1 Friday, 3 February 2006

2 [Open session]

3 [The accused entered court]

4 [The witness entered court]

5 --- Upon commencing at 9.04 a.m.

6 JUDGE ROBINSON: Let's the witness make the declaration.

7 THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth, the

8 whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

9 JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you. You may sit. I understand that you

10 may need to stand at particular times, and you're perfectly free to do so.

11 WITNESS: EVE-ANN PRENTICE

12 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic.

13 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you.

14 Examination by Mr. Milosevic:

15 Q. Ms. Prentice, would you please introduce yourself.

16 A. My name is Eve-Ann Prentice, I'm a journalist, and I specialise in

17 covering the Balkan region since the mid-1980s, first for The Guardian

18 newspaper and then for The Times newspaper in London.

19 Q. You're a political correspondent. From where does your interest

20 in political topics stem?

21 A. I had always wanted to cover the politics of Eastern Europe. I

22 suppose originally it came from my father was a politician who also worked

23 in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, so I was travelling to the

24 region since I was a child. But my interest in the Balkans really comes

25 from the mid-1980s, which is where I decided I really wanted to -- the

1 region in which I wanted to specialise.

2 Q. In the mid-1980s, when you started to take an interest in that

3 part of the world, what knowledge did you have about the area before you

4 began to travel to the SFRY?

5 A. I had very little knowledge before I had gone there. I had read

6 about the area. I suppose my big first surprise was having covered

7 solidarity in Poland and having been to Romania in the early 1980s, I

8 suppose I had a preconception that Yugoslavia might be a similar socialist

9 country where it was quite -- those countries were quite grey, and I was

10 very surprised to find that Yugoslavia was -- had much more contact with

11 the rest of Europe. Poland had been quite isolated. The then

12 Czechoslovakia had been quite isolated, so my first impressions were that

13 Yugoslavia was a very -- much more integrated into the rest of Europe.

14 That was the first impression. I then, of course, travelling there more

15 regularly, began to see it was slightly more are subtle situation. And as

16 the 1980s progressed, it was clear to me that there were lots of political

17 strains, both internal and external, and that the country was going to be

18 politically very important for the whole region, and this is why I wanted

19 to really cover Yugoslavia more than anywhere else.

20 Q. How many times did you visit the territory of the former

21 Yugoslavia? Only very briefly, please.

22 A. I'm afraid it really is too many to count. Possibly in the region

23 of 40 or 50 times.

24 Q. As you're a journalist, someone involved with the mass media, was

25 there a special professional motive that induced you to come and testify

1 here?

2 A. Well, of course I was asked, but my main motive is I have -- I

3 think my views are very well known. As the 1990s progressed and the

4 conflicts in the former Yugoslavia unfolded, I was dismayed to see that in

5 general the conflicts were treated as black and white situations where -

6 this is a generalisation, but it happened over and over again, in my

7 opinion - where the Serbian side was regarded as uniquely guilty and all

8 other sides were considered to be innocent victims, whereas it was very

9 plain to me that everybody fought as hard as they were physically able to

10 gain ground for their -- for their own people, and everybody had their

11 innocent victims, including the Serbs. And I felt increasingly strongly

12 that this was not -- that the conflicts were not being covered in a truly

13 fair and objective way.

14 Q. In your opinion, was there a difference - and how big a difference

15 was it? - between the images that you were able to see among the Western

16 media and Western politicians and reality?

17 A. There was -- yes. There were many big differences between what

18 Western leaders were portraying as to be the situation and the reality.

19 The Western politicians were giving the impression that every -- every

20 time civilians were killed, it was definitely Serbs' fault, and every time

21 it was clear that another side, for instance the Croats in Mostar, when

22 they bombed the Stari Most, the old bridge there, this is just one

23 example, there was very little attempt to make it clear that, you know,

24 this was -- this was a Croatian bombing, and to this day people -- the

25 ordinary public in Britain, for instance, are of the opinion that Serbs

1 bombed that bridge. This is just one example. There were many, many

2 examples, and this -- this inclination to try to portray the conflicts as

3 black and white, good against evil, seemed to me to intensify as the years

4 unfolded.

5 Q. In your opinion, what were the reasons for this enormous

6 discrepancy between reality and the way it was portrayed?

7 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic. Mr. Milosevic, that is not an

8 issue of relevance to the -- to the trial. Please bring the witness to

9 matters that are of relevance to the indictment.

10 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well, Mr. Robinson.

11 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

12 Q. Ms. Prentice, when did you visit Kosovo and Metohija?

13 A. I first visited a few times in the 1980s, I was there a few times

14 in the early 1990s, and then again during the NATO bombardment in 1999.

15 Q. And was it your impression that there were links between the

16 situation in Kosovo and Metohija during the 1980s and when you visited in

17 1998 and 1999 during the conflicts and the NATO aggression against

18 Yugoslavia?

19 A. It became clear to me during my visits before 1999 that there was

20 an increasing -- particularly from the mid- to late 1990s, that there was

21 a terrorism war underway. I could see that the Serbs in Kosovo were

22 feeling increasingly under threat as -- from terrorist attacks from the

23 KLA from the late 1990s, but even before that it was clear to me that

24 there was a situation that had many parallels with Northern Ireland; a

25 cyclical conflict that had its roots in history and that the cycle was

1 likely to keep returning. It was also clear to me that people -- that

2 battles were underway between KLA terrorists and Yugoslav forces that took

3 place in -- to a large extent in villages in the countryside and that

4 civilians were being caught up in these conflicts. It was -- it was, to

5 my view, very much akin to a civil war and not, as I increasingly saw

6 being reported by much of the media, as -- as a kind of invasion of ethnic

7 Albanian ordinary citizens.

8 JUDGE ROBINSON: "A kind of invasion." I'm sorry, I don't

9 understand that last part of your somebody sentence, Ms. Prentice, "as a

10 kind of invasion of ethnic --"

11 THE WITNESS: The impression I got from a lot of the coverage of

12 the situation in Kosovo towards the end of the 1990s, was that many people

13 seemed to have the impression, ordinary people in Britain, readers, I'm

14 talking about, of the newspapers I was working for, that Kosovo had been

15 invaded, even though the very educated might be very well aware that

16 Kosovo was part of Serbia and had been for many hundreds of years, there

17 was definitely an impression that there had been a kind of invasion, and

18 this impression was not very often corrected.

19 I suppose this is what I'm referring to when I talk about a kind

20 of invasion.

21 JUDGE ROBINSON: I see. All right. Thank you.

22 Mr. Milosevic, pretty soon I think Mr. Nice is going to be on his

23 feet, questioning the relevance of this evidence, and so it is my duty to

24 ask you once more to bring the witness to matters that are of importance

25 and that have a bearing on the issues raised by the indictment.

1 JUDGE KWON: Or to the specific matters, not to the general

2 matters.

3 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Ms. Prentice is one of the few

4 intellectuals from the West who visited Kosovo and Metohija many, many

5 times. Therefore, what she was able to observe and conclude is, I feel,

6 relevant.

7 JUDGE ROBINSON: Relevant for what? That's the question.

8 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] For the understanding of what really

9 happened there and for the discernment of the truth, which is being turned

10 upside down here.

11 JUDGE ROBINSON: Well, proceed, Mr. Milosevic.

12 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

13 Q. Ms. Prentice, did you deal with the conference in Rambouillet?

14 A. I wrote about the Rambouillet accord. I was not at the conference

15 itself, but I was at that time diplomatic correspondent for The Times, and

16 it was part of my job to analyse and write about the -- the accord.

17 Q. You could not have attended the conference because there actually

18 wasn't a conference, but you did read the accord and write about it. Will

19 you tell us only briefly what you concluded about that gathering.

20 MR. NICE: No, I --

21 JUDGE BONOMY: Yes. This is another sad day for this Tribunal

22 when we have a witness who says -- has already told us she was 40 or 50

23 times in Kosovo, and we have yet to hear one specific question about one

24 specific event in Kosovo. We have a clear indication in the 65 ter

25 summary of the evidence that she has personal knowledge of facts relating

1 to the parties and of the events in the Meja village. And in any event,

2 if we are to hear general opinions from her, they will only have any

3 validity if we know the factual basis in the first instance.

4 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, let the witness deal with matters

5 of fact, the matters of fact that you indicated in your 65 ter statement.

6 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well. Very well, Mr. Robinson.

7 Don't worry, we will come to facts.

8 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

9 Q. Ms. Prentice, what places in Kosovo and Metohija did you visit in

10 1998, and what did you see there, and then we'll move on to 1999.

11 A. In 1998, I went to Kosovska Mitrovica and Pristina. This was a

12 relatively brief visit, but what I saw there was -- I went because I was

13 in Belgrade, and I had heard that there had been an attack on Serbian

14 schoolchildren in a cafe. And I went to -- this was in Kosovska

15 Mitrovica. I went to investigate this, but actually pretty well as I

16 arrived there, there was a counter-attack on what were -- what I was told

17 to be KLA homes which had -- or KLA strongholds which were in ordinary

18 homes of those believed to have attacked the Serbian schoolchildren in a

19 cafe. And this is the -- this is the very nature of this cycle of

20 violence that I was referring to earlier.

21 Q. Where were you during 1999? First of all, during the war.

22 A. I was based in Belgrade initially for -- for -- in mid-April.

23 Then I managed to go to Kosovo two times, once in the second -- first and

24 second week of May. Then I went back to Belgrade to renew a visa for four

25 days, and then I was there for the last two weeks of May and the very

1 beginning of June. I travelled to most parts of Kosovo at that time apart

2 from the area around Djakovica and Pec. So I was in Pristina, Kosovska

3 Mitrovica, Gnjilane, Prizren; pretty well every area apart from the

4 Djakovica region.

5 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Before I proceed, let me just draw

6 your attention to the fact that there is no interpretation into Serbian,

7 so anyone in the public who may be following cannot hear this. I've had

8 interpretation up to now.

9 JUDGE ROBINSON: May I ask the booth to attend to that technical

10 matter.

11 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well. We'll see now when I

12 proceed.

13 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

14 Q. During these one may say prolonged visits in the course of the

15 war, did you talk to Albanian civilians? I'm not referring only to

16 Albanians. I'm talking about civilians in general, of all ethnicities.

17 A. Yes, I did.

18 JUDGE KWON: No translation.

19 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes. Try again, Mr. Milosevic.

20 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

21 Q. Did you interview Albanian civilians?

22 A. I interviewed Albanian civilians, Roma civilians, ethnic Turkish

23 civilians, people from all backgrounds in Kosovo and Metohija.

24 Q. Where did you meet Albanian civilians and talk to them?

25 A. In really every opportunity that I had. Obviously the main

1 anxiety in the West at that time was for -- was about what was happening

2 to ethnic Albanian inside Kosovo. There were not that many Western

3 journalists who had been able to reach the province, so I made it a

4 priority to try to speak as many civilians as possible. So pretty well

5 every town and village where there were people, I did manage to speak to

6 people. For instance, in Kosovska Mitrovica, I spoke to pensioners

7 queuing to try to get their pensions. I spoke to people boarding buses in

8 Pristina. I spoke to people in their houses and in the streets in

9 Prizren. It's probably too numerous times to mention the number of times

10 I spoke to civilians.

11 JUDGE ROBINSON: Ms. Prentice, the Serbian is on channel 6.

12 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

13 Q. Did the Albanian civilians you spoke to say they were afraid?

14 A. Some of them told me that they were afraid of the KLA. One person

15 told me he was afraid of the Serbian police. The vast majority gave me

16 the impression that they were under great pressure to leave Kosovo but

17 that the -- a large part of that pressure was coming from the KLA

18 leadership and indeed from some -- what they described as Albanians coming

19 from Albania proper who had come into the province.

20 Q. Did I understand you correctly to say that even the Albanians who

21 had come from Albania were afraid of the KLA, not just those from Kosovo?

22 A. No, I'm sorry, I didn't explain that very well. What I meant was

23 that the ordinary civilians seemed to be -- seemed to be under

24 considerable pressure from the KLA and from Albanians who had come into

25 the province from Albania proper, and they -- I think they were quite

1 surprised to see these people who had come in, they said, in the previous

2 nine to 12 months.

3 Q. Did you have an opportunity of talking to those Albanian civilians

4 who were leaving Kosovo and Metohija?

5 A. I did. For instance, there were some coaches bound, according to

6 the signs on the coaches, for Macedonia in Pristina, and I was quite

7 careful to try to speak to them when there were no police or other Serbian

8 forces around. I spoke to them while there were some -- one or two -

9 limited numbers - of police around, and they said they were leaving to

10 escape the bombs. I then went back. I waited around the area and then

11 found a time when there was nobody that they might have been nervous about

12 from the Serbian forces, and I managed to, along with a colleague from the

13 Irish Times, we did manage to speak to them completely alone. It was at

14 that time that most of them said that they were going to escape the

15 bombing, that they wanted to get away. One person said, "No, we're not.

16 We're -- I'm going because I'm afraid of the police."

17 We said to the rest of them, "Is that what you're all afraid of?"

18 But nobody -- I just wanted to point out that nobody else getting on these

19 buses rallied to say -- to agree with him.

20 JUDGE BONOMY: I may have missed this point already in your

21 evidence, but do you speak Albanian?

22 THE WITNESS: No, only limited, but we had somebody with us who

23 did speak Albanian.

24 JUDGE BONOMY: You had an interpreter, did you, or just someone

25 who was actually a fluent Albanian speaker?

1 THE WITNESS: We had a fluent Albanian speaker.

2 JUDGE BONOMY: And what about Serbian?

3 A. I speak more Serbian -- I understand more Serbian than I do

4 Albanian, but again I did rely on fluent Serbian speakers to translate

5 complicated interviews.

6 JUDGE BONOMY: And are these generally colleagues?

7 THE WITNESS: Sometimes it was colleagues, sometimes it was people

8 that I had known from the region before. There was a human rights lawyer.

9 The person I tended to use for Albanian translation was a colleague of

10 Ibrahim Rugova who was a human rights lawyer that I knew in the region.

11 JUDGE BONOMY: Thank you very much.

12 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

13 Q. Now that you've just mentioned the one person who told you -- the

14 person who told you they were afraid of the police, is that the same

15 person that you mentioned in a previous answer or is that another person

16 who told you that they were afraid of the police?

17 A. It is the same person.

18 Q. Apart from that one person who told you that they were afraid of

19 the police, in the many talks you had to people, can you quote another

20 example of an Albanian telling you that they were afraid of the police or

21 the army perhaps?

22 A. I didn't have anybody else say that they were afraid. I had

23 certainly had people who evidently felt, well, caustic, just fed up, I

24 suppose, about the whole situation, the way it had unraveled. Certainly

25 there were people -- there were ethnic Albanians in Prizren who, for

1 instance, said that they were very happy about the bombing. They regarded

2 the bombing as -- as something friendly towards them. But this was right

3 towards the end of the bombing, and my impression was -- well, more than

4 impression: They said that they felt that within a week, within two

5 weeks, that NATO would be inside Kosovo and they were happy about the

6 bombing at that juncture. But I do stress that earlier on during the

7 bombing, people -- ordinary Albanians definitely told me that they were

8 frightened of -- of the bombing.

9 Q. I would like to focus on questions relating to the reasons that

10 you established, that is to say why they were fleeing from Kosovo and

11 Metohija, on the basis of what you were personally told and your personal

12 experience of that.

13 A. I arrived in -- during the bombing, as I say, during the latter

14 part of the second week of May and then was there again for the last two

15 weeks of May. So I was not there at the very beginning, but my entire

16 impression was, while I had been in Belgrade and watching the coverage of

17 -- of the ethnic Albanians on the border of Macedonia and in Albania, and

18 in Montenegro, the impression that I had been given was that the vast

19 majority had been somehow forcibly expelled by Serb forces.

20 My impression when I actually got there was that certainly

21 probably before I had arrived - and this was from speaking to very senior

22 journalists who had been in Kosovo at the beginning of the NATO campaign -

23 that there may well have been people who had been pressed and -- to get on

24 buses and to leave Kosovo. But by the time I got there, the vast majority

25 of the ordinary ethnic Albanians were, number one, very frightened of the

1 bombing, and at least as frightened of the KLA. They were -- if I was

2 talking to some ethnic Albanians and some KLA people came within earshot,

3 they behaved in a very frightened way and they didn't want to carry on

4 speaking.

5 JUDGE ROBINSON: How would you have known that they were KLA

6 people?

7 THE WITNESS: Because they said that to us. And these people had

8 a very -- gosh. They seemed in command of the situation at a given time.

9 For instance, when I was talking to those pensioners at Kosovska

10 Mitrovica, they were quite keen to talk to us, and then these young,

11 heavily armed ethnic Albanian people, who they said were KLA, came and

12 obviously didn't like us speaking to them. And I had no reason to doubt

13 that when they told us that they were KLA people, that they were. They

14 were young, they were well-armed, and people were afraid of them.

15 JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you.

16 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

17 Q. Did you have an opportunity when talking to the Albanian civilians

18 of hearing anything about the behaviour of the KLA which could be linked

19 up with the reasons for the people's departure or not?

20 A. Yes. They -- we were told many times that - this is the ordinary

21 civilian ethnic Albanians - that it was their -- that they had been told

22 it was their patriotic duty to leave because the world was watching. This

23 was their one big opportunity to make Kosovo part of Albania eventually,

24 that NATO was there, ready to come in, and that anybody who failed to join

25 this exodus was somehow not supporting the -- the Albanian cause.

1 Q. So to be more precise, what did they say was their patriotic duty?

2 What was this patriotic duty of theirs, according to them?

3 A. They had been told -- they said that they had been told by KLA

4 leaders that their patriotic duty was to join the exodus, was to leave

5 Kosovo, to be seen to be leaving Kosovo.

6 Q. You said at the beginning, when enumerating the reasons for which

7 they were fleeing, that first and foremost they were fleeing because they

8 were afraid of the bombing. Did I understand you correctly?

9 A. I don't think -- I don't mean first and foremost but that they had

10 -- my overall impression was that before I had even arrived in the

11 province -- this is from senior colleagues who had already been there. My

12 impression was that at the very beginning, certainly some -- some ethnic

13 Albanians, particularly from the Pristina region, had been pressed to

14 leave by Serbian people. By the time I arrived, my impression was that

15 those - and there were still very, very many ethnic Albanians throughout

16 Kosovo when I arrived - was that they were much more reluctant to -- they

17 -- they were frightened of the bombing, they were frightened of the KLA,

18 they didn't really want to leave their homes, but they did want to get to

19 places of safety away from the bombing if they lived -- particularly if

20 they lived in areas near high-profile targets, such as petrol pumps or

21 storages or bridges.

22 They were ordinary people who just seemed caught in a maelstrom

23 between all these forces; the bombing, the KLA, the recent Serbian

24 fighting between KLA and Serbian forces. All these things they seemed to

25 be -- feel they were victims of.

1 Q. If you were to rank the reasons for which they left Kosovo, what

2 in your opinion would be the priority reasons for which the Albanians left

3 Kosovo? From what you've -- from what you managed to learn in talking to

4 them and what you were able to see and hear yourself.

5 A. Well, my time there, number one seemed to me to be fear of the KLA

6 leadership, closely followed by fear of being killed or injured in the

7 bombing. But I do stress that this was from the time that I was there.

8 Q. And that's the period I'm asking you about, because you're

9 testifying about what you yourself were able to establish, being there.

10 Now, what about your personal knowledge? Did it tell you of the

11 justification or -- of being -- of these people being justified fearing

12 the bombing or being unjustified in fearing it?

13 A. I definitely think they were justified. The bombing towards the

14 middle and the end of May intensified as every day went by. And as

15 Serbian communications and anti-aircraft equipment was gradually weakened,

16 the bombing not only seemed to intensify but air -- but NATO aircraft were

17 able to fly lower sorties when they were bombing. And although that --

18 NATO subsequently said that minimised collateral damage, actually being --

19 seeing and feeling the aircraft much -- much lower heights also seemed to

20 be more frightening for the civilian population. There were many times

21 that I saw -- well, nobody was immune from the bombs, of course, from all

22 backgrounds in Kosovo, but we saw many civilian dead and injured, many

23 ordinary homes that were bombed by NATO repeatedly. For instance, there

24 were many blocks of flats near the Jugopetrol dump on the edge of

25 Pristina. These were hit almost nightly. They were almost completely

1 rubble after a couple of weeks, and people were trying to take shelter

2 underground. There were some underground shelters, but one of these was

3 breached by -- by bombing, so they were not deemed to be safe.

4 We saw homes that were destroyed and people injured in Kosovska

5 Mitrovica. In Gnjilane, I had just -- we had just come into the town when

6 there was a bombing raid. A school canteen was hit. All the dinner

7 ladies were injured.

8 When this is happening on a daily basis, it does make civilian

9 populations very frightened.

10 Q. We have to make a slight digression here. Let me ask you this:

11 Did you know whether the members of other ethnic -- ethnicities were

12 fleeing from Kosovo, were leaving Kosovo?

13 A. I didn't have firsthand experience of that. I mean, I know that

14 some Serbs were trying to get away, some ethnic Albanians. I did see some

15 -- very, very small number of Roma. But the only time that I came across

16 other minorities in any numbers was near Prizren after a convoy I was with

17 was bombed. Those people were not trying to leave at that time, but I

18 think that they felt -- they were in -- they were in a mountain village,

19 and they were not near any big targets, so it's difficult for me to say

20 about other ethnic minorities.

21 Q. Did you have any personal experience except for what you've told

22 us you saw when you were on the spot when the civilians were bombed? Did

23 you have any experience of the bombing other than that?

24 A. I was with a group of Western journalists near Prizren when our --

25 the two cars we were travelling in were hit by NATO bombs and our driver

1 was killed and we were slightly injured. We were fortunate that we were

2 -- a shepherd boy saw us being -- there were five bombs on a narrow

3 mountain road and there was no sign that this bombing was going to end,

4 and it was very difficult to get away because there was a ravine on one

5 side and a rock face on the other, and the shepherd boy told a JNA group

6 further up the mountain where he was -- where he was keeping sheep, and

7 those -- those soldiers actually came down and pulled us away from that

8 area. So that was probably the nearest I came to the bombs, when our

9 driver was killed.

10 JUDGE BONOMY: Do you remember the date of that event?

11 THE WITNESS: That was May the 30th, 1999.

12 JUDGE BONOMY: And what do you think was the actual target?

13 THE WITNESS: The road that we were on -- it was towards the end

14 of the NATO bombardment, and the road that we were on was one of the few

15 east-west roads leading towards Prizren and onwards to Djakovica. I can

16 only guess that the target was the road. There were two road tunnels very

17 close by us, where we were actually hit.

18 JUDGE BONOMY: How many planes were there?

19 THE WITNESS: Two.

20 JUDGE BONOMY: And did they fly over more than once?

21 THE WITNESS: Yes. At least five times.

22 JUDGE BONOMY: Thank you.

23 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

24 Q. Ms. Prentice, do you have any knowledge, generally speaking, about

25 aviation, the air force?

1 A. I am a private pilot, so I have some knowledge of general

2 aviation. So I have -- I have an understanding of height, for instance.

3 So I was able to -- when we were attacked, for instance, I was able to

4 gauge that the air -- the -- the NATO aircraft were probably not more than

5 a thousand to 2.000 feet high when they dropped their bombs, and would

6 definitely have seen -- like, we were not the only civilians on the road,

7 for instance. There were elderly people on the -- where we were exactly

8 who were going to -- travelling down to the market at Prizren. So I know

9 that they would have seen -- they were not so high or anything like high

10 enough not to have seen that there were people on the road when -- when

11 they dropped their bombs.

12 JUDGE ROBINSON: And these people were walking?

13 THE WITNESS: Yes. They were on foot.

14 JUDGE BONOMY: And what was the appearance of your vehicles?

15 THE WITNESS: They were two civilian cars. Sorry, I can't

16 remember the actual mark, but ...

17 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

18 Q. And who was with you when you were hit and when your driver was

19 killed?

20 A. A reporter from Corriere Della Sera, Renzo Cianfanelli; a

21 Portuguese camera team of a cameraman and a reporter; and a reporter from

22 one of the main Portuguese newspapers; and -- well, the driver and an

23 interpreter.

24 Q. You mentioned that there was a shepherd nearby, a shepherd boy who

25 told you that further on, a little further on there was a unit of our

1 army. What happened?

2 A. We felt our car -- one of our cars was completely destroyed

3 because of the bombs and the other car was unusable because it was covered

4 with rubble. So we felt very trapped. So the -- after about half an

5 hour, two Jugo cars came -- came, appeared on the scene, and two Yugoslav

6 army soldiers climbed out, pulled us from our various places where we were

7 trying to shelter from the bombing. Two of us were in a water culvert by

8 the side of the road. Two other people were sheltering under the remains

9 of a tunnel, and one -- one of our group had been blown into the river,

10 so to all intents and purposes, we didn't know where that person was.

11 That was the cameraman from Portuguese television. The Yugoslav army

12 soldiers bundled us into these civilian cars, Jugo cars, very small, and

13 took us away from the area and took us to a village where they had a camp,

14 and cleaned us up - cuts and bruises - cleaned us up in their army -- they

15 had a very rudimentary army hospital to -- clinic. Just a room, really.

16 And they fed us, and 36 hours later they -- when the bombing on that road

17 had subsided a little, they took us back to Pristina.

18 It was -- when we got back to Pristina, we did hear that -- we

19 were asked to give a press conference, and the BBC had been in fairly

20 close contact with the Serbian press centre in Pristina because they

21 wondered what had happened to us. It was evident we had gone missing.

22 And we were then told that it had been -- de facto information had been

23 given by NATO in Brussels that it -- that there had been no bombing in

24 that area and that the implication was that we had probably been attacked

25 by Serbian forces. So we did give a press conference to correct that

1 impression.

2 Q. Was that just an impression, or if NATO said that there was no

3 attack and no planes there, was it your impression that the Serb forces

4 had perhaps attacked you? Was that in the media in any way? So they

5 considered you missing five or six hours.

6 A. That and -- we were -- we were missing in that we were not able to

7 make contact with any of our newspapers or media organisations, or indeed

8 anybody else, for 36 hours or more. When we did contact them, they had

9 been asking questions at NATO press conferences in Brussels, and NATO had

10 told them that there had been no NATO bombing in the area where we had

11 last been seen on this road towards Prizren, and that they assumed that we

12 had been hit by Serbian forces.

13 I can't speak for the families of the others. My own family, my

14 father was a member of the House of Lords, so he was in contact with the

15 foreign office and whoever he could be, because obviously he was concerned

16 when we were missing. He was told, not in a press conference way, but he

17 was told that it seemed that we had been hit by Serbian forces. So of

18 course he was --

19 JUDGE ROBINSON: Ms. Prentice.

20 THE WITNESS: Yes.

21 JUDGE ROBINSON: You have clearly concluded that you were hit by

22 NATO aircraft. By what means did you ascertain that the aircraft was

23 NATO?

24 THE WITNESS: We could see them very clearly. There is -- there

25 is a Portuguese television -- the cameraman who was blown into the river

1 carried on filming until he was blown into the river. And not only did I

2 see it with my own eyes, but I subsequently watched that video when it was

3 brought back to Pristina and then again when Portuguese television showed

4 it on their own television. The aircraft were very, very clearly visible.

5 I could almost read the registration on the tail fins.

6 JUDGE ROBINSON: And that would have enabled you to distinguish a

7 NATO aircraft from Serb aircraft.

8 THE WITNESS: There were no Serb aircraft at all by this time of

9 the war. The combat was all on the ground. These were -- they were red

10 fighter aircraft. They were Western aircraft. They were very, very low.

11 They were bombing that road because it was strategic. I'm pretty -- you

12 know, that -- that would be obvious. I couldn't manage why -- well,

13 anyway it is inconceivable that they were Serbian aircraft. There were no

14 Serbian aircraft flying at that time of the war in that part of Kosovo.

15 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

16 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

17 Q. You've just said that the Portuguese reporter managed to film the

18 attack and that it was broadcast over Portuguese television. Did the BBC

19 broadcast it?

20 A. No, it didn't.

21 Q. Do you have an explanation for that? Did you delve into that

22 question why not?

23 A. My whole impression was that once they knew that we were alive and

24 safe, the fact that we had been hit by NATO aircraft and rescued by

25 Serbian troops didn't merit further coverage. We did -- the BBC did cover

1 our press conference on their main Today programme on the morning after we

2 got back to Pristina, but that was the extent of the coverage of our

3 particular incident when the driver was killed.

4 JUDGE BONOMY: Ms. Prentice, did The Times cover it?

5 THE WITNESS: Yes.

6 JUDGE BONOMY: Thank you. So -- well, so it was obviously common

7 knowledge in the United Kingdom.

8 THE WITNESS: It was common knowledge. I covered it myself for

9 The Times. I wrote about my own experiences.

10 JUDGE BONOMY: Thank you.

11 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

12 Q. Could one say that, apart from your having been a victim of an air

13 attack by NATO - your driver was killed, you were injured - that at least

14 in some measure you were also a victim of anti-Serb propaganda? Yes or

15 no.

16 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, I don't understand that question

17 at all. What are you trying to get at?

18 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I think the witness understands the

19 question very well, because she told us very clearly --

20 JUDGE ROBINSON: I'm not allowing it.

21 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

22 Q. Ms. Prentice, as a professional journalist and an intellectual,

23 could you please tell us whether, in your view, one could talk about the

24 existence or the non-existence throughout this time of anti-Serb

25 propaganda in the West?

1 A. Throughout -- from the beginning of the 1990s, I became aware that

2 certain phrases seemed to be being used to portray -- by Western leaders

3 to portray all the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia as innocent victims

4 being attacked by guilty Serbs, and that there were two phrases in

5 particular I found were used to great effect to this end. One was "ethnic

6 cleansing," which was used almost exclusively in relation to Serbian

7 activities and which was so redolent of -- and I'm sure was meant to be

8 redolent of Nazis and Nazi death camps and that sort of thing, and the

9 other was the use of "Greater Serbia" as a name of the Serbs.

10 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, suppose there was anti-Serb

11 propaganda in the West. How does that impact on the indictment?

12 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I have to tell you, Mr. Robinson,

13 that this entire indictment is an example of this anti-Serb propaganda in

14 a kitsch version according to everything that has just been said.

15 Mr. Nice and his associates have drawn up an indictment based on

16 television series and stories told by enemies of the Serbs. That's all it

17 contains, from beginning to end.

18 I'm asking a competent witness, one of the few respected Western

19 journalists - in this case from Britain - to tell us what she knows.

20 JUDGE BONOMY: That sort of remark is quite uncalled for here.

21 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Kay, can you help us?

22 MR. KAY: It's a credibility issue. That's what the accused is

23 dealing with. And the Court has heard the broad thrust of the Prosecution

24 case, which takes a particular line in relation to NATO bombing and indeed

25 the attitude of the Serbian government and has presented the evidence in a

1 way that it is a plan of the Serbian government to have committed these

2 acts. And the Court is faced with evidence from international

3 politicians, generals such as General Wesley Clark who, it could be said

4 by the Defence properly, had an interest to serve, to justify the acts

5 that they were taking and were able to present their evidence and to

6 present their case in a way to manipulate public opinion as to the

7 justness of their cause, and that lies behind the accused, in my

8 submission, investigating these issues with this witness who is a

9 journalist.

10 The Prosecution, for their part, have called propaganda experts --

11 JUDGE ROBINSON: When you say credibility, do you mean the

12 credibility of the indictment as a whole or of particular --

13 MR. KAY: Yes, the combined issues through the presentation of the

14 evidence, with several witnesses all proceeding down a particular path.

15 JUDGE BONOMY: But, Mr. Kay, even if the indictment is fantasy, as

16 the accused maintains, the way to get to the root of its accuracy is to

17 look at facts, to investigate evidence through witnesses who had personal

18 experience of the facts. Now, I appreciate that the Prosecution may well

19 have done certain things that can be seen to be comparable to what's being

20 done today. That may be so. But that doesn't justify it, and a Bench as

21 now composed that wants to get to facts I think would be much more

22 assisted by the accused if he was to ask the witness about her own

23 personal experience of events on the ground.

24 For example, we haven't even found out how often she was on the

25 road, how she was finding out experience -- the information she's given us

1 from Albanians, where exactly she was. Was she at the border or was she

2 between various places on the border? Did she see people moving around?

3 I've got no basic information at the moment on which I could make a

4 realistic assessment of the value of the evidence she's given. And that's

5 no fault of hers.

6 MR. KAY: I hope that's understood. She's given evidence of the

7 experience so far, which is a picture, if you like, of her own personal

8 experience, but it may be that greater detail -- and the witness,

9 hopefully, will have heard Your Honour's remarks and perhaps be able to

10 include such information she has --

11 JUDGE BONOMY: And we have to be sensitive to her own personal

12 needs. She's here for today and we need to use this time valuably. And

13 the accused, in my opinion, is failing to do that and that's most

14 distressing, I think, for the witness.

15 MR. KAY: Yes, I hope -- [Microphone not activated]

16 [Trial Chamber confers].

17 THE ACCUSED: [No interpretation]

18 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, the Chamber is consulting.

19 [Trial Chamber confers]

20 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, we'll allow the question, but you

21 must move from general observations to the area of facts very quickly and

22 utilise the very limited time in the best way possible.

23 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. Robinson, if the fact that the

24 witness herself was bombed and her driver killed is a general --

25 JUDGE ROBINSON: Don't argue, just move on.

1 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

2 Q. Ms. Prentice, we were speaking about anti-Serb propaganda. Who

3 were the chief protagonists of this? Was it politicians or journalists?

4 A. The instigators were the Western politicians and generals, but I

5 would say that too many journalists helped this by at best not questioning

6 deeply enough the causes and the -- and the claims that were made by the

7 Western politicians, and indeed some journalists I believe actually

8 colluded with the attempt to portray particularly the Bosnian conflict and

9 then Kosovo as this black and white guilt -- guilty and innocent, as if

10 one side was almost unarmed and totally the victim and the other side;

11 i.e., the Serbs, were the armed ones and the perpetrators of all killing

12 and destruction.

13 JUDGE BONOMY: Are you prepared to give us an example of a

14 colluding journalist in relation to Kosovo?

15 THE WITNESS: Gosh. May I ponder that and go on to other

16 questions for the time being?

17 JUDGE BONOMY: Certainly.

18 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

19 Q. Very well. In connection with this example, I may be able to

20 assist you. For example, an example where a Western leader gives

21 statements --

22 JUDGE BONOMY: It would be helpful if you were cautious not to

23 give -- not to present a leading question.

24 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] It's not a leading question if I ask

25 the witness whether she remembers an example where a Western leader made

1 statements to the effect that Serbs had committed crimes against humanity

2 which in her opinion or in an objective opinion cannot be true.

3 THE WITNESS: As far as the Western leaders are concerned, there's

4 the -- for instance, President Clinton and his Defence spokesman William

5 Cohen repeatedly said in February and early March 1999 that they had

6 evidence that there were 100.000 ethnic Albanians believed to have been

7 killed in Kosovo by that time by Serbian forces, and that once NATO could

8 go in there and investigate, and the UN, that this would be proved, that

9 this de facto bordering on genocide had happened. In the event, the UN,

10 as far as I understand it to date, has uncovered something in the region

11 of 2.800 dead, not all of them ethnic Albanian, and some of theme believed

12 to have been victims of the bombing anyway.

13 I -- my point would be that the public perception of 100.000 dead

14 enabled the Western politicians to gain a great deal more support for the

15 campaign than they would have had had the -- had the figure actually been

16 known to be 2.800.

17 I've just been -- if I may go back to the point you were asking

18 about journalism as well. An example would be, to me, CNN and the BBC

19 gave very big coverage to one particular group of apparent refugees

20 crossing over into Albania. I think it was the second week of May. And

21 they were mostly women and children. And they were interviewed at length

22 by the BBC and CNN, and they said that all their menfolk had been taken

23 away and killed. The very next day a similar number of men from that same

24 village crossed over the border in the same place. I believe it was the

25 BBC but not CNN who then asked them had they come from that village where

1 the women and children had been from yesterday, and they were indeed. But

2 instead of the coverage then saying, well, in fact there had not been a

3 massacre of the menfolk from that village, the phrase that the TV then

4 reverted to was, "They are the walking dead. They are the people who've

5 been separated out."

6 It was -- this is the sort of -- that's one example of the sort of

7 thing I mean.

8 JUDGE BONOMY: Thank you.

9 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

10 Q. Ms. Prentice, you said that you had been assisted by soldiers of

11 the Yugoslav army. I won't ask you any more about that. But in

12 connection with the behaviour of members of the army and police, what was

13 the attitude, to the best of your knowledge, of the army and police

14 towards civilians?

15 A. The village where we stayed for 36 hours or so after our driver

16 was killed was populated largely by ethnic Turkish people and a few Roma,

17 and I was very surprised at the ease at which the population of the

18 village lived alongside the Yugoslav army units. There seemed to be a lot

19 of mutual support in that the -- the villagers would provide vegetables

20 and food for the Yugoslav army units; the Yugoslav army units were giving

21 us cigarettes and other things that they were able to give to the

22 villagers that they found in short supply.

23 We were invited into several of the homes of the local population.

24 They gave us tea. They let us get washed in there, because the Yugoslav

25 army unit was using a disused farmhouse where there was no electricity.

1 Although there was an army radio set, there was -- there was no power for

2 heating and cooking. So the village population were very, very kind and

3 let us use their rudimentary washing facilities. And it was very clear

4 when there were no Serbian troops inside their homes that they were very

5 relaxed about having the JNA camping in their village.

6 Again, it was just in very stark contrast to the image that I had

7 seen perpetrated while I was still in Belgrade about what was happening in

8 Kosovo. It was just another surprising aspect.

9 Q. Where did you see this in Belgrade that you mentioned?

10 A. Sorry, where did I see ...

11 Q. You say that what you experienced was in contrast to what you had

12 seen in Belgrade.

13 A. I'm sorry. Watching CNN and the BBC on television from the Hyatt

14 Hotel, which is where I was based while I was still in Belgrade.

15 Q. Thank you. We won't go into examples of other journalists. I

16 don't know whether you'll be able to answer the following question, but

17 did your office, the office of The London Times, ask you for information

18 about the relationship between the army and police and the authorities and

19 the civilians, and the Albanian population?

20 A. The vast majority of The Times' reporters covering this conflict

21 were based outside -- well, everybody except myself were based outside

22 Kosovo, and indeed outside Serbia altogether. They were in Albania,

23 Macedonia, and Montenegro. So obviously I was the only eyewitness inside

24 Kosovo for The Times, and they were, of course, very keen to know what was

25 happening to the -- particularly the ethnic Albanian population, but of

1 course any of the non-Serb population.

2 Of course as I travelled around, and I was constantly really on

3 the road travelling to -- on a daily basis to most parts of Kosovo, it

4 became clear that what I was filing from inside Kosovo was at some

5 variance to what was being filed by my colleagues in Macedonia and Albania

6 and Montenegro.

7 Q. Did they ask you to write about what you had seen there, to report

8 on what you were observing? Did you report on that? Was that published

9 in The Times?

10 A. Yes, I did write about what I saw, and yes, it was published in

11 The Times. There were -- there were a couple of occasions where I, for

12 instance, wrote about Serb civilians who were sheltering from the bombing,

13 and whether this was a deliberate editorial decision or not I really

14 cannot say, but that was -- that particular report, for instance, was not

15 used. I cannot help -- there definitely was a slight feeling that any

16 Serb suffering was seen as a bit of a distraction from the main story

17 which was perceived to be the ethnic Albanian suffering.

18 JUDGE ROBINSON: Are you still writing for The Times?

19 THE WITNESS: On a freelance basis. I was then a staffer.

20 JUDGE BONOMY: Have you any reason to think that the others who

21 were reporting from without Kosovo were not reporting genuinely, whether

22 they were being misled or not?

23 THE WITNESS: I have reason to believe that 90 per cent of them 90

24 per cent of the time were genuinely reporting, whether they'd been misled

25 or not, what -- correctly. I do have reason to believe that there were

1 occasions where falsehoods were reported, where what was reported as, for

2 instance, the deaths of a group of people, eyewitness account of the

3 deaths of a group of people, for instance, did not happen.

4 JUDGE BONOMY: Now, your information, I assume, about that can

5 only be secondhand and you've had to make a judgement about it; is that

6 right? I'm not criticising your judgement, I just want to know the

7 factual position.

8 THE WITNESS: What the fact was.

9 JUDGE BONOMY: Yes.

10 THE WITNESS: The -- the particular incident I'm thinking about,

11 yes, I was not there, but the person wrote a phrase that they said they

12 had heard in Serbian from a survivor from this alleged massacre, that my

13 colleague Dessa Trevisan, who is fluent, who is Serbo-Croat and who speaks

14 both languages fluently, pointed out far from meaning, "My poor father who

15 has been killed," this phrase meant "Death to my father." This was just

16 one example of somebody who seems to have reported something that actually

17 didn't happen and had been helped to dream up a phrase that wasn't

18 accurate. My only evidence on that one is -- is -- that the language used

19 was -- did not ring true.

20 JUDGE BONOMY: Going back briefly to the incident you referred to

21 where the women and children were crossing the border and were complaining

22 about the deaths or the murder of the men, again is your information on

23 that secondhand or were you actually there to see these people?

24 THE WITNESS: I saw them --

25 JUDGE BONOMY: Those were two contrasting television reports you

1 saw, was it?

2 THE WITNESS: I saw them leaving from my side of the border. I

3 saw -- I subsequently saw the TV report of the women and children

4 arriving.

5 JUDGE BONOMY: Yes.

6 THE WITNESS: Obviously I wasn't the other side of the border,

7 yeah.

8 JUDGE BONOMY: So you saw both the women and children and then

9 later the men leaving and --

10 THE WITNESS: [Interpretation] Not the men.

11 JUDGE BONOMY: You saw the women and children.

12 THE WITNESS: Uh-huh.

13 JUDGE BONOMY: Thank you.

14 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

15 Q. Ms. Prentice, you said that all your colleagues were in Albania,

16 Macedonia, and Montenegro, that you were the only one in Kosovo. I'm

17 speaking of your newspaper. From whom did your colleagues in Albania,

18 Montenegro, and Macedonia obtain information about what was happening in

19 Kosovo?

20 Let's start from the fact that they are all honest, decent

21 journalists writing sincerely about what they had learned. From whom

22 could they have learned all this?

23 A. I can't say for sure because I was not with them on that side of

24 the border, but from what they -- from the articles that they wrote, it

25 seems clear to me that they got their information from the mouths of the

1 people who were running away from Kosovo or who were leaving Kosovo. So

2 mostly ethnic Albanians but anybody else who was crossing the border. And

3 of course they got information from briefings by NATO in Brussels and by

4 various government departments in Western capitals.

5 Q. I think this clarifies sufficiently. I concluded from our

6 conversation that you also visited the village of Rekane. I think you

7 mentioned that.

8 A. Yes, this is the village where we -- where this Yugoslav army unit

9 was camped with the -- with the majority Turkish population.

10 Q. Were there any Albanians in the village or were most people

11 Turkish, Roma, and so on? Were there any Albanians living there?

12 A. They were mostly Turkish and Roma. I didn't actually -- don't

13 think I saw any ethnic Albanians in Rekane.

14 Q. Mr. Bonomy indicated the need to establish more precisely where

15 you actually were. You were in many places in Kosovo and Metohija. You

16 mentioned Pristina, Prizren, Podujevo, Orahovac. I think you mentioned

17 that.

18 A. Yes, indeed. Pretty well -- every day I and at least one or two

19 other journalists and driver and interpreters, we would set out -- the way

20 we worked was to -- if there had been -- if we heard that there'd been a

21 particularly heavy bombing in an area overnight, then we would try to go

22 there. We heard about -- for instance, the reason we were in Prizren --

23 or trying to get to Prizren when our convoy was attacked, was to see

24 survivors of two very high-profile convoys, refugee convoys, that had been

25 hit by NATO and the survivors had been taken to Prizren hospital.

1 So the way we would work would be decide in the morning which part

2 of Kosovo we thought produced the most newsworthy and the most revealing

3 of what was going on, but then quite often you would -- Kosovo is

4 relatively small in that we were able to travel to more than one place in

5 a given day sometimes. So quite often you'd cover two or even three

6 aspects of the conflict on a given day. And as I say -- so we were

7 constantly on the move, constantly trying to interview people.

8 JUDGE BONOMY: In relation to the information you gave about

9 people's -- the reasons for people's fears, did you spend any significant

10 time among obvious large groups of apparent refugees?

11 THE WITNESS: I suppose the biggest would be the people I was

12 talking -- referring to earlier who were getting aboard buses at Pristina.

13 They were quite -- there were daily quite large numbers of people there.

14 I also spoke to what were evidently people heading off around

15 Prizren. I made two trips to the Prizren area, and we were -- yes, we

16 spoke to quite large numbers of people there who were heading off.

17 Smaller numbers -- those two centres had -- I suppose the numbers would

18 have been at least in the hundreds, maybe even a thousand or more at each

19 time. In Kosovska Mitrovica there were much smaller numbers of people

20 trying to leave, but that did include quite a number of Serbs as well.

21 JUDGE BONOMY: Thank you.

22 JUDGE ROBINSON: Before we adjourn for the 20-minute break, may I

23 inquire of Mr. Milosevic and Mr. Nice of their estimate of this witness's

24 evidence. How much longer will you be in chief? I make the inquiry

25 because we have a witness who is waiting, and if we are not going to need

1 him, then I'm sure he'd be more comfortable in his hotel.

2 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, that's what I said yesterday,

3 that I tried to do. I will complete the examination-in-chief during the

4 next session, and then Mr. Nice has half my time to conduct his

5 cross-examination of the witness, and I assume that would be sufficient.

6 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes. Mr. Nice.

7 MR. NICE: I'm sure it will be sufficient. If I have half his

8 time, I'm sure that will be enough.

9 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes. We will adjourn for 20 minutes.

10 --- Recess taken at 10.35 a.m.

11 --- On resuming at 10.57 a.m.

12 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, you may continue.

13 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

14 Q. Ms. Prentice, you explained to us a moment ago that the largest

15 groups leaving Kosovo which you encountered, and the people you talked to,

16 were groups boarding buses in Pristina and Prizren on different occasions.

17 Did I understand you correctly?

18 A. That's correct.

19 Q. Tell us, please, when you were on the spot at that time, when you

20 talked to those groups of people and when you watched them boarding the

21 buses and departing, did you notice any activity on the part of the army

22 and the police or just the police or just the army or the police and the

23 army together linked to their departure?

24 A. There were a small number of police. I didn't see any army. And

25 they were standing some -- gosh, at least 20 yards to a hundred yards

1 away. They were not right close by to the buses.

2 Q. And the policemen whom you saw, did they influence those Albanians

3 in any way, or these large groups in any way, making them go towards the

4 buses or anything like that, or giving suggestions out of any kind?

5 A. I didn't see any activity of that sort.

6 Q. And did you see anything that could indicate any improper conduct

7 on the part of the army or the police vis-a-vis these Albanian citizens,

8 these people departing, and the people you encountered generally?

9 Anything that could indicate any form of improper behaviour on the part of

10 the army or the police?

11 A. I personally didn't see any behaviour of that sort.

12 Q. You mentioned that the Albanian civilians were afraid of the KLA.

13 Can you explain this to us more closely. When you talked to the Albanian

14 civilians, did you happen to learn why they were so afraid of the KLA?

15 A. There were several occasions where the ethnic Albanian civilians

16 told us that they were being coerced, that they were being pressed to

17 leave. Very often these were more -- a lot of these civilians were women,

18 and quite a lot of elderly people amongst them, and I felt -- well, they

19 said that they were just very weary of the whole situation; of the war

20 that had been going on, of the NATO bombing, and that they didn't like

21 being asked to leave Kosovo.

22 They -- I think a good example of this would be I made many

23 interviews with Ibrahim Rugova, and as I say, I used to use one of his

24 aides as an interpreter. I never saw Ibrahim Rugova with -- looking

25 frightened or having any sort of bodyguard during -- either before the

1 NATO bombardment in the 1980s and 1990s or indeed during the NATO

2 bombardment, but I went back to Kosovo at the end of 1999, and he was --

3 he had a very large bodyguard of at least 15 people who were heavily armed

4 with him, and I asked him the same question that I had asked these

5 civilians: You know, why are you frightened? Why are you walking around

6 with all these bodyguards? Now, he didn't answer me with anything but a

7 sort of body language shrug that said you know, I know what it is; it's

8 the KLA.

9 And that may sound as if I'm really putting words in his mouth,

10 but having interviewed him so many times, I knew what that body language

11 wink and a shrug meant. And he, of course, was an ethnic Albanian.

12 Q. Did you have any knowledge and information about how the KLA, for

13 example, acted towards civilians during battles, during fighting with our

14 army or the police, when fighting was going on?

15 A. I spent -- I made a great deal of investigation not at the time

16 but in the weeks following the NATO bombardment. I spent a lot of time

17 talking to a Yugoslav army doctor who had by then become displaced from

18 Kosovo. He was from Kosovo but who had had to flee his home when it was

19 attacked by ethnic -- by Albanians when NATO went into Kosovo.

20 I spent a couple of months every day interviewing him about what

21 he had -- how he had worked, what he had seen. He -- he had been on the

22 front line, particularly in the villages, in the rural parts of Kosovo

23 where the vast majority of the battles between Yugoslav forces had taken

24 place against the KLA.

25 His story was consistent. Of course I can't verify it because I

1 wasn't there, but he told me of many, many incidents where he was part of

2 the Yugoslav army troop that was sent to different villages to contain and

3 fight KLA forces who were headquartered inside these villages, and it

4 became clear from talking to him that because the battles were taking

5 place in villages where civilians were and that open ground was out --

6 immediately outside the fighting area, he said it -- it was -- he's a

7 doctor, his whole cause is to preserve life, but he said he was constantly

8 dismayed to see particularly women come -- they'd be shot at -- that the

9 Yugoslav army side would go into an area, be fired on by KLA from a given

10 building in a village, and then women would come running at them out of --

11 out of the firing area. And he said that, you know, he did see many

12 civilians killed in that way, old women as well. And he said that the

13 Yugoslav army soldiers themselves, the young people especially, and the

14 conscripted soldiers especially, were very upset when they found that they

15 had been -- thought that they were firing at a KLA terrorist hideout and

16 suddenly civilians would be running at them, and of course they were still

17 firing, and that they had shot and killed or injured these civilians.

18 So my impression was that the KLA were willing to put civilians in

19 danger at the sites of these battles.

20 Q. You were in Gnjilane. Do you remember when you were there?

21 A. I was in Gnjilane in the latter part of May 1999.

22 Q. So in the latter part of May 1999, you say you were in Gnjilane.

23 Did anything happen at that time in Gnjilane when you were there?

24 A. There was a bombing raid by NATO on -- there was a big industrial

25 estate, and that seemed to be the focus of the attack by NATO, but there

1 were many -- we saw many civilians hit in that attack and a lot of damage

2 done to civilian houses. There was a canteen. The dinner ladies who were

3 running that canteen, they were killed. Building workers, there were some

4 building workers that we saw that were killed in this bombing raid.

5 Q. And just tell us briefly, please, before that bombing -- you

6 arrived before the bombing and you were present during the bombing; is

7 that right?

8 A. The bombing was coming to an end as we were coming into town. So

9 we were not there throughout, but it had -- it was just finishing off, and

10 we were there to see the immediate after-effects. People were still sort

11 of in the rubble, injured.

12 Q. Did you manage to establish whether, apart from the after-effects

13 of the bombing, there was some other or any other damage done in Gnjilane,

14 for example?

15 A. No. The rest of the town -- the only damage that we saw seemed

16 very, very apparently caused by aerial bombardment. It's a fairly small

17 town, so I think we saw most parts of it.

18 Q. Well, I'm asking you that because certain things there cannot be

19 doubted. You were there in the last ten days of May. You saw the bombing

20 of Gnjilane, you saw the damage caused by it. And in the indictment, in

21 paragraph 63(i), it says that as of the 6th of April Gnjilane -- forced

22 out the population systematically, set fire to houses, cultural monuments,

23 and so on and so forth.

24 So were you able in Gnjilane, apart from the damage done by the

25 bombing, could you see anything that would indicate that that was true,

1 that the Serbs had indeed set fire to shops, cultural monuments, and

2 things like that?

3 A. I did not see any damage of that sort. I didn't see any burnt-out

4 shops or cultural monuments or churches or mosques; nothing of that sort

5 at all. There were -- a few shops were closed up, but not damaged. They

6 had signs on them that the owners had gone away. That was on, I suppose,

7 half a dozen shops that we saw, but they weren't burned out and I didn't

8 see any damage of that sort.

9 Q. Were you in Istok when there was suffering there in the Dubrava

10 prison, where there were casualties?

11 A. I did go to Istok, but it was a few hours after there'd been an

12 incident there. I and my colleagues that I was travelling with, we had

13 returned to Pristina from another assignment, and we were told that there

14 had been some sort of bombing or some sort of event at the prison at

15 Istok, so then we set out. But the vast majority of the press corps in

16 Pristina had gone there some hours before us.

17 When we got there, we were told by the press corps that had been

18 there throughout that they had seen bombing by NATO of the prison. What

19 we saw was damaged walls to the prison, badly damaged. It certainly

20 looked like the effects of an aerial bombardment to me. It looked as if

21 it had come from the air, not -- not the ground.

22 JUDGE KWON: Ms. Prentice, do you remember the date of your visit?

23 THE WITNESS: I -- I have a note of it, not with me at this

24 second, but I think it would have been something like 20, 22nd, 23rd of

25 May, something like that.

1 JUDGE KWON: Or do you remember the day of the week, by any

2 chance?

3 THE WITNESS: No, I'm afraid I don't. I'm afraid that every day

4 became like every other.

5 JUDGE KWON: I'm interested in your expression "bombing or some

6 sort of event."

7 THE WITNESS: Because all they told us was, "You really ought to

8 go to Istok, that something has happened there." And we really didn't

9 know what. All that we were told was, "Everybody seems to have gone out

10 to Istok. Something's happened." This often happened, that we were

11 told --

12 JUDGE KWON: Were the prisoners still there or were they

13 evacuated?

14 THE WITNESS: No, they were still there.

15 JUDGE KWON: So you went there before they were evacuated.

16 THE WITNESS: Yes.

17 JUDGE KWON: Thank you.

18 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

19 Q. Were you in Nis during the bombing of Nis?

20 A. Yes. I can remember the date of that, actually, because that was

21 the same day as the bombing of the Chinese embassy, which is why I

22 remember that date, and I believe that was the 5th of May.

23 Again, the target of the NATO attack seems to have been the

24 airport, but there were a large amount of cluster bombs dropped which

25 exploded in a market and residential area. There was a series of cobbled

1 streets with houses which were -- they weren't destroyed, but they looked

2 as if they'd been sprayed by very heavy machine-gun fire, and this was the

3 effect of the exploding cluster bombs. And there were -- I counted at

4 least 30 bodies in the street, and there were another 30 or so. After an

5 hour we went to the hospital to see what was happening there, because --

6 when we got there a couple of ambulance men had been killed on the grounds

7 of the hospital, but there were at least another 30 people badly injured,

8 in the hospital.

9 JUDGE BONOMY: That -- the date's out with the period I thought

10 you actually were there, but have I misunderstood? I thought you were

11 there the last two weeks in May and into the first week of June.

12 THE WITNESS: I was in -- was in Kosovo?

13 JUDGE BONOMY: Yes.

14 THE WITNESS: I went to Kosovo almost immediately after -- I was

15 in Kosovo from about the 8th, 9th, or 10th of May until about the 15th or

16 16th, then went back to Belgrade to get a renewed visa, and then went back

17 for the last two weeks of May and the first couple of days of June.

18 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

19 Q. Ms. Prentice, in the first and second half of May you were in

20 Prizren; is that correct?

21 A. Yes. I made two separate visits during -- during each of my two

22 separate visits, I made one visit to Prizren, yeah.

23 Q. And every time you went to Kosovo, you would go to Prizren, would

24 you? Because I made a note of it from my conversation with you, that you

25 were there on the 10th and the 12th and the 30th and some other dates,

1 that you were in Prizren then; is that right?

2 A. That would be around -- I can't remember whether it was the 10th

3 or the 12th. I remember that it was -- it would have been around then,

4 and then again on the 29th and 30th. And I only -- I remember the 30th

5 because that was the day our driver was killed and we'd gone there the day

6 before.

7 Q. All right. Very well. Now, in paragraph 63(b), speaking about

8 Prizren, referring to Prizren, it says on the 25th of March itself, and

9 then in a portion of that paragraph, not to take up too much time, it says

10 the following: "From the 28th of March, in the city of Prizren forces of

11 the FRY and Serbia went from house to house, ordering Kosovo Albanian

12 residents to leave." And then it goes on to say that the forces of the

13 FRY and Serbia beat and killed Kosovo Albanian men, et cetera.

14 When you were in Prizren yourself, was there anything that you saw

15 there that could confirm or refute this kind of allegation; that is to say

16 that from the 28th of March onwards, they went round Prizren, that is to

17 say the forces of the FRY and Serbia, went from house to house, beating

18 Albanians, ordering them out, and disseminating an atmosphere of terror?

19 You were there for number of days; did you feel any of that to be true?

20 A. Certainly while I was there I was able to freely go to areas of

21 the town, some particular streets where ethnic Albanians were. There

22 seemed to be plenty of ethnic Albanians there. Certainly -- certainly the

23 town was not empty of ethnic Albanians or anything like it. There seemed

24 to be -- the very centre, near the bridge, seemed to be populated much

25 more by Serbs, and then there were a lot of medieval streets where there

1 were many Albanians, families sitting around. It was summer, so most

2 people were sitting outside and their windows were open.

3 It seemed a slightly divided town, but certainly it was not devoid

4 of ethnic Albanians. And the ones we spoke to, as I think I mentioned

5 before, they tended to be -- there were lots of -- unlike in Kosovska

6 Mitrovica where there seemed to be a lot of elderly and particularly women

7 ethnic Albanians, there seemed to be people of all ages, ethnic Albanians

8 in Prizren, and the young men in particular seemed very jubilant about the

9 NATO bombing. And they were saying -- because I was saying, aren't you --

10 you know, there was bombing going on in the middle distance, and the

11 police station in Prizren, the area around there had been bombed quite

12 extensively, and I was asking them were they -- were they not frightened.

13 Because I personally was frightened of bombs. I'm not a war

14 correspondent. I just happened to know the region and was there because I

15 knew the region.

16 The young men seemed to be jubilant about the NATO bombing, and

17 they were saying, "Come on. It will be there soon. The next week. It

18 will be two weeks maximum and NATO will be here."

19 So that was the situation we found in Prizren.

20 Q. Tell us, please, how much truth is there -- is there in the

21 following -- actually, were you in Orahovac?

22 A. I was briefly in Orahovac, yeah.

23 Q. In paragraph 63(a), which refers to Orahovac, (i), it says:

24 "During this forcible expulsion throughout the territory of Orahovac, the

25 forces of the FRY and Serbia systematically set fire to shops, religious

1 sites of Kosovo Albanians," and so on and so forth. "Systematically burnt

2 houses, shops, cultural monuments and religious sites belonging to Kosovo

3 Albanians." Did you see any of that happening while you were there?

4 A. I didn't see any evidence of that at all. It was quite striking

5 to me that by the end of 1999, that during the criss-crossing Kosovo in

6 May and early June 1999, I don't think I saw a single mosque, for

7 instance, destroyed or damaged. I was very shocked at the end of 1999,

8 Christmas, when I went back, at how many Orthodox churches had been

9 destroyed. So I don't think I would have been blind to the destruction of

10 any churches or monuments in the May. I certainly didn't see any damage

11 of that sort in Orahovac, or indeed anywhere I went.

12 Q. In connection with Pristina, in this same paragraph under (g) --

13 and as I understood it, you kept going back to Pristina; is that correct?

14 A. Yes, I was based in Pristina.

15 Q. It says that: "Beginning on or about the 24th of March, Serbian

16 police went to the homes of Kosovo Albanians in the city of Pristina and

17 forced the residents to leave. During the course of these forced

18 expulsions, a number of people were killed. Many of those forced from

19 their homes went directly to the train station while others sought shelter

20 in nearby neighbourhoods," and so on.

21 You were in Pristina more than once during the war. Were you able

22 to see any of this in Pristina?

23 A. I was not there at the beginning, so I really cannot comment on

24 March and April in Pristina. By the time I got there, there were --

25 certainly seemed to be a goodly population of ethnic Albanians still

1 there. Some of them were going -- the number of coaches that seemed to be

2 leaving from behind the post office seemed to be in the number of half a

3 dozen a day. There didn't seem to be -- but I cannot -- of course I

4 cannot say anything about the beginning, and there were colleagues who had

5 been there from the beginning who said that they had seen columns of

6 ethnic Albanians leaving Pristina right at the beginning of the bombing.

7 They were unable to say whether they were -- they didn't say they'd seen

8 them being beaten or pushed, but they were unable to say why these columns

9 were formed or where they were going. But by the time we were there, no,

10 I didn't see any coercion or any forcing of people.

11 Q. In paragraph 16, as this refers to a joint criminal enterprise,

12 which I won't go into, it says: "The aim was to expel a substantial

13 portion of the Kosovo Albanian population from the territory of the

14 province of Kosovo in an effort to ensure continued Serbian control over

15 the province."

16 During your numerous visits and travels in Kosovo and Metohija,

17 did anything indicate that the Albanian population was being expelled from

18 the territory of the province, not to mention what the purpose might have

19 been? Did you see any of this?

20 A. Only what I've described earlier with people who told us that they

21 were going because they were being -- they were frightened of the KLA and

22 they were being told it was their patriotic duty. I didn't see any -- I

23 didn't see anybody being forced to leave by Serbian forces. I was not

24 everywhere. I cannot say this did not happen. I can say I did not

25 personally see it happen.

1 Q. Yes. In paragraph 53, for example, and elsewhere, it mentions a

2 widespread campaign of terror aimed against the -- "a deliberate and

3 widespread or systematic campaign of terror and violence directed at

4 Kosovo Albanian civilians living in Kosovo in the FRY." A widespread or

5 systematic or deliberate campaign would have to be evident. Did you see

6 any of this or does anything you have seen point to the truth of what it

7 says here, a planned -- a deliberate and widespread and systematic

8 campaign of terror and violence?

9 MR. NICE: As the Court will know, I have not really objected to

10 any line of questioning, because if this witness wants to say things, why

11 not, but it may be that that last question is going so far towards a

12 generalised conclusion that it really is a waste of time.

13 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, I have to be asking myself a

14 question. How valuable is her evidence on these matters that you're

15 putting to her from the indictment? I think we have been through this

16 before in the earlier part of your case, the tendency to ask witnesses

17 very general questions. She can only say that she didn't see, but how

18 often was she there? How valuable is this evidence?

19 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I hope we've been able to establish

20 how often Ms. Prentice was there and at what intervals. A widespread

21 campaign of terror could not have been perpetrated invisibly. It's not

22 possible that she couldn't have seen any of this if it existed.

23 That man, Kirudja, who spent three days in Yugoslavia, testified

24 about his three days in Yugoslavia. Ms. Prentice was there 40 times.

25 JUDGE ROBINSON: It does not appear to me to be very helpful.

1 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well.

2 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

3 Q. You mentioned that you visited the victims of two large-scale

4 attacks on columns of civilians in Meja and Korisa. Did you mention that?

5 A. Yes, I did, yeah.

6 Q. Tell me, what did the victims of these attacks tell you? You went

7 to see them in hospital; correct?

8 A. In Prizren hospital. Some of the survivors had been taken to

9 Prizren hospital, which was precisely the reason for making our second

10 visit to Prizren.

11 They were badly burned, many of them, so they were in great pain.

12 They said that they -- they -- they were lamenting the deaths of their

13 families, the people who had not survived. They said that they had been

14 repeatedly bombed. They couldn't understand why -- what they said was the

15 NATO jets who had attacked them, they couldn't understand why they hadn't

16 realised that this was a civilian refugee column in both cases. They --

17 they generally were lamenting and in mourning and in pain.

18 Q. Very well. Did you interview Serbs and other non-Albanians who

19 had to leave Kosovo?

20 A. May I ask - sorry - at which time you are talking about? Because

21 I spoke to many, many Serbs --

22 Q. Any period during your visits to Kosovo.

23 A. I spoke to many hundreds of Serbs and other non-ethnic Albanian

24 people from Kosovo who poured across the provincial boundary into Serbia

25 proper after NATO had entered Kosovo. There were at one point up to

1 200.000 people flooding across the border around Vranje, Kursumlija, and I

2 spent a couple of months in that region, talking to people from all

3 backgrounds apart from ethnic Albanians. I didn't come across any ethnic

4 Albanians, but Roma, Serb and others.

5 JUDGE BONOMY: Which two months were these?

6 THE WITNESS: That would have been June and July. End of June,

7 July.

8 JUDGE BONOMY: 1999.

9 THE WITNESS: 1999.

10 JUDGE ROBINSON: And were you able to gather from them why they

11 left?

12 THE WITNESS: Some of them were people I had known during my

13 previous visits. Even in that complete pandemonium. It's quite

14 astonishing that these two people managed to find me who I had known quite

15 well. But it was obvious from all of them, so their stories were utterly

16 verifiable because I knew them intimately. But it was evident from all of

17 them that they had had to flee in fear of their lives after NATO had

18 entered Kosovo because it seemed that the peacekeepers were unable to

19 protect them from ethnic Albanians, particularly KLA, and they said

20 Albanians from Albania proper.

21 They all had stories of -- they all had minimal belongings with

22 them, they had so evidently left in a great rush. Many of them had

23 children. You know, they hadn't -- they hadn't even brought a change of

24 clothing for their children, they had left in such a hurry. So it was

25 evident to me that they had left in great fear, and their homes had been

1 -- many of them said that their homes had been taken over by ethnic

2 Albanians.

3 JUDGE ROBINSON: So if I understand you, then, this reason would

4 not have had anything to do with the NATO bombing.

5 THE WITNESS: No. That particular -- that exodus happened -- that

6 big exodus of mostly Serbs from Kosovo came after NATO entered the

7 province.

8 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

9 Q. Ms. Prentice, since we have very little time, I'll ask you very

10 briefly, I hope, something about the other places you visited during the

11 wars in Yugoslavia. When were you in Sarajevo?

12 A. In Sarajevo in late 1994.

13 Q. In 1994, there was an event that was very widely reported. On the

14 5th of February, 1994, there was an explosion at the Markale market. Did

15 you take an interest in what had happened; and what did you learn about

16 what had happened?

17 A. I did take an interest in it because it had attracted not only

18 huge coverage in the Western press but had led in large part to NATO

19 airstrikes on Republika Srpska.

20 I was -- I began to have suspicions about the way it was

21 automatically originally blamed on Serbian artillery, this attack on the

22 market, because I have among my contacts Paul Beaver of Jane's Defence

23 Weekly, which is a very respected military publication, and I began to

24 have suspicions that maybe it had not been perpetrated by Serb artillery

25 when he told me about the -- the very detailed analysis he had been able

1 to carry out with and in conjunction with UN munitions experts. He

2 seemed --

3 MR. NICE: I wonder if we're going to have the document or the

4 analysis available. It's all very well to report things secondhand like

5 this but it's not going to be of much value unless we can see the

6 workings.

7 JUDGE ROBINSON: Would you have that document at hand?

8 THE WITNESS: I don't have the document at hand, but it is easily

9 findable. When you say "the document," I mean I'm talking -- you're

10 talking about Jane's Defence Weekly.

11 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes.

12 THE WITNESS: The publication.

13 JUDGE KWON: What is the name of the weekly?

14 THE WITNESS: Jane, as in the name J-a-n-e, Jane's Defence Weekly.

15 JUDGE ROBINSON: Well, you can ask her questions on that,

16 Mr. Nice.

17 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

18 Q. Ms. Prentice, what did you find out when you investigated the

19 event or the incident at the Markale market?

20 MR. NICE: I'm sorry, Your Honours, there must be some limit.

21 Journalists can of course make inquiries and they can write their

22 conclusions, but this is a court that's dealing with evidence and I don't

23 think this is going to help us at all.

24 [Trial Chamber confers]

25 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, this will be hearsay evidence, and

1 we of course take in hearsay evidence, it's a question of the weight we

2 attach to it, but let us hear how she carried out her investigations.

3 That would help us determine what weight to attach to it.

4 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you, Mr. Robinson.

5 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

6 Q. Ms. Prentice, please tell us, what did you learn?

7 JUDGE ROBINSON: No, not what she learnt. I mean, how did she

8 come by what she learnt.

9 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well.

10 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

11 Q. How did you learn what you have just told us?

12 A. I interviewed Paul Beaver. I also spoke to some Western

13 diplomats, including the Dutch ambassador to -- I'm sorry. I beg your

14 pardon. It was the Portuguese -- not the Dutch, the Portuguese ambassador

15 to Bosnia. He went on to be the Portuguese attache in Belgrade who had

16 heard I'd been investigating this, and he had concerns about the incident

17 himself in that he had been shown some documentation, he told me, which

18 indicated that the explosion had not been fired by any artillery at all

19 but had been placed -- that he'd been shown evidence that an explosive

20 device had been taped underneath a market stall.

21 And I also spoke to UN people who had been in -- on site at

22 Markale within minutes of it happening who told me off the record -- these

23 were French peacekeepers who were very quickly on the scene -- who told me

24 that the injuries had been almost exclusively from the feet up and were

25 not consistent with any sort of aerial -- any explosive landing from the

1 air.

2 I also spoke to Lord Owen, David Owen about this. I also asked my

3 father as I began to become more suspicious about the way the causes of

4 the explosion had -- were being covered. I asked my father to -- whether

5 he would consider asking a question in the House of Lords, which he did.

6 He asked for any technical information or any proof that had been made

7 available to the British government. The answer that came back - and I'm

8 sorry, I actually was trying to get this answer sent over from Hansard

9 from the House of Lords yesterday, but so far they haven't sent it - but

10 the -- so I can only tell you that the gist of the written answer that was

11 given to my father was that it didn't matter who had perpetrated the

12 bombing because it had led to the ability to launch airstrikes against

13 Pale.

14 I think those -- that's the gist, really, about how I investigated

15 this. When I asked -- oh, by the way, when I asked Lord Owen about this,

16 his -- he would neither confirm nor deny that he had evidence or proof

17 that the bombing had been perpetrated indeed by the Bosnian Muslim

18 government in the taping of a bomb underneath the -- under a market stall.

19 And the very fact that he would not deny it lent weight to my suspicions.

20 Q. Are your suspicions also supported by the response officially

21 given to your father that the end justifies the means and that what

22 matters is that Pale was bombed, not who perpetrated this incident?

23 A. That seemed to me to be a de facto admission, yes, that they had

24 -- that the British government did indeed have some of the -- did have

25 indeed the evidence, if not proof, that the bombing was not perpetrated by

1 Serb artillery.

2 Q. Thank you, Ms. Prentice. During your stay in Sarajevo, did you

3 visit the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina? And if you did, on what

4 occasion?

5 A. I stayed with a member of the Presidency, and I visited the

6 Presidency to interview Alija Izetbegovic.

7 Q. Which meeting in the Presidency building, the Presidency of

8 Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo, sticks in your memory?

9 A. The meeting that I had in November 1994, there was -- while I was

10 -- there was another journalist in Sarajevo from Der Spiegel who was also

11 going to -- there to interview Mr. Izetbegovic, and there was a very

12 important looking Arabic looking person is the best way I can describe it

13 who came in and went ahead just before I was supposed to go in to

14 interview, and I was curious because it obviously looked as if it was

15 somebody very, very important, and they were shown straight through to

16 Mr. Izetbegovic's office. So I asked about it afterwards, and I have

17 absolutely no way of -- I had no way of knowing who this person was, but I

18 was told, first of all by again my colleague Dessa Trevisan that the

19 reporter from Der Spiegel had recognised this person as being Osama bin

20 Laden.

21 I then spoke to the correspondent from Der Spiegel, and of course

22 I've looked at pictures of Osama bin Laden now. I had no way -- I didn't

23 report this because, you know, I did not recognise him, but I gather that

24 the colleague from Der Spiegel did write about this in her -- these were

25 -- so as a journalist, obviously that stuck out in my mind very much,

1 particularly after 9/11. But even at that time, the name of Osama bin

2 Laden was known.

3 Q. Did you later, in view of the pictures and what you remembered,

4 were you able to conclude that it was actually him?

5 MR. NICE: I suppose it might be thought that a marginally leading

6 question, but I don't know. But by all means, and if the lady wants to

7 tell us --

8 JUDGE BONOMY: No. She's made it clear that she's got no way of

9 telling. She's told us that.

10 JUDGE ROBINSON: Ask another question, Mr. Milosevic, and let us

11 end this examination-in-chief as quickly as possible.

12 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I understood her to say that she

13 didn't recognise him at the moment when she saw him but that later she did

14 establish it was him. I wanted to clarify that. But if it's leading, she

15 needn't answer it. This is too serious a matter to pass over just like

16 that.

17 JUDGE ROBINSON: Let us move on.

18 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

19 Q. And who was your colleague from Der Spiegel, if you can tell us?

20 A. Her name was Flotel [sic].

21 Q. Renate Flotel?

22 A. Renate Flotel.

23 Q. Later on did you investigate the presence of Islamic

24 fundamentalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

25 A. I did, particularly after the atrocities on 9/11. I tried to

1 interview as many people as possible, ranging from Western politicians to

2 Serbian and Croatian and Muslim people from Bosnia and from Serbia about

3 whether or not there was an outside Islamic presence in Bosnia.

4 It's -- on a couple of trips back to Bosnia after 1995, up until

5 the present day, it seemed to me a very unstable place despite the Dayton

6 Peace Accord, and -- and there were many people, when they heard that I

7 was trying to ascertain whether there really was an outside Islamic

8 influence in Bosnia, who came to me to tell me that they had evidence

9 about that. They included Mr. Toholj from Republika Srpska who told me,

10 for instance, that there was a Afghan brigade under the command of

11 somebody by the name of Mahmud Abu Abdul Aziz al Montasibe from Saudi

12 Arabia. He told me also that they had set up a training camp to teach

13 Bosnian Muslim troops the rules --

14 MR. NICE: The witness is clearly referring to some document. In

15 accordance with the Chamber's normal practice, whether it's a note or some

16 other document, the Chamber will want to know what she's referring to.

17 JUDGE ROBINSON: Ms. Prentice, are you reading from a document?

18 If so, what is it?

19 THE WITNESS: I am referring to a document because names of these

20 people --

21 JUDGE ROBINSON: What is it?

22 THE WITNESS: It is my own -- it is my own notes.

23 JUDGE ROBINSON: Made when?

24 THE WITNESS: Made in 2002, when I was investigating this. This

25 is my -- it's a synopsis for a proposed book about this subject.

1 JUDGE ROBINSON: Very well. Thank you.

2 MR. NICE: It's going to be impossible for me to deal with those.

3 Obviously I can have access to those notes, but seeing the quantity of

4 them, I won't have a chance to deal with this adequately by the close of

5 today, nor may I seek to do so, but I just draw to your attention the

6 problem.

7 THE INTERPRETER: Could Mr. Nice please adjust his microphone and

8 speak into it. Thank you.

9 MR. NICE: Yes. Sorry.

10 [Trial Chamber confers]

11 JUDGE ROBINSON: Just two matters. A housekeeping matter: The

12 other witness should be sent away now. It doesn't appear as if we'll need

13 him today.

14 Secondly, Mr. Milosevic, would you explain the relevance of this.

15 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I consider that the participation of

16 Islamic fundamentalism in the conflict when -- especially when it is

17 linked with the ideological basis and book written by Alija Izetbegovic

18 that has been tendered as an exhibit here, admitted into evidence, that I

19 addressed, are key questions of the events and conflicts and clashes in

20 Bosnia-Herzegovina, how the war broke out and all the suffering that

21 followed. And here we're talking about a very strong Islamic

22 fundamentalist presence which Europe will be paying for in many decades to

23 come, because had there not been those bases in Bosnia, terrorist activity

24 in Europe wouldn't have been possible.

25 JUDGE ROBINSON: That's a matter of historical interest, but you

1 have not explained how it relates to the allegations in the indictment.

2 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, it relates in this sense:

3 Those allegations are quite wrong, quite incorrect, and you're reversing

4 the thesis of perpetrator and victim in most cases.

5 JUDGE ROBINSON: I rule it's not --

6 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Of course it doesn't mean --

7 JUDGE ROBINSON: I rule it's not relevant. Move on to another

8 area, please.

9 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

10 Q. Ms. Prentice, Sarajevo -- you've been to Sarajevo, you say.

11 Sarajevo throughout the war was treated in the West as a city under

12 Serbian siege. Do you agree with that allegation?

13 A. At the time that I was there in late 1994, it was not a city under

14 siege. I was able to travel relatively easily between -- for instance,

15 between Pale and Republika Srpska and any part of Sarajevo really that I

16 wanted to go.

17 It was not a city at peace, I'm not saying this was easy, but it

18 was completely possible to move around different areas.

19 Q. And did you have an insight into the presence of the armed forces

20 of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo, for example? Or rather, can we say

21 that it was under siege or can we say that it was a city divided, judging

22 by what you saw?

23 A. In my opinion, it was a divided city.

24 Q. Did you have an opportunity of seeing when the shooting started in

25 Sarajevo, when fire was opened?

1 A. I was -- gosh, more than once saw and heard shooting, particularly

2 around the Holiday Inn. One had to be very careful moving along the main

3 thoroughfares. While I was staying with the Presidency, as I previously

4 said, I was stopping with a member of the Bosnian Presidency, and while I

5 was staying at their home, very close by to the Bosnian Presidency, there

6 was -- a shell exploded very -- very close by that shook their home.

7 It was in a part of Sarajevo of very tall buildings and very

8 narrow streets, and that particular shell would certainly -- it would have

9 been almost impossible for it to have come from anything other than one of

10 the Muslim positions.

11 So those were the main times that I -- that I personally

12 experienced fire, was moving to and from the airport, at the Presidency,

13 and around the Holiday Inn.

14 Q. Thank you, Ms. Prentice.

15 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] May I just add to an explanation

16 that I gave with respect to the relevancy of Islamic fundamentalism from

17 the standpoint of your question, Mr. Robinson; that is to say, what has it

18 do with the indictment? The indictment says that the Serbs created a

19 Greater Serbia, but they were not creating a Greater Serbia, they were

20 defending themselves from the making of a fundamentalistic state in which

21 they were supposed to be some vassals, or serfs, as they had been for

22 several centuries under the Turks, and that is without a doubt quite clear

23 here.

24 MR. NICE: That's a way of attempting to add to the evidence.

25 It's not a response to the question of relevance, but there it is.

1 JUDGE ROBINSON: The ruling stands.

2 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

3 Q. Do you consider that that explosion in your vicinity was staged

4 because of you or for some other reason?

5 A. I did have that suspicion.

6 MR. NICE: Really, Your Honour, there must be some kind of limit

7 to the questioning process that this Court suffers. The accused has been

8 trying to engage in the role of the lawyer for several years now. I

9 wonder if he'd like to consider whether he's going to say that that

10 question was leading or not.

11 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes. That's a leading question, Mr. Milosevic.

12 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, I -- what I can tell you is

13 that I'm not trying to play at being a lawyer at all, nor is that a life's

14 ambition of mine at all which I would be proud of.

15 JUDGE ROBINSON: You have -- you have a technique that you have

16 developed, Mr. Milosevic, of including an alternative in your questions,

17 as if that somehow would take away from its leading character, but it

18 doesn't.

19 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

20 Q. Were you at Pale, Ms. Prentice?

21 A. Yes, I was.

22 Q. And what was your impression about what you saw there?

23 A. I was there several times, but at the -- in that part of late 1994

24 when I had spent more time in Sarajevo, my overwhelming impression was one

25 of surprise that there were large numbers of non-Serb ethnic minorities

1 who were being given shelter in Pale. These were people who had -- whose

2 homes had been destroyed in Sarajevo or who had fled just from the general

3 chaos and violence.

4 I was surprised, because at that time even I had been under the

5 impression from other coverage of the situation in Sarajevo that all

6 non-Serbs would be at very real danger if they put themselves totally at

7 the mercy, let's say, of Serbian forces. I --

8 Q. In Sarajevo did you meet any of the British politicians, perhaps?

9 A. I met Robin Cook, who was then shadow foreign secretary. He was

10 on a fact-finding visit to Sarajevo. He gave a press conference, and I

11 did ask him if he was going to go to visit Pale as well, and I was quite

12 shocked when he said that even if that were possible, which it wasn't

13 physically, he wouldn't do that because, you know, the Serbs were -- he

14 actually used words "Why would I want to go and see those monsters?" That

15 was his phrase. I was quite shocked by that. I explained to him that it

16 was indeed physically possible to go to Pale, that I myself was going back

17 later that day, and if he was on a fact-finding tour, I suggested he might

18 like to come and see for himself what it was like there and the fact that

19 there were people, non-Serbs, being given shelter there. He declined to

20 do so.

21 I did actually write him several letters in the ensuing months,

22 protesting that. On a fact-finding tour, I thought that he should have

23 tried to have seen all sides. I didn't have a single reply to any of my

24 letters. Again, I'm afraid I hooked in my politician father and asked him

25 if he could get a reply, and I think he just had one stock reply from

1 Mr. Cook's office, just saying, "Thank you for your letter. We're looking

2 into it," but no explanation was ever given.

3 Q. Thank you, Ms. Prentice. I don't have enough time to go through

4 some of the questions I had intended to ask you, but I will just ask you

5 one more question, and it is this: Did you have any health problems at

6 all after the bombing that you described at Prizren where your driver was

7 killed and everything else that you told us about? So my question is

8 this: Did you have any health problems after the bombing, after that

9 bombing?

10 A. Yes, I did. Within two weeks, I had lost my voice and my voice

11 was lost pretty well permanently, apart from the very occasional day, for

12 six to nine months afterwards. I also had a return -- I had been treated

13 for cancer in 1995, but -- and had done the five years and been declared

14 clear, but the cancer returned very soon after that as well.

15 I was checked for -- there was some suspicion that there was

16 depleted uranium used in the bombing on the road where the driver -- our

17 driver was killed, and I did ask to be tested when I returned to the UK,

18 and there was not the availability to have a test that would prove I had

19 been affected by depleted uranium, but it was proved that I had been --

20 there were heavy metals in my system, and that was regarded as a distinct

21 possibility in the medical reports.

22 It also was made clear to me that my immune system had been

23 affected by these heavy metals, and of course a depressed immune system is

24 linked to the return of cancer.

25 Q. Thank you, Ms. Prentice. That concludes my examination-in-chief.

1 You'll be asked some questions now by the other side.

2 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes.

3 MR. KAY: There's three supplemental matters that the assigned

4 counsel would like to raise with the witness, just to clarify certain

5 detail.

6 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes. We're going to take the break now for 20

7 minutes.

8 MR. NICE: I'm going to be very short of time if Mr. Kay takes

9 time. I wonder if we could get those done before the break.

10 JUDGE ROBINSON: Okay, let's hear Mr. Kay then.

11 MR. KAY: It will only take three minutes.

12 Questioned by Mr. Kay:

13 Q. Ms. Prentice, the description of the walking dead incident, if you

14 remember that, can you help the Court by telling us the place where you

15 were at that time and the date.

16 A. Yes. That was Orahovac, and I can't recall the exact date, but it

17 was during my first of those two visits. So it would have been the end --

18 the -- something like the 10th, 11th, 12th of May. Sometime around then.

19 Q. You mentioned the Clinton-Cohen statements in the media.

20 A. Uh-huh.

21 Q. Can you say where that was reported, where you saw those reports.

22 A. Numerous outlets: BBC, the Today programme, in The Times, on

23 Reuters News Agency, Associated Press News Agency, Washington Post. It

24 was repeatedly -- that statistic was repeatedly quoted.

25 Q. You mentioned speaking to people boarding buses. You gave the

1 detail that it was in Pristina and Prizren. On occasion you said they

2 were making statements such as "pressed to leave" or "asked to leave," but

3 you didn't clarify that. Was there any statement made to you as to who

4 was asking the people to leave or pressing them to leave?

5 A. Yes. I was told that they were being pressed by the KLA to leave,

6 that they were being told that this was their patriotic duty, that they

7 needed to go to help cement the allied attack.

8 MR. KAY: Thank you.

9 JUDGE ROBINSON: We will break for 20 minutes.

10 --- Recess taken at 12.15 p.m.

11 --- On resuming at 12.41 p.m.

12 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. Nice.

13 Cross-examination by Mr. Nice:

14 Q. Ms. Prentice, how was the man who you say looked like Osama bin

15 Laden dressed?

16 A. He was in -- he had a headdress and what I can describe as an

17 olive green suit.

18 Q. So he was wearing, what, a Western suit and a headdress. Was he

19 carrying --

20 A. It wasn't a Western dress, it was the sort of thing that I would

21 say that Colonel Gadhafi might wear; that sort of a suit.

22 Q. So pyjamas, something like that, a colourful thing. Yes, I see.

23 Was he carrying his stick?

24 A. I'm sorry, I can't recall.

25 Q. Journalists sometimes operate with direct observation of what

1 they're reporting on. In your case, you never saw anybody set light to

2 anybody else's house?

3 A. No.

4 Q. You never saw anybody kill anybody?

5 A. Well, I saw people being killed by bombs.

6 Q. Apart from the bombing, as between the various factions, you never

7 saw anybody kill anybody?

8 A. No.

9 Q. You never saw anybody at the point of being thrown out of their

10 house or thrown out of their town?

11 A. No.

12 Q. So you're entirely dependent for that on what you were told by

13 others.

14 A. Yes.

15 Q. And indeed, just to get it completely clear, the total --

16 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Nice, please observe a pause.

17 MR. NICE: Certainly, certainly.

18 JUDGE ROBINSON: And the witness, please observe a pause between

19 the question and answer for the benefit of the interpreters.

20 MR. NICE:

21 Q. Just so we can have this in mind, your total period of time in

22 Kosovo 1999 was two days at the beginning of May and about ten days at the

23 end of May.

24 A. It was a week in -- on the first trip, and it was two and a half

25 weeks.

1 Q. Was it as long as a week on the first trip?

2 A. Yes. It was from about the 9th, 10th or 11th until about the

3 15th, 16th, something like that.

4 Q. On both occasions of your visits to Kosovo you were accompanied by

5 a man called Schiffer?

6 A. Yes.

7 Q. Who is a pro-Serb philosopher?

8 A. Yes.

9 Q. You were accompanied by two officials to whom you paid large sums

10 of money for protection, and they were presumably members of the MUP.

11 A. I do not believe they were members of the MUP. I came to -- I saw

12 them several times afterwards. I don't believe they were members of MUP

13 and --

14 Q. By whom were they provided to you, by the man Schiffer?

15 A. By the man Schiffer.

16 Q. And you never knew of the particular arrangements yourself; he

17 controlled your visits?

18 A. He provided the transport. We were allowed to go where we wanted.

19 We didn't have to have them with us all the time.

20 Q. Come back to that later. So no firsthand experience of any of the

21 essential issues we are concerned with here. Of course you have some

22 examples of people speaking to you who had themselves direct experience,

23 yes?

24 A. Yes.

25 Q. Let's go back to 1993. In 1993, you went to Bosnia, didn't you?

1 A. 1994.

2 Q. Well, what about your observation of the camps at Omarska and

3 Keraterm?

4 A. I'm sorry, I'm not sure which -- which reference is to Omarska.

5 Q. Do you have this one, please? I won't take very long on this.

6 The Court, the overhead projector, and the witness. Just lay the first

7 page on the overhead projector, please, we're very pressed for time, and

8 then if you can distribute the other copies. We'll look at that. The

9 rest can -- there we are.

10 This is a printout of an article May the 13th of 1993, with your

11 byline, and it deals with: "A Roman Catholic priest's gruesome testimony

12 of torture and death in the Serb-run detention camp in Northern Bosnia.

13 His account of systematic brutality, seized after attempts by troops to

14 make him leave his hometown near Prijedor, taken first to the Keraterm

15 camp." Do you remember writing this article?

16 A. I wrote it in London. I interviewed this man in London.

17 Q. I see, so you didn't go there then.

18 A. No.

19 Q. But this is an example of firsthand hearsay, if we can use that

20 shorthand. Somebody who was there. No reason to doubt this man?

21 A. I interviewed him at length and reported what he had to say.

22 Q. No reason to doubt him.

23 A. No.

24 Q. No. So that you were able to put in The Times in 1993 account of

25 the Serb's treatment of people in the Omarska camp. Let's just read on to

1 the end of first page. "Forced to sing Chetnik songs --" over the page,

2 please, Mr. Nort, see at the top: "Beaten on their hands with planks and

3 batons, ordered to drink their own urine, begged to be killed, had a gun

4 put in his mouth." Yes?

5 A. Yes.

6 Q. And then at the bottom: "As soon as it gets dark, you wonder if

7 you're next in line. By my calculation and the rest of the prisoners',

8 1.300 people died like this." So those are the Serb camps in Bosnia on

9 which you reported in 1993. Accurate, so far as you know?

10 A. I was reporting what he said.

11 Q. Yes. Thank you very much. You, of course, in 1993 also went to

12 Kosovo, didn't you?

13 A. I believe so. I went a few times. I can't remember the exact --

14 Q. Well, you went to Kosovo and you noticed the sort of presence of

15 the authorities on the streets, didn't you? Can you remember that?

16 A. I remember going to interview President Rugova and I think I

17 mentioned the presence of police on the streets, yes.

18 Q. Yes. You were in the -- you were in the -- you were able to

19 experience the equivalent, really, of, I suppose, some of the

20 characteristics of a police state, weren't you? You visited Kosovo in

21 1993 and I'm just going to quote to you; tell me if this is accurate:

22 "Serb militias were in evidence on every street corner and a self-imposed

23 curfew kept most people off the streets after dark. Arkan, leader of the

24 paramilitary Tigers, had owned a share in the Grand Hotel that's in

25 Pristina, and the scent of latent terror had been overpowering."

1 Now, this was your own direct experience of Pristina in 1993. May

2 we take it that it's accurate?

3 A. The atmosphere of terror came from the strife between both sides.

4 Q. Let's have a look at it. It's in your book. Can we have the

5 book, please. You published a book in 2000 called "One Woman's War." A

6 great deal of it is about your own life, your own experiences, but some of

7 it touches on Kosovo.

8 Page 144, please. Foot of the page, please. Further down.

9 That's it.

10 You deal here with Pristina. Huge cement cooling towers on the

11 outskirts of the city, and so on. So you're there dealing with 1999. And

12 then you go on in that last paragraph that begins shortly after, two

13 sentences on, you say: "The last time I had visited the Kosovo capital

14 had been in 1993 when Serb militias were in evidence on every street

15 corner and a self-imposed curfew kept most people off the streets after

16 dark. Arkan, leader of the paramilitary Tigers, had owned a share in the

17 Grand Hotel and the scent of latent terror had been overpowering." And

18 then you go on to deal with two men in the hotel and the ridiculous size

19 of the key ring, and this and that.

20 And indeed, if we go to the right hand page, please, Mr. Nort,

21 you're then dealing with the position in 1999. Nothing in your 1993

22 account of anything except for terror imposed by the Serb forces and by

23 Arkan. Do you think you're beginning to suffer memory revision as a

24 result of the passage of time?

25 A. I think that the whole tenor of my book and the way I expressed it

1 was to point out that as time had gone by through the 1990s, I became more

2 and more aware that the situation was not as simple and as black and white

3 as I had seen. My memories of thinking back to 1993, I truly do mean that

4 the atmosphere of --

5 Q. Let me interrupt you because we are very short of time.

6 A. Yes.

7 Q. When you wrote your book in 2000, you had no reason to bat for

8 NATO or for the West. Indeed, the book would have been a more exciting

9 read if you had tended to bat for the underdog, but may we take it that

10 you expressed there absolutely your understanding of events as of 2000?

11 A. It was an attempt at an honest recollection of --

12 Q. Thank you.

13 A. -- how I felt at every stage. May I please just add that actually

14 it would have been much more saleable had it been pro-NATO. I actually

15 was not batting for the underdog at all, I was batting for the truth.

16 Q. We've seen the passage, we'll move on now to 1999. Just back to

17 how long you were in Kosovo, not how long were you in Serbia. How long

18 were you actually in Kosovo itself on the first visit? How many days?

19 A. It was, I think, six.

20 Q. Very well. Let's go, please -- well, before we -- we'll go,

21 please, to page 139. Before we -- as that's being turned up by Mr. Nort

22 for the overhead projector, it's right, isn't it, that there was

23 considerable reluctance to allow any journalist to get into Kosovo at that

24 time?

25 A. Correct.

1 Q. And so the journalists were simply stopped from seeing what there

2 might have been to see; correct?

3 A. Because they were kept away, yes, which was why I wanted to go to

4 see for myself.

5 Q. You were in company in your initial efforts to get in with the

6 well known figure, Dessa Trevisan?

7 A. Yes.

8 Q. Then, I think, already in her 70s?

9 A. Yes.

10 Q. An outspoken opponent of this accused?

11 A. At various times.

12 Q. Yes. Who had been expelled from the country, who had been

13 arrested. Indeed, she'd been subject of an attack, I think a potentially

14 fatal attack in 1999, was it, when she was shot at, yes?

15 A. She was shot at with an air pellet. I don't think it was a

16 life-threatening attack.

17 Q. And she couldn't get into this country, a known opponent of this

18 accused; correct?

19 A. Correct.

20 Q. Thank you. Let's look at page 100 -- what did I ask to go on the

21 overhead projector? 139, thank you. Here we see on the bottom -- bottom

22 right-hand side, please, Mr. Nort.

23 This: "There had been about 27.000 ethnic Albanians in Kosovska

24 Mitrovica before the bombing campaign had started, the mayor said. Most

25 had left in April, but in the past week 5.000 had returned. He added --"

1 "... he added. 'Can we speak to them?' I asked. 'They will be

2 frightened to say anything because there are some KLA among them,' he

3 answered. It was impossible to tell if this was true and, in the end, the

4 only ethnic Albanians we were able to talk to in the town were the elderly

5 queueing for their pensions. Even here, we were trailed by a Serbian

6 radio reporter and a tape recorder -- with a tape recorder."

7 So that we can get the picture of the way journalism worked,

8 people were frightened of Serbian accredited reporters with tape

9 recorders, yes?

10 A. I'm sure they would be uneasy. I'm not sure that fear would be

11 entirely accurate. Uneasy, yes.

12 Q. Page 140, please, to try and get at the heart of what you were

13 saying in your book in 2000. Left-hand side: In mid-May -- a bit further

14 down -- towns in Kosovo were teeming with displaced people while the

15 countryside was largely deserted. There were large numbers of ethnic

16 Albanians in Kosovska Mitrovica, Pristina, and Prizren, although many

17 seemed under pressure to leave, both from the Serbs and from the KLA who

18 wanted every Albanian to join the exodus which was mesmerising the world.

19 Thousands of ethnic Albanians had fled to these towns to escape the

20 battles in the countryside.

21 Next sentence: In at least some cases, shopkeepers seemed to have

22 been put under pressure to leave by someone other than Serb forces.

23 So there you're allowing for various pressures on them; correct?

24 A. Yes.

25 Q. If we look at the right-hand side of page 141, you summarise the

1 position from your research in this way: "The image that was being

2 projected in the West at this time was that all ethnic Albanians had been

3 subjected to mass deportation, rape, and killing. Certainly these evils

4 were perpetrated, but I began to build up a more subtle picture, based on

5 seeing these villages at first-hand, speaking to some ethnic Albanians who

6 stayed behind, and later talking to disaffected soldiers and militiamen

7 who took part in the Kosovo battles."

8 So may we take it from -- that what's going to follow in this

9 paragraph is first-hand hearsay reporting. You're reporting what people

10 had told you they had suffered.

11 A. And what -- yes.

12 Q. Right. So that your summary reads as follows: "Widespread brutal

13 killings were carried out in periodic raids by Serb police and shadowy

14 paramilitary forces in 1998. Another fierce purge of ethnic Albanians

15 began in early 1999 and only intensified as the threat of airstrikes

16 became certainty."

17 That's your analysis. Do you still stand by it?

18 A. I -- I stand by that, and as I said earlier, I couldn't talk about

19 what had happened --

20 Q. Thank you.

21 A. -- earlier --

22 Q. You've also referred in your evidence --

23 A. -- before I got there.

24 Q. -- to reliable journalists to whom you turned. There are two

25 passages from them that I'm going to take you to. This is the first:

1 "Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, the only Western reporter in

2 Kosovo throughout the NATO bombing campaign, says that the main campaign

3 to sweep away the KLA once and for all, no matter what the consequences

4 for innocent ethnic Albanians, began in the second week of March and ended

5 on the 20th of April. This was when the main refugee exodus took place."

6 Then the first sentence of the next paragraph: "'There was a

7 dramatic change on April the 20th, when people stopped being driven out,'

8 he told me."

9 Now, obviously this is another journalist but one upon whom you --

10 you rely. Have you considered any of the evidence in this case?

11 A. I'm -- I'm sorry, I don't --

12 Q. Have you considered any of the evidence that's been given in this

13 case? Have you reviewed it as a journalist?

14 A. No. No.

15 Q. I mean, you're not -- because there is a witness, called Patrick

16 Ball, who describes the phases of departure, and one of them indeed does

17 come to allow, not on the 20th but on about the 22nd of April. Can you

18 help us at all with what was the apparent reason that, as you understood

19 it, for this change on April the 20th?

20 A. That -- I -- I really can only revert to what Paul Watson had told

21 me and --

22 A. Very well.

23 Q. -- what I quoted, because I was not there at that time.

24 Q. Very well. For fairness, and before we move on to the next

25 passage, note that at the end of this paragraph, you say, quoting him --

1 we might as well read the whole of it: "'But those who hated the

2 Albanians used the chaos of the airstrikes to overreact.' Watson also

3 believed there was more than one reason for the refugee crisis. 'Many

4 left because they were driven out, but an equal number left to escape the

5 NATO bombardment and some left between -- because of the fighting between

6 the KLA and the Yugoslav army.'"

7 So that's, I think, I hope in the time available, a summary of his

8 position.

9 Can we now please go to page 147. Ms. Prentice, you'll recollect

10 that you've given evidence about what you saw of how you spoke to people

11 in a bus queue.

12 A. Yes.

13 Q. I take it you don't have your original notes with you here of

14 those events; it's a long time ago now?

15 A. No. I do still have them, but they're not here.

16 Q. I see. But you had the notes to hand when you prepared your book,

17 of course, because you would be working from your notes.

18 A. Yep.

19 Q. And you'll remember that you've explained today how it was clearly

20 the case, was it, that people were really frightened of the KLA, is that

21 it?

22 A. Yes, we were told that, yes.

23 Q. Let's see what you wrote in your book. Right-hand side, just at

24 the bottom of the bit on the screen at the moment, so if we could move it

25 up a bit. "At this moment --" yes. We -- "Whispering together --" top of

1 the screen -- "we hurriedly decided to split up; I would try to keep the

2 Schiffer -" that's your Serbian philosopher guide - "contingent busy on

3 one side of the square while Elaine talked to Albanians on the opposite

4 side. Then we would reverse roles.

5 "At this moment, several buses with the destination 'Macedonia'

6 written on the front pulled into the square. The ethnic Albanians were

7 instantly roused from their lethargy and began swarming around the

8 vehicles as surly-looking drivers looked disdainfully down on their

9 prospective passengers. Schiffer and Nebojsa -" he's one of your guards -

10 "were at -- at my side the instant I began to try to find an

11 English-speaking Albanian. 'Would you like to talk to them? I will

12 translate,' said a smiling Nebojsa. 'Look, there is no heavy police

13 presence here,' said Schiffer, 'no one is harassing them.' It was true

14 that the number of police was no greater than you might see on the London

15 street, but I knew that there were more ways than one to press unwanted

16 people to leave."

17 What did you mean by that?

18 A. That if people felt that -- that you didn't have to -- you didn't

19 have to witness somebody physically pushing somebody, that -- that they

20 might feel so uneasy that they would go anyway.

21 Q. And were you saying something there or implying something there

22 about the very presence of your Serb guards Nebojsa and in company with

23 Schiffer?

24 A. Absolutely because --

25 Q. Yes.

1 A. -- because we were not happy about having them around, and that

2 was why I went back and so did Elaine Lafferty. And later on in the

3 second shift, which is why I got hold of the aid of Ibrahim Rugova to come

4 subsequently when we went back on the -- to try to speak to them, it was

5 precisely because we were not happy about having them there.

6 Q. Yes. The very presence of your companions could both corrupt the

7 accounts that people would give you and indeed tend to drive them out of

8 the places where they were living.

9 A. Which is why --

10 Q. All right.

11 A. -- we did not want them with us and why we did -- eventually were

12 able to speak to people not in their presence.

13 Q. Let's read on and see what they actually said, according to your

14 book.

15 "Nebojsa began addressing one young family --" Mr. Nort, you'll

16 be required -- "in Serbian. 'Why are they going?' I asked, playing the

17 game. The family mumbled something incoherent which Nebojsa translated

18 as: 'They are leaving to escape the NATO bombing.' .

19 "I spotted Elaine in earnest conversation with a couple queueing

20 to board one of the buses. Schiffer also saw her, tried to beckon her to

21 his side, and eventually moved off to join her. I meanwhile thanked

22 Nebojsa, made as if to follow Schiffer, but dodged behind another bus.

23 "'Anybody speak English?' I asked quietly but urgently as I moved

24 up and down the line of people waiting to climb on the bus. 'Are you with

25 Serbian television?' came a young man's voice. I was quickly able to

1 reassure him and his brother that I was a British journalist, which to

2 them equaled friend of NATO and the ethnic Albanian community. 'Why are

3 you leaving?' 'Because we are being forced to go,' they said. 'The police

4 have told us we must go on these buses.' They turned their backs on me as

5 they saw a worried-looking Nebojsa approaching.

6 "Back in the hotel, Elaine took me to one side. She had been

7 talking to an English-speaking man who also said he was being forced to

8 leave. When Schiffer had approached, he insisted on questioning the man

9 anew for Elaine's benefit. This time, however, when Schiffer claimed the

10 man had insisted he was leaving to escape the NATO bombardment, the ethnic

11 Albanian had shot back with: 'No - I'm leaving because of the police.' As

12 Elaine said, it was a brave thing to do."

13 And then this comment: "The problem for all journalists trying to

14 discover this secretive and -- to cover this secretive and plot-filled

15 region was that it was well nigh impossible to tell who was telling the

16 truth. The general impression we gained that afternoon was that ethnic

17 Albanians were under pressure to leave the country."

18 Now, Ms. Prentice, do you recognise that that account in your book

19 - and unless I've missed it, I think the only account you give in your

20 book about what people said to you directly in reported speech about why

21 they were leaving - I may be wrong about that because we've only had a

22 short time to deal with your evidence - do you recognise that that

23 account's different from what you were telling us this morning?

24 A. No, because I think I pointed out there had been the one person

25 who -- who said, No, we are being forced to leave by the police, which is

1 the reference there, and I repeated at length many times in the book that

2 I became increasingly aware that the ethnic Albanians were under -- seemed

3 to be under very much pressure by the KLA to leave. And I answered the

4 questions that I was asked about had I seen being forced? I had not seen

5 people being forced. I did not see there people being forced. I did --

6 Q. Ms. Prentice --

7 A. I did point out earlier on that there had been this person --

8 Q. Miss Prentice, please. The passage we've just read --

9 A. Uh-huh.

10 Q. -- is clearly to the effect that the answers you got from both

11 people spoken to when free of the presence of Nebojsa and Schiffer was

12 that they were being told to leave by the police, and there is no

13 indication in the passage we've got here that they were actually being

14 forced out by the KLA. It's as simple as that, isn't it?

15 A. I am sure that somewhere -- I know that I quoted somewhere the

16 people who said that they were being forced to go by the KLA.

17 Q. Well, we'll try and find it for you --

18 JUDGE BONOMY: Can I ask you, is there more than one edition of

19 the book, or was it revised at some stage?

20 THE WITNESS: It was merely updated. There isn't -- all this

21 stayed the same. It was merely updated for a paperback edition.

22 JUDGE BONOMY: It's just I have a copy here but the pages must be

23 different, because I certainly can't find these passages.

24 MR. NICE: The -- we haven't looked at the publication date. This

25 one is publication date, I think, 2000 -- copyright 2000, published 2001

1 by Duckbacks. That's what I have.

2 JUDGE BONOMY: It's 2000, yes, you're right.

3 MR. NICE:

4 Q. Can we look, please, at the foot of this page and see that this is

5 the second passage that I want you to comment on from coming from a

6 reliable journalist, Paul Watson, who deals with the assassination of

7 Kelmendi, the lawyer, immediately as NATO's bombing began. But then on

8 the right-hand side, please, bottom of the page, please, Mr. Nort, your

9 colleague Watson reports this: "'Several days later --'" that's after the

10 beginning of NATO -- "'the campaign of terror took another sinister twist

11 in what was probably my most painful moment in the war. From my

12 fourth-floor hotel room, I heard a man's voice shouting from the street

13 below. I looked down on thousands of people being force-marched by

14 Yugoslav troops through the city to the railway station, where they were

15 packed into rail cars and deported to Macedonia.'"

16 Now, you remember, we discriminated between direct experience and

17 first-hand. This is first-hand experience. This is Watson saying what he

18 experienced. No reason to doubt it, is there?

19 A. This is the very reason I put it in. As I said earlier, I had no

20 way of knowing what happened in the weeks -- in the few days leading up to

21 the NATO bombardment, and immediately afterwards. I did point out earlier

22 that I -- I couldn't say and so I had to rely on what other people --

23 which is the very reason that I put this in my book, for the very reason

24 that I wanted people to hear what both sides had been saying.

25 Q. Certainly.

1 A. And I don't regard that as -- as -- I mean --

2 Q. Ms. Prentice, there's no complaint. I just want the simple answer

3 to the question. We're trying to assess the accuracy and reliability of

4 your sources of information. You've explained how the people you saw were

5 unreliable in Schiffer and arguably more reliable without him. Here

6 Watson is giving an account -- let's just go over to the next page: "I

7 ran down eight flights of stairs and out of the lobby door," says Watson.

8 And then at the top of the next page: "I stood in shock as a long column

9 of ethnic Albanians about 15 people across, maybe 7.000 in all, moved

10 silently past."

11 Now, my question is: You know Watson. You've included him in

12 your book as a reliable source. There is simply no reason to doubt what

13 he says, is there?

14 A. No, there isn't.

15 Q. Thank you. Let's move on to one other, I think, passage. Page

16 159, please.

17 There's an account you give of the origins of the exodus based on

18 rumour. It can be found on page 158. I know I'm not going to have to

19 time to deal with it, but I identify it for those who want to read it.

20 Page 159, and we'll read over to page 160, and apart from one

21 other substantial passage I'll finish with what I want to ask you about

22 your book, I think.

23 "What Western viewers were not told was the Serb side of the story;

24 that the KLA had become so strong in 1998, that parts of Kosovo became

25 no-go areas for Serbs, and that some Serb families were living as virtual

1 hostages in some Albanian-dominated villages. The Serb forces - army,

2 police and shadowy paramilitaries - were put under great pressure both by

3 Kosovo Serbs and by the Belgrade regime to act. In the spring and summer

4 of 1998, they decided enough was enough and embarked on a fierce campaign

5 to sweep KLA from the province. Many perished in these battles, Serbs and

6 Albanians."

7 You stand by that?

8 A. Yes.

9 Q. And this is your reporting, speaking -- it may, of course,

10 sometimes be to secondhand hearsay, but sometimes to first-hand hearsay;

11 would that be right?

12 A. Correct.

13 Q. Thank you. "When the NATO bombing campaign started, the Serbs

14 intensified their drive, fuelled by unprecedented venom because they now

15 blamed the Albanians for bringing down the might of NATO missiles on their

16 heads. Atrocities were doubtless committed and many Albanians were

17 killed, but the Serbs I spoke to insisted that most of those who perished

18 had been real or suspected KLA fighters." So first-hand hearsay, yes?

19 A. Right.

20 Q. "If true, this is a crucially different situation from the image

21 of wholesale slaughter aimed at exterminating a race. It is also

22 important to remember that many of the demobilised soldiers I spoke to had

23 been conscripts, ordinary civilians called up to fight in a time of war

24 and who were often as critical of the Belgrade regime as they were of the

25 West." So you're now identifying your first-hand hearsay sources,

1 correct?

2 A. Right.

3 Q. "They all told similar stories of swoops on ethnic Albanian

4 villages, aimed at destroying the KLA. They also said they had heard of

5 atrocities committed by secretive paramilitaries who had not distinguished

6 between armed guerillas and civilians, including women and children, when

7 they went into battle."

8 So this is - let us remember - 1998 that you're initially dealing

9 with. In 1998, paramilitaries attacking and killing women and children in

10 the course of the attacks on KLA thought to be strongholds, yes?

11 A. Correct.

12 Q. Thank you. "The men's accounts also tallied with information

13 provided by Barovic -" he was a lawyer you spoke to - "after he visited

14 Montenegro in July ... The lawyers told him -" this is in Montenegro -

15 "they were forced to leave their homes by men in uniform. Many were

16 beaten up as they were put onto buses or bundled into cars to leave

17 Kosovo. However, says Barovic, they did not directly witness any

18 systematic campaign of killing." All right. Still stand by that?

19 A. Right.

20 Q. Last point, please, from your researches. Perhaps a quick

21 reference to 163, which may interest the Chamber for other reasons. 163.

22 You deal, at the top of the page, about how if -- or actually, the foot of

23 162, but I'll just read that. "If they were caught -" that's KLA or

24 people in KLA things - "paraffin-soaked rags were used to swab the

25 suspects' hands, necks and shoulders, to ascertain whether they had been

1 in recent contact with traces of explosives, a key giveaway if they had

2 been firing weapons. Those whose swabs were positive were usually taken

3 away and shot, the ex-policeman said, unless they were aged 14 or less,

4 when they were taken prisoner."

5 First-hand account of potential prisoners simply being shot for

6 being positive to the paraffin test, correct?

7 A. Correct.

8 Q. And if we go on to page 165, this is the results of your research

9 through first-hand hearsay into this general topic. Foot of the page.

10 You're now dealing with a former conscript, but you turn -- everything

11 went --"'From then on, everything went wrong and we knew the bombing

12 would happen,' said another former policeman. 'In Kosovo, almost all of

13 us had satellite television and we could see how the world was reporting

14 what was happening in Kosovo. They said we were massacring people when in

15 reality we were involved in two-way battles. It was unbearable to watch

16 the reports. No one talked about the deaths of Serbs. Everyone talked

17 about Albanians killed at Racak, but no one mentioned 250 Serbs kidnapped

18 from Orahovac. It was such a low, disgusting media game.' It was clear

19 from talking to Serbs who had served in the Yugoslav forces in the run-up

20 to the NATO campaign --" now let's just pause here. This is your -- you

21 again. We've moved on from the immediate source of information, the

22 former policeman, and you're now saying it was clear from talking to Serbs

23 who had served in the Yugoslav forces in the run-up to the NATO campaign;

24 is that right?

25 A. Correct.

1 Q. Rough -- give us an idea; how many members of the forces did you

2 speak to in order to give the summary that's about to follow?

3 A. A dozen or so.

4 Q. Right. So -- and you were getting a consistent story, were you,

5 from the dozen or so Serb forces?

6 A. Correct.

7 Q. This is what those sources explained to you in the run-up before

8 March 1999. They viewed the killing of ethnic Albanian fighters taken

9 prisoner as acceptable. They couldn't understand while people in the --

10 why people in the West regarded this as criminal. To them, a massacre

11 would involve the murder of innocent men, women and children. "'Everyone

12 saw us as monsters with knives in our mouths. But we have our own code of

13 ethics, so we know how to fight and what the limits are. I personally

14 cannot imagine what a massacre is like.'"

15 So you're distinguishing here, is this right, between their

16 concept of a massacre and their concept of the appropriate response in

17 killing people taken as prisoners, yes?

18 A. I -- both sides -- I had interviews with both sides. I was

19 pointing out that both sides, in direct fighting, one armed group against

20 another armed group, both killed people, correct.

21 Q. I don't want there to be any doubt about this because we may rely,

22 of course, on your evidence. What you were saying there on the basis of

23 what 20 or thereabouts soldiers who had been involved in the run-up to the

24 campaign, was that killing ethnic Albanian fighters taken prisoner was

25 acceptable. Do you stick by that?

1 A. Yes. That is what they told me, yeah.

2 Q. Page 178, please. On page 178, please, we see you're dealing

3 there with the RTS bombing. Bit further down the page. The parents --

4 well, yes. It says -- up a little bit, sorry.

5 "... a massive missile attack smashed open the building which

6 housed RTS State Television in the centre of the city. At least ten

7 people died, most of them make-up girls, tea boys, and technicians.

8 "The parents of these youngsters later asked bitterly why all the

9 bosses had left at least an hour before the blast, and why the children of

10 some senior party members had been warned to stay away that night. Many

11 people subsequently believed that the Government had been told in advance

12 of the planned attack but failed to alert junior employees."

13 Was that your own -- the result of your own inquiries of these

14 people to whom you refer?

15 A. This is.

16 Q. In Yugoslavia, or -- this is, of course, not in the confined

17 period of time in which you were in Kosovo but otherwise. Are you aware

18 of recent developments in relation to the RTS story?

19 A. I'm not sure which developments --

20 Q. Let's have a look at --

21 A. -- you're referring to.

22 Q. -- lay it on the overhead projector. As a journalist having

23 written about it, one would expect you probably to follow it if you

24 could. The former director of the state broadcast --

25 A. Oh, yes, I'm aware of this.

1 Q. He was sentenced to ten years for failing to protect them. They

2 found him guilty of causing grave danger to public security for failing to

3 evacuate them. So you're aware of that.

4 And are you aware of more recent material -- can we lay this on

5 the overhead projector, please. Yes, Miljanovic was a member of the SPS -

6 that's the accused party - and here is something a couple of days ago

7 which explains how -- we can just see it -- a statement has been made by

8 Petkanic in which it's been asserted that: "... Major General Bakocevic

9 presented Marko Milosevic with papers based on which he stated, in front

10 of the people present, that the RTS building would be bombed and there

11 would be victims; but that the propaganda, which would occur after the TV

12 station is bombed ... would be useful for the state." You're aware of

13 that development; material going to show that there was an active decision

14 to allow people to die at RTS?

15 A. I have indeed written about this several times.

16 Q. Very well. This is linked, of course, to the accused's son.

17 Let's now deal with your own bombing. Obviously, everybody has

18 complete sympathy with you. Just a couple of questions. You are recorded

19 on the transcript, and I think I recollect your saying this, that the

20 aeroplanes were of a particular colour. What colour?

21 A. Red.

22 Q. See, I must suggest to you that either your memory has been

23 distorted or that that simply can't be right because there were no planes

24 painted red flying for NATO or probably for Serbia. It's a non-military

25 colour. It just doesn't happen. You don't have -- I'm informed and

1 putting it to you, you don't have red aeroplanes.

2 A. I was told this as well. NATO said this. All I can say is that

3 on the TV film, which I have a copy of at home, the -- there are great --

4 a great part of the planes were red.

5 Q. NATO's never --

6 JUDGE ROBINSON: Did that confirm what you saw or was it the film

7 which first enabled you to say that it was red?

8 THE WITNESS: I had -- I had always thought that from the moment

9 that I saw them, and then I managed to get hold of the film not that long

10 ago, 18 months ago, two years ago.

11 MR. NICE:

12 Q. Was it Serbian television that put the film out first?

13 A. I'm sorry, I don't know. I had assumed it was Portuguese

14 television since it belonged to them.

15 Q. Are you aware that there is evidence in this case from a man

16 called Djosan's documents that in fact Serb forces were flying on the 30th

17 of April at 6.00 in the morning? I'll give you the exhibit number in a

18 second.

19 A. No, I'm not aware, no.

20 Q. So your assertion that no Serb forces were flying was based on

21 what information?

22 A. On the information from both -- I cannot be absolutely specific at

23 this juncture in time, but from both the Serbian assertions but also I'm

24 -- I was also listening to NATO briefings and I'm pretty sure that in

25 that last couple of weeks of the NATO campaign, NATO was pointing out that

1 they had knocked out air defences in southern Serbia and over much of

2 Kosovo.

3 JUDGE ROBINSON: What time of the day was your incident?

4 THE WITNESS: About three or four in the afternoon.

5 MR. NICE:

6 Q. NATO publishes - and again, we don't have time to go into it - a

7 list of the targets they hit on the day that you say you were bombed. It

8 doesn't include anything that could relate to, as far as we can see, that

9 you say that you were bombed. Where was it that you say that you were

10 bombed? You obviously were bombed, I don't doubt that.

11 A. It was about eight kilometres outside Prizren, on a road that was

12 strategically important to the Serbs, and the bombing was directed at the

13 road and it would be very hard to think why any Serb forces would want to

14 destroy the road that they needed.

15 Q. To the west or east of Prizren?

16 A. It was east, almost east of Prizren.

17 MR. NICE: Your Honours, if we find out anything that enables us

18 to make a concession about this, we will. Our inquiries reveal nothing.

19 Q. You see, you've also said that these planes were flying very low.

20 NATO planes flew high but Serb planes may well have flown low to avoid

21 being detected. Is it indeed possible that this bombing was by Serb

22 planes?

23 A. I think it is almost inconceivable. I cannot conceive that -- and

24 also, the NATO planes were flying high until the last couple of weeks and

25 because they said that they had knocked out many of the air defences, they

1 themselves said that they were flying far lower to minimise collateral

2 damage that had been, as they said, inevitable when they were forced to

3 fly at much greater altitude. NATO themselves said that they had started

4 to fly far lower to minimise the damage. But the main reason is I cannot

5 think why Serbia would want to destroy its own supply route.

6 Q. Sorry.

7 A. These bombs were aimed at -- there were two tunnels very close by

8 on this road, and it was the tunnels they were aiming at, because by

9 pulling down the tunnel -- by destroying the tunnels, they were making the

10 road impassable.

11 MR. NICE: Your Honours, the evidence of flying by the VJ at the

12 -- as of the 30th of April, is D321, tab 6.

13 JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you.

14 MR. NICE:

15 Q. You made the point about the shelling in Sarajevo, that you were

16 being targeted then for some reason and it was a staged shelling. Or

17 perhaps you weren't be targeted; it was a staged shelling. Trying to

18 connect things up very rapidly. Why do you say that was a staged

19 shelling?

20 A. I said that I had the suspicion that it could have been because my

21 -- because I already had deep reservations about the Markale --

22 Q. Well -- I see.

23 A. -- attack.

24 Q. Let's just deal with Markale very briefly. Der Spiegel article

25 you haven't brought with you; there is nothing published by Jane's Weekly,

1 this is simply something that somebody from Jane's Weekly told you had

2 been done; is that right?

3 A. Right. I had a very detailed interview which went into the --

4 Q. But -- I'm sorry -- you haven't produced the workings, you haven't

5 produced the analysis, so we can't deal with it, can we, Ms. Prentice?

6 A. I spoke to enough experts not from any of the warring sides in

7 Bosnia to persuade me --

8 Q. I'm sorry --

9 A. -- that --

10 Q. -- I'm going to ask you to answer the question, you see. We deal

11 with evidence here, not your conclusions.

12 A. Uh-huh.

13 Q. You haven't brought anything that tells us what the alleged

14 workings of the Jane's Weekly expert, or whatever it was, amounts to, have

15 you? You don't know.

16 A. I have notes. I did ask -- before I came here, I did ask if I

17 needed to bring anything with me. I was told no. Had I brought every

18 single thing -- I am, by the way, unable to physically carry baggage

19 myself. I would have had to have -- if I had brought everything --

20 Q. I'm going to cut you short because of time.

21 JUDGE ROBINSON: No, just let her finish, Mr. Nice.

22 MR. NICE: Very well.

23 THE WITNESS: Had I been -- had I known what documentation would

24 have been valuable to this Court, I would, of course, have brought it. I

25 did ask in advance more than once whether I should bring anything with me

1 relating to any given incidents. The volume of material I have relating

2 to all my time in the former Yugoslavia would fill more than the boot of a

3 car. I could not have brought it all with me.

4 MR. NICE:

5 Q. May I press on? The analyst from Jane hasn't published this

6 report himself - if it was a he - has he?

7 A. I don't know whether he has or not. That --

8 Q. Well --

9 A. -- I do not know.

10 Q. -- the implication you've been making is that David Owen somehow

11 knows of a piece of material that shows that a bomb was attached

12 underneath a table in Markale market and that the British government also

13 has somehow proof. Is that what you're suggesting? Because if so, are

14 you also suggesting that both these bodies have suppressed this extremely

15 important evidence on a topic that everybody's very interested in?

16 A. I am most definitely suggesting that it is being suppressed, yes.

17 Q. Okay. By whom and why?

18 A. By Western governments because as I -- to me, one of the clear

19 indications was that written answer to my father, that quote --

20 Q. But you haven't brought that with you. We don't know what the

21 government actually said.

22 A. I have asked that -- I did ask Hansard at the House of lords to

23 send a copy of that to this Court and to Mr. Milosevic's lawyers, and I

24 only knew I was coming here 36 hours before I came. I immediately asked

25 them. The fact that it has not arrived yet I cannot answer. It has been

1 asked for.

2 Q. You see, I've got a few more questions to ask but I'm going ask

3 you a concluding topic very quickly first. You realise, and until I asked

4 you questions, you gave evidence here almost exclusively favourable to

5 this accused, didn't you?

6 A. I answered the questions that were put to me by the accused.

7 Q. I'm going to -- yes, and I have to suggest to you that when we

8 look at your book, the effect of your answers, particularly when you deal

9 with how you interviewed people about leaving was different from your

10 earlier recollection and favourable to this accused.

11 A. I answered the questions that were put to me. The book itself

12 should -- I hope shows that I have always tried to put as many sides as

13 possible, very often in these difficult situations, by quoting people who

14 have been at places where I have not been able. I don't think any Western

15 reporter actually saw any of the battles that took place in Kosovo.

16 Q. You see, you make the point that the accused tried to help you

17 after the bombing -- this can be found on page 25 of the book, we don't

18 have time to look at it -- but you say: "He was probably not acting

19 merely for humanitarian reasons since our plight was rich fodder for his

20 propaganda machine." Do you remember saying that?

21 A. Yes, I do.

22 Q. After he was arraigned, you were the first privileged journalist

23 to be able to interview his daughter, weren't you?

24 A. I have no idea whether I was the first.

25 Q. You certainly interviewed her immediately after the arrest.

1 A. Not immediately after the arrest. I believe it was -- gosh, it

2 was only a couple of years ago. I don't think it was immediately after

3 the arrest.

4 Q. Very well. And you've been described by the accused as an

5 intellectual. That's a word used in the Balkans rather differently from

6 the way it's used in England, and I'm not suggesting --

7 A. I would agree with that. It is not a term I have applied to

8 myself.

9 Q. Thank you very much. But nevertheless, as a person interested in

10 this area, can I just invite you to consider this passage from Rebecca

11 West's book -- I always get the title wrong -- Grey Falcon and -- Black

12 Lamb and Grey Falcon.

13 A. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

14 Q. Just look at this passage, please: "British author Rebecca West

15 gave a telling description of the lack of objectivity and tendency to take

16 sides exhibited by their compatriots in their writings about the Balkans

17 more than a half a century ago." And then this quotation: "English

18 persons therefore of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly

19 went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who in fact was ill-treating whom,

20 and being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept

21 the horrible hypothesis that everyone was ill-treating everybody else, all

22 came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as

23 suffering and innocent. Eternally massacri, never massacra."

24 Do you think, on fair reflection, that what happened to you,

25 including the awful experience that you suffered by being bombed, that you

1 have fallen foul of being some degree in that syndrome?

2 A. I repeatedly say in my book and have repeatedly said in every

3 article that I have written analysing the situation that all sides have

4 been victims, all sides have perpetrated terrible misdeeds. I mean, you

5 quoted some of them from the book there. I have held that position since

6 long before my driver was killed. My attitude did not change one bit. My

7 attitude was very plain in all my writings from the -- the first outbreak

8 of hostilities in what is now the former Yugoslavia.

9 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Nice, I'm not sure whether Mr. Milosevic

10 wants to re-examine, but if he does, I think we'll have to give him --

11 MR. NICE: One question of fact, please.

12 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes.

13 MR. NICE:

14 Q. You identified a village Rekane as being a Turkish-speaking

15 village; is that right?

16 A. Right.

17 Q. It's in the vicinity of Prizren, south and east of it, correct?

18 A. It is in the vicinity of Prizren.

19 Q. Are you not -- you say it's Turkish-speaking. Is that because you

20 heard them speaking Turkish or because you were told it was a

21 Turkish-speaking village?

22 A. Because they were wearing the clothes of the Turkish minority,

23 because they were speaking -- seemed to be speaking Turkish. They

24 certainly weren't speaking Albanian.

25 Q. No, they were -- well, if you were in the right village, Rekane is

1 a Gorani village where the Bosnian Muslims speak B/C/S. Did you not

2 realise that?

3 A. Evidently not. I was told that they were Turkish and they --

4 Q. Thank you.

5 A. They themselves --

6 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. Milosevic. Any re-examination, bearing

7 in mind the time?

8 THE INTERPRETER: Microphone, please.

9 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Just one factual question.

10 Re-examination by Mr. Milosevic:

11 Q. Ms. Prentice, when were you bombed? Do you recall the date?

12 A. It was May -- I believe it was the 30th of May, 1999.

13 Q. The 30th of May, 1999. Did you notice that Mr. Nice kept asking

14 you about the 30th of April? Was it the 30th of May or the 30th of April?

15 A. No, I didn't notice that, no. It was definitely May. It was

16 either the last day of May or the penultimate day of May. It was right on

17 the tail end.

18 Q. Thank you.

19 JUDGE ROBINSON: Ms. Prentice, that concludes your evidence.

20 Thank you for coming to the Tribunal to give it and you may leave when we

21 adjourn.

22 JUDGE ROBINSON: Exhibits.

23 MR. NICE: Oh. The book should be either exhibited in part or in

24 whole. I'm in the Court's hands. It's already in English so it doesn't

25 present a translation burden. I doubt if --

1 [Trial Chamber confers]

2 MR. NICE: And also the article on the -- the 1993 article on the

3 prison camps in Bosnia ought to be exhibited.

4 JUDGE ROBINSON: The book in its entirety, or just those parts

5 that you referred to? Mr. Milosevic, what do you have to say on this?

6 Shall we exhibit the book in its entirety or just those parts to which

7 reference was made?

8 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I did not use the book for the

9 reasons of time. As Mr. Nice was very selective and one-sided in his

10 choice of quotations, I believe the book ought to be exhibited as a whole

11 to see what the author was writing about at the time.

12 MR. NICE: Yes, Your Honour. I am not going to tolerate too much

13 of these sort of comments from this accused unanswered. I was not

14 selective. I was actually very careful to try and put both sides, and

15 it's very unfortunate that, as with so many other witnesses, this material

16 was not served in advance in written form so that we could all have dealt

17 with it in more detail.

18 JUDGE ROBINSON: Well, we'll exhibit the book in its entirety.

19 MR. NICE: And then the article of 1993 on the prison camps.

20 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes, that will also be exhibited.

21 MR. NICE: The other material dealing with the RTS is material

22 that she, to an extent, acknowledged but I'm -- I think probably her

23 acknowledgements are as much as I can get in unless the Chamber would like

24 to see the documents more fully because we had to deal with them so

25 briefly.

1 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. Robinson, I didn't understand

2 that the witness accepted the material. She accepted and acknowledged her

3 book. She could not have accepted the material on the RTS because that's

4 something that she cannot know about; that's not correct.

5 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes, we'll not exhibit that.

6 THE REGISTRAR: Your Honours, the book entitled "One Woman's War"

7 will be Exhibit 940; and the article of 1993 will be Exhibit 941.

8 JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you. We are adjourned until Monday,

9 9.00 a.m. next week.

10 [The witness withdrew]

11 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 1.43 p.m.,

12 to be reconvened on Monday, the 6th day

13 of February, 2006, at 9.00 a.m.

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