Page 13714
1 Tuesday, 18 March 2003
2 [Open session]
3 [The accused entered court]
4 --- Upon commencing at 9.05 a.m.
5 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Good morning to everybody. May we hear the
6 case, please?
7 THE REGISTRAR: Good morning. This is case number IT-97-24-T, the
8 Prosecutor versus Milomir Stakic.
9 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Thank you. And the appearances, please for the
10 Prosecution?
11 MS. KORNER: Joanna Korner, Ann Sutherland, assisted by Ruth
12 Karper, case manager. Good morning, Your Honours.
13 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Defence?
14 MR. LUKIC: Good morning, Your Honours. Branko
15 Lukic, John Ostojic and Danilo Cirkovic for the Defence.
16 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: One of the few good news of this morning is that
17 the witness is ready and without any further ado, please let's start. In
18 the meantime, I may announce that in all likelihood, Mr. Peter Stanar will
19 testify next Monday. Mr. Kuruzovic either already on Tuesday or on
20 Wednesday next week. As we said yesterday, this would be during the
21 rebuttal period of time with the agreement of the parties. Later on, I'll
22 ask the Prosecution whether or not the Prosecution intends to call the
23 now-available Mr. Dosen during rebuttal but not now.
24 [The witness entered court]
25 WITNESS: SRDJA TRIFKOVIC [resumed]
Page 13715
1 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Good morning, Mr. Trifkovic. I hope you feel
2 better now as well and you're fit for the continuation of your expert
3 testimony today.
4 THE WITNESS: Good morning, Your Honour, yes, I feel much better
5 than I did over the past couple of days even though I'm not back 100 per
6 cent in top form but I think I'm up to it for today.
7 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: That's what we have in common. The Defence,
8 please.
9 Examined by Mr. Lukic continued.
10 Q. Good morning, Dr. Trifkovic.
11 A. Good morning, Mr. Lukic.
12 Q. Today, we are in full force and because I was questioning you on
13 Friday, I'll continue, although Mr. Ostojic is with us as well.
14 On Friday we finished with your opinion on the role of Dr. Stakic
15 before the 30th of April, 1992, and now I would like to ask you, based
16 upon review of the documents provided, as Donia's report, numerous
17 articles and literature, my other things, can you please describe for us
18 Dr. Stakic's role after the takeover of Prijedor municipality on April the
19 30th, 1992?
20 MS. KORNER: Your Honour, I do not want to interrupt but I wonder
21 if in the light of this question, the witness could indicate on what he's
22 basing this answer.
23 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Certainly, the witness will do, and refer to
24 concrete parts of articles that we have the necessary basis for this. The
25 more concrete we are, the better it is, no doubt, you know Dr. Trifkovic.
Page 13716
1 THE WITNESS: Yes, certainly, Your Honour. My only basis for
2 forming an opinion in this respect, the published sources, specifically
3 the Kozarski Vjesnik newspaper, which seems to have carried fairly
4 faithfully public pronouncements of different officials, both before and
5 after the events of May of 1992. As I indicated in my
6 examination-in-chief on Friday afternoon, prior to the events of the
7 spring of 1992, Dr. Stakic acted, if anything, more like a Yugo nostalgist
8 than a greater Serb nationalist and the tone of one might say conciliatory
9 regret over the way that events were shaping up is also strongly felt in
10 his interview entitled -- under the headline, "Serbs live in this
11 municipality too." That was published in February of 1992 in Kozarski
12 Vjesnik. In that interview, Stakic elaborated at some length on the
13 reasons for the establishment of the Serb municipality in Prijedor,
14 pointing out the desire of the SDA to marginalise the SDS and present it
15 with faits accomplis and also stressing the need to have functioning
16 organs in the municipality and to overcome the blockade of its organs by
17 the central ministries in Sarajevo.
18 In the period after the spring of 1992, I think that particularly
19 poignant is the interview or rather sorry the report that we had on the
20 occasion of the bishop -- of Bishop Komarica's visit to Prijedor. He's
21 the Roman Catholic bishop of Banja Luka. I'm now speaking from memory. I
22 can of course verify the specific dates if need be but for the sake of the
23 narrative I think it's easier. When bishop Komarica came to Banja Luka,
24 accompanied by both his -- some of his priests and HDZ officials,
25 Dr. Stakic spoke in terms again of ethnic conciliation, of the need for
Page 13717
1 rebuilding trust and rebuilding connections that will endure even after
2 the war is over. When he appealed on the Ukrainians in the Prijedor
3 municipality to remain in their homes, there is a small Ukrainian or
4 Ruthenian community in the Prijedor municipality, they were settled there
5 in the 19th century by the Austrians. He also spoke in terms of the need
6 to overcome the legacy of ethnic divisions and of the need to create
7 conditions for common co-living "suzivot" is I think the term used, and
8 all of this indicates that even if indeed it was his agenda to seek a
9 radical nationalist solution to the situation in the Prijedor
10 municipality, he chose a very unusual method of pursuing that objective,
11 because elsewhere, in the former Yugoslavia, and I'm talking about all
12 sides of the ethnic divide, it was common practice for people of strongly
13 nationalist persuasion to use the language of threats, vilification, even
14 demonisation of other ethnic groups. I stress again this was practice
15 common to Serbs, as well as Croats, as well as Muslims, and the process of
16 eventual ethnic cleansing, whether it be the Muslims in Foca or the Serbs
17 in Mostar or the Croats in Central Bosnia was almost invariably preceded
18 by a campaign of verbal abuse and a torrent of hate speech that had the
19 objective of encouraging people to leave of their own volition even before
20 the violence started in earnest. It is my considered opinion that the
21 public announcements of Dr. Stakic did not fit that pattern.
22 MR. LUKIC:
23 Q. Dr. Trifkovic, would you be so kind and look at your list of
24 documents, the shorter one? I'll try to point out a few numbers so you
25 can tell us whether those documents are among others you considered when
Page 13718
1 testifying about the -- Dr. Stakic's personality and conduct. It's number
2 018, 022, 048, 054, 059, 064, 067, and 073.
3 A. Yes, I have to emphasise that you're now referring also to several
4 documents that we've dealt with in -- on Friday afternoon. I didn't
5 specifically refer to them now because I thought the question referred
6 specifically to the period after the takeover of the Assembly. Of course,
7 the documents that you list now also refer to the period leading up to the
8 rupture, specifically Stakic's speech at the November 29th celebration in
9 1991, which I dealt with on Friday and which I characterised as an example
10 of what I would term Yugo nostalgic rather than greater Serb discourse.
11 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Maybe it's my own fault but asking my
12 colleagues, we are not aware of this what you call short list. Could you
13 please, for a better understanding of that, what the expert tells us,
14 provide us with the short list? Thank you.
15 MR. LUKIC: May I continue, Your Honour?
16 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Please.
17 MR. LUKIC: Thank you.
18 Q. Dr. Trifkovic, do you have an opinion, based upon a reasonable
19 degree of certainty, of other comparable conflicts in history?
20 A. Oh, the list is long and very sad. I didn't expect this question
21 but if you give me just a moment to try and focus, I will certainly try to
22 give you an answer. Without going into ancient history, if you simply
23 look at the modern period from the end of Napoleonic wars from 1815
24 onwards, it is unfortunate that in European conflicts, there had been an
25 increasing tendency to turn disputes over power and territory into
Page 13719
1 all-national disputes in which the civilians were both the stake and the
2 chief victims. The shifting ethnic picture, as the result of those
3 conflicts roughly runs as follows: There was a shift in the ethnic
4 composition of Schleswig-Holstein in the aftermath of Denmark's defeat at
5 the hands of Prussia in 1864. There was an attempt by the second Reich to
6 alter the ethnic picture of Alsace and Lorraine through loyalty oaths in
7 the period of 1871 to 1914. There was the exodus of the Turks from the
8 Ottoman Empire's Balkan possessions in the aftermath of the Balkan wars of
9 1912. There was an ethnic shift in the newly acquired Polish parts of
10 Silesia and Pomerania in 1919, and so on. But the most drastic examples
11 of the ethnic balance being altered by the force of arms came in 1945,
12 when, with the advance of the Red Army, the Poles who had lived east of
13 the Curzon line roughly the Bug River were forced west into what used to
14 be called the little Poland or the Duchy of Warsaw, while the Germans who
15 had lived east of the Oder-Neisse line in the Asian provinces of east
16 Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, were even though it's maybe politically
17 incorrect to say so in the context, but, yes, they were ethnically
18 cleansed and forced west of those two rivers. The same fate befell the
19 Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia and the Volksdeutscher in Yugoslavia.
20 Further instances of ethnic cleansing of effectively innocent civilians is
21 the consequence of World War II, affected the Italians in Istria and
22 maritime Slovenia. The Germans of Bessarabia and to a lesser extent the
23 Tyrolese south of the Brenner Pass and Alto Adige. The total number of
24 persons thus affected is estimated variously between 12 and 15 million.
25 Outside Europe, the most drastic example of the change of ethnic
Page 13720
1 composition resulting from war or civil war was in the Indian subcontinent
2 where, in the period 1947-48, in addition to millions of people
3 slaughtered, an effective, although chaotic exchange of population had
4 taken place resulting in the creation of the state of Pakistan, the Muslim
5 state of Pakistan, and the exodus of Hindus both from east Pakistan,
6 today's Bangladesh, and from Bihar [phoen], today's Pakistan proper.
7 In addition, I forgot to mention in the aftermath of World War I,
8 the ethnic cleansing and population exchange between Greece and Turkey
9 where long-established Greek settlements along the Aegean coast of Asia
10 Minor, numbering 2 million people and centred on the city of Smyrna,
11 today's Izmir, were wiped out and likewise, the long-established Turkish
12 communities in Greece, both in the islands and on the mainland were
13 expelled.
14 So one may say that over the past 100 years, we have witnessed a
15 number of instances where disputes over land, over territory, and power,
16 were inexorably linked with the process that over the past decade has come
17 to be known as ethnic cleansing. I have little doubt in my mind that
18 similar fate would have befallen the unionists of Northern Ireland, the
19 Protestants, had there not been partition of the six counts of Ulster that
20 were left under the British Crown in 1921.
21 I'm afraid this is a sketchy answer to a serious question that
22 merits more focused elaboration but not having been prepared for it, I've
23 tried to give the best outline I could.
24 Q. Thank you, doctor. I would like to ask you now in your expert
25 opinion, as an academic, historian and political scientist, how would you
Page 13721
1 characterise the Bosnian and Herzegovinian conflict in 1991 and 1992?
2 A. I would start by stating what it was not. It was not a mysterious
3 and irrational conflict springing from some ancient hatreds that go to the
4 mists of pre-modern experience that is rooted in some atavistic blood lust
5 of the savage Balkan peasants. In a funny way it was a rational conflict
6 because it was a dispute over clearly defined objectives and I think what
7 is often lost in the propagandistic discourse on the wars in the former
8 Yugoslavia is the fact that each side has a relatively rational story to
9 tell. The fact that this - and I use the term "rational" in strictly
10 technical sense - the fact that this rational discourse is often lost is
11 primarily due to the desire of different parties in the conflict to couch
12 its interests in universal terms such as democracy, multi-culturalism,
13 tolerance, and all the politically correct catch-all terms that are
14 expected to be picked up by the rest of the world in the right kind of
15 way.
16 So let me try to give a succinct description of each side's
17 position and expectations.
18 With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Muslim side felt that
19 it could claim the right of Bosnia-Herzegovina to independence on the same
20 terms as those both claimed and obtained on January 15th, 1992, by Croatia
21 and Slovenia. They did face a problem. The problem was the
22 constitutional arrangements in Bosnia-Herzegovina that specifically
23 precluded any change of constitutional status of the republic without the
24 consensual agreement of all three constituent nations. The Muslim
25 leadership tried to overcome this problem by forging a tactical alliance
Page 13722
1 with the HDZ and by frankly pretending that the constitutional
2 ban on two sides outvoting the third simply wasn't there.
3 The Croat side was primarily interested in sooner or later joining
4 in -- joining with Croatia but regarded the tactical step of forging a
5 temporary alliance with the SDA for the purpose of detaching
6 Bosnia-Herzegovina from Yugoslavia as a prudent and necessary first step
7 in the process.
8 The Serb side was determined not to be taken out of Yugoslavia by
9 force and, in the extreme event of even accepting the independence of
10 Bosnia-Herzegovina, was determined not to allow the internal order of
11 Bosnia-Herzegovina that would not give each constituent ethnic group the
12 full degree of self-rule that would avoid a danger of majorisation or --
13 that's the Yugoslav term for the rule of one or a couple of ethnic groups
14 over another -- and those three positions, incompatible as they seem, in
15 terms of conflict management, could have been reconciled had there been on
16 the part of the international community more of a technical skill in
17 conflict resolution and conflict management.
18 Since you ask about my opinion not only as a historian but also as
19 a political scientist, I would say that in terms of games theory and in
20 terms of the optimal model which would require for each side to give up
21 some of its requirements but not to give up on its core requirement,
22 probably the Cutilheiro Plan of February, 1992 or the Owen Stoltenberg
23 tripartite federal plan of the fall of 1993 would provide the model that
24 could have provided -- that could have avoided the worst aspects of the
25 conflict. In other words, satisfying the Muslim core requirement for an
Page 13723
1 internationally recognised and sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina with intact
2 outside borders, and at the same time rearranging constitutional order of
3 the republic in such a way as to allay the fears of Serbs and Croats of
4 being marginalised by the most numerous ethnic group, and also giving
5 expression to the fact already embodied in the pre-war Bosnian
6 constitution, that the republic is constituted of three nations, three
7 constituent ethnic groups, the consensus of which is required for any
8 change of its constitutional status.
9 So from purely technical point of view, the recognition of April
10 6th, 1992, even though ostensibly motivated by the desire to avoid the
11 worst of the conflict, was in fact a colossal blunder, because it
12 emboldened the Muslim leadership not to make concessions to the Cutilheiro
13 requirements for a cantonal tripartite internal division of the country
14 but to endure on the road to what they called the republic of citizens,
15 Gradjanska Drzava which was de facto the concept of a more or less
16 centralised, more or less unitary Bosnia. By insisting on that concept,
17 they fell into the same trap that the Serbian leadership of the Kingdom of
18 Yugoslavia fell between the two world wars. That is, trying to impose
19 administrative unity from above in the face of ethnic diversity from
20 below. For King Alexander to embark on that experiment in 1929 was an act
21 of folly. For Izetbegovic to persist with the same demand in 1992 simply
22 defies belief.
23 Q. Dr. Trifkovic, can you now specifically explain to us your opinion
24 as an academic historian again and political scientist again, the effect
25 of the developments in the B and H, the Prijedor municipality?
Page 13724
1 A. Those who have read my report will immediately understand that my
2 overall attempt was to contextualise the events in Prijedor and place them
3 in the broader context of the events in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole n
4 Croatia, in Belgrade, in Brussels, in Washington DC and elsewhere. It is
5 no more possible to write an isolated history of the Prijedor municipality
6 in the Bosnian wars of 1992 to 1995, than it is possible to write the
7 history of the city of Toledo in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 in
8 isolation from what was going on in the rest of Spain or the history of
9 the city of Richmond in Virginia, in the war between the States of 1861 to
10 1865 in isolation from what was going on on the battlefields and in
11 Washington and in Atlanta and elsewhere around the United States.
12 The city of Prijedor was in a way a microcosm of Bosnian
13 divisions, Bosnian fears, Bosnian expectations, Bosnian hopes, and as I
14 have tried to indicate, both the actions of the SDA in the municipality,
15 notably the refusal to appoint number 2 in the local Ministry of the
16 Interior, i.e., the commander of the police station, and the Serbian
17 response, which often was an improvised and ad hoc affair, both seemed to
18 have been imported from without. Furthermore, the tensions in the
19 municipality towards the end of 1991 were greatly heightened by the events
20 next door in Croatia, by the influx of Serb refugees from Croatia, who
21 also brought the tales of terror that sounded eerily reminiscent of the
22 events still very much in the living memory of many Prijedorians from the
23 period of 1941 to 1945. And the mobilisation of the reservists, their
24 stint on the Slavonian front and their return home, all of which created
25 the sense that events were spiralling out of control and that no matter
Page 13725
1 what the decisions on the ground, cosmic forces were at play, that events
2 were getting out of their own hands and that they will be just the chess
3 pieces in a much bigger game than that concerning the Prijedor
4 municipality.
5 This doomsday feeling also prompted many citizens of Prijedor to
6 pack up and leave well before the first shots were fired, with the
7 somewhat predictable pattern of departures of Muslims and Croats to
8 Croatia and on to Austria and Germany where many of them had their family
9 members as guests workers, gastarbeiters and many Serbs heading east to
10 Belgrade, Novi Sad and other places in Serbia.
11 Also, in the run-up to the beginning of the war itself, I think it
12 is important to emphasise, and this is something that I did not include in
13 my report, because I did not have the primary materials at my disposal
14 then, that the functioning of the Municipal Assembly was grinding to a
15 halt, that the financial assistance to the Prijedor municipality by the
16 central ministries in Sarajevo was absent, that in fact from late summer
17 of 1991, the contributions paid by the Prijedor municipality through
18 various forms of sales tax, customs and excise, and company income, were
19 not being recycled back, which by the beginning of 1992, created a crisis
20 in the functioning of the key services in the municipality, such as
21 health, social services, pensions, education and veteran affairs, that
22 because of the lack of reproductive materials, several companies were
23 winding down their production, and that -- and this is an opinion
24 reflected by both Serbs and Muslims in the pages of the local newspaper,
25 that they were being let down by Sarajevo, that they were being treated
Page 13726
1 with neglect and left to stew in their own juice. I do not know to what
2 extent this particular aspect, which I hadn't had the time to study
3 properly, influenced this -- the feeling of hopelessness and foreboding,
4 but it is certain that it could not have helped, particularly taking the
5 context of the overall climate in the republic itself and the violence
6 next door in Croatia.
7 Q. Dr. Trifkovic, can you also tell us what effect, if any, on
8 Prijedor municipality had the interparty agreement, creation of Patriotic
9 League and Green Berets, what the effect has -- was by the dispatch from
10 Mr. Delimustafic on the 29th of April, 1992 and attacks on military
11 convoys, if you can briefly explain to us?
12 A. Since this question is now entering into the realm of the military
13 sequence of events, which of and by itself does not crucially impact the
14 political, historical narrative, I would prefer not to go into detail on
15 the domino effect, if you will, of actions, counteractions, causes and
16 effects. In fact, my understanding was, when I was doing the final
17 version of my background report, that it would more or less end with the
18 beginning of the shooting war in the municipality of Prijedor and so short
19 of saying that what I already said on Friday, that it always matters a
20 great deal who fired the first shots because the beginning of violence has
21 incalculable momentum of its own, I would rather not try to evaluate the
22 specific impact of any one step in the subsequent equation because I
23 expect the military expert will deal with that in some detail.
24 Q. Thank you, doctor.
25 May I ask you, then, do you have an opinion, based upon a
Page 13727
1 reasonable degree of certainty, as an academic historian and political
2 scientist, whether the takeover in the Prijedor municipality was part of a
3 joint criminal enterprise to ethnically cleanse B and H?
4 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Could you please rephrase your question because
5 you are mixing judicial terms with terms normally used by historians and
6 political experts.
7 MR. LUKIC:
8 Q. Doctor, I have to rephrase my question and I'll ask you, can you
9 tell us what effect did the takeover have on various ethnic groups?
10 A. What we were witnessing in Bosnia and Herzegovina in April and May
11 of 1992, is the process of establishment of territorial control by the
12 political organs of different ethnic groups, almost invariably
13 corresponding to the numeric preponderance of a given ethnic group in a
14 given locality. An unsurprising corollary of such takeovers was the sense
15 of insecurity of the minority ethnic group or the ethnic group which was
16 not in power in a given locality, so that, quite unsurprisingly, I
17 emphasise, Serbs and Muslims would not regard the HVO control over the
18 city of Mostar as something to be welcomed or regarded with indifference.
19 Likewise, the Serbs left in the centre of Sarajevo did not feel that they
20 had a stake in the resulting order. And so I think it is not surprising
21 that the Muslims in the Prijedor municipality did not regard the SDS
22 takeover as something that they would either welcome or readily identify
23 with, but at the same time, if you look at the period between the takeover
24 itself and the violent escalation in the municipality with the shoot-outs
25 at Hambarine and then in the city of Prijedor itself, at the very end of
Page 13728
1 May, you do not get the impression that anything particularly drastic or
2 dramatic was taking place. In fact, from the published sources, one gets
3 the impression that events start veering towards a violent reckoning only
4 after the shooting war started in the municipality.
5 Also, I believe that it was Dr. Stakic's explicit desire, judging
6 by the published sources, to allay the fears of the non-Serbs and to
7 explain the establishment of the Serb control over the municipality
8 strictly in terms of the need to enable the functioning of the municipal
9 organs and to have a continuous provision of services.
10 Whereas I find it hard to judge to what extent Dr. Stakic's
11 statements reflected consensual view of the SDS leadership in Prijedor as
12 a whole, I think it is remarkable that if and when a conciliatory tone
13 were required, it seems that almost invariably it was he who was used as
14 the conduit for such statements, either because he had already enjoyed a
15 reputation of a person with conciliatory frame of mind or because such
16 reputation had been established through his statements in the run-up to
17 the dramatic events we are dealing with today.
18 Q. There are many more issues that we would like to discuss with you,
19 doctor, some of which are address in your report, however, the time
20 constraints imposed at this time, we have no more questions. Thank you.
21 A. Thank you.
22 MS. KORNER: Your Honour, I don't know whether Your Honour has
23 imposed time constraints but if Mr. Lukic feels there are other matters to
24 be covered with the doctor, then I think he ought to be enabled to.
25 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: You were first on your feet. Than I had the
Page 13729
1 possibility to answer. I am not aware of any time constraints imposed on
2 you.
3 MR. LUKIC: Dr. Trifkovic has some other commitments and we
4 discussed it previously the last week, so we set --
5 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: I read carefully the transcript of last week.
6 Maybe for this purpose in open court, ask you when is it absolutely
7 necessary that you have to leave this friendly country of the Netherlands?
8 THE WITNESS: Your Honour, the Netherlands is very much a friendly
9 country to me. Two of my daughters are half Dutch and one of them still
10 lives in this country so I feel almost at home here. The problem is not
11 so much being here but having my fairly busy scheduled totally thrown off
12 balance so the answer is I absolutely should have been back in Chicago
13 yesterday, but that being neither here nor there if there is any
14 possibility of wrapping up my testimony in the course of today, I would be
15 greatly appreciative. Of course, I realise it's up to the Court to decide
16 whether this is indeed possible or not, but I am more or less reconciled
17 to all kinds of problems that I will have to deal with as the result of my
18 staying on this week, and in that spirit, I throw myself at your mercy.
19 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: I think your testimony is of that importance
20 that there in fact should be no kind of limitation of the Defence, and
21 therefore, I invite you, if possible, to continue with your extremely
22 interesting analysis, if necessary until tomorrow, but this would be then
23 the absolute deadline. Would this be feasible for you, also in light that
24 you have scheduled your lectures for Thursday and Friday?
25 THE WITNESS: They were already cancelled now because I wasn't
Page 13730
1 sure what was going to happen so I couldn't keep them in abeyance. Since
2 I have the microphone right now, on Friday I was asked by Mr. Lukic to
3 elaborate on the issue of the impact of the mujahedin from around the
4 world making their appearance in Bosnia and using Bosnia as a staging base
5 for their operations elsewhere around the world. Again, since I didn't
6 expect that question, I wasn't able to provide a detailed and documented
7 answer but thanks to the wonders of Federal Express, I now have four
8 copies of my latest book, "The Sword of the Profit. Islam: History,
9 Theology, Impact on the World."
10 And in the chapter 5, page 217, there is a subchapter dealing with
11 this very issue. So I have these four copies. Maybe one for OTP, one for
12 Defence and two for the Bench in case you deem it useful.
13 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Thank you very much for this. May I ask the
14 usher to distribute it? It would be then for the Defence to tender, if
15 necessary, these documents.
16 So this would be provisionally marked D94 but maybe, based on
17 questions by the Defence, you can elaborate a little bit more on this,
18 what you're discussing in your book, but may I ask the Defence, in the
19 light of what we have just heard, to continue with the line of their
20 questions?
21 MR. LUKIC: Thank you, Your Honours.
22 Q. Yes, Dr. Trifkovic, can you tell us now what was the impact of
23 early appearance in mujahedins in Bosnia and Herzegovina and whatever you
24 deem necessary to explain this issue?
25 A. Already in the period before the beginning of Yugoslavia's
Page 13731
1 disintegration, in the 1970s and the 1980s, while Yugoslavia was a
2 prominent member of the so-called non-aligned movement, a sort of special
3 relationship was being developed between Bosnia-Herzegovina and certain
4 non-aligned countries in the Arab world, and Tito's policy of close
5 friendship with the Arabs and most notably his special relationship with
6 the late Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, led to the provision of
7 special educational facilities for hundreds of Bosnian students in such
8 establishments as the main Islamic university in Cairo, and various other
9 institutions of higher learning in the Muslim world, in places such as
10 Tripoli in Libya, Kuwait and Damascus. The result of this was also the
11 financial assistance from the Arab world for the construction of mosques
12 in Bosnia-Herzegovina so that during this non-aligned period in the late
13 1970s and in the aftermath of Tito's death in the 1980s, the number of new
14 religious objects built in Bosnia-Herzegovina exceeded that built during
15 the entire Ottoman period between the 1460s and the 1870s. So with the
16 outbreak of the war, or rather with the on set of the crisis that led to
17 the outbreak of the war, strong and enduring links had already been
18 developed between the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina and various segments
19 in the Arab and Islamic world, not least Alasna [phoen] University, Saudi
20 Arabia, Libya, and a prominent example of this connection was Haris
21 Silajdzic who was, for instance, instrumental in arranging the visit by
22 Alija Izetbegovic to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia why at the end of March,
23 1992, at a very delicate moment, when the Cutilheiro plan seemed in
24 imminent danger of collapse and international recognition of Bosnia was
25 looming large.
Page 13732
1 Nevertheless, the arrival of the so-called mujahedin from
2 different parts of the Islamic world to Bosnia was not regarded as a
3 welcome development even by many Muslims, who were taken aback by -- I'm
4 talking about Bosnian Muslims, of course -- who were taken aback by the
5 single-minded fanaticism, by the blood lust and by the lack of even
6 rudimentary balanced view of the place they were in and the objectives
7 they were fighting on the part of the newly arrived volunteers, who by the
8 way started terrorising local Muslim population in the areas where they
9 established themselves, notably in a village near Travnik, forcing women
10 to cover their heads, forcing men to grow beards, and generally behaving
11 the way that I suppose the Jihadists would behave everywhere trying to
12 impose their code of conduct and their view of the world on those under
13 their sway. Also their method of warfare itself and, in particular, their
14 savage treatment of prisoners with well-documented cases of decapitation
15 of Serb prisoners, such video tapes were even sold in Islamic centres
16 around the western world until not so long ago, even for the denizens of
17 the Balkans who were brutalised by mutual experiences, this was something
18 qualitatively new, the notion of saving prisoners if for no other reason
19 than to exchange them for one's own on the other side was alien to these
20 mujahedin. Additional problem was created for the rest of the world by
21 the fact that many of them were given Bosnian citizenship and issued
22 Bosnian passports and were thus able to move across European borders with
23 less difficulty than would have been the case had they retained Pakistani
24 or Saudi or Algerian, or some other nationality of the countries that
25 provide the bulk of terrorist suspects these days. In the book I provide
Page 13733
1 a fairly detailed list of documented cases of terrorism, Islamic
2 terrorism, springing out of Bosnia, ending with the spring of 2002, which
3 was the time when the manuscript went to the printers. Beyond that date,
4 the portfolio has grown and I'm sure that people better acquainted with
5 the work of western intelligence services would be more qualified than I
6 am to give you the precise road map, but suffice to say that at least
7 following the departure of Alija Izetbegovic from the position of Bosnian
8 president, we have witnessed an attempt by the authorities in Sarajevo to
9 put an end to the misuse and abuse of Bosnian hospitality by the mujahedin
10 and that in particular, in the aftermath of September 11th, the
11 authorities of Bosnia-Herzegovina have made a serious effort to confront
12 this menace, well aware that the failure to do so would expose them to all
13 kinds of suspicions and accusations which are not in their own interest.
14 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: May I ask you an extremely trivial question? On
15 the top line of your book, one can read, the political incorrect guide to
16 Islam. Is this headline one by the editors, in order to better sell this
17 book? Or is it on purpose from your own political view to provide, to a
18 certain extent, a provocative other view on the Islam?
19 THE WITNESS: Since you put me on the spot like this I'll have to
20 answer frankly, it's a marketing stunt by the publishers. I was
21 personally opposed to it because I felt that it lowered the tone, if you
22 will, but in their wisdom, they opted for this little addendum, and it
23 seems to have worked because the book is now within the five best selling
24 titles dealing with Islam in the United States, so who am I to complain?
25 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Just to be sure that it's not an expression of
Page 13734
1 your own view but it would be the incorrect guide? Okay. Mr. Lukic,
2 please.
3 MR. LUKIC: Your Honours, I think that I finalised this issue if
4 Dr. Trifkovic doesn't have anything else to add.
5 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: But you mentioned beforehand that you would have
6 number of additional questions and in the light of the limited time, you
7 said you didn't want to put forward these questions but please do so.
8 Continue.
9 MR. LUKIC: Thank you, Your Honour. But also we said that
10 everything is in the Dr. Trifkovic's report so we don't have any further
11 questions.
12 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Thank you. Then it would be for the
13 Prosecution.
14 Cross-examined by Ms. Korner:
15 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Madam Korner, please.
16 MS. KORNER:
17 Q. Dr. Trifkovic, when were you first instructed to prepare this
18 report?
19 A. At first I was not instructed to prepare it. I was approached by
20 Mr. Ostojic, who I had known personally for some years, with a view to my
21 potential role as an expert witness for the Defence. After a number of
22 rather sporadic meetings at several weeks distance, being the period of
23 September, October, I think that we've clarified the shape and the terms
24 of the report sometime in November of last year, 2002.
25 Q. And what were the terms of reference that you were given?
Page 13735
1 A. I explained to Dr. -- to Mr. Ostojic that I do not have much
2 interest in the -- to use the colloquial term of the nitty-gritty of who
3 did what to whom, when and how in the municipality of Prijedor. But
4 having read the two reports of Professor Donia, both the shorter one
5 dealing with Prijedor itself and the longer one dealing with Bosnian
6 Krajina, I felt that where I could provide an useful contribution would be
7 to place the events in Prijedor in the broader context of events in
8 Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole and broader than that, within the context of
9 the Yugoslav crisis and the diplomatic moves connected with it. And I --
10 in some ways, my -- the eventual shape of my report is the result of my
11 suggestion to Mr. Ostojic as to where I felt I could provide a useful
12 input rather than his specific instructions to me as to what the report
13 ought be like. In other words, it was, one might say, a two-way process
14 where we worked out my potential useful role in providing the historical
15 and political background to the events in Prijedor for this Court.
16 Q. Dr. Trifkovic, I understand that you want to leave if possible
17 today. I think that's unlikely. I think if you can try and cut your
18 answers down, is the simple answer to the question I asked that there were
19 no terms of reference? In other words, you were not handed a letter
20 setting out your terms of reference?
21 A. I was not handed a letter setting out my terms of reference but we
22 did reach the verbal agreement about the terms of reference towards the
23 end of November of last year, 2002.
24 Q. So your understanding from your conversations over a period of
25 weeks with Mr. Ostojic, was that you were to write a report putting the
Page 13736
1 events in Prijedor into historical perspective?
2 A. Historical and political perspective, yes.
3 Q. How long did it take you to write this report?
4 A. I prepared the first draft of the report shortly after Christmas.
5 In fact, in the first week of the new year. Mr. Ostojic was travelling
6 along --
7 Q. Can I -- how long? A hundred hours, 200 hours, 50 hours?
8 A. I would say 120 hours.
9 Q. That's the full report?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Including reading the documents that were produced by Mr. Lukic,
12 the three binders?
13 A. It is unfortunate that the -- that many of the subsequent
14 documents were given to me after the report was completed. My report was
15 completed in the second week of February of this year and it is in the
16 aftermath of that event that further translations of articles from both
17 Kozarski Vjesnik and Oslobodenje were made available to me. Some of those
18 materials are very useful and had I had them at my disposal earlier than
19 that I would certainly have made use of those materials in my report.
20 Q. I'm sorry, why did you need translations? You read --
21 A. Yes, I do but it is my understanding that unless a document is
22 actually entered as a translated document into the court records, and
23 given a reference number, that I cannot use it at face value in my report
24 under the -- and make reference to it in foot notes.
25 Q. All right. I want to come on to the documents you looked at in a
Page 13737
1 moment. Am I right in supposing that you have no legal training at all?
2 A. I did have a course in international law while I was studying
3 international relations but it was more years ago than I care to remember.
4 Q. So the answer is apart from that, you're not a lawyer?
5 A. No, I'm not.
6 Q. You've never done any legal --
7 A. No.
8 Q. Apart from this? Thank you. In order to prepare this report, did
9 you speak to Dr. Stakic?
10 A. Yes, I did. I met Dr. Stakic twice here at -- in the Scheveningen
11 jail once for half an hour, once for closer to an hour in October of last
12 year.
13 Q. Why was that? Why did you meet him?
14 A. Primarily because I felt that before I take on the task, I wanted
15 to create my own impression of the man. I believe in intuition. I
16 believe in assessing a person on the basis of firsthand contact, and I
17 felt that this was an issue of such importance, such magnitude, and such
18 potential weight for my personal state of mind, if you will, and as well
19 as professional reputation, that I wouldn't feel at ease undertaking the
20 task if I had the feeling that the person was being devious, duplicitous,
21 that I was -- if I had problems with Dr. Stakic as a person, as the result
22 of those meetings.
23 Q. So is your opinion of Dr. Stakic, which you've given to this
24 Court, based as much on your meeting with him over approximately one and a
25 half hours as the documentation that you read?
Page 13738
1 A. No, it is not. The meetings, as I said, purely had a purpose of
2 establishing a non-scientific sense of the person that had no impact on
3 the contents of my report but simply had a lot to do with my decision to
4 undertake writing it.
5 Q. I see. And when did you see Dr. Stakic?
6 A. I believe it was one day in September and one day in the first
7 week of October. On both occasions, I was in Europe on a different
8 business, and I made detours to The Hague for the purpose of those
9 meetings.
10 Q. The Court was told in a document that related to your proposed
11 evidence, that you were going to provide the Honourable Court with an
12 objective overview of the history in the region of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In
13 your view, is your report and what you've told us an objective view?
14 A. The issue of objectivity in the social sciences and human affairs
15 is as old as those sciences themselves and without dwelling on the
16 philosophical issues involved, I would say yes, that it is.
17 Q. All right. Now, you have been described quite a lot as a
18 historian and an academic historian, and a political scientist. Am I
19 right in assuming that as a historian, you would regard yourself as a
20 responsible historian?
21 A. Indeed, yes.
22 Q. As a journalist, which you told us was another aspect of your
23 working career, would you regard yourself as a responsible journalist?
24 A. I'm less proud of my journalistic career than I am of my academic
25 career. Unlike many journalists who have an exalted view of their
Page 13739
1 profession, I do not think that journalists are, by and large,
2 particularly responsible lot, but certainly when it comes to the coverage
3 of affairs Yugoslav or affairs ex-Yugoslav, I think I have been more
4 responsible than most.
5 Q. And by that, can I give an example? You wouldn't rush into print
6 without checking the accuracy of the information that you were going to
7 give in an article?
8 A. Rushing into print and checking accuracy are very often extremely
9 contradictory demands, as all too many journalists covering former
10 Yugoslav affairs have had opportunity to find out. Let me simply say that
11 I would never knowingly rush into print with a piece of information I was
12 aware of as being erroneous.
13 Q. Or make serious allegations of impropriety or illegality or
14 something of that nature without at least attempting to ensure that the
15 basis for these allegations was there?
16 A. Not without at least attempting to ascertain otherwise, yes.
17 Q. And the same, I take it, even more so as a historian, you would
18 want to check very carefully your facts before you went into print on a
19 particular aspect of history?
20 A. As a historian, I can only say that my articles are almost
21 invariably subject to peer review, and that therefore even if there was
22 the problem of rushing into print, as you put it, it would be picked up
23 and corrected by the process of refereeing articles to which my scholarly
24 articles in the quarterlies and in the books are invariably subjected.
25 Q. The basic documents for a historian to look at, first of all, are
Page 13740
1 those that were created at the time. Would you agree with that?
2 A. There are three groups of documents. One would be the formal
3 documents of the political, military and diplomatic bodies and
4 personalities involved. One would be firsthand memoirs, accounts,
5 testimonies, interviews. And the third would be impartial observer
6 accounts, reminiscences. So it would be what you mention is one of the
7 three groups of documents.
8 Q. One of the difficulties, isn't it, with memoirs and the like is
9 that they are filtered, as it were, through the selective memory of the
10 person who is publishing them.
11 A. That is quite so but at the same time, we shouldn't give undue
12 credence to documents themselves either because very often, even as they
13 are being created, they are being written with a view to self-justifying
14 narrative of the events in the time to follow.
15 Q. But they are better in each case, are they not, than second-hand
16 accounts from other books; for example, other historians who have written
17 about these events?
18 A. Well, yes and no. In one particular area, in the -- that is, for
19 instance, the constitutional imbroglio involving Bosnia-Herzegovina, I
20 found other authors more lucid and more clearly -- better capable of
21 defining the problems and offering their own view of the solutions than
22 the documents themselves, because no matter how many times you read the
23 decisions of the Assembly of Bosnia-Herzegovina or the Serbs taking
24 exception to those decisions and criticising them, when you look at, for
25 instance, Robert Hayden's book on the constitutional aspects of the
Page 13741
1 Bosnian crisis, the issues are spelt out with a degree of clarity and
2 coherence that primary sources are never capable of telling of and by
3 themselves.
4 Q. I want to deal in a moment with the various books that you've
5 referred to in your report. Mr. Hayden, whom you've just mentioned, do
6 you know him personally?
7 A. I met him last in 1994 at AAASS convention in Pittsburg. I have
8 met him, I don't know him.
9 Q. Were you aware that he had testified at this Tribunal as well?
10 A. No, I was not.
11 Q. He didn't tell you that he'd testified in the Tadic case?
12 A. I met him in 1994. I suspect it was before his testimony in the
13 Tadic case.
14 Q. In this particular case, from what I understand you to say, this
15 is the first time you've been asked to look at Prijedor.
16 A. That's right.
17 Q. And before that, other than the name, did you have any knowledge
18 about the events in Prijedor?
19 A. I was certainly aware of Prijedor being mentioned in connection
20 with the events of the summer of 1992. I also followed with some interest
21 the controversy surrounding the so-called "picture that shook the world"
22 with Penny Marshall, ITN, and Deichman's article.
23 Q. You looked at, if we look at your report and the documents that
24 were supplied, a number of newspaper articles, a great many newspaper
25 articles; is that correct?
Page 13742
1 A. That's correct. In the aftermath of my visit here in October of
2 last year, I took with me a number of copies of Kozarski Vjesnik from the
3 period under review and I incorporated most of those articles relevant to
4 the period.
5 Q. And do I also understand, looking at the list of documents, that
6 you read books written by the Muslim side of the conflict?
7 A. In addition, I would mention, because I'm not sure any more which
8 ones I referred to in the report and which ones I read subsequently, but
9 there is a whole array of articles by Muslim authors on the period of the
10 founding of the Patriotic League. While I was doing the report I know I
11 had used Halilovic's book, "Cunning Strategy," but there is also a whole
12 host of serialised articles on the early days of the League and the
13 beginnings of the Green Berets in different locations all over Bosnia
14 published by the Dani magazine as well as by the Oslobodenje daily.
15 Q. You also refer in your report to a number of other authors. For
16 example, Noel Malcolm whom you criticise somewhat.
17 A. Only in passing. I did read his short history of Bosnia but I did
18 not find it particularly useful for the purposes of my report.
19 Q. All right. And you told the Court last week - and this is page 59
20 of the LiveNote for the 13th of March - that: "In view of my extensive
21 experience, personal as well as professional interest in the wars of
22 Yugoslav succession, the primary source was, of course, my accumulated and
23 varied collection of experiences, both concerning personal contacts and
24 primary and secondary sources." And you stand by that, do you?
25 A. Yes.
Page 13743
1 Q. Did you look at any of the SDS minutes for the Prijedor
2 municipality for this period?
3 A. I did look at the December document. I believe it's December
4 19th, 1991, known as variant A and variant B. I did not see any specific
5 minutes of SDS meetings other than that particular one. I did, however,
6 see a number of articles in Kozarski Vjesnik relating, relevant to the
7 various SDS events, including reports of their meetings and statements by
8 their leading personalities after those meetings.
9 Q. Were you aware that the Defence were in possession of the book of
10 the SDS meetings in 1991 and 2? Or 1992, I'm sorry.
11 A. No, I'm not aware.
12 Q. You weren't aware?
13 A. No.
14 Q. Did you ask whether there were any original documents produced at
15 the time which you could see?
16 A. I did not specifically ask for SDS related documents. I did ask
17 for any useful sources that could assist me in the preparation of my
18 report, and in connection with that I was given the document both in
19 original and translation called, "Variant A and B" as well as Kozarski
20 Vjesnik articles and the subsequent folders which, unfortunately, came
21 after my report had already been written.
22 Q. Yes. I understand you to say that you've just -- that you've
23 looked at a large number of newspaper articles and some of the memoirs.
24 What I'm asking you about is documents relating to these events produced
25 at the time. Did you, for example, know that there were records of the
Page 13744
1 municipal assembly meetings in Prijedor available?
2 A. No, I was not aware that there were meetings of the municipal
3 assembly of Prijedor available.
4 Q. Because you make a number of comments in your report about the
5 events. Would it have helped you, do you think, to compile your report,
6 to have seen these documents?
7 A. It depends. Very often - and I've seen minutes of different
8 meetings of different bodies in different contexts, not the one in
9 Prijedor - such minutes only blur the issue and make it more difficult to
10 sift the occasional grain of gold from tonnes of sand than would otherwise
11 be the case. I would be very pleasantly surprised if any of those minutes
12 would qualitatively throw a -- would throw a qualitative new light on the
13 overall pattern of events as outlined in my report.
14 Q. So in your view, as a historian, it is better -- you are more
15 likely to get a better picture of the events from newspaper articles? Is
16 that what you're saying?
17 A. No, I'm saying that while indeed it would have been very useful to
18 have access to primary sources, that those primary sources of and by
19 themselves would not necessarily change the overall picture of events that
20 I present, because let me emphasise again, in the events leading up to
21 Yugoslavia's disintegration and from its disintegration into wars of
22 Yugoslav succession, the primary documents concerning meetings of
23 political bodies seem to have often had the objective of providing ex post
24 facto justification for those bodies for what they were doing as they were
25 doing it. So without passing judgement on the minutes of the Prijedor
Page 13745
1 Municipal Assembly meetings, I'm simply trying to say that it would be a
2 pleasant surprise for me, once I look at them, if they were capable of
3 throwing a qualitatively new light on the fundamental assumption that I am
4 taking in my report, which is the events in Prijedor were reactive to the
5 broader Bosnian context and not proactive in and of themselves.
6 Q. All right. I understand that -- we'll deal with your report after
7 the break, but your general case is that the Serbs were reacting to
8 effectively the positions taken by the Muslims and the Croats. But I want
9 to -- I want to make sure I understand this. Are you saying that the --
10 what was being recorded in the minutes of the SDS party of the municipal
11 assembly was all being said with an eye to the future?
12 A. I did not say that what was being said at the SDS assembly alone
13 was being said with an eye to the future. I have stated, and I am not the
14 first one to do so, that on all sides, there was a certain - how shall I
15 put it? - desire to provide a manoeuvring space when it comes to the
16 verdict of history, so that not only on the SDS side but on other sides
17 too, decisions that had very clear political meaning in the sense of one
18 party's interests and objectives were couched in the language that at
19 least gave the appearance of appealing to the interests of other parties
20 and satisfying the requirements of other parties' interests.
21 Q. I don't want to spend too long on this, Dr. Trifkovic. Is the
22 situation this: That you didn't inquire whether any of this type of
23 documentation was available for you to see because you don't believe that
24 it could have assisted you?
25 A. No, as I said earlier, I did inquire what was available. I
Page 13746
1 believe had these documents been available to me, I would have certainly
2 gladly read them and made use of them in my report. I was not aware of
3 their existence, but I'm simply adding, as a personal comment, that even
4 without seeing these particular documents that you're referring to but
5 having seen various other contemporary minutes, that we shouldn't trust
6 too much even into the so-called primary sources because the actors in
7 historical events, being aware of making history, very often have a way of
8 distorting the minutes of ongoing events and couching them in the language
9 that suits the way they want to be perceived in the future.
10 Q. Just finally on this, I think, because it's time for a break, have
11 you at any stage read the records of the assembly meetings at republic
12 level?
13 A. I did read the minutes of the 14th of October debate, or rather,
14 the debate preceding the vote on the 14th of October, when the memorandum
15 on the independent and sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina was adopted by the
16 SDA-HDZ MPs. I also followed the statements by the SDS board when they
17 called for the plebiscite of the Serbian people in Bosnia-Herzegovina on
18 November 9th of 1991. The statement -- sorry, these were not minutes of
19 the assembly. The actual minutes of the assembly that I did read
20 concerned the debate in advance of the vote on the memorandum.
21 Q. So, I'm sorry, does this mean to say in the whole of your career
22 as a historian in respect of events in Bosnia, the only minutes of the
23 assemblies that you have ever read are those of the 14th, 15th of October,
24 1991?
25 A. Good Lord, no. I thought you were asking specifically when we are
Page 13747
1 talking about my report here. I also read very carefully, but it was not
2 relevant to the report, the debate of the Republika Srpska assembly
3 concerning the acceptance of the Vance-Owen Plan in the spring of 1993. I
4 wasn't sure about your question. I thought you were specifically asking
5 me when it comes to the period under review, which is the period from the
6 multi-party election until the events of May of 1992, I believe that the
7 debate that preceded the vote on the memorandum was in many ways most
8 significant because it spelt out the relevant positions of the three
9 interested parties more clearly and more nakedly, if you will, than
10 anything that had preceded it.
11 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: It is -- Dr. Trifkovic, the trial stays
12 adjourned now until 5 minutes past 11.00.
13 --- Recess taken at 10.35 a.m.
14 --- On resuming at 11.09 a.m.
15 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: The Prosecution, please.
16 MS. KORNER: Thank you, Your Honour.
17 Q. Dr. Trifkovic, I want to ask you about one more set of minutes of
18 assembly meetings. Have you ever read the minutes of the 16th session of
19 the assembly of the Serbian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, held on the
20 12th of May, 1992 in Banja Luka?
21 A. No, I have not read the minutes themselves. I have read the
22 accounts of the session but not the minutes.
23 Q. Didn't you think it was important, not only for this case but for
24 your knowledge as a historian of the events of 1992, to read the original
25 minutes?
Page 13748
1 A. Since you insist so much on the issue of the minutes of different
2 sessions, let me make a general comment concerning the selection of
3 sources. In the frankly unlimited deluge of different minutes, whether
4 it's the Herceg-Bosna assembly in Mostar, whether it's the BH
5 Muslim-dominated government in Sarajevo, or the Republika Srpska organs of
6 different kinds, if one were to try and process the particular original
7 documents in their entirety, we are not looking at 100 or 120 hours, which
8 I was allotted for this task, but easily five or ten times more. I
9 believe that very often when we look at historical events, if we get to
10 the minutiae, to the nitty-gritty of who said what, where and when, we
11 lose sight, let me reiterate, of the key decisions by the key decision
12 makers. And quite frankly, both in the case of the different assemblies
13 on both sides of the ethnic divide and lower ranking officials, the
14 statements are of far lesser importance than the key determinants of the
15 decision making elite, whether it's the Izetbegovic-Ganic-Silajgic
16 triumvirate on one side or Karadzic-Krajisnik-Koljevic triumvirate on the
17 other. So with due respect, even though I do not think that minutes are
18 unimportant per se, I do not think that going through the detailed minutes
19 of different assemblies on different sides of the divide would
20 fundamentally or materially alter the overall picture that I tried to
21 provide in my report.
22 Q. I'm sorry, are you saying that the statements of the leaders on
23 both sides about what their goals and objectives were during 1992, are not
24 important?
25 A. No, on the contrary, what I'm saying is that what those leaders
Page 13749
1 have stated on different occasions, and in particular I'm referring to the
2 Assembly in Banja Luka that you mentioned, the strategic objectives of the
3 Serbian side, even in the second rendering, are more important than
4 reading the -- every word of the minutes per se. In other words, I do not
5 think that it is particularly important to read the original document in
6 order to acquire the overall picture of what was the political drift, what
7 was the, if you will, broad picture, rather than what was the specific
8 statement of which party at which step of the way. So if we were to say
9 that on the 12th of May, the Serb leadership has stated the strategic
10 objectives of the conflict, as far as they were concerned, I think that
11 even with the second re-summary contained in various sources that I have
12 had access to, I can form as good a picture as to what was going on in
13 Banja Luka as if I had actually read the minutes themselves.
14 Q. So you are aware that that is where the Serbs set out their six
15 strategic goals?
16 A. I am aware that that is where the enumeration of the six so-called
17 strategic goals was stated, yes.
18 Q. Why so-called?
19 A. Because I do not think that in an objective sense, the six have
20 quite the same strategic significance. In other words, the fact that they
21 themselves chose to call them strategic doesn't make them equally
22 strategic. I think that on the Serb side there had always been a tendency
23 to confuse quantitative aspects, such as maps, territorial delineations,
24 with what I believe were far more important and substantive constitutional
25 issues, so much so that Karadzic's propensity to draw maps was something
Page 13750
1 of a standing joke even on the Serbian side, from the very early days. So
2 in reply to your question, they may have called their six objectives
3 strategic. I think that as far as the Serbs were concerned, there should
4 have been only one real strategic objective and that is to have themselves
5 recognised as one of the constituent nations of Bosnia-Herzegovina without
6 whose agreement no change in its constitutional status could be legally
7 effected.
8 Q. Do you accept that one of those goals, separation from those who
9 are our enemies, and who have used every opportunity, especially in this
10 century to attack us and who would continue with such practices if we were
11 to continue to stay together in the same state, and I am quoting from page
12 00913513 of Exhibit S141, was in effect a statement of ethnic separation?
13 A. I believe that that statement was a carbon copy of a statement
14 issued by the gathering of Muslim intellectuals at Dom Milicija, the
15 militia hall in Sarajevo on 10th of June of 1991, where they stated that
16 with the separation of Croatia and Slovenia from Yugoslavia, which by the
17 way had not taken place on that date, it was yet to happen within a
18 fortnight, that they would not stay within Yugoslavia because they would
19 not risk being subjected to genocide and disappearance. In other words,
20 the statement of the Serb Assembly on 12th of May of 1992 reflected the
21 same sentiment that was present in the Muslim elite's statement from
22 almost a year previously, 11 months previously, and that is the reluctance
23 of one ethnic group to remain in a polity in which it would be dominated
24 by the members of another ethnic group.
25 Q. Did you refer to that document when you were preparing your
Page 13751
1 report? The Muslim document that you've just talked about.
2 A. I may have referred to the Muslim decision to go ahead with
3 separation in case of Croatia's and Slovenia's secession without
4 specifically referring to that document. I cannot immediately recall
5 whether I quote the document or not. But I'm that sure you have the
6 record of that document.
7 Q. Do you have that document here?
8 A. Maybe instead of the document itself, I have the reference to
9 the -- that gathering being made by various Muslim memoirists, including
10 Sefer Halilovic, including Sulejman Vran and others. In other words, if
11 you ask me what I have here is reference to that gathering in Dom Milicija
12 by a variety of Muslim sources.
13 Q. Do you -- is the answer to the question no, you don't have the
14 document?
15 A. I don't have the document itself.
16 Q. Have you ever seen the document itself?
17 A. What I have seen is the accounts of the gathering, because the
18 gathering itself was confidential and I do not know if the formal record
19 of the gathering exists.
20 Q. So the answer to the question, Dr. Trifkovic, is you have never
21 seen a document setting out the assertion you've just made?
22 A. I have seen a variety of Muslim sources, a variety of Muslims, who
23 were present at that session, talking about the decisions of the gathering
24 of the Muslim intellectuals, even there is a number of the directive which
25 they issued and since they coincide, I have no reason to believe, and
Page 13752
1 since they are not mutually contradictory, I have no reason to believe
2 that they do not correspond to the facts.
3 Q. I would like just to put one more speech from this Assembly to
4 you, Dr. Trifkovic, a speech made by Dr. -- I'm sorry, a man named Dragan
5 Kalinic. This is at page 00913522.
6 Who stated in the middle -- at the beginning of his speech,
7 rather, "Among all the issues, this Assembly should decide on, the most
8 important one is this: Have we chosen the option of war or the option of
9 negotiation? I say this with a reason, and I must instantly add that
10 knowing who our enemies are, how perfidious they are, how they cannot be
11 trusted, until they are physically, militarily destroyed and crushed,
12 which of course implies eliminating and liquidating their key people."
13 Have you ever read that speech before, Dr. Trifkovic?
14 A. I have seen reference to it. I have not read the speech in the
15 original. I admit this is very strong language of the kind that we
16 unfortunately encountered on all sides at this moment in Bosnian imbroglio
17 and that when it comes to war speech, and this is undoubtedly what may be
18 classed as war speech, it started in the context of Bosnia-Herzegovina
19 with a remarkable statement by Alija Izetbegovic from over a year earlier
20 that for the sake of peace, he would not sacrifice Bosnia's sovereignty,
21 and he -- sorry, that he would not choose peace over sovereignty and he
22 would not sacrifice sovereignty for the sake of peace.
23 Q. Well, you quote that in your report and I'll come to that later.
24 So your view objective as you are, is that this speech and what was said
25 in the 12th of May Assembly generally, is a reaction to what was said by
Page 13753
1 the Muslim side in 1991?
2 A. Not only in 1991. I was again, if we are seeking a modicum of
3 objectivity, which is always difficult when we encounter events which we
4 know to have resulted in tragic outcomes, there was a clear sequence of
5 proactive events on the Muslim side creating reaction on the Serbian side.
6 The seminal event, as I tried to indicate in my examination-in-chief last
7 Thursday and Friday evening, was the illegal vote by Muslim and Croat MPs
8 in the Bosnian assembly on October 14th --
9 Q. I don't want to stop you, Doctor, but I'm going to come to that.
10 I'm going to come to that in your report.
11 A. So various moves on the part of the proactive side created
12 responses on the reactive side. I think it stands to reason that the
13 Serbs had a reactive posture because, after all, they were the ones who
14 wanted to preserve the status quo of Bosnia as part of Yugoslavia, and
15 it's also unremarkable and unsurprising that the Muslim-Croat tactical
16 alliance was proactive because it wanted to change that status, and to
17 change it even, if need be, in disregard of Bosnia's own constitution.
18 Q. You told us that you saw the document which is generally known as
19 variant A and B.
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. Did you ask to see it or were you given it?
22 A. I was given it.
23 Q. Were you also given the minutes of the meeting of the Serbian
24 democratic party in Prijedor on the 27th of December, 1991?
25 A. No, I was not.
Page 13754
1 Q. Were you aware that there were such minutes where this document
2 was discussed?
3 A. No, I was not.
4 Q. Would that have been something that you would have thought was
5 useful in your discussion of the events of Prijedor as they related to the
6 larger events?
7 A. Quite possibly so, but without seeing them, I'm not able to
8 comment with certainty.
9 Q. Now, I want to for a moment ask you a couple of questions about
10 your career. You told us that you were an adviser, this was in your
11 original examination-in-chief on the 13th of March, that -- forgive me --
12 you were a political consultant to, amongst others, Crown Prince Alexander
13 of Yugoslavia, the Republika Srpska, and the now former president of
14 Yugoslavia, Dr. Kostunica, plus a variety of private companies. Were you
15 also an adviser to Biljana Plavsic?
16 A. In the period of February to July of 1998, I was the adviser to
17 president -- then president of Republika Srpska, Biljana Plavsic, for
18 relations with the Serbian diaspora, in which capacity I organised her
19 visit to the United States and Canada in May of that year.
20 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Sorry to interrupt but we have not come back to
21 this. In your own annex 1, you pointed out that you had been an adviser
22 to the Dr. Biljana Plavsic as from 1997 already.
23 THE WITNESS: In late 1997 I corresponded with letter in an
24 informal capacity, providing my views on the way in which the Dayton
25 framework was being perceived in the Western world and different attitudes
Page 13755
1 to the pursuance of that framework on both sides of the Atlantic, but it
2 was only in the period February, or rather, March of 1998 to July of 1998,
3 that this relationship had a formalised character. In other words, it was
4 a part-time consultancy engagement for me at a small monthly retainer, but
5 in the period of November 1997 to March 1997 [sic] it had an informal and
6 non-remunerary character.
7 MS. KORNER:
8 Q. Do we take it that you got to know Mrs. Plavsic reasonably well
9 during this period?
10 A. During this period, I not only got to know Mrs. Plavsic reasonably
11 well but I accepted the assignment on the understanding that she was
12 wholly committed to the Dayton process and was frankly regarded as persona
13 grata [Realtime transcript read in error "gratan"] in the Western power
14 centres [Realtime transcript read in error "person power centres"]. As
15 someone who had, unlike many other people interested in things Serbian,
16 someone who had regarded, always regarded the Dayton framework as the best
17 deal the Serbs could hope for under the circumstances, I believed that she
18 should be helped in clarifying the position of the Republika Srpska in
19 terms of standing behind Dayton 100 per cent but behind the letter of
20 Dayton and not some nebulous spirit of Dayton that had the hidden agenda
21 of salami slicing Republika Srpska into oblivion.
22 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Sorry, just that the transcript is clear on page
23 42, line 12, one can't read -- it reads here, she was frankly regarded as
24 "gratan." Persona grata, you said, or persona non-grata.
25 THE WITNESS: Persona grata.
Page 13756
1 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Persona grata. Okay, thank you. And then you
2 continued "in Western power centres," not "in person power centres,"
3 correct?
4 THE WITNESS: Yes.
5 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Thank you.
6 MS. KORNER:
7 Q. Were you also the spokesman and chief of the Republika Srpska
8 bureau in London?
9 A. In the period between November of 1993 and July of 1994, an
10 attempt was made by me to institute an unofficial representative office of
11 the Republika Srpska in London. When I say "attempt," after all these
12 years, all I can say in full frankness to the Court is that the failure to
13 turn it into an ongoing concern was the total lack of informational
14 coherence on the Serbian side, the impossibility of establishing clear
15 channels of communication, and of regular two-way inputs which would at
16 least enable me, as very often the person asked to give interviews and
17 take part in university debates, round tables and the like, and which had
18 resulted in my personal decision to terminate that relationship in August
19 of 1994, and from that point on, in all of my public utterances and media
20 contacts, I acted as the Balkan affairs analyst with close links to the
21 Bosnian Serbs, which enabled me to speak with greater authority; in other
22 words, not to be held accountable for, frankly, what was a blunderous and
23 often incoherent position emanating from Pale. This, to some extent, was
24 also due to the fact that on the Republika Srpska side, the system of
25 external communication was made extremely difficult by the appointment of
Page 13757
1 Dr. Karadzic's daughter as the head of the international press centre and
2 made my own attempts to communicate with Pale in order to give some
3 credence to the putative existence of the representative office in London
4 well nigh impossible.
5 Q. Dr. Trifkovic, is there any reason why that doesn't appear on your
6 CV?
7 A. What doesn't appear?
8 Q. That you were the representative of the Republika Srpska between
9 November, 1993 and July, 1994, in London.
10 A. Well, first of all, my consulting engagements for Republika Srpska
11 cover -- in other words, I didn't elaborate on the types of duties that I
12 had with HRH Crown Prince Aleksandar's office in 1992-93; I didn't
13 elaborate on the kind of duties I performed for Biljana Plavsic in 1998; I
14 didn't elaborate on the kind of information input that I was providing to
15 President Kostunica in 2000 and 2001. So the only reason is that, first
16 of all, the status of my putative representation was both legally and
17 substantively moot; and secondly, because even in terms of my own
18 relationship with Pale, it remained somewhat murky, and in the end, ended
19 in what I have to admit was the failure to establish the reasonable level
20 of coherence and two-way communication that would give real substance to
21 something that didn't move beyond the name and the title.
22 Q. So it would be wrong, would it, to suggest to you that the reason
23 it's omitted is because it might reduce your appearance as an objective
24 historian of this period?
25 A. Oh, absolutely. And at no time did I intend to either conceal or
Page 13758
1 mislead anyone regarding the existence of these connections. They are a
2 matter of public record, including dozens of media interviews and articles
3 dating from that period. But looking back at them, including the
4 transcripts of my BBC and BBC World service interviews, I absolutely have
5 nothing to regret when it comes to what I hope was a reasonably accurate
6 and informative presentation of what I can only now call generic Serb
7 point of view rather than specifically Republika Srpska point of view,
8 because as I say, due to the lack of developed system of bureaucratic
9 decision-making on the Republika Srpska side, I was in the end reduced to
10 improvising what I could only describe as self-generated positions and
11 scenarios which necessitated my divorcing myself from any
12 institutionalised body, even putative as it was.
13 Q. Again, Dr. Trifkovic, I have to remind you that the shorter your
14 answers the more likely you are to be able to leave here --
15 A. But this is of course a very delicate question and it was
16 specifically angled at my presumed desire to conceal any element of my
17 biography from the Court, I felt it was necessary to give a more detailed
18 answer.
19 Q. All right. But it's entirely your choice, Doctor. I'm not going
20 to stop you; I'm just reminding you.
21 Dr. Trifkovic, what exactly is the Serbian National Defence
22 Council of America?
23 A. Serbian National Defence Council of America came into being in
24 1914, in the summer of 1914, as a Serbian-American organisation founded by
25 the famous Serbian-American scientist, Mihajlo Pupin, a close personal
Page 13759
1 friend of President Woodrow Wilson, and it came into being as at that time
2 the main conduit of humanitarian assistance and, later on, volunteers for
3 Serbia in World War I. Its work between the two world wars was in
4 abeyance and then it was reactivated in 1941 during World War II. In the
5 aftermath of the war, it acted as both social and humanitarian as well as
6 strongly anti-communist political body, recognised by the U.S. government
7 as one of the leading Serbian-American organisations, so much so that its
8 president is regularly invited to the "white house" for briefings given to
9 members of ethnic groups and to social events as well as political
10 manifestations such as the inaugural breakfast after the new
11 administration came into power. It is an organization of the Serbian
12 diaspora as patriotically American as simultaneously interested in things
13 Serbian, as for instance, the Jewish American congress or the variety of
14 Irish-American, Greek-American, Armenian-American or indeed Chinese- or
15 Korean- or Vietnamese-American lobby groups. All of them have a great
16 deal of interest in the developments of their old country and all of them
17 at the same time look at those developments through the prism primarily of
18 the interest of the ethnic diaspora in the United States and not of the
19 old country itself.
20 Q. And are you on the editorial board of its magazine? I think it's
21 probably the right word, Liberty?
22 A. Liberty is the fortnightly newspaper. I am on its editorial board
23 and I have been contributing to it with some regularity for the past five
24 years. It was originally started during World War I. It renewed
25 publishing during World War II. In recent years and certainly since I've
Page 13760
1 been writing for it, it's been distinguished by its stringent opposition
2 to the Milosevic regime as well as of course the view of the wars of the
3 Yugoslav succession that take into account what I would term the generic
4 Serb point of view rather than that which identifies itself with any
5 particular group or personality in the former Yugoslavia.
6 Q. All right. So you wouldn't say that any of the positions that
7 I've now dealt with in any way reduce your objectivity when looking at the
8 events of 1992?
9 A. I would in fact greatly resent your making any such suggestion,
10 just as Morton Abramowitz would resent the suggestion that his ability to
11 speak on Middle Eastern issues would be impaired by his membership of the
12 Jewish-American Congress or such as Senator Edward Kennedy would resent
13 any suggestion that his membership of Irish-American organisations impairs
14 his ability to speak on the issues of Northern Ireland.
15 Q. Would you agree, Dr. Trifkovic, that you hold a deep-felt dislike,
16 not to say hatred, of the Muslim race?
17 A. First of all, there is no Muslim race, and the Koran is quite
18 clear on the issue that quite the contrary, Islam is the brotherhood of
19 the believers regardless of race and ethnicity, and the answer to your
20 question is no.
21 Q. Thank you. You have on a number of occasions, I think, written
22 articles about Islam, have you not?
23 A. I have indeed.
24 Q. I would like to you have a look at some of them, please. I'm
25 going to ask you be handed and the Court and the Defence, a collection of
Page 13761
1 articles --
2 A. I have seven copies of the same article.
3 Q. All right. Yes, sorry, they should be handed out -- I tell you
4 what, if the usher will sort them into bundles, if the usher hands them
5 back, we'll sort them into bundles.
6 MS. KORNER: Your Honour, I'm sorry, in future we will hand them
7 out individually but I just thought it was easier to do the collection.
8 Q. I've put them in date order. The first, Dr. Trifkovic, dated
9 August the 29th, 2000, "Islamic Resurgence in Nigeria; Clinton's Telling
10 Silence." Remember that article?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. You deal in some detail, with what you allege is the brutal
13 oppression, this is in paragraph 2, of the millions of Christians
14 inhabiting the north of the country by their Islamic rulers.
15 A. M'hm, yes.
16 Q. And I'd like you to go, please, to the second page, the third or
17 the second full paragraph on that page. The forth line down, "Theological
18 analysis and ethical reflection have practically disappeared from Muslim
19 intellectual domain everywhere and in black Africa they have never
20 developed. Contemporary Islam has thus been described as a flight from
21 ethical concern with explicitly political objectives" and then there is a
22 further quote from whom we don't know from this article, "Islam is thus
23 reduced from a faith to a simplifying doctrine that justifies converting
24 all non-believers, condemning them if they refuse, subjugating them and if
25 they persist in refusing to submit, killing them."
Page 13762
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 Blank pages inserted to ensure pagination corresponds between the French and
13 English transcripts. Pages 13762 to 13773.
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Page 13774
1 That's a general statement. Do you agree?
2 A. It is a general statement, and it partly relies on, as I put in
3 parentheses, quotes that are not specifically mine, but yes, it is a
4 statement that is shared most notably by Bernard Lewis and his recently
5 published book, "What Went Wrong?" I believe that a flight from ethical
6 concern is specifically Bernard Lewis's quote.
7 Q. I'm not interested in Mr. Lewis, whoever he may be's book. I'm
8 interested in knowing is this your belief?
9 A. It is my belief that in the 11th century, of the Christian era or
10 the 5th century of the Hijira there was something that might be called the
11 closing of the Islamic mind, after the brief flowering of the golden age
12 of Islam in Cordoba in the west and Bagdad in the east. There was an
13 explicit decision by the kulejma [phoen] to put an end to theological
14 speculation which would be of an open-ended cosmological kind and to focus
15 on the elaboration of the given body of Sunna that has been codified by
16 that time. From that point on, for the past 900 years, what we witness in
17 Islam is an elaboration of the legal practices and behavioural precepts
18 that are not based upon the spirit of critical inquiry but strictly upon
19 the theologistic regurgitation of the existing body of the primary
20 scripture, the Koran, the Hadis [phoen], the traditions of the prophet and
21 the Sharia.
22 Q. I'll ask you once more: Do you believe, Dr. Trifkovic, that the
23 Islamic or Islam condemns non-believers, if they refuse to subjugation and
24 if they persist in refusing to submit, to kill them?
25 A. There are Koranic quotes that clearly authorise --
Page 13775
1 Q. I'm going to stop you, Dr. Trifkovic. I'm not interested in
2 Koranic quotes. Is that what you believe?
3 A. What I believe, excuse me?
4 Q. Do you believe, this is the third time, do you believe that Islam,
5 if they cannot subjugate non-believers, will kill them?
6 A. There is a major body of thought in Islam that authorises killing
7 of non-believers who refuse to submit to the faith. What Islam is, I
8 cannot reply now. What I can say is that there are Islamic strains of
9 thought and Islamic forms of practice. Islamic practice in Nigeria today
10 does authorise the killing of non-believers, as we've seen with the
11 controversy surrounding Miss World pageant that had to be cancelled a few
12 months ago. It is unfortunate that my article was published before that
13 time because it would provide further evidence of the problem.
14 Q. This is the last time, Dr. Trifkovic S that what you believe?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. All right. Can we look at the next article, please? February the
17 27th, 2002, "Islamic Terrorism in Italy. Shape of Things to Come." If
18 you look, please, at the second page of that article, the fourth paragraph
19 on that page begins, "The unpleasant truth emerging from the Italian
20 trial --" you refer to a trial that was going on -- "is that the mosques
21 throughout the western world are being used to teach hate." Is that all
22 mosques?
23 A. It is --
24 Q. Or some?
25 A. It is many mosques. And it -- I can elaborate on why it is so,
Page 13776
1 because most mosques in the western world that were built over the past
2 decades were financed by the Saudis, whose Wahabi strain of Islam is only
3 vaguely comparable to the kind of stern puritanism in the Christian
4 context and yet it is the one that is most amply endowed with petrol
5 dollars and the one that has created, for instance, the Finsbury --
6 famous, notorious, Finsbury Park Mosque in north London and its many
7 equivalents from Leicester, Birmingham and Leeds to Dearborn, Michigan,
8 Berlin, Marseilles and Milan.
9 Q. You go on to talk about Britain in this article if we look at to
10 the bottom of the page, "Britain leads the way." If you go to the next
11 page, page 3, second paragraph, second sentence, "In Britain today, where
12 Islam controls the inner cities, we have major social exclusion and the
13 development of sharia. We have had churches burned, Christians attacked,
14 and a mission centre destroyed. The media has deliberately kept
15 everything off the air." Which cities do you say are controlled by Islam?
16 A. This quote is not mine. It is from the daily newspaper, the
17 Washington Times, and it quotes an Anglican cleric, a Pakistani-born
18 convert to Christianity, that was -- who was quoted in the article warning
19 of what was going on in Britain but again, since you ask me I will give
20 you some very specific answers. For instance, in the city of Oldham, the
21 old symbol of the city, the owl, had been removed from the lampposts and
22 signposts because the city council in which a heavy Muslim presence was
23 established due to the demographic shift concluded that the old owl of
24 Oldham was somehow insulting to Islamic sensibilities against graven idols
25 and imagery. Also what I think the author of this quote is particularly
Page 13777
1 referring to is not so much control of the inner cities themselves but
2 control of the Muslim social and religious life in the inner cities. In
3 fact, it is a standard complaint by the moderate clerics in Great Britain
4 that their work is being undermined by the radical ones who seem to be
5 more richly endowed with money and who have greater sway with the young --
6 with the young congregation.
7 Q. You're saying, are you, this whole paragraph from the words, "My
8 own feeling," is a quote?
9 A. Indeed, it is, yes.
10 Q. Where are the quotation marks?
11 A. In the printout, they do not appear, because they -- the whole
12 thing -- I don't know what programme was used, but you will see that the
13 line above the quote doesn't -- I indicate that this is the beginning of
14 the quote in itself in western societies, if it was my own narrative there
15 would have been no need for the separation. And secondly, there is also
16 the reference, reference number 1, which again relates to the entire
17 paragraph and it is from the Washington Times of January 16th, 2002. I
18 remember the quote well. It is, I repeat, not mine. It is from the
19 newspaper, the Washington Times.
20 Q. All right. Let's move on to the next page where you go to
21 Germany. Meanwhile across the channel. "In Germany," you start, "the
22 highest court in the land ruled in January 2002 that Muslim butchers
23 should be allowed to slaughter animals according to Islamic practice, by
24 slitting their throats and letting them bleed to death without stunning
25 them first in any way." Do I take it that you disapprove of this
Page 13778
1 decision?
2 A. I disapprove of any decision that undermines the secular
3 democratic tradition of western jurisprudence and constitutional tradition
4 in favour of making exceptions that pander to the creation of special
5 status for Islamic communities in the western world, that is but the first
6 step to further demands which will not stop short of creating parallel
7 sharia in addition to western jurisprudence.
8 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Does it mean that you don't accept the freedom
9 of religion?
10 THE WITNESS: No, Your Honour. I accept the freedom of religion
11 but that freedom of religion has to be circumscribed by the requirements
12 of the secular democratic society's host societies in which those
13 immigrants have to make certain compromises. I would submit that Muslims
14 who choose to live in Germany should be expected to make accommodation to
15 the main stream society's mores and main stream society's constitutional
16 and legal terms of reference and if they regard it as unacceptable, they
17 are welcome not to come.
18 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: But you respect [Microphone not activated] you
19 respect the decision by law makers and constitutional and higher courts in
20 other countries coming to different conclusions as regards the freedom of
21 religion?
22 THE WITNESS: Let me emphasise, I think that any requirement for
23 special treatment and exemptions, whether it is by the Muslims or for that
24 matter, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, there have been cases
25 concerning blood transfusion or organ transplants as life saving device,
Page 13779
1 the Morman's matrimonial issues, are very dangerous, I believe, that the
2 constitutional legal based upon the two centuries of western secularism is
3 too precious to be undermined with special dispensations for one group or
4 another because once you allow one exception, it may prove to be a thin
5 wedge that may undermine the entire edifice in due course.
6 MS. KORNER:
7 Q. The next paragraph, "Bosnian Muslims are the second largest
8 immigrant group in Germany. They maintain close ties with the Turkish
9 community. Already a decade ago, with a number of Muslim residents
10 approaching 3 million, and the number of mosque associations exceeding
11 2.000, the writing was on the German wall."
12 What writing?
13 A. The writing that is stated in the following paragraph, which is
14 again not mine, but an assessment by an Italian journalist by the name of
15 Vittorio Messori published in Avenira in Rome in 1992. And that -- and
16 that writing we can read, "The Turks in Berlin constitutes a social
17 problem without a solution. There are entire sections of the city closed
18 in on themselves, they support a parallel and hostile culture with no kind
19 of symbiosis with the German culture and the Maghrebians have done the
20 same thing in Marseilles, et cetera. The point that I'm trying to make
21 and we can go on and on with the examples from France, from Britain, from
22 Germany, is that when you have a large and compact Islamic diaspora in the
23 western world, unlike other immigrant groups, and I am also speaking of
24 the American experience here, unlike other immigrant groups that through
25 the centuries, have come into these host societies and sought to integrate
Page 13780
1 into those societies, to enrich the life of those societies with elements
2 of their own culture and tradition and also to enrich themselves by
3 accepting the dominant modes of social and political organisations in the
4 host societies, that the Islamic diaspora is unlike any other, that it is
5 qualitatively different in many ways and that this difference is
6 manifested primarily in its tendency to create ghettoised forms of social
7 and religious life that in the long term seeks to not only leave the
8 community itself unaffected by the main stream but also to convert the
9 host society by first seeking special dispensations and special privileges
10 and then eventually escalating to parallel forms of social and legal and
11 political institutions.
12 Q. We'll finish looking at this series of articles in a moment,
13 Dr. Trifkovic. At the bottom of the page, "Avoiding the camp of saints,
14 open-ended population explosion in every predominantly Muslim country in
15 the world is underlying reality behind immigration trends. Fortifying the
16 impression that tomorrow belongs to Islam. A Muslim woman has between
17 five and six children on average compared to fewer than two for women in
18 the developed world.
19 What is the basis for that statistical analysis?
20 A. The basis is UN statistical year books. The last I actually
21 looked at in the connection with this article was 1989. If you look at
22 the aggregates for the moderate countries and the Middle East and, of
23 course, excluding Israel and allowing for some minor distortions as the
24 result of the presence of Christian communities in Egypt, Lebanon and
25 Syria, this is the result that you will -- that you will find for the
Page 13781
1 Muslim world. For the European world, I think the picture is considerably
2 grimmer, that in fact more recent data indicate that in Italy, in
3 particular, as well as in Germany and France, we are not only below
4 replacement level in Italy, I believe it is below 1.2, whereas 2.2 would
5 be simple arithmetical replacement. I think what I'm saying here is not a
6 matter of opinion, it is a matter of generally recognised empirically
7 verifiable fact.
8 Q. Were you aware that during the run-up to the conflict in 1992, one
9 of the methods of scaring the Serb population was to expound on the Muslim
10 birth rate as being much higher?
11 A. I do not know who and how specifically referred to the problem of
12 Muslim birth rates as a means of, as you put it, scaring the Serbs but I
13 would be very surprised if note was not taken of the fact that indeed the
14 birth rates of the Muslim population in the former Yugoslavia, and I think
15 this refers more notably to Kosovo than to Bosnia, are exponentially
16 greater than the birth rates for the Serbs or the Croats. When I was
17 writing this article, I had -- I did not have the Yugoslav events on my
18 mind in particular. In fact, since my focus was on Western Europe, I
19 believe that the discrepancy in the birth rates is far greater between the
20 majority Muslim societies of North Africa and the Middle East on the one
21 hand and west European societies on the other than between the Bosnian
22 Muslims on one side and the Bosnian Christians, Serbs and Croats, on the
23 other.
24 Q. Look at one last paragraph, please. It's over on the next page.
25 Page 6. "It is nevertheless wrong to conclude that Muslims have simply
Page 13782
1 replaced communists as the main threat to the west. They are but two
2 faces of the same menace, of the closed society and the closed mind, and
3 they have been the one real threat all along.
4 "Ideological divisions have not given way to communitarian ones.
5 The totalitarian nature of Islam, akin to communism and Naziism in aspects
6 makes the threat different in degree to that faced during the war -- the
7 Cold War but not in kind. It demands a similar response.
8 Now, what response would that be?
9 A. That response would specifically mean that prospective immigrants
10 from the Muslim world into the western world would be subjected to very
11 close interrogation as regards their religious and political beliefs. I
12 submit that it is possible that there will be a reform of Islam from
13 within. In fact, there is no doubt that moderate Islamic clerics do exist
14 and that even the majority of ordinary Muslims are eminently moderate in
15 their beliefs and in their daily practices but at the same time, I submit
16 that for the time being, the vocal minorities that control political Islam
17 and the vocal and motivated minorities that control the religious life of
18 Islamic communities in the western world are pushing the other way, and
19 therefore, just as to be very specific, in the Cold War, every applicant
20 for a U.S. visa was asked if he was a member of a Communist Party, and was
21 denied that visa if the answer was yes, unless he was coming on official
22 business. People should be asked whether they subscribe to the variety of
23 Islam as elaborated by Bihabism [phoen] and as presented through the
24 hundreds of mosques in the western world, which try to find and in fact do
25 find in their own terms, within their own analytical paradigm, the
Page 13783
1 justification for violent overthrow of the existing social and political
2 order in line with Koranic precepts and in line with the Sunna, the
3 practices and traditions of the prophet and the historic practice of 14
4 centuries of political Islam. So the similar response refers primarily to
5 the understanding that the militant strain of Islam should be treated as a
6 subversive ideology rather than a religion, and that by now is also
7 becoming a somewhat unremarkable view, even though when I first wrote it,
8 may have had the character of a rather bold statement, in the meantime, I
9 can quote a whole host of articles primarily in the United States that not
10 only follow a similar strain of thought but also even quote me as the
11 support of the given point of view.
12 Q. The Washington Times that you say -- that the first part was a
13 quote from, is that a newspaper that's run by something called the
14 Unification Church?
15 A. The Unification Church is --
16 Q. Can you just answer that yes or no, please?
17 A. It's not run by it. The Unification Church is a shareholder in
18 the Washington Times company.
19 Q. Very quickly, then, can we run through the last two of these
20 articles--
21 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: I'm sorry to interrupt first that we don't lose
22 the order, the first article would be provisional marked S400 I is the one
23 from August 29. And the second one from February 27 would be provisional
24 marked S410 I, but -- sorry, in order that we don't have to come back to
25 this article, I think it's mandatory to come back to page 4 of these seven
Page 13784
1 pages, when you discuss the decision and strongly criticise the decision
2 of the German constitutional court, which of course is your right to
3 criticise the constitutional court, but then you continue with a sentence,
4 "If and when the constitutional court allows clitoridectomy for Germany's
5 Muslim girls" continues, it will turn the host countries Britain, France,
6 Germany, into an Islamic society by compelling it to adapt to their way of
7 life, what brings you, what's the factual basis for bringing you to the
8 insinuation that any German court could allow this clitoridectomy for
9 Germany's Muslim girls? Aren't you aware of the contrary?
10 THE WITNESS: Your Honour, this is an obvious journalistic
11 rhetorical turn of phrase that follows from Mr. Hasan Oezdogan's
12 declaration that the decision that I referred to earlier is but an
13 important step in the integration of Muslims in Germany. It was a
14 deliberate piece of sarcasm implying that what in fact should be regarded
15 as a major victory for the Muslim community that they obtained an
16 exception to slaughter sheep and lambs the way they deem fit is but an
17 important step. I'm implying that in terms of their own perception of
18 what integration really means, the full integration will be achieved only
19 if they are free to act any which way they deem fit. It was no reflection
20 on the intentions or practices of Germany's or other countries' legal
21 bodies. It was a reference to the Muslim activists's own perception of
22 what they will regard as sufficient preconditions for full integration.
23 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Do you regard that article, as you have written
24 here, knowing better, that the jurisprudence is absolutely the contrary,
25 that this is a serious article?
Page 13785
1 THE WITNESS: This article was written on the immediate heels of
2 the ruling on January of 2002 and it was written in the context of a
3 broader host of issues that included the terrorist cell being uncovered in
4 Italy and the problem of increasing fundamentalism in Britain. I would be
5 very curious to correct my assertions in the light of subsequent legal
6 rulings and of course it is something of a disadvantage for me to discuss
7 the details of the aftermath of the article with you of all people, as an
8 expert in German constitutional affairs, but the quote that we are
9 specifically discussing here is -- was written in the immediate aftermath
10 of the decision of January 2002 and the triumphant statement by the head
11 of Germany's Islamic Council commenting on that decision.
12 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: I think we get a clear view of your approach to
13 religious freedom. Please continue.
14 MS. KORNER: Thank you, Your Honour.
15 Q. Very quickly, then, Dr. Trifkovic, the next article, December the
16 20th, 2002, you devoted to Britain in its entirety, entitled "The Islamic
17 conquest of Britain."
18 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: S411.
19 MS. KORNER: Thank you.
20 Q. According to your research, in paragraph 2, "The long haul may
21 well end up in Britain becoming an Islamic country by the end of the
22 century with sharia law replacing common law and the Koran replacing the
23 magnificent edifice of its unwritten constitution. If current demographic
24 trends continue with native Britons aborting and birth controlling
25 themselves to death, with Muslims already settled in Britain having third
Page 13786
1 world birth rates, rampant immigration continuing unabated, the writing
2 again is clearly on the wall."
3 On what do you base this assertion that Britain may well become an
4 Islamic country by the end of this century?
5 A. On the extrapolation of the existing statistical trends if
6 projected unaltered until the end of the country. There was an article in
7 the Guardian, surprisingly so in the Guardian I say, because the Guardian
8 is usually regarded as the mouthpiece of the liberal segment of the
9 British establishment and therefore unlikely to dwell on the tricky issues
10 of the demographic shift that dealt with the issue of which way Britain is
11 heading in this respect. And I again say that this is not only an opinion
12 from the conservative corner of Eurocentric nostalgia that laments the
13 passing of the traditional European nations, even people who are eminently
14 supportive of the open-ended immigration, and there was an article only
15 this morning in the International Herald Tribune, point out that on
16 present form, the existing population of native European countries such as
17 Italy, France, Germany and Britain will be halved towards the end of the
18 century and that immigration will necessarily fill up the missing jobs and
19 that most of that immigration will come from the nearest part of the third
20 world to Europe, which is the Maghreb North Africa and the Middle East.
21 Q. You go --
22 A. In the case of the U.K., of course, we also have the Indian
23 subcontinent and it is a well-known fact that even from among the
24 subcontinental immigrants, the Hindus and the Sihks have a much lower
25 birth rates than the Muslims. In fact, the Hindu birth rates in the
Page 13787
1 second generation approach those of the native population, whereas the
2 Muslim birth rates even though they dropped compared to Pakistan or to
3 Bangladesh where those immigrants had original nationally come from,
4 nevertheless tend to stabilise at roughly 3 to 4 live births per woman
5 which is still considerably higher than the native population. London
6 already has a majority of either immigrants or second generation
7 immigrants, and on present form, we will have contiguous and strong
8 culturally and religiously strong pockets of more or less clear Muslim
9 majority in a number of inner city areas. Some of them have already been
10 established, for instance in the city of Leicester north of London, and
11 the way that the leadership of the Islamic community in Britain right now
12 is acting, does not bode very well for the opening up of their religious
13 and social life in the direction of full integration and the give and take
14 in the spirit of multi-cultural tolerance and of post modern,
15 post-national, information-based technology in a secular democracy.
16 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Madam Korner, may I ask you not to continue with
17 this line of questioning? I think the picture is absolutely clear, and I
18 don't like to hear this expression of intolerance any longer in this
19 courtroom. So we should come to another area and it should expressed --
20 be expressed that this Court never will attribute of any of the comments
21 given by the expert to Dr. Stakic. We never heard such kind of
22 expressions from Dr. Stakic. This should be quite clear. The trial stays
23 now adjourned for 20 minutes to 1.00.
24 --- Recess taken at 12.22 p.m.
25 --- On resuming at 12.43 p.m.
Page 13788
1 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Please be seated, and let us hear from the
2 expert.
3 MS. KORNER:
4 Q. Just one last question on these articles. Is this what you call
5 responsible journalism, Dr. Trifkovic?
6 A. This is a loaded question. This is not only responsible. This is
7 imminently factually-based journalism which seeks to establish a clear
8 point, that there is a phenomenon called political Islam and that
9 political Islam is a threat to western democracy as we know it. That is
10 my considered view point and I stick by it.
11 Q. All right. I want to look at one other article you wrote on the
12 question of responsible journalism, which is separate from your outbursts
13 against Islam?
14 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: We still have February 3, 2003, "Islam as
15 sedition."
16 MS. KORNER: Yes.
17 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: This would be S412A.
18 MS. KORNER: Thank you, Your Honour.
19 Q. I want to make it absolutely clear, Dr. Trifkovic, before we look
20 at this article you're perfectly entitled to hold any views you like about
21 this tribunal but I want to ask you the basis for these views. There is
22 no date on this article but in fact it appears on the list of your
23 articles from the web site and it's dated March 2000. And it's headed
24 "The Hague Tribunal, Bad Justice, Worse Politics."
25 You deal with the detention unit at Scheveningen which you
Page 13789
1 describe as ten miles away from the court. It is a small point but what
2 makes you assert that it's ten miles away?
3 A. First of all the correction about the date. This appeared in the
4 Chronicles magazine in the June issue of 1996. Why it appears under the
5 2000 date line in -- on the web site, I do not know. I haven't looked at
6 the web site version of it. Of course I remember the article well from
7 the time when it appeared.
8 Q. Well --
9 A. The ten miles --
10 Q. I can show you your web site --
11 A. I believe you. I'm saying simply that if we look at Chronicles
12 magazine issues.
13 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: Sorry to interrupt. This can't be correct that
14 it's June issue of 1996, when you are quoting Toronto Star from November
15 3, 1992 -- 1999, on page 2.
16 MS. KORNER: Your Honour, I think that must be right because there
17 is a reference we'll see later to Tadic being four years before.
18 THE WITNESS: No that was -- in that case, something is mixed up
19 here because the article under this heading was published in Chronicles of
20 1996. There was a subsequent article which was entitled something
21 different, what the web site editor did with the two I do not know. I
22 would need to read this article by itself, but please proceed with
23 specific questions.
24 Q. I'm perfectly happy, Dr. Trifkovic if you want to take time just
25 to read through it. I don't want to take you by surprise on this. Do you
Page 13790
1 want time to read through it?
2 A. No, please go ahead.
3 Q. The question I asked, was what made you assert that the court was
4 ten miles from the detention unit? What did you base that on?
5 A. That obviously is a mistake. I have no recollection of the ten
6 mile assertion. At that time I may have based it on a secondhand press
7 articles which in this particular instance were obviously wrong.
8 Q. Can we look, please, at the third paragraph which begins, "The
9 tradition, that is to say the International Court of Justice tradition,"
10 which you referred to in the previous paragraph, "is now being destroyed
11 by a pseudo legal impostor, the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, which was
12 inserted deliberately into The Hague to provide the pretender with a legal
13 and cultural pedigree and at the same time to devalue the true legacy. It
14 is as if Jimmy Swaggart set up shop in Rome, took a crash course in Latin
15 and took to wearing a Miter." For those who may not know, am I right in
16 saying that Jimmy Swaggart was the television evangelist who actually fell
17 foul of the law?
18 A. Yes, that's correct.
19 Q. "It has funds --" I'm sorry, "This so-called Tribunal uses legal
20 language. It has jurists on its panels and they are dressed in a bizarre
21 imitation of continental judicial attire. It has funds, lots of funds,
22 but it is a fraud." Is that a view you hold today?
23 A. This is verbatim section from the article published in June of
24 1996, and I readily admit that I have considerably modified my views of
25 the Tribunal in the intervening seven years.
Page 13791
1 Q. All right. Well, let's go on to the part that's headed, "Myth of
2 the Bosnian Holocaust." And if we go over the page, please, to the third
3 paragraph, which begins, "Kenny and others have proven that the Bosnian
4 Holocaust story was fabricated by the Muslim side as part of a
5 wide-ranging and effective PR campaign and eagerly embraced by their
6 sympathisers in the media. In fact, after an initial bout of heavy
7 fighting from 1993 to 1995, there was a period of relative calm on most
8 fronts in Bosnia, interrupted by brief outbursts in isolated localities
9 such as Gorazde and Bihac. Stories of mass murder and atrocities have not
10 been substantiated even after sustained and well-publicised digs in the
11 area of Srebrenica. Had there been a slaughter on the alleged scale,
12 there would have been fewer rather than more voters especially on the
13 Muslim side on the electoral roll in 1996 than in 1990."
14 Now, first of all, is it still your view that, as you put it, the
15 Bosnian Holocaust story was fabricated by the Muslim side?
16 A. I greatly object to the use of the term "Holocaust" in the context
17 of Bosnia because I still believe that it devalues the magnitude and the
18 tragic tragedy of the Holocaust, which is the extermination of the
19 European Jews by the Nazis during World War II. I still believe that even
20 though it may be poor form to count the bodies, that the magnitude of the
21 Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995 does not exceed in purely quantitative terms
22 of victims and suffering a number of civil wars seen elsewhere around the
23 world, including Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939, including the Russian
24 civil war during the revolution of 1917 to 21. To single out and I
25 deliberately put in parenthesis Bosnian Holocaust as a defining moment
Page 13792
1 which in terms of the number of victims and the magnitude of suffering is
2 somehow unique and solely comparable to the Holocaust of 1942 to 1945 is
3 misleading.
4 Q. "Stories of mass murder and atrocities not substantiated even
5 after sustained and well-publicised digs in the area of Srebrenica." Are
6 you saying that there was no massacre at Srebrenica?
7 A. No. I'm not saying -- what I'm saying is on the form of the time
8 when the article was written which I will need to look at my notes but
9 this section of the article certainly refers to the period of the spring
10 of 1996, there were many curious questions surrounding the Srebrenica
11 episode, including the reappearance of a number of people who were claimed
12 to have disappeared in Srebrenica in the ranks of the Muslim army. But
13 what we have here is an obvious blending of two articles, one that deals
14 with Bosnia and another one that deals with Kosovo over which I, frankly,
15 did not have control. I am not saying that any of this is not written by
16 me, I am simply putting it in the context that this looks like a somewhat
17 clumsily put together melange of two different pieces.
18 Q. I'm sorry. But why would somebody want to do that?
19 A. I'm not saying that this was done -- if it -- it probably has to
20 do with the dictates of the web site management deadlines which sometimes
21 result in the print articles from the magazine being posted and articles
22 that are related to a similar subject matter are sometimes bundled by the
23 editor into single piece from two or three different articles by the same
24 author without the author necessarily having a hand in the process of
25 editing. I know it sounds complicated but this is the factual state.
Page 13793
1 Q. Well, you're going to be coming back tomorrow, Dr. Trifkovic, are
2 you able overnight to get the two individual articles?
3 A. I can try to do so, yes. We are looking at the article on -- from
4 June of 1996 and then another one concerning the Kosovo. Yes, yes, I'll
5 try to do so.
6 Q. All right. You didn't actually answer the question. Do you now
7 accept that there was a massacre of something in the region of 7.000 men
8 and boys at Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serbs?
9 A. Yes, I do.
10 Q. All right. If we leave out of -- we skip the next page, we come
11 down to the real rationale at the bottom of page 3, where you deal again
12 by saying there was no Holocaust and then say "So why the War Crimes
13 Tribunal?" Mrs. Albright's answer and then you go on to quote what
14 Madeleine Albright had to say and deal with American policy, which you end
15 up by saying, "The Serbs were to be pilloried and the Tribunal was needed
16 to give due legitimacy and pseudo legality to that decision." Was that
17 part written in 1996 or in 2000?
18 A. It was written in 1996 and it specifically referred to the U.S.
19 intent behind the setting up of the Tribunal, as reflected in both
20 Albright's statement and Susan Woodward's comment.
21 Q. All right. You then go on to say, "And pseudo legal it was" and
22 so on and so forth, "The procedures --" I'm sorry, can you find that
23 paragraph? That's three from the bottom -- "under which people are being
24 tried at The Hague are outrageous, when the trial of Dusko Tadic was well
25 underway four years ago, even The New York Times had to admit that the
Page 13794
1 Court still needs to establish exactly what evidence will be admitted and
2 what constitutes --" I think that should be "an offence." "The rules of
3 evidence remain totally unclear to this day." Now, we can take it that
4 part was written in 2000?
5 A. Also I will add that that part was based on my telephone interview
6 with Alfred Rubin, Professor of International Law at Tufts University,
7 with whom I had an extensive conversation concerning the evolving rules of
8 evidence with trials under way and whose judgement I trusted on this
9 issue, in view of his position as the chairman of the International Law
10 Society of the United States.
11 Q. I'm sorry. So you're saying that assertion, "The rules of
12 evidence remain totally unclear to this day," is -- refers to a phone
13 conversation you had with someone called Professor Rubin who said that
14 rules were still evolving?
15 A. That's right.
16 Q. Why didn't you say that in the article?
17 A. I started quoting Professor Rubin higher up in the article, and as
18 we proceeded, it is implied that what comes in cursive or parenthesis
19 refers to other people's opinion. What you will find is that very often
20 rather than repeat so and so says, quotes are put in either italics or
21 parenthesis.
22 Q. And in your view, as a historian, academic, political scientist,
23 unclear means the same as evolving, does it?
24 A. No, it does not, and I would say that you can have perfect clarity
25 about the process of evolution or else that you can have lack of clarity
Page 13795
1 even if evolution is complete. What I would say, however, is that it
2 would have been greatly preferable if the evolution had not continued
3 while trials were underway.
4 Q. But that's not what you say, is it?
5 A. Excuse me?
6 Q. That is not what you say in this article. You make a bald
7 assertion that "The rules of evidence remain totally unclear to this day."
8 And isn't that because you wanted your readers, whoever they may be, to
9 believe that this was an unfair court?
10 A. It is up to the reader to conclude whether the fairness is
11 contained within the judicial process that continues to establish the
12 rules of evidence even as trials are underway. I would simply submit, and
13 now I quote from memory, Professor Rubin, "That it would be most
14 remarkable for the domestic jurisdiction of any democratic country in the
15 world to proceed on the similar basis." In other words, to change the
16 rules of evidence while trials are already in process.
17 Q. Well, you're not a lawyer, Professor Trifkovic, it may be an
18 unfair question. Have you never heard of a change in the laws while a
19 trial is continuing?
20 A. Yes, even though I'm not a lawyer, I believe it would be very
21 difficult to retroactively affect the rights of the accused on the basis
22 of evolving legislation that is enacted after the beginning of a person's
23 trial.
24 Q. All right. Can we go to the next sentence, please? "Equally
25 unacceptable in a normal court of law is that the fact that the accused
Page 13796
1 has no right to confront his accuser. That means the accusers may remain
2 anonymous. And as the American Bar Association has noted in a critique,
3 immune from cross-examination." On what did you base that assertion?
4 A. On the basis of a paper published by the American Bar Association
5 at the end of 1995, early 1996, and that -- the exact title and format of
6 which I would have to check if I have access to the Internet, but it was
7 certainly not my own extrapolation. It was a quoted opinion from the ABA.
8 Q. "In short, contrary to any civilised system of justice, the
9 accused is held guilty until proven innocent."
10 On what did you base that?
11 A. That again is the continuing -- whatever is in italics or
12 parentheses is taken as a quote from a stated source rather than my own
13 words.
14 Q. So we are talking again about the American Bar Association?
15 A. The ABA article which I will have to try and reference for you for
16 the morning.
17 Q. Was this written in 1996 or in 2000?
18 A. It was definitely early on. It was written in the aftermath of --
19 it was -- it was in the very early days, yeah.
20 Q. All right. Can we go to the next page, please? The paragraph
21 beginning "In contrast." "In contrast, by all accounts, The Hague
22 Tribunal is a well-financed, well-oiled, sophisticated affair. Their
23 witnesses are given red-carpet treatment at The Hague and a great deal of
24 resources are brought to bear. A lot of time goes into preparing each
25 case. Disregarding rules of evidence and established legal procedure, it
Page 13797
1 investigates, indicts, prosecutes and renders sentence as a single body.
2 Pausing there, when was that written?
3 A. In 1996.
4 Q. And on what was that based?
5 A. I believe that it still troubles some legal minds, and I could
6 quote a number of interlocutors that I have consulted in addition to
7 professor Rubin in preparing this article that there has been no
8 separation between the initiation of investigations, the trial itself, and
9 the appeals procedure, that indeed to some it is extremely troubling that
10 it is under the roof of a single institution that we have the initiation
11 of investigations, the conduct on investigations itself, the indictment,
12 the trial and the appeal.
13 Q. "The witnesses are given red-carpet treatment at The Hague." Now,
14 where did you get that from?
15 A. It related to the well-publicised facts at that time that those
16 who want to come forward as Prosecution witnesses will be given not only
17 immunity but, in case of well-founded fear of Prosecution in the country
18 of origin, even new identity and a new life in the West, which considering
19 the state of the collapsed societies of better part of former Yugoslavia
20 in the aftermath of the wars, was a very alluring prospects for many.
21 Q. A well publicised fact. Can you actually please quote an article,
22 a book, an interview, on which you based this.
23 A. At the time of the Tadic trial, there were in fact articles both
24 which again I, given the time and resources, will be able to reference.
25 In both the Bosnian Muslim press and in the Belgrade press, in one case
Page 13798
1 complementary to the Tribunal, in another case critical of the Tribunal,
2 regarding the care and attention given to Prosecution witnesses.
3 Q. All right. It demands that arbitrarily proclaimed war criminals
4 be physically delivered to The Hague. What do you mean by arbitrarily
5 proclaimed?
6 A. No, "proclaimed" is a bad choice of word. "Arbitrarily accused"
7 would be a better choice of words. And on balance, I believe that this
8 Tribunal has been less selective in its choice of the accused recently
9 than was the case back in 1996. I think that even a very objective
10 observer looking at the roll call of the accused in 1996 would notice an
11 ethnic imbalance that is glaring compared to the magnitude of atrocities
12 and serious crimes committed on different sides of the divide or, rather,
13 should be used the plural, of ethnic divides.
14 I still believe that it is somewhat problematic that in the case
15 of the Serbs, the responsibility extends all the way to the top of the
16 command and control structure, both political and military, whereas Franjo
17 Tudjman was allowed to die peacefully in his bed and Alija Izetbegovic is
18 enjoying his twilight years as a retired head of state.
19 I believe that an impartial and objective observer looking at the
20 events of 1990 to 1992 would conclude that there is at least prima facie
21 case for at least investigating and openly investigating, if not
22 necessarily indicting, the political leaders of all three ethnic groups
23 and that command and control responsibility in the case of the non-Serbs
24 was somewhat arbitrarily cut somewhere halfway or two-thirds up the
25 command and control ladder.
Page 13799
1 Q. Are you aware, Dr. Trifkovic, that the issuing of an indictment
2 has to be based upon evidence?
3 A. Indeed I am, and that's why I'm saying that it is somewhat
4 surprising that evidence such as there is or could have been established
5 in the case of the two aforementioned leaders, has not been deemed
6 sufficient for the Office of the Prosecutor to instigate proceedings.
7 Q. All right. Let's just finish off this paragraph. "It is not
8 allowed defence attorneys to challenge the accusations by hiding itself
9 behind a lack of mandate for trial in absentia. It has turned the NATO
10 troops in the Balkans into its private gendarmerie empowered to hunt and
11 arrest anyone it regards as a suspect. It is sustaining a world-wide
12 media frenzy through which the accused are pronounced guilty by
13 association and without a trial. It is destroying and making a mockery of
14 the judicial system and secular legal tradition. The Hague story, besides
15 being a travesty of the due process, as we know it, amounts to the
16 abandonment of positive international law."
17 Would you agree that this is a polemic?
18 A. Oh, yes it was written as a polemic.
19 Q. Would you state that this is responsible journalism?
20 A. If we postulate polemic as a rhetorical device that has specific
21 purpose of putting controversial issues in sharp focus, I would say that
22 this is as responsible as any number of op-eds or editorials that not only
23 deal with the analysis of issues but with contentious opinions and with
24 different scenarios for their long-term resolution.
25 My cutting edge of the rhetorical turn of phrase, if you will, was
Page 13800
1 particularly aimed not so much at The Hague Tribunal's procedures but as
2 the longer term issue of the International Criminal Court, which I deal in
3 the subsequent paragraph.
4 Also let me add that at the time that these words being written in
5 the spring of 1996 when we still had the era of Cherif Bassiouni's report
6 as the initial body of evidence, later I understand discarded, and with
7 Judge Goldstone's somewhat clumsy beginning of indictments that were
8 sometimes surprising in their arbitrariness, I, being very frank, as I've
9 been all day today, readily concede that from a distance of six or seven
10 years I would have to end this rhetoric to a considerable extent today.
11 Q. Well, let's look at the next paragraph, the one that begins,
12 "There are people in Washington who have a different scenario in mind.
13 They do not seek to delegitimise war crimes per se but to enhance their
14 power to decide what is a war crime on the basis of current political
15 calculations. Applied in recent practice, political discretion over what
16 constitutes a war crime means that when Bosnian Muslims are shelled,
17 driven from their homes, or murdered, those powerful Washingtonians are
18 seething with indignation and they duly send The Hague into top gear,
19 indict first, ask questions later. When Serbs are driven from their homes
20 in the Krajina in 1995, or in Sarajevo in the winter of 1996, or from
21 Kosovo to this very day, when they are expelled in their hundreds of
22 thousands or are discovered with their throats cut, they pretend not to
23 see."
24 Now, first, we can take it from that that this paragraph was
25 written in 2000?
Page 13801
1 A. This paragraph was written in 2000, but very importantly it was
2 written with reference to the outgoing Clinton administration, which was
3 still very much in power at that time, and not with reference to the Bush
4 administration, which is inaugurated about a year later.
5 Q. Am I right this paragraph is intended to suggest that this
6 Tribunal is driven entirely by American policy?
7 A. No. This paragraph seeks to suggest that there are elements in
8 the American power structure as it was then, under President Clinton, and
9 I was alluding specifically to the then-Secretary of State, Albright, who
10 wanted to use the Tribunal for an arbitrary apportioning of guilt, or
11 rather, to an arbitrary closing of the eyes to prima facie crimes against
12 humanity committed by other sides.
13 Q. Sorry, what is the sentence "they duly send The Hague into top
14 gear, indict first, ask questions later," what does that mean?
15 A. Well, "they" refers to the intelligence services of the major
16 powers, in this particular case the United States, who supply the raw
17 material, if you will, the primary body of evidence, that the Tribunal
18 then turns into investigations and indictments.
19 Q. In the next paragraph you return to your Islamic furrow, if that's
20 the right word. "In the meantime, he who pays the piper calls the tune."
21 At its inception The Hague Tribunal received 93.4 per cent of its funding
22 from two Islamic countries, Pakistan and Malaysia." And where did you get
23 that piece of information?
24 A. Oh, that was stated -- and I'm now speaking from memory, I don't
25 think -- because this is a compilation, it doesn't have the footnotes, but
Page 13802
1 in the original there would have been a footnote. I believe this to have
2 been stated by Cherif Bassiouni in an interview with the Chicago Tribune
3 on the occasion of the publication of his initial report. I seem to
4 recall that the figure of 93.4 per cent for the initial injection of
5 financial liquidity was actually stated by Bassiouni himself.
6 Q. Mirabile --
7 A. Sorry, let me add that I believe this was done in a complimentary
8 sense that he was trying to point out how these countries were going
9 beyond the call of duty to provide initial funding.
10 Q. Then of course, you turn it round the other way because you go on
11 to say, "Mirabile dictu both have been given the right to appoint judges
12 to the panel," so the suggestion there is because they gave the money,
13 they got the judges; is that right?
14 A. The suggestion is obvious because there are 150-odd member
15 countries of the United Nations and if we have two, that provide the
16 initial funding, and both are given seats on the initial panel, until
17 proven otherwise, I think one is well justified to at least suspect prima
18 facie linkage.
19 Q. Speculation?
20 A. Speculation.
21 Q. All right. If we go to --
22 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: May I ask you also to provide this, it's not
23 quoted here, it's not in italics but you're making reference to Professor
24 Cherif Bassiouni about this 93.5 per cent of its funding from two Islamic
25 countries, Pakistan and Malaysia, I would appreciate to get this source.
Page 13803
1 Thank you.
2 MS. KORNER:
3 Q. Can we go over the page, please? "Many transgressors, par
4 excellence. Are safe from Prosecution. The Bosnian Muslim government has
5 stage-managed three well-publicised explosions in Sarajevo, in May, 1992,
6 February, 1994, and August 1995. A total of 121 civilians has been killed
7 as a result." On what did you base that allegation?
8 A. Satish Nambiar and -- well, Generals Nambiar and MacKenzie
9 vis-a-vis the bread que massacre of May 1992. Lord David Owen's Balkan
10 Odyssey refers to the Markale incident of February, 1994 in his memoirs.
11 He mentioned in passing the existence of the secret UN report, and the way
12 in which he used even the implied threat of its publication as a means of
13 getting the Muslims to continue negotiating on -- at a time when -- I find
14 it a little difficult to give you specific references to something that I
15 wasn't preparing myself to comment upon in detail today. But let me say
16 that for the Markale incident, from February of 1994, the press references
17 to the existence of the secret UN report which establishes the
18 impossibility of a single 120 millimetre mortar causing 80 deaths and
19 considerably greater number of wounded in that particular location, have
20 been made by, among others, the Daily Telegraph and the Independent. They
21 have been specifically stated by a Russian colonel who was present with
22 one of the two Russian battalions in the area, and whereas we can only
23 conclude from circumstantial evidence that the report does exist,
24 reference to it is made by both Sir Michael Rose in his memoirs and by, as
25 I mentioned earlier, David Owen in his Balkan Odyssey.
Page 13804
1 Q. So your sources for this are all books published by people who
2 were, if I can put it that way, around at the time?
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. You have never looked at any of the evidence relating to the
5 actual investigations that were carried out?
6 A. Well, the problem with that is that it appears to have been the
7 case that we had two different sets of investigations, and that some of
8 them were made public and others were not. For instance, there is again
9 in both Nambiar's and McKenzie's accounts, a specific reference to the
10 Vase Miskina Street being cordoned off some minutes before the bread queue
11 explosion and a video camera making an appearance in situ. There is also
12 the reference in Sir Michael Rose and in David Owen, to the existence of
13 this secret UN report, which both emphasise had been progressively reduced
14 in the number of persons that were allowed access to it.
15 Q. But, Dr. Trifkovic, the point is this: Don't you see any problem
16 at all as a historian, political scientist, journalist, in asserting as a
17 fact "The Bosnian Muslim government has stage-managed three
18 well-publicised explosions" without qualifying that in any way?
19 A. The best qualification that I can give to these events is cui
20 bono. If we have time after time outrages in the Balkans that are almost
21 automatically, almost reflexively, ascribed to one particular side of the
22 conflict, and if we have reasonable doubt on that interpretation of the
23 events, given by some of the highest officials of the international
24 community on the ground, be they military or political personalities, I
25 think that reasonable doubt that you mention should be on the other side,
Page 13805
1 on the side that has almost reflexively, I emphasise, blamed the Serb side
2 for each and every of those events.
3 Q. You didn't even think of perhaps using an expression like the
4 "evidence suggests"?
5 A. I admit that it would have been more prudent for me to have done
6 so.
7 Q. All right. And finally, on this article, if we look at the
8 penultimate paragraph on page 6, "It could hardly be otherwise," you're
9 referring back to the Prosecutions, "since the model for The Hague
10 Tribunal is not Nuremberg 1946 but Moscow 1938. It is a deeply flawed
11 institution created for dishonest political ends. It is also an obscene
12 travesty of justice as understood and practice in the civilised world."
13 Written in 1996 or 2000?
14 A. In 1996.
15 Q. You don't think that the way you put that is extreme?
16 A. Extremism is in the eye of the beholder. In 1996, if we look at
17 again I submit the list of the accused, if we look at the initial brief,
18 if we look at the behaviour of the first Prosecutor and his public
19 statements, if we look at the initial report Cherif Bassiouni's report
20 that provide the initial body of evidence, it was a politicised body par
21 excellence, I have already mentioned and I will mention it again, that
22 from seven years distance, I would rephrase some of these statements quite
23 considerably so, and that without, in any event, trying to justify
24 Trifkovic, 1996, I would say that Trifkovic 2003 would seek a more
25 fortuitous formulation.
Page 13806
1 Q. Dr. Trifkovic, isn't it in fact the case that far from being an
2 objective observer of these events and their aftermath, you are in fact a
3 strongly committed Serb nationalist?
4 A. It is interesting that views that are shared by a large number of
5 non-Serbs, whether they be political or legal commentators, are in this
6 case equated with, as you put it, Serbian nationalism. Since I'm not a
7 lawyer, I am not sure what would be the legal definition of a nationalist
8 but I would say that for each and every element in my statements,
9 especially as they relate to the period and the context in which they were
10 expressed, I could quote a number of authors who have neither ethnic or
11 emotional connection with the Balkans, and who have expressed similar
12 opinions and similar sentiments. Furthermore, I would say that the same
13 phenomenon applies to the other side, to people who are sympathetic to the
14 Bosnian Muslims, for instance. One of them, Ed Vulliamy was accepted as
15 an expert witness even though, in one of his interviews with the Bosnian
16 press, he openly referred to Serb civilians, all Serb civilians, as
17 Chetniks and in the context of Serb civilians leaving Sarajevo in the
18 winter of 1996 said it was the right and proper thing for them to go
19 because they condoned aggression. It is quite possible that in the study
20 of these emotionally-laden and extremely controversial issues, people take
21 strong opinions and sides and argue their cases both analytically and
22 polemically.
23 You have chosen to focus on some of my articles which are written
24 quite openly in the spirit of polemics, but at the same time I would
25 submit that in the polemical spirit, you will find many other prominent
Page 13807
1 analysts of that part of the world, such as Robert Fisk, such as
2 Christiane Amanpour, saying or asserting things that, from the distance of
3 four, five, six or seven years, they would prefer to have stated
4 differently and whose not only analysis but even more pertinently running
5 commentary on current events have not withstood the test of time.
6 For what it's worth, I will say that had I still retained my
7 jaundiced view of the proceedings in this Court that I held in the spring
8 of 1996, I would not have agreed to appear as expert witness, and that it
9 is exactly because I believe that with a change of both personnel and
10 modus operandi, it is, if not ideal, certainly the only available and
11 therefore the best show in town to ascertain who did what to whom in the
12 Balkans, how and why, that I am here today.
13 Q. Is the answer to my question, Dr. Trifkovic, no, you are not a
14 Serb nationalist?
15 A. Indeed it is.
16 Q. Who told you, Dr. Trifkovic, that Mr. Vulliamy was an expert
17 witness?
18 A. Reference to that was made in the article in one of the Bosnian
19 Muslim papers, which again I didn't regard it as significant. I didn't
20 bring it with me and I didn't mention it in the -- in the -- in my
21 analysis, but it was an interview I think prompted by the fact that he was
22 engaged as an expert witness.
23 Q. Who told you that he was engaged as an expert witness?
24 A. No one told me. I'm saying in the article, in which there is an
25 interview with Vulliamy, in one of the Bosnian Muslim papers, there is --
Page 13808
1 the reference is made to Vulliamy's testimony in The Hague.
2 Q. All right. Let me ask you this next, please: Did you read any of
3 the testimony that has been given in this case before writing your report,
4 or after?
5 A. The only testimony I did read was the military report -- sorry,
6 the testimony of the military witness Ewan Brown.
7 Q. And why did you read Mr. Brown's testimony?
8 A. It was given to me by Mr. Ostojic in late November. It was the
9 only bundle of -- it was the only actual piece of testimony that I was
10 given.
11 Q. So you weren't given the testimony of a Mr. Semenovic?
12 A. No. I was not given the testimony of Mr. Semenovic.
13 Q. Or any of the testimony of Dr. Donia?
14 A. No. I was only given the two written documents by Dr. Donia, the
15 short and the long one.
16 Q. So the short one that you described being Dr. Donia's report
17 headed, "Prijedor in the Bosnian Krajina, a background report"?
18 A. That's correct.
19 Q. And the long one that you have referred to is, "The Bosnian
20 Krajina in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina"?
21 A. That's correct.
22 Q. And in effect, your report is a response largely to his big
23 report; isn't that correct?
24 A. It may have started as a response to that and evolved into an
25 attempt to present a broad-picture context of the Prijedor events. In
Page 13809
1 other words, whereas the initial impetus was to write a response to
2 Donia's long report, in the end it evolved into an attempt to tell a story
3 by itself.
4 Q. Because when we look at your report, there is very little that is
5 actually concerned with Prijedor itself; isn't that right?
6 A. Well, I think everything is concerned with Prijedor itself because
7 I don't believe that anything that has taken place in Prijedor would have
8 taken place were it not for broader events taking place outside of
9 Prijedor.
10 Q. I understand that. You make that clear in your report. But the
11 actual consideration of events in Prijedor, by my count, amounts to some
12 four, seven, nine pages.
13 A. Yes. I think that is about right.
14 Q. As a matter of interest, did you ask why you were being given Ewan
15 Brown's report, which was a military analysis, rather than any other
16 documents?
17 A. Because the initial possibility that Mr. Ostojic had mentioned was
18 that I would also refer to the military aspects of the problem, but having
19 looked at the material, I concluded that in this area, I would indeed be
20 out of my depth and that I preferred not to deal with issues that would
21 fall outside my area of expertise and close personal knowledge.
22 Q. Yes, because you have no expertise, as I understand it, in
23 military history.
24 A. Oh, I do have a lot of expertise in military history, but not in
25 ongoing or very recent military history of Bosnia in 1991-2.
Page 13810
1 Q. I want to come to the report itself and some of the assertions
2 that you make. Before I do that, are you able to say which of the
3 documents, the newspaper articles and the books you saw before writing the
4 report and which only after? Do you have a list?
5 A. Excuse me?
6 Q. Do you have a list?
7 A. Of?
8 Q. The documents you saw before you wrote the report and those you
9 saw after the report had been delivered.
10 A. No, I don't. What you have in the footnotes of the report are
11 the documents that I've seen prior to delivering the report. We have to
12 assume, and I think it is correct to say, that whatever is not listed in
13 the footnotes has been given to me subsequent to the report's submission.
14 Q. All right. And were those footnotes written by you as well?
15 A. Of course.
16 Q. Well, then, can we look, please at the -- have you got your report
17 there in front of you? Dr. Trifkovic, do you have the report?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. You do, all right. Can we look, please, first of all, then, at
20 the second page? And it's a small point but I'd just like to ask you.
21 It's under the heading, "Eastern question and Europe," where you have a
22 footnote relating to your sentence that the unprecedented propagandistic
23 depiction of Turkey as tolerant and humane, and the myth lingers on even
24 today in some quarters," and you footnote there that such bias is notably
25 present in Noel Malcolm's, "Bosnia, a short history."
Page 13811
1 And It's right, isn't it, that you refer to him a number of
2 occasions, nearly always critically?
3 A. When it comes to the issue of the character of the Ottoman Empire,
4 I think that Noel Malcolm's overall treatment of the subject matter would
5 definitely fall into the category of apologetics.
6 Q. It's more the next sentence that I want to ask you about: "The
7 true record is nevertheless clear and it was aptly summarised in a British
8 diplomat's report from Turkey in 1909," and you quote. Which diplomat and
9 where do we find that?
10 A. Okay. It is the British consul general in Mosul, in today's
11 northern Iraq, and he referred specifically to the question posed by the
12 Foreign Office as to what was the effect of the young Turks' putative
13 reforms on the position of religious minorities on the ground.
14 Q. All right. Actually, the real question - I'm sorry, I phrased it
15 rather badly - is why didn't you footnote that when you wrote it?
16 A. I admit I should have done so. I assure you that the quote is
17 genuine and it is contained in a number of sources. It is the British
18 consul general in Mosul.
19 Q. All right. Can we go then, please, now, to page 7, which is
20 headed, "World War II bloodbath"? And in the third paragraph, you state,
21 "The technique of Ustasha killing was savage. A slit throat or a blow
22 with a heavy club in the back of the head was the most common method."
23 The first thing I want to know is why you felt it necessary to
24 describe this in your report?
25 A. Because the whole trauma of the Ustasha experience, both in
Page 13812
1 Prijedor itself and in the context of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole, must
2 not be underestimated when we try to understand the frame of mind and the
3 collective psychosis of the different ethnic groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina
4 at the outset of the conflict in 1991-92.
5 Q. Can I stop you there? I understand why you've included what
6 happened in the 1941 period onwards but why was it necessary to describe
7 in this sort of gory detail the method of killing?
8 A. Oh, by the way, the specific description of the savagery, and this
9 is again something that is only indirectly apparent from my references at
10 the bottom of the page, is that the Axis commanders on the ground were
11 making comments about this, and expressing shock and outrage. Italian
12 commanders, I could quote names, Ambrosio, in the case of the Germans,
13 Glaise von Horstenau, and his assistant, captain whose name now escapes
14 me, in other words, what I am doing here is not so much give my own
15 description out of the blue but putting things in the context, because
16 what happened in Prijedor on the night of August 3rd, 4th of 1941 is
17 something that has been commented upon by the German field commanders and
18 not only by the historians of the war on the Partizan side, i.e., on the
19 winning side, in -- after 1945.
20 Q. Can I ask -- as I understand it, you're saying that's why you
21 describe it as the most common method because two people described it?
22 A. No. The description is actually well established through
23 countless commissions that explored the mass graves all over the so-called
24 independent state of Croatia in the after math of 1945. In fact the
25 Ustashas made a public point of saying that they would not waste bullets
Page 13813
1 and the -- the aforementioned methods of killing, for instance, were amply
2 present in the entire area of the Jasenovac concentration camps which
3 again is a matter well established, well documented, and I didn't deem it
4 necessary to make particular reference to it because it's not even denied
5 by anyone of repute.
6 Q. All right. I will simply return to my original question: Why did
7 you feel it necessary to include in this report a description of how the
8 killings happened?
9 A. Because on the night of August 3rd, 4th of 1941, that was the
10 method of the killing used by the Ustasha Flying Gendarmerie in the city
11 of Prijedor. The consequences of that night of terror were commented upon
12 in, again, even more graphic detail than I did, by the Commission for the
13 Establishment of Crimes of Occupiers and their Collaborators of the
14 Peoples Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late 1940s, as well as by
15 the report of the Wehrmacht field commander who came to relieve the city
16 of Prijedor and who sent to Glaise von Horstenau in Zagreb a report
17 expressing his outrage at the savagery that he witnessed.
18 Q. All right. Can we move on, please? Page 8. At the bottom of
19 that page, you say this: "In fact, until 1945, more Bosnian Muslims
20 fought in German uniform notably in the 7th SS Hanjar Sword Division than
21 as partisans. What is your source of that assertion?
22 A. If you look at the numbers of members of the veterans --
23 Q. I want the source, please, I'm sorry, Dr. Trifkovic?
24 A. Yes, comparison between the numbers -- comparative analysis of the
25 membership of the Subnor, which is Association of Veterans Organisations
Page 13814
1 of People's Liberation Struggle, Savez Udruzenja Boraca Narodnoslo
2 bodilactcog rata, on the one hand, and the German documents concerning the
3 enrollment of Bosnian Muslim volunteers in three particular formations,
4 the Hanjar division, the Gendarmerie, which is not part of the SS but
5 which was established by the plenipotentiary of the Reichsfuhrer SS
6 Heinrich Himmler in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1943 and the auxiliary village
7 militia which was not part of the Ustasha militia, but was established by
8 the Germans as a parallel body to it. The tally for the former comes to
9 roughly 50.000 Bosnian Muslim veterans who have one way or another passed
10 through Partizan ranks, the tally for the latter comes closer to 70.000.
11 In fact according to one source I've seen it's 78.000. This is a very
12 recent book published in Israel that I obtained only a few weeks ago and
13 for which I will gladly provide reference.
14 Q. I just want to make sure I understand this. It's those who are
15 listed as members of the Veterans Association, which you named and I'm
16 familiar with, those numbers as opposed to the numbers shown in the German
17 records of the people that they -- and in these regiments?
18 A. That's correct.
19 Q. Did it ever occur to you that maybe some people didn't want to
20 join the Veterans Association?
21 A. Not at all, because in the aftermath of World War II, the
22 membership of the Veterans Association was the path to successful
23 professional careers, jobs, and social recognition. And in fact, if
24 anything, I believe that again on all sides of the ethnic divide, the
25 membership was somewhat inflated because, for a good many years, it was
Page 13815
1 only necessary to bring two witnesses to state that you had joined a
2 Partizan outfit in a village or a hamlet or that you had somehow assisted
3 the Partizans in their endeavours, and you were given recognition. This
4 was particularly rampant not in the immediate aftermath of the war but
5 later on in the 1950s, when it also suited the interests of the Titoist
6 regime to even post facto inflate the ranks of the Partizans and present
7 the movement as much more massive than it had actually been. So if
8 anything, I would say that the published figures give, if their erroneous,
9 they err on the size of the contingents.
10 Q. Finally this, on this matter, ever occur to you that dead men
11 can't join Veteran Associations either?
12 A. That is undoubtedly true. I think that the proportionate
13 proportionality applies in that in the same way you could say that losses
14 were incurred by the other side. What I would like to do, and this is
15 indeed a project that I don't think has been conducted so far, is a
16 comprehensive study of the actual losses in the former Yugoslavia during
17 World War II. What we have at the moment is a rather tentative set of
18 figures used by different sides for different purposes, but if we
19 extrapolate the number of losses and if we factor in the time when
20 different ethnic groups joined the Partizans en masse and in the case of
21 the Croats and the Muslims, the joining en masse occurred after the
22 collapse of Italy in September of 1943, I think that the factor of
23 distortion would be somewhere in the region of 7 to 10 per cent and not
24 such as to invalidate my general claim that the number of members of
25 German supplied or German-organised units exceeded the number of
Page 13816
1 volunteers joining Tito's Partizan units.
2 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: I think we have as soon as possible to conclude,
3 but it remains open, the question of admission into evidence the documents
4 S409 through 413, 413 would be the article "The Hague Tribunal, Bad
5 Justice, Worse Politics," were it wanted to go into some further details.
6 Any objections?
7 MR. LUKIC: Your Honour, we don't have objections except for the
8 last document and we think that it would be fair for Dr. Trifkovic to try
9 to clarify of how many documents this one is compiled.
10 MS. KORNER: Your Honour, I have no objection if Dr. Trifkovic is
11 able to get the two articles that I agree it would be preferable.
12 JUDGE SCHOMBURG: There were a number of questions open related to
13 this article. Therefore, admitted into evidence the documents S409 I
14 through S412 I. It would be for the defence to demonstrate tomorrow
15 whether or not, and then if so, in which part, they want to tender
16 provisional marked document D94 "The Sword of the Prophet" by Srdja
17 Trifkovic.
18 We have to continue tomorrow, 9.00, same courtroom, the same rules
19 apply as in the past. The trial stays adjourned until tomorrow at 9.00.
20 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at
21 1.52 p.m., to be reconvened on Wednesday,
22 the 19th day of March, 2003, at 9.00 a.m.
23
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