THE HAGUE, March 8: Slobodan Milosevic waved an FBI document at his war crimes trial on Friday to support his claim that the bloodshed in Kosovo was a struggle against fighters backed by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.
The former Yugoslav president is accused of murders, deportations and other atrocities as part of a campaign to carve out a Greater Serbia after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in 1991.
But as his trial wound up its fourth week, the Serbian nationalist turned to one of his chief defenses: that he was struggling against separatists and terrorists to hold a crumbling Yugoslav republic together.
“Neither the army nor the police have been implicated in war crimes,” said Milosevic, who is acting in his own defense before a UN tribunal that he dismisses as illegal.
Cross-examining a Kosovo human rights activist, Milosevic suggested that Al Qaeda and other Muslim fighters were actively supporting the guerillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during the 1998-99 conflict.
He brandished what he called a statement by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to the US Congress which said, “Al Qaeda supports Muslim fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo”.
The rights activist, Sabit Kadriu, dismissed the one-time Serbian strongman’s suggestions of Kosovo as a hotbed of terrorism, saying: “It’s a fiction of your imagination.”
But when Kadriu reiterated his testimony that the Serbs went on a spree of “mutilating and killing civilians,” Milosevic shot back: “We know whose specialty this is. It is the Al Qaeda branch in Kosovo.”
Milosevic has only recently played the anti-terrorism card in linking the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s to Al Qaeda.
His brother Borislav Milosevic alleged last month that the KLA had direct ties to Al Qaeda. He said Osama travelled to Albania in 1998, but the Albanian authorities have denied that.
Milosevic is facing charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. If convicted he could be sentenced to life in prison.
The former Balkans strongman spent the day sparring with Kadriu, an Albanian Kosovar, in a cross-examination laced with political polemics that drew exasperated rebukes for both sides from impatient judges.
Clearly frustrated by the tribunal’s efforts to rein in his questioning, Milosevic snapped back at Presiding Judge Richard May: “I’d like to ask you not to give me instructions, please.”
Kadriu, a teacher and branch leader of the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms, became progressively bolder, and was the first witness to look Milosevic squarely in the eye as they dueled.
On Thursday he had testified about Serb savagery in Kosovo, including massacres of Albanians, mutilations and public rapes before the campaign of terror was ended by NATO air strikes in June 1999.
Milosevic dismissed the accounts as “sheer, unadulterated lies” and came back on Friday with his own litany of atrocities he said were perpetrated on ethnic Serbs from Kosovo.
He grilled Kadriu on alleged killings, burnings and rapes of Serbs as well as the destruction of their forests, orchards and cemeteries in the predominently Albanian province of Serbia.
“Do you know how many inhabitants of Kosovo, under pressure from Albanian violence, had to leave the province?” the Serbian nationalist thundered. “Do you know, or do you not know?”
“I have never heard of these things,” Kadriu responded. “Power was in the hands of Milosevic. Who would dare to do such things?”
The two men clashed over the deaths of more than 60 members of one Kosovar family. Milosevic said they were KLA members killed in action; Kadriu said they were massacred in their house by Serb forces.—AFP