as precisely as possible to
4 the questions the Prosecutor asks of you. You have no freedom of speech,
5 as it were, here. It may be regrettable, but that's the Rules of
6 Procedure with which we all have to comply.
7 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Your Honour, if you allow me to say
8 something.
9 JUDGE TRECHSEL: Unfortunately, I have to be impolite, and I
10 cannot allow you to say something. Many witnesses have already asked
11 this question, and the answer is always the same.
12 Please, Ms. West.
13 MS. WEST: Thank you.
14 Q. Professor, we're going to move on in this article, and it's just
15 going to be the second page of your B/C/S. And in the English, it is at
16 the part entitled as "Number 4," the second-to-last page, and it's
17 "Record linkage for exceptionally large files."
18 "Many individuals believe that identifying duplicates is one of
19 the most difficult of the data quality issues. For a large matching
20 situation, such as matching the main Social Security Administration's
21 file of over 600 million records against the 2000 census file of 300
22 million records, this may entail the detailed comparison of 600 trillion
23 pairs of records. Matching must be done using name, address, and
24 date-of-birth information, because the census file does not contain the
25 social security number. Matching is done on secure administrative-record
Page 35029
1 machines having two additional sets of firewalls inside the main
2 firewalls protecting the census bureau computers.
3 "To match efficiently, the files are matched in a series of
4 blocking passes. During a blocking pass, only those pairs agreeing on
5 certain characteristics are considered. For instance, on one blocking
6 pass, only those pairs agreeing on the first and last name may be
7 considered. Other characteristics, such as date of birth and address,
8 are used to determine whether a pair is a match. On another pass, only
9 those pairs agreeing on date of birth may be considered."
10 Professor --
11 MR. KARNAVAS: Before we even hear the question, unless they can
12 establish -- the Prosecution can establish that this was the procedure
13 used in Bosnia
14 process that the United States uses in a highly-sophisticated number,
15 with social security numbers and what have you, versus the one that was
16 used in 1991, they are two different things. So how can she possibly
17 answer a question?
18 JUDGE TRECHSEL: The question was not even put, Mr. Karnavas.
19 THE INTERPRETER: Microphone for the Judge, please. Microphone
20 for His Honour.
21 MR. KARNAVAS: Your Honour, that's my whole point. I am raising
22 an objection on the grounds that this document is not relevant for the
23 comparative purposes. We already know what she's trying to do, because
24 we've heard the previous question, and I didn't object. But now when
25 she's going into this, it's very clear. I don't need to hear the
Page 35030
1 question. I know the question. I can ask the question myself.
2 She's going to be making a comparison. What I am saying is,
3 while this may be acceptable procedure in the United States, it doesn't
4 mean that it's acceptable, because no foundation has been laid insofar as
5 the 1991 process. That's what I'm saying.
6 JUDGE TRECHSEL: It may very well go to credibility. It is on
7 methodology. We'll listen to what the Prosecutor asks.
8 MS. WEST: Thank you.
9 Q. Professor, my question is whether this, what I just read, this
10 method, sounds familiar to you. Is this the method that the OTP used in
11 their report?
12 A. I wouldn't be able to say. This is not about the matching of
13 different sources of data. This is about merging parts of one and the
14 same source that is called a census and how by merging parts and as a
15 result of the merge, you can end up with duplicates, how you expunge
16 them. That has nothing whatsoever to do with the comparison of two
17 sources of data.
18 This is just a technology to clean the material in order to
19 provide the reliability of the data found in the census of the USA, and
20 this is not the same method. This is not the method which allows me to
21 find Svetlana Radovanovic, when I compare two different sources. This is
22 how I understand the whole matter, as I read it.
23 Q. I'm just going to read the second sentence again to you, which
24 says:
25 "For a large matching situation, such as matching the main Social
Page 35031
1 Security Administration's file of over 600 million records against the
2 2000 census of 300 million records, this may entail a detailed
3 comparison."
4 Professor, this matching article from the US census is about
5 matching different sources, correct, and it is not an article about
6 cleaning up materials --
7 A. No, madam, you are not right. If you go back to the beginning,
8 where it says "a short overview" for large registers, the registers of
9 population, and for databases which originate from merging two or many
10 databases, one has to establish the duplicates. We're talking about two
11 or more databases from the census. When one needs to establish certain,
12 you can then compare two or more databases which refer to the population
13 and establish whether there are any duplicates.
14 Q. Professor, nonetheless, my question is whether the sort of
15 process is familiar to you. I'd like you to look at P09836, and that's
16 binder 1.
17 A. P09836.
18 Q. P09836. This is the OTP report, and you can go directly --
19 there's a red tab, the red tab. It would be page 108 of the B/C/S, and
20 I think you're there.
21 I'm just going to read this paragraph and ask you a question.
22 It's entitled "Data-Linking." It's page 94 of the English, second
23 paragraph:
24 "To link our data sets, we employed a multi-step procedure. Each
25 step consisted of several comparisons between two sets of related
Page 35032
1 individual-level data records. One record always describes one
2 individual and is a collection of his or her characteristics on a number
3 of items, such as, for example, the first name, family name ..." --
4 A. I apologise. I've lost you. You're reading from page 108, the
5 first paragraph on that page, are you?
6 Q. The second paragraph.
7 A. [In English] Second, excuse me.
8 Q. So we'll start again:
9 "To link our data sets, we employed a multi-step procedure. Each
10 step consisted of several comparisons between two sets of related
11 individual-level data records. One record always describes one
12 individual and is a collection of his or her characteristics on a number
13 of items, such as, for example, the first name, family name, father's
14 name, date of birth, et cetera. All steps follow the same logic (see
15 below).
16 "The differences between the steps were the slightly differing
17 criteria used to match the records, and the fact that the population
18 available for next possible matches shrank after each step. In other
19 words, once a number of records has been matched in two related data
20 sets, these records were excluded from the next round of matching. In
21 the next step, the matching criterion applied was modified compared with
22 the previous ones to capture new matches."
23 So, Professor, my question is: This method that the OTP report
24 describes right here, isn't that exactly what the US census talked about,
25 not in the abstract but in the part entitled "Record Linkage"?
Page 35033
1 A. It's not the same. The USA
2 parts of one database; and, here, different sources are used. Different
3 databases are used in order to establish a link surrounding one person;
4 and, thus, you form a third database. In the USA census, nobody attempts
5 to form a third, a seventh or a tenth database. One and only database is
6 established, but it consists of several elements, and it has to be made
7 reliable by discarding all duplicates.
8 This process here consists of two databases; and by matching a
9 third base, a database is formed through a number of steps. The first
10 step is, I have got a match, so I will put that aside. Then I change my
11 criteria, I modify, I match, and I add to the first match. These are the
12 statistics of matching, as I called it.
13 If the OTP expert said what she did and how much she matched
14 according to the first criteria, and, for example, it would be
15 20 per cent, and then in the second step, the match result would be
16 40 per cent, according to a different set of criteria, then it would be
17 okay. But she didn't, and that's where the problem lies.
18 Q. But, nonetheless, Professor, would you agree that the US Census
19 Bureau advocates a method that is very different than the single,
20 unchangeable identification key method that you suggest?
21 A. We are confusing terms. Either I'm not able to explain things
22 properly, or I'm receiving a bad interpretation, or there is something
23 else at stake.
24 The USA
25 They establish it by establishing duplicates, making circles, trying to
Page 35034
1 establish a database which will contain reliable data on every single
2 person without any duplicates whatsoever.
3 Your expert did not do the same. Your expert combines two
4 databases into a third database. If your expert had done the following
5 and said, "I took the census in order to establish a reliable database
6 which will contain the exact ID numbers," it would be okay. That would
7 be the first step. The second step, "From such census, I would like to
8 take out those with only partial ID numbers." The third step would be
9 identifying those with erroneous ID numbers. There is a modality that
10 may be applied to do that. The fourth step would be to identify those
11 without any ID numbers at all.
12 If she had come up with an operational system of her own in order
13 to reduce that database to one single key, that would be comparable.
14 This is what the United States of America do, and this is what your
15 expert should have done.
16 JUDGE TRECHSEL: I have a problem of understanding. Perhaps I'm
17 completely wrong.
18 You keep stressing that the United States is using one database,
19 the same always. I read that in the report, where we had been where,
20 there is, on the one hand, the main Social Security Administration file
21 and, on the other hand, the census. Now, according to you, is that the
22 same or is that also two different bases?
23 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Based on which they established
24 just one, and then what can happen to them is that both in the Social
25 Security Administration file and in the census, they find one person.
Page 35035
1 That's how I understand things when I'm reading this page. This means
2 that I have to establish one single database which will exclude any
3 possible duplication.
4 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Madam Witness, let me leave
5 the United States and let me come back to the former Yugoslavia
6 The JMBG system, which seems or which is, rather, the outcome of
7 a piece of legislation which was passed at the time in 1976, unless I'm
8 mistaken, is a system which includes 13 entries; the date of birth, the
9 place of birth, the gender, and one last key, which is the "K" key, which
10 is established after a very complicated calculation.
11 Now, when I look at this Yugoslav system, it seems to me, and
12 again maybe I'm mistaken, that it had not provided for the ethnic
13 background or ethnic identification as part of the 13 different entries.
14 The fact of being a Serb, a Muslim, or a Croat was not being considered?
15 All right.
16 So for Mostar, for instance, the identifier, which is figure 15,
17 because it's a city which was given a number, and for Mostar, if you're
18 interested, that's number 15, now, if a demographer sees that a person is
19 born in Mostar, number 15, in light of the ethnic makeup of Mostar, you
20 know you may be wrong every one time out of two, and you say that this
21 person is either a Muslim or a Croat.
22 So the JMBG system is imperfect, from an ethnic point of view,
23 because there's no reference to the ethnic background?
24 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Yes.
25 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] All right. That explains,
Page 35036
1 then, that you need to cross-reference, if I understand things correctly,
2 with another source, which is, as is the thesis of the Prosecution, the
3 voters' list. And in the voters' lists or roll, the ethnic background
4 may be included?
5 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] No. The OTP knows only too well
6 that electoral rolls do not contain ethnic background, and they know that
7 this is contained in the census. They need this matching exercise in
8 order to take over the ethnicity and install it into the electoral rolls
9 to establish a new database and proclaim it a new database which reflects
10 the situation as it was in 1997.
11 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Right. If I understand you
12 well, for a demographer or a statistician, somebody who's studied
13 statistics, the only basis in this area is only the outcome of the census
14 in which the citizen may or may not have indicated whether they were
15 Serbs, Croats, or Muslims, because they were free. That was really the
16 only instrument available?
17 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] That's correct. But you have to
18 bear in mind that this ethnic declaration was valid at that very point in
19 time and only at that point in time.
20 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Fine, then. You do confirm,
21 then, that the only reliable basis is the census, but that's not even so
22 sure, because for the rest there is no ethnic reference at all?
23 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Yes.
24 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Okay. Well, I think that's
25 it, then.
Page 35037
1 MS. WEST: Mr. President, I'm about to move on to a new topic.
2 Shall I go ahead or do you want to break?
3 JUDGE ANTONETTI: [Interpretation] Well, we have two minutes and
4 48 seconds left. Maybe it's better to leave it at that for today, all
5 the more, so that in 30 minutes from now, I have another trial to attend
6 to. So we're going to continue tomorrow.
7 Madam West, we're going to calculate the time that you've used
8 today, and it is quite likely that we shall finish tomorrow, including
9 with the additional questions. You've used up one hour and fifteen
10 minutes, so you have one hour and forty-five minutes left. All right?
11 So, Madam Witness, again these are my instructions: You shall
12 have no contacts, neither with Mr. Karnavas, nor with the Prosecution,
13 nor with the Judges, obviously, and we'll have the pleasure of meeting
14 you again tomorrow morning at 9.00.
15 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 1.43 p.m.
16 to be reconvened on Wednesday, the 26th day of
17 November, 2008, at 9.00 a.m.
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25