1 THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL CASE NO. IT-94-1-T

2 FOR THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

3 IN THE TRIAL CHAMBER

4 Friday, 7th June 1996

5 (10.00 a.m.)

6 MR. EDWARD VULLIAMY, recalled

7 Examined by MR. KEEGAN, continued.

8 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Mr. Keegan, would you continue with Mr. Vulliamy,

9 please?

10 MR. KEEGAN: Yes, your Honour, thank you.

11 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Before we begin with Mr. Vulliamy, Mr. Niemann, we

12 have received the motion that you filed yesterday afternoon.

13 MR. NIEMANN: Yes, your Honour.

14 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Has the Defence received a copy of that?

15 MR. WLADIMIROFF: Yes, your Honour.

16 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: That needs to be discussed in closed session today.

17 MR. NIEMANN: Yes.

18 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: So we will at the appropriate time, after we have

19 concluded Mr. Vulliamy, discuss that in closed session. The motion

20 that you filed regarding -- have a seat, Mr. Vulliamy ---

21 MR. NIEMANN: The extension of time.

22 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: -- extension of time, we can also talk about, even

23 though we had given the Defence 14 days to respond to that. The

24 delayed transmission equipment is not fully installed, but I am told

25 that it will be installed fully by Tuesday. I was told that you think

1 that we will continue through today or most of the day with Mr.

2 Vulliamy.

3 MR. NIEMANN: We think so, your Honour. We may have some time this

4 afternoon to do those matters though.

5 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: I had suggested through Miss Featherstone that the

6 Prosecution proceed with the next witness and just be very careful

7 with the witness, but you rejected that suggestion, I understand.

8 MR. NIEMANN: Your Honours, we do not have a witness here, unfortunately,

9 at the moment. We have moved a little faster than we expected. We

10 had tried to put something in place last night, but it was not

11 thought possible to bring the witness forward anyway, but we

12 do not anticipate -----

13 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Why do you not have the next witness here?

14 MR. NIEMANN: Your Honours, we have moved forward at a much faster rate

15 than we expected.

16 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Mr. Niemann, you are responsible for having your

17 witnesses here and available to present them. If they have to wait

18 longer than what is expected, that is unfortunate. I am certainly

19 very concerned for their inconvenience, but our convenience as a

20 Tribunal is more important. So have your witnesses here and

21 available, because we are spending a lot of time. That is absolutely

22 no excuse. Do you understand?

23 MR. NIEMANN: Hopefully, your Honours, it will not be a problem, because

24 this witness -----

25 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Not "hopefully", there will not be a problem any

1 more. You have your witnesses here and ready to present them.

2 MR. NIEMANN: I certainly will.

3 THE PRESIDING JUDGE (To the witness): Mr. Vulliamy, you understand you

4 are still under oath?

5 THE WITNESS: Yes, I do indeed.

6 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Very good.

7 MR. KEEGAN: Mr. Vulliamy, when we closed yesterday, you had been

8 describing your experiences as you accompanied that convoy of Bosnian

9 Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Sanski Most. You left off at that

10 point where you were greeted by a soldier from the army of the

11 Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina who said that he had buses waiting. Can

12 you describe the impact on the members of that group from Sanski Most

13 when that soldier greeted them?

14 A. Yes, well, we were at the end of -- they were at the end of eleven

15 hours of being herded through a gauntlet and three hours walking

16 through a battle and two hours walking over a mountain, and here was

17 this man talking about buses.

18 Some of the older people cried -- I think they felt their journey

19 was over -- with sort of relief and confusion; some were too dazed

20 really to know what was going on. I recall some old women going up

21 and touching the insignia on the side of his arm, as though it was a

22 sort of talisman, just a symbol of their safety, I suppose. Yes, they

23 thought they were safe and they were glad to be alive. It had been

24 quite a day, that had begun for them, as they said, with them being

25 pulled out of their homes that very morning; it was now about some 18

1 hours or so later.

2 Q. Can you then describe your impressions as you entered Travnik, the

3 town of Travnik, on those buses?

4 A. It was now 3.00 in the morning. The places on the buses were

5 allocated for the women and the children and the elderly, others

6 walked, and the large group of 1600 people were split up and organised

7 and taken to -- and this was quite a shock -- any public building,

8 schools, gymnasium or sports halls, whatever, where spaces were found

9 on the floor for them in places that were already teeming with people,

10 other people; and it did not take long to ascertain that all these

11 people had come also from the same Prijedor/Banja Luka region and had

12 come down the same road as us, many, many thousand -- we later

13 established how many. But what was happening at that point was that

14 people were trying to find a space of floor to camp down on and to

15 unpack that which they had been able to manage with them on foot in

16 the dead of the night.

17 Q. The following day, did you have an opportunity to speak to the people

18 from the convoy about what had occurred to them in Sanski Most?

19 A. Yes, we did, both that night before we went to -- we ourselves were

20 billeted in a room full of wounded soldiers actually -- and the

21 following day. Both people from our convoy whom we had known and

22 recognised and other people who had been on that same road which, as

23 you can understand, there was quite a sort of bond by this point.

24 They talked about how and why they had been forced to leave. I

25 remember one doctor, in particular, talking about how he felt guilty

1 because his wife and two female friends had been in a front room

2 through which and into which a grenade had been thrown from the

3 street. He had been in the bathroom at the back and survived and

4 been obliged to leave. Others said that men had come to their houses

5 and they had been told they had 24 hours to get out or they would be

6 killed; that sort of story and variations on that theme continued

7 throughout the day and, indeed, throughout the next three years.

8 Q. Did you also have the opportunity to speak to other people in the town

9 who had come from other areas?

10 A. Yes, these were the people from Sanski Most. They were the ones with

11 whom we had travelled. But, yes, they had come from all over the

12 Bosnian Krajina area, Prijedor, Banja Luka area, most notably from the

13 town of Kozarac and from Prijedor itself, from other villages around

14 Banja Luka, a town called Klucj, in particular, that whole area. This

15 was the -- this was unknown to the outside world at that time -- as it

16 were, the dumping ground, this town, Travnik, was the dumping ground.

17 Q. Did those individuals from these other areas relate similar stories to

18 those that you heard from the people of Sanski Most?

19 A. Yes, if can put it this way, each story was different, but each story

20 was the same; violence, intimidation, deportation and they were almost

21 perversely, because of the sort of place they were now in, quite

22 relieved to be there.

23 Q. Had they all been forcibly transported down that same road, turned

24 over to the local paramilitaries at the border and then forced across,

25 as your group had been?

1 A. The pattern was almost identical, yes. The police had escorted them.

2 We all talked about this place called Smet (which I mentioned

3 yesterday) at which the cars were taken, yes, every time. Then they

4 had walked across this No Man's Land over the same rocks, through the

5 same battle field; the only difference was that some had gone straight

6 along the road if there was no fighting that night, others, if there

7 had been fighting, had gone over the mountain like us. But the story

8 was more or less the same throughout, yes.

9 Q. At that time did you get any estimate as to how many refugees were in

10 the town of Travnik?

11 A. The following day, we were told that there were 36,000 definitely and

12 then others that they maybe had not been able to account for who had

13 not registered. 50,000 was the top figure we heard by then, and this

14 is the end of August 1992.

15 Q. How long did you stay in Travnik on that occasion?

16 A. On that occasion only until the following day. One had one's

17 professional duties to perform, and our priority was to get to a

18 telephone rather quickly, as you might understand, and that nearest

19 telephone was at Split. So we arranged for transport to take us down

20 to the Croatian coast where we could communicate what we had seen.

21 Q. Was your experience with this convoy from Sanski Most the first

22 reported instance of someone accompanying one of these convoys of

23 forcibly displaced people?

24 A. Yes, it was. It was the first and, as far as I know, the only time

25 that people had -- that people from the outside had accompanied such a

1 convoy all the way, as it were, from the inside, rather than greet

2 such convoys as they came through the crossing points which was quite

3 common. But, yes, I think we were the first -- I know we were the

4 first and I think the only to actually accompany such a convoy all the

5 way through the gauntlet, as it were.

6 Q. Subsequent to your experience, did the ICRC issue a document which

7 described similar accounts of treatment of non-Serbs from the Banja

8 Luka area and their forcible transfer over the same route to Travnik

9 as you had experienced?

10 A. Yes, I believe the International Committee of the Red Cross did then

11 verify our findings in a report of their own. There is a document, I

12 think, which says, talks about the difficulties people were having in

13 the Banja Luka region, and talks about them coming over the mountains,

14 along the road into this town of Travnik, about the difficulties in

15 the town in (inaudible).

16 MR. KEEGAN: If I could ask that this document be marked as the next

17 Prosecution Exhibit which will be 182 and then shown to the witness,

18 please? (To the witness): Mr. Vulliamy, do you recognise that

19 document?

20 A. Yes, I do.

21 Q. Is that the document to which you just referred?

22 A. Yes, it is.

23 MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, I would tender that document.

24 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection?

25 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No objection, your Honour.

1 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Exhibit 182 will be admitted.

2 MR. KEEGAN (To the witness): During this same period of time that we are

3 speaking of, were there statements being made by Serb officials in the

4 Banja Luka region and by the Serb media which reinforced the

5 impression of the people you spoke to that this was a dangerous and

6 organised activity and would continue?

7 A. Yes, indeed. There were statements being made by the leaders of all

8 the communities and in all their mass media, including those of the,

9 as it were, engineers of this, as it appeared to us, that this was a

10 campaign, that it was organised and it was intended.

11 Q. Are there any of those particular statements which stand out in your

12 mind?

13 A. Yes, there was a leader article in a Belgrade magazine called Epoka

14 which was photocopied for me by my translator earlier on in Belgrade,

15 which said that if Muslims did not fly white flags or white sheets, or

16 whatever, from the minarets of their mosques, then those villages

17 would be erased. This was translated for me; and, indeed, when

18 working in the Prijedor area during this summer we did see a lot of

19 these white flags, sheets, pillow cases, hanging from minarets, trees

20 sometimes, or windows or washing lines or whatever.

21 The other thing I recall was -- this was a colleague of mine who

22 worked for the same newspaper called Ian Trainer, did some work with

23 an office in Banja Luka that was organising, as they put it,

24 transportations. This was being run, among others, by a man called

25 Vukic who was a member of the Serbian Democratic Party, a senior

1 member. He was telling my colleague that he hoped to get rid of

2 20,000 Muslims in a given period of time and get them to Zenica, which

3 was a Muslim held town, if possible. My colleague talked to other

4 people in that office, published an article about that episode in

5 which people had said that, well, if this was difficult and these --

6 they were hoping to get some Serbs back from Zenica in exchange -- if

7 this was difficult, they would make life so difficult for the Muslims

8 that they would want to go anyway.

9 Q. Later on in 1992, in October, was a statement released by the UNHCR

10 from Banja Luka which indicated that, in fact, that was the case, that

11 the Muslims were so desperate to leave that the UNHCR felt compelled

12 to assist?

13 A. Yes, I recall that coming out, yes.

14 MR. KEEGAN: If I could have this document marked next, please? It will

15 be No. 183. (To the witness): Mr. Vulliamy, do you recognise that

16 article?

17 A. Yes, I remember it -- I remember this statement coming from the UNHCR,

18 from their headquarters, talking about the last stages of ethnic

19 cleansing and "horrible things", and also confirming the systematic

20 nature, in the eyes of this organisation who had people in Banja Luka,

21 that was being carried out with, as they called it, "enormous

22 repression".

23 MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, I would tender Prosecution 183.

24 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection?

25 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No objection, your Honour.

1 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Exhibit 183 will be admitted.

2 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Mr. Keegan, could you have that put on the elmo?

3 MR. KEEGAN: Certainly, your Honour.

4 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Or is it a very long article?

5 MR. KEEGAN: No, your Honour, it is just the one page. If you could place

6 it on the elmo?

7 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Can you arrange it so that we can see the top?

8 MR. KEEGAN (To the witness): This is the article to which we were just

9 referring, Prosecution Exhibit 183, Mr. Vulliamy?

10 A. Yes, that is the one.

11 Q. As it indicates, it was issued on 9 October 1992 by the UNHCR.

12 A. Yes, I recall them releasing it. I think we wrote articles recording

13 its release.

14 MR. KEEGAN: Is that sufficient, your Honour?

15 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Yes.

16 MR. KEEGAN (To the witness): Mr. Vulliamy, did you return to Travnik soon

17 after your first trip?

18 A. Yes, I did. I went back some three-and-a-half weeks later and, in

19 fact, on and off made the town my sort of base camp for the ensuing

20 year, but that return visit was an interesting one.

21 Q. What were the main impressions or events that you recall from that

22 return visit?

23 A. Well, the first thing was that the numbers of these refugees or

24 deportees, whatever we want to call them, had increased yet more and

25 immeasurably so. People were talking about, I think, 76,000 to 80,000

1 refugees now in the town. People were now having to sleep out in the

2 open as well in these packed buildings; and the situation was very

3 difficult within those buildings in terms of sanitation and so on. So

4 the place was chocabloc with refugees. They had all come down that

5 same road, all in the manner I have just described, and with one

6 exception which was the second discovery of that return visit.

7 There was talk in the town of a massacre of one of these convoys of

8 people on August 21st 1992. That was four days after we had made that

9 journey. So it was pretty resonant and one was grateful, perhaps,

10 that it had happened that night and not our night. But on that same

11 road and in a place I recalled (and still recall vividly) we were

12 hearing reports that 200 to 250 men had been taken off the buses and

13 out of their cars if they had been driving them to the edge of a

14 ravine and executed.

15 I remember the ravine well, and this was in the early stages -- it

16 was only a few days after that I was back in Travnik -- the early

17 stages of investigating and reporting this. I sought witnesses; there

18 were none in town, but I did later speak to somebody who had been a

19 survivor of that in another town -- this is a long time later -- and I

20 think some video tapes were made. But that was the second discovery,

21 that this massacre had taken, that these attacks on the convoys of

22 which we had seen, as I tried to explain yesterday, remnants

23 literally, human remnants, of such attacks had culminated or grown

24 into a specific massacre of large numbers of people. That was the

25 second thing -- important discovery on the return visit.

1 The third was a conversation I had with a man who described his

2 detention along with about 100 other Muslims in a very small village

3 outside the town of Donji Vakuf which is near Travnik but on Serbian

4 held territory.

5 Q. By the time you had that conversation with that man about that camp in

6 Donji Vakuf, you had already experienced first-hand, camps in

7 Bosnia-Herzegovina, had you not?

8 A. Yes, indeed.

9 Q. Were you among one of a group of three of the first journalists

10 allowed into the camps at Omarska and Trnopolje?

11 A. Yes, I was. I had been one of those three reporters who had gone

12 into Omarska and to Trnopolje camps earlier in the summer, yes.

13 Q. What struck you as so telling about this small camp in Donji Vakuf

14 that was related to you by this gentleman?

15 A. Well, the camps that we had uncovered in the Prijedor region, Omarska

16 and Trnopolje, were fairly large camps, but what this man was talking

17 about was a little shed in which 100 men had been detained. He

18 described how some of them had been murdered, beaten to death, and he

19 described what the Commander of this little camp said to him which

20 was, with a smile, I remember him saying: "The journalists have found

21 the big camps up near Prijedor, but they will never find you down

22 here".

23 This man was later exchanged and got to Travnik, but had no idea

24 what had happened to -- sorry, along with 19 others, but had no idea

25 what had happened to the other 80 whom he had not seen again. I

1 thought, well, that is just a shed, that is just 80 people, but then

2 it dawned on me that, well, that is one shed, what about other sheds

3 that potentially, although we had been able to identify big camps up

4 in the Prijedor region, specifically Omarska and Trnopolje, and others

5 had emerged subsequently, these were, had been, I mean, the keepers of

6 these camps, if that is the right word, had been unable to hide these

7 from us any longer, but goodness knows how many other little places

8 there were. What this man was describing was the potential for sheds,

9 barns, back yards, in any village, in any country village, being used

10 to detain and to, in this case anyway, murder people and beat them.

11 So, one got this impression of a sort of a network of detention that

12 we really were not going to be able to get a grasp of, simply because

13 this place that he had described was so isolated.

14 Q. Did you continue to witness similar instances of forced displacement,

15 ethnic cleansing, if you will, throughout the conflict right up

16 through 1995?

17 A. Yes, at first hand all over Bosnia-Herzegovina, in circumstances that

18 differed according to region, but the net result was always the same.

19 MR. KEEGAN: If we could have Exhibit 181 returned to the witness, please?

20 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: May I ask you just one question while that is being

21 given to you, 181? The article in 183, Mr. Vulliamy, says that there

22 were people who were desperate to leave. If someone were reading that

23 article, could someone reasonably conclude that "desperate to leave"

24 means that they voluntarily wished to leave this area because there

25 has been a change in leadership and they wished to go elsewhere?

1 A. Yes, I suppose the other language used in that article and, more

2 importantly, what I saw from my own experience was that, as you

3 rightly say, the change in leadership was one that was creating

4 circumstances that made them desperate to leave. I mean, they did not

5 appear to be desperate to leave because they did not approve of the

6 views expressed by that new leadership. I mean, everything that I saw

7 with my own eyes and in all the conversations I had suggested that it

8 was not, you know, like a change of government in my country; that

9 this was a change of leadership which, you know, after which had

10 followed a campaign of violence against these people and that it was

11 that that was making them desperate to leave. It was fear of violence

12 and gunfire and grenades that was making them desperate to leave, not

13 just the fact of a change of leadership.

14 Q. What was the ethnicity of the person who ran this camp that you

15 referred to as a "shed"?

16 A. Serbian.

17 Q. What was the ethnicity of the people who, you understand, were

18 detained there?

19 A. The man I spoke to was a Muslim, and he said that the other people in

20 the camp had also been Muslims.

21 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: 181 now?

22 MR. KEEGAN: Yes. (To the witness): If you could place the map on the

23 elmo, Mr. Vulliamy, and if you could first simply point out various

24 places in which you witnessed the ethnic cleansing and then we will go

25 back and describe those instances.

1 A. Sorry, can I just, your Honours, a point of clarification the answer

2 to that last question, "Bosnian-Serb" would be the correct answer, not

3 "Serbian". When you say, who ran the shed, it is Bosnian-Serb. I am

4 sorry right. Where are we? Sorry.

5 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Thank you.

6 MR. KEEGAN: So if you could just point out the various locations

7 beginning in 1992 and up through 1995 where you subsequently witnessed

8 similar instances to those that you have just described?

9 A. Well, my first witness to ethnic cleansing was in an area of a town

10 called Loznica which is right here. Loznica itself is in the east of

11 Serbia close to the border with Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the people in

12 a camp were, a transit place that I went to in Loznica, had come from

13 this area just inside Bosnia-Herzegovina having been threatened and

14 taken there by soldiers.

15 Q. What was the date of that?

16 A. I was there on August 2nd 1992.

17 Q. The next instance, its location?

18 A. Well, after that, well, in Travnik after the episodes I have just been

19 describing, there was a dramatic exodus of people, Muslims and Croats,

20 following the fall of a town called Jajce, here in central Bosnia.

21 This town fell and some 50,000 people fled over these mountains here

22 into Turbe and Travnik. That was a massive, a massive movement of

23 people under fire.

24 Q. From there, where did you go next?

25 A. I worked at various points in 1992 and 1993 in what was then called

1 the Bihac pocket, which is this area here which was held by the

2 Bosnian government, and surrounded -- this area, although it is

3 Croatia, was held by the Croatian Serbs, and this here was held by the

4 Bosnian-Serbs, so it was surrounded completely. Bihac was the main

5 town in that pocket. I spent a great deal of time there, and also at

6 a particularly terrifying place called Bosanska Krupa right here on

7 the river which was the border, if you like, between the government

8 held and the Serbian held territory.

9 Q. From Bosanska Krupa in the Bihac pocket where did you go next?

10 A. During the second half -- sorry, 1993, the spring of 1993, was

11 dominated by the fall or the partial fall of the town of Srebrenica.

12 Here it is. This was not to be confused with the final fall of

13 Srebrenica in 1995. This was, as it were, Srebrenica take one, and

14 people fled from there up to Kladanj here and thence to Tuzla where I

15 was based for a short time, with people flooding into that place.

16 Q. In the second half of 1993?

17 A. In the second half of 1993, the theme changes somewhat. The most

18 ferocious ethnic cleansing, as we were by then calling it -- forgive

19 the shorthand but that was the word we used -- was not being

20 perpetrated by the Bosnian-Serbs but by the Bosnian-Croats, and it was

21 happening in the area of Herzegovina. This is the Croatian,

22 predominantly Croatian bit of the country down here, and the

23 expulsions were mainly of Muslims from the towns like Capljina,

24 Ljubuski, Citluk, and culminating in the siege of Mostar, the Muslim

25 bit of Mostar there. There were also, by the way, camps but we might

1 like to, sort of, talk about that later.

2 Q. From there what were the next two significant instances that you

3 observed and witnessed?

4 A. When I returned in 1995, we had the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa in the

5 summer of that year. I was there, in particular, for the fall of

6 Zepa, the second of those two, and people were once again coming

7 across here to Kakanji, and thence to Zenica where I was based at the

8 time. There it is there in central Bosnia.

9 There was a sort of final episode in 1995 which took one rather

10 symbolically and depressingly back to square one, spending time here

11 in Travnik and Turbe once again, people were still coming through from

12 the Prijedor region three years later, again down the same road as I

13 had travelled three years before; so it is right through.

14 Q. What I would like to do now is take you back to each of those

15 instances and discuss them; the first being Loznica which you have

16 pointed out on the map. For this examination, we will need the video

17 tape, the first segment of the video.

18 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is this an exhibit that is in evidence?

19 MR. KEEGAN: Not yet, your Honour. It would be Exhibit 184. If we could

20 run the very first segment, please? If you could stop it there,

21 please. Sorry, you need to back up just slightly to that initial

22 building. Thank you.

23 (To the witness): Mr. Vulliamy, do you recognise that building?

24 A. Yes, I do.

25 Q. What is that, please?

1 A. It is the sports hall of a school complex in Loznica which I

2 identified earlier in the eastern part of Serbia.

3 Q. When approximately were you at that school?

4 A. I was there on August 2nd 1992.

5 Q. If we could run to the next segment, please, and stop. I realise that

6 it is a rather difficult shot but, as the tape plays, I think it will

7 become clearer. What was this perspective of? What was the camera

8 looking at here?

9 A. What is happening here is that these are the roofs in front of us of

10 the buildings next to the school which was being used as a transit

11 camp, it was full of people, and what we are looking at is the village

12 from which they had come. It is a hillside, that sort of blue,

13 turquoise bit is a hillside, and that is within Bosnia-Herzegovina

14 because we are so close to the border. We are looking at the village

15 that the people encamped in the school, had been sent away from, from

16 where they had lived, it is called Sepak. It was so close that they

17 could see it from the place in which they were encamped.

18 Q. What was the ethnic background of those people who came from that

19 village which you spoke to?

20 A. They were all Muslim.

21 Q. Who were the people who were running the camp?

22 A. It was the police of the Republic of Serbia proper rather than

23 Bosnian-Serbs dressed in blue uniforms. This place was in Serbia.

24 Q. If we could continue running the video and with the audio. Your

25 Honours, it appears that the best audio actually comes by wearing the

1 headphones.

2 (Extract of video tape was played)

3 If you could stop the video there, please? This gentleman, Mr. Vulliamy,

4 is this one of the individuals who were interviewed by the group of

5 reporters that went to Loznica that day?

6 A. Yes, it is. I should say that this material was shot by the ITN crew

7 with whom I was in Belgrade. They had gone down there the previous

8 day, on August 1st.

9 Q. The woman talking to this man, that would be Penny Marshal, one of the

10 reporters who was with you on that trip?

11 A. That is my colleague, Penny Marshal of ITN, yes.

12 Q. The man mentioned the village of Subotica. They were supposed to be

13 taken to the village of Subotica. Where is Subotica?

14 A. Subotica is right up in the north of Serbia close to the Hungarian

15 border.

16 Q. Was that story repeated to you with the individuals whom you

17 interviewed?

18 A. Oh, yes, absolutely, they were all told the same thing. They were

19 told that they were going to go -- they said they had been told they

20 were going to go to Subotica and thence to Germany or Austria. That

21 was just the same, if I may say so, as the people from Sanski Most had

22 been told on the convoy that I was on, that, you know, "the papers

23 are in order, you are going to Germany or Austria". That is what

24 everybody I spoke to here as well had been told.

25 Q. The following description which this man gives of what occurred and

1 his impression of it, is it consistent with the interviews, all of

2 interviews, which were conducted in Loznica?

3 A. Yes, indeed, yes absolutely.

4 Q. If we could play the rest of that tape with the audio?

5 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection to Exhibit 184?

6 MR. KEEGAN: I was going to tender it at the end at the

7 end ---

8 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: After we have seen it all?

9 MR. KEEGAN: -- of this segment, yes.

10 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: OK, very good.

11 (The video tape was played)

12 Thank you. If you could stop it there? I would tender that segment

13 of the tape, your Honour, at this time.

14 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No objection, your Honour.

15 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: 184 will be admitted.

16 MR. KEEGAN (To the witness): Mr. Vulliamy, did you yourself go over to the

17 village of Zepa in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

18 A. Yes, I did. I interviewed an older man who could also see his house

19 from the camp. He tried to point it out to me. In fact, he issued

20 the same sort of challenge as that young man. He said: "You can go

21 to my house, I cannot". So I said: "Well, OK, I will".

22 Q. Did you, in fact, go over there?

23 A. Yes, I did.

24 Q. How did you get over to the village of Zepa?

25 A. Very easily. My translator and guide said that we take the car down

1 to a small bridge, there is a crossing over the river which was also

2 the border between Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He said it would be

3 less trouble to park the car and walk across, and we did. Nobody

4 asked to see anything; we just walked across.

5 Q. When you crossed the border, were you required to show any sort of

6 identification at all?

7 A. None at all, no, just walked across it.

8 Q. Was anyone being stopped and asked for identification?

9 A. Not that I could see, no. Most of the traffic in both directions was

10 military and they were not being asked to show any ID.

11 Q. When you say "military", can you describe type of uniforms that they

12 were wearing?

13 A. Most of them were in the uniforms of the JNA, the Yugoslav People's

14 Army.

15 Q. How could you recognise that?

16 A. Well, I knew it well from the war in Croatia, from -- well, indeed,

17 from day, previous day. I mean, it was a familiar uniform to me by

18 then.

19 Q. What insignia did they have on their uniform?

20 A. Some of them were still wearing the old red star from the communist

21 era, one or two, on the front of their helmets, if they had helmets,

22 or on other parts of their uniform. Some had no insignia and some had

23 the emerging insignia of the new Serbia, if you like, the post

24 Yugoslav Serbia, which was an eagle, a two headed eagle.

25 Q. What type of activity was going on along and across that border?

1 A. Well, as I said, the majority of the traffic in both directions was

2 military, although there were some civilians going to and from as

3 well. Loznica was a largely militarized town at that point. I

4 described yesterday the atmosphere in the towns of Sid and Bogojevo in

5 Eastern Serbia near the Croatian border, and here we had something

6 fairly similar in Loznica. There were a lot of trucks, soldiers

7 hanging around the cafes, yards with military vehicles parked and just

8 military traffic coming and going, some soldiers on foot, others in

9 private cars, others in mini buses.

10 Q. Did you see transport of military equipment and men going across the

11 border from the Republic of Serbia into Bosnia-Herzegovina?

12 A. Yes, on that occasion I did not see any heavy tanks or anything but,

13 yes, there were small amoured vehicles were travelling to and fro,

14 yes, and mostly from the Serbian side into the Bosnian side.

15 Q. Did you talk to any of the soldiers about what they were doing in that

16 area, what the purposes of this movement of military personnel and

17 equipment were for?

18 A. Very anecdotally. I did not want to draw attention to myself. I did

19 not feel particularly safe, despite the ease with which we had crossed

20 border. So it was fairly sort of jovial, you know: "How long have

21 you been here?" They would say: "Oh, a few days". "Everything OK?"

22 "Yes, it is quiet here now"; that sort of banter. I did not have any

23 in-depth conversations with them. I did not particularly want to draw

24 attention to myself on that occasion.

25 Q. Was it clear to you who was in control of that region?

1 A. Very clear indeed, the Yugoslav People's Army, the soldiers.

2 Q. Did all of these soldiers, regardless of the insignia which they wore

3 at the time, appear to you to act as one unit?

4 A. Yes, I mean, there was no reason to believe that they were not. They

5 were - some of them were, sort of, casually patrolling, others were

6 attaching flags to the lampposts in the village of Sepak which we

7 eventually reached, yes.

8 Q. In the areas where the equipment was stored and the men were billeted,

9 were individuals with all of the various types of insignia working

10 together without distinction?

11 A. Yes, I mean, the men, as far as I could gather, were billeted and the

12 operation was, sort of, based in Loznica on the Serbian side, I mean,

13 all the -- I was not there long, but it was long enough to realise

14 that all the, as it were, vehicle maintenance, that sort of thing -- I

15 am sorry to be so vernacular about it, but, you know, the drink in the

16 evening, that was all happening in Loznica over on the Serbian side.

17 Sepak was just a tiny village, so I do not think there were many

18 soldiers staying there.

19 Q. Who was guarding the actual camp in Loznica?

20 A. The Serbian police.

21 Q. Were they wearing the regular police uniform?

22 A. Yes, they were wearing blue uniforms.

23 Q. Who did the people that you interviewed in the camp tell you had

24 brought them to the camp?

25 A. Soldiers from -- actually, they were not particularly clear where they

1 were from. I mean, they just talked about "the army", "the soldiers"

2 had arrived. Once I got into the village, we could see there had been

3 some fire straight across some of the houses, but they just talked

4 about "soldiers", "the army", "the military".

5 Q. You did, in fact, make it to the village of Sepak yourself?

6 A. Yes, I did.

7 Q. Did you find that old man's house?

8 A. I am pretty sure I did, yes. His description matched roughly what I

9 found, yes.

10 Q. Was there anyone living in the house?

11 A. Yes, there was.

12 Q. Who was that?

13 A. It was a Bosnian-Serb family from the Sarajevo suburbs, a suburb

14 called Gobavica, who said that their house had been on the front line

15 there and had been destroyed and they had been relocated to Sepak.

16 Q. Did they have any comments for the former owner of the house which

17 they asked you to relate?

18 A. They did not seem that concerned. When I talked to the former owner

19 of the house, he had asked a fellow -- if I could just in parenthesis

20 here for the sake of clarity -- in the Loznica camp, or the transit

21 camp, there was a part for Muslims and another part for Serbs. The

22 Serbs had beds, I would hasten to add, and the Muslims did not.

23 There were Serbian refugees around as well at that time. They were

24 putting some of them up in this place too.

25 Anyway, this gentleman had asked one of the Serbs, as it were, on

1 the other side of the camp to telephone his house to see if there was

2 anybody there. He had done so, there was and, if you will forgive an

3 anecdote, the message to him was, could he please call back some time

4 and tell him how the washing machine worked. So I knew that there was

5 somebody there already. It was a Serbian family from Sarajevo.

6 They did not seem to care much about the people who had left,

7 although they, sort of, said: "Well, it is a pity, it is a shame",

8 but they said: "It is not a crime or it is not theft of any kind

9 because our house was blown up by Muslim guns in Sarajevo, so we have

10 a Muslim house in return". They were fairly unperturbed and they

11 liked the DIY that he had done.

12 Q. After you left Loznica, was that the trip from where you then went on

13 to Omarska and Trnopolje?

14 A. Yes, this is the same, as it were, chapter. We were at Omarska within

15 a couple of days of that.

16 Q. The next aspect of the ethnic cleansing, as you referred to it, that

17 you experienced, you said, was Jajce in the fall of 1992. Could you

18 describe what you witnessed in Jajce and when that was?

19 A. Yes, this is in the period between September and October 1992. Jajce

20 was a small town and a tourist attraction just to the north west of

21 Travnik. It was held by the Muslim Croat alliance, as it then was,

22 and attached to Travnik by a sort of umbilical cord, a corridor,

23 through which you could get up to Jajce. I tried several times to do

24 that, but each time was beaten back by gunfire across this corridor

25 which was only about 500 metres wide, so I never actually got up to

1 Jajce but got pretty close, and that corridor was littered with

2 vehicles that had been shot off the road, some ambulances and so on.

3 Q. Can you indicate on the map exactly where you get to?

4 A. There is Jajce. At present on this map which is current under Muslim

5 Croat Federation authority, but then the line was sort of here like

6 that at the time, but there was, as I say, this fairly remarkable sort

7 of cord attaching Jajce which was out on a promontory, as it were,

8 from the Federation territory down here.

9 So you would work your way up this corridor at night, of course,

10 only, and this is where all the shooting and the wrecked vehicles

11 were.

12 Q. So you were somewhere in that corridor?

13 A. Yes, we would go up there, we would stay the night, maybe come back

14 before daylight, and the town eventually fell under what was reported

15 to be particularly ferocious bombardment and the people who were

16 defending it unable to do so any longer.

17 The evacuation was ordered, and we met that evacuation fairly --

18 about midway between Travnik and Jajce. They started at a place

19 called Karaula halfway up the corridor and it was a remarkable sight.

20 There were in all some (we later counted) 50,000 people making their

21 way along the tracks, and they had with them their animals sometimes,

22 herds of sheep; there were a large number of horse drawn carts,

23 cattle, again old people, children, everybody.

24 They were under fire as they moved towards the relative safety of

25 Travnik. I can remember in the afternoon heat suddenly from -- I

1 mean, we were in, I suppose, theoretically safe territory towards, you

2 know, the place where these people were heading, and a shot rang out

3 from nowhere, and the next thing you knew there was somebody on a cart

4 who had been shot in the arm, a fairly old man; and there were people

5 being transported in wheel barrows and so on.

6 By this time there must have been 90,000 or more people in Travnik

7 and in the surrounding villages which were now being used to billet

8 refugees, add another 50,000 and that was quite a sight. That late

9 afternoon, that night, I can remember every piece of ground in the

10 town, people were encamped with animals, broilers, defeated army. I

11 wrote at the time -- forgive me, sort of, using such language, it

12 looked look like something out of Tolstoi, frankly, this scene of

13 smoke and animals and complete and utter chaos.

14 Later that night it began to rain very hard and we, some of us,

15 joined in trying to find people somewhere to go. The UNHCR had a

16 couple of people down there -- very few. The Red Cross, I think, were

17 coming on, and people were trying to find places to shelter.

18 Then the shells started coming in from what was now a new front line

19 because, the corridor having fallen, the guns had moved up just that

20 day or, at least, mortars had been moved up. I can remember the day

21 ending with this almost, sort of, adding insult to injury, they

22 started shelling the places where the refugees were encamped on the

23 streets of this town. Some were injured. I can remember people were

24 just running from this shell fire which lasted for about 20 minutes.

25 Q. Did the people that were coming out of Jajce describe what had

1 happened in those final days in the town?

2 A. Yes, they had described living mostly underground during the last

3 days. They said that when food supplies had reached them up the

4 corridor, they had gone out to queue for them and the queues for the

5 food had been attacked. They said that there was no way they could

6 stay there any longer. The soldiers were saying that the defence of

7 the town was unsustainable.

8 Most memorably, people were just talking about watching their house

9 hit, or one man said he saw his house on fire as he left. People were

10 talking about scrambling up muddy banks. They were talking about the

11 retreat from the town under fire. One man talked about seeing

12 somebody shot in the head right in front of him as he had retreated.

13 There it was a comfortless, a comfortless story.

14 Q. Subsequent to your trip in October, did the ICRC issue a release about

15 this very operation the following day?

16 A. Yes, I remember they arrived in Travnik and I can remember their

17 account of the events.

18 MR. KEEGAN: If could I have this document marked as the next Prosecution

19 Exhibit No. 185 and then shown to the witness, please? (Exhibit 185

20 was handed to the witness) (To the witness): Mr. Vulliamy, do you

21 recognise that document?

22 A. Yes. This is the press release they put out , in fact, during the

23 fall of the town. It was after the first couple of days with more

24 people still on the road for whom we were waiting on these newly

25 established front lines, much closer to the town of Travnik itself.

1 Q. If you could place that on the elmo, please, for the court?

2 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection to 185?

3 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No, your Honour.

4 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: It will be admitted.

5 MR. KEEGAN: That first paragraph that is describing the numbers of

6 persons coming from Jajce and the fact that the sheltering capacity of

7 Travnik at that point was exhausted?

8 A. Yes, that is right, exactly. They had obviously better access to the

9 exact numbers than we did at the time, but all I can say is that both

10 out on the roads, or mountain tracks as I should properly call them,

11 and coming into the town, I mean, they were vast, vast numbers of

12 people. I mean, our convoy of 1600 had seemed vast enough; here was

13 what I think was one of the biggest exoduses of the war. I see the

14 ICRC are putting the total at something like 50,000 in all or 30,000

15 in Travnik at the time they wrote this document with another 20,000

16 expected to be -- expected to come in and still out on the road. That

17 was about the estimated population of the town at the time, made up of

18 residents and also from refugees from surrounding areas, including

19 the Prijedor region who had fled into that town, into Jajce, as well

20 as into Travnik.

21 Q. During this same time, in October and November 92, were there, in

22 addition to your experiences in the Jajce area, continuing

23 notifications from the ICRC and the High Representative for the Human

24 Rights Commission about the continued ethnic cleansing and

25 mistreatment of non-Serbs in the Banja Luka/Prijedor area?

1 A. Yes, they were frequent and, in particular, from the latter source you

2 have mentioned, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights.

3 MR. KEEGAN: If I could have these next two documents marked, please?

4 They will be exhibits 186 and 187.

5 (To the witness): Mr. Vulliamy, if you could review those one at a time

6 and then place them on the elmo, please? Do you recognise No. 186?

7 A. Yes, this is a man called Beat Schweizer. He is the head of the Red

8 Cross, the International Committee of the Red Cross office that had

9 been established in Banja Luka since late June, and he is giving an

10 interview here to the Austrian radio which I believe is -----

11 Q. If you could place that on the elmo, please?

12 A. Yes, of course.

13 Q. In this particular article he is describing the conditions that he is

14 aware of in the Trnopolje camp?

15 A. Yes, he starts off talking about the camp which, as we knew by then,

16 was a place into which people from the Banja Luka region had been

17 collected, and he is saying that it is getting out of control.

18 MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, I would offer Exhibit 186.

19 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection?

20 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No objection.

21 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: 186 will be admitted.

22 MR. KEEGAN (To the witness): Now the next Exhibit 187. Do you recognise

23 that?

24 A. Yes, this is an agency report of the Agence France Press reporting one

25 of the many reports compiled by Tadeuz Mazowiecki who was the United

1 Nations High Representative from the Commission on Human Rights.

2 Q. If you could place that on the elmo?

3 A. This was one of his many articles about and denunciations of, in this

4 case, ethnic cleansing.

5 Q. This was issued after his visit to the Trnopolje camp?

6 A. Yes.

7 Q. In which he described the circumstances as he saw them?

8 A. Yes.

9 MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, I would offer Exhibit 187.

10 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No objection.

11 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: 187 will be admitted.

12 MR. KEEGAN: If you could move that to the bottom, please?

13 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Does 187 explain why the 100 to 200,000 or so

14 persons referred to in 186 wanted to leave the area, Mr. Vulliamy? Do

15 you understand my question?

16 A. Yes, I do. 187 is about the Trnopolje camp which we found during the

17 summer of 1992. The significance of it, as it were, at this stage of

18 the discussion is that it was to Trnopolje that many people were

19 brought from their homes and villages or, indeed, fled from their

20 homes and villages because their homes and villages were burning down

21 or under shell fire, and from there that by this time people were

22 being sent on those convoys that we are talking about. So Trnopolje

23 is, as it were, the staging post, was by this time the staging post,

24 the transit camp, the place from which people from all sorts of

25 different circumstances in the Prijedor region (which, perhaps, we

1 will move on to later) were coming to for a variety of reasons and,

2 thereafter, were being either herded over the mountains (as we were)

3 into Travnik or being taken there by, as happened later, the Red

4 Cross. Trnopolje was, if you like, the distribution point for this

5 process, or one of them -- one of the many, I should say.

6 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Excuse me, Mr. Keegan. I do not mean to interrupt.

7 I guess again my focus is really a concern about what happens in

8 times of war and people may want to leave for a number of reasons. I

9 wanted to find out how 187 and 186 were connected and whether or not

10 this was a forced expulsion or a desire once again on the part of

11 people to leave, but I think the witness has explained it.

12 MR. KEEGAN: Yes, your Honour, and I think also if the court considers

13 this exhibit in line with all the other testimony from the other

14 witnesses who have come previously describing what events were

15 occurring in that region throughout this time. (To the witness): Mr.

16 Vulliamy, if we could now move on to the next situation which you had

17 indicated you witnessed which was the Bihac pocket area.

18 A. Yes, Bihac was important for a number of reasons. It was described by

19 the United Nations because it was this pocket, there was a tranche of

20 Serbian held territory, Prijedor, Banja Luka, this area, very loosely

21 connected to Serbia through a corridor. Then there was, if I may say

22 so, the Croatian Serbian bit, the Krajina in Croatia where Serbs were

23 living.

24 So the Bihac pocket was, as the United Nations soldiers put it, a

25 bone in the throat of that tranche of land which the Serbs wanted, had

1 actually, but they wanted, this was the pocket in its throat, as the

2 soldiers put it. It was subject to particularly ferocious attack at

3 various stages of the war and, also importantly, it was yet another

4 dumping ground because it was adjacent to the Prijedor region. It was

5 another place, yet another place, as we realised when we went there,

6 for deportees, refugees, people fleeing, people in flight, people

7 forced into flight, however we are going to put it. There are two

8 places I would like to talk about, if I may?

9 Q. Yes, you first mentioned Bosanska Krupa.

10 A. Bosanski Krupa was one of the most frightening places I have been to

11 in the whole war. It was right on the River Una which was the border

12 between the edge of the Muslim held Bihac pocket and the Bosnian Serb

13 territory, and so the two sides, if that is the word, were separated

14 only by the width of the river.

15 Q. How did you get into that town?

16 A. A long, long walk. We drove to a place call Cazim nearby and then

17 walked down a hillside, or in some places ran down the hillside

18 because the snipers could see us and were shooting at us, into the

19 town which was on the valley floor next to the river.

20 Q. What did you find once you were in that village?

21 A. It was a shooting gallery.

22 Q. What do you mean by that?

23 A. The United Nations had not been there. The Red Cross had not been

24 there at that time. This is September 1992, the first time I went

25 there. No supplies had got in there and people were living off the

1 fruit that they had grown on their trees and the food that they had

2 grown in their gardens.

3 Q. How did they harvest that fruit?

4 A. They used to just dig it up and the place was -- I hasten to add, also

5 there were large numbers of refugees from the Prijedor area living

6 there as well, having fled across the river from the Serbian

7 territory. What people would have to do -- I will have to explain

8 this, sort of, with gestures as well as words, if I may -- is that to

9 go out anywhere in the town, the houses were right along the river,

10 you would have to hide behind a house, run to the next house and, as

11 you did so, "clack, clack", the snipers would shoot at you.

12 (Indicating) You would run and you would stop, and then you would run

13 again to the next house. That was how people moved around the town.

14 That is how we moved around the town. We asked how many people had

15 been killed during this. We were told 56 during the two weeks

16 preceding our visit.

17 Q. How many forces from the Bosnian Army were resident in that town?

18 A. I do not know, but very few. I mean, there was a thing called a

19 police station which was basically a house and there were about, sort

20 of, I suppose, 20 to 50 soldiers mooching about.

21 Q. What kind of weapons did they?

22 A. Very few -- rifles, a few machine guns.

23 Q. What was the ethnic background of all of the people that you met in

24 that village?

25 A. They were all Muslim with one Croat.

1 Q. Had you also on some occasion had the opportunity to discover what

2 forces were aligned on the other side of the river?

3 A. Well, it was the Bosnian-Serb Army and it was pretty clear what

4 weaponry they had from what was starting to come into Bosanska Krupa

5 as night fell.

6 Q. What was that?

7 A. Mortars and shells.

8 Q. What were the conditions that the people were living under in that

9 town?

10 A. Terrifying. They were living in their cellars, if they had any. One

11 man had a cellar in which he put a lot of people, in which he offered

12 to fit people, neighbours, when the shelling got particularly heavy;

13 otherwise they were just sitting in their houses. Some of the houses

14 were destroyed, obviously, and people were sort of living in, as it

15 were, the fire shadows, as we would call it, of the walls that

16 remained of the houses.

17 Q. How long did you spend in that town?

18 A. Two days.

19 Q. During that time was this sniper fire, as you explained it, constant?

20 A. Yes, it was sniper fire during the day with the odd mortar coming in

21 and then the heavier stuff would come in towards evening.

22 Q. How did you get out of that town?

23 A. We played the cat and mouse game. We ran between the houses and, yes,

24 bullets, you know, you could hear them whizzing past us. Then we had

25 to run up the track back out of the town which is what the fitter

1 citizens of the place had done, by definition, leaving behind the more

2 elderly people who represented a disproportionate numbers of the

3 population because they obviously could not run up the hill.

4 Q. Was that the only way into or out of that village at that time?

5 A. It was the only viable way. There was a road down to Bihac which the

6 UN eventually navigated sometime later, but to drive down that road

7 was suicidal at that time.

8 Q. As compared to running up the hill?

9 A. You were a lot safer running up the hill than you were driving, let

10 alone walking, down the road because the road skirted the river and

11 you were just, I mean, you were fully exposed; you would not have had

12 a chance.

13 Q. From Bosanksa Krupa did you move into the town of Bihac itself?

14 A. Yes, indeed.

15 Q. Can you describe the situation that met you there?

16 A. Bihac, like Travnik, was full of refugees mostly from the

17 Prijedor/Banja Luka region. I remember, in particular, one group of

18 people who were living in a network of tunnels and underground cellars

19 that the German army had dug, built, in the Second World War. The

20 shelling was sometimes very heavy indeed, and we took refuge in one of

21 these tunnels one afternoon. I remember, as one became accustomed to

22 the darkness, a fairly extraordinary sight, just these people eating

23 soup or lying on makeshift beds in these tunnels, mostly old people,

24 some from Bihac itself, the majority from Prijedor and the surrounding

25 villages who had fled into the town.

1 Q. What type of conditions were they living under in those tunnels?

2 A. Very difficult conditions, both physically and psychologically. It

3 was dark all the time. They were getting food. They would send

4 people out to get food from the aid organisations. They were

5 mumbling. They were people who were too terrified. They were old

6 people for the most part who were just too afraid to go out. One old

7 lady I interviewed at length, she was 80 something, she remembered the

8 Second World War. She said: "It was nothing like this", and one had

9 this awful feeling that she was going to end her days down there. They

10 were -----

11 Q. Was there sufficient lighting down in these tunnels?

12 A. No, no, the lighting was coming through grates at the upper part of

13 the tunnels.

14 Q. Was there adequate bedding for everyone?

15 A. Well, there was somewhere to lie down. They had constructed, sort of,

16 very primitive bunks for some of the older people. A few were

17 sleeping on the floors. No, there was not adequate bedding. They had

18 done their best.

19 Q. Was there running water?

20 A. No.

21 Q. Were there kitchens?

22 A. No, they had, sort of, camper stoves that they were making soup on.

23 Q. Did any of the people from the Prijedor/Banja Luka region whom you

24 spoke to indicate that they had voluntarily left their homes to come

25 to these conditions?

1 A. No, there was one young woman we spoke to, typically -- and forgive

2 the detail -- when she realised she was going to be interviewed by

3 foreigners, she sort of disappeared for about 10 minutes and came back

4 made up, which I thought was rather sort of tragic in its way.

5 She told a terrifying story about having been burnt out of her house

6 in a village near Prijedor. She described their marching, they were

7 marched down the road, she said, by soldiers. She said that sometimes

8 they would open fire, but usually they were just going, "Get on, get

9 on, get on".

10 She described how she and a friend of hers had peeled off from that

11 convoy towards night and had come through the woods into Bosanska

12 Krupa, in fact. The Serbs there -- she said the Serbs had kept them a

13 few days to make coffee, but then they had allowed them to cross the

14 river into Bosanska Krupa. She had come from there to Bihac. That

15 was one of the many stories we heard. She was now living in this

16 tunnel. I said: "Why are you living in this tunnel? You are a young

17 woman, you could be living in the town". She said: "I am too afraid

18 of the explosions to go out. I never go out".

19 Q. While you were in Bihac did you, in fact, witness yourself an attack

20 from the forces on the other side of the line?

21 A. Yes, there were several attacks, and we were shot at actually driving

22 down a road from the Croatian Serbian side of the pocket; fire coming

23 from, as it were, not the Bosnian Serb side but the Croatian Serb

24 side, and this was confirmed by the UN as a fairly regular thing,

25 shelling and shooting.

1 There was one attack I particularly remember on the Bihac hospital

2 where I spent quite a bit of time. A shell came into the hospital and

3 a man recovering from another attack was wounded in this hospital bed.

4 Something even more memorable happened in that hospital actually. A

5 seven year old girl died more less in my arms, well, not in my arms,

6 but my hand on her. She had been shot in the head by a sniper while,

7 I was told, running across her back garden with her mother running

8 from an explosion, and a sniper had caught her in the head which was

9 all bandaged up and you could not, sort of, see her face very well.

10 She was unconscious and the doctor said: "Come and see this girl?"

11 and I had a photographer with me who took a photograph. I just had my

12 hand on her shoulder, and as I did so there was a kind of quiver and a

13 shake, and the panic, doctors all over the place. I stood back.

14 They came in and that was, in fact, her death at that moment.

15 Q. You indicated that the attack which you had yourself witnessed had

16 come from the area of the Republic of Serb Krajina. If you could

17 indicate on the map the area which you were referring to, please, to

18 Exhibit 181?

19 A. Here is the Bihac pocket. Here is what we call the Bosnian Krajina --

20 sorry, if I am confusing -- this is the Prijedor/Banja Luka region

21 held by the Bosnian Serbs. Here is the bit marked on the map as

22 Croatia which is called the Croatian Krajina held at that time by the

23 Croatian Serbian forces and, although most of the attacks would

24 logically come here from the Bosnian Serb side, this shooting was from

25 the Croatian side, Serbs here on the Croatian side into the pocket.

1 Bihac is there, and there are actually roads and communities skirting

2 this border.

3 This area was under the tutelage of the United Nations soldiers

4 policing the peace in Croatia at the time. It was with some disdain,

5 I might add, that the UN military observers within Bihac itself

6 confirmed that the attacks from this side, from this UN protected zone

7 within Serbian held Croatia, were fairly regular.

8 MR. KEEGAN: If I could have this document marked as the next exhibit

9 please, 188? (To the witness): While that document is being marked,

10 Mr. Vulliamy, was there any doubt or hesitation in the military

11 command or in the UN officials that you talked to in Bihac that the

12 attacks were being conducted in a co-ordinated fashion between the

13 Bosnian Serbs and the Croatian Serbs against Bihac?

14 A. Absolutely no doubt at all. There was the United Nations military

15 observer team there, was headed by a Norwegian, the deputy was British

16 and neither of them -- in fact, they were one of the angriest

17 military, team of military observers I had come across in the whole

18 war for that very reason, yes.

19 Q. Did they describe to you that the attacks were conducted by large

20 scale groups of the army of the Bosnian Serbs and the Croatian Serbs?

21 A. Yes, they were, indeed, and they were also confirming bombing from the

22 air.

23 Q. Were many of those reports from the Bihac pocket later down played by

24 senior UNPROFOR and UN officials?

25 A. Yes, throughout the Bihac pocket went through various crises during

1 its history, and particularly the reports from the ground that we had

2 confirmed over and over again that an underground aerodrome, an

3 airfield, within the Serbian held bit of Croatia was being used by

4 fighter bombers which were bombing the Bihac pocket. We were taken up

5 to see the results of such bombing and, yes, pretty clear from the

6 craters that this was bombing from the air.

7 Q. If you could place Exhibit 188 on the elmo, please, for the court? Do

8 you recognise that report?

9 A. I recognise the facts in it, but that is a report from Belgrade that I

10 do not -- I mean, I do not know that particular account of the facts

11 but I recognise the facts well, yes.

12 Q. Is this the report, one of the reports, you mentioned that initially

13 indicates that troops from the Republic of Serb Krajina, that is, the

14 Croatian Serb territory was attacking the Bihac pocket?

15 A. Yes, this is UNPROFOR, United Nations Protection Force, confirming in

16 April 1993 what we had already been told in August, sorry, September,

17 forgive me, 1992, that these attacks were coming not only from the

18 Bosnian Serb side but from within what they called the RSK, the

19 Serbian Krajina part of Croatia, as well, so that this place is

20 surrounded and being attacked from all sides, one in coordination with

21 the other.

22 Q. Does that report also indicate that by the time the report from the

23 field which indicated a force of 1,000 troops had reached Zagreb, it

24 was then revised by the headquarters in Zagreb to be 100 to 150?

25 A. That is right.

1 Q. Thank you. From Bihac, Mr. Vulliamy, you indicated that you then next

2 witnessed a similar activity in the Tuzla Srebrenica situation?

3 A. Yes, I was in Tuzla briefly during the spring of 1993. The town of

4 Srebrenica was unreachable at the time, and the collapse and surrender

5 of the town was being monitored by radio hams with whom we were in

6 contact who were able to talk to Srebrenica on short wave radio.

7 MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, if I might, I neglected to offer Exhibit 188.

8 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Any objection to 188?

9 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No, your Honour.

10 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: It will be admitted.

11 MR. KEEGAN: Thank you. (To the witness): After you received these

12 reports, what did you do?

13 A. Well, all we could do really was to wait for more news and wait for

14 people to come, if they ever were going to come. This was not the

15 fall of Srebrenica that we have heard so much in 1995; this was the

16 point at which the Bosnian-Serb army marched into and shelled the town

17 to such a degree that it surrendered. This was the series of

18 instances that gave way to the safe -- declaration of safe areas of

19 which Srebrenica was one.

20 Basically, we were in Tuzla and the first people started coming in

21 from Srebrenica. I was not able to stay there very long at that time.

22 All I can describe is the trucks of people coming in at the end of a

23 very long journey into Tuzla, another town, I hasten to add, jam

24 packed with refugees from all over the place. They were coming in in

25 a wearisome and distressed state.

1 The Serbian army had not got into the town, but they talked about

2 relentless shelling. I remember one woman saying, in particular, that

3 the streets were so full that you could not but get a direct hit if

4 you put any shell into the streets of that town.

5 I had then to leave Tuzla for other reasons. Subsequent accounts

6 talked about people clambering on to trucks and other people being

7 caught in minefields, but I was not directly taking those testimonies.

8 Q. At the same time that you were hearing these reports over the short

9 wave and through the people you were talking to, was again the High

10 Representative for the Human Rights Commission and the UNHCR issuing

11 statements both with regards to the situation in Tuzla and in

12 Srebrenica itself?

13 A. Yes, the, as it were, first fall of Srebrenica was one of the major

14 crises in the war internationally. Of course, both Mr. Mazowiecki and

15 the UNHCR were watching it, they were engaged, they were involved and

16 were speaking publicly about it.

17 MR. KEEGAN: If I could have these next two documents marked as Exhibits

18 189 and 190, please?

19 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Mr. Vulliamy -- I am trying to follow your lead, Mr.

20 Keegan -- did you give us a number, an estimate at least, that you

21 could make as to the number of refugees you saw in Bosanska Krupa and

22 Bihac or does Exhibit 188 give us a number?

23 A. Forgive me, 188 is -----

24 MR. KEEGAN: 188 has been removed. If you could go ahead and give your

25 recollection.

1 A. To be honest, numbers games, I do not particularly like; I prefer to

2 quote people who make a job of counting numbers, the International Red

3 Cross, the UNHCR and so on. This pertains to numbers of refugees,

4 numbers of dead, numbers of wounded, numbers of people homeless and so

5 on, numbers of missing. It is always difficult for us because one is

6 seeing groups of 20 here, five here, 100 there, and you see a camp

7 full of inestimable hundreds. So it is difficult to say, but in

8 Bosanska Krupa, I would say that a fairly small number, let us say,

9 hundreds not thousands. I would not want to put it any more specific

10 than that.

11 In Bihac, the numbers I saw, well, I saw hundreds in places that

12 suggested there would be thousands, if not tens of thousands, but I

13 would not want to say for a minute to you that I had seen crowds of

14 tens of thousands of people in Bihac. No, I did not. They were too

15 dispersed. People were billeted in all kinds of places, and I am more

16 than happy to try to make estimates for you, but it is not a game I

17 like playing, frankly.

18 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Thank you. Do you want to discuss Exhibits 189 and

19 190 quickly or should we stand in recess?

20 MR. KEEGAN: Yes, your Honour, I think we will be able to wrap it up

21 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: OK.

22 MR. KEEGAN (To the witness): Do you have Exhibits 188?

23 A. Yes, I do, thank you.

24 Q. Sorry, 189 and 190?

25 A. Yes.

1 Q. If you could review 189 first? Do you recognise what that document

2 is?

3 A. Yes, I do indeed. Well, it is an Agence France Press report of a

4 document I know.

5 Q. That is the report by the Special Raporteur that we referred to

6 earlier?

7 A. Yes. Mr. Mazowiecki of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

8 Q. In which he describes the situation in Tuzla. If you can move the

9 document up to the paragraph referring to Tuzla? Just at the bottom

10 of the screen there. That particular section of the report relates to

11 the number of refugees that had actually been registered at that time

12 in Tuzla by the UNHCR?

13 A. Yes.

14 Q. Was it your experience in all of these areas which you visited that

15 the number of registered refugees was not necessarily an accurate

16 reflection of how many were in an area?

17 A. The number of registered refugees was, by definition, the minimum.

18 Those were the people that the International Commission for the Red

19 Cross, or in this case or more usually, the UNHCR, knew were there and

20 who had registered with them. So if one wants to make estimates of

21 numbers, you take that as the base and then one has to depend on one's

22 own assessment to make calculations above that. But, yes, this is Mr.

23 Mazowiecki's estimate of the numbers who were arriving in Tuzla at

24 that time.

25 This is -- the Special Raporteur is by now well into his series of

1 reports. This is one of a great number which we were following very

2 closely. I remember this one well. This is the one which, if you

3 will pardon the expression, we referred to as him finally "doing his

4 nut" because he says that "if you do not stop this" -- he addresses

5 the International Community and says, "If you do not stop this, then

6 you are complying with it". We reported those remarks very -- with

7 some shock coming from a man like that.

8 MR. KEEGAN: I would tender Exhibit 189, your Honour.

9 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection?

10 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No objection, your Honour.

11 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: 189 will be admitted.

12 MR. KEEGAN (To the witness): If you could now take a look at 190,

13 please? Do you recognise that report from the UNHCR representative

14 regarding Srebrenica?

15 A. Yes, I do. This is again Agence France Press recording remarks that I

16 remember very well indeed from Larry Hollingsworth who was an ex,

17 former British army soldier now working for the UNHCR who I knew

18 personally, and here he is giving his view of the incident in

19 Srebrenica, the results of which I was seeing in terms of refugees

20 coming into Tuzla.

21 Q. If you could move that up, please? Were the shellings and effects of

22 that shelling that was reported in this UNHCR release consistent with

23 those reports that you also received?

24 A. Yes, indeed, and consistent with what everybody else was saying. One

25 television journalist called Tony Burkley -- I think only one -- got

1 into Srebrenica at that time, and certainly Mr. Hollingsworth's

2 assessment was borne out by everybody else that I spoke to, whether

3 they were colleagues, refugees, from that. It was one of the low

4 points, as I recall, of the war.

5 Q. Thank you. Your Honour, I would tender Exhibit 190.

6 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection?

7 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No, your Honour.

8 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: 190 will be admitted.

9 MR. KEEGAN: I think that would be convenient.

10 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: We will stand in recess for 20 minutes.

11 (11.35 a.m.)

12 (Adjourned for a short time)

13 (11.55 a.m.)

14 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Mr. Keegan, you may proceed.

15 MR. KEEGAN: Thank you, your Honour. Mr. Vulliamy, when we recessed you

16 had just finished describing the situation surrounding the fall of

17 Srebrenica and some of the reports that were coming out at that time

18 about what was happening in East Bosnia. At the same time that this

19 exodus from Srebrenica was occurring and the attack on Srebrenica was

20 being conducted, were government officials from the Bosnian Serb

21 Republic also issuing press statements that both had once responded to

22 allegations about war crimes and also indicated their intent in the

23 conduct of these operations?

24 A. I had by now ----

25 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Turn your microphone on, Mr. Vulliamy, please.

1 THE WITNESS: At this point I had no direct communication with the Bosnian

2 Serb leadership because I was more or less based on the other side,

3 but I do recall them continuing to make their intention fairly clear

4 to keep up this, as they regarded it, war until its completion to

5 their satisfaction, yes.

6 Q. If I could have this document please marked as the next exhibit in

7 order, that would be 191, and shown to the witness, please. If you

8 could please review Exhibit 191. That report of a statement by

9 General Milovanovic of the main staff of the Army of the Republika

10 Srspka, is that familiar to you?

11 A. Yes, indeed, I remember reading it.

12 Q. In fact the first paragraph, does that refer to one of the statements

13 that you made mention of that referred to their intention?

14 A. Yes, indeed. It was quite widely reported. When he says that the

15 Serbs in Bosnia would never accept the Drina River as their border, by

16 the "Drina River" he means the -- the Drina River is the border

17 between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, and what he is saying here is

18 that the Bosnian Serbs would never accept that river as a border, in

19 other words, we are part of that country. It was, as the thing says,

20 a speech he made on the first anniversary of the one of the armies

21 brigades.

22 Q. Thank you. Your Honour, I would offer Exhibit 191.

23 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection?

24 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No, your Honour.

25 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Exhibit 191 will be admitted.

1 MR. KEEGAN: If I could have this document marked it will be 192.

2 THE WITNESS: There is a reference to a referendum in here that is not

3 explained. That referendum was a rejection by some 99 per cent of the

4 Vance Owen peace-plan which had been accepted by the other two sides.

5 MR. KEEGAN: Could you review Exhibit 192, please. What is Exhibit 192?

6 A. 192 is an interview by Dr. Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs.

7 It is an interview he gives to a Turkish radio station or newspaper

8 which I have to admit I did not see or listen to.

9 Q. If you could place that on the elmo, please.

10 A. Sure. He is discussing the semantics of the term "ethnic cleansing".

11 Q. Does he also make reference to the allegations about the camps as

12 well, down in the middle paragraph?

13 A. Yes. He is denying that they are concentration camps; he calls them

14 camps for prisoners of war. This is in response, I expect, to our

15 discoveries of Omarska and Trnopolje in which a number of emaciated

16 prisoners were found and he is talking about a slim boy sent to the

17 camp by accident. He calls all the others very handsome and

18 well-built people. Perhaps in due course we can come to that. But

19 that is Mr. Karadzic's point of view anyway for the record. I do not

20 remember this particular interview because it was to a Turkish media,

21 but I remember him saying similar things to the British and the

22 American media.

23 Q. On other occasions?

24 A. Yes.

25 Q. I would offer Exhibit 192, your Honour.

1 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection?

2 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No objection, your Honour.

3 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: 192 will be admitted.

4 MR. KEEGAN: Finally, if I could have this document marked as Exhibit 193.

5 During this same time that you were now witnessing the scenes in

6 Eastern Bosnia, did there

7 continue to be reports issued by UNHCR and others about continued

8 ethnic cleansing and forced expulsions in the Banja Luka region?

9 A. All the way through, yes.

10 Q. If you could review Exhibit 193, please.

11 A. Yes, this is the spring of 1993 and by now we can see the UNHCR

12 engaged in evacuating people along the same route that we would have

13 taken under armed Serbian, Bosnian Serb guard. They are talking about

14 people coming out of the Banja Luka area into central Bosnia. That is

15 the road we took. By "central Bosnia" they mean Travnik at least as

16 the port of entry. So we can now see the UNHCR according to this

17 story.

18 Q. The conditions under which the UNHCR report indicate those people had

19 been living, are they similar circumstances to which the people whom

20 you interviewed described to you?

21 A. Yes, it seems to me that the gist has not changed. On our convoy and

22 in all the people I interviewed coming in from all sorts of places,

23 markedly the Banja Luka Prijedor region, they were talking about

24 attacks on their homes, terror, murder and so on, and here UNHCR is

25 ratifying this, talking about seven murders in one district.

1 Q. Again the people being forcibly transferred or deported were expected

2 to pay for that transportation by the Serbs?

3 A. Yes. Here again the UNHCR is confirming something we had heard over

4 and over again, that this deportation was regarded as something for

5 which a fare was payable.

6 Q. Thank you your Honour I would offer Exhibit 193.

7 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Is there any objection?

8 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No, your Honour.

9 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: 193 is admitted.

10 MR. KEEGAN: If I could also have this next document marked, please. That

11 would be Exhibit 194. Mr. Vulliamy, as we move into 1994 did the

12 reports from these non-governmental organisations, international

13 organisations, in particular the ICRC, become more specific and

14 aggressive in their tone?

15 A. Yes, they became, let us say, more out spoken. The ICRC is well known

16 for its judicious conduct, judicious in the extreme. Its job is to

17 fulfil its professional brief. We had this discussion with its

18 officers over and over again. Its job is not to apportion blame or

19 usually to make didactic remarks, but such is the situation by the

20 time of this press release, which I recall reading about, they are

21 starting to use a more didactic language, yes.

22 Q. If you could put the first page of 194 on the screen, please. The

23 first page of this press release gives a summary, a brief summary, of

24 the ICRC's attempts and their opinion on the situation. Is that

25 correct?

1 A. Yes, it does.

2 Q. Summed up by that single sentence in the second paragraph?

3 A. That the state of affairs is unacceptable to the ICRC, they say, and

4 they are talking about civilians being used, as they say, bargaining

5 chips in the interests of political causes, I do not wish to interpret

6 the document, but politics was military by this time in the country as

7 I think is abundantly clear.

8 Q. If you put the second page on. On the second page do they

9 specifically mention the Banja Luka region and then those areas in

10 central Bosnia to which you have referred?

11 A. Again, we are our September 1994, this is two years after our convoy

12 out of the Prijedor area, and they are saying that the minorities are

13 being subjected to harassment and discrimination every day; having

14 lost all hope for the future they have no choice but to leave.

15 Q. When they speak of majorities in the Banja Luka region, what ethnic

16 background are they referring to?

17 A. Muslims and Croats.

18 Q. In central Bosnia and Zenica and in Bihac, in all of those areas, who

19 were the people whom you interviewed which related those tales of

20 forced ethnic cleansing and other crimes?

21 A. In central Bosnia leaving the Zenica region, this would be Croats and

22 some Serbs leaving what was by now a very hard line Muslim town. In

23 the Bihac area they would be talking about Muslims and some Croats

24 fleeing from Serbian authority, as I explained earlier.

25 Q. The figure they use is tens of thousands?

1 A. Yes.

2 Q. In Gorazde, in Srebrenica what populations are they talking about?

3 A. In Gorazde, in Srebrenica, well, these are both isolated pockets of

4 overwhelmingly almost exclusively Muslim populations encircled by

5 Serbian guns, so this would be Muslims in those two pockets.

6 Q. In that following one line paragraph, "In most of these situations it

7 is the Muslim civilian population that is the principal victim of such

8 an abominable policy", do you find that to be a significant statement

9 to be made by the ICRC?

10 A. It was abundantly clear to anybody who was covering the war that that

11 was the case. It was uncharacteristic of the ICRC to make such a

12 partial remark, if you like, but they appear from the fact they did

13 so, to have regarded the situation as sufficiently serious to have

14 crossed a line that they, from the conversations I had with them

15 personally and from the press releases they put out normally, declined

16 to cross.

17 Q. Thank you. Your Honour, I would offer Exhibit 195.

18 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Any objection?

19 MR. WLADIMIROFF: No objection.

20 MR. KEEGAN: Excuse me, 194.

21 MR. WLADIMIROFF: It is the same number we were referring to.

22 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: For the official record though it is 194 and that

23 will be admitted.

24 MR. KEEGAN: Mr. Vulliamy, if we could return now to the instances of

25 ethnic cleansing which you referred to earlier that you witnessed.

1 After Tuzla, Srebrenica you indicated in your summary that the next

2 area of ethnic cleansing which you witnessed was in the Mostar Prozor

3 region that had been conducted by Bosnian Croats against Bosnian

4 Muslims?

5 A. Yes, we are talking here about Prozor in central Bosnia which pertains

6 to late 1992, but throughout the latter half of 1993 the emphasis and

7 shift of the conflict changes. I will just summarise. We were now

8 engaged or I was now engaged mostly in covering the mass deportation

9 of Muslims from the Herzegovina and Lasva Valley areas by Croatian

10 forces. The pattern here was that men were being taken to camps and I

11 was busy gaining access to those camps and did so. The worst was a

12 place called Dretelj where Muslims were being held by Croats, and

13 women and children were by and large being herded by military soldiers

14 into a very small Muslim pocket in the city of Mostar to which a

15 particularly ferocious siege was laid. There were also instances of

16 ethnic cleansing between Muslims and Croats in both directions in

17 central Bosnia, and that took up most of my work for the latter part

18 of 1993.

19 Q. Then as we move on to the last couple of instances which you

20 mentioned, one being Zepa in Eastern Bosnia in 1995, if you could

21 describe the circumstances which you found there?

22 A. The fall of the two eastern enclaves held thus far by the Bosnian

23 government in Srebrenica and Zepa, they were both UN safe areas, in

24 1995 is, I think, fairly well known. My experience was mainly of the

25 latter. I was in the Muslim held town of Zenica when large numbers of

1 people from the fallen enclave, by then fallen enclave of Zepa in

2 eastern Bosnia, were coming into the town. I apologise if this is

3 becoming monotonous, but their accounts were of heavy shelling in a

4 town by now jam packed full of refugees from all over Eastern Bosnia

5 and also from the fallen Srebrenica itself. The town had succumbed to

6 the Bosnian-Serb Army just weeks before. Large numbers of people had

7 fled from one pocket into the other. The pocket had been shelled and

8 people were talking once again about shells landing in crowded streets

9 in which people were sleeping and unable to avoid direct hit on

10 civilians, if you like. There was a negotiated surrender in which the

11 UN acted as broker and the people were evacuated in a fashion which

12 was fairly orderly compared to what we know about Srebrenica without

13 the thousands reported massacred, but it was nevertheless a pretty

14 distressing sight. They came in, some in primitive vehicles, trucks,

15 and some on foot into Zenica. They had been met further up towards

16 the front lines by their own army, the Bosnian Government Army, and

17 brought to Zepa in a fairly orderly way and kept in compounds and fed.

18 We were allowed to go and talk to them and they had talked about the

19 town holding out for as long as it could, but unable to hold out any

20 longer and given what they had heard from the people who had arrived

21 there from Srebrenica, very afraid indeed that the same thing might

22 happen to them.

23 Q. In addition to talking to the people in Zenica who had come out of

24 Zepa, did you talk to Zepa refugees in other locations?

25 A. Yes, in Ireland, in Dublin of all places. I had a call to tell me

1 that some people had arrived in Dublin from two camps within Serbia

2 itself. This was in the Christmas period of 1995. I was very

3 interested to talk to them because I wanted to know about the camps

4 they had been kept in and also to hear more about what had happened to

5 Zepa. There were 24 of them in all, men, a part of a group which had

6 refused to surrender and had gone off into the wilderness, into the

7 mountains, and then had elected to cross the border into Serbia and to

8 try their luck by surrendering eventually there, not to the Bosnian

9 Serbs of whom they were afraid because they thought they would be

10 massacred, as had happened to their colleagues in Srebrenica. They

11 were put in these camps and told the stories about their travels

12 through to Serbia and about what they had witnessed, people being

13 rounded up on the way and killed and the camps had been hard at first

14 but had improved after the UNHCR and ICRC were made aware of them, and

15 there they were held up in a mental hospital in Dublin, mental

16 hospital because that was the only place they could find any room for

17 them I hasten to add. They were talking too about the fall of Zepa

18 and how after four years they had been unable to continue defending

19 the town and feared what had happened to Srebrenica some weeks before.

20 Q. Mr. Vulliamy, if I could ask you to slow down in your speech to give

21 the translators an opportunity to stay with you. Now in talking to

22 all of these people in these district locations, did they indicate to

23 you similar stories about the shelling of Zepa which you briefly

24 mentioned earlier?

25 A. They said that the shelling had been relentless and they told me, and

1 it was of interest to me professionally at the time, that a lot of the

2 shelling was coming from within Serbia itself across the border. Zepa

3 nestles against the border between Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina on

4 the River Drina.

5 Q. Once again what time frame was this?

6 A. They were talking about shelling throughout the siege, from 1992 up

7 until the fall of the town in 1995, but they were talking in

8 particular about the recent shelling during the early summer which had

9 led to the final collapse of the pocket. They were saying that, as

10 far as they could ascertain, the gun positions from which they were

11 being shelled were at a place called Jagodnica in Serbia proper.

12 Q. If could you indicate where on the map that would be. That is Exhibit

13 181.

14 A. Zepa and Jagodnica nestles against the border just here.

15 Q. Thank you.

16 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: That is the border right on the other side of Zepa?

17 A. Jagodnica is not marked I am afraid but it is there.

18 Q. To the west of Skarlarni?

19 A. Yes, roughly equidistant between the two towns, just within the

20 Serbian border. It is a

21 high town on a hill, so I was told. I have not been there.

22 MR. KEEGAN: Thank you. Again, the majority of the people that you talked

23 to, were they civilians or were they military men?

24 A. In Zenica they were civilians almost entirely, mostly women and

25 children. The group in Dublin had all been in the army. My

1 impression was that any male from the age of about 17 upwards in Zepa

2 was in the army by then.

3 Q. Thank you. You indicated in your initial summary that the final

4 instance of ethnic cleansing which you witnessed that stood out in

5 your mind was your return to Travnik and the area of Vlasic. Can you

6 describe for the Court what you encountered there, please?

7 A. Yes, it was a wheel come full circle in its way. This was in August

8 1995 and I was back in Travnik. By then the Bosnian Army was pushing

9 up towards Donji Vakuf held by the Serbs and to my surprise actually

10 there were still small numbers of people coming into Travnik through

11 that same crossing point at Smet, exactly as had been the case three

12 years previous. This time they were in much smaller groups like 50 on

13 one of the nights I went up to meet them. By now Travnik was so full

14 there was no question of putting them up in town. They were by now

15 being bussed up to tiny little mountain villages and put on the floors

16 of schools up there. There were extraordinary scenes. There were

17 families who had seen the lists of who was coming and were greeting

18 relatives they had not seen for three years and so on. What I think

19 was most interesting was the stories these people were telling,

20 because they had been in Banja Luka and Prijedor for three years under

21 the Bosnian Serb authorities and were telling the most, well, spine

22 chilling tales. Some of them had lived in the cellars of their own

23 homes, some of them had pretended to be Serbs or changed their name in

24 order to get on, in order to sell produce at a market. Some of the

25 men had been taken prisoner and sent out digging trenches for the

1 Bosnian Serb side to use against their own people, because these were

2 of course Muslims. Others had been in prison. Others had been in

3 forced labour camps, factories. One man had worked in a railway yard.

4 It was extraordinary to hear these stories coming from people who had

5 walked that very same road. We talked of course about points on the

6 road. The soldiers in Skender Vakuf, yes, well, I remember them, it

7 was that sort of chat.

8 The other extraordinary thing was I went back to the school

9 gymnasium floor to which the people had come down off the mountains

10 that day, that night that I travelled with them to find people that I

11 knew from 1992 still there in the same place, same bit of floor. Their

12 children had met other refugees. One couple had a baby by then. One

13 old lady said -- some said they wanted to go home. One old lady said

14 she never wanted to leave the gym; she had not been out of the gym for

15 18 months. As I knew, some told me, "Well, we are all going mad here

16 really", but it was extraordinary to think that these people were

17 still here three years later. People were still coming through and

18 the people who come through with me three years earlier still there.

19 Q. Was there also a reference to the massacre you mentioned earlier while

20 you were there?

21 A. Yes. With the by now advancing Bosnian Army I went up into their

22 trenches where the mines were quite close, and it was extraordinary.

23 I was able for the first time since 1992 to look down on Smet. Smet

24 was the place where the cars were taken, where we set out in to the No

25 Man's Land. We were looking down on the very spot and a man asked us

1 to stop talking because it was August 21st and he said, "This is the

2 third anniversary of the massacre at the ravine at Smet". Once again

3 there was the sense of time going round in circles, but by now this

4 massacre of which I had heard told when I returned to Travnik in

5 September 1992 was a well-known thing. It had become famous

6 throughout the army and throughout the country, throughout the world

7 indeed. All the soldiers that I was with on that occasion were

8 themselves, had been on that road. So there we were above

9 Smet on the anniversary of the massacre, and all these men were

10 themselves from Prijedor. Many of them had been in Omarska, in the

11 camps. So by now everything was ringing very, very familiar indeed.

12 Nothing much was changing, but known to us then the war was nearing an

13 end.

14 Q. What other aspects about the conflict that you experienced stand out

15 in your mind?

16 A. Well, the camps that I am describing, that I have mentioned above all

17 -- you can come to those when you wish -- but also the opening up of

18 the east of Bosnia, the Drina valley. This had been more or less

19 sealed off during most of the war to almost all reporters. We had

20 heard accounts of the violence there in the early months, but no-one

21 had really been able to do any work there and to sustain what had been

22 going on. That was one of the discoveries of the last few months that

23 was particularly upsetting, and the siege of the Bosnian capital,

24 Sarajevo.

25 Q. If we could start first with Eastern Bosnia? When did you begin your

1 investigation in that area?

2 A. Soon after it became even partially safe to go there. People were,

3 most people were working on Srebrenica and the aftermath of the fall

4 of Srebrenica, but I was more interested in places about which we knew

5 almost nothing, but about which people, some refugees, were talking,

6 namely, Visegrad and Foca, and especially Visegrad.

7 Q. If you could put on the map, Exhibit 181?

8 A. Visegrad is here on the River Drina just within Bosnia-Herzegovina.

9 Q. Foca -- follow the river down.

10 A. Here it is.

11 Q. What time frame is it that you are now looking in these areas?

12 A. I was investigating these towns -- I never -- I should say, I became

13 so wrapped up in Visegrad, I never actually got to Foca -- this was

14 this year, earlier this year, in February and March '96.

15 Q. What did you discover on your investigation?

16 A. I started to hear stories about the bridge at Visegrad. It is a

17 famous bridge built by the Ottomans and the title of a book called

18 "The Bridge on the Drina" by a writer called Ivo Andric, who is the

19 only Yugoslav ever to win a Nobel Prize which he did for this book.

20 So the bridge was a, sort of, symbol of Bosnia.

21 I found out that the bridge had been used for very public mass

22 executions of Muslims through a period of months in 1992. I first

23 heard about this from one of the soldiers from Zepa in Dublin. He was

24 17 then and said he had been too young when he got to Zepa to join the

25 army. He was from Visegrad and his job had been for three years to

1 wade or sail a little boat out into the river in Zepa which is down

2 river from Visegrad and to hoik corpses out of the water. He had done

3 that for three years.

4 I started to -- I just wanted to uncover this. I devoted a lot of

5 energy into finding exactly what he was talking about. The people

6 from Visegrad, there were 14,000 Muslims in Visegrad in 1992 and,

7 unlike from the Prijedor/Banja Luka region in the places where the

8 refugees tended to collect, Gorazde, in Sarajevo, they were pretty

9 hard to find. There were not many of them around. But those who had

10 been there in that spring to early summer 1992 all told the same

11 story, whether they were in Ireland, Belgium, Holland, and various

12 parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, that the trucks would go down to this

13 bridge and people would be shot and stabbed and bodies thrown into the

14 river.

15 Q. What was the ethnic background of the victims ---

16 A. Muslim.

17 Q. -- of these murders? Did these witnesses indicate to you who was

18 committing these murders?

19 A. Yes, they did. They said that it was a local gang of Bosnian Serbs

20 and a name recurred which it would, perhaps, be inappropriate to

21 mention at the moment. I am at your discretion on that.

22 Q. They indicated that these murders were conducted in open on that

23 bridge throughout the summer of 1992?

24 A. Yes. Visegrad is rather like an arena. The town comes down two sides

25 of a valley and the river runs through the bottom of the valley and

1 the bridge spans the river. These executions took place nightly, if

2 not daily. I spoke to people who had watched their families being

3 executed on the bridge and their friends being executed on the bridge,

4 people had survived, wounded in the water, shielded perhaps by other

5 corpses from bullets, as was the case on one occasion.

6 I managed to confirm a story which was that a manager of an

7 hydroelectric power station further down river, across the Serbian

8 border in Serbia itself, had made a phone call to the police station

9 in Visegrad during this period, asking the police to relent on the

10 killings because the corpses were blocking the calvets in his dam and

11 to such a degree that he did not have the staff to remove them in

12 time, and that the water was going over the dam instead of through the

13 calvets. So it was clear to me from that sort of anecdote that this

14 was killing on a very large scale indeed.

15 Q. How did you confirm that particular anecdote?

16 A. I got through to the power station and, albeit rather gruffly and

17 briefly, the man on the end who identified himself as the manager --

18 to my translator -- said, "Da, da, da" -- "Yes, yes, yes" -- and put

19 the phone down. But the other source for that was a testimony which I

20 was given taken by the United Nations in Gorazde from a prisoner of

21 the Muslim army, the Bosnian government in Gorazde, Serbian prisoner,

22 who had talked in great detail about these killings on the bridge. He

23 had also told this story having been -- and named the police officer

24 who had taken the complaint and so on. I mean, it was documented in

25 some detail from somebody from who had worked within the Visegrad

1 police station.

2 Q. Was there any estimation on the number of victims of these killings in

3 Visegrad?

4 A. Again, as I was asked earlier, numbers is always a dangerous thing to

5 do, but, I mean, we seemed to be talking about thousands.

6 Q. If we could turn now to Sarajevo. When did you first go to the

7 capital?

8 A. I was first in Sarajevo in August 1992, about three to four months

9 into the siege, on

10 both sides of the line, both with the Serbs in the mountains above

11 the city and with the completely mixed community of all three ethnic

12 groups which was entrapped within the city.

13 Q. What type of contact did you have with the Serbian forces that were

14 surrounding the city?

15 A. I was given a rather good tour of gun positions and a splendid view of

16 the city from above by two Serbian -- Bosnian-Serb soldiers based at

17 Pale. This was during our inspection and visit to camps in the area.

18 These two showed us the gun positions without any difficulty, without

19 any embarrassment. I remember one remark one of them made when they

20 were discussing the people down below, they said, "The only good

21 Muslim is a dead Muslim", and he made, without actually firing, to

22 sort of spray the city with bullets from his gun; and, yes, they did

23 not make any -- they were not apologising for what they were doing at

24 all.

25 Q. From the viewpoint of those gun positions, could you clearly see the

1 various sections of the city below?

2 A. Oh, yes, Sarajevo is in a bowl surrounded by mountains, so as you look

3 down on the city it is almost like looking at a map. You can see the

4 airport, you can see the main streets, you can see the various estates

5 -- very clear, yes.

6 Q. Could you clearly see apartment buildings and homes?

7 A. Oh, yes.

8 Q. If you knew the city well enough, could you pick out where the

9 hospital and other significant landmarks in the city were?

10 A. At that time, I have to say no. This was early on.

11 Q. It was a general question, which was if you knew the city well enough

12 ---

13 A. Oh, gosh, yes.

14 Q. -- could you do that from there?

15 A. Oh, I mean without binoculars, I mean, you could do that very easily.

16 Q. Can you describe, were you in the city itself when it was shelled?

17 A. Oh, frequently, on many occasions. It would be impossible to have

18 been in the city when it was not being shelled.

19 Q. Can you describe some of those specific instances that you were

20 subject to?

21 A. The most infamous occasion that I was there for was the so-called

22 water queue massacre of 1993, July, if I recall properly. The

23 situation was a particularly pernicious one. Those laying siege to

24 the city had cut off the gas and water at that time, and so people

25 were being forced to go and queue for water in plastic cannisters or

1 buckets at the very few points left in the city where you could still

2 get it. One of those was a well in the fairly exposed suburb of

3 Dobrinja near the airport and the No Man's Land.

4 I was working down in the centre of the town when reports came

5 through that a queue for water at this well had been shelled and there

6 were large numbers of people killed. We got to the scene of the

7 shelling, about between 10, maybe 20, minutes after these reports.

8 The scene there was of bodies, bits of bodies. I remember the

9 corporation workers who had by now attached hoses to the well, hosing

10 sort of watery blood into the drainage. One thing I will not forget

11 was this line of plastic cannisters where the people had been which

12 were untouched in this sort of queue. It was like a sort of phantom

13 queue for water.

14 Q. Were you able to determine whether the majority of the people in that

15 line were civilians or military?

16 A. Well, there were water queues all over Sarajevo at all times and

17 invariably 98 per cent civilian.

18 Q. Can you describe what -- if we can describe it as such -- would be a

19 normal occasion of a shelling that you experienced?

20 A. Well, the shelling of Sarajevo was daily, nightly, if not hourly,

21 sometimes minutely -- it is not a word I know -- but sometimes more

22 than one shell would come into the same area within a minute. It is

23 an extraordinary experience. You hear a sort of a whine in the air,

24 followed by a loud thud, a sort of dead sound, and everything seems to

25 be in slow motion. You hear shattering glass and people screaming and

1 running and you run. This was something that I experienced a number

2 of times. Other people, of course, lived with it for four years --

3 three years, forgive me.

4 I remember one occasion when this happened and the shell came in. I

5 was in a car at that time and the driver very quickly did a sort of

6 very speedy U-turn away from the shell. People were running with us

7 up the road away from the site of the shelling, and another shell came

8 in not so far up the road in front of them in the area towards which

9 they were running, suggesting a fairly sort of deliberate targeting of

10 these missiles intended to cause maximum casualties.

11 Q. This group of people who were running, were they civilian or military?

12 A. All civilian, yes.

13 Q. Were there occasions when you could determine from where the fire was

14 coming, the shelling?

15 A. Well, the gun positions, as I knew from summer 1992, were up in the

16 hills where the Serbian positions were, but the best time you could

17 know for sure was at night, because when they were shelling at night,

18 what they would do is often put up a flare and you could see that the

19 flare was coming from the hills where the positions were. The flare

20 would light the city and it was a most unwelcome sight, because within

21 a short period of time of the flare hanging in the sky the shells

22 would come smashing in, and that could be in the block next to you or

23 right outside the hotel where we stayed at or it could be at the other

24 end of the town, a distant thud.

25 When they put a flare up, it would usually be they did not want to

1 waste their flares. They used to put in quite a few shells. That was

2 the time at which, I mean, it was beyond all doubt where they were

3 coming from. There was also a lot of tracer fire in the darker hours

4 which is a form of fire where one in every five bullets is lit so that

5 the gunner can see his line, and you could see very clearly where that

6 fire was coming from.

7 Q. Again if you could please just slow down in your descriptions. If you

8 could describe, please, the effect of these attacks on the people in

9 the town that you encountered?

10 A. Well, the effects of the attacks on some people was obviously to kill

11 them, on others to wound them and to cripple them. On those that the

12 shells missed, it was to drive them slightly mad, for want of a better

13 way of putting it. I remember a friend of mine saying once, "The

14 thing about Sarajevo is that everybody in the city has a number on

15 their back and you do not know what your number is, but it is between

16 1 and 300,000, and if 10 people are killed that day you know it is 11

17 upwards, but that you could be next". In Sarajevo, you are never out

18 of range of the shells. A shell could hit you at any minute and

19 during most of time you are walking around the streets you are within

20 very easy sight of a sniper.

21 It was extraordinary after the war to go into some of the snipers'

22 nests, blocks of flats and so on, and to look through the holes that

23 they had made and to see how easily they could see the streets, how

24 easily identifiable the people were walking along them.

25 So I think the idea was to, well, I cannot read the minds of those

1 laying siege to the city, but the effect was, even to those who were

2 not wounded or killed, that these people were going crazy with living

3 on the edge of being attacked at any time.

4 Q. In August 1992, you were one of a group of journalists who were the

5 first to visit the Omarska and Trnopolje camps; is that correct?

6 A. Yes.

7 Q. How did that visit come about?

8 A. Throughout the month of July 1992, reports had been reaching the press

9 and coming out in the -- and reaching the Croatian city of Karlovac in

10 the testimonies of refugees that what was going on in the Prijedor and

11 Banja Luka area was not just the intimidation and violence that we

12 have described that led to people being desperate to leave the area or

13 being deported from the area, but mass detentions in what were

14 variously described as holding camps, holding centres, and so on.

15 These were reported mostly in my own paper, The Guardian, by other

16 people because during July 1992 I was still in London, and by a

17 newspaper from New York called News Day and a reporter called Roy

18 Gutman. Mr. Gutman published an article about a camp that he had

19 located called Manjaca, which he described as being run by the Bosnian

20 Serb military. A colleague of mine published a report towards the end

21 of July in which people who had fled the area and were coming into the

22 Croatian city of Karlovac were talking about a place called Omarska.

23 The leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Dr. Radovan Karadzic, happened to

24 be in London for a conference on, as I recall, 27th or 26th July. The

25 Guardian had published that day an article on the front page in which

1 people were talking about the word "Omarska" and a holding centre or a

2 camp or some place called Omarska. Dr. Karadzic was on live television

3 and he was cornered and questioned by the interviewer. He said that

4 this was propaganda and that the -- I shall not try to repeat his

5 exact words, they can be verified, but he gave to believe the accounts

6 that were being given by people who had fled the area in Karlovac to

7 the paper were untrue, and said to the interviewer on the television,

8 which was a network called ITN, Independent Television News: "You

9 know, if you insist, you can come and see for yourselves", I

10 paraphrase. I cannot recall the exact words. Well, we insisted.

11 The ITN said to him, either on air or soon after he went off air:

12 "Well, we would like to take you up on that offer, if we may", and

13 because The Guardian had carried the reports on this place, Omarska,

14 we decided that we would join in and we would do it as a team effort

15 and would take up the offer.

16 Q. When did you leave for Serbia?

17 A. Well, I left the following day. My boss, the Foreign Editor, a man

18 called Paul Webster, had a conversation with Dr. Karadzic by mobile

19 phone as he was on his way to the airport and said: "We want to come,

20 we want to look at this place". Dr. Karadzic said: "Well, you know,

21 it will take a couple of weeks", and my boss, as I recall, said: "No,

22 no, if that is all right with you, we will come straightaway. I have

23 a reporter ready. We will be there tomorrow".

24 I was told to organise myself to get to Belgrade via Budapest --

25 there was no flight to Belgrade -- to get there as soon as possible

1 and to present myself, and that ITN would be doing the same thing. We

2 met at the airport in Budapest in Hungary and drove to Belgrade. We

3 arrived on 28th July.

4 Q. When you arrived in Belgrade, were there certain requirements that you

5 had to accomplish first such as certifications?

6 A. Yes, we had to accredit ourselves with an organisation called CRNA,

7 C-R-N-A, which was the government press agency in Serbia. I mean, the

8 project was in Bosnia but the accreditation was in Belgrade with the

9 Serbian government press agency, CRNA, yes. I mean, we explained to

10 them that we had come as Dr. Karadzic's, I will say "guests", although

11 that is probably not quite the right word, and then they registered

12 and gave us the necessary papers.

13 Q. Were you given a point of contact?

14 A. Yes, we were put under the tutelage of a woman called Klara Mandic.

15 Q. What organisation was she from?

16 A. She introduced herself as an officer of the Serbian Jewish Friendship

17 Society which I found fairly confusing, frankly, but she seemed to be

18 the woman in charge of at least the initial liaison with whatever

19 authorities we were dealing with. It was never quite clear -- in

20 Belgrade it was never quite clear. But she would be the person who

21 would come to the Hyatt Hotel where we were staying and would relay to

22 us what the plans were going to be.

23 Q. When you were met by her at the hotel did she have other individuals

24 with her?

25 A. She came over quite a few times and there was a gathering organised by

1 her at the hotel with various people. I could not quite work out what

2 the purpose of it was, but one of them was the Vice President of the

3 self-declared Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, that is to say,

4 the Bosnian Serbs, Professor Nikola Koljevic, who was there. We

5 talked generally about Serbian history and the suffering of the Serbs.

6 They were telling us a lot about that and the present war.

7 Q. How long did you remain in Belgrade?

8 A. Longer than we had hoped. We were anxious to get on and to get to the

9 Banja Luka/Prijedor area and get to Omarska, but we stayed there three

10 or four days.

11 Q. Was there an explanation for the delay?

12 A. It was mainly, sort of, it was presented to us anyway as being

13 bureaucratic, that everything had to be organised, it was difficult.

14 There was a war on. There were logistical problems, "We are concerned

15 for your security", that sort of thing. We, I think, had covered

16 enough war by this time to know that, you know, we can look after

17 ourselves, we just wanted to get on. They kept us there until our

18 final departure date which was, as I recall, on August 2nd -- sorry, I

19 think it was the 3rd.

20 Q. During this period that you were in Belgrade, is that when you visited

21 the Loznica camp which you have described earlier to the court?

22 A. Yes, for want of a better way of putting it, we were killing time in

23 Belgrade, and there was by then issued a list published by the Bosnian

24 government of "concentration camps", and some of those locations were

25 within striking range of Belgrade, day trip range of Belgrade, if you

1 like, that would not lose us the opportunity to depart. Loznica was

2 one of those. It, clearly, was not a concentration camp. My

3 colleagues from ITN also made a visit to Subotica to find that that

4 was not either. These were the transit camps that you saw on the

5 video and I described earlier. So, yes, that was when I went down to

6 Loznica. It is a short drive from Belgrade.

7 Q. How did you finally travel to Pale?

8 A. We travelled down to Pale which is the Bosnian Serb capital by

9 military helicopter.

10 Q. Who arranged for the helicopter, as far as you know?

11 A. Well, I mean, as far as we were concerned, as far as we could see, it

12 was Miss Klara Mandic of the Serbian Jewish Friendship Society, but,

13 you know, one made one's own inferences. It did not seem that this

14 organisation would necessarily have that much authority over military

15 air transport, and the place from which we left was a place under the

16 authority of the Yugoslav People's Army.

17 Q. Once you arrived in Pale, what was the first event?

18 A. Well, a helicopter landed in a field, took off again and before long

19 we were introduced to Dr. Karadzic, the President of the Bosnian

20 Serbs.

21 Q. If we could play the tape, please? Do you recognise what this is, if

22 you put it on the video monitor?

23 A. Well, that is me on the helicopter.

24 Q. During that helicopter ride what did you notice? If you could stop

25 the tape for a moment, please? What could you see out of the windows

1 of the helicopter?

2 A. We flew over Eastern Bosnia and were able to see village after village

3 destroyed. When I say "destroyed", I mean completely destroyed, every

4 house destroyed, empty, not even any soldiers, not like Zepa as I

5 described earlier, but just sort of ghost villages smashed to pieces.

6 I remember looking down at them and looking at the soldier who was

7 with us on the helicopter and an expression of rather morbid, yes,

8 pleasure on his face. I wrote, I think, somewhere that it looked as

9 though he was savouring some sort of gastronomic delicacy.

10 MR. KEEGAN: If we could play the tape again, please, with the audio

11 again? I would recommend the headphones for the court. This is

12 approximately a 10 minute section.

13 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: 184, is it?

14 MR. KEEGAN: Yes 184, your Honour.

15 (The video tape was played)

16 Q. If we could stop the tape there for a moment, please? Later in your

17 journey, in fact, upon your arrival in the area of the camps, was

18 there an incident of an attack?

19 A. Yes, there was.

20 Q. Did it, in fact, turn out to be a real attack?

21 A. We thought at the time, and I am even more convinced now, that the

22 apparent attack on us, on our convoy as we went towards Omarska, was a

23 fake. We were approaching the camp and suddenly there was some

24 shooting just over us from out of the woods, and the people who were

25 with us, the Bosnian Serb police who were escorting us, jumped out of

1 their amoured personnel carrier. They were running around on a bridge

2 and getting into the ditch and there was quite an exchange of fire.

3 Q. Is this shown later on in the video tape?

4 A. Yes.

5 Q. Thank you. If we could continue the tape now, please?

6 (The video tape was played)

7 if you could stop the tape, please? That would be a convenient place to

8 break?

9 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: We will stand in recess for lunch until 2.30.

10 (1.00 p.m.)

11 (Luncheon Adjournment)

12

13 (2.30 p.m.) PRIVATE

14 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Mr. Keegan, would you like to continue, please?

15 MR. KEEGAN: Thank you, your Honour. (To the witness): Mr. Vulliamy,

16 after the brief interview with Radovan Karadzic, what was next on the

17 agenda in Pale?

18 A. Lunch. We were asked into his headquarters for a meal.

19 Q. Who presided over this lunch?

20 A. The man who took charge of us generally then and presided over the

21 lunch was the Vice President of the Bosnian Serbs, Professor Nikola

22 Koljevic, whom we had met before in Belgrade.

23 Q. Who else made appearances at that lunch?

24 A. Well, in the building at the same time, it was pointed out to us a

25 Mr. Krajisnik who was an official in the parliament there in Pale, and

1 a swashbuckling figure came past and was very briefly introduced as

2 the military Commander. I now know that to have been General Ratko

3 Mladic.

4 Q. After lunch did you then travel to one of the camps which the Bosnian

5 Serbs wanted you to visit?

6 A. Yes, we did.

7 Q. Which camp was that?

8 A. We went to a camp or prison on the outskirts of Sarajevo in the Serb

9 held area called Kula. This was in a part of the city called Lukavica

10 under the Serbs.

11 Q. If we could roll the next sections of the video, please, without any

12 audio. Exhibit 184. Is that the Kula camp?

13 A. Yes, this looks like Kula.

14 Q. This was the camp which Dr. Karadzic had referred to in his interview

15 which we listened to, where he said people who had committed homicide

16 against Serbs were being held?

17 A. Yes, that is right. This is the same place as the one he wanted us

18 to see and the one whose inmates he had previously described as people

19 who were suspected of murder.

20 Q. Did you speak to some of these inmates?

21 A. Yes, we did, both in the presence of the guards and for a very brief

22 period alone with them.

23 Q. What did they indicate was the reason they were there?

24 A. Well, as far as their testimonies went, there was certainly nothing

25 to do with homicide or murder. They were civilians from two suburbs

1 of Sarajevo, Hadzici and another. They had been taken from their

2 homes to another place where they said they had been brutally treated

3 by extremists and thereafter taken by the Bosnian Serb military to

4 this place, Kula, where they said the treatment was slightly better.

5 They said they did not know why they were, but they were waiting for

6 exchange in return for Serbian people who had been taken by the other

7 side.

8 In our discussions afterwards, we decided that they were a

9 sort of currency of the war, a human currency. Their story was that

10 they were just civilians who had been rounded up and herded there.

11 Q. When did you finally begin your journey to the Prijedor opstina?

12 A. The next morning. We stayed overnight in Pale, the Bosnian Serb

13 capital, and then after a wait we were boarded on to a military sort

14 of mini bus and taken north from Pale to the town of Bijeljina.

15 Q. If you could utilize the map, Exhibit 181, and point out the route

16 which you travelled?

17 A. There is Pale and we are travelling up here, up here, through here to

18 Bijeljina where we take a break; and then we carry on through what is

19 called the corridor, Brcko, a series of dirt tracks through this

20 narrow stretch of land held by the Serbs here, through Derventa and

21 thence to Banja Luka. There is Banja Luka.

22 Q. Can you describe some of what you saw along that way?

23 A. Well, two very different sorts of community, if I may say so. One,

24 intact, normal places, people going about their normal lives and, in

25 other parts, areas of widespread and wholesale destruction, by which I

1 mean buildings burned out, buildings blown up, buildings strafed with

2 machine gunfire, either stretched out along the road. In the rural

3 areas or sometimes concentrated in urban settlements where, well,

4 almost every building you could see in some parts were destroyed. I

5 mean, this was the case in the town of Brcko which we went through in

6 that corridor that I pointed out earlier. So, there would be some

7 communities intact, other communities partially, if not wholly,

8 destroyed and the destroyed ones empty of people, obviously.

9 Q. You remained overnight in Banja Luka?

10 A. Yes, yes.

11 Q. The following day how did you travel to Prijedor?

12 A. We were met at the hotel to which they took us by a man introducing

13 himself as Major Milutinovic who said he was responsible for liaison

14 on behalf of the Bosnian-Serb army in Banja Luka. We went in the same

15 vehicle with him -- hang on, no, the vehicle came up behind. Forgive

16 me. We went in a car -- I cannot remember whose car it was -- to

17 Prijedor that morning with him through a very different landscape.

18 Q. What was different about the landscape there?

19 A. Well, for at least the second half of the journey virtually every

20 house that we passed on the side of the road, be it alone or in a

21 collection of houses, had been blown up, burned down, strafed with

22 fire, or all three, and we were skirting the town at that point or at

23 one point along the way of Kozarac before arriving in Prijedor.

24 Q. What was the scene in Kozarac as you went by?

25 A. The centre of the town was a little way off to our right, that is, to

1 the north of the road we were taking. We were looking up the hill at

2 it and, more immediately, at the houses beside the road down which we

3 were driving which were the outskirts of the town. Almost every

4 building, as I say, was destroyed, burned, shelled, the roof burned

5 off, charred, signs of fire, both artillery and machine gunfire,

6 against the walls. Every now and then, surreally, would be a house

7 intact, either intact and unattended, or sometimes even intact and

8 with people going about their business in the garden or hanging up

9 some washing or something like that. There were also in some of the

10 fields of the uninhabited areas people tending the fields as we were

11 getting towards harvest time.

12 Q. Did you ask Major Milutinovic about these people that you saw?

13 A. Yes, we did. We said: "Who are the people in the fields?" and we

14 asked him about the houses too. He said: "The people in the fields"

15 -- well, he answered variously. He said that some were Muslims and

16 Croats who had had, and I quote, "accepted the new order" and that

17 others were Serbs; that was the people working in the fields.

18 Q. If we could run the next segment of the video, please?

19 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: What did he say about the buildings? Was it a

20 two-part question?

21 MR. KEEGAN: No, your Honour.

22 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Sorry. I must be hearing something. You asked him

23 about the housing too. He said people in the field. What did he say

24 about the housing?

25 MR. KEEGAN (To the witness): Did you ask him about the disparity between

1 the houses which were completely intact and those which were destroyed

2 right next to them?

3 A. Well, we wanted to be sort of delicate about it. We were very much

4 under his command, as it were. The aim was to get to the camp so we

5 tried to be as tactful as possible. I remember asking: "So whose are

6 the intact houses?" He did not say anything and I said: "Are they

7 the Serbs?" He sort of grunted in a way that I took to mean

8 affirmative, sort of the "Hmmm", like that.

9 He then was telling us all the while about how 40,000 refugees

10 had left the area. At that point I did not see any reason to push him

11 on it. We wanted to get to the camp rather than engage in a

12 confrontation over who had or had not left the area. At that point it

13 did not seem politic or in my interests to engage him in an argument.

14 MR. KEEGAN: If we could run the tape now, please?

15 (The video was played)

16 Continue. Are these following scenes representative of the type of

17 destruction that you saw all along the trip?

18 A. Yes, this is the sort of thing. These houses are actually in better

19 condition than some of those we saw. I mean, the walls are in the

20 main still standing. I mean, a lot of them had been destroyed

21 completely -- more like that one that has just gone past. Yes, there

22 is a typical one. Yes, this is the sort of thing. I mean, it went on

23 for miles and miles and miles, both at Kozarac and in many

24 communities preceding.

25 Q. Was there any discussion with the escorts as you were driving by

1 these things?

2 A. Before meeting Mr. Milutinovic?

3 Q. Yes.

4 A. Yes, we asked the soldiers as we went through the town of Brcko,

5 which was a particularly, you know, extensively destroyed place, "What

6 is all this? What has been happening here? What happened to this

7 place?" because that really was a landscape to behold. They said:

8 "Oh, this is a Serbian town. This has been done by the Croats in the

9 fighting". At that time I did not know enough to disagree; were he to

10 say the same to me now, I would have done.

11 Q. If you could continue with the next segment, please? Is this a

12 representation of the effect you were talking about with having houses

13 standing next to each other, some totally destroyed while others in

14 perfect condition?

15 A. Yes, that is a representation of the proximity of them, yes. In some

16 places it was even more bizarre than that. You would have great rows

17 of destroyed buildings and then maybe sort of one in the middle intact

18 and inhabited. I drove down the same road just earlier on this year

19 and that is still the case.

20 Q. Thank you. You can stop the tape now. You indicated in the earlier

21 answer that Major Milutinovic had referred to the fact that there had

22 been 40,000 displaced persons. Did he make any particular references

23 to Kozarac?

24 A. Yes, he did talk about Kozarac. He talked about it as a place that

25 had seen considerable violence during the Second World War, and its

1 proximity to the concentration camp which was kept by the pro-Nazi

2 Croatian regime at that time in which the enemies of that regime were

3 kept and in turn detained and killed in large numbers. Kozarac had

4 been one of the assembly points for taking people to that camp, he

5 explained to us, and that was -- he did not say much more; he just

6 said that "large numbers of Serbs were killed around here in Jasenovac

7 which is just over there, and a lot of them came from Kozarac".

8 Jasenovac was a place familiar to me. I had been there during

9 my coverage of the Croatian war and I knew it to be a place where

10 large numbers of Serbs and also Muslim and Croat dissidents under that

11 regime, Jews and gypsies had been killed and detained in large

12 numbers; so I knew what he was talking about.

13 Q. Did you ask the Major about the camps which you wanted to visit while

14 you were driving around

15 A. We talked about that more than anything else and continued to say

16 that "We hoped we were going to Omarska. Omarska is where we have

17 asked to go. That is what Dr. Karadzic has said that we would be able

18 to do", and he kept saying: "Well, I want you to see somewhere called

19 Manjaca. That will be much more interesting for you", he said, "and,

20 as a soldier, I can help you get access to it. That is the place I

21 think you will go to", and it was clearly the place he wanted to take

22 us to.

23 Q. When you arrived in Prijedor, what was the first significant event

24 that made an impression on you?

25 A. We parked in the centre of the town outside the Civic Centre, the

1 Town Hall, and the first thing I saw was a long queue of women down

2 the side of one of the streets just outside the -- adjacent to the

3 Civic Centre.

4 Q. Can we run the video tape, please? Is that the queue of women you

5 are referring to?

6 A. Indeed it is.

7 Q. Did you have the opportunity to talk to those women?

8 A. Yes, we did.

9 Q. Why did they tell you they were there?

10 A. We talked to them both while we were waiting for our appointment

11 inside and

12 again afterwards. On both occasions they said more or less the same

13 thing. They said that this office they were queuing up outside,

14 although it was in the police station, was a refugee office, and that

15 they were being told that they could, at a price, leave. They had

16 diverse accounts of whether or not they wanted to leave.

17 Q. Stop the tape, please. Excuse me.

18 A. They said variously whether they wanted to leave or not, but the

19 thing that they were most concerned about, and the one thing that they

20 all had in common, was that their husbands and men folk or older sons

21 had been taken away from them and their homes, and they did not know

22 where they were. They were trying to get information off this police

23 station/refugee office -- it seemed to be the same thing -- as to

24 where their men folk might be.

25 The word that was going around between them and that they

1 conveyed to us was Omarska, and that made us more determined to get

2 where we hoped we were heading for. There were at that time the first

3 accounts that I heard direct of people talking about violence against

4 their homes and firing guns into their houses, but -- it sounds

5 callous now but I will say it -- we were so impatient to get on with

6 our trip to the camp that one paid now, perhaps not forgivably, rather

7 scant regard to this, took it on board but did not bother to make a

8 big thing of it; we just wanted to get on with the day's programme.

9 The most interesting thing that they said to us, therefore, was that

10 they had heard about Omarska and this is where they believed their men

11 folk were and had been for some weeks.

12 Q. When you got inside the building who did you first meet?

13 A. We went through various rigmarole downstairs, and then we were taken

14 up to a room to meet a group of men ready to hold some sort of

15 conference for us. The first man we were introduced to was the Chief

16 of Police. He was introduced as a man called Simo Drljaca. He

17 through -- he had an interpretress whose name was Nada Balaban, and

18 the introductions duly made to a Colonel called Vladimir Arsic,

19 introduced to us as the Commander for the military in the region, and

20 then two other principal civilian -- I took it they were civilian;

21 they were described as civilian officials although they were in

22 military uniform -- the President of what was described to us as the

23 Crisis Committee or Crisis Staff, a man called Milomir Stakic, and

24 another man who was described as his Deputy, Milan Kovacevic.

25 Q. If we could run the next segment of the video tape, please? (Video

1 tape played) Who was that man?

2 A. That man just passed then on the left is Dr. Milan Kovacevic.

3 Q. And this man?

4 A. This man is the Colonel, Vladimir Arsic.

5 Q. And that man?

6 A. This man is Milomir Stakic and he was the President of the Crisis

7 Staff and also the Mayor of the town.

8 Q. If you could stop the tape, please. Did you have in this meeting an

9 opportunity to hear each one of these men speak?

10 A. Yes, we did.

11 Q. Who began the meeting for that group?

12 A. The meeting was begun, well, as it were, the pleasantries were begun

13 by the police chief, Mr. Drljaca, but the main, sort of, the man who

14 kicked off the meeting, as it were, was Colonel Arsic of the military.

15 Q. What did he say to you?

16 A. He made a long speech. It was a long meeting -- longer than we

17 really wanted. He gave a long speech, the gist of which was that he

18 would like us to visit a camp called Manjaca which, as Commander of

19 the military in the area, he had authority to take us to because it

20 was a military camp for prisoners of war, he said. We said variously,

21 I mean, it was a speech into which we interjected and saying, "We want

22 to go to Omarska", and he said, "No, Manjaca will be much more

23 interesting for you because in Manjaca you have real Muslim fighters

24 and prisoners of war, but in Omarska you only have civilian refugees".

25 The more he went on in this way, the more determined we were, of

1 course, to go to Omarska.

2 One of the things that he said was that, you know, that there

3 was a, sort of, processing going on in Manjaca, and described

4 impending hearings for these prisoners of war to determine who was

5 guilty and who was not.

6 Now, I should say the thing about Manjaca, I mean, you might

7 think we were, sort of, looking a gift horse in the mouth, but Manjaca

8 had already been inspected by the International Red Cross. We knew

9 this and that, as it were, you know, that had been done and,

10 professionally speaking, because I was there doing a job rather than

11 preparing for this. Manjaca had also been visited by Mr. Roy Gutman of

12 the New York News Day, newspaper.

13 If you will forgive a calculated professional judgment, it was

14 not something that we wanted to do, to go to a camp that had already

15 been, if you will pardon the expression, "done" by somebody else.

16 Omarska was the place everyone was talking about; Omarska was the

17 place that we had got on the trail of; Omarska was what the women were

18 talking about, and this exchange with Colonel Arsic went on for a

19 while, to and fro. He gave us a bit of background on what had

20 happened in the area which was more fully explained later, but at the

21 end of this conversation he said that he did not have authority to

22 take us to Omarska anyway, because Omarska was not run by the

23 military, and we would have to ask elsewhere for permission.

24 Q. Did Dr. Milomir Stakic then enter into the discussion with you?

25 A. Yes, Stakic came in briefly, and made his main speech later on but,

1 as it transpired, the people to whom we would appropriately apply to

2 go to Omarska who were in charge of Omarska, ergo, had the authority

3 to take us there, were indeed sitting in the room. They were Mr.

4 Stakic, the Mayor of Prijedor, his Deputy, Mr. Kovacevic, and the

5 police chief.

6 So we said: "Well, we will ask these people then if we can go

7 there instead of you, Colonel. Thank you for your help but,

8 obviously, you are not in a position; maybe these people are". Mr.

9 Stakic then embarked on a long account of what, according to him, had

10 been happening in the area. He said that he had tried to make peace

11 with the Muslims but that they had refused his offers of peace. He

12 said that they had documentation on the distribution of, if I remember

13 rightly, 3,500 weapons or, sorry, weapons to 3,500 Muslim men in the

14 village of Kozarac. He said that the local Muslims were being whipped

15 up by extremists who had come in from outside.

16 The tenor was, you know, "We want peace with these people but

17 they do not want peace. They are preparing for some sort of

18 insurrection". Our request to go to Omarska under his authority,

19 rather than to have this conversation about what was going on in the

20 area, seemed to have got lost in his monologue at this point. I

21 cannot remember how the conversation fizzled out, but we then -- it

22 turned into a sort of round robin.

23 Q. Did you ask him specifically about the camps and who was in the

24 camps?

25 A. Yes, he said that -- I mean, he would not use the word "camps"; he

1 kept saying "transit centres", "centre", "centres", "There are not

2 any camps, there are only centres". He seemed to echo -- actually, it

3 got confusing and it is confusing now, it was confusing then; whereas

4 the Colonel had said: "Omarska is boring, you will not want to go

5 there, it is just civilians", it was either Mr. Stakic or his

6 colleague, Kovacevic, who at this point said: "Oh, there are

7 prisoners of war in Omarska. There are people being screened as to

8 whether or not they are in the army". We were (and, if you will

9 pardon me for being illogical, it was an illogical conversation), we

10 were going round and round and it was becoming unclear as to whether

11 whoever was in Omarska was being screened for being in the army or was

12 a civilian refugee; it depended on who you talked to.

13 It also depended on who you talked to in the room whether it

14 was being called a "camp" or a "centre" or a "transit holding point"

15 or something, but, of course, all this was happening through

16 translators, so the semantics are difficult. But, either way, you

17 know, we were getting impatient, I was getting impatient. We were

18 getting nowhere. All that was becoming clear was that Manjaca OK,

19 Omarska not OK; and the more the conversation went that way, the more

20 determined we were to go to Omarska, the more we insisted that we

21 must.

22 Q. Did Dr. Kovacevic enter into the discussion?

23 A. Yes, Dr. Kovacevic was introduced as the man in charge of the camp in

24 terms of its day-to-day running, along with the police chief. He

25 opened up by saying, fairly frankly: "Well, I do not actually want

1 you here anyway", or some such word. He said: "I do not approve of

2 your presence here", and he gave two reasons for that; one was, as I

3 recall, he said: "I have had a bad experience with the international

4 mass media", and he said that he feared for our security if we went to

5 Omarska.

6 The security question took us by surprise, I remember it

7 taking me by surprise, because every time we talked about Manjaca or

8 anything else, there did not seem to be a security problem, but there

9 always was a security problem whenever we talked about Omarska. Dr.

10 Kovacevic then ------

11 Q. Please continue.

12 A. Well, he, as it were, did his turn and he told us that there was not

13 anything that people like us could tell the Serbs about concentration

14 camps because he himself had been born in one. I found this quite

15 interesting, that here is the man who is introduced as running this

16 camp and it turns out he was born in a camp. I asked him about it,

17 and he said that he been born in Jasenovac which was the camp kept by

18 the Croats in the previous generation. This was taken as a -- he

19 talked a bit about the war. He made, retrospectively, a rather ironic

20 point, that it was some time before the outside world knew about the

21 concentration camps kept by the Nazis and even longer before they did

22 anything about it.

23 So I was quite interested -- I was waking up a bit at this

24 point and more interested in this sort of conversation because this

25 man's mind was clearly quite an interesting one, from a professional

1 point of view.

2 However, we were not getting very far in our request. I

3 believe at this point Mr. Stakic came back in and said that he wanted

4 to show us a video.

5 Q. What was the video supposed to be about?

6 A. Well, Mr. Stakic's points thus far had been Islamic insurrection. As

7 I said before, the 3,500 armed men, the Serbs seeking to defend

8 themselves and so on.

9 Q. Had Dr. Kovacevic made any references to crimes or atrocities

10 committed against Serbs?

11 A. Yes, he mentioned one place in which he said 20 Serbs had been killed

12 by Muslim gunmen. Some were outside Prijedor. I do not recall the

13 name of the village. He had also, I should say, been getting out maps

14 at various points during this conversation, and said something quite

15 interesting. He said -- he got out a map that had been devised in

16 1941 showing the greater Serbia -- we touched on that a bit yesterday,

17 this was the occasion I was thinking of -- and got out this map

18 showing great tranches of land which was called "Serbia" and said to

19 us, in an odd twist in the conversation, I remember he said: "You are

20 lucky to be here at this great moment in the history of the Serbs". I

21 thought it was a curious, rather flamboyant remark.

22 Q. Did he make reference to evidence or instances of Serbian babies

23 being killed?

24 A. Oh, yes. There was a line, during the depiction of this so-called

25 Islamic uprising, he said that (and I wrote this one down) that the

1 River Una, which runs along the edge of the Bihac pocket, there had

2 been, quote, "hundreds of Serbian babies nailed to crosses with their

3 eyes gouged out". Dr. Karadzic had told us yesterday that hundreds of

4 Serbian babies had been found nailed to crosses with their eyes gouged

5 out floating down the Drina river on the other side of the country, so

6 there was an allegation.

7 Q. In this video was there any proof of these atrocities or these

8 preparations for battle which they had talked about?

9 A. Well, the video that they showed started with a fact that a copy of

10 the Koran had been found in somebody's house, and then it went on to

11 show a casket of ammunition being opened up with lots of bullets and a

12 sort of bandaliero type thing inside, and there were various shots of

13 soldiers, but I do not remember it very well. I have to confess, I

14 rather lost interest in the video. There was a commentary which was

15 itself rather like a machine gun, and the thing was being variously

16 interpreted. I just remember hearing words like "jihad" and things,

17 and I was not -- I confess, I was not paying a great deal of attention

18 after the first five minutes.

19 Q. If we could run the rest of that video segment, please, with the

20 audio.

21 (The video tape was played)

22 Stop the video, please. How did the meeting end?

23 A. The meeting went on for quite a long while after the video, and it

24 ended with us saying: "Look, it is Omarska", and I think we made it

25 clear that we were not going to leave until we had been to this place

1 and could we, please, sort of hurry up and get there. We were told to

2 go outside and to wait outside on the street while they talked in

3 private, which we did. We carried on our interviews with the women

4 on the pavement actually at that time. This lasted about 20 minutes.

5 After a while, Mr. Drljaca, the police chief, came out of the civic

6 centre and said: "Come on, we are going, we are going Omarska", and

7 we organised our vehicles ready for take off.

8 Q. Did anyone attempt to join your group at that point?

9 A. Yes, to my professional annoyance, a car with British number plates

10 arrived with a colleague of mine called Tim Juda(?) from The Times at

11 the wheel and a colleague, another colleague from the French paper,

12 Liberation. "Hello, Tim", "Hello, Ed", usual sort of thing. "What

13 are you doing?" "Well, we are hoping to get to Omarska actually".

14 "Oh, really, do you mind if we come along?" The sort of public answer,

15 as always, was, "No, not at all, please do"; the private answer was,

16 "Dam!" So they joined our convoy.

17 Q. Were they allowed to stay in the convoy?

18 A. Well, unfortunately for them, they were not. I would rather you did

19 not ask my view on that. The police came up to them and said: "Who

20 are you? What are you doing?" They said: "Well, apparently, these

21 people are going to go to Omarska; we would like to come too". They

22 were asked by the police: "Well, are you part of this" -- they went

23 into another conclave, came out again, away again, said: "Are you

24 part of Dr. Karadzic's invitation?" They said no, and then the police

25 told them to get out of the convoy.

1 Q. After that did the convoy proceed?

2 A. Yes, we set off finally out of the town of Prijedor back along the

3 road that we had taken into the town towards Omarska. We had seen the

4 turn off to Omarska on the way and now we were going back towards it.

5 Q. Did you have an armed escort with you?

6 A. Yes, we did. We were in our bus. There was a car in front of us and

7 a blue painted amoured personnel carrier with a turret machine gun

8 thing on the top.

9 Q. If we could run the next segment of the video tape, please?

10 (The video tape was played)

11 Is that the convoy?

12 A. Yes, there we go.

13 Q. As you were travelling to the camp, you made reference earlier to a

14 battle scene which occurred.

15 A. Yes.

16 Q. Approximately how long into the trip had that occurred?

17 A. I do not recall, but it was after we turned off the main road, so it

18 must have been about 20 minutes or so, 25 minutes.

19 Q. Is this the scenes of that battle?

20 A. This is, indeed, the scene. What happened was there was shooting,

21 bullets came quite close over us and, well, I do not need to describe

22 it. You can see men rushing about. To our right here off camera is a

23 man crouching in a ditch firing. The amoured personnel carrier was

24 also firing quite dramatically into the woods. This chap seems to be

25 standing around. He is not very worried. Anyway, it was an exchange

1 of fire that lasted quite a time. I mean, it was -----

2 Q. Stop the tape, please.

3 A. Yes, it was a pretty -- an apparently serious one.

4 Q. How did this battle end?

5 A. Sorry?

6 Q. How did this battle end?

7 A. It ended because Major Milutinovic was saying: "It is not safe for

8 you". He said, I remember him saying, "They shoot journalists around

9 here, you know". He said: "It is not safe for you. The Muslims are

10 in the woods". He said: "There are mujaheddin in the woods and we

11 cannot go any further". We sort of took stock amongst ourselves. One

12 of us was quite worried and thought, well, maybe there are Muslims in

13 the woods and maybe they will shoot us but, as is more likely the

14 case, even if this is a fake, this is quite a good get out for them,

15 quote, you know, "The Muslim gunmen shot the journalists". That was

16 probably quite a good point, given what Dr. Karadzic had said the

17 previous day about, you know, you may be attacked and concerns for our

18 safety and so on.

19 I am afraid I was not being very sort of judicious at this

20 point. I was just so sort of cross and anxious to get on with it and

21 fed up with all this messing about, and I conferred with another

22 colleague. We just said: "Look, this is ridiculous. There is no war

23 going on around here. We have been driving around this place for

24 nearly 24 hours now. We have not heard a single shot. Now suddenly

25 there is a battle going on outside the place we want to go to. This

1 is rubbish. This is a prank".

2 I got quite angry with Major Milutinovic. I said: "No, we

3 will carry on, if you please. We insist. This is nonsense. Can we

4 keep going?" and then the battle abruptly stopped and we proceeded.

5 Q. If you can slow down just a bit?

6 A. I am sorry. I said: "Can we stop this prank and continue?" and we

7 did.

8 Q. Do you know now at this time at the scene of that battle site how far

9 you actually were from the camp?

10 A. Well, it was hard to tell -- I am sorry, I should have mentioned this

11 earlier. We went down the main road, past the turn off to Omarska.

12 "Oh, dear", heart sink, perhaps we are not going there after all that.

13 We instead take another turn off further on down the road to the

14 right and wind through all sorts of dusty tracks and back roads,

15 thinking, well, whatever is on the direct road to Omarska, which I

16 know now to be about 90 seconds drive from the turn off, they do not

17 want us to see.

18 We drove instead through these, as I say, tracks and back

19 roads which were in themselves very interesting, because there were

20 large numbers of burned and blown out houses of the kind you have seen

21 all around that back area and equally large numbers of houses with

22 white sheets sometimes hanging from the trees, white pillow cases,

23 white flags flying. We asked Mr. Milutinovic what these were, and he

24 said that these were -- oh, yes, yesterday we had seen them and he

25 said they were Muslims and Croats who had accepted the new order.

1 Today he said they were people waiting to leave.

2 So, yes, we -- I am sorry, we went up a back route, a long

3 back route, it emerged, to avoid going in through the front gate of

4 the Omarska iron ore mining complex.

5 Q. If we could show the next segment of the tape, please? Is this the

6 entrance of the convoy into the camp itself?

7 A. Yes, this is us going in the back gate of Omarska.

8 Q. If you could stop the tape right there, please, with the picture?

9 Who is the man on the left in that picture?

10 A. The man on the left is Major Milutinovic.

11 Q. The man in the middle?

12 A. The man in the middle is the police chief, Simo Drljaca.

13 Q. The man on the right?

14 A. The man on the right was introduced to us as the Commander on the

15 ground in the camp, a Mr. Mejakic.

16 Q. At this point what is occurring when you first arrive in the camp?

17 A. Well, what is occurring is what we sort of feared would be another

18 set of hurdles. There was a conversation about whether we can talk to

19 the prisoners and Mrs. Balaban, not in the picture translating what

20 one of them was saying, I do not know which, said that "none of these

21 prisoners want to talk to you". We had not actually asked any of them;

22 we had not seen any yet. But, initially, the briefing was: "They do

23 not want to talk to you", and that is what I can remember from that

24 bit of the conversation anyway.

25 Q. Where did you first go in the camp?

1 A. We went around the corner of the building you can see on the screen,

2 into a sort of yard area beyond that building looking towards the main

3 bit of the complex. We could see the buildings that make up the

4 complex.

5 Q. What part of the camp did you actually go into first?

6 A. Well, we stayed outside for a while and watched a group of men being,

7 well, if I can describe this, they were coming up in front of us

8 across the yard. This is before we went into the building. There was

9 a large, rusty red coloured hangar, a sort of large shed. There were

10 other buildings around but this was the biggest one. From the other

11 side of the yard, we could see a group of men emerging out of the door

12 in the side of this hangar, and they were sort of, quite obviously,

13 adjusting to the light -- it was bright sunlight and hot -- and they

14 were lined up by men with guns into formation.

15 There was a building to our left which is the one you seen on

16 the video. This building is over the other side of the yard. They

17 were made to jog in an obviously rehearsed camp drill across the yard,

18 drilled by the men with the guns, and watched from above, from the top

19 of the building we saw in the video, by a beefy machine gunner with a

20 big gun on a tripod, a pair of reflective sunglasses, I remember. He

21 was in a sort of position with a window, and he followed them with the

22 gun as they made this fairly wretched jog in line across the yard into

23 the building beside which we were standing.

24 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Excuse me. I had a question when the last video was

25 being shown, but I did not want to interrupt you, Mr. Keegan. But

1 there was a gentleman standing there with a beret on. He was the

2 furthest one from at least our views. Do you recall what colour that

3 beret was?

4 A. As I recall, it was a sort of reddish colour, maroon.

5 MR. KEEGAN: You will see it on the video.

6 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: I cannot wait, is that what you are telling me?

7 Hold on -- OK, I will.

8 MR. KEEGAN (To the witness): From there did you go into the canteen area

9 of that building?

10 A. Yes, we did.

11 Q. Could we run the tape again, please? Pick it up where we left off.

12 (The video tape was played)

13 Continue to run. Is this the view inside the canteen?

14 A. Yes, this is the inside of the canteen.

15 Q. What was your first impression when you saw these men eating?

16 A. Well, when they were running across the -- when they had been running

17 across the yard, I could see that some of them, at least, were in the

18 most appalling condition. They were very thin, others in reasonable

19 condition, others skeletal. When they were eating, they were eating

20 like -- well, we will see it -- they were eating fairly avidly. They

21 were eating as though they had not eaten for a very long time, as

22 though they had not seen food for a while. It was a fairly sobering

23 sight.

24 Q. Were you able to interview many of these individuals?

25 A. Yes, well, we tried -- that is the television crew doing so there.

1 They were under the watchful eyes of the guards who were patrolling

2 the canteen. We tried to talk to them as best we could. They were

3 reluctant to do so. The physical state of some of them told us more

4 than their words, quite honestly, as to what kind of treatment they

5 were getting. One boy did talk about how he had been arrested, but

6 there was very little to go on in terms of interviews and words. They

7 were manifestly scared -- scared stiff actually. One of them did say

8 something which I will never forget. He simply said: "I do not want

9 to tell any lies but I cannot tell the truth".

10 Q. Approximately how long was your group allowed to remain in the

11 canteen area?

12 A. We were in the canteen area for three lunch shifts.

13 Q. How long -----

14 A. Well, they were given a minute to eat each -- each shift was given a

15 minute to eat this bowl of watery bean stew and half a roll, and most

16 of them -- they were then lined up. They were called to order and

17 they could get back in line and, as you see here, they were then

18 marched out of the building as the next lot came in. A large number

19 of them, I noticed, were keeping their roll or part of the roll for

20 later. I remember writing that if they were eating even half that

21 much every day they would not be quite so thin and hungry.

22 Q. If you could stop the tape, please? Please continue.

23 A. Well, you saw the pictures. They were -- they looked malnourished,

24 their eyes were -- the worst of them, this is -- eyes bulging. You

25 asked if we could interview them. The answer is, on the understanding

1 of the word "interview" that I am used to, no, we could not. It

2 sounds stupid to say, but I am going to say it, that the stares that

3 they gave us told us more than what they told us. I mean, there is

4 something inimitable about somebody staring at you in that way that is

5 saying, "You know, look at me, and try to work out for yourself what I

6 am trying to say". If that sounds like gilding the lily, it is not,

7 because that was the atmosphere in that place at that time.

8 Q. From the canteen where did you go?

9 A. Well, we asked to see the sleeping quarters and we had heard there

10 was a medical centre. We wanted to see that. They said: "No, we are

11 going upstairs now" and, to my disappointment, we find ourselves in an

12 office and we said: "Are we going to see the sleeping quarters? Can

13 we see where these people are living and can we go into this hangar?"

14 I mean, it was the red building from which these men had emerged in

15 these three shifts that was, obviously, of interest. That was, you

16 know, that was where our journey clearly had to end. But they said:

17 "No, we are going to an office now for a briefing", and we then went

18 upstairs above to the floor above the canteen in the same building for

19 a briefing.

20 Q. If we could run the video tape with the audio this time, please?

21 (The video tape was played)

22 If we could stop the tape, please?

23 In addition to the discussion about the various categories of

24 prisoners in the camp, did you ask questions regarding whether

25 international organisations such as the Red Cross had been allowed in?

1 A. Well, I knew that the International Red Cross had not been allowed

2 in, but I asked, had the International Red Cross been allowed in. The

3 reply from Mr. Drljaca was that, "We would like to have the

4 International Red Cross in because it is so expensive to have this

5 place". I did not quite understand that. Mrs. Balaban then added

6 either her own comment or was translating somebody else's remark, I do

7 not recall whose, saying: "No, we do not need the Red Cross in here

8 because this is not a camp, it is a centre", so I was no wiser than

9 when I began asking the questions. I was also asking over and over

10 again: "Can we see the sleeping quarters, please?" to which there was

11 no quick response.

12 Q. What occurred as you left the office?

13 A. We finally left the office and Mr. Drljaca, or one of his people with

14 him, I cannot remember who, said: "We would like you to interview the

15 leader of the local Muslim party, the SDA, now", and they presented a

16 man in the corridor. Well, to be honest with you, I just wanted to

17 get on and see these sleeping quarters. I just wanted to get into the

18 shed. I did not want to sit around and interview somebody that they

19 had suggested I interview.

20 This was all time, these were all hurdles now. We had had

21 taste enough from the canteen as to what kind of "interviews" these

22 were going to be, if any. I did not want to talk to anybody from a

23 political party in a corridor surrounded by guards. This was not

24 going to get us anywhere in particular, I thought. "No, thank you".

25 We declined the invitation to interview this man and said: "Come on,

1 let us go and have a look in the hangar, please".

2 Q. Were there any other news agencies besides the ITN crews who

3 accompanied you on this trip?

4 A. Yes, sorry, I should have said this at the beginning. Back in Pale,

5 we had been joined by a television crew from the Bosnian Serb

6 television channel who were making a film of us visiting Omarska. I

7 did not actually take much notice of them. Most of the time I forgot

8 they were there until a rather bizarre episode in the office. Sorry

9 to return to the office, but in the office there was another exchange

10 of fire in the woods. They said: "Oh, it is the Muslims in the woods

11 shooting again", but paid no heed. We said: "Oh, enough of this

12 nonsense", but the Bosnian Serb TV then did an interview with Mr.

13 Drljaca saying: "Are we safe? Who are these people in the woods?"

14 He was saying: "It is the Muslims in the woods". That was the only

15 time I noticed them, but they were with us, yes, throughout.

16 Q. When you get outside what transpired?

17 A. There was a discussion about going into the hangar and seeing the

18 rest of the camp which then developed into something of an argument,

19 because they seemed to be saying that our visit had come to an end,

20 and we were saying: "But Dr. Karadzic had said that we could see

21 whatever we wanted", and they said, well, you know, they said various

22 things.

23 One of the things was that we were not safe in the camp. Mrs.

24 Balaban said something that I found particularly interesting. When we

25 challenged her on Dr. Karadzic's promise that we could see whatever we

1 wanted, she said something to the effect of: "He told us you could

2 see this and this, but not that", suggesting that there had been some

3 instruction from him as to what we could or could not see within the

4 camp.

5 Q. Can we see the next part of the video tape, please, with the audio?

6 (The video tape was played)

7 If you could stop the tape, please? Was that the end of your

8 visit in the Omarska camp?

9 A. It was almost the end of the visit. Just after that, the gentleman

10 you see in the flack jacket, Ian Williams of ITN, and I, I said:

11 "Come on, Ian, let us just walk over there and see what happens". We

12 took a few paces and the two gentlemen, Mr. Drljaca and Mr. Mejakic,

13 you see retreating, then sort of moved around in an arc as though to

14 block us, and I felt, perhaps, there was a line being drawn by that

15 manoeuvre that was not worth crossing.

16 In the exchange, one of the bits that gets slightly lost was

17 Mr. Drljaca saying that we are not safe here; whereas that had

18 previously applied to the supposed Muslims in the woods, one sort of

19 began to wonder where the threat might come from if we pushed it.

20 Then that was it.

21 I have just remembered something pertaining to interviews in

22 the canteen; would be it be appropriate?

23 Q. Yes, please.

24 A. Sorry, I apologise. I have suddenly remembered something, looking at

25 the film. I did an interview which is not on the camera with a man

1 who had a wound down the side of his face. I said: "Where did you get

2 that from?" He said: "Oh, I fell over", and I remember going, "Fell

3 over?"

4 I met this man on a frontline when he was a soldier three

5 years later. It was an extraordinary moment. He said: "I know you".

6 I said: "I am sorry, I do not remember you", because he had doubled

7 in weight by then. He said: "Do you remember when you were in

8 Omarska there was a man with a wound to the side of his face who said

9 he had fallen over?" I said: "Yes, of course I remember him". He

10 said: "That was me". He said: "Well, no, I was lying. There was a

11 guard just behind you. I hoped you would believe me. I think the

12 lady from the television believed me". It was, sort of, just, sorry,

13 to round up that point about not being able to do interviews. It was

14 an extraordinary moment having this man recognise me, and we talked

15 about a lot about what had happened since, but perhaps just in

16 parenthesis I remembered that, watching the film.

17 Q. What did the group do next?

18 A. We abandoned our attempt to get into the shed for the reason I have

19 just explained, and we got back in our bus and went to Trnopolje camp,

20 again through the same sort of landscape that I have described before

21 of destroyed houses and some intact houses with white sheets and

22 pillow cases flying from the windows or trees.

23 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Before you move on to that camp, you indicated

24 earlier in your testimony that Roy Gutman from News Day had discovered

25 Omarska. I gather that was before this trip that we have just seen,

1 your trip, is that correct? Then I wanted to know whether they had

2 gotten or he had gotten into the camp Omarska.

3 A. I am sorry if that was not clear. What had happened precedent to

4 that visit was that Mr. Gutman had heard about a camp called Manjaca,

5 which was the military camp that they were trying to get us to go to

6 see. He had a couple of days before our visit, that was August 5th,

7 on August 2nd he had published a story from inside Manjaca.

8 He had also talked to refugees from the Prijedor region in

9 Croatia who were talking about Omarska, and had also interviewed some

10 people who had been in Omarska, but he had not been in the camp. So

11 he had been writing about Omarska. My colleague, a woman called

12 Maggie O'Kane of The Guardian had also been writing about Omarska

13 based on a mixture of, in Maggie's case, people from the area who had

14 heard about it, much like the women in the streets in Prijedor but who

15 had got out. Mr. Gutman had found some people who had been in the camp

16 and had interviewed them in, I believe, Croatia but I am not sure

17 exactly where. But nobody had been inside the camp before that day.

18 It had been mentioned on the basis of testimony but not visited by

19 anybody.

20 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Thank you.

21 MR. KEEGAN: If we could run the tape, please?

22 (The video tape was played)

23 What were your first impressions when you reached Trnopolje?

24 A. Right. Well, we pulled up across a scrap of land from this scene

25 here -- can I switch this off? I will describe it better if I am not

1 looking at it.

2 Q. Yes.

3 A. We pulled up across a patch of land from a remarkable scene. I

4 remember thinking, this does not belong in this time. I have no idea

5 who was more amazed to see who, us, the people that were standing

6 behind this barbed wire fence, or them to see a bunch of people with

7 notebooks and television camera getting out of a bus.

8 We walked across the stretch of land towards them. We shook

9 hands with some of them. It was bewildering. I am going to describe

10 who was behind the wire with the video off because I can do it better

11 if I am not trying to accompany the picture. Some of them were in what

12 might be described as "normal" condition, others were in appalling

13 condition ---

14 Q. If we could -----

15 A. -- skeletal and malnourished and standing up behind this barbed wired

16 fence.

17 Q. Did you get the opportunity to talk to some of these men?

18 A. Yes, we did.

19 Q. Did you ask them where they had come from?

20 A. Yes, they had come from all over the place. The man that I started

21 talking to first whose emaciated figure then became known throughout

22 the world as a result of these pictures, his name was Fikret Alic and

23 he was from Kozarac and he had, you know, we were now -- our heads

24 were full of Omarska and now here we were in this other place. I

25 said: "Were you in Omarska or have you been here, or what have you

1 been doing?" He said: "No, I was in another place call Keraterm".

2 Here was a name I had not heard before. I said: "Good Lord, well,

3 what is Keraterm like?" He said: "Well, it is much worse than here".

4 He told the story about how he had been, well, he said that

5 about 200 people were killed in one night there, and his friend who

6 had also been in Keraterm said that Omarska was even worse, and they

7 had come from Keraterm that morning, said Mr. Alic, the thin, the very

8 thin man. That was quite a long conversation with him.

9 He had some friends with him, as I said, who were also in

10 Keraterm who told the same sort of story. I said: "200 people in one

11 night? How do you know?" He said: "I know because I was there" and

12 -- well, to be honest one went on a kind of over-drive at this point.

13 I mean, one was writing down as, you know, bits that were coming,

14 that people were saying, and conducting interviews as methodically as

15 one could in the circumstances when confronted with this sight.

16 Q. Were you then guided around the camp by a guard?

17 A. Yes, it was surprisingly easy at Trnopolje to give the guards the

18 slip after what had happened in Omarska, and there was one man there

19 -- his name was Ibrahim, and he sort of whisked me away and said:

20 "Come on, you know, you can come inside", and so I followed him.

21 Q. What did he tell you about the camp?

22 A. Yes, well, yes, he did, and showed me around the inside. It was a

23 school, Trnopolje, a school and its grounds, and he said: "Everything

24 happens here". I said: "Is it as bad as Omarska?" He said: "No, no,

25 no, it is nothing like Omarska, but there is violence and there is

1 beating", and he said something, he said: "And they give the women a

2 hard time". I think we touched on this theme yesterday.

3 One was so sort of dazed concentrating on, trying to

4 concentrate on one thing at a time, that I let that slip by, and even

5 the women in our party who had similar things did not sort of latch on

6 to this thing of rape that we were actually being told about, but we

7 were talking about conditions, beating. We wanted to anchor this

8 thing down somehow.

9 But Ibrahim told me that people were coming here from other

10 camps, that they were coming here from villages. In the grounds of

11 the school, we sat, I sat down and, using him as an interpreter,

12 although his English was not great, it was OK, started to talk to

13 families that were encamped out in this heat, in this crowded place.

14 Q. Did he describe how the conditions in the camp compared to the

15 conditions out in the town, in some of the local communes?

16 A. Yes, both he and some of the people I spoke to -- let me describe the

17 conditions in the camp first, and then we can make more sense of it.

18 Open latrines, that is to say, holes full of excreta, so there was a

19 terrible stink; inside the school, and it was surreal because they

20 would have thing likes "photo club" written on the door, but inside

21 would just be, I mean, what seemed to be sort of piles of people -- I

22 cannot put it better than that -- the place was full to bursting,

23 although the temperature was high; and the odd bit of bread perhaps

24 being, sort of, you know, cut up to small pieces and distributed

25 between a family.

1 I sat down and talked to some people, mainly the women with

2 their children, and one of them said: "Well, I came here

3 voluntarily", and I thought, you know, "From what do you come here

4 voluntarily?" She said that the violence in the villages was so much

5 worse, that this was a safe place to come, at least here there was

6 some sort of company, she said, I remember.

7 They used the term "fighting" sometimes, sometimes they used

8 the term "soldiers"; people talked about their houses being burnt,

9 they did not have anywhere to go so they would come here. They also,

10 some of them, said that they had paid to come into this place.

11 The authority, the people -- I mean, later just before we

12 left, taking this up with the people, the crowd you have seen on the

13 video, they sort of made a virtue of the fact that people had come

14 here voluntarily. They seemed to think that was some kind of

15 mitigating aspect to all this. I drew just the opposite conclusion.

16 I just thought, well, if you flee here, then what are you fleeing

17 from?

18 Q. Did you get a chance to tour the medical facilities in the camp?

19 A. Yes, there was a sort of makeshift or what might be called hospital.

20 There was a sort of sweaty, crowded room with a very paultry

21 selection of bottles and a doctor whom we met and who was, rather like

22 the people in the canteen of Omarska, seemed to be unwilling to go

23 into too many details about what his work was. But he did give my

24 colleague, Penny Marshal, who is the female reporter you have seen on

25 the video, a roll of film which she took and which we later developed.

1 Q. If we could run the video, please, with the audio?

2 (The video was played)

3 Is this the man that you see in the picture now representative of a number

4 of the prisoners that you saw there?

5 A. Yes, indeed. I may or may not have seen this particular man. I do

6 not remember. But, yes, there were plenty of people like him.

7 Q. If we could stop the tape there, please? You indicated earlier that

8 you had interviewed people within the camp who related to you stories

9 about Omarska and Keraterm in their experiences there, is that

10 correct?

11 A. Yes, indeed, we learned more about Omarska and Keraterm from talking

12 to the people in this camp than we had done in Omarska itself.

13 Q. If we could run this interview, please, with the audio?

14 (The video was played)

15 Continue the tape, please. Stop the tape there, please. Was that

16 interview, brief interview, that we have heard representative of the

17 interviews which you conducted with your colleagues in the camp, the

18 information provided in that interview?

19 A. Yes. I mean, that interview with the doctor, I mean, I was sort of

20 mooching about at the back there. I mean, he was not going to -- he

21 obviously was not saying very much. But one could gather, as we had

22 done in the canteen, that what was not being said was as important as

23 the few remarks he was able to make.

24 Q. You said that the doctor gave you a film or actually gave a film to

25 Penny Marshal.

1 A. Yes, he gave it to her. She was doing the interviews.

2 Q. What did that film show?

3 A. Once developed, we saw that they were snapshots of the bodies -- I

4 cannot say "bodies" -- the torsos and parts of the bodies of some of

5 the people he had treated which showed severe bruising, widespread

6 bruising, signs of beating and torture of various kinds.

7 Q. After you left the Trnopolje camp where did you go?

8 A. We went straight back to Belgrade -- a long drive.

9 Q. Did you remain in the Belgrade area while your stories were published

10 and broadcast?

11 A. Yes, I did. It was late in the evening of August 5th that we got

12 back and I wrote my article about all this on the day of August 6th,

13 and it was published on August 7th. The ITN material was transmitted

14 on the night of the 6th. I would just like to say one thing before we

15 leave Trnopolje which I think is important, if I may? Could I? I am

16 sorry to -- I do not wish to ---

17 Q. Yes.

18 A. -- that there was a man there from the Yugoslav Red Cross whom I

19 interviewed, and it was particularly illuminating. I do not recall

20 his name at the moment. I think it is Isic, but I can get it for you,

21 if you want. I asked, I said: "What do you think of the conditions

22 here?" He said: "I think they are fine". I asked him: "Have you

23 been into Omarska?" and he said: "Yes, I have certainly been into

24 Omarska, and I would say, in my professional assessment, that the

25 health of the people there is very good except for some diarrhoea".

1 Sorry, I wanted that on the record because that was an interview I did

2 that I thought was important.

3 Q. What was the reaction from the Bosnian Serb leadership to the reports

4 you published in the TV coverage?

5 A. A pretty explosive reaction all around. The Bosnian Serb leadership

6 said various things. General Mladic, as I recall, said that the

7 pictures that had been transmitted were forgeries and photo montages,

8 or else pictures showing Serbian prisoners in Muslim camps. I cannot

9 remember Dr. Karadzic's exact words, but they suggested that there had

10 been some exaggeration -- I think they suggested that he was surprised

11 by what had been discovered, while it was, forgive me, it was the

12 Yugoslav President, Milan Panic, who said that anybody running such

13 places would be punished and that they should be closed down.

14 Q. What was the reaction from the international community?

15 A. Outrage and resolved to do something about it. I recall President

16 Bush saying that something to the effect of (and again I can get the

17 exact quote, if you want it) that everything necessary must be done to

18 end this, and to stop this, what is going on, and my hotel telephone

19 on August 7th was ringing continually.

20 MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, that might be a convenient time to take the

21 afternoon recess.

22 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Yes. That last comment that you added, Mr.

23 Vulliamy, as I recall earlier in the testimony, maybe several days

24 ago, a witness told us that one of the camps was run somehow in

25 conjunction with the Yugoslav International Red Cross or, at least,

1 there was some involvement, unless I have mischaracterised the

2 testimony. I had a question then as to how that could be involved.

3 You have answered it now. So thank you for adding that or, at least,

4 adding what they said about it. Thank you. We will stand in recess

5 for 20 minutes.

6 (4.00 p.m.)

7 (The court adjourned for a short time)

8 (4.25 p.m.)

9 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Mr. Niemann?

10 MR. NIEMANN: Your Honours, we have brought an out of turn witness down to

11 The Hague to follow on after this witness, but I have spoken to Mr.

12 Keegan and he expects to take the rest of the day or almost the rest

13 of the day, within a matter of minutes before 5.30. The witness is

14 waiting in the witness room at the moment, but he has suffered a

15 family bereavement some 40 days ago. According to his religion, he

16 needs to attend a ceremony 40 days after the event. He is most

17 anxious to leave if he possibly could. He is prepared to stay, of

18 course, if necessary. But, as I think we will probably only get five

19 minutes into his evidence, I am wondering if your Honours would mind

20 giving him leave to go and come back at a later date to give his

21 evidence, if that were possible? I do not think the court will be

22 inconvenienced for any longer than about five minutes, if at all and

23 probably not at all, I suspect.

24 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Mr. Keegan, how long do you think you will require

25 for direct of Mr. Vulliamy?

1 MR. KEEGAN: I would expect probably at a minimum 30 minutes.

2 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Will there be cross-examination of Mr. Vulliamy?

3 MR. KAY: Yes, we anticipate there will be, your Honour.

4 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Do you think that you will require more than fifteen

5 minutes?

6 MR. KAY: It is difficult to say, but I do not think the court will be

7 inconvenienced as we are aware of some other business that we have to

8 deal with anyway, as a matter of law.

9 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: That is why I said 15 minutes. If you take 30

10 minutes and you take 15 minutes, then that would leave us 15 minutes

11 to deal with the matters that we wanted to discuss. That witness may

12 be excused for today, Mr. Niemann. Thank you for having him or her

13 here.

14 MR. NIEMANN: Yes, your Honour.

15 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Him, I guess. We will resume with him on Tuesday at

16 10.00.

17 MR. NIEMANN: He is out of turn, so we will go back to the correct order,

18 your Honour.

19 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Very good, thank you. Mr. Keegan, would you

20 continue, please?

21 MR. KEEGAN: Thank you, your Honour. (To the witness): In addition to

22 the responses from government officials, did the ICRC and other

23 non-governmental organisations indicate that they were going to take

24 action with regard to these camps?

25 A. As I recall, yes, they did. The reactions were varied across the

1 board. I remember that the issue of camps on all sides being raised,

2 and I remember almost universally the clamour being for Omarska at

3 least to be closed down and I understand that it was almost

4 immediately.

5 Q. Did you have another meeting with Dr. Koljevic in Belgrade after the

6 release of your stories about the camp?

7 A. Yes, I did. It was a surprising one. This is Professor Nikola

8 Koljevic, the Vice President of the Bosnian Serbs, Dr. Karadzic's

9 Deputy, who had I think, although I cannot really tell, been in

10 overall supervision of our visit. The atmosphere in Belgrade on the

11 day of publication was not altogether hospitable. I spent most of the

12 day in and out of television studios and talking to radio stations;

13 and there was a surprising invitation from Professor Koljevic to tea

14 and cakes at a hotel in Belgrade.

15 I do not remember much about the conversation, but I do

16 remember very vividly one remark from him that surprised me and it

17 went something like this. He said in a semi-humorous, semi-mocking

18 way: "So you found them then? Congratulations", he said, "you will do

19 well out of this, young man. Took you a long time, did it not? Three

20 months and all that happening so near Venice. All you people", by

21 whom I think he meant the outside world, "all you people could worry

22 about was poor, poor Sarajevo, multi-cultural cross-roads of Europe,

23 university town", and he talked about the pretty girls in Sarajevo,

24 poor Sarajevo, and concluded his remarks by saying: "None of you ever

25 had your holidays in Prijedor, did you? No Winter Olympics in

1 Omarska".

2 It was an extraordinary monologue. He had given a press

3 conference as well that day that I had attended, and I took his remark

4 to be a piece of barbed wit and mockery at us as representing in a way

5 the world for having gone on covering the war, as most of us had

6 done, concentrating on the siege of, as he put it, "poor, poor

7 multi-cultural Sarajevo", while they got on with the business, as he

8 put it, "so near Venice" operating the camps that we had just

9 uncovered with impugnity undetected and unhindered. It was a

10 particularly bizarre conversation.

11 Q. After the release of the articles about the camps, Omarska and

12 Trnopolje, was there, in fact, a return by the ITN crew and others to

13 Trnopolje?

14 A. Yes, they went back.

15 Q. Could we run the tape again, please, with the audio? Can we stop the

16 tape there, please? Did you get an opportunity to look at that

17 photograph which you have just pointed to in the newspaper?

18 A. Yes, I did. I looked at all the photographs. They are from the film

19 that he had given Penny during the visit that I was on.

20 Q. What was that particular photograph of?

21 A. A picture of a man's body bruised all down the side, if I identify it

22 correctly, side and the back -- large scale bruising.

23 Q. That photograph came from the film which the doctor had given Penny

24 Marshal?

25 A. Yes, it did.

1 Q. If we can run the rest of the tape, please? Mr. Vulliamy, have you

2 recently gone back to the Prijedor area and interviewed several of the

3 persons whom you dealt with in 1992?

4 A. Yes.

5 Q. Among those people whom did you interview?

6 A. Well, first of all, this is in February of this year, for reasons,

7 part professional, part personal, I suppose, I wanted to see the place

8 again now that it was possible to go back into that area, and the

9 first thing we did, I did, was to go back to the camp itself, and the

10 first people I spoke to were sentries at the gate of the front

11 entrance this time to what was now an empty iron ore mining complex,

12 disused.

13 Q. Did you ask those guards about the mining facility and about when it

14 had been a camp?

15 A. Yes, in a circumspect way. I was not certain whether I was grata or

16 not in the area and did not have papers from Pale to be there, so I

17 was being circumspect at first, and asked them about -- first of all,

18 we said: "Well, I hear that there were Serbian refugees here only

19 last year", and they said, yes, there were, and talked about that a

20 bit. Then: "So what about the camp? What about the concentration

21 camp that was here a few years ago?" They said: "There was no camp

22 here. That was all lies", and they were friendly enough. They said:

23 "No, it was a mine, it was an iron ore mine. I should know, I was

24 working here in the summer of 1992", and I thought, well, I believe

25 that you were working here in 1992, but I do not believe that it was

1 an iron ore mine because I can remember it. Of course, I did not let

2 on that I had been there and, sort of, bit my tongue.

3 I said: "Well, what about the television pictures then?" They

4 said: "That was a video montage, Muslim propaganda. I know how they

5 do it", and they were laughing, and we were laughing along with them,

6 about how they would construct this video montage. I remember we

7 asked: "Well, we have just driven from Prijedor and all the houses

8 have been burned along the route, whose houses were they?" They said:

9 "Oh, it is Muslims". We said: "Well, why did they go?" and these

10 boys, the two of them, said: "I do not know. They just up and

11 left". I do not know. It is as though I myself had packed my bags

12 and gone.

13 We returned to this matter of the camp: "Are you sure that in

14 August there was no camp here?" and they said: "No, there was no camp,

15 nothing, all lies". It was a pretty peculiar conversation.

16 Q. Did you ask them for their names?

17 A. Yes, that was -- that conversation ended very surreally and it went

18 like this: we had been taking notes and said: "What are your names,

19 please?" They said: "No names. That is a secret. We have had a

20 nice conversation, no names". I said: "Why not?" They said: "Oh,

21 you know what can happen", and I am quoting as accurately as my memory

22 serves -- I can give you the exact words if you want but this is

23 pretty exactly what they said -- "You know how it is; you can be

24 walking down the street one day and they will get you and take you to

25 The Hague". "The Hague?" "Yes", they said. One of them said: "The

1 Muslims know me, I know them, they know what I have done and that is

2 how it is. They can just take you to The Hague. Look what happened

3 to Dule Tadic". And I said: "Sorry, who?" "Dule Tadic in The

4 Hague", and I said, well, my colleague actually said: "Do you know

5 him?" and they said, this one man answered: "Oh, yes, we know him.

6 He had a nice restaurant in Kozarac", and we let the conversation end

7 with them saying: "He was getting some hassle from Muslims who were

8 jealous of his restaurant and wanted to open a rival restaurant". Then

9 I figured that it was best for the conversation to conclude and we

10 left on amicable terms, if you like, but it was a curious twist to the

11 end of the conversation.

12 Q. Did you subsequently interview some of the officials in Prijedor whom

13 you had met in 1992?

14 A. Yes, I thought it would be interesting to seek out once again Mr.

15 Drljaca, the police chief, Dr. Kovacevic, the man who when the

16 television crews had returned to Trnopolje and Omarska during that

17 last piece of video we had seen -- I was not there for that actually;

18 I had gone off to do something else -- it was Kovacevic, the hefty man

19 with the moustache and the t-shirt, you will recall, who was given the

20 unenviable job of justifying the whole thing to the cameras which were

21 by then, in terms of hundreds of them, down there quite a circus, not

22 just the ITN that time; and he was given the task of justifying it.

23 So I thought it would be interesting to go and find him again.

24 I also wanted to find Mr. Stakic, the Mayor, the rather bald headed

25 gentleman, who was nominally in charge of the operation, so I set

1 about looking for all three of them.

2 Q. Did you, in fact, interview Mr. Drljaca?

3 A. No, we did not. He was permanently out of town which is either true

4 or, in my experience, is the shorthand for "he does not want to talk

5 to you".

6 Q. Did you get to interview Dr. Kovacevic?

7 A. Yes, at length and this was a pretty extraordinary interview.

8 Q. What is your most vivid impression from that interview?

9 A. Well, it turned out that Dr. Kovacevic, it turned out that he was a

10 doctor, he had told us back in 1992, if you recall, that he had been

11 born in Jasenovac, in the concentration camp, and that was one reason

12 why I wanted to go and talk to him. I found out that he was the

13 director of the Prijedor hospital by this time.

14 We went to see him at about half past nine to 10 o'clock in

15 the morning. He told us that it had been a bad year -- a good year

16 for grapes, but there was no -- the jam factories were all shut, shame

17 to let them go to waste, as so he pulled a bottle of brandy out of the

18 cupboard and started drinking it. During the two hours or so that we

19 talked, he said that -- he drunk quite a lot of this brandy, and said

20 things that I really was not expecting to hear.

21 He said that Omarska had been planned as a detention centre,

22 but had (and I quote almost exactly) "turned into something else". He

23 said that he attributed that to what he called "collective madness".

24 We asked him about the burned down houses along the road and the camps

25 and he said: "It all looks very carefully planned if your view is

1 from New York, but here on the ground when", and I think he said

2 something, "when everything is coming apart inside your head, when

3 things are breaking apart inside people's heads where everything is

4 burning", and he talked about this collective madness.

5 As the conversation continued and, to be frank, as he

6 continued to drink the brandy, he seemed to become more and more

7 haunted and his eyes were bulging. He was clearly tortured by what he

8 was talking about. At one point I remember we asked him -- I was

9 with a colleague from another newspaper -- we asked him: "How much

10 responsibility do you take for this?" and he said -- I do have a

11 transcript of this and we can check it against, if you like, but to my

12 best recollection he said: "To say that I was -- if someone -- if I

13 was" -- pardon me -- "if I was acquitted of a responsibility in that

14 collective madness, that would not be right". He then qualified it by

15 saying, and forgive me if I quote him in this way, the court, but this

16 is what he said, he said: "If Dusko Tadic killed somebody and I did

17 not, then it is not the same thing; but if I run this hospital well,

18 then I am responsible for that success. If I run this hospital badly,

19 then I am to blame". Those were his words, if not exactly, very

20 closely.

21 He then said that he wanted to get out, that he was like an

22 animal trapped in the area. He said he wanted to go and practise

23 abroad. He told us a bit about his career. He corrected his earlier

24 remarks and said that he had not been born in Jasenovac, he had spent

25 part of his childhood there, and gave quite a convincing account of

1 how his aunt had taken him while his mother was fleeing through the

2 woods around Kozarac.

3 Q. Did he indicate to you during this conversation whether the situation

4 that developed through 1990 into 1992 resulting in the conflict, did

5 he categorise that as a destruction of Bosnia and why or why that was

6 not necessary for that to happen?

7 A. Yes, despite his apparent remorse and acceptance of responsibility,

8 he said that he thought it was, and I quote almost exactly "necessary

9 to destroy Bosnia". He had kept the view that we cannot live

10 together, that the Muslims and the Serbs cannot live together, and

11 that it was necessary to destroy the country of Bosnia in which both

12 lived at the same time. But he continued in a different vein when we

13 asked him why he had left political life, and his answer was: "I left

14 political life because I saw too many evil things. If you have to do

15 things by killing people, well, then that is my personal secret", and

16 he added shortly afterwards, "Now my hair is white, I do not sleep too

17 well".

18 Q. Did you ask him about the link between what happened in Jasenovac and

19 what happened in Omarska?

20 A. Yes, we did, we talked a lot about Jasenovac. Perhaps I should say a

21 little bit about what he told us about what he had done after

22 Jasenovac. He said that he grown up after the war. He had gone to,

23 of all places, Germany and studied anaesthetics and then come back to

24 his home area. We said to him: "But, hang on, Jasenovac was the

25 Croats. Omarska for which you were responsible was mostly Muslims,

1 you know, why, what is the connection?" He came up with an

2 intelligent reply. He said: "If you get bitten by a snake, you become

3 afraid of lizards, but a snake is still a snake and a lizard is still

4 a lizard".

5 Q. Did you pointedly ask him what that reference was to?

6 A. Yes, it was clear in the conversation that the snake was the Croats

7 and the lizards were the Muslims; that what he was saying was: "We

8 were bitten by the Croats in my generation and we were afraid of the

9 lizards", which I took to be the Muslims, "but the snake was still a

10 snake and the lizard was still a lizard". For a man in his cups, he

11 made sense in that way.

12 We asked him, had he ever met any of the prisoners

13 subsequently after the camp had closed down. He described an

14 extraordinary episode. He said he had been called up for medical

15 reasons to a frontline near Doboj where there was fighting, and that

16 -- these frontlines are often only metres apart and there was quite of

17 lot of parle between the two sides during the dulls. Anyway, he said:

18 "And there was a man on the other side of the trenches, on the other

19 side, and I recognised him", he said, "he had been a prisoner". He

20 described a conversation in which they played each other their various

21 propaganda radios. He said: "He was playing me some Muslim music and

22 Muslim stuff, and I was playing him our Serbian radio". He said we,

23 together, we cursed those people. He said to me, and it was -- he

24 said: "Oh, God, help me. He had been in Omarska". That was towards

25 the end of the conversation.

1 Q. Did you also interview Dr. Stakic?

2 A. Yes, this was a different interview. I found him. By the way, I

3 should say that before this year I did not know these people were

4 "Dr." anything; you know, it was Stakic and Kovacevic. I did not know

5 they were doctors. It turned out that Stakic, the President of this

6 Crisis Staff, the Mayor of Prijedor, was also a doctor and he was now

7 running a day care health centre.

8 He came down to meet us at the health centre, and this was a

9 very different interview. He was composed, well in control of

10 himself. There was a glass of brandy, but only one and did not

11 produce any remorse. It was a peculiar conversation.

12 He had with him a man he introduced as his deputy at the

13 health centre. We started talking about the war. He said exactly the

14 same thing as he had told us those three years ago. Neither of these

15 men, by the way, recognised me. He said, in fact, yes, he said there

16 were 3,500 armed men in Kozarac. It was an exact repetition three

17 years later of what he had said on that morning before we went into

18 the camps.

19 We asked about Omarska and the man introduced to us as his

20 deputy suddenly butted in and said: "Omarska was a mine; there was no

21 camp in Omarska". Dr. Stakic changed the theme slightly and said:

22 "Oh, this is my lawyer", so now this man had become a lawyer. Mr.

23 Stakic then directly contradicted what his lawyer had just said and

24 said: "Oh, Omarska was a place where people were taken who had taken

25 up arms against us, and they were being vetted as to whether or not

1 they had started the insurrection against us. These were prisoners of

2 war". So there is another version as to who was in Omarska.

3 Q. How did he describe the pictures that were shown on TV in 1992 after

4 your visit to the camps?

5 A. I do not actually recall. I think that the man introduced as the

6 lawyer butted in at one point and said: "Oh, they were forgeries",

7 and I think Mr. Stakic mumbled something about them being Serbian

8 prisoners in Muslim camps. It was clear that this whole conversation

9 was being taped. He started messing around with a tape recorder, and

10 then it became clear that the man who had started off as the deputy,

11 who then became the lawyer, was some sort of policeman or bodyguard,

12 and our interpreter had recognised him and was trying to convey this

13 to us with sign language, pointing to the tape recorder.

14 The conversation ended, but we kept asking about Omarska, and

15 the reply was always "Jasenovac", "Jasenovac", "Jasenovac", so we were

16 going round and round. We would ask about one lot of camps and the

17 reply would be about another lot of camps in the previous generation

18 which I found interesting.

19 We ended up, Dr. Stakic said -- it was dark outside by now --

20 he said: "It is very brave of you to be here with us at this time of

21 night", which we took as a good cue to make our way back to Banja

22 Luka.

23 Q. Did you ask him about the effect of the Serb fight and what the goal

24 was for these years that the conflict had been going on?

25 A. Yes, he said that the Serbs were defending themselves, defending

1 their people, and there was a line from his sort of this side kick

2 man, the secret policeman, lawyer, whatever he was, who said that,

3 you know: "We learned our history in concentration camps". Then we

4 asked why he had left political office. He said that he had gone back

5 to continue his specialisation in neuropsychiatry, but now he was

6 going to stand again for the Mayor of Prijedor for Dr. Karadzic's SDS

7 party.

8 Q. Did you have an opportunity to see Major Milutinovic again?

9 A. Yes, indeed, in Banja Luka, this was the military man, if you recall,

10 and he had said: "Omarska, well, first let me say that the army had

11 nothing to do with Omarska, it was run by the civilian authorities"

12 which, to give him his credit is true. He then said: "If there had

13 been anything going on that was awry in Omarska, then the army would

14 have known about it, and I can tell you that the army did not know

15 about it". This is the man who was in the camp with us with the sort

16 of pointed hat on.

17 Q. What was his position at the time you interviewed him again?

18 A. Oh, yes, well, he had been Colonel in 1992 -- sorry, he had been a

19 Major in 1992, he was now a Colonel, and he was the personal spokesman

20 for General Mladic and I think his Adjutant as well, a sort of

21 spokesman and aide de camp.

22 He said that, "How can there have been anything wrong in

23 Omarska in August 1992? The journalists went to Omarska in 1992 and

24 they found nothing". I bit my tongue.

25 Q. Finally, did you have an opportunity to speak again with Professor

1 Koljevic?

2 A. Yes, we found him at his office in Banja Luka; quite spritely, speaks

3 very good English. He is an authority on Shakespeare and likes to

4 quote a lot of literary references. Two long conversations. He was

5 the only man to whom I gave my name and identified myself. I reminded

6 him that he had mocked me, as it were, me being the outside world,

7 for taking so long in uncovering the camps. He apologised for mocking

8 us, and said that Omarska was one of those things that was very

9 difficult to control, and talked about his politics, his views, and

10 what the war had meant to him and talked about -- I used the term

11 yesterday "racial memory" -- he talked a lot about racial memory, how

12 the Serbs were proud of their racial memory, and how he regarded this

13 as the third great revolt of the Serbs; the other two having been

14 against the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians.

15 He talked mainly in this rather puffed up way. There was a

16 very strange moment when he went over to the window and stared out of

17 the window at the square below, and appeared to lose himself in his

18 thoughts and started talking about disinternment of bones. It was not

19 quite clear what bones he was talking about. He said it was 1989 when

20 the Serbs were digging up their dead from the war and moving them

21 elsewhere in the country. He started talking about children's shoes

22 interred and things. It was very strange and then came to his senses

23 and came back and talked about the war. He accepted -- he was

24 obsessed by lies and deceit and talked about propaganda a lot, and

25 seemed to regard everything that we, the mass media, had done during

1 the war as some sort of grand conspiracy.

2 Q. Did he particularly categorise certain aspects of reports that had

3 been published about certain aspects of the conflict ---

4 A. Yes.

5 Q. -- in reference to this discussion on propaganda?

6 A. Yes, indeed. In fact, I mean, he is an expert on theatre and

7 Shakespeare. His books are quite well know. They are obligatory if

8 you are a student of English in former Yugoslavia. He portrayed the

9 whole thing as though it was some kind of grand drama, hyped up by the

10 west. He said: "You began with the demonic Serb, then you moved into

11 the massacre of children, poor little children, in Sarajevo -- very

12 effective". He was sort of congratulating us, rather like he was back

13 in 1992. "Then you started talking about concentration camps with all

14 the resonance that has with the Nazis. Then you moved into rape and

15 the violation of women", and made some rather uncouth jokes about

16 that. "Then, finally, you end up with this grand word 'genocide'",

17 and he treated it all as though it was a, sort of, great drama, a

18 piece of theatre, that we, the mass media, had constructed to depict

19 his people's defence of themselves as he saw it. It was most

20 illuminating.

21 Q. What was the particular comment he made with regards to the

22 allegations of rape as a war crime?

23 A. I cannot remember, but it was something to the effect of that

24 Napoleon had said that rape could not be a crime in war, and it was

25 something about how a woman with her skirt up can run faster than a

1 man with his trousers done, if I recall. He thought that was quite

2 funny.

3 Q. Did he make reference to the pictures which were published, in fact,

4 in The Guardian of Fikret Alic behind the wire in Trnopolje?

5 A. Yes. As far as I felt secure to do so, I challenged him on it. I

6 said: "What about what we have found? What about the torsos behind

7 the wire?" And he said: "Oh, there was one man with tuberculosis",

8 he said, "there was a man with tuberculosis, and the media found him

9 and they took pictures of him and blew it all over the world. That

10 man was suffering from TB".

11 Q. Did he, like Dr. Kovacevic, make reference to the destruction of

12 Yugoslavia and Bosnia?

13 A. Yes. He said it was necessary and talked about the future Republika

14 Srpska as a place that would be a country for the Serbs and so on.

15 Yes, he did.

16 Q. Did he place the responsibility for the destruction on the JNA within

17 this context?

18 A. There was one interesting line, yes. He said towards the beginning

19 of the conversation: "It was necessary for the JNA to destroy

20 Yugoslavia".

21 Q. How did he categorise the conflict that was going on with regard to

22 the Serbs?

23 A. Well, as I said, you know, he set it in the history of the struggle

24 of the Serbian people and their quest to survive against these

25 endlessly constructive enemies out to decimate them, the third great

1 Serb rebellion and in this melodramatic, sort, historical context --

2 sorry, I would just like to add about the boy having TB; he was

3 referring to Fikret Alic, I think. I subsequently met Fikret Alic,

4 fattened out quite a bit. He did not have TB. I would just like to

5 say that.

6 MR. KEEGAN: I have nothing further, your Honour.

7 MR. KAY: In the event there is no cross-examination, your Honour.

8 JUDGE STEPHEN: I have only one question. Early in your evidence, and by

9 now you may have forgotten it, you contrasted the Serb view of the

10 Croats with the Serb view of the Muslims. I think you described the

11 description of the Muslims as being filthy gypsies, that was the term

12 used, they were dirty, they bred like rabbits. I had gained the

13 impression that the Muslims tended to be in Bosnia Herzegovina the

14 wealthier class, the urban dwellers, the by and large professional

15 people, and so on. Am I right in that and, if so, how does that

16 reconcile with the contempt shown for them, as you put it, by the

17 Serbs?

18 A. In most parts of the country that is absolutely accurate, a social

19 point. This is a broad brush. In Eastern Bosnia there is a fairly

20 sizeable Muslim peasantry and a greater or smaller Muslim peasantry

21 elsewhere in the country. There is also a Muslim industrial working

22 strata in central Bosnia. But the history of the people is that they

23 were, as it were, the governors of under the Ottoman tutelage and were

24 large landowners. During the 30s they were largely stripped of their

25 land owning and urbanised and became the intelligentsia. So, yes,

1 particularly in the area we are talking about, the Prijedor region,

2 one would find from what I can gather in most villages the chances are

3 that the headmaster and the small businessman would be a Muslim.

4 However, I stand by obviously the characterization which I heard over

5 and over again, filthy gypsies, and so on. It is a difficult one to

6 reconcile. I do not want to try to get into political psychoanalysis,

7 but perhaps, and there are historical precedents for this I am sure,

8 in the resentment of the relative economic superiority or relative

9 economic comfort of this group of people, there might have been some

10 sort of attempt to degrade them beneath those who harboured that

11 resentment.

12 Q. I think I will not take you any further. You at least confirm my

13 general impression of their status.

14 A. Oh, absolutely, from what I know. There are people better qualified

15 than I to talk about the sociology in makeup of that country, but from

16 the sort of people that one met and from everything one heard, yes, in

17 the main by the time that community had urbanised, certainly in

18 Sarajevo itself, the Muslims tended to be the shopkeepers, the

19 businessmen, the intelligentsia and the middle class in quite a lot of

20 these communities, yes.

21 JUDGE STEPHEN: Thank you.

22 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: I have one question. Earlier, just maybe 10 minutes

23 ago, you said regarding the Omarska camp, during an interview you said

24 that to give him his credit it was true that Omarska was run by the

25 civilian authorities.

1 A. Yes.

2 Q. Do you recall that testimony?

3 A. Yes, indeed.

4 Q. What did you mean by that?

5 A. Well, Major Milutinovic, as he was in 1992, Colonel Milutinovic as he

6 was in 1995, was I think trying to make the point, "If we are going to

7 talk about Omarska, I am a military man. Omarska was not run by the

8 military; it was run by the civilian authorities in Prijedor." When I

9 meant by to give him his credit, what I meant was it was a fair point

10 inasmuch as it was clear to us during our meeting in Prijedor at the

11 Civic Centre and during our conversation with Colonel Arsic and the

12 civilian authorities, that it was the civilian authorities and the

13 police that were running Omarska, not the army. So that Colonel

14 Milutinovic's detachment from Omarska was in a way valid in so far as,

15 although he had been with us in the camp, and I am sure knew perfectly

16 well what was going on in the camp, he did not have formal direct

17 authority over it. The formal direct, formal direct authority over

18 Omarska for the running of the camp was in the hands of the Mayor of

19 Prijedor, Mr. Stakic's deputy, Mr. Koracevic and the Chief of Police,

20 Mr. Drljaca, as far as we could ascertain and as far as we were told.

21 So I suppose he was trying to say: "We will talk about Omarska, but I

22 was not in control of it; it was not under military authority."

23 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Thank you. Mr. Keegan, are there additional

24 questions?

25 MR. KEEGAN: Nothing, your Honour.

1 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Mr. Kay, do you have any cross-examination?

2 MR. KAY: No, thank you, your Honour.

3 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: Very good. Is there any objection to Mr. Vulliamy

4 being permanently excused?

5 MR. KAY: No your Honour.

6 THE PRESIDING JUDGE: You are excused, sir. Thank you very much for

7 coming.

8 (The witness withdrew).

9 We need to go into closed session at this time to talk about

10 the motion, one motion at least that the Prosecutor has filed.

11

12 (Hearing in Closed Session).

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