Page 5778
1 Tuesday, 5 May 2009
2 [Open session]
3 [The accused entered court]
4 --- Upon commencing at 9.00 a.m.
5 JUDGE MOLOTO: Good morning to everyone in and around the
6 courtroom.
7 Madam Registrar, will you please call the case.
8 THE REGISTRAR: Good morning, Your Honours. Good morning,
9 everyone in and around the courtroom. This is case number IT-04-81-T,
10 the Prosecutor versus Momcilo Perisic.
11 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you very much.
12 And could we have appearances for today, starting with the
13 Prosecution.
14 MR. THOMAS: Good morning, Your Honours. Barney Thomas,
15 April Carter and Carmela Javier for the Prosecution.
16 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you very much. And for the Defence.
17 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Good mornings, Your Honours. Good
18 morning to everyone in and around the courtroom. The Defence is today
19 Milos
20 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you very much.
21 Just before we start there's an oral decision we'd like to make,
22 but before we do so, I would just want to find out whether the
23 Prosecution has a response thereto. This is the motion of the Defence
24 requesting extension of time to respond to the Prosecution motion about
25 Muhamed Sacirbey.
Page 5779
1 MR. THOMAS: Your Honours, I wonder if I could get back to you on
2 that, on the -- at the first break.
3 JUDGE MOLOTO: Would you like to us hold the reading of the
4 decision.
5 MR. THOMAS: Yes, sir. I'm sorry about that. I expect the
6 answer is no, we don't respond. But I just want to clear that before --
7 before the decision is delivered.
8 JUDGE MOLOTO: Okay, we'll wait.
9 MR. THOMAS: Thank you, Your Honours.
10 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you very much. That being the case, then I
11 call on you Mr. Thomas.
12 MR. THOMAS: Thank you, Your Honour. There is one administrative
13 matter before we start the evidence this morning. The witness for
14 scheduled for tomorrow, Mr. Malik, we were advised yesterday that because
15 of adverse weather conditions en route he was not able to make a
16 connecting flight. He does not arrive now in The Hague until Friday so
17 we will not be able to reach his testimony until the beginning of next
18 week. That -- it's because it's important that we at least capitalise on
19 his presence we would lead from evidence from him as soon as he arrived,
20 but the problem -- the difficulty obviously is that that will not be
21 tomorrow.
22 The witness scheduled to follow him cannot begin tomorrow for two
23 reasons. Firstly, there is difficulty, first of all, in my learned
24 friend Mr. Lukic being prepared. He has commitments this afternoon in
25 another court and he is also wanting to spend some time, I understand,
Page 5780
1 with that witness, after proofing but before the testimony begins and
2 he's currently still under proofing. There's also a difficulty presented
3 to the Prosecution in that the relevant authorities have not yet issued a
4 waiver for this witness but assure us that the waiver will be issued for
5 his testimony on Thursday.
6 So I simply wish to signal at this stage, Your Honours, that we
7 have a difficulty with tomorrow. At the moment we have a witness for
8 today. We don't have a witness for tomorrow. We have a witness for
9 Thursday, and I'm confident that by the end of next week we will have
10 somehow been able to get through all of the witnesses that were otherwise
11 scheduled between now and the end of next week. But tomorrow presents a
12 difficulty.
13 I just wanted to make sure with Your Honours that there was --
14 that that could be accommodated because if any other alternative
15 arrangements were to be made for tomorrow that would only involve the
16 witness scheduled here for Thursday. And with a -- I don't think any
17 diplomatic efforts can be made to secure a waiver before Thursday because
18 the government is sitting in session on Thursday morning and that's when
19 the waiver is to be granted.
20 So I don't know that anything can be done to speed that up
21 process but I just wanted to bring that to Your Honours' attention at
22 this stage rather than wait until the end of the day today.
23 JUDGE MOLOTO: I'm not quite sure I -- what waiver are you
24 talking about?
25 MR. THOMAS: The waiver --
Page 5781
1 JUDGE MOLOTO: For who?
2 MR. THOMAS: -- is required for the witness currently scheduled
3 for Thursday.
4 JUDGE MOLOTO: Okay.
5 MR. THOMAS: So we loose -- we can't call Mr. Malik for tomorrow.
6 The witness scheduled for Thursday at this stage can't be brought
7 forward.
8 JUDGE MOLOTO: I understand what you are saying. What I would
9 like to get some enlightenment on is the fact that as long ago as the
10 29th of April you already notified us that there would be no witness on
11 the 8th, and between that date and the 8th it was not possible to
12 schedule a witness for the 8th?
13 MR. THOMAS: The 8th, Your Honour, I'm sorry.
14 JUDGE MOLOTO: The 8th of May. According to the schedule that
15 you sent us, on the 8th of May there's no -- well, I must not say you
16 sent us. It comes from Chambers and I don't know how Chambers got it but
17 Friday, the 8th of May, there is -- according to the schedule I have
18 before me there is no witness.
19 MR. THOMAS: That's right, Your Honour, because we're not sitting
20 Fridays yet.
21 JUDGE MOLOTO: My apologies.
22 MR. THOMAS: I thought I had missed something for a moment,
23 sorry.
24 JUDGE MOLOTO: My apologies.
25 MR. THOMAS: Thank you, sir.
Page 5782
1 JUDGE MOLOTO: Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for that
2 explanation, Mr. Thomas. Is there anything we need to do? The short
3 message is definitely we are not sitting tomorrow. Is that the message?
4 MR. THOMAS: That is the message, Your Honours.
5 JUDGE MOLOTO: Okay. You may call the witness for today.
6 MR. THOMAS: And that witness --
7 JUDGE MOLOTO: Sorry. It looks like Mr. Lukic wants to stand up.
8 Okay. Mr. Thomas.
9 MR. THOMAS: And I defer to Madam Carter at this point,
10 Your Honours.
11 JUDGE MOLOTO: Madam Carter, good morning.
12 MS. CARTER: Good morning, Your Honour. The Office of the
13 Prosecutor calls Dr. Ewa Tabeau.
14 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you.
15 [The witness entered court]
16 THE WITNESS: Good morning.
17 JUDGE MOLOTO: Good morning, ma'am.
18 THE WITNESS: Good morning.
19 JUDGE MOLOTO: Ma'am, will you please make the declaration.
20 THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth, the
21 whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
22 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you so much. You may be seated.
23 THE WITNESS: Thank you.
24 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you very much.
25 Madam Carter.
Page 5783
1 WITNESS: EWA TABEAU
2 Examination by Ms. Carter:
3 MS. CARTER: Thank you, Your Honours.
4 Q. Dr. Tabeau, will you please state your name for the record.
5 A. I'm Ewa Tabeau.
6 Q. What is your area of expertise?
7 A. It is demography, and in particular demography of conflict.
8 Q. Before we begin the substance of your testimony I would like to
9 go through a few predicate matters. Can you please describe the field of
10 demography?
11 A. Demography is a research area that focuses on the population, on
12 the -- describes the population, changes in the population, explains the
13 trends and patterns in demographic phenomena. Among the phenomena there
14 are deaths, there are births, marriages, divorces, and migration. These
15 are the basic demography processes.
16 Q. And you noted for the Court that your specific area of expertise
17 is demography in relation to conflicts. Is that correct?
18 A. Yes, it's correct.
19 Q. And how does that -- how is that described?
20 A. Demography of conflict is a subarea of demography. The main
21 subject of demography of conflict is the demographic consequences of
22 conflict, but in -- within the area also other subjects are studied, like
23 demographic causes of conflict and the similar.
24 Q. Okay. We do have your resume through the time of your Galic
25 report. However, can you please the education and training that you have
Page 5784
1 developed regarding this expertise?
2 A. I studied statistics and econometrics at the Warsaw Economic
3 University in the 1970s and graduated with the highest grade in
4 statistics and econometrics with a Master degree. Later I engaged in a
5 Ph.D. programme in demography, which I completed successfully, in the
6 area of mathematical demography, also with the highest grade, also from
7 the same university, Economic University of Poland. I worked a number of
8 years at the same university where I taught statistics and demography to
9 undergraduate courses. Later I moved to the Netherlands and became a
10 researcher and later a senior researcher in the Netherlands
11 Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, which the National Dutch
12 Institute for Demography. And finally, in the year 2000 I joined this
13 Tribunal, the Office of the Prosecutor where the became the head of the
14 Demographic Unit.
15 Q. During your time as an expert have you had the opportunity to
16 testify?
17 A. Yes, I testified several times -- I think 13 or 14 times before
18 the ICTY Trial Chambers.
19 Q. Okay. Can you name for us which cases you have testified in?
20 A. I testified in several cases related to Sarajevo. In the
21 General Galic case, Dragomir Milosevic case. I testified in
22 Slobodan Milosevic, also on Sarajevo
23 internally displaced persons and refugees. I testified in Prlic which is
24 the Herceg-Bosnia conflict. I testified in Popovic which is Srebrenica.
25 I testified in Seselj and a number of other cases; Lukic and Lukic, for
Page 5785
1 instance, recently; and Vasiljevic, a number of years ago; in Simic et
2 al, which is Bosanska Posavina.
3 Q. During your time as an expert have you always testified for the
4 Prosecution or have you had the opportunity to testify for the Defence?
5 A. I testified one time for the Defence. It was in Lukic and Lukic
6 case, recently this year.
7 Q. Thank you. As you are aware -- I have been advised to please
8 slow down so --
9 A. I'm sorry.
10 Q. Actually it was for me.
11 As you were aware, the reports you compiled regarding the siege
12 of Sarajevo
13 corresponding addendums have been admitted as P2325, through P2331.
14 In today's testimony, I want to focus on the killed and the
15 wounded in the Perisic indictment period, beginning on 23 August 1994
16 I'd like to begin with the killed.
17 In P2325, your report from the Galic case, at Table A3.13 at
18 e-court page 69, as well as P2331, your report in the Slobodan Milosevic
19 case, at Tables A3 and A4, which is e-court pages 9, you give a monthly
20 break down of the killed soldiers and civilians.
21 These numbers and the totals given do not fully correspond with
22 each other during the overlapping period of September 1993 through
23 August 1994. Can you please explain to the Chamber why these numbers are
24 different?
25 JUDGE MOLOTO: That explanation for me doesn't -- is not helpful
Page 5786
1 unless I know exactly where we are Madam Carter. You just started
2 talking about the Galic and Slobodan Milosevic cases, and I'm not sure --
3 and their addendums. Can you refer us to what you are looking at so that
4 if we do have it -- is it in the report of the witness?
5 MS. CARTER: Certainly, Your Honour. The Galic report is P2325
6 and I refer to Table A3.13, and that's at page 69 of the report.
7 JUDGE MOLOTO: Well --
8 MS. CARTER: And it is currently on the screen. And, if possible
9 can both pages be brought up, meaning, P2331, at page 9, next to it.
10 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you so much, Madam Carter.
11 Now, what doesn't correspond.
12 THE WITNESS: If I may have one comment, the second table on the
13 right -- yes, that should be replaced by a different one. Yes. This is
14 what we need for our discussion.
15 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you so much.
16 THE WITNESS: We have two pages from two different expert
17 reports, both related to Sarajevo
18 comes from the Galic report. It is a simple time distribution of killed
19 persons, civilians and soldiers, and individuals with a non-status, shown
20 for the period from September 1992 until August 1995 -- 1994. It's a
21 monthly distribution, so the numbers in the table are absolute numbers of
22 killed persons by month in the mentioned period.
23 This period, September 1992 to August 1994, yes, the period of
24 the Galic report, which is different from the indictment period of this
25 case, and as well, of the period which was discussed in the Sarajevo
Page 5787
1 report that I made with my colleagues for the Slobodan Milosevic case.
2 So, the other page, on our screen, on the right-hand side, comes
3 from the Slobodan Milosevic report. The period of analysis is far
4 broader in this report than in the Galic report. In the
5 Slobodan Milosevic report, we were interested in the casualties of the
6 entire conflict period, starting in April 1992 until November 1995. In
7 the Table A3 which is made for soldiers and A4 which is for civilians the
8 period of analysis is even broader. It begins in January 1992 and ends
9 in December 1995.
10 There is even one more category, unknown month of death included
11 which is the first row in each of these tables.
12 The data shown in the tables A3 and 4 is of the same type as the
13 data shown for the Galic report. It is monthly distribution, monthly
14 distribution of killed persons separately shown here for soldiers and for
15 civilians. Of course, the numbers for civilians are our first interest,
16 so we will be focussing on table A4 from the right side of the screen,
17 and the first column numbers for civilians, from the other table, A3.13.
18 These numbers are not identical, at least we can compare in the
19 period that we can directly compare. There is an overlap between these
20 two periods, and the numbers can be for this period compared.
21 I also prepared a small extract of these data from these two
22 tables for the period relevant for the Perisic case. The period that is
23 12 months that are the same in the Galic report, in Slobodan Milosevic
24 report and in the indictment of Perisic case. This period begins in
25 September 1993, and lasts until August 1994. I have made a separate
Page 5788
1 table with exactly the same figures and I'm not sure that we can use this
2 table but if we may use this table, then I -- I would like to rather use
3 this because it is easier to see the differences in this smaller sample
4 of data.
5 MS. CARTER: Your Honour, we were provided with this extract as
6 of yesterday. I did provide it to Defence counsel at that time. It is
7 not on our 65 ter list, so I'm not certain if it would be appropriate to
8 use before us. It is also not on e-court. We can use the ELMO system if
9 the Court would like to review this item and with leave of Defence
10 counsel.
11 JUDGE MOLOTO: Mr. Lukic.
12 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Your Honour, it is true that we
13 received this yesterday afternoon. After an information -- informative
14 conversation with Ms. Tabeau, we received several new documents or
15 excerpts from these new documents. I don't have any objection to us
16 seeing them now, but I would like to reserve the right to consult with my
17 client once these documents are translated into B/C/S, because right now
18 they're only in English, and I -- for those reasons I would suggest that
19 we only marked for identification so that I can give our position later
20 on.
21 What I have requested yesterday from Ms. Carter, and she
22 confirmed this, was whether these documents were based on the two earlier
23 reports exclusively and she confirmed that. So if that is -- if it is
24 clear, if these documents are clearer than the ones that we used in the
25 earlier cases, I don't object to them being used here but I would like to
Page 5789
1 be able to review them in detail, but I do agree they be used now and
2 marked for identification for those purposes.
3 JUDGE MOLOTO: You can use them and we mark them for
4 identification, Madam Carter.
5 MS. CARTER: Thank you, Your Honour. And we --
6 JUDGE MOLOTO: Madam Carter, you do confirm that they're based on
7 the earlier reports, exclusively.
8 MS. CARTER: That is the advice I was given by Dr. Tabeau. I can
9 confirm again.
10 Q. Dr. Tabeau, the graphs that you provided to me as of yesterday,
11 what is the provenance of those items?
12 A. These is a sample of data and results from the two reports that
13 we are discussing now: One being the Galic report on Sarajevo; and one
14 being Slobodan Milosevic report on Sarajevo.
15 Q. Okay.
16 MS. CARTER: And with the assistance of the usher, we do have the
17 report to be placed on the ELMO.
18 Q. Ms. Tabeau, on first glance I do note there are some markings,
19 specifically a straight line and a circle, next to the civilians on this
20 chart that is not present in the document that you provided to me or to
21 the Defence. Who made these markings?
22 A. I have made them just a second ago.
23 Q. Okay. Thank you. You were going to advise the Court as to
24 what -- what created the difference in the numbers of the civilians in
25 these two reports.
Page 5790
1 A. Now, first of all, I would like to say that there is a difference
2 in the number of killed persons, both civilians and soldiers, between
3 these two reports, and I'm speaking of the period that is overlapping
4 between Galic report and Slobodan Milosevic report and is part of the
5 indictment, Perisic indictment. This is a period, once again, of
6 12 months, beginning as shown in this table in September 1993 until
7 August 1994.
8 So these are 12 months that can be directly compared and for each
9 month, the number of civilians and of soldiers can be seen as in this
10 table next to each other.
11 Generally, the number of civilians killed within these 12 months
12 is higher in the Slobodan Milosevic report. It is 548, as opposed to the
13 lower number from Galic report, which is 370.
14 These are the two numbers I have just mentioned, 548 from
15 Slobodan Milosevic, and 370 from Galic report.
16 There is also a difference in the number of soldiers. The
17 difference is less significant. There are 499 killed soldiers reported
18 in the Galic report, and 472 in the Slobodan Milosevic report.
19 So what is the source of these differences? The reports, first
20 of all, were made based on different sources. The Galic report used only
21 one source, Sarajevo Household Survey, that was a special survey run
22 during the conflict by mid-1994 by the research institute in Sarajevo
23 and we used this one source to compile all statistics in the Galic
24 report.
25 The source is very large. It was a Household Survey that was
Page 5791
1 meant to be complete to cover all households living in Sarajevo by
2 mid-1994. All together 85.000 households were interviewed in this
3 survey. The 85.000 households represented the population of
4 approximately 340.000 individuals. We used this source which we
5 computerised, not all of it, a part of it, by the OTP and established a
6 database, a database that included records of killings, woundings, and
7 natural deaths which we studied in the Galic report. This is a good
8 source but just one source.
9 And when it comes to sources when studying demographic
10 consequences of war, we must be aware of the fact that there is no source
11 which is complete and which is perfect, doesn't have any deficiencies so
12 is also the Household Survey. It was meant to be complete but most
13 certainly incomplete and there are certain deficiencies like
14 incompleteness in data that actually made us exclude certain records from
15 our analysis.
16 In order to improve this situation, in the Slobodan Milosevic
17 report that was made later we have applied a different approach. We
18 worked with a number of sources, big sources, including the Sarajevo
19 Household Survey, which were merged with each other, duplicates were
20 eliminated, overlap was eliminated and one master list of casualties was
21 established. This could only be done for the killed persons, because
22 sources covering injuries and wounding of the population are very
23 infrequent. Sarajevo Household Survey is just one of the few sources
24 that we have in our archive that could be used for this analysis.
25 So in Slobodan Milosevic we worked with a number of sources. It
Page 5792
1 was Household Survey Sarajevo. It was a statistical database on wartime
2 mortality, a big one, established at our request, at the OTP request by
3 the statistical authority of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
4 In this database there are 20 -- approximately 25.000 war-related deaths
5 reported of both civilians and soldiers for the entire country, Bosnia
6 and Herzegovina
7 December 1995.
8 Of course, only a small sample of this data is related to
9 Sarajevo
10 relate to Sarajevo
11 Missing Persons --
12 JUDGE MOLOTO: Could you please slow down and --
13 THE WITNESS: I'm sorry.
14 JUDGE MOLOTO: It is very difficult for the court reporter to
15 catch up with you. I'm not quite sure because you're talking in English
16 I suspect the interpreters might also be having difficulties, those who
17 are interpreting into other languages. I don't hear any interpretation,
18 I hear you only, but I think -- will you please just slow down.
19 THE WITNESS: I'm sorry. Of course, I will.
20 I was saying, in Slobodan Milosevic report a number of sources
21 were used together, combined with each other and gleaned from
22 deficiencies. Among these sources there was Sarajevo Household Survey.
23 There was the federal authority, statistical authority database on
24 wartime mortality in Bosnia
25 Bosnia and Herzegovina. There a database compiled by an NGO in Bosnia
Page 5793
1 Muslims Against Genocide. Later this database evolved and became the
2 Bosnian Book of Death, which is quite known in Bosnia as the largest
3 existing database.
4 MS. CARTER: If I may briefly interrupt. From looking at the
5 court reporter, I think we're still having difficulty with speed. If you
6 it slow down a bit further.
7 THE WITNESS: Right. I'm very sorry.
8 So Muslims Against Genocide is an NGO in Bosnia and Herzegovina
9 which at some point was collecting information about victims of conflict,
10 of civilians and soldiers, and they combined this information in a
11 database on war-related casualties and established a database called
12 Muslims Against Genocide database which we used in this project.
13 So all together, a number of large sources. So sources is the
14 major difference between the statistics compiled in Galic and
15 Slobodan Milosevic report. But not the only difference.
16 JUDGE MOLOTO: I just want to ask you a question.
17 Do I understand you to be saying, in fact, that your report is
18 the result of you getting information from data that was built up by
19 other people and other organisations. It's not entirely your own work
20 product.
21 THE WITNESS: Any report I made is based on sources made by
22 others. So is the Galic report so is the Slobodan Milosevic report. It
23 is -- we are speaking of large numbers of victims of this war, and large
24 number of people worked down there in Bosnia and Herzegovina to put
25 together record of information about these victims.
Page 5794
1 JUDGE MOLOTO: I'm not asking for an explanation.
2 THE WITNESS: Yes.
3 JUDGE MOLOTO: I'm just asking whether that is the fact.
4 THE WITNESS: Yes, it's the fact.
5 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you.
6 THE WITNESS: Yes.
7 JUDGE MOLOTO: I'm sure Madam Carter will get to the point but I
8 can't wait to hear you tell me about information relating to deaths of
9 civilians and soldiers, and wounded of civilians and soldiers that
10 relates to the period 26 August 1993
11 THE WITNESS: I am not sure that I understood the question. Is
12 the question about --
13 JUDGE MOLOTO: The question is: I would like to hear what you
14 extrapolate from these reports. I understand that these reports were not
15 drafted for this case. They were drafted for Galic and
16 Slobodan Milosevic.
17 Now, to the extent that they may cover the period covered by the
18 Perisic case, I'm expecting that you're going extrapolate from them and
19 tell us what the figures are relating to the indictment period in the
20 Perisic case. That's what I'm interested in.
21 THE WITNESS: Yes, I understand. I suggest we will look at first
22 page from this set of paper that was just introduced this morning. I
23 have included a little table on the first page and this is a table that
24 summarises the number of casualties for the entire indictment period of
25 the Perisic case. That would be -- I could not include the data from the
Page 5795
1 26th of August but the first month next after it is September 1993, until
2 the end of November 1995.
3 So the overall number of victims is 1.782 and this includes both
4 civilians and soldiers. These are killed persons. The number of killed
5 civilians is 949 and soldiers 833. These numbers come from the
6 Slobodan Milosevic report that I started explaining in terms of sources.
7 This one report actually can be used to extract the relevant numbers for
8 the Perisic case.
9 So that's the number, that's the major information that can be
10 extracted from Slobodan Milosevic report.
11 JUDGE MOLOTO: Do you have any similar information regarding the
12 wounded?
13 THE WITNESS: Unfortunately, there is no information about
14 wounding in the Slobodan Milosevic report. However, this can be
15 extrapolated using the information from Galic report. Based on these
16 12 months overlapping between these two reports, it is possible to
17 estimate the relationship between killed and wounded civilians and the
18 relationship is some kind of ratio 1:3.2, that means per one civilian
19 3.2 -- per one killed civilian 3.2 civilians were wounded. So this ratio
20 can be applied and the general number of wounded persons can be obtained
21 for the Perisic period as well. Applying the numbers that we see on the
22 screen. That would be a roughly three times more wounded persons --
23 wounded civilians compared with the killed civilians.
24 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yes. But I did think that a little earlier you
25 showed us a table that you referred to as absolute numbers but not
Page 5796
1 estimates.
2 THE WITNESS: Yes. The table is absolute numbers and these are
3 counts, that means numbers that can be documented by records, individual
4 records of information about persons. So these are not estimates. And
5 these are minimum numbers, the lowest numbers we have to think of. When
6 it comes to estimation, there is some estimated numbers in the Galic
7 report as well. This ratio I mentioned is not an estimate. It is a
8 ratio that is obtained from the count, from the real data. So the ratio
9 is not an estimate it is the quantification of a relationship --
10 JUDGE MOLOTO: From absolute figures?
11 THE WITNESS: Yes, from absolute figures.
12 JUDGE MOLOTO: Okay.
13 THE WITNESS: But as we know, in statistics once a measure is
14 estimated from the actual data, there can be an extrapolation and the
15 same measure can be applied to a bigger population for which we don't
16 know the same thing. That means I'm speaking here about wounded persons.
17 If there are, of course, good reasons to apply these measures and I think
18 there are good reasons to apply the measure of wounded persons to overall
19 killed number of civilians and obtain an estimated number of civilians
20 for the Perisic period.
21 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yes, Madam Carter.
22 MS. CARTER: Thank you, Your Honour.
23 For clarification of the record, if we can re-call P2325 at
24 page 69. That's Table A3.13. It is already up on the e-court. Thank
25 you.
Page 5797
1 I believe that Your Honour was referring to the chart to the
2 left-hand side and you indicated that we did have some raw data in
3 relation to the wounded civilians -- I'm sorry. I apologise. Actually
4 this is actually for the killed civilians. The wounded civilians would
5 say be A4.13.
6 JUDGE MOLOTO: [Microphone not activated] ... or A3.13.
7 MS. CARTER: It's Table A4.13, document ID page 02194824.
8 THE WITNESS: Excuse me? May I have your help, please? Can you
9 help me, please?
10 Thank you.
11 MS. CARTER:
12 Q. Dr. Tabeau, what we now see before us at Table A4.13 purports to
13 the monthly number of persons wounded within the front lines of Sarajevo
14 and you've compiled the same monthly breakdown. Did you use the same
15 method that you were describing to the Court previously in order to
16 derive these numbers?
17 A. Yes. These the are the same -- these are also counts of wounded
18 persons. The table comes from the Galic report, so from this table we
19 unfortunately cannot have a figure that would be covering the indictment
20 period of the Perisic case. From this table we can only take the data
21 for one year, beginning in September 1993 until August 1994.
22 Q. Okay. When you indicated that there was a ratio of 3.2, 1:3.2,
23 how did you arrive at that figure?
24 A. This figure was obtained using data on civilians from the Galic
25 report, only from the 12 months that overlap with the Perisic indictment
Page 5798
1 period, which is the first year basically of the indictment period, and
2 the overall total of killed civilians was compared with the overall total
3 of wounded persons. It is basically dividing the wounded by the killed.
4 Q. However, you previously indicated that based on that one year,
5 you can extrapolate forward past August 1994; is that correct?
6 A. Yes. It is possible. That -- what can be -- this can be done,
7 indeed, yes.
8 Q. Okay. Is it a normal demographic tool in order to complete these
9 extrapolations?
10 A. Demographic extrapolation can be done in many ways, extrapolating
11 this kind of ratio is one way of doing this. There are more
12 sophisticated tools that can be used for this kind of extrapolation. In
13 Dragomir Milosevic report, which unfortunately is not discussed today,
14 another type of extrapolation was presented from which the monthly totals
15 of wounded persons for the entire siege period were obtained by
16 comparison of two sources reporting the -- on the wounding.
17 So a statistical model, more complex model than a ratio was used
18 in this kind of extrapolation.
19 Q. When using that secondary type of operation did you obtain
20 similar numbers to the numbers that you're testifying here today,
21 specifically 3.2 times per every 1 killed?
22 A. Well, I don't know for this particular period because I don't
23 have it at hand and I haven't made it. But generally, this model-based
24 extrapolation is even more sophisticated and detailed. That means not
25 only the relationship, the general relationship as the ratio 1:3.2 is
Page 5799
1 contained in this extrapolation but also the monthly distribution or even
2 weekly distribution can be produced using the model.
3 So generally I would think the answer is yes, these kind of
4 ratios are preserved because these are the most general measures, but the
5 more sophisticated the model, the more sophisticated the output of the
6 model.
7 Q. But as to a bottom line, as you're sitting here today with the
8 information that you have available, specifically the -- I'm sorry,
9 specifically the Galic report and the Slobodan Milosevic report, can you
10 testify before this Court today that we would be able to use a 3.2 ratio
11 in order to determine the wounded post-August 1994?
12 A. Yes, I would think yes. Yes.
13 Q. Okay. Thank you.
14 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yes, Mr. Lukic.
15 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] I didn't want to interrupt,
16 Your Honours, but now that I saw on the screen a technical problem with
17 the translation of this document, this is an official translation made by
18 CLSS which was used already in the Galic case. I'll read it out what it
19 says in B/C/S. It says: A 413, number of persons killed monthly within
20 the front lines in Sarajevo
21 Obviously this is meant to be a translation of the English
22 version. Unfortunately, in preparing for the examination, I used the
23 English version. I'll try to make use of this fact that I established
24 all the figures are the same, but the heading of the table is completely
25 different.
Page 5800
1 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yes, Madam Carter.
2 MS. CARTER: My B/C/S is terribly poor. I would not be able to
3 verify or to deny that that fact is accurate. We would ask if Defence
4 counsel could provide for us if there other corrections that need to be
5 made, we can certainly ask for this to be retranslated. But the report
6 was originally drafted in the English and that would be the controlling
7 language of it. But, certainly, we would want to have an accurate record
8 in the B/C/S.
9 JUDGE MOLOTO: Well, your colleague has indicated therefore that
10 this -- the B/C/S indicates this is the dead [Realtime transcript read in
11 error "date"] instead of the wounded, if you can take that up with your
12 translators, please.
13 MS. CARTER: Certainly, Your Honour. I will do that at the first
14 opportunity.
15 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you.
16 MS. CARTER:
17 Q. Ms. Tabeau, given the questioning of the Court as well as the
18 answers that you have provided to me, I have no further questions of you
19 at this time.
20 MS. CARTER: And I pass the witness.
21 JUDGE MOLOTO: Can I just correct the transcript. I don't think
22 this may be corrected later. I said it indicates the dead instead of the
23 wounded, not the date of the wounded. Okay?
24 Mr. Lukic.
25 MR. LUKIC: If you can put this ELMO ...
Page 5801
1 Cross-examination by Mr. Lukic:
2 Q. [Interpretation] Good morning, Ms. Tabeau.
3 A. Good morning.
4 MS. CARTER: I do apologise for interrupting Mr. Lukic. Given
5 the fact that we are now going back to the item on the ELMO, I would ask
6 that it be tendered as an IC exhibit and marked for identification
7 awaiting translation.
8 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] I agree, Your Honours.
9 JUDGE MOLOTO: What is an IC exhibit, Madam Carter?
10 MS. CARTER: A court exhibit Your Honour. An in-court exhibit.
11 I apologise, I may use a term that's not ...
12 JUDGE MOLOTO: Okay. The document -- now, this is the document
13 that is on the screen here? According to my e-court, I have got this one
14 that has got 5090 at the end, which has got -- which is mistranslated,
15 but then there was the previous one. What are you actually wanting
16 admitted, Madam Carter?
17 MS. CARTER: Your Honour, we're asking for the charts that are on
18 the ELMO not the item that's on the e-court. I believe it is being
19 provided to you now.
20 JUDGE MOLOTO: The graphs. Okay. Okay. Fine. These documents
21 are admitted into evidence. May it please be given an exhibit number and
22 marked for identification.
23 THE REGISTRAR: Your Honours, that will be Exhibit P2332, marked
24 for identification.
25 JUDGE MOLOTO: Okay.
Page 5802
1 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Let me just check with Ms. Carter.
2 These tables that were now marked for identification do not include the
3 additional informative report that we got, the interview made with
4 Ms. Tabeau. You are just tendering the tables, right, and the
5 informative conversation that took place on the 4th of May, 2009, is not
6 part of it, or is it.
7 MS. CARTER: That's correct. We're only tendering the graphs.
8 It is a six-page item beginning with a coloured graph entitled
9 "S. Milosevic Report: Time, trend, and killings."
10 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation]
11 Q. Ms. Tabeau, good morning. My name is Novak Lukic and I represent
12 the Defence of Mr. Perisic. I will be examining you.
13 A number of years ago, we met in this very courtroom, in the
14 Bosanski Samac case. You may not remember but I certainly do.
15 I will ask you an initial question. I believe it has to do with
16 the methodology. You told this Court that in many cases before the
17 Tribunal you acted as expert mostly for the OTP. You still work for the
18 OTP, don't you?
19 A. Yes, I do.
20 Q. Did you ever have the chance, did you ever read the decisions of
21 Tribunal in the cases where you were summoned as an expert?
22 A. I occasionally do. I read the decision, for instance, related to
23 admitting my reports in this case.
24 Q. I'm asking you this because both you and everybody else here
25 knows that it is the business of an expert to help the Court to arrive at
Page 5803
1 certain conclusions, and that was your role in the cases where you
2 testified, isn't it?
3 A. Yes, it was.
4 Q. Were you interested in whether afterward your report did indeed
5 help the Court to -- to decide in possible future cases that were similar
6 to the one in which you were testifying?
7 A. Well, I think, yes, generally, yes, in any case to which a report
8 is relevant, most certainly.
9 Q. And I suppose that you read the decision of the Tribunal in the
10 Galic case, where your report was partly taken into consideration and
11 partly was not.
12 A. If you are speaking of the decision in this case, I -- I don't --
13 you need to clarify.
14 Q. The verdict of the Tribunal in the Galic case where you were --
15 testified as an expert, and a part of the verdict reference is made to
16 your report but other parts of your report were not taken into
17 consideration. Did you actually read the first instance decision in the
18 Galic case?
19 A. If you refer to the Judgement, I did read part of it. But it's
20 never the case that a report is accepted as in a whole. There will be
21 results that are accepted and will be deferred to in a Judgement, and
22 there will be parts that are not referred to in a Judgement.
23 Q. My question was: If some parts, some comments of the Tribunal,
24 with regard to your report were not accepted, would you be -- would you
25 be inclined to correct some -- those parts of your report by looking for
Page 5804
1 other sources or trying to apply different calculation methods? Was the
2 position of the Trial Chamber some sort of green light for you to try and
3 find something different?
4 A. I think, sir, that decisions in the Judgement are justified by
5 numerous factors. It is not only my report that is taken into account
6 but several other factors, like witness testimonies, additional reports,
7 et cetera, et cetera.
8 What you are saying is if there were errors in my report, whether
9 I would be inclined to correct them. Is that so?
10 Q. Well, perhaps trying to find another method, another way of
11 arriving at certain conclusions that could assist the Trial Chamber,
12 because the Trial Chamber may decide that Ms. Tabeau's report was not
13 useful to us in certain parts.
14 Well, would that induce to you change something in your -- in
15 your method of work, because there are many similar cases before this
16 Tribunal?
17 A. Sir, in every next report I make I try to improve things. That
18 is the normal way of doing things for me. I am -- I have been learning,
19 as all of us here in this Tribunal, and I am always trying, in every
20 report, and I do my best to present a good, reliable picture and good
21 statistics. But if you are aware of errors in my Sarajevo report, then
22 please tell me, because, so far, I don't recall that errors were pointed
23 to me by Trial Chambers, which I would need to correct in my next report.
24 Q. All right. Let's not dwell upon that any longer because that is
25 for the Court to decide anyway.
Page 5805
1 A general question: You now -- you now fully stand by your
2 report, both the Galic reports and the Milosevic reports. You stand by
3 the findings and the facts contained in those reports, don't you?
4 A. Yes, I do. But for the Slobodan Milosevic, there is a more
5 recent update, which is the Dragomir Milosevic report, not used in this
6 case.
7 Q. I will focus my whole examination on these two reports that are
8 considered here. So the report from the Galic case and the
9 Slobodan Milosevic case.
10 Do you fully stand by the findings in these two reports? That's
11 my question.
12 A. Yes, I do.
13 Q. I'll ask you about your sources now.
14 I suppose that you agree with me when I say that for any
15 expertise, irrespective of the area of the expertise, it is of paramount
16 importance that the sources of information be of high quality.
17 A. Yes, it is.
18 Q. The quality of that information presupposes that in your
19 judgement as a researcher they be of the kind that you, as an expert, may
20 trust them. Isn't that so?
21 A. Yes, it is.
22 Q. And in your reports, in a certain way, you even assist the
23 quality of the information obtained from various sources that you took
24 into consideration and graded them.
25 A. The assessment of sources is an important step in our work.
Page 5806
1 Every source is assessed and various detailed -- in a very detailed way.
2 There are much more information and results from assessment than what is
3 reported in our expert reports because the assessment process is a
4 lengthy procedure and has to do with studying the data items in the
5 database; how deficient they are; how many have empty cells, that means
6 lacking values; how many show logical inconsistencies; how -- what is the
7 coverage every source; what are the biases of every source; whether
8 ethnic groups are well represented or underrepresented or
9 overrepresented. So assessment procedure is a thorough lengthy process.
10 And it is true that there this is an hierarchy of sources that we
11 used in the Galic report which certainly has to do with the reliability
12 and deficiencies of sources, but at the same time as far as I remember,
13 there is a statement in the report that all sources used were of
14 acceptable quality and were relatively reliable.
15 I'm sorry, Slobodan Milosevic report, not Galic report.
16 Q. That's correct. You said as much in the introductory part of the
17 Slobodan Milosevic case that all sources have a certain quality and you
18 rank them hierarchically when you couple them to certain events, and I
19 believe that -- this had to do with the army of BiH?
20 A. I disagree, it has not to do with the army. The hierarchy of
21 sources was applied to the sources that were used for the master list of
22 victims and not to army records because -- and well, hierarchy of sources
23 was a very practical issue related to the fact that when overlapping
24 records between the sources were found, there was a need to decide which
25 record from which source will be taken first and which ones will be
Page 5807
1 considered to be duplicates.
2 So that was the meaning of the hierarchy. And the lists of
3 military records were not used as part of the master list. They were
4 used for a totally different purpose. They were used for monitoring of
5 the status, military status of victims.
6 Q. Actually it was my error. You said that the report was the
7 report of the federal statistics bureau and that in your report that
8 report had the priority in the hierarchy and not the army report;
9 correct?
10 A. The database established by the federal statistical authority was
11 indeed the first priority in our duplicate checks. It is a database that
12 is established by professional statisticians, based on a standardised
13 death notification for every death case. So it has to have a better
14 quality than any other source. All other sources were not compiled by
15 professionals -- professionals, including even the ICRC which is
16 considered to provide highly reliable lists of missing persons. But,
17 still, it is not a statistical authority. They are not professionals.
18 Q. In order to draw a conclusion that a certain piece of information
19 is of good quality, I assume that it is of paramount importance that you
20 can compare this information and perhaps find it -- confirmation for it
21 in some other source that this is something that would actually raise or
22 attribute to assessing this as a high quality source of information --
23 piece of information; correct?
24 A. Well, we cross-references sources all the time, sir. It is a
25 continuous process. This is the major part of the work of my unit,
Page 5808
1 cross-referencing sources through individual matching. We have the
2 population census, as you remember from Simic case, the population census
3 is the core of our population database. We link sources with the
4 population census, compare how information about individuals is reported.
5 Q. Perhaps I wasn't precise enough, but I did not get the answer to
6 my question.
7 The quality of a piece of information, or, rather, a source is
8 better if you can cross-reference the information, if you can compare it
9 with some other information from some other source, rather than if you
10 only have one source of information; correct?
11 A. The quality is as it is. The quality of every source is a
12 feature of this source, right? It has nothing to do with
13 cross-referencing which can help the understanding of a given source in a
14 better way.
15 So what you're trying to say that using multiple sources is
16 better than using one source. I hope this is what you are saying. Is
17 that so, am I right or not?
18 Q. Well, here is what I want to ask you, and it has to do with what
19 I have read in your reports.
20 Your assessments -- your conclusions regarding the number of
21 killed individuals in the period that you surveyed, you had several
22 sources for this case. In particular for the Milosevic report, you used
23 five different sources that dealt with a number of individuals killed.
24 One of those sources, for instance, was the source the Federal Bureau of
25 Statistics. Now the quality of the information contained for you was
Page 5809
1 considered to be good, if you could actually find confirmation, or if you
2 could actually compare and collate them with information that you found
3 in other sources, information relating to the same facts.
4 A. No. I think you misunderstood the procedure. It is -- the
5 federal statistical authority database is a very good database. But this
6 doesn't mean that all other sources are completely to be neglected. That
7 would be very wrong to understand this, you know, like this. Using more
8 sources is better because the picture is more complete. But using one
9 large source, as the Sarajevo Household Survey, which is huge, really,
10 believe me, it's unbelievably large, there is nothing wrong in using one
11 source and produce minimum numbers from this source.
12 So I believe that numbers in both these reports, Galic report and
13 Slobodan Milosevic report, are very good, and believe me, I have compared
14 my sources so many times, from the Galic report, from Slobodan Milosevic
15 report, from Dragomir Milosevic report, and you would be surprised to see
16 the consistency in trends and patterns obtained from each of these
17 reports.
18 There is a new report in which this comparison is presented. We
19 don't have it here but I know what I am saying. There is nothing wrong
20 in using one source, a single source, like Sarajevo Household Survey, to
21 produce these kinds of statistics. There is nothing wrong to work with
22 merged sources, five of them, seven of them, because the picture is even
23 more complete. The problem with sources on war victims is that they are
24 all incomplete, whether you like it or not. That is how it is.
25 So you either have to work with sources that are showing a good
Page 5810
1 coverage and you know they are unbiased, or you have to work with
2 multiple sources.
3 Q. I fully agree with you, and in that sense, you actually compared
4 sources and assessed their quality.
5 Now my question now is this: Your conclusion and your findings
6 when talking about the wounded individuals, for them, you had -- you used
7 only one source and this is the Sarajevo Household Survey for 1994.
8 Now when these -- when that source is concerned, the information
9 contained therein, you did not compare them with any other sources.
10 A. Oh, yes, I did. Not in these two reports, but in the
11 Dragomir Milosevic report there is a wonderful comparison with hospital
12 records from major hospitals in Sarajevo
13 records from Sarajevo
14 victims of shelling/sniping and other violent deaths. And there is a
15 wonderful consistency in the trends between wounded persons reported in
16 Household Survey Sarajevo
17 consistency that could be used to estimate the overall trend in the
18 wounded persons, both hospitalised and non-hospitalised, not only for the
19 period related to Dragomir Milosevic but to the period of the entire
20 siege.
21 Q. You know that that is not the subject matter of your testimony in
22 this -- before this Trial Chamber.
23 Now, I said that I will focus all my questions on your findings
24 in the Galic and Slobodan Milosevic cases, which are part of the record,
25 and now I will go back to the same question.
Page 5811
1 In the case of the wounded in the Galic report, because there is
2 no mention of wounded individuals in the Milosevic case, so in the Galic
3 report, did you use any other report other than the Sarajevo Household
4 Survey for 1994? Just answer my question with yes or no. It is simple.
5 A. In the Galic report, it is only wounded reported in Household
6 Survey Sarajevo
7 Q. And that source, for the purposes of that report, you were unable
8 to compare it with any other source in respect of those facts; correct?
9 A. In the Galic report, that's no comparison with any other source
10 on wounded persons. Just the Household Survey Sarajevo.
11 Q. When you were preparing your report and working on the data, did
12 you, and I mean your entire team that worked on it, did you look for
13 sources yourself or were they offered to you by the Prosecutor?
14 A. No. We looked for the sources ourselves.
15 Q. Did you try to find certain sources and were unable to get to
16 them, or were prevented from doing so by any authorities?
17 A. Not that I recall. The source we wanted for the Galic report,
18 Sarajevo Household Survey, was offered to us by the owners of the source.
19 Q. Now, I would like to ask you about all the sources from both
20 reports.
21 In view of the fact that most of those sources other than the
22 ICRC and the BiH -- the Serbian Army report and the HVO report, all the
23 other sources are sources whose provenance are the federal authorities,
24 the authorities of the federal Bosnia and Herzegovina, in other words,
25 one of the sides in the conflict.
Page 5812
1 So did you have certain reservations in respect of the
2 authenticity and actual correctness of the information contained therein?
3 A. Well, not really. Why statistical authority would be believed to
4 be biased. Later, I also collected the same database from the RS
5 statistical authority and used these two databases together. So when it
6 comes to Sarajevo
7 those that were covering the -- these episode of the conflict the best
8 possible way, so that was the major criterion of selecting our sources.
9 If at the time of the Slobodan Milosevic report, of making of Slobodan
10 Milosevic report, I already had the RS mortality database, I would most
11 certainly have taken it and included it as part of my analysis.
12 Q. All right. Now just a question that has more to do with your
13 impressions but I believe that you may answer that question, being an
14 expert witness here.
15 Now, during your communication in preparing the reports when you
16 communicated with various institutions, and I mean the Bosnia and
17 Herzegovina
18 impression that they had a vested interest in your producing the report
19 and did they ask you to provide them the report once you have completed
20 it?
21 A. Well, indeed, I shouldn't be speaking of my impressions. But, as
22 a matter of fact, it is part of the discussion of sources. You know, I
23 said sources are biased and bias often depends on who makes the sources.
24 As a matter of fact, in every conflict every party in the conflict is
25 interested in showing their victims were the most significant ones. So
Page 5813
1 that is what happens all the time. But this is my role as a
2 statistician, first of all, to recognise the bias, and second, to be able
3 to deal with the bias. And this is what I have been doing. This is what
4 I have been doing in the reports like Slobodan Milosevic.
5 First of all, bias is a very essential issue when it comes to
6 ethnic cleansing, and in the cases of Sarajevo we don't speak about
7 ethnic cleansing. We are speaking of civilians being killed perhaps
8 indiscriminately, so this is a different issue so what really matters are
9 the numbers. The numbers are the crucial issue and from this point of
10 view, in every source all ethnic groups are represented. Every source I
11 used in Slobodan Milosevic case.
12 Sarajevo
13 Sarajevo
14 federation statistical authority, right? So they were registering deaths
15 of every victims disregarding the ethnicity because is that the role of
16 the statistical authority in every country in every time. So there is no
17 reason to believe that they were selective and they were skipping one
18 ethnic group because they didn't like it. I have no reasons to believe
19 that anything like this happened.
20 Q. Is your position on that the same with regard to the Sarajevo
21 Household Survey of 1994, or when this survey is in question, did you
22 have certain greater reservations before you reached your conclusions?
23 A. Sarajevo Household Survey, again, was meant to cover the entire
24 population that lived within the front lines, confrontation lines in
25 Sarajevo
Page 5814
1 it was easier for them to get access to the Bosniak families than to
2 minority groups there. But as a matter of fact, as I said, it is not the
3 ethnic composition of victims that is studied in my reports as the most
4 important issue. It is the numbers of victims.
5 It might be so that Bosniak victims are reported more
6 systematically and more completely than other ethnic groups but the other
7 ethnic groups are reported as well in the survey.
8 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Your Honour, perhaps this is a good
9 time for the break.
10 JUDGE MOLOTO: We'll take a break and come back at quarter to
11 11.00.
12 Court adjourned.
13 --- Recess taken at 10.18 a.m.
14 --- On resuming at 10.47 a.m.
15 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yes, Mr. Lukic.
16 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation]
17 Q. Ms. Tabeau, I would like to continue our discussion regarding
18 sources.
19 Now, the census of 1991, we can agree, was a high-quality source
20 or basis on which you could draw comparisons; correct?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. Were you able to see the federal law, federal code on the census,
23 which was promulgated in 1990, where instructions for conducting the
24 census of 1991 were provided? I believe this was prepared by the then
25 federal statistical bureau.
Page 5815
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. Would you agree with me that this census of the population,
3 because of the -- the situation, as it was, the political situation and
4 the sensitivity of that moment, but regardless of that, that in fact the
5 census was very thoroughly and well prepared?
6 A. Yes, it was prepared very well.
7 Q. The census-takers, the individuals who were involved in this,
8 were individuals who had previously been trained - they were especially
9 instructed - in how to conduct the survey?
10 A. Yes. There was a training for the interviewers and for the
11 instructors, and a lot of other activities around the census. The
12 preparations took about ten years, as for every census.
13 Q. And the handbooks or the material that the interviewers received
14 in the course of the training provided for certain definitions of certain
15 terms that were to be explored in the census?
16 A. Yes. But I want to note we are speaking about the most important
17 survey, complete survey of the population in every country. This
18 population survey, the census, is the most essential source of the
19 information about the population in every country as it is complete, it
20 is huge, there is an army of people involved in the preparation and
21 conduct of the census, and after all, it is the major task of the
22 statistical authority in every country to prepare and conduct the census.
23 And, again, I want to make it clear, to avoid any unnecessary
24 discussion, that demographic of war and sources used in the study of
25 conflict and demographic consequences of conflict shouldn't be measure
Page 5816
1 the same way as official statistics. Official statistics and statistics
2 produced in the area of demography of conflict cannot be directly
3 compared because these two situation, like, you know, the time when the
4 census was prepared and conducted and the time when sources on victims of
5 war are compiled, these two situations cannot be compared, because they
6 are totally uncomparable.
7 Q. All right. So it is your position that they cannot be compared
8 but as a demographer when you assess the quality of a certain source, you
9 have to consider certain standards that in your assessment would be valid
10 when assessing the quality of the source. So we're not talking just
11 about the census but also about war demographics. When you assess a
12 certain source, a source that was relevant for your find information this
13 particular case, for instance, the Household Survey Sarajevo, you used
14 certain standards in assessing the quality of information contained
15 therein and you compare them to the standards -- the world standards, as
16 it were, in compiling such a service; correct?
17 A. You are speaking, sir, of a standard, a standard of assessment of
18 a source. Standards in well established statistical service like the
19 census cannot be taken and applied in war demographics, in sources for
20 war demographics. That is, first, impossible, and second, it would be
21 wrong. One important task of war demographics is first to identify the
22 sources that can be used in a study of casualties of a conflict, to
23 provide a thorough assessment of these sources, to identify deficiencies
24 and biases of sources, and having done all this, to deal with the sources
25 accordingly.
Page 5817
1 So that is my position. So it is not about the standard,
2 worldwide standard of official statistics. It is about the area of war
3 demographics that requires a different approach to sources dealing with
4 sources and analysis. It is exactly the same as you would have said
5 Western countries demography and third-world countries demography is the
6 same; it is not. Believe me, non-Western countries demography is
7 different than Western countries demography, as are war demographics and
8 official statistics. So you can't measure everything with the same
9 standard. That is impossible, and wrong, simply.
10 Q. Well, I don't want to polemicize here the theory of statistics,
11 but if we have in mind the standards used in Western countries and you
12 compare them to third-country standards, the quality of the statistics
13 is, at the same time, compared with the standards that exist in other
14 countries. Is that correct? Well, just answer me with yes or no. We
15 don't have to elaborate on this.
16 A. I can't answer yes and no because you are speaking about
17 standards in western and third-world countries. In third-world country
18 there are no sources as they are in Western countries. In many African
19 countries, for instance, there is no census at all, and still there is a
20 need to have some information about the population, analyse this
21 information and come up with certain meaningful outcomes. So we are
22 speaking of the same situation. We have war demographics that need to be
23 compiled for an area affected by war. That cannot be done using the
24 regular statistical sources and worldwide statistical standards --
25 Q. Well, let's narrow that down, let's narrow down our topic under
Page 5818
1 discussion here.
2 You said that you were aware there was law on the census that
3 regulated the census of 1991. Do you remember, and I will tell that you
4 it was Article 21 of the law, of the code, that regulated or provided for
5 sanctions for -- for sanctions for providing false information, so anyone
6 who would provide false information to an interviewer would be punished.
7 Yes or no, do you remember that there was such a provision?
8 A. I don't exactly know whether it was 21 Article or something else,
9 but most certainly people were, first of all, obliged to participate in
10 the census, everybody, and everybody by law was obligated to provide the
11 true information.
12 Q. And under the law, every individual was to provide information on
13 themselves. So the -- the basic sentiments of citizens had to be
14 provided by that citizen himself; for instance, the ethnicity or the
15 religious affiliations and so on.
16 A. That's right.
17 Q. And now you're telling us that these two criteria, these two
18 forms that are significant in providing information to an interviewer
19 could not be compared to the surveys or censuses from the time of war.
20 The 1994 census provided for one member of the household providing
21 information for all other members of the household to the interviewer.
22 Is that correct?
23 A. Yes, that's correct. However, we didn't use this information in
24 our analysis in Galic. As you might remember, 81.6 per cent of the
25 records of the Sarajevo Household Survey, the part that we computerised
Page 5819
1 for the Galic report which was about 40.000 records, 37.022, 37.022
2 records, 81.6 per cent of those records were matched with census, 1991
3 population census. Having done the matching, sir, you can transfer
4 information between sources. So for the records matched you could use
5 the ethnicity reported in the census and this is what we have done. So
6 there is no bias in ethnicity in our report because it is taken from the
7 census, and there is a small group of the individuals that are not
8 matched for which we don't have ethnicity and in our report it says
9 ethnicity unknown.
10 Q. You will agree with me, and I believe that you also said so
11 during the examination-in-chief, that the many purpose of your report in
12 the Galic case was to establish the number of civilians who were killed
13 or wounded. That was your task, the status -- the victim status was the
14 focus of your work in both reports. Correct?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. In the Sarajevo Household Survey of 1994, in respect of the
17 wounded, you, the individuals who compiled this report, there was a --
18 there was a question relating to the status of a member of the household,
19 whether they were killed or wounded. When I say "status," I mean either
20 this could refer or apply to either a civilian or a military person.
21 Correct?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. The person giving that information to the interviewer was not
24 obliged to prove the information given to the interviewer by any document
25 when it comes to injury or death, or other status. Whatever was said to
Page 5820
1 the interviewer was entered into the form without any proof or evidence.
2 A. Yes. There wasn't -- there was no requirement to prove the facts
3 of death, injury, dates, marital status.
4 Q. Let us now take a look at this questionnaire. It is part of this
5 document P2325. It's English page 56, and in B/C/S it's page 55.
6 Let us just briefly analyse what kind of information was given or
7 was available.
8 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] If we could move one page back on the
9 left side. Or, rather, no, leave it this way because the legend is both
10 in B/C/S and in English.
11 Q. Let us start with the following: This is the questionnaire used
12 by the interviewers in the Sarajevo Household Survey in 1994, isn't it?
13 A. Yes, it is.
14 Q. It is in two languages, B/C/S and English.
15 As far as I remember from your report, you only processed part of
16 the information from that questionnaire; is that correct?
17 A. Yes, it is.
18 Q. You processed the information from questions 1 and 2. Isn't it?
19 A. Yes. Yes, among others.
20 Q. Yes, yes, we'll get to that. I find number 2 interesting,
21 because it provides information about whether that family household lives
22 at the same address where it lived before the war or if, in the meantime,
23 it had moved to another of the six Sarajevo
24 correct?
25 A. Yes, it is.
Page 5821
1 Q. I think - and correct me if I'm wrong - that did you not analyse
2 the answers under 4 in your report?
3 A. No, I didn't.
4 Q. That is a question about the members of the family household who
5 had fled or were displaced from Sarajevo
6 territory, as it says, controlled by the aggressor, so that during the
7 population census in 1991, were members of the family household and lived
8 there and, at the time when this survey was made, for some reason, were
9 no longer to be found at that place. Is that correct?
10 A. I'm not sure what you are saying. Well, it is a question that is
11 related to listing the family members of a given household and giving
12 information about whether or not they moved from their original
13 pre-census location.
14 So in this sense, that is correct.
15 Q. Then you separately processed information which I presume were
16 important to you, the answers under 5, 6, and 12. Did I miss anything?
17 5, 6, and 12, and that is information about casualties and those who died
18 a natural death, including their status. Isn't that right?
19 A. That's right.
20 Q. At the time when you were drafting the Galic report, this was an
21 important database for you, regarding the status of the victim, wasn't
22 it?
23 A. Yes, it was.
24 Q. As far as I remember, the only other source which also mentioned
25 the status - namely, civilian or soldier - was the report of the burial
Page 5822
1 authority. I believe they were the only ones that had that information.
2 A. No, you are wrong. There was also the ABiH list of fallen
3 soldiers and other military personnel. That was used in the Galic
4 report.
5 Q. Could you please tell me where in the Galic case you relied on
6 the ABiH report for me to be able to find it?
7 A. In the executive summary in the most important table, Table 1, in
8 the Galic report, which is page 3.
9 Q. Okay. We'll get to that table later on.
10 A. We have -- we have two definitions of status listed in this
11 table. The first one is the status, marital status as reported in the
12 household survey. And the second one is called status external
13 definition. It is page 3, English version of the Galic report.
14 Q. For the purpose of precision, that is at Table 1 in the Galic
15 report at page 3, right?
16 A. Right.
17 Q. All right. Thank you.
18 A. So --
19 Q. We'll get back to that later. But I haven't seen -- oh, yes.
20 Can you tell me where you referred that ABiH source? Is it
21 marked ABiH/VRS?
22 A. This is the lists of the fallen soldiers, the military lists of
23 fallen soldiers and other military personnel that were provided to us, to
24 the Demographic Unit and for the OTP by the Defence ministries, the ABiH
25 at least by the federal Ministry of Defence and the VRS by the RS
Page 5823
1 Ministry of Defence. So we used these lists in addition to the status
2 reported in the Household Survey, as a more objective definition of the
3 military status, we believed, namely, that the status that was
4 self-reported which was not documented by any formal documents might be
5 an over-reporting of soldiers, and this actual fact is a rather known
6 fact in sever other sources. It is not only this source. People tend to
7 over-report soldiers.
8 So for the distinction between civilian victims and military
9 victims it is really important to have well-reported soldiers on the
10 first place.
11 Q. I agree fully that is a very important topic, but I really fail
12 to understand. Maybe it is my fault. When I was reading your report in
13 the Galic case, when I read the content of the report, I cannot see in
14 the content or the report itself that you refer, as you do in the
15 Milosevic case, to a BiH source. I can see you referring to the
16 Household Survey and the database of the Bakije undertaking company, and
17 you analyse those.
18 So my question is: Did you in the Galic report, rely on the --
19 the report of the Ministry of Defence? Because I haven't seen that
20 anywhere. You mentioned the table, and say that the table considers
21 information from those sources but did you analyse them anywhere? Do you
22 mention that?
23 A. I just started explaining where in the report you can find
24 references to ABiH list, and Table 1 is just one place.
25 If you go to page 27 of the English version of the report, there
Page 5824
1 is a paragraph, that is the second paragraph for -- from the bottom --
2 from the top, in which I explain how we used the military lists.
3 Page 27, English version of the report. It's the page where the Table 5
4 is included and look at the second paragraph and actually the first
5 paragraph from the top is related as well.
6 In this paragraph we explain how the external definition of
7 status was made and from this paragraph you see that we used the records
8 of fallen soldiers through the matching with the census and Household
9 Survey, and we used the records matched for marking them as soldiers, and
10 it was for about 80 per cent of matched records. For the remaining
11 20 records that were not matched we used the self-reported status. So it
12 is an integration of two definitions. For 80 per cent of records it is
13 the external status from the military lists, and for the remaining
14 20 records are matched records. It is as reported in the Household
15 Survey Sarajevo
16 which we used the Sarajevo Household Survey definition, and for the 80,
17 it is the external source used for this definition this item expresses,
18 as a matter of fact, the external definition as obtained from applying
19 the military lists.
20 Q. I must ask a layman's question to be able to understand.
21 In any case, generally speaking, in the Household Survey you
22 established that there were no more combatants than civilians who came to
23 harm, based on that information. Or let us take a look at the tables.
24 This will simplify things.
25 Let me ask you this: When you refer to the Ministry of Defence
Page 5825
1 that gave you information about killed combatants, that's the same source
2 that you used in the Milosevic case for the members of the army BiH, or
3 until -- up until 1995 or are we talking about two different sources
4 there?
5 A. It's the same source.
6 Q. I'll proceed along my way of questioning the status of civilian
7 or combatant; that, I believe, is important to all of us here in this
8 courtroom.
9 But let me get back to the data from the Household Survey. Did
10 the authors of that survey, from 1994, inform you that all households
11 were registered in the territory of the parts of the six Sarajevo
12 municipalities?
13 A. Yes, they said all to which they had access were registered.
14 Q. About 85.000 households were registered there; isn't that right?
15 A. That's right.
16 Q. But neither they nor you were able to tell whether all households
17 that, at the time, were present in the parts of those six municipalities
18 were indeed registered, or do you suppose that, indeed, all households
19 were registered?
20 A. Well, I think marginal numbers could have been skipped. But it
21 doesn't matter really. Because 85.000 households is a really huge number
22 if you compare this number from the pre-war data from the census and
23 publications on the households then you see that it is almost all. So it
24 really doesn't matter whether the few you are thinking of were left out
25 or not. That is one thing.
Page 5826
1 Another thing is the numbers we presented in the Galic report are
2 presented as minimum numbers, minimum numbers, at least numbers. So we
3 don't claim it is a complete number that we have there covering all the
4 victims. It is a minimum number. We are aware of the fact that some
5 victims are left out and we even made an estimate to account for those
6 that are not listed in our sources. To address this fact explicitly.
7 So I think all in all what we presented in the Galic report is
8 first coming from a large source, a source that was well prepared, this
9 regarding the difficult circumstances at that time, a source that was
10 collected -- data was collected through interviewers that were trained.
11 It is not that they didn't have any training at all. The structures used
12 in collecting the data were the "mjesna zajednica," the local communities
13 that had a very easy access to the population, so this is all together a
14 very good source and in addition to this, it is large. And we are saying
15 in addition to this, even though it is large and well done, we still
16 believe it is incomplete and we come up with minimum numbers, only
17 minimum numbers, conservative numbers.
18 Q. I would prefer a shorter answer so that we might be able to
19 finish today. I understand that you want to be as precise as possible.
20 But you used this source to statistically establish the
21 population that lived in that territory at that time; is that correct?
22 A. Yes. We tried to estimate the size of this population.
23 Q. You established it by multiplying 85.000 by 4, as the estimated
24 number of members of a household at that time and that territory, isn't
25 it?
Page 5827
1 A. That's right.
2 Q. And you said yourself that in your report, statistically for the
3 territories of all the municipalities that could be processed before the
4 war, that the overall numbers were raised due to the migrations of
5 population during the period of time in question; isn't that correct?
6 A. Yes, that's correct. I think the average household size was
7 lower that for -- according to the pre-war data. It was 3 point
8 something, as far as I remember.
9 Q. You said a minute ago you did not include question 4 that gave
10 information about the population that had left the territory, in order to
11 get more precise data about the persons who had left Sarajevo in --
12 during the period in question. You did not consider that, or did you?
13 A. Yes and no, I must say. I did not include the data from this
14 questionnaire, but in addition to the main data I used for the Galic
15 report, we at some point collected a pilot sample of the data which was
16 several thousands of questionnaires from two municipalities, I think one
17 of them was Stari Grad and the other one was Centar. And these
18 questionnaires, these pilot questionnaires that we collected were all
19 questionnaires available for these areas and these questionnaires
20 contained data on all demographic events, including the displaced
21 population.
22 So not only killed and wounded and natural deaths were there, but
23 also births, live births and still births, also deaths during the Second
24 World War, and the displaced population living in Sarajevo at the time of
25 the survey. Using the pilot we estimated the displaced population in
Page 5828
1 these two locations within Sarajevo
2 report, and it was about 86 of original population living in these two
3 locations versus 14 per cent of the displaced population in these
4 municipalities.
5 So we had good ideas about the displacement present within the
6 Sarajevo
7 Q. That pilot project you analysed encompasses two municipalities,
8 that is about 4.000 households, I believe, and that is .5 per cent of the
9 number of households established, isn't it?
10 A. That is correct.
11 Q. And according to you, as a demographer, that was a sufficient
12 parameter for you to be able to draw conclusion about the number of
13 persons who had left the territories of those municipalities; correct?
14 A. I have not drawn any conclusions based on this number. I am
15 mentioning this number to you in response to your question. Most
16 importantly, what's the importance, what the meaning -- what's the
17 meaning of the displaced persons? The report is about the number of
18 casualties within the confrontation lines. And if you are leading with
19 these questions to the calculation of rates, then, again, it is
20 irrelevant because rates are calculated only for the population
21 originating from these municipalities and not for the displaced
22 population.
23 Q. Ms. Tabeau, reading your findings, I conclude that the -- your --
24 the assumed number of persons living there, about 300.000, is the basis
25 that you -- for several analyses of yours. Your assumption of the number
Page 5829
1 of inhabitants of that area is very important, isn't it?
2 A. Yes, it is.
3 Q. Why didn't you simply add up the -- the -- the members of the
4 households in these 85.000 households from the questionnaire? I can't
5 see that this is such a huge task. Why didn't you proceed in this simple
6 fashion?
7 A. I think are you wrong about that it is a simple task. It is a
8 huge task. It is a huge task. We are speaking of entering information
9 for at least 300.000 individuals. 300.000 individuals. Do you realise
10 that? In order to have this information that are you addressing right
11 now, you would need to --
12 Q. No --
13 A. -- enter all records of both non-displaced and displaced
14 population from this survey, and every questionnaire, and there are
15 85.000 questionnaires, contains a number of names listed as household
16 members.
17 Q. I must interrupt you. Regarding this information, I believe that
18 the names and personal information are not important. Only numbers are
19 important. And you are saying that merely adding up numbers from 85.000
20 questionnaires is more difficult than making assumptions the way you did.
21 Is that what you are saying?
22 A. No, sir, this is not what I'm saying. This is -- what I'm saying
23 is that you have no idea about how statistics are made, how much it takes
24 from the moment a survey --
25 Q. I must interrupt you.
Page 5830
1 A. [Previous translation continues] ...
2 Q. I really am soliciting a simple answer. I'm saying that up until
3 the total population, if we rely on the household survey from 1994 as a
4 high-quality source, in a simple fashion, that would take some time.
5 However, could have made -- could have accurately established the
6 population present there, instead of making assumptions.
7 You did not simply count the persons that were -- that could be
8 found in the sources.
9 A. I didn't count the displaced persons and the majority of the
10 survey population because I didn't need them. In order to come up with
11 numbers of casualties, of killed persons and wounded persons, I needed to
12 computerise the records of killed and wounded persons and this is what I
13 did, and it really doesn't matter whether a person originally lived in
14 Sarajevo
15 long as the person is listed as a killed or wounded person.
16 Q. But the figure of 340.000 at which you arrived based on your
17 assumption was used as a basis for your statistical estimate, wasn't it?
18 A. For the estimation of rates, and if you would think a little bit,
19 the 340 [sic] I estimated from the average size of four for a household
20 is more than if you would have used 3 as the average household. And if
21 you think a little bit how the rates are calculated and that the
22 population is actually in the denominator, so the larger size is better
23 for calculation of the conservative rates, that is lower rates, lower,
24 not higher but relatively lower, lower.
25 So what I did I took the conservative approach not to
Page 5831
1 overestimate the rates, which is good for the Defence, actually.
2 Q. I am logically fully aware of what you have said but I don't want
3 to go into the issue of what is good for me or not.
4 I just want to know whether it was statistically correct if you
5 have the relevant data to simply count the persons. You didn't do it.
6 You think that this method of counting people was not -- was not
7 necessary for you, that it was sufficient for you to make an estimate.
8 Is that correct?
9 A. Well, there were two things. It wasn't absolutely necessary,
10 that is one. And, second, it was extremely resource consuming, and I'm
11 not the person to decide about the resources, sir.
12 Q. All right. That's an answer.
13 I'll ask you a few questions about another source. With regard
14 to the Milosevic case, that's the ICRC report that you have mentioned,
15 and you consider it a high-quality report, and I understood this to be a
16 report about missing persons which, according to the conclusions of the
17 ICRC, can be used as accounting for missing people, so missing persons
18 that were to be found in their database?
19 A. Yes, these are missing persons, not killed, explicitly killed or
20 wounded. These are missing person who are believed to be dead and who
21 died in violent circumstances.
22 Q. And from that source, from that list of missing persons of the
23 ICRC, you matched, as far as I understood, 570 persons who were
24 inhabitants of Sarajevo
25 that correctly? Which means that ...
Page 5832
1 A. I think in order to get the right answer, you, sir, have to go to
2 page 8 of the Slobodan Milosevic report and look at Table A2.
3 Q. Mm-hm.
4 A. In this table - do you have it? - there is a category "Unique
5 ICRC." The Table shows how many records entered per source. So there is
6 a category "Unique ICRC" and it says that 70 records were taken from the
7 ICRC alone.
8 And the number you mentioned, the 570 records have been indeed
9 matched with the census and come from the ICRC, but it is not that all of
10 them are unique ICRC records taken for the Slobodan Milosevic report.
11 The -- another 500 records out of 570 overlapped with other sources,
12 predominantly with sources like Household Survey Sarajevo or Muslims
13 Against Genocide, and were accepted on the basis of the other sources for
14 the analysis.
15 So it is at the same time a proof that the 570 missing persons
16 matched with the census have been confirmed for as many as 500 as deaths
17 in other sources.
18 Q. That's exactly what I assumed, and my question was, or is, did
19 the Prosecutor inform the ICRC about these 500 individuals that they had
20 on their list as missing persons that they had actually been killed based
21 on other sources. I mean, maybe has nothing to do with our proceedings
22 here, but it seems to me if that's how you matched them, that this is
23 something that would you have done.
24 A. Sir, I don't want to speak about these issues because this is not
25 part of this trial, but we do indeed have an ongoing cooperation with the
Page 5833
1 ICRC and that should clarify your question.
2 Q. I agree. I agree there is no need to go any further into this
3 but this is something that just occurred to me while I was preparing for
4 this cross, considering it useful information.
5 But let's move on to something else. I would like to discuss now
6 the procedure for identifying those killed, and now, let's go to your
7 report in the Milosevic case, the Slobodan Milosevic case.
8 If I understood this correctly, what you did is you matched
9 information from several different sources, and once you matched that
10 information, you actually produced new information or, rather,
11 conclusions that then you incorporated into your report. Is that
12 correct?
13 A. I didn't produce any new information. I produced a new list of
14 victims and the information in this list, which I call a master list, or
15 integrated list, is exactly the same as in the underlying sources.
16 Q. And now we will discuss absolute figures, not assessments.
17 So you've, after you have matched the information, you have
18 learned the names, the first and last names, of individuals who were
19 killed. That was one type of information that you matched. Correct?
20 A. Yes. Names were part of the records matched.
21 Q. In some sources you also had a very useful bit of information
22 called the pin number for citizens which was very useful for matching;
23 correct?
24 A. You are speaking of JMBG, right? The pin number.
25 Q. Yes, that's correct.
Page 5834
1 A. [Previous translation continues] ... in some sources, yes.
2 Predominantly for a number of records in the military lists. But in a
3 majority of sources in Slobodan Milosevic, we didn't have JMBG reported.
4 Q. You then received information as to the place of death of that
5 individual, and you established that all these individuals who were the
6 subject of your survey had been killed in those areas of these six
7 municipalities under the BH Army control; correct?
8 A. Yes. The place of death was part of the record from mortality
9 sources and was taken for the master list.
10 Q. The next type of information was the time of death; correct?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. Then you also had information as to the cause of death or injury;
13 correct?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. And finally, perhaps I omitted something, but I am just
16 mentioning here the things that are important to me, the next item was
17 the status of that individual, whether it was a combatant or a civilian.
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. The status as category is corroborated by the following sources.
20 All the three sources of the three armies: The BH army, the VRS and the
21 HVO, the information provided from those sources. Correct?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. Then, as we saw earlier, you also used, for this category, the
24 Sarajevo Household Survey of 1994, which also included this; correct?
25 A. Yes.
Page 5835
1 Q. And also the Bakije Funeral Home lists, they were -- the
2 information from that were also contained in the source. Correct?
3 A. Yes. And I think federal authority also included for a few
4 records, reporting of the military status.
5 Q. Do you mean the Federal Bureau of Statistics or the federal
6 Ministry of Defence?
7 A. Federal Bureau of Statistics. But in order to be sure about it,
8 I would have to double-check this. But it wasn't in any case a
9 systematic reporting of the military status in this source.
10 Q. You've -- have also pointed out in your report, and I found this
11 information acceptable but I just want to verify it with you, the lists
12 that you received from the BH army on the soldiers killed, none of those
13 lists contained the information as to the place of their death; correct?
14 A. Yes, that's right.
15 Q. I assume that you -- that the most reliable source for you
16 regarding this issue of status, whether the person was a combatant or a
17 civilian, was -- or were the military sources; and, for the moment, I
18 would like to discuss the BH army source.
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Is it -- am I correct if I claim that if you found in another
21 source that a person was a combatant but this did not match with the
22 status as provided for in the lists of the BH army, that you would then
23 change that status to civilian, and I'm -- I refer here to those
24 individuals who have been -- who were killed.
25 A. Sir, one clarification. The military lists were not used to
Page 5836
1 create the master list as such, because place of death was not reported.
2 Military lists were used for monitoring the status of the individuals
3 that entered the master list based on the other sources used in the
4 project.
5 Whatever record was matched from the master list with military
6 lists, and there were 80 per cent of matched, the military status was
7 assigned as military because the match was established. For a small
8 number of records we couldn't do that because these records were not
9 matched. For these records the status was taken as reported in the
10 source from which the record originated.
11 So it is again a merge here. Basically it is mainly the military
12 status as reported in the ABiH lists, and VRS lists as well, we used
13 those as well, and for a small number of unmatched record it is the
14 status as reported in the original sources.
15 So these are important facts, and we should have a clear picture
16 of them.
17 Q. Well, I have to put a very basic question.
18 If you found based on the Household Survey of 1994 that an
19 individual was listed as a combatant and you didn't find that same person
20 on the BH Army list, what group did you put this individual under in your
21 report in the Milosevic case? When I mean what group, I mean whether you
22 grouped them as -- you put them under civilian or combatant.
23 A. As a combatant. Because he is - or she - reported as a combatant
24 in the original source.
25 Q. Very well. Thank you. You must know, Ms. Tabeau, that a
Page 5837
1 combatant in an armed conflict is not -- does not imply only a member of
2 an army, a soldier of an army. I assume you know that there is this
3 category of combatant.
4 A. Yes, I'm aware. But as I explained in the Galic report that if a
5 person is reported as a soldier or combatant or whatever way, we just
6 take it as a person who possibly could have died as a combatant. That
7 means in a combat. But we, as a matter of fact, don't know the specific
8 circumstances for death of all people listed as soldiers in any source.
9 So in order to decide whether these people died in combat, we would have
10 to go through these victims on case-by-case basis and study circumstances
11 and then decide. And this is obviously impossible, because the numbers
12 are so large.
13 So what we can do, we can take the status as reported, and we can
14 assume it's a proxy for the circumstances of death, but this is by no
15 means a specific confirmation of the fact that they died in combat.
16 JUDGE MOLOTO: In fact, that fact would have to be verified by
17 the person who compiled the source document?
18 THE WITNESS: Even this person probably is --
19 JUDGE MOLOTO: If at all.
20 THE WITNESS: If at all, yes. That's my answer.
21 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation]
22 Q. Are you aware that members of paramilitary units and militias in
23 an armed conflict are not considered civilians? Do you know that this is
24 a category under the Geneva Conventions?
25 A. Well, I'm not a lawyer but I can imagine that they are not
Page 5838
1 considered, yes. It is not my area, so I wouldn't like to make
2 statements about these kinds of legal issues.
3 Q. Yes, yes, of course. Did you by any chance request that the
4 police of the BH provide you are lists of their members killed during the
5 conflict?
6 A. I think the police members are reported in the databases provided
7 by the Ministries of Defence as one of the categories. I didn't explain,
8 but these two databases, or three, we have three databases, one for ABiH,
9 one VRS, and one HVO, these three databases include not only soldiers but
10 also some other categories. They include police members who died during
11 the conflict. They include even the personnel of the ministries of the
12 Defence and associated organisations, and even persons who were part of
13 the production section -- sector providing goods and services for the
14 army.
15 So these are very broad lists and, of course, a large number of
16 individuals included in these lists died as soldiers in -- most likely in
17 combat situations but by no means all of them should and can be seen like
18 this. So police, we didn't request these records separately but police
19 records are part of the databases that we used in this report.
20 Q. Let us now take a look at your first report, and we've already
21 mentioned this topic earlier but let's now discuss it more thoroughly.
22 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Can we please see document P2325,
23 Table 1.
24 Q. This is from your Galic report.
25 JUDGE MOLOTO: Just to avoid any confusion, this P2325, that's a
Page 5839
1 number for the Galic case. It's not an exhibit number for this trial.
2 THE WITNESS: Yes.
3 JUDGE MOLOTO: Okay. Thank you.
4 [Trial Chamber and registrar confer]
5 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] I will have to intervene.
6 JUDGE MOLOTO: It is -- it is an exhibit in this case, I'm told.
7 Thank you.
8 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation]
9 Q. So this is a table of statistical overview. It's called "An
10 Overview of Summary Statistics from the Household Survey Sarajevo
11 And as regards the individuals killed you established that
12 1.399 civilians were killed, and 2.381 soldiers; correct?
13 A. Yes. These are minimum numbers.
14 Q. Based on that source?
15 A. Based on that source and related to the indictment period only.
16 Galic indictment period.
17 Q. That's right. When you matched this with other sources, this
18 period, you established that the number of civilians was somewhat higher,
19 the number of soldiers, combatants, somewhat lower, but that the number
20 of soldiers was still greater, far greater than the number of civilians
21 killed. Correct?
22 A. Well, we can take a look these additional pages which were used
23 at the beginning of my testimony today. I studied these numbers --
24 Q. No, I have to ask you based on my prepared questions. Please
25 just answer my questions. I'm just referring to what I have prepared
Page 5840
1 for.
2 So do you agree with me that the number of combatants under both
3 sources was greater, the number of combatants killed was greater than the
4 number of civilians killed in both these sources?
5 So please answer with yes or no.
6 JUDGE MOLOTO: You're perfectly entitled to ask questions
7 according to your preparation. I think the witness is entitled to give
8 the answers according to her preparation.
9 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] I agree. I agree, absolutely.
10 JUDGE MOLOTO: So she should be able to go to the documents that
11 will give her the answer that you asked for.
12 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Yes, Your Honour. I will follow your
13 instructions.
14 JUDGE MOLOTO: Sorry, if you still remember the question, please
15 answer it.
16 THE WITNESS: Yes. First of all, the number of civilians in the
17 Slobodan Milosevic report for the period of the Perisic indictment, the
18 number of civilians is higher than the number of soldiers killed. I'm
19 speaking of killed persons.
20 But now we can go back to the Galic report and we can pay
21 attention to these 12 months that can be compared between Galic report
22 and Perisic -- and Slobodan Milosevic report, and we can take a look at
23 the table, if you allow me to do so. And in these cases, in Galic the
24 number of civilians will be lower than the number of soldiers, and in the
25 Slobodan Milosevic the number of civilians will be higher than the number
Page 5841
1 of soldiers.
2 So there will be an opposite picture from these two reports. We
3 can take a look at the Table --
4 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation]
5 Q. I'm aware of that and that's exactly what I wanted to ask you
6 about. That is what I would like to us talk about here.
7 So let's just talk about the same period of time, just the period
8 of time that you reported in the Galic report, and your findings in the
9 Milosevic case. And perhaps we can proceed in the following manner.
10 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Let us look -- just a moment, please.
11 Could we now please see the Galic table, A3.13. That will be on
12 page -- just a moment, please.
13 Table A3.13, Your Honours, I wonder if you have a copy of that
14 report before you. This is in Annex 3, Table 13.
15 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yes, Madam Carter is on her feet.
16 MS. CARTER: Just for the assistance of the Chamber and Defence
17 counsel, that would be page 69 in the e-court.
18 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Thank you very much.
19 Q. I'm not going to ask you to make a calculation here. But please
20 take a look at 1993 and the number of soldiers, combatants killed.
21 That's in the second column.
22 According to your sources, the sources that you used in the Galic
23 case, in absolute figures, this is the total number of combatants killed
24 in the period from January through December 1993, and I calculated that
25 that figure is 1.389 or thereabout, the total for this. If you have a
Page 5842
1 calculator and if you wish to add it up yourself, I would like to compare
2 this to the same category that you described in the Milosevic case, and I
3 would like to compare this by year.
4 So, according to this table, am I correct that the total number
5 of combatants killed is what we see in column 3, for the period
6 January through December 1993, and we -- if we add them all up, we will
7 get the total number of combatants killed in the Galic case. Correct?
8 A. In 1993, killed in 1993, combatants, yes.
9 Q. That's right.
10 A. Soldiers. I would prefer to say soldiers. Is it okay?
11 Q. Well, I am using the B/C/S term.
12 You're right, actually. I wanted to check. It is soldiers.
13 That's how it is stated here.
14 Now, I would like to compare the totals that we have here with
15 your table in the Milosevic case, Table A3, where you mentioned the same
16 category, the soldiers except here you use the term "combatant." And in
17 absolute figures for the same territory, the same period you used the
18 figure 1.150 persons. Correct?
19 A. Sir, I don't have these numbers calculated right now, except for
20 this little table that I made for you, actually, to simplify your task.
21 And the total in that table, you're speaking about the same 12 months, I
22 guess, because that is the only period that is the same in these two
23 reports.
24 So what is your total, 1.150 and this is for 1993, entire 1993?
25 Q. Well, my total -- correct, that's the period. But when I added
Page 5843
1 up all the numbers in the A3.13 figure without the unknown, all the
2 combatants killed in the period January through December 1993, I came up
3 with the number 1.389. Maybe I'm mistaken but I don't think so. But
4 that number is higher than the number that you have come up with. Even
5 if you look at the breakdown by month, you can see that that number is
6 higher per month in the table that -- in the Milosevic case. Correct?
7 A. Yes. This is why I insist to show you this table for the
8 12 overlapping months for Perisic in which we can see these numbers per
9 month. Per month. And you are right, the number of soldiers will be
10 higher in Slobodan Milosevic report, generally. That is what you are
11 saying, and I agree with that.
12 I would like to add that the numbers for the Galic report are the
13 numbers from the self-reported status not from the external definition.
14 This is self-reported in Galic. So we have two different definitions
15 used for data shown in these two reports.
16 Q. You told me a minute ago that where the status was given -- the
17 status given was different, you accepted the status that was
18 self-reported.
19 Now, why did you -- the status that you -- that was used in the
20 household review -- survey, you -- in other words, let me ask you this:
21 You used -- in the Milosevic case you used the Household Survey of 1994.
22 Correct?
23 A. Right. But I can answer your question already --
24 Q. Did you include all those individuals who were mentioned in that
25 survey as combatants, did you use those figures in the Milosevic case?
Page 5844
1 Yes or no?
2 A. For the remaining unmatched 20 per cent of records.
3 Sir, there are two definitions in Galic, two definitions of
4 status in Galic. All statistics in all tables in the Galic report are
5 presented based on self-reported status taken from the Sarajevo Household
6 Survey. The other definition is shown in the summary table, Table 1, and
7 there is another table, 3, and perhaps more tables only in terms of
8 summary statistics to address the issue of over-reporting the military
9 status by the respondents of the Sarajevo
10 course, has impact on the numbers of civilians. But you are comparing
11 two things that are not directly comparable because these are two
12 different definitions of status used in these two reports.
13 Q. Well, we are drifting away from each other now.
14 Now my question was very simple, Ms. Tabeau. Please try to
15 answer in simple terms because I'm a lawyer, and I, unfortunately, cannot
16 fully follow your expert report here.
17 The status of combatant or the status of soldier was set forth in
18 the Galic report for a certain period of time, for the same location,
19 where you established that the greater number of combatants were killed
20 in that period than civilians, than the number of civilians killed in
21 that period. Correct?
22 A. The status in the Galic report is self-reported by the
23 respondents of the Sarajevo Household Survey. So there will be -- if you
24 compare this with the external definition of status, there will be more
25 soldiers, according to the internal definition.
Page 5845
1 Q. That was my question. According to the source that you used in
2 the Galic case, there was a greater number of soldiers killed than
3 civilians for the reported period; correct?
4 A. Compared to the Slobodan Milosevic, yes.
5 JUDGE MOLOTO: Maybe on that note, then we can take up from there
6 later, don't you think?
7 We will come back at half past 12.00.
8 Court adjourned.
9 --- Recess taken at 12.02 p.m.
10 --- On resuming at 12.31 p.m.
11 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yes, Mr. Lukic.
12 MR. LUKIC: Thank you, Your Honour.
13 [Interpretation] Could we please get the second report of
14 Ms. Tabeau back on the screen. That is Exhibit P2325. That is
15 Table A3.13. I said the second report from the Galic case. Maybe I
16 misquoted it. I'm sorry, the first report from the Galic case, P2325.
17 Q. We'll return to this table for a little while, Ms. Tabeau.
18 We're now looking at the period from September 1992 through
19 August 1994 in the Galic case report.
20 Do you agree with me that when I say that in the period in
21 question, in all months, except for October 1992, more soldiers were
22 killed than civilians, according to this report?
23 A. Well, generally, this is the case. But there will be more cases
24 like October 1992. But generally --
25 Q. Yes, there are some. October 1992 and now I see February 1994.
Page 5846
1 But in the other months, and in some months, significantly fewer
2 civilians than soldiers were killed in these municipalities, or parts of
3 municipalities.
4 A. Generally, this would be the expectation that fewer civilians
5 than soldiers were killed.
6 Q. Let us now look at your report P2331, that is the Milosevic case
7 report, Tables A3 and A4.
8 Let us first agree that we're talking about the same territory;
9 is that correct?
10 A. Not necessarily, because the territories were, in the Galic
11 report, within the confrontation line, which covered large parts of the
12 six municipalities, and in the Slobodan Milosevic report, these were
13 six -- the same municipalities -- municipalities taken as a whole.
14 So there is a slight difference in the territories.
15 Q. Uh-huh. This is news to me. So you're saying that in the
16 Slobodan Milosevic case, you analysed the territory within the boundaries
17 of the municipalities that were covered by the 1991 census. That is to
18 say, a larger territory than that in the other case.
19 A. Yes, slightly larger. We studied the population from the census,
20 1991 population, for both territories. Using the bridging system between
21 [B/C/S spoken] from the Galic report and the municipalities reported in
22 the census, we were able to establish that the population within the
23 confrontation lines was approximately 80 per cent of the census
24 population. I'm not speaking of geographic territories because that is
25 irrelevant. What is really relevant is the population size in these
Page 5847
1 territories.
2 Q. I agree. But let us make something clear: The population that
3 you examined that lived in the territory in the Milosevic case and the
4 population in the Galic case is 340.000 persons. That is the number.
5 And that's the number that is based on the Household Survey in 1994.
6 A. It is an estimate of this population.
7 Q. All right. That means that we're talking about the same number
8 of persons as estimated in both reports.
9 A. I'm now confused. Sorry, you -- please rephrase the question.
10 Q. In the Galic case, you found out and expressed the opinion that
11 the population was 340.000, based on the 85.000 households that were the
12 source of your work from the Household Survey carried out in 1994, and
13 you rely on the same population size in the Milosevic case report, as the
14 population you are examining.
15 A. Well, I don't recall that I mentioned the population size. I
16 mentioned six municipalities in the Slobodan Milosevic report, and the
17 population size in these municipalities is not 340.000.
18 JUDGE MOLOTO: What is the population size in those
19 municipalities?
20 THE WITNESS: In -- according to the 1991 population census --
21 JUDGE MOLOTO: No. According to the Milosevic report.
22 THE WITNESS: It is unclear because the population changed since
23 after the 1991 population census and we have the estimate, 340.000
24 individuals who stayed within the confrontation lines and it is unclear
25 how many stayed outside the confrontation lines. And because of the
Page 5848
1 freedom of movement outside the confrontation lines, it is expected that
2 large parts of the population outside the confrontation lines moved out
3 and separated as much as they could, went far away from the conflict,
4 which is not the case within the population --
5 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you so much --
6 THE WITNESS: -- within the population lines.
7 JUDGE MOLOTO: -- for that answer.
8 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation]
9 Q. Let us now take a look at your report for the Milosevic case, the
10 following table, Tables 2 and 3.
11 These tables show the number of combatants and civilians that
12 came to harm. If we look at the table for the Galic case, for -- which
13 covered the period from September 1992 till August 1994, we saw that in
14 all months there is a greater number of killed combatants than civilians
15 except for two months.
16 Isn't that correct? And if we look at the same months, the same
17 period in these two tables, for each month, if we compare from
18 September 1992, in the same period, we can see that there are more
19 civilians listed here than combatants. Correct?
20 A. Well, I think -- I agreed already that the number of soldiers
21 will be greater in the Slobodan Milosevic report. Sorry. I'm now
22 confused. Let me think about it. Will be lower. Will be lower than in
23 the Galic report, generally speaking.
24 Q. Correct.
25 A. In all periods. In all periods, yes. So if you have a
Page 5849
1 particular period in mind, it is most likely correct what you are saying.
2 Q. Yes. I was comparing the two periods that are comparable from
3 two reports.
4 So the same period in two reports reflects different status
5 categories of the persons killed in the same territory. Isn't that so?
6 You have said as much. In the Milosevic case, there were more civilians
7 killed in the same period than in the Galic case.
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. Although you said a minute ago that where the source of your
10 information stated that a person was a combatant or a soldier,
11 respectively, that you stuck to that categorisation. Isn't that correct?
12 A. In the Slobodan Milosevic, it is the military lists, as the main
13 source for the military status. In the Slobodan Milosevic report.
14 Does that answer your question?
15 Q. Which means that, in the Slobodan Milosevic case, your
16 Household Survey from 1994 were persons were characterized as soldiers,
17 you did not count as soldiers unless they were mentioned in the ABiH
18 report. I'm speaking about the report for 1995. Instead, you reduced
19 the number of soldiers as compared to the number of civilians.
20 A. No. We had a long discussion about how this was done in
21 Slobodan Milosevic report. For the matched records we took the military
22 status as reported in the military lists, for the matched. For the
23 matched individuals.
24 For the remaining, it was as reported in the original source.
25 However, it is not that all household records were taken and used as such
Page 5850
1 in the Slobodan Milosevic report, because there was a hierarchy of
2 sources, so most records entered from the federal statistical authority
3 database.
4 Q. [Microphone not activated]
5 A. [Previous translation continues] ... compare these sources as if
6 they could correspond one to one to each other. They don't. They are --
7 they don't. On one hand we have a report in which one source was used,
8 Household Survey, and in the other report we have a number of source,
9 large sources used and also organised hierarchically, and there will be
10 differences in reporting in the sources whether you wanted it or not.
11 Our way of dealing the differences in reporting of the military
12 status in the sources was by using one uniform, consistent definition of
13 the military status as reported in the military lists. So this is what
14 we did, and this is a different definition of the status than the
15 definition used in the Household Survey. In addition to this, the number
16 of sources which was bigger, which is another source for differences in
17 the outcoming statistics and there is a slight difference in that
18 territory so there is enough differences not to compare these sources
19 directly.
20 Q. Madam, a simple question: Did you, in the Slobodan Milosevic
21 case, discount sources that stated a person as a soldier --
22 JUDGE MOLOTO: [Previous translation continues] ... Madam Carter.
23 MS. CARTER: Your Honour, this has been asked an answered
24 repeatedly.
25 JUDGE MOLOTO: Mr. Lukic.
Page 5851
1 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] I may have asked the question several
2 times, but I don't believe I got an answer.
3 JUDGE MOLOTO: You have got an answer, sir.
4 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] All right.
5 JUDGE MOLOTO: The witness has said to you that if the source
6 categorised the person as a soldier, she kept it as a soldier.
7 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Yes.
8 JUDGE MOLOTO: [Previous translation continues] ... she's told you
9 that the reason for the difference between the Galic list and the
10 Milosevic list are the following and I may not remember them all. One,
11 in the Galic list, these were self-reported people who tended to
12 over-increase the number of soldiers; two, in the Galic -- in the -- in
13 the Milosevic list, they used soldiers -- army, military lists, not
14 self-reported people; then she said in the Galic report, they went
15 municipality by municipality for the six municipalities. In the
16 Milosevic report they went for the whole municipalities as one single
17 whole, which was slightly bigger than -- than the municipalities in the
18 Galic case.
19 So -- and that's why she is saying -- I see you shaking your
20 head. But if you want, we can look it up in the record.
21 THE WITNESS: Yeah.
22 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] No, I fully agree with your
23 interpretation of the witness's words. But I did not get an answer that
24 would be satisfactory for my analysis. But obviously I cannot get an
25 answer that would be of use to the Trial Chamber, but that is obviously
Page 5852
1 my problem.
2 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yeah.
3 Yes, Madam Carter.
4 MS. CARTER: Respectively to Defence counsel, I point him to
5 page 70, it's beginning at line 11, where she specifically indicates that
6 if it was a matched person from the household list to the military lists,
7 she used the military list. For all of the remainder, she kept the
8 self-reported status. She has been very clear on this issue.
9 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] All right.
10 THE WITNESS: May I add something?
11 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yes, ma'am. Did I interpret you correctly?
12 THE WITNESS: Very, very correctly, Your Honour. Very, very
13 well. Thank you.
14 I just want to remark that perhaps will be helpful when reading
15 these reports. It is less about directly comparing the statistics from
16 these two reports. It is more about, you know, one report being
17 complimentary to each other. I believe that the Galic report is an
18 important report because it shows unquestionable minimum number of
19 victims and for these victims shows a number of very important
20 distributions, including cause of death distributions in terms of
21 shelling and sniping. It shows sex distribution, age distribution, how
22 many women, how many elderly were killed. It shows municipality, saying
23 where the activities were the most intense.
24 So this is an important starting point. And then we have the
25 Slobodan Milosevic report which is extremely general and gives only
Page 5853
1 overall numbers, but if you read these numbers together with the specific
2 details from the Galic report, then the picture becomes very complete, in
3 my view. There might be a degree of extrapolation which is allowed
4 between these two reports but there shouldn't be a direct comparison of
5 every single statistic between these two reports.
6 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation]
7 Q. All right, I agree. Just please explain to me where such a
8 difference in categorisation came about, that in one report the number of
9 civilians killed is much greater than soldiers and the other, it's the
10 other -- it is vice versa. So what could have caused such greatly
11 differing results of your research? Because for the same period in two
12 reports you give very different data. What is the reason for that?
13 JUDGE MOLOTO: Madam Carter.
14 MS. CARTER: Your Honour, I would again object, asked and answer.
15 As the Court has laid out the reasons why, I'm certain that Defence
16 counsel should know as well.
17 JUDGE MOLOTO: I was trying to explain some of the reasons, but I
18 think you talked to the witness.
19 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] I have a problem, Your Honours,
20 because I don't understand. The witness explained that where the
21 territories differ. That's my problem. I thought that the territorial
22 and -- framework and the time framework were the same, but I understand
23 that -- that the categorisation differs, and Ms. Tabeau says that two
24 reports can be understood as being complimentary but they give a very
25 different picture of the events.
Page 5854
1 However, if it clear to you, I can proceed.
2 JUDGE MOLOTO: It is not clear to me but what is clear to me are
3 her explanations, and I was still trying to tell you the differences that
4 she has told us the whole of this morning. One of them was that -- one
5 of them was that -- in addition to what I have told you already, in the
6 Milosevic list there was a multiplicity of sources. In the Galic list,
7 is the HSS list source. In the Galic list, she mentioned the periods, I
8 think, starting from 1992 or somewhere, but then she's -- this was
9 in-chief. But in the Milosevic list, it was for the entire period of the
10 war.
11 Now, these are all factors that one can expect would result in
12 slight differences, in differences. To what extent they affect the
13 differences I do not know. But, you know -- but then, of course, she has
14 just explained to you now that the Galic list categorised according to
15 age, sex --
16 MR. LUKIC: Status.
17 JUDGE MOLOTO: -- whereas the other one is just general. It
18 doesn't give children, women, men, elderly. So ...
19 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] All right.
20 JUDGE MOLOTO: [Previous translation continues] ... I have heard
21 so far today.
22 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] All right.
23 Q. Ms. Tabeau, in your second report, let us take a look at Table 1A
24 and at Table 1B. That's at page -- it's at the very beginning.
25 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] In B/C/S, it's page 2, and in English
Page 5855
1 it's also page 2.
2 Q. These are your key conclusions.
3 Let me check if I understood this correctly. In Table 1A you
4 speak about the absolute numbers of those killed. From 1992 through
5 1995, you state that 3.686 soldiers were killed, and in excess of 3.000
6 civilians, as direct consequences of the war.
7 Now, these are absolutely numbers that are matched?
8 A. I think the number of civilians is 4.015, not 3.000.
9 Q. Yes. Yes, indeed. 4.015 civilians and 3.686 soldiers. That's
10 what the table states. And these are the figures that you matched from
11 different sources?
12 A. That's right.
13 Q. And then in Table 1B, you work with estimated categories by
14 raising the -- the figures by 24 per cent [as interpreted], as the
15 estimated number of casualties, both civilian and military.
16 A. That's right.
17 Q. This percentage of 23 per cent [as interpreted], you applied to
18 the population of all six municipalities, didn't you?
19 A. To the victims from these territories. So, yes, yes, to the
20 victims, to the numbers of victims from these territories.
21 Q. All right.
22 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] I've done with this table.
23 Q. So that we agree that the first table contains absolute figures
24 and the second table contains estimates, and it represents, as you said
25 in your conclusion, a -- that this is a -- an inference and it is
Page 5856
1 described how you arrived that inference?
2 A. Yes. One is observed, absolute, minimum numbers; one is
3 estimated. That's right. Table 1B is estimated.
4 Q. Mm-hm.
5 JUDGE MOLOTO: If I may ask a question.
6 If 1B is then estimate and 1A is absolute, why do you call 1B
7 corrected?
8 THE WITNESS: Because that is of the method of estimation, it's
9 just a matter of fact a correction for the -- it doesn't have a specific
10 meaning. It is an unfortunate term. It should be called estimated. I'm
11 sorry.
12 JUDGE MOLOTO: It's all right.
13 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation]
14 Q. A general question that follows from what you have shown us today
15 when you analysed the period of the indictment against Mr. Perisic.
16 If we look chronologically at the number of victims, that number
17 globally speaking has decreased from 1992. It significantly decreased in
18 1994, and in the three spring months of 1995 it rose but then it dropped
19 again.
20 But generally, my question is: Your survey shows that the number
21 of victims, regardless of their status, drastically decreased from 1992
22 when the conflict started until the end the war?
23 A. I would disagree. I have a very good of chart of this in the set
24 of the materials distributed today in the beginning of this testimony.
25 There is a time trend in killings, on the first page, covering the entire
Page 5857
1 conflict period and we can take a look at this chart on the ELMO. And
2 see all --
3 Q. If we can put it on the ELMO, I would like to put Table 1 on the
4 ELMO from your report.
5 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Oh, I'm sorry.
6 Q. This first table, or Figure 1, shows in red the oscillation of
7 mortality in civilians and the other, the mortality of combatants.
8 What we can observe is that there is a peak in the first months
9 of 1992 until June, and after that it varies but mostly falls. And the
10 green line represents the period covered by the indictment against
11 Mr. Perisic. If we look at that period until the end of 1995 do you
12 agree with me that this period, globally speaking -- or, rather, that the
13 number of victims globally speaking in that period is significantly below
14 that until August 1995?
15 A. Generally speaking, yes, most certainly. However, there are some
16 local peaks and can you see them in the October 1993 --
17 Q. Yes, we can perhaps take a look at the table to see that.
18 Maybe the easiest way, because that is what I found when I was
19 preparing for this cross, is to use Table -- you agree with me that each
20 of these peaks, in the period when Mr. Perisic was there, that this
21 highest peak, as it were, was always lower or about the same as the peaks
22 in the previous periods. Correct?
23 A. Yes, it's correct.
24 Q. On this table, we can see the period in the spring of 1995,
25 between May and August 1995, there is an increased number of victims,
Page 5858
1 both in the civilian and the soldiers' category, and I think that you
2 stressed this in your report, that there was significant surge as
3 compared to the earlier period, a surge in the number of victims, and
4 that can be seen on the Tables A3 and A4.
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. I will now ask you, although maybe this is not part of your
7 expertise, but are you aware that at this time a major BH offensive
8 started, it started in May and went on through May and June, up until
9 August 1995 when the NATO air-strikes began?
10 A. Yes, it's possible.
11 Q. And this can lead us to the conclusion that the victims,
12 regardless of the category, there is a correlation between the victims
13 and the conflict going on in -- on the battlefields at the time.
14 A. Sir, I didn't study the factors behind these trends, so, of
15 course, there must be a correlation, there must be an association between
16 combat activities and the number of victims. There is no doubt about it.
17 But I didn't study the causes and especially the military actions of both
18 armies, so I don't think I can answer this.
19 Q. Very well, fair enough. I would just now like to take a look at
20 one more analysis where the wounded are mentioned, that's in the first
21 report, because that is not the subject of the second report.
22 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] That is table -- in Annex 4, Table 9.
23 I believe that is on page 91, but I'm not sure if that's the same page in
24 e-court. Perhaps page 88. I think that's the right page.
25 THE WITNESS: It's 90, I think.
Page 5859
1 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] I would just like to know the pages.
2 So page -- that's the first report. Table A4.9, page ...
3 JUDGE MOLOTO: A4.9 is at page 91.
4 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation]
5 Q. We discussed a bit earlier, Ms. Tabeau, that the only source for
6 the wounded, and you analysed this only in the Galic report, was the
7 report -- or, rather, information that you received from the survey or
8 census of -- the Household Survey which is the only source that actually
9 also provides information on the wounded; correct?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Just to make sure that I have correctly understood this category,
12 what you've said here - and that's interesting - you've established that
13 in this period under review, 178 women soldiers were wounded, 2 of whom,
14 as far as I can see, were wounded -- were injured, rather, unrelated to
15 the conflict, but 176 women soldiers were actually wounded in the course
16 of the fighting, correct, during combat, in this period that we are
17 reviewing, which is 1992 through 1994.
18 A. Number of women is 178. 178. And they are reported as soldiers,
19 wounded as soldiers. It is the self-reported status.
20 Q. Yes, yes. Yes. That's uncontested because this is the source
21 that you had, the -- in the Household Survey.
22 Now, in this same report, there is a total of 7.594 wounded men,
23 and I can also see in the penultimate column that there are also injuries
24 and accidents that's unrelated to the conflict. But all the other
25 reports had to -- all the other reported woundings were in correlation or
Page 5860
1 connected to the fighting, to the conflict. Correct?
2 A. Well, I think there are 36 cases for men of woundings in accident
3 and other cases, including self-inflicted injuries, but honestly,
4 actually it is a very difficult task to decide whether an accident was
5 war related or not. In the Sarajevo Household Survey, many accidents
6 were reported like gas explosions, accidental falls from damaged stairs,
7 accidental falls on street, traffic accidents related to the lack of
8 light regulation of the traffic, and -- et cetera.
9 So personally I believe these accidents were war-related. At the
10 same time I recognise that nobody killed these persons by shooting, by
11 shelling or sniping. But I did include these cases of accidents among
12 the war-related cases.
13 Q. Yes. And what you have just said, I believe you have also
14 explained this during your testimony in Galic, but that is only an
15 assumption, and what we are discussing here are the figures which was
16 your task to provide certain information based on those figures and not
17 to determine whether the wounding was inflicted out of combat or as
18 collateral damage, because that would be just speculating and that was
19 not your task. Correct?
20 A. Well, you are right. I didn't try even to distinguish between
21 collateral and other. However, you must remember that in the Sarajevo
22 Household Survey killed persons are reported separately from natural
23 deaths. All these cases of accidents reported in this table and wounded
24 persons are reported separately from natural deaths, so I believe that --
25 I have done it right. I didn't mix up, for instance, for killed persons,
Page 5861
1 causes of death of natural deaths with causes of death of killed persons,
2 and for wounded causes of death were reported -- causes of wounding were
3 reported separately.
4 So I have presented the survey data as they were reported. I
5 think I didn't cross any borders here.
6 Q. Very well. Now, I will present some of my conclusions based on
7 what we have heard today or what I have read in your reports.
8 First of all, you consider and you stand by both of these
9 reports, and there's nothing in those reports that you feel should be
10 altered in any way. As far as you're concerned, they're completely
11 accurate and properly done, the way that you have worked on these
12 projects.
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. And your primary task was to try, based on various sources, to
15 determine the number of civilian casualties in the territory under the
16 control of the BH army. When I say "casualties," I mean both dead and
17 injured, or wounded.
18 A. Well, my task was to quantify the numbers of killed and wounded
19 persons, and -- yes. Yes. On the first place. And, of course, show any
20 other details related to these basic numbers.
21 Q. When determining the status of those individuals, you used
22 various sources, and all those sources confirmed -- or, rather, you used
23 all of those sources for both of your reports to determine the status of
24 those individuals -- or, rather, whether they are a civilian or a
25 combatant soldier?
Page 5862
1 A. So one source, the one from Galic, included the reporting,
2 self-reporting of the status. I used this as reported. And in the other
3 report, in Slobodan Milosevic, I did use the military lists for the
4 determination of the military status. On the first place, yes.
5 Q. In your Milosevic report, you also used the self-reporting, the
6 Household Survey as a source for your report, for your research.
7 A. For a number of unmatched records -- small number of unmatched
8 records the self-reported status from -- well, whatever status was
9 reported in the sources was accepted for the unmatched records. So it is
10 a match. But generally for a majority of records it is as reported in
11 the military lists.
12 Q. And now I will again go back to what I did not quite understand.
13 In the Milosevic case, did you use the Sarajevo Household Survey
14 self-reporting in -- for in -- in the category status of individual. Yes
15 or no? And I apologise if I'm not perfectly clear again, but did you use
16 that report in the Milosevic case in the unmatched cases, the cases that
17 were not matched with other sources?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. And then you just used that status, that is, self-reported, there
20 as the status in your reports?
21 A. I don't know what to say really, because your problem is that you
22 don't really understand how the -- the micro analysis of data is done.
23 So it is possible that you assign a certain value to 80 per cent of your
24 records and this value would come from the military lists, and there will
25 be 20 per cent of remaining records and you can assign to these records
Page 5863
1 no value but just you can take the value existing in the sources, and
2 that's my answer. This is what I did.
3 Q. So, you did use the Sarajevo Household Survey when describing the
4 status, or, to be more precise, you used the Household Survey 1994 in the
5 Milosevic case in determining the status of the victims. Yes or no?
6 A. For a small number of records, yes.
7 Q. Thank you, Ms. Tabeau.
8 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] Thank you, Your Honours. I have no
9 further questions.
10 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you very much, Mr. Lukic.
11 Madam Carter.
12 MS. CARTER: Yes, Your Honour. I do have a few questions.
13 Re-examination by Ms. Carter:
14 Q. Dr. Tabeau, in the charts that you provided before the Court
15 today, at page 2, you provided for us the overlaps between the Galic
16 reports and the Slobodan Milosevic report.
17 And just so we're clear on what we're talking about --
18 A. Yes, I did.
19 Q. The differences between the soldiers is 27. There are 27 less
20 soldiers in the Slobodan Milosevic report than there are in the Galic
21 report. Is that correct?
22 A. That is correct. It is for the 12 months that can be compared
23 between these two reports.
24 Q. And secondly, you compared for that one year that were 151 more
25 civilians in the Slobodan Milosevic report; is that correct?
Page 5864
1 A. I think the number is 178. 178 for civilians.
2 Q. Pardon. I actually jumped ahead of myself. So what we're
3 dealing with is we're still -- even taking what it appears that Defence
4 counsel would like us to do in maintaining those 27 soldiers from the
5 Galic report, you still had a net gain of 151 civilians; is that correct?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Okay. Thank you. At the beginning of Defence counsel's
8 questioning of you, at page 25, line 14, he stated: "If some parts, some
9 comments of the Tribunal with regard to your reports were not accepted,
10 would you be inclined to correct those parts of your report by looking
11 for other sources or trying to apply different calculation methods?"
12 And you indicated that you had had the opportunity to read some
13 of the Judgements that used your testimony. If I were to hold out to you
14 that at the Galic Trial Judgement, paragraph 581, which has been accepted
15 by this Court as adjudicated fact 130, they indicated that:
16 "The Trial Chamber considers that the main conclusions of the
17 Tabeau report are supported by other evidence in the trial record
18 including evidence tendered by the Defence which shows that the conflict
19 in Sarajevo
20 The Trial Chamber recalls that the Tabeau report presents minimum numbers
21 from only six municipalities, bearing in mind these limitations, the
22 Trial Chamber finds beyond a reasonable doubt that many hundreds of
23 civilians were killed and thousands were injured in ABiH-controlled areas
24 during the indictment period."
25 Is there anything about this finding of the Galic Trial Chamber
Page 5865
1 that would make you alter your statistics or your opinions?
2 A. It is only that it is minimum numbers. It is --
3 JUDGE MOLOTO: Sorry. Sorry, Mr. Lukic is on his feet.
4 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] My question in my cross was to a
5 different effect. My question was: If there was a situation where a
6 Trial Chamber did not accept some position of Ms. Tabeau's, whereas
7 Ms. Carter is now here talking about some portions that were accepted by
8 Trial Chamber, so I think that Ms. Carter is now posing questions that
9 are not in line with my cross-examination. And I don't object to
10 Ms. Tabeau answering this question, but I think that is not the topic.
11 JUDGE MOLOTO: Yeah. But the only difference between what you
12 are saying now and what you said when you cross-examined the witness is
13 that now you are saying, If there was a situation where the Trial Chamber
14 did. You didn't put it as a -- as a hypothesis when you cross-examined.
15 You put it as a fact that, indeed, there are some Trial Chambers that did
16 not accept certain parts of her report. That is the distinction between
17 what you are saying now and what you said then.
18 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] That's precisely in that sense that
19 I've said it.
20 JUDGE MOLOTO: [Previous translation continues] ...
21 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] In that same case, in the footnote --
22 JUDGE MOLOTO: Madam Carter is saying -- is asking the witness,
23 based on the comments that are made by the Trial Chamber in the Galic
24 case, whether there is anything that would cause her, given that comment,
25 to want to alter her report.
Page 5866
1 MR. LUKIC: [Interpretation] I'm clear with what she meant with
2 her question, but my question had to do with -- in the cases where a
3 Trial Chamber did not accept the report, and I think that was the sense
4 of my cross-examination, and that's what I meant.
5 JUDGE MOLOTO: [Previous translation continues] ... you did
6 indicate you don't object to Madam Tabeau answer Madam Carter's question.
7 May she go ahead an answer the question? We will understand that
8 you are not on the same page with Madam Carter. Or you say you are not
9 on the same page with Madam Carter.
10 MS. CARTER:
11 Q. Dr. Tabeau, do you need me to repeat the question?
12 A. No. I think my answer is no, I wouldn't change anything in my
13 Galic report, except in the next report I made about Sarajevo I tried to
14 present more complete numbers instead of these very minimum numbers, the
15 absolutely minimum that come from the Galic report. The whole effort was
16 how to improve this, how to present more complete numbers and
17 Slobodan Milosevic is just one of the reports that I attempted to do so.
18 Q. Thank you. Now as to footnote 2081 from the Galic Trial Chamber
19 Judgement as well, the Court did provide a caveat in which they said:
20 "The authors of the Tabeau report attempted to determine if there
21 was a correlation in terms of timing between the killing or wounding of
22 soldiers and the killing and wounding of civilians."
23 And it concluded in tentative language that civilians were
24 becoming victims of shooting and shelling, not necessarily when soldiers
25 were killed or wounded but this would suggest that the losses of the
Page 5867
1 population were perhaps caused by mechanisms other than those accounting
2 for the killing and wounding of soldiers, and the emphasis was added to
3 that -- the bits that I emphasised in my questioning.
4 Now, I want to draw you to your Slobodan Milosevic report, in
5 which you indicated that you had more complete numbers.
6 If your numbers are accurate, then in 1994, 279 soldiers were
7 killed, while 349 civilians were killed; and in 1995, 307 soldiers were
8 killed, while 350 civilians were killed. Given that the civilians are
9 far outnumbering the soldiers, is this statistically significant to you
10 with regards to the targeting of civilians?
11 A. Well, it is an indication that targeting was possible. But it
12 would certainly require more studying and especially more detailed data
13 by day, not only by month, day, week, decades of the months and certain
14 additional calculations would be needed. A simple thing I could do to
15 investigate this issue is the calculation of the civilian-to-soldiers
16 ratio, which did I, and which is included in the set of materials
17 distributed today on the first page. It is figure 2 and from this chart
18 we can see that there was a number of values of this ratio which
19 indicated that the number of civilians were very close to number of
20 soldiers or was even higher than the number of killed soldiers, so this
21 only confirms that this general observation, the targeting of civilians
22 was possible.
23 Also the correlation calculated for the Galic period overlapping
24 with the Slobodan Milosevic period correlation calculated for monthly
25 data for killed civilians and soldiers shows that these two series were
Page 5868
1 correlated, but if the observation period is larger, then the correlation
2 drops immediately and becomes much lower.
3 So it is possible, that's my answer, but in order to firmly make
4 a statement about this, additional studies of the data would be
5 necessary.
6 MS. CARTER: I pass the witness.
7 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you, Madam Carter.
8 [Trial Chamber confers]
9 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you very much.
10 That brings us to the conclusion of your testimony, Madam Tabeau.
11 Thank you so much for taking time from your busy schedule to come and
12 testify. I guess you don't have far to go, so you just walk well back to
13 your office --
14 THE WITNESS: Thank you very much.
15 JUDGE MOLOTO: -- and you are now excused. You may stand down.
16 THE WITNESS: Thank you. Good day.
17 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you very much.
18 [The witness withdrew]
19 JUDGE MOLOTO: Madam Carter.
20 MS. CARTER: Your Honour, I turn the floor over to Mr. Thomas.
21 JUDGE MOLOTO: Mr. Thomas.
22 MR. THOMAS: Thank you, Your Honours.
23 I can indicate in relation, Your Honours, to the administrative
24 matter raised this morning, the oral decision, that the Prosecution will
25 not be filing a response. The next witness, as I indicated this morning,
Page 5869
1 will be on Thursday, so we're in your hands now as to whether you wish to
2 dispose of that matter now, Your Honours.
3 JUDGE MOLOTO: Thank you so much, Mr. Thomas.
4 Then the Chamber will then read -- may the Chamber please move
5 into private session.
6 [Private session]
7 (redacted)
8 (redacted)
9 (redacted)
10 (redacted)
11 (redacted)
12 (redacted)
13 (redacted)
14 (redacted)
15 (redacted)
16 (redacted)
17 (redacted)
18 (redacted)
19 (redacted)
20 (redacted)
21 (redacted)
22 (redacted)
23 (redacted)
24 (redacted)
25 (redacted)
Page 5870
1 (redacted)
2 (redacted)
3 (redacted)
4 (redacted)
5 (redacted)
6 (redacted)
7 (redacted)
8 [Open session]
9 THE REGISTRAR: Your Honours, we're back in open session.
10 JUDGE MOLOTO: We're back in open session. Thank you so much.
11 The matter stands adjourned to Thursday, the 7th of May, at 9.00
12 in the morning, Courtroom I.
13 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 1.29 p.m.
14 to be reconvened on Thursday, the 7th day of May,
15 2009, at 9.00 a.m.
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