²⁸¹⁰

Thursday, 11 April 2002

[Open session]

[The accused entered court]

--- Upon commencing at 9.30 a.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Nice.

MR. NICE: General Drewienkiewicz. Your Honour, this witness is going to produce a large number of exhibits. With the agreement of the Registry, you're going to be provided with binders, and we'll be, I hope, producing the exhibits in the order in which they appear in the binder. Those binders are in the last stages of preparation. The summary of this witness caused me some concern. Indeed I discussed it with your legal officer before Easter when we were originally hoping to call the witness. He's provided a very long and detailed statement which the accused will have had, and it was my guess that the accused will have been working in preparation of any questions he wants to ask the witness on the basis of that statement.

The statement in the proofing sessions and for the production of exhibits has been added to by some other passages which I've had italicised, and it seemed to me that the accused would find it more helpful to navigate his way around a document if it was simply a document on this occasion with which he was familiar, added to by the additional materials. So basically what you're getting is a very full document on this occasion. You'll see when it comes. It's being copied at the moment. It didn't have paragraph numbers, and I thought paragraph numbers really do assist in finding our way around the document. ²⁸¹¹ I can start the witness, though, without the document, because there are quite a lot of background matters we can deal with in a conventional way.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. We will have the witness, please.

MR. NICE: This really is a witness whose name ought to be spelled out on the overhead projector. He tells me that even in native Poland where his family came -- comes from, it's a name that is extremely difficult for Poles to pronounce, and indeed he's often known as General DZ, the first and last letters of his name.

JUDGE ROBINSON: May we use that?

MR. NICE: I think so, yes.

[The witness entered court]

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Let the witness take the declaration.

THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

JUDGE MAY: If you would like to take a seat.

WITNESS: JOHN DREWIENKIEWICZ Examined by Mr. Nice:

Q. Is your name Karol John Drewienkiewicz?

A. It is.

Q. Sometimes known, because of the length and complexity of your name, as "DZ"?

A. It is.

Q. Would you object if people so describe you in the course of this hearing if they find that more comfortable than to use your full name? ²⁸¹²

A. By all means.

Q. General, we're going to be speaking in English, and one of the problems there is that, because the material has to be interpreted, we can get tempted to talk too rapidly and in particular for one to follow the other without leaving the necessary break. Your evidence is going to take a considerable time in chief, and you will be speaking to me. One technique that can work is to turn to channel 5, the French channel, leave the headphones either around your neck or on the table with the volume turned down so that it's the mildest background for you but enables you to know when the previous question has been translated. It's a matter for you but that sometimes works. The trouble is, if you turn the volume up too much, it then interferes with the other interpreting.

MR. NICE: Coming now are the document summaries. It's not really appropriate, but the documents of this witness. I'll hand them to the usher, please, for distribution. The exhibit binders will be with us in about five minutes.

Q. General, I'm going to deal with matters in a very summary way so far as background and that sort of thing is concerned. You are or have been a career soldier, starting off with the Royal Engineers, landing up with the rank of Major General, as we already know. Is that correct?

A. That is correct.

Q. In 1989 - paragraph 2 - 1988/1989, were you Secretary to the United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff Committee, and then in due course appointed as Director, in 1995, of Support at NATO headquarters, and in 1996 starting your association with the former Yugoslavia headquarters for IFOR ²⁸¹³ in Sarajevo; is that correct?

A. That's correct.

Q. In 1997, you became Commanding General for SFOR Support Command in Zagreb, returning to Heidelberg in August 1997, going back to Sarajevo in January 1998 as a military advisor to the Civilian High Rep for some six or seven months?

A. That's correct.

Q. And then to the Staff College for a period of time --

A. Sorry, no. That -- that's out of sequence.

Q. I'm sorry. Yes. Of course it is, yes. You were due to go as an instructor to the Royal College of Defence Studies. That was postponed when you were seconded - this is paragraph 4 - to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE.

A. That's correct.

Q. Page 2, paragraph 6, you retired from the army and you retain a position with OSCE at the moment in Sarajevo, in Bosnia?

A. That's correct.

Q. Now we'll go back to your involvement in Kosovo.

A. Yes.

Q. You started working for the OSCE in Vienna in October of 1998. At that time, there had been an agreement between Holbrooke and Milosevic; is that correct, as you understand it?

A. I understand there was an agreement, but the agreement that was signed was between Bronislaw Geremek, the Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE, and Minister Zivadin Jovanovic, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. ²⁸¹⁴

Q. Your function at this time, when you started working with the OSCE, was as what, or to do what?

A. At the start, I was seconded by the British Foreign Office to the UK delegation of the OSCE to assist the OSCE permanent staff in planning the operation of the Kosovo Verification Mission. So at the start, I was the Chief of Planning.

MR. NICE: The Exhibit binders have now arrived. We can distribute those.

THE INTERPRETER: Could the interpreters please have a copy of the resume -- of the summary.

JUDGE MAY: The interpreters are asking for a copy of the summary.

MR. NICE: Certainly. If it hasn't arrived, it must ... May the witness have the registry copy? I understand that the summaries for the interpreters are being distributed.

THE REGISTRAR: The bundle will be given the exhibit number 94.

MR. NICE: Thank you very much. Tab 1 of 94, if that could be laid on the ELMO.

Your Honour, I see that the witness has with him, I think, a copy of the summary that we are looking at.

Q. Is that right, General?

A. Yes.

MR. NICE: We haven't explored this as a practice, and I don't know what the view of the Chamber is as to whether he should have his own summary before him. It's really his statement.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Kay, any objection? It's a lengthy document. ²⁸¹⁵

MR. KAY: If it's a note made by him, then of course it's perfectly acceptable. If it's a note made by someone else, then a distinction has to be drawn.

JUDGE MAY: He's got to deal with a huge amount of material.

MR. KAY: Yes. That's what ...

JUDGE MAY: If it's a statement that he's adopted ... I notice there are some 299 paragraphs, 44 pages. It's asking a great deal of a witness to give evidence without reference, isn't it, to some document? The old rules were fine for cases in which witnesses were dealing with a small amount of evidence.

MR. KAY: Yes.

JUDGE MAY: Here we're dealing with a huge amount of evidence, and isn't it more realistic that a witness should be entitled to refer to a statement?

MR. KAY: Perhaps it would help the Court if he was able to tell us about his input onto the note itself, and then any ambiguities will be clarified as to the document.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Mr. Nice, perhaps you could explore that.

MR. NICE:

Q. Yes. This document, General, just tell us, was it a statement that you made originally?

A. This is a copy of a report which appears to be the report of a Serbian government --

Q. No, no. Not the -- we're not looking at the document. ²⁸¹⁶

A. Sorry.

Q. We're just looking at your -- the document you've been looking at, I think, your own summary. Are you looking at that?

A. Yes.

Q. That's what we're concerned about.

A. Right.

Q. Your summary is a statement that's been prepared how?

A. In June of 2000, I came here, and with all of my contemporaneous notes, and went through them and, with the aid of them, described the things that I had seen and the circumstances in which they took place. And a statement which was a summary of I think about a six-day process was put together, which I then went through line by line and agreed that that was a correct shorthand version of the six days of description that I had gone through with the aid of the notes that I made at the time in a number of notebooks.

Q. And before Easter -- sorry. I'm making the same mistake. Before Easter, did you come back here, expecting to give evidence then --

A. Yes.

Q. -- go through the statement, adding to it largely from handwritten notes of your own, prepared while you were here, passages that typically, but not always, appear in italics in the present version?

A. Yes.

Q. I think that's all I need.

A. Other documents were made available before Easter --

Q. Yes. ²⁸¹⁷

A. -- some of which I recognised as documents I had had a hand in producing. Others were descriptions of meetings I had been at, which I had not seen before, and I went through those, identified them where necessary, and made comments that I felt were appropriate at the time. That was just before Easter.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Mr. Kay, is there anything you want to add?

MR. KAY: No, as long as the status of the document is, of course, acknowledged by all.

JUDGE MAY: It's not the witness's evidence.

MR. KAY: Yes.

JUDGE MAY: It's merely an aide-memoire when he's trying to give evidence.

MR. KAY: Yes. It will help us to follow the paragraphs perhaps that he's referring to.

JUDGE MAY: And help him when he's being referred to different parts of it.

MR. KAY: Yes.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic, the issue here is whether this witness should be allowed to refer to the statement which he has in front of him, which you've heard him describe how he came to make it. He went through it line by line. Normally, as you will appreciate, witnesses do not have their summaries in front of them and give their evidence without it, but because of the detail and the amount of this evidence, it may be appropriate for this witness to have it in front of him to refresh his memory and as an aide-memoire. It is, of course, not evidence. It's what ²⁸¹⁸ he says which is evidence. Do you want to make any observations about that? Do you object?

THE ACCUSED: [No interpretation]

JUDGE MAY: We didn't get the translation.

THE INTERPRETER: Microphone, please.

JUDGE MAY: Could you put your microphone on, please.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] What I said was it's up to you, your affair.

JUDGE MAY: Very well.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Just like the several kilogrammes that we've just received.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. Yes.

MR. NICE: May I, in fact, have substituted for the version, or additional to the version that the witness has got, one that's got paragraph numbers on it? Because I suppose his doesn't, being an earlier generation. Right.

Q. If you'd like to just get yourself through to the appropriate paragraph, please, General, which is paragraph 8. And in the exhibit binder now on the overhead projector, there is tab 1, OTP reference 2790. It's a document, a statement of the Serbian government, dated the 13th of October, which outlines the principles of the political framework for resolving the situation in Kosovo during a government session, as reported by Serbian President Milutinovic, and related to the talks between Yugoslavia, President Milosevic, and Ambassadors Holbrooke and Hill. We have only very limited time in which to deal with your ²⁸¹⁹ evidence. Going to principle 9 and 10, what are your comments on those, please?

A. First of all, I only saw this document just before Easter. I was certainly not aware of it and it was never drawn to my attention when I was in Kosovo. That said, I note that it talks about the establishment of police under local communal direction, representative of the local population.

If this had actually been carried out, then many of the problems that I observed might not have happened. And it was never, in my experience, carried out nor was it ever declared that it was going to be carried out.

Similarly, principle 10, which talks about the -- the access for foreign, including forensics, experts to -- to the issue of crimes against humanity and international law, this certainly does not describe the experience that we discovered, that I discovered, when the forensic team investigated the killings at Racak. The -- at that stage, the international forensic team was certainly not allowed complete and unimpeded access, which is what is described in paragraph 10.

Q. As to the -- I'm sorry. And as to the timetable?

A. The timetable which is described in this document again was not made evident to the OSCE on the ground or in Vienna, to the best of my knowledge.

Q. Tab 2, please. OTP reference 1404. The agreement of the 16th of October being one, I think, of three working documents of the agreement for which you have comments on two paragraphs in section 1 and section 4. ²⁸²⁰ Section 1, paragraph 9, please.

A. Yes. At this -- in this document, the degree of cooperation that was described in this document - and we referred to this document or I referred to this document a lot in my time in Kosovo since it was, in effect, the mandate of the -- of the Verification Mission - the level of cooperation was described as full, and this was not, in fact, the case. Specifically, when we wanted to bring in the verifiers from -- from the contributing states, one of the things that slowed down their arrival was the issue of visas in Belgrade.

Secondly, we -- when we reviewed, when I reviewed, the level of medical facilities available, I recommended and it was accepted that the OSCE should hire a medevac, a medical evacuation helicopter from Switzerland, in fact. And there was then a request made by the mission for access into -- into the air space above Kosovo so that it could come and be stationed at Pristina airport. This was denied both when we first asked and subsequently, so that we were never able to use the medical evacuation helicopter that we felt we needed.

Q. And --

A. And this is reflected again in, I think, section 4, paragraph 6.

Q. Thank you.

A. And I was certainly present at -- on at least one occasion when a direct request was made to Deputy Prime Minister Sainovic on this affair, and he flatly refused the request.

Q. Tab 3, please. OTP reference 1426. This document, an agreement to determine required measures for Yugoslavia's compliance with UN ²⁸²¹ Resolution 1199. Paragraph 1, on the reduction of police levels, please.

A. Yes. This paragraph stated that police numbers would be reduced to the levels in Kosovo of February 1998. At paragraph 5, it was stated that the VJ would return to barracks except for three company-sized teams, which I would estimate then and now as equating to a force of about 400 men in total, three company-sized teams to protect communication lines in specific locations. And further, at paragraph 8, that VJ and MUP commanders, that is army and police commanders, were to supply weekly reports of the manning, weapons, and activities, and to immediately notify the KDOMs and the OSCE of any deployments that were contrary to these provisions.

On the basis of those three statements made in the agreement, we continually requested, firstly, baseline statements and, secondly, updates of those baseline statements on army and police deployments. And they were met in -- we never got a real baseline statement, and we very rarely got statements of -- of deployments as they happened.

Q. I'll deal with what were and what was the history of KDOMs quite shortly, but let's turn to tab 4 first. OTP reference 1428. Is this the third working document of the mission?

A. Yes. Yes, it is.

Q. The basis for another agreement made on the 25th of October, limiting the number of police in its checkpoints and observation posts. We can see that document there. So your comment on this?

A. This document again was one that we referred to quite a lot. It was unclear at the time, and I never found out whether it was supposed to ²⁸²² be a one-off agreement or not which only reflected the situation in October of 1998, but we used it as a benchmark for seeing the level of occupation of these -- of these checkpoints, and we specifically, in early January 1999, did a simultaneous check of all of the locations and found that the majority of them were manned at that time on a basis which appeared to us to be continuous when we -- when we checked it later. So it was not the case that only one-third were being manned.

Q. Now, that document, being dated the 25th of October, takes us slightly ahead of where we've reached in your history of events. Just picking it up, and very briefly, at paragraph 14. You went on a fact-finding mission on the 17th of October?

A. Yes.

Q. You attended a meeting - paragraph 15 - in Belgrade. And in 16, you can tell us that, at that meeting, somebody who introduced himself as an Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Serbian OSCE liaison person, Mrs. Ratkovic, were present?

A. That's correct.

Q. And were you the subject of requests at that meeting that you were unable or disinclined to answer?

A. Yes. The purpose of our going to Belgrade and down to Pristina was to see what the conditions were in order to plan the mission, and it was very much a fact-finding mission. We were not given the authority to negotiate on the specifics of the agreement, and I believe that the meeting that I attended in Belgrade was intended to discuss the fine print of the agreement which, as I say, I was -- I was not authorised, nor was ²⁸²³ Sandrock who was with me, authorised to discuss that. This was less than 48 hours after I had actually arrived in Vienna, and so I was very much not in a position to do any serious negotiating at that point. So we were asking questions rather than -- rather than discussing the fine point of the agreement.

Q. Paragraph 17 and what you sought in relation to safe passage or clear passage.

A. Yes. We had quite a long shopping list of what we needed in order to set the mission up quickly. It included requests for accommodation; full sets of maps; identification of where there were likely to be mines; a speeded-up procedure for the issue of visas, because then and later we were only getting single-entry visas, which considerably hampered us; and a statement on freedom of movement both for our staff and equipment we wanted to bring in.

We also wanted to be sure that the -- the VJ and the MUP on the ground in Kosovo knew that we were coming, because we were going to drive down from Belgrade to Pristina the next morning, and we wanted no interference over issue -- over whether or not we had the right documentation or something like that, which was something we were concerned about.

Q. Just in a couple of sentences, as you've dealt with on paragraph 17 and 18, satisfactory or unsatisfactory arrangements and as to visas.

A. We got a satisfactory arrangement as far as the people on the ground being aware of who we were and that we were coming. As far as visas were concerned, we continued to have problems, and it was always ²⁸²⁴ slow, and we never got a really quick and satisfactory way of getting multi-entry visas for our staff. And that would often delay the arrival of key people by up to two weeks.

Q. Paragraph -- sorry. Paragraph 19, just one point. On arrival and following discussions with, amongst others, the UK military attache, John Crossland, what was your understanding or assumption about the number of chains of command that you would see in operation on the ground?

A. At that time in October 1998, John Crossland said to me that it was his understanding, having been in the area for over a year, that there were two separate chains of command operating; one for the army and one for the police.

Q. Summarising 20 through to 22 or 3, you drove from Serbia to Pristina and found the reaction of the population negative and sometimes threatening.

A. Yes, that was the case. It was particularly difficult when in the -- in the towns along the way, particularly as we got closer to Kosovo, that the local population were quite hostile and made gestures to us as we -- as we sat at the traffic lights.

Q. The identifying colour of your vehicles being?

A. At this stage, they were white.

Q. Later?

A. Later, because we had identification problems and ended up with a white vehicle being shot at as it drove into the back of a firefight between MUP and the Kosovo Liberation Army, and the MUP had got a mix of blue, green, and white vehicles, I recommended and it was agreed that we ²⁸²⁵ should repaint our white vehicles into orange since that was a much more distinctive colour and was useful both when the snow was on the ground and when it was not on the ground. So we turned to orange.

Q. In Pristina - paragraph 23 and 24 - did you meet the head of something called the Temporary Executive Counsel, Zoran Andjelkovic?

A. We did.

Q. Your view, rapidly, as to his true authority and power?

A. He introduced himself as the head of the temporary government and the Executive Council, but we never managed to get any action out of him. He did not appear to actually have any executive authority, and he certainly never actually produced any results for us. And we felt that he was simply a symbol, a figurehead. He also found -- we became aware that he was summoned back to Belgrade later in October, but we never found out the purpose of it, and certainly his demeanour and his ability to produce results did not improve as a result.

Q. Paragraph 25. Was he, along with people like Ambassador Walker, to be on something called the Commission of Cooperation? Was that a body that existed but, in your view, withered on the vine?

A. Yes, that is the case.

Q. But of no great consequence?

A. Nothing ever came out of it. No action ever came out of it, and so I have to say that the meetings became very infrequent because they produced no result. It was -- the commission was called into being one last time in early March of 1999, after an incident on the border in which a serious breach of the Vienna Convention had taken place with regard to ²⁸²⁶ some of our people and their vehicles, and so a meeting was convened under this -- the authority of this group, which bore all the hallmarks of all of the previous meetings; namely, it had a lot of people, it went on for a long time, and produced no result.

Q. Tab 5, very shortly. In Pristina, were there four main Serbian authority buildings: the civil administration building and the public police headquarters, to which you did have access; the army headquarters and the main police headquarters, to which, to your knowledge, no OSCE people ever had access?

A. That is correct. I apologise for the scruffiness of the sketch. I'd have done better if I'd realised it was going to be produced here.

Q. Nevertheless, there's a sketch of that, if it ever becomes relevant, and we can move on in your statement.

We needn't trouble with the listing of representatives. They're there if others want to ask about them.

Paragraph 29. On the 29th of October of 1998, did you drive from Pristina to Pec?

A. I did, yes.

Q. Noticing, as to police presence, what?

A. Yes. The police presence was extensive on the ground along the roads that I used, but while there were checkpoints, we were waved straight through them. However, the police presence was more than I had expected.

Q. Uniforms and markings on uniforms?

A. All of the police I saw wore blue uniforms, which I expected, and ^{2827 BLANK PAGE 2828} had the word "Policija," normally in white lettering, somewhere about the uniforms; sometimes on the back, sometimes on the front. Some of them - and it seemed to correspond with the fact that they were getting more heavily armed as we went west towards Pec - but some of the police then had the word "Milicija" on their uniforms, but again this was -- these were mainly blue uniforms.

Q. During the drive, which I think took some five hours, what did you observe about people working in the fields?

A. The journey was remarkable in that there was nobody in the fields whatsoever, and this being October, I would have expected people to have been working in the fields, particularly since the area that I drove through was a mainly agricultural area. There was only one place where I met or saw an Albanian outside of his house, and he was driving a tractor within a village, and he was in quite a hurry to move on so was disinclined to stop and chat to me.

Q. Did you, in fact - paragraph 31 - get directed by him to a family home?

A. Yes.

Q. And this is on the eastern edge, I think, of Decani.

A. That's correct.

Q. You approached Pec from the south?

A. Yes. I went to Pec and then turned south and drove south down the Pec-to-Prizren road; and within Decani, where there had been a lot of destruction, I turned east and went to the eastern edge of the village, where I found a family that was prepared to open their doors and show me ²⁸²⁹ what state they were living in.

Q. Your observations, please.

A. Throughout the whole village of Decani, all of the courtyard gates were closed, locked, barred, and bolted, in effect, or if they were open, it was because they were destroyed to some degree; they had been forced open.

The family that I met who were prepared to let me into their courtyard and talk to me were living in one downstairs room of their house because the roof of the house had been burned, and so they -- and the windows were out, and so they were living in this one room with plastic over their windows. I was able to speak with them because one of the family spoke some German and I speak German.

Q. Same journey but now on the Pristina-Pec road, what observations did you make, with your military experience, of damage there?

A. Throughout the journey, there was a constant -- there were constant signs of any position from which anyone could possibly have taken cover in order to dominate the road had been knocked down. In particular, walls -- the walls that were between a village and the road, perhaps 100 or 200 metres from the road, those walls had all been knocked down. So the walls that were parallel to the road, that might have afforded cover, had generally been knocked down systematically. You would expect that to be done by forces that were concerned for their safety and worried about being ambushed.

Q. Did you make another observation - paragraph 33, I think something you added in the time you were here before Easter - did you make another ²⁸³⁰ observation about bridges and the military significance of what you saw or didn't see about the bridges?

A. Yes. I was particularly struck by the fact that all of the bridges were standing, and obviously this was in contrast to my previous experience in Bosnia. And as an engineer, I'm well aware of the benefits that having a good road system, well-bridged, gives to a force which has superior mobility to the people it's fighting. So given that the Yugoslav forces were quite mobile, I was surprised that no attempt appeared to have been made to knock any of the bridges down by the insurgents in order to reduce the mobility of the Yugoslav forces. It would certainly have reduced the ability of the Yugoslav forces to move rapidly from one area to another, and therefore would have reduced their capability to a degree. From this, I concluded that, certainly at this stage, the UCK, the Kosovo Liberation Army, did not have the resources or the expertise to demolish bridges.

Q. Thank you. Your impressions of Pristina and its inhabitants, please. Paragraph 34.

A. Yes. It was certainly bustling when we arrived in October 1998; however, as you walked around the place, you noticed that a lot of people, and in particular, those who were dressed in the distinctive dress of the Kosovar Albanians, appeared rather cowed and did not make eye contact with us as we walked around.

Q. Linked to that general observation, and from contact with Serbs, what did you judge their -- what was your reception by Serbs or, indeed, by Kosovar Albanians at that time? ²⁸³¹

A. The general degree of reception we got was welcoming, really from all sides, because we got the impression that there was a very real feeling that NATO bombing had been imminent and that that risk had passed with the agreement to deploy the Kosovo Verification Mission. So they were really quite pleased to see us at most levels, certainly at official levels.

Q. On the 21st of October, you returned to Vienna, being appointed one of the deputy heads of mission on the 2nd of November, coming back to Pristina on the 23rd of November?

A. That's correct. And in between those times, I was in Vienna, putting together the plan to deploy the Kosovo Verification Mission and starting to procure equipment and to call forward individuals who had been offered by the nations.

Q. Itself a major logistical exercise, I think.

A. Yes, particularly because the OSCE deploys missions by putting them together on an individual-by-individual basis. It's not like a military unit where you've got, you know, a hundred people with vehicles, with rations, with radios, with tentage, able to drive down the road or get into a transport aircraft and get off the other end and start to be effective. We had to procure every vehicle, every radio, we had to procure the accommodation they were going to live in --

Q. Right.

A. -- and so on. So it was much more tedious and slow.

Q. Two things from paragraph 37, or one perhaps: The primary role of the OSCE, KVM in relation to verification and elections, please. ²⁸³²

A. Yes. Stemming directly from the original agreement, the role was to liaise with the relevant authorities, to supervise an election, and to conduct arms verification and verification of forces in the field.

Q. The framework of the organisation - paragraph 38, but only in summary - was that there were a number of deputy heads of mission, each with an appointed liaison function allocated by Ambassador Walker?

A. That is correct. I was given the job of Deputy Head of Mission for Operations, but other deputies were given the task of liaising with the Serbian authorities, specifically, liaising over police, liaising with the Albanian community, and so on.

Q. We can just note that you've listed the people concerned and go straight to paragraph 43. There was no appointment, in relation to police and justice, until a later stage, namely, late December 1998?

A. That is correct. There was something of a hiatus over the appointment of the deputy who was to be principally responsible for policing matters. As a result of that, the nomination that was accepted by the OSCE didn't take place until late December, and the individual concerned arrived quite late in January. So until then, I found myself dealing with police matters as well, despite the fact that it wasn't quite what I thought I was going to be doing.

Q. And that then brings me to the conclusion of the end of paragraph 45. Having this additional role thrust on you, were you able to form a view about the level of cooperation between the police and the VJ?

A. Yes. As I said, it is -- it was not originally my job, and it came my way because nobody else was doing it and it interfaced with what ²⁸³³ we were doing with the Yugoslav army anyway.

And in doing so, it became increasingly apparent that what the police were doing was to an increasing extent interlocked with what the army was doing. And so over the period that I was in Kosovo, it became clear to me that the police and the army began to function more closely for operations rather than operating as two separate bodies with two separate chains of command. So their chains of command seemed to coalesce over the period that I was there.

Q. Paragraph 47 and on. In your role as Deputy Head of Mission - Operations, assisting Ambassador Walker, were you also to absorb what were the various KDOMs?

A. Yes. That was the --

Q. And so could you just explain what they were, and very briefly, because it will probably save time, run through the substance of the paragraphs that deal with which KDOMs were absorbed and which weren't.

A. Yes. The KDOMs were called the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Missions, and they were set up as, in effect, forward outposts of the various embassies in Belgrade which reported directly back to the various embassies in Belgrade and operated on the ground. They were put together quite quickly in the late summer of 1998 and were primarily military people who were simply ordered through national channels to go to Belgrade and then deploy from Belgrade. They -- their mandate was limited simply to reporting, and they were on the ground in some strength in October 1998 when I first arrived.

The biggest player in this was the US-KDOM which, as I have said, ²⁸³⁴ reported in a straight line -- was commanded, in effect, by the US embassy. There was a UK, a British KDOM reporting to the British embassy, and then we later saw a French, a Russian, and a Canadian KDOM of varying sizes.

They had good vehicles, good communications, but they didn't really cooperate with one another. They certainly didn't coordinate particularly well when I first saw them in October, and so you tended to either see -- see five of them or none. The --

Q. As to -- sorry. Yes.

A. Of the -- the intention was that as the Kosovo Verification Mission was built up, that the KDOMs would be folded into and taken over by and absorbed within the Kosovo Verification Mission. This happened to a degree. We absorbed the UK-KDOM and the French KDOM and the Russian and the Canadian KDOM over various periods of time. The US-KDOM built up to about -- first to 60 and then to about 120, and we absorbed some of the US-KDOM but not all, and a proportion of the US-KDOM remained independent all through our time in Kosovo.

There was also an EU-KDOM which, again, remained independent although it was not very big.

Q. And as a result?

A. The result of all of the KDOMs was, frankly, a degree of inefficiency, because they -- while we talked to them, we didn't totally share all information, they not with us, and it tended to confuse the issue. The reason given for the US-KDOM keeping some people as dedicated was to assist Ambassador Hill in his diplomatic efforts, and in order to ²⁸³⁵ do that, about 30 were kept as the remnant of the US-KDOM.

Q. Paragraph 52. The police structure in the province was a five regional structure -- I beg your pardon. The structure of the province was five regional, but the police had seven; is that correct?

A. Yes. This was because some of the areas were of a size - long and thin - that would make it difficult to -- to get to places if they were all being deployed from one central location.

Q. So the five police units -- or the seven police units were, please?

A. There was one for each of the five regions, but then one of the regions which was long and thin had Pristina in the north and Urosevac in the south, and so a separate police force was based in Urosevac and another one was at based at Djakovica.

Q. Thank you. The other four regions apart from Pristina being Prizren, Pec --

A. -- Mitrovica and Gnjilane.

Q. Did the KVM establish five Regional Centres?

A. Yes. We mirrored the administrative backgrounds to the greatest extent possible because obviously there were regional officials that we needed to deal with, and so we followed the existing regional boundaries to the greatest extent possible. And then below the regional level at each -- we intended to establish a smaller centre subordinate to the Regional Centre at each opstina. We called those coordination centres. The idea simply was to have so many people on the ground that whenever something happened, we would always have people within a few ²⁸³⁶ minutes to be able to get there, or patrol based on a very local area so that they built up their knowledge of the area and established good working relations with the people in the area.

Q. Paragraph 54 and just in general. At that stage, night-time patrolling by the KVM easy or difficult?

A. It was dangerous because, having decided we would have orange vehicles, that only worked in the day. And obviously all vehicles at night are black, and therefore, we were, I was, reluctant that we should patrol at night until the situation stopped being as volatile as it was. The result was that, it being winter with only about 10 hours of daylight, there was a lot of patrolling in the day by the Kosovo Verification Mission and really not very much at night. And I think both -- both sides took advantage of this.

Q. Paragraph 56. Briefly, please, explain the last sentence of that paragraph which follows on from a meeting you had with Sean Burns, head of US-KDOM. The last sentence speaks of threats to kill made by the KLA. Can you just help us with that?

A. Yes. It was our understanding that one of the reasons why there was no agreement with the Albanian -- the Kosovo Albanians, which we hoped would have matched the -- the agreement that had been already signed in Belgrade in October was that there was a publicly -- a publicly-known threat that any Kosovo Albanian who did a deal with Ambassador Hill or with anybody else in the international community to restrain the activities of the Kosovo Liberation Army would be killed. And certainly there was then no agreement with the Albanian side at any level, and this, ²⁸³⁷ I believe, was a factor.

Q. In paragraph 57, you deal with an administrative delay to the establishment of KVM that you believed to be intentional, but I needn't trouble you with the detail of that. You can answer questions about it if asked.

Can we then move, in paragraph 59, to the structure that enabled you to -- and others at the head of the mission to pick up reports.

A. Yes. Firstly, in -- set -- in choosing somewhere to operate from, and we obviously needed big premises, sort of bank premises were typically -- banks or hotels were typically good buildings, and in order to do this, contracts had to be set up and agreed. And this took a long time and certainly was not done as quickly as possible, and this was another of the factors in delaying everything. And most of the -- since most of the property was owned -- was owned by the state, these contracts all went back to Belgrade, and again all of this took longer, and we never really detected any -- any wish to do this more quickly or to expedite the process.

In setting ourselves up to work on the ground, at each level, at the Regional Centre level and at my level in Pristina, three people were appointed; one to deal with the VJ as a liaison officer on a daily basis, one to deal with the MUP, and one to deal with the Kosovo Liberation Army. These people were -- were specially selected as our -- the best people we had because we relied on them very much for their view of what might happen next.

Q. You've set out the names in your statement. I'm not going to ask ²⁸³⁸ you to give all those names at this stage.

Paragraph 63. I think your general pattern in meetings was to have notes taken for you. Is that correct?

A. Yes. Firstly so that I could remind myself later, and obviously I would pass copies of those -- the notes of the meeting to the Head of Mission and the deputies so that we kept as coordinated as possible. We obviously met at the beginning of each day, but from -- from those meetings at the beginning of each day, several of us would go away with a shopping list of things to do, and it was important that we kept everybody else informed of what was going on. So notes were taken, and the record was circulated as quickly as possible.

Q. The position -- paragraph 64, the position in Pristina, so far as MUP liaison was concerned, was that there was a daily 9.00 meeting at the police station.

A. That's correct.

Q. Typically what happened?

A. The normal -- in fact, almost -- on almost every occasion, the meeting was a list of a police view of what had happened over the past 24 hours, which tended to be, "An attack took place by the UCK at this place, shots were fired," and so on. And there was not an ability to discuss what the police deployment was. This was asked for but was very, very seldom given. Nor were future -- future changes to deployment ever notified in advance. So it was not an information exchange, and it was certainly not the sort of meeting that we had anticipated we would be going to. ²⁸³⁹

Q. Paragraph 65 and 6, a word or so about Sreten Lukic, please.

A. Sreten Lukic identified himself as the police general in Kosovo, and he generally regarded himself above dealing with liaison officers. I managed to get into his presence on occasion, but it was a rare thing for anyone to be allowed into the presence of Lukic, and one certainly was not able to have discussions of substance there.

Q. I think your view at the time, based on military experience and possibly experience of communist regimes, was that the Serbian authorities would probably have been creating daily situation reports.

A. Yes, that is correct. We certainly did, and we felt that this was taking place with the people with whom we met. Typically at meetings, long lists of -- were read selectively from pre-prepared reports, which appeared often to be a report of what had been happening over the past day or days.

Q. Tab 6, please. Thank you. OTP reference 1439, a document you had not seen, I think --

A. Yes, that's correct.

Q. -- until shortly before Easter of this year. A document headed "The Republic of Serbia, Ministry of the Interior, Police Station Pec, dated the 28th of December, 1998." Your observations on it?

A. I have not seen this before when I saw it just before Easter, but it certainly supports my view that there were daily situation reports generated by the Serbian authorities, but if you read this, you'll find that its purpose is to show what the OSCE is doing rather than actually assist the OSCE. So we were described in terms, if not of enemy forces, ²⁸⁴⁰ certainly not of friendly forces.

JUDGE KWON: General DZ, are you able to read Serbian?

THE WITNESS: No, I'm afraid not, so I've relied on the translations.

JUDGE KWON: Thank you.

MR. NICE:

Q. Paragraph 68, the Fusion Centre. Couple of sentences, please.

A. The Fusion Centre was our attempt to bring all of the different strands of -- of information and fact that were reported and to try to use them to create an overall picture and then to try to work out what might happen next. In other words, to identify trends. It was also the formal basis on which the Head of Mission would decide whether or not we were dealing with formal compliance or non-compliance to the OSCE/FRY agreement, because we were very concerned that individuals on the ground should not, in effect, be able to declare whether or not an incident was compliance or non-compliance.

We certainly felt at the start that there would be relatively few incidents that would amount to formal non-compliance and that this was a prerogative that should be dealt with at head-of-mission level so that he could then formally put the opinion together that went to Belgrade and to Vienna to say that, "This is so bad that I formally --" "I," the Head of Mission, "declare it to be non-compliance."

In order to do this, the facts as seen from Pristina were put together overnight, every night, by the Fusion Centre, and this was referred to loosely by us as "the Blue Book," which was circulated to the ²⁸⁴¹ Head of Mission and his deputies for his morning meeting.

Q. I think that on the 18th of November, Ambassador Walker told you that General Dusan Loncar had been appointed coordinator --

A. Yes.

Q. -- for the FRY liaison to OSCE; is that correct?

A. Yes, it is. My impression was that Loncar was appointed because Andjelkovic was being ineffective. There was also a connection between Loncar and Walker in that Loncar had dealt with Walker in Eastern Slavonia when Loncar was there and Walker was the UN head of the -- the head of the UN mission there.

Q. We may have to take things in a little more summary form because of time, General, but paragraph 70, your judgement or your opinion about General Loncar?

A. Loncar was very well-informed. He certainly appeared to have good communications with people in the field and was generally one of the first to know when something happened. He also seemed better able to get decisions from Belgrade, and either as a result of a telephone call, or he sometimes said to me that he had just spent the night driving up to Belgrade and driving back down.

Q. Your attitude towards meeting the KLA was that you, I think, because of your particular function, preferred not to. We'll explain that in a second. You first met them in January of 1999, I think, KLA commanders.

A. Yes. I felt that it was not going to be helpful to my relations with the senior Serb officials for me to be seen with KLA commanders, who ²⁸⁴² were known to use television quite skillfully, and so I didn't want to be seen in a compromising position with them, and I had got people whose only job it was to deal on a day-to-day basis with them. It was also the impression that was around from the turn of the year that Walker was perceived, certainly by the Serbs, as being anti-Serbian, and therefore he increasingly became reluctant to deal with the Serbian authorities.

Q. We'll move on to paragraph 73. I don't think I need trouble you with 72. 73. I think you were due to meet Serbian Chief of Staff Perisic in Belgrade on the 27th of November, or thereabouts, but in fact you discovered he had been dismissed.

A. That's correct, and the meeting went ahead with General Ojdanic. The purpose of the meeting was to seek a baseline of where everything was and what the deployment of the VJ was in Kosovo, to get a detailed statement that we could use as the basis for our verification and subsequent inspections. This never actually arrived, and we ended up having to base our knowledge, such as it was, on an arms-control document that had previously been made available to the OSCE in a different context, but it was agreed that that should be used by us.

Q. However, from that meeting, did you make discoveries about intended and undertaken military training?

A. Yes. One of the issues was how many people were out of barracks, how many soldiers were out of barracks, and at this point it was stated that normal training outside barracks would be -- would now be undertaken and that soldiers would be rotated in and out of Kosovo; that is, soldiers stationed outside Kosovo would be moved into Kosovo, and soldiers ²⁸⁴³ stationed in Kosovo would be moved out of Kosovo. In that context, I said that it was important that we knew what the training areas were, and were told: "Noted."

It appeared, in the end, that these training areas were not formal training areas that actually existed as military lands on any map but that they were simply training over open land, and quite often training very close to villages where a KLA presence was known to be. And of course, if you drive past in a tank and someone shoots at you, you're then able to respond in self-defence. And the way this training was carried out was certainly intimidating to the local population, and as our time in -- as we spent longer in Kosovo, the degree to which training started to take place outside barracks increased on a quite dramatic scale. In terms of rotation of people, I discussed this at the time and said that while this was feasible, it would need to be verified so that we knew that when X people went out, X people came in. And this was not used in order to increase troop strengths in Kosovo, which obviously was one of the factors in the October agreements. And therefore, I attempted to set up a mechanism for being there when this happened, and this was flatly refused at the time.

Q. I think you sought a meeting with a Pristina Corps Commander on this topic, Pavkovic, and that was refused.

A. That's correct. I said if -- basically said to Ojdanic that if this is below his level, then can I please talk to the man on the ground whose job it is, and was told that no, I couldn't.

Q. Before we part from paragraph 78, you've told us about the ^{2844 BLANK PAGE 2845} cooperation between the MUP and the VJ and the strengthening of the command link.

A. Yes.

Q. What was your view, nevertheless, about --

A. My --

Q. -- or otherwise of chains of command?

A. Yes. The chain of command -- from the time that Ojdanic took over, the chain of command links between the army and the police seemed to strengthen gradually. I had been given the impression in conversation that the predecessor, Perisic, had been keen to retain some space between the actions of the army and the actions of the police, but over my time in Kosovo, there appeared to be a stronger link developing as time went on.

Q. Paragraph 82, perhaps. No, I don't think I need trouble you with that. Yes, I need. It was at the meeting on the 4th of December, in Pristina, that Loncar - paragraph 84 - made criticisms of KVM?

A. Yes. This was a meeting at which, rather than try to work out what we were going to do next, we had a long list of everything that had happened that had been bad since October, and my point there was that we had not been on the ground in October, despite the agreement having been signed, and that my intention was to talk about how we were going to work in the future rather than trawl over the history of it.

Q. Loncar, on one occasion, I think, answered the telephone.

A. Yes. And in explaining to us that he needed to stay on the telephone rather than just simply say, "I'll ring you back later," he said, "It's Sainovic." So it was clear to me that he was being rung up to ²⁸⁴⁶ be given instructions, but having taken the phone call, there was no reference to it when we returned to the meeting.

Q. Paragraphs 86. Loncar identified areas of concern: the Decani area, which was said to be heavily mined; Malisevo, which was said to be tense and said to be the centre of KLA activity, from which residents had been driven; and Podujevo. Correct?

A. Yes. The first two, Decani and Malisevo, are in the west of Kosovo and had been areas where there had been a lot of violence over the summer.

Podujevo was new to us, and this was important because it was north of Pristina, on the Pristina-to-Nis road, and was essentially the umbilical cord between Pristina and the rest of Serbia. And there started to be opportunistic action by the Kosovo Liberation Army moving forward to dominate the road and to carry out random shootings at vehicles on the road, which was obviously of great concern to General Loncar. It was certainly the fact that positions which had been established by the VJ in the summer and which had been vacated as a result of the October agreement by the VJ when the VJ had gone back to barracks were gradually being occupied by the Kosovo Liberation Army, and General Loncar was obviously very concerned that we should go and get the Kosovo Liberation Army to move out and to not adopt this opportunistic action.

Q. I think he was also interested in the way KVM would describe and even denounce the KLA.

A. Yes. He always referred to them as "the so-called KLA" and as "terrorists." I attempted to not use quite such emotional language and ²⁸⁴⁷ tended to refer to them as "the insurgents," which I felt described them in a way that was accurate but not emotional.

Q. By this time, in December, you say in paragraph 89, the KVM were not yet engaged in regular contact with the KLA, but that was to come later, you being short of vehicles at the time --

A. That's correct.

Q. -- so short of vehicles that, some six weeks after the signing of the agreement, you were still not verifying in the way that you had been required to do.

A. That's correct, and it goes back to the need to build up the mission. We had to go to the vehicle manufacturers and say, "How many vehicles have you got on your outpark? Can we buy them quickly?"

Q. We needn't trouble with the details on that.

JUDGE MAY: Is that a convenient moment? It's now 11.00. General Drewienkiewicz, during this and any other adjournment, would you please remember not to speak to anybody about your evidence - that does include members of the Prosecution team - not until it's over. Thank you very much.

We'll adjourn for half an hour; half past 11.00.

--- Recess taken at 11.00 a.m.

--- On resuming at 11.30 a.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Nice.

MR. NICE:

Q. I think on the 9th of December you went and made an inspection of the Pristina Brigade barracks; is that correct? ²⁸⁴⁸

A. That is correct, yes.

Q. Tell us about that in a couple of sentences.

A. I started off by telling General Loncar I was going to do this and asked him if he wanted to come with me, and he said no, he wouldn't. So I took a group of verifiers to the barracks. We got as far as the front gate and said, "We are coming in to make an inspection," and that was denied. So we waited at the gate of the barracks, and eventually the base commander came to the -- to the barracks gate and we discussed the need to do inspections. I explained to him that this was important in view of the various agreements that had been made, and he said that he was not remotely interested in it.

I stayed there for an hour and a half, during which time we continued not to be allowed in. Eventually, we gave up and drove round the barracks very visibly taking photos over the wire to attempt to establish the level of equipment actually held in the barracks.

Q. Yes. And then on the evening, that evening, you went to a meeting, I think, in a restaurant, the top floor of the OSCE in Pristina?

A. Yes. This was a major meeting between the Head of Mission and Deputy Prime Minister Sainovic with General Loncar and myself also present. The purpose of the meeting was to attempt to speed up the process of getting KVM requests approved and facilitated, and it had no effect at all. Deputy Prime Minister Sainovic rejected all the requests and -- and read out a long list of complaints, of his concerns about what the international community was doing. He specifically said that we should stop supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army and that the ²⁸⁴⁹ international community should cut off monetary support for the Kosovo Liberation Army from the western banking system. There was no doubt in my mind that the person who was senior on the Serbian side was Deputy Prime Minister Sainovic. And my eyes met the eyes of General Loncar at several moments when Deputy Prime Minister Sainovic was haranguing the international community, and I noted that General Loncar was grimacing at some of the more outrageous statements.

Q. Bo Pellnas was your liaison to the government --

A. That's correct.

Q. -- in Belgrade, and paragraph 93, very briefly, he, I think, identified Sainovic as the person you were to deal with. And just as a slightly earlier, out of sequence matter, I think in November -- 23rd of November, Walker had written a particular letter of request to which you attached some significance.

A. Yes. This was a letter which I had had a hand in the drafting of in which it was specifically stated what Walker proposed to do in order to fulfil his mandate. This letter was written to Milosevic because it was felt that he was the correct level to deal with. There was subsequently complaints from Sainovic that Walker should have not been so forward as to send that particular letter, but that was what happened.

Q. And I think your overall impression about Walker and his access to the accused was what?

A. Walker felt that he should have been granted more access to the accused. Walker felt that he was being fobbed off with people at a lower level when there were issues that should rightly have been dealt with at ²⁸⁵⁰ the highest level. The result was that those people that Walker dealt with were able or quite often claimed that a particular request was above their -- above their level of competence, which obviously would have been avoided had Walker had more regular access to the accused.

Q. Ninety-six and then 94. You organised the inspection -- or 95 and 94 -- or 96, to follow the pattern described to Ojdanic on the 27th of November, and you waited two weeks, I think, before going to Prizren to inspect the barracks there.

A. Yes. I was concerned that we should not attempt to do anything before there had been an opportunity for orders to be passed down chains of command and indeed for discussions to take place, and so it was not quite two weeks before we actually went and attempted to do our first inspection. Again, prior to doing the inspection, I had a meeting in Pristina where again we -- we wanted to lay down the modalities for doing the inspections.

Q. Thank you. Paragraph 98. On the 14th of December, there was a ceasefire breach.

A. Yes. This occurred close to the Albanian border, broadly between Prizren and the Albanian border. We first got reports via Loncar's office that several terrorists had been killed, and this information came to us via Bo Pellnas's office in Belgrade as well, who got it from Sainovic. At that point, the KVM were invited to go and see what had happened. We contacted the KVM at Prizren and told them to get some people down there. The patrols went to the scene of the action and got there several hours after it had happened, obviously in the daylight. The ²⁸⁵¹ patrols, my people, were able to confirm that there had been a firefight in the area which had appeared to have been in the hours of darkness, in the early hours of that morning. My people were taken to three specific locations where they observed dead bodies and a lot of equipment. The action appeared to have been between a Kosovo Liberation Army resupply column which had walked into a VJ position which was an ambush. The KLA were fired at, and they then withdrew and eventually 34 KLA members were killed in -- over the period of the ambush. And it was reported that nine Albanians, nine Kosovo Liberation Army members, had been taken prisoner, including one female. The patrols photographed the bodies which were in three broad locations but were given no sight of the prisoners.

At a later date, the prisoners reoccur in the --

Q. Yes.

A. -- in the statement. But shall I leave it at that for the moment?

Q. Leave it -- all right.

A. At the time we concluded, and I still believe that this was a legitimate ambush, but we did have some concerns that not all 34 of the people that were killed were killed during the ambush or whether this was a subsequent hunting down and killing. But it was a fact that most of the Kosovo Liberation Army people that we photographed were wearing KLA uniforms. And we subsequently were told that there had been 145 people in this resupply column. That was consistent with the number of backpacks and the like that were found at the scene and was subsequently confirmed ²⁸⁵² by the accounts of the KLA who had been taken prisoner.

Q. Paragraph 101, Prizren was advised of this incident by the Brigade Commander, Bozidar Delic.

A. Yes. He -- he was seen by us -- this brigade commander was seen by us as the man on the ground whose forces were most constantly in -- in contact with -- with the Kosovo Liberation Army, having clashes with them. And we -- we felt he was one of the more skilled brigade commanders. It was a difficult area, and we felt he did know his job.

Q. He had contacts with the KLA, which in your judgement were different in quality from the contacts or non-contacts --

A. Yes. By "contact" I mean not meetings with but fights with. His forces fought with.

Q. Yes.

A. Further east, in the Urosevac area, there appeared to be a far lower level of military activity, and the -- the VJ and MUP forces appeared to have far -- far less contact and hence experience in dealing with the Kosovo Liberation Army. And it is my view that this is one of the reasons why events at Racak got out of hand, because it is, in my view, quite possible that the commander on the ground was not as experienced as the man in the Prizren area.

Q. Paragraph 102. Same day, 14th of December, a shooting at the Serbian Panda Bar in Pec where four teenage Serbs were killed and seven wounded. But your view, formed from an experience on the ground at the time, as to how that came about was what?

A. At the time, the two incidents were placed in -- were linked by ²⁸⁵³ observers on the ground. Not by us but by people that were describing what was going on. Because the ambush took place in the early hours of one morning and later that day this bad event took place in Pec, it was my view that the two were -- were not connected, that it was a coincidence that it happened, because the view that this was an attack laid on by the Kosovo Liberation Army in response to their being ambushed on the border about 12 to 14 hours earlier to my mind indicated a level of command and control that they simply didn't have.

Q. Right. Then briefly, 104. On the 15th, you asked Loncar for access to the prisoners. He confirmed that he had them but didn't tell you where they were and didn't indicate that you would be allowed access?

A. That is correct.

Q. He accused - 105 - the United States of supplying the KLA with weapons, giving as evidence of that --?

A. That among the weapons that had been found at the ambush site, there was a weapon with an infrared site, in other words, a night site. This became a very ill-tempered meeting and became very confrontational between Loncar and Walker, with Loncar accusing the United States of arming the Kosovo Liberation Army, Walker having nothing to do with the statement, and it just became -- it degenerated into a shouting match.

Q. Paragraph 107. On the 19th of December, at a meeting where Colonel Kotur was asked about a VJ armoured unit south of Podujevo --

A. Yes. This relates to a unit which left its barracks, ostensibly for training, and moved first to a small grass airstrip south of Podujevo, which is north of Pristina, and then the intention was announced that it ²⁸⁵⁴ would carry out out-of-barracks training on a training area. And since all of the area west of Podujevo was known to be villages where mainly Albanians lived, I stated at the time, and stated repeatedly, that to go manoeuvring in that area, to do driver training in that area in armoured vehicles, was bound to lead to trouble and would be provocative, and so I strongly advised him not to do it.

In the event of subsequent --

Q. Shall we move on a little?

A. Yes.

Q. 109. You asked Loncar, on the 20 of December, for defined limits of a training schedule, and you never received those.

A. That's correct. Again, I was of the view that if units were to be allowed out of barracks to train, that we should be informed of where they would train and what the limits of the area they would train on. That would have been perfectly normal practice in a normal context, and that was the sort of detail I was asking for. And again, I never got those.

Q. And then 110. You travelled to the area, you met a Major Drankovic, who was engaged in some apparent training, you asked him what his boundaries were, and he told you --

A. And again, he produced a map and very broadly waved his hand over it and said, "Well, this is the training area." And I said, "Well, that area clearly includes a lot of areas which are populated by Kosovar Albanians. Most of these villages are villages where only Kosovar Albanians live. If you carry out your training next to those villages, then it's quite likely that you will provoke an incident." And he said, ²⁸⁵⁵ "Yes. Well, in that case, we shall exercise our right of self-defence," and that was really the end of that meeting.

Q. 24th of December - paragraph 112 - a VJ column, with the MUP, left Pristina.

A. Yes. This was the first major moment at which a really significant force came out of the barracks in Pristina and went up to the area west of Podujevo and attacked the area -- the positions that had originally been occupied by the VJ in October, which had subsequently been pulled out of by the VJ and which the KLA had infiltrated into over the course of the succeeding weeks. The purpose of that column was to attack the KLA in that position, which it did.

Q. Paragraph 113. You noticed it on its return towards Pristina and you noticed its composition.

A. Yes. This was a column that was returning to barracks at the end of the day, and within the column, the VJ vehicles and the MUP vehicles were mixed up together, and I felt that was odd at the time because it indicated to me that they were all one composite unit rather than units that were separate. I would have expected the VJ to be one column and the MUP to be another. But to have one police vehicle, then two VJ vehicles, then one police vehicle, indicated that they were all operating under one command, in my view.

Q. And on that day, you had a meeting -- or there was a meeting or meetings between Ambassador Walker, Loncar, Sainovic, and yourself --

A. Yes.

Q. -- during one of which something was said about further military ²⁸⁵⁶ action.

A. As a result of this -- well, in the course of this meeting, it was stated that this was the last of the military action that would be required.

Q. Thank you. On the same day, a phone contact by Colonel Mijatovic?

A. Yes. Colonel Mijatovic was the police liaison, and a routine phone call, ringing to say, "Should we have our normal liaison meeting between the liaison officers?" He said, "No, no, no. We don't need to even have a liaison meeting this morning because there's nothing going on." And since the attack on the village of Gornja Lapastica was actually going on at the time, only 30 minutes to the north, this clearly undermined his credibility in future dealings.

Q. Paragraph 117, same day, meeting with Lukic to establish a rapport and to discuss the level of MUP forces in Malisevo, you proposing a reduction. His reaction?

A. Yes. Malisevo was quite a long way to the west and had got a very substantial police presence there, which was more of a garrison than a police station, and the presence of those police in those numbers was acting as a deterrent to any of the Albanians going back to the village. And so I was trying to persuade him to reduce the level of presence and the way it operated, which was very aggressively, in that area. And Lukic said no, he would not reduce the presence, and I got the firm impression that this was a decision he could make, that he was deciding he would not, but he did not indicate he would have to clear this sort of proposal with anyone more senior. ²⁸⁵⁷

Q. Paragraph 119 is a meeting -- was it the first meeting you had with Walker and the KLA, I think at night?

A. Yes. This was on the afternoon of the 25th of December, when the situation again started to be tense and started to flare up. Walker and I went up to Podujevo, and Walker decided that he would personally go and see the local KLA commander, which was a departure from what had been the practice up until that moment. So we went into the village where the KLA were and a meeting took place, and this was really the point at which we started to leave liaison officers with the KLA in order to communicate things to them rapidly, using our communications.

Q. 120. You refer to the fact that on the 29th of December, the situation report - which I don't think we've actually got produced, but you've actually seen it - recorded the situation was quiet, when there were five murders, and you say that should compare with what happened a month earlier, when one killing would have excited interest.

A. Yes. I think this is simply a comment, looking back on it, that what was regarded as almost commonplace by the end of December was very seriously more violent than the situation only about three weeks earlier.

Q. 121. Sainovic was seen in Pristina, but not to make contact with you or the KVM?

A. Yes. We got the -- no. I was told by Loncar that he often had to go and see Sainovic, and then within an hour I might see him again, he having seen Sainovic, and so it was clear that Sainovic was not in Belgrade but in Pristina. But Sainovic did not take the opportunity to ever go and see Walker or deal directly with the Kosovo Verification ²⁸⁵⁸ Mission. Loncar continued to be the intermediary.

Q. And then relations finally broke down --

A. Yes, indeed.

Q. -- Sainovic and Walker after Racak.

MR. NICE: Next Exhibit, please, tab 7.

Q. General, we're going to have to deal with exhibits, which will, of course, remain with the Chamber, to consider as swiftly as we can, because they can consume a lot of time.

This is a document that I think you hadn't seen until --

A. That is correct. This is the Serbian version of one of the meetings between General Loncar and myself in December, and I only saw it before Easter, but I do recall the meeting, and I think the significant aspect of this meeting is that it is faithfully recorded in that I was at this stage using the words "disproportionate use of force" when we were discussing the actions of the Yugoslav forces in the area west of Podujevo. I did this because there had already been instances of the FRY forces using heavy weapons against villages which were known to contain civilians, and there had been instances both of heavy mortars being used and of tank main armament, in other words, the sort of -- the 100-millimetre shell that a tank will fire through its main gun rather than simply using its machine-gun.

Q. We see your use of "disproportionate" five lines up from the bottom of the first page, but otherwise you think it's a faithful account --

A. Yes, indeed. ²⁸⁵⁹

Q. -- a faithful account of the meeting? Thank you. Was any permission given to you - I think this may be dealt with as well -- to visit the --

A. No.

Q. -- captives?

A. There were regular requests to have contact with the KLA who had been captured in the border ambush, the nine, asking if we could go and see them and check on their condition, and this was constantly denied.

Q. Paragraph 125. As things were deteriorating - and we're now in late December - in Podujevo, an elderly Serbian man had been shot, I think.

A. Yes. This led to a discussion in Walker's office between Loncar and Kotur at how the recovery of the body should take place. We were concerned about it because we knew that this was a largely Kosovar Albanian village, and therefore to send in a large force of police and army would aggravate the situation.

As I recall it, the Serb had been -- had been firing at Albanians himself and had then been shot in something that was quite local. And there was a plan that was described by Loncar, saying that about 15 vehicles of various sorts were going to be sent in in order to recover the body, and we were arguing that a smaller delegation would be less provocative and would allow the incident to be defused more rapidly. We thought we had reached an agreement that the recovery of this body, which was clearly important, would be carried out in a low-key way, and we were discussing things like what the exact number of vehicles was, ²⁸⁶⁰ which vehicles were going to lead, was it going to be ours or -- which we felt it should be.

And as we were going through this discussion, the telephone rang, and we were told that in fact this operation had gone ahead as originally conceived, that a large number of police with armoured vehicles had entered the village and a firefight had erupted in the village. So this caused Walker to lose patience with General Loncar and basically said what was the point of us trying to work out this sort of detail, to try and keep a lid on the violence when, in fact, operations were going on behind our back, in effect.

The meeting became ill-tempered. Kotur, in the course as we were all leaving, turned to me and said, "Police; you just can't trust them." And was saying, "Well, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing." Loncar was adamant that the police were using their own chain of command, but it was my impression that this was not the case.

Q. Because? And that would have required independent actions by the police --

A. Yes.

Q. -- commander in --

A. The point was that everything in this area was done with the -- in the presence of the VJ, who were manning the heavy weapons on the high ground. And therefore, to carry out an operation without the knowledge and cooperation of the people who were there to give you support from heavy weapons if you needed it would have been most unusual.

Q. You had five or six days of home leave between the 30th of ^{2861 BLANK PAGE 2862} December and the 31st -- and the 6th of January of 1999. Then we come, I think, to the next exhibit, please. Tab 8. OTP reference 1567. This is an OSCE daily report, summarising the activities of a day when you were still on leave, but, nevertheless, you can help us with it?

A. Yes.

Q. In particular, it's the Racak area that I think on page --

A. Yes. This report is the first indication in an OSCE report that the police were stepping up levels of activity in the Racak area, and it specifically mentions an observation point in the mental hospital which had excellent fields of view to the west towards Racak and the road that runs west from Stimlje through Suva Reka through the Dulje Heights, which was an area where clashes between the UCK and the security force -- the Yugoslav security forces took place.

Q. We haven't yet had any evidence, I think, about Racak. Yours will be the first.

A. That's correct.

Q. We're going to -- when we see the plans, either through you or through another witness, we'll find that the mental hospital is a significant feature on the road there, isn't it?

A. Yes. It is on the south-west outskirts of Stimlje. And so as you look west from the mental hospital, you can see over the open fields to the west, which -- and to the south, which takes you to Racak.

Q. Next exhibit, please, tab 9. Another OSCE report three days later. 6th of January, covering the 5th. ²⁸⁶³

A. Yes. This is the first report in which we saw a report of a policeman wearing what's described as a grey jumpsuit in the Decani area, and it is also the first -- so this is the first sighting of the special police unit which we believe carried out the action at Rogovo in late January.

It also, on Racak, describes the food situation there as being critical, and that was certainly reflected by the -- my discussions with the UNHCR who were moving food into that area at various times over this period.

Q. You just immediately look at page 2 of the document. Just -- that's the passage in the Pec district.

A. Yes.

Q. Alternative MUP clothing, one policeman seen wearing a grey jumpsuit is set out.

A. Yes.

Q. Thank you very much. Paragraph 137. You started to receive, on the 8th of January, reports about roadblocks.

A. Yes. This was the first action that involved Serbian civilians in the area south of Pristina, to the south and to the south-west, and these roadblocks of local vigilantes, many of them wearing masks over their faces, effectively closed off all communication between Pristina and any area to the south. So it actually cut all communications between Pristina and Skopje.

Q. The explanation paragraph, 138, by the "authorities," being what?

A. It was described to me as being a spontaneous civilian ²⁸⁶⁴ demonstration which was protesting against government inactivity against the KLA. The -- I went out to see what exactly was happening on the ground and found myself watching Serb paramilitaries driving around in Golfs with their black ski masks on, carrying Kalashnikovs and would move to an area and then harangue the local civilians to get them, to persuade them to erect a roadblock. And this organising of roadblocks was seen by me at a couple of locations.

The interesting thing was this was one of the few moments when civic disorder took place and the police were not present to deal with it, because quite -- there were normally enough police present to be able to deal with any civil disorder, but the police were noticeably absent at that stage.

Q. Paragraph 140. I don't think I need to trouble with that.

A. No.

Q. Paragraph 141. On the 8th of January, during a meeting with Loncar --

A. Yes. This was a meeting, one of the regular meetings I was having with Loncar, and in the course of it there was a telephone call which Loncar took and then -- and he said, "There has been an incident." And shortly after that, the police colonel, Colonel Mijatovic, entered the room and said that three policemen had been killed in the area of Dulje, which is in the high ground between Suva Reka and Stimlje, quite close to Stimlje, and that there had been a daytime ambush of a police patrol and that these three policemen had been killed in that ambush. This is significant because it was the biggest daytime attack by ²⁸⁶⁵ the Kosovo Liberation Army that we had witnessed upon the police and was clearly a serious escalation.

Q. Yes. Now, let's move to the next exhibit, which is tab 10, OTP reference 1580, a document again you hadn't seen until recently.

A. Yes. This is the description of that meeting. And the meeting -- as you say, I had not seen this document before the period just before Easter of this year, but the purpose of the meeting was a follow-up to the roadblocks established by the paramilitaries, and --

Q. Just for good order, we make sure we don't go too fast, if the first page of it is on the overhead projector, we can see just a little bit further down there's your name and the way you're being recorded as expressing concern over the roadblocks and so on. Can you carry on?

A. Yes. The other point that I brought up was that we were getting evidence from our people on the ground that the Yugoslav army was looting property when it was searching areas, and I was making the point that this was not acceptable and would -- would bring their forces into disrepute and that this should be investigated and proper instructions issued to make sure that didn't happen.

We were then talking about the number of VJ that were out of barracks, and my point there was that the original agreement that we were still, as far as we were concerned, adhering to was that three company positions were allowed but that the area south of Podujevo had now been established as a fourth location at which there was a strong VJ presence out of barracks.

Q. May we go to page 5 of the exhibit, please. This meeting, I ²⁸⁶⁶ think, was interrupted, wasn't it?

A. That's correct. And this is the moment which --

Q. Paragraph 6.

A. Yes, six. That's during the discussion. "During the discussion, Loncar was informed over the telephone that three policemen had been killed, two seriously injured, between Suva Reka and Stimlje. Loncar said with concern that we will use tanks and the army and not the police in our search for the killers in order to find them."

It is certainly of note that that was what was stated. I did not specifically react to that because he was clearly distressed, and I did not take that as -- as a declaration of intent but, rather, that -- because it was a very serious incident, that they would take all steps necessary to track down the killers. And that was, in my mind, a -- a natural reaction in the circumstances.

Q. Before we pass from this exhibit, just a little bit further down the page, I think, or thereabouts, you've had the experience, interesting or otherwise, of seeing, after the event, what other people were writing about you. You see their observation here that you were using the KVM in respect of promotion, something to that effect.

A. Yes.

Q. I don't think you need protest too much about any of that as a Major General at the time but to just tell us what was his position.

A. Well, I think my -- my reaction to this was to be somewhat upset, having actually been in the Balkans for 22 of the 28 months preceding, since October 1996. I felt that I was there because the OSCE knew me and ²⁸⁶⁷ trusted me as being someone who was quite good at dealing with civilian organisations. I did feel that at the time I was sensitive to the -- the local situation, and I felt that we should be taking every measure possible to prevent the situation from spiralling upward and out of control, and this was really why I had -- I had been prepared to go and join this mission at six hours' notice, at a time when I thought I was about to go to a more normal teaching job. So it wasn't how I saw it.

Q. Well, we needn't cover that. Paragraph 143, and the next exhibit, which is tab 11, OTP reference 2794. It is a press release that was put out, condemning that ceasefire breach.

A. Yes. This is important, because it was often alleged that we did not condemn the actions of the insurgents when they -- when they carried out actions but we only condemned the actions of the Yugoslav forces. And I think this is quite clear as stating it strongly condemns an unacceptable breach of the ceasefire in that the three police were killed. Further down: "The KVM considers that such terrorist attacks and breaches of ceasefire undermine attempts to reach a political solution of the conflict."

So I think this was a very clear statement which was in no way sympathetic to the insurgents.

Q. Deal very briefly, in summary, negotiations, paragraph 144, over the VJ prisoners over the next five days.

A. Yes. The --

Q. And then -- again, I don't think we need the detail of that.

A. I think the point here was that we invested a lot of effort into ²⁸⁶⁸ getting the -- securing the release of the eight VJ soldiers who were held prisoner by the Kosovo Liberation Army. There were many moments when we thought that the army and police would storm the position. We literally interposed ourselves between the two sides and attempted to talk the situation down. I personally slept on the floor of my office for three nights in order to be there if telephone messages were received, and eventually, as a result of extensive negotiations, the release of those eight soldiers was -- was secured, and we were able to bring them off the mountain and hand them over to their families.

Q. Next exhibit, please, tab 12, OTP reference 1582. Just to deal with the reporting structure, there were daily reports and there were also summarising periodic reports. Would that be right?

A. Yes, that's correct. This periodic report is really dealing with a specific highlight describing firstly the meeting between Principal Deputy Head of Mission Keller, who was the French Deputy Head of Mission, to Walker, and Deputy Prime Minister Sainovic in which the strong day-to-day control that Sainovic appears to have exercised comes out, I think.

We also, in this, describe the state of VJ forces out of the barracks, which we equated to the equivalent of about six companies, remembering still that the agreement called for only three.

Q. Yes. Can we just find that in the document, please.

A. Yes. If we go to page -- paragraph 4 --

Q. Thank you. Yes.

A. -- second subparagraph, paragraph 4, states that KVM patrols ²⁸⁶⁹ report a battalion-sized VJ deployment in the area of Podujevo. It is that battalion-sized deployment by which we would mean about three companies, to be in addition to the three that were authorised. So those three plus the original three make the six that I referred to.

Q. Then the last page of the document, in case people want to track this at any time, records the KVM force at 682 by this time.

A. Yes.

Q. 149 deals with the exchange of the eight VJ for nine KLA.

A. Yes. And at that point, the tension certainly did reduce and there were the beginnings of indications that the VJ and MUP forces were starting to return to barracks, particularly in the area around Mitrovica. So at the time, this was seen as an encouraging sign and was certainly the result of a lot of hard negotiation on the ground.

Q. However, you received a report which was perhaps less encouraging or more discouraging.

A. Yes. This was a telephone call from the American military attache in Belgrade, who reported that he had observed an armoured column on its way on the main Belgrade-to-Nis road, which by this stage had passed Nis and by this stage was within 20 miles of Kosovo. Our concern - because this was when we were in the middle of attempting to get the eight VJ soldiers off the top of a hill where the KLA were holding them - was that this was going to seriously complicate the situation if extra forces started to appear from outside. And I brought this up with General Loncar and was assured by him that they were not going to cross into Kosovo. And I said, "Fine, but you're really not sending the right message in ²⁸⁷⁰ deploying these sort of units so close to Kosovo when we are trying to bring this situation to a negotiated solution."

Q. Next exhibit - but we won't be looking, I think, at any part of it particularly - is an eight-page document, tab 13, OTP reference 2795. This is a report on the ambush and subsequent hostage-taking incident of the 8th and 9th of January. It gives a chronology of the capture and negotiation surrounding the release of the eight VJ soldiers, which we've taken this morning in summary because we want to deal with it in that way. This report was prepared by whom, General?

A. It was prepared by one of the liaison officers who worked directly for me, and was prepared on my instruction because it was important that we just reminded ourselves of the chronology of this thing, because by this stage, we were really all quite tired and there was a danger that we were going to forget where we were, quite frankly. And so -- yes.

Q. If we need to look for detail of that exchange, we can probably find it in this document.

A. I remember using this at the time as my aide-memoire, and it was a document that was constantly updated, and this is the final version of it, but it certainly reflects how we felt at the time on the ground.

Q. Exhibit tab 14, a daily report this time for the 11th of January but covering the 10th.

A. Yes. This --

Q. Now, the passage we particularly want to look at relates to the VJ MUP full-scale combat potential. Can you just take us to that, if you can find it. Certainly it's covered on the assessment in the first -- ²⁸⁷¹

A. Yes. I think it must be the assessment. Let me just ...

Q. We see on the first page: "Tensions remain high in the Stimlje area as a result of the two ambushes."

A. Yes. Sorry. I've got it now. "Tensions remain high in the Stimlje area as a result of the two ambushes against MUP patrols within the last three days. Strong VJ and MUP forces remain in the area. A report of increased VJ logistical support moving into the area indicates that the VJ are 'repaired' --" by which I think it means "prepared" "-- to remain deployed for an extended period."

And then Pec is different.

Q. Right. That was --

A. The report also describes places where the KVM, in trying to get to investigate events, was having its freedom of movement beginning to be curtailed. And again, this is one of the early indications of it.

Q. Next exhibit, please. Tab 15, OTP reference 1584. A short addendum to the daily update.

A. Yes. This was an irregular report put out if there was a feeling that we needed to just get everybody aware of an increase or a change in the security situation, and so given that the VJ and the MUP were increasing their activity, this was put out to make sure everybody was aware of it.

Q. Tab 16 deals with - OTP reference 1586 - deals with a meeting between yourself and General Loncar on the 11th of January.

A. Yes. Again, this is one I did not see until March of this year, ²⁸⁷² but this was our last meeting in the five-day process of getting the eight soldiers off the top of the hill. And again, reference is made to everything being done at the behest of Deputy Prime Minister Sainovic.

Q. That's on page 2, I think you'll find, and also 3. Is that correct?

A. Yes, that is. We wanted to resolve the problem in a peaceful manner, in a manner agreed upon in yesterday's discussions between Vice Premier Sainovic and Keller and Hill, Hill being the American ambassador.

Q. Thank you. Exhibit tab 17, a report for the period covered by the 12th of January in our report from the OSCE again.

A. And the point of note here is the KVM patrols from Pristina and Prizren confirm the increase of VJ activity in the Stimlje area. Movement of armoured vehicles, including tanks, have been observed.

Q. Page 2, paragraph 4. So this is all in the Racak build-up, really, isn't it?

A. That is correct, yes.

Q. Can you recall the state of concern or anxiety by OSCE at that time?

A. Yes. At this point, we were covering in some strength the area in the west, the three counties in Kosovo in the west, which were the areas where the fighting had been worst in the summer. We were not in great strength in the rest of Kosovo, in the east of Kosovo, because that was not an area where there had been big problems or a very large KLA presence. And so as we built up, we were putting down a field presence in the areas in order of priority. ²⁸⁷³ The area of Racak and Stimlje were not actually yet in an area where we had got very substantial coverage. As events deteriorated in that area, we put more people into the area, but it was happening in an area where our coverage was less good than it was in the west, in the Pec and Decani area, where the problems had been worst, and therefore, where we had gone to in greater strength most early.

Q. The next exhibit is tab 18. This is another meeting, this time -- sorry. It's a meeting evidenced by the Serbs and not seen by you until very recently.

A. That is correct, and this again simply describes the situation as it was seen by another member of the Kosovo Verification Mission on the 11th of January.

Q. Because although you were present at this meeting --

A. No, I wasn't.

Q. No, you weren't present. This is Nikolaev.

A. Yes, correct. I think it's useful really only in describing the situation as seen by others than myself on the 11th of January.

Q. Consistent or inconsistent with your own --

A. It's entirely consistent.

Q. It's available for that purpose of checking, then, if required. Paragraph 160. The nine KLA prisoners were, I think, exposed to a visit by your deputy or one of your liaison officers, Ciaglinski?

A. Yes, that's correct.

Q. And although we may hear from Mr. Ciaglinski himself, reported back to you was what? ²⁸⁷⁴

A. This referred to the nine KLA who had been taken prisoner in December in the border ambush, and in the course of this, in January, we were told that they could now be seen and identified and spoken to, provided it was done by someone who was entirely discreet, and that was why I sent Richard Ciaglinski, who is someone with whom I dealt with daily.

Ciaglinski travelled immediately to Nis and saw the nine prisoners. They stated - and this confirmed what we had learned up until then - that they had been part of a resupply column of the KLA that was moving supplies from Albania into Kosovo. They stated that they had been recruited quite reluctantly and had gone to Albania and been given no more than two days' training before they were sent on the supply mission. They had been armed but had not had very much training on how to use their weapons, so that when they walked into the ambush in the middle of the night, they simply dropped their weapons and ran. The conversations that Ciaglinski had with them, which were consistent, said that about 90 had run away and that about 40 had been killed or captured, and Ciaglinski had revisited the prisoners at a later date, and of course these were eventually handed over in a response to the handing over of the eight VJ soldiers subsequently.

Q. And indeed after Racak, as it happened?

A. Yes. It occurred to me that I was surprised that there had not been media use made of the fact that these KLA prisoners were actually extremely reluctant and had been -- had not been described as such, because, in my view, it would have very substantially damaged the ²⁸⁷⁵ Albanian -- the KLA image at the time. But the media at the time, I'm sure you can recall, was that the VJ forces were fighting an implacable enemy rather than these groups of scared boys.

Q. Tab 19, please, the OSCE report for the 13th of January. And we're interested in seeing how things were developing in the Racak area.

A. In Stimlje, yes.

Q. It's on the second page, I think.

A. Yes. I'm having difficulty.

Q. Humanitarian activity, second paragraph.

A. Yes. Yes, I've got it.

Q. It's now being reported --

A. Yes. Pristina Regional Centre visited villages in the Stimlje area following reports that residents had left and taken to the hills. Verifiers found 50 people in Belince, 350 in Racak, and 680 in Malpolje, all of which are in the area around Stimlje.

Q. Did that cause any concern to the OSCE, to have this number of people taking to the hills, or was this standard behaviour of --

A. It was quite normal by this stage that when there was major activity by the Yugoslav forces, that the residents would move out of the area and be given shelter by neighbouring villages. And so this had happened before - it had happened in the summer - and was relatively commonplace. It obviously was of concern because we were talking all the time to the UNHCR, passing this sort of thing on so that they could be helped in providing food relief and that sort of thing.

Q. On the same page, second line of "Security Situation," we can see ²⁸⁷⁶ a reference to a tank firing 50 to 60 main armament rounds. Again, is that a concerning manner or par for the course?

A. Yes. Well, a tank carries about 40 to 50 rounds in its turret, and so if tanks are firing 50 to 60 rounds, it means that they are doing more than simply responding to a situation with an aimed shot. So again, this indicates to me a very disproportionate response to small-arms fire. Again, one could argue that if you saw exactly where the person was firing at you from and you had a tank available, you might fire one round at that position, but to fire the entire contents of your turret in that direction is very, very disproportionate and would not be allowed in any normal security situation that I'm aware of.

Q. Thank you. Paragraphs 165 and 166. You went, on the 13th of January, to a KLA camp in Stari Trg, waiting for Walker, and held a media conference --

A. This was in connection with the release of the eight VJ soldiers and really just describes the mechanism by which we were in one place and Walker was in another, with everybody in telephone contact with one another, while the release of the eight VJ soldiers was finalised.

Q. As a reflection of your approach, when the VJ -- the KLA woman, if she was a spokesman or other official, attempted to describe the men as prisoners of war and saying they had been treated correctly, you used different terminology, saying that they were soldiers who had been detained?

A. Yes. I didn't want to find myself being quoted as agreeing that these were prisoners of war, because that would certainly have given a ²⁸⁷⁷ flavour to the conflict that I didn't think was at that stage justified, and so I only referred to them as soldiers who had been detained or held against their will.

Q. And at paragraph 167, you were able to see that when the soldiers were released, they appeared to have been assaulted, with bruises and black eyes showing --

A. Yes.

Q. -- terrified of their situation?

A. They were certainly very frightened, and it was only when we were able to indicate to them that we were -- you know, we were there to take them back that they began to realise that they were not going to get harmed in any way.

Q. Very well. Exhibit 20 -- tab 20. I beg your pardon. A substantial OSCE report, of which probably one of the lines we want is unhappily copied in a fold in the paper, but I think you've been able to work out what you think it says in context.

A. Well, the summary starts: "It was --" I think: "It was broadly --" or no. I think it's: " ... generally a quiet day."

Q. Or evenly "really," I suppose.

A. Yes. "... though there has been much VJ influence on our area of operations because of the Serbian New Year celebrations," I think it is. But I think to see the date on that, which is the 14th of January, and note that we were thinking it was a quiet day, I think indicates that there was not a sort of constant crescendo in the Stimlje and Racak area. Things were happening all over the place that we were responding to, of ^{2878 BLANK PAGE 2879} which events in Stimlje and Racak were part of, but they were certainly not seen as the main focus of our activity at that stage.

Q. 169 and 170 we can perhaps deal with this way: that on the 15th of January, there was a report brought to you in the course of a meeting, about bad things happening in Stimlje. You sent Maisonneuve to investigate and received a report that a KVM member had been wounded in the Decani area, where his vehicle had been fired upon, so you had to go and deal with that as an emergency.

A. Yes. These were two completely separate incidents, one in the Stimlje area and the other much closer to where we were in Pec, in Decani. And at the time I sent Maisonneuve, whose area Stimlje was not, but it was just over from his area, and so he knew it quite well. So I told him to go and see what was going on in Stimlje, and I went and attempted to sort out the aftermath of having two of our people wounded in Decani.

Q. Exhibit 21, please. Again, this is a one-page document being an OSCE press release dealing with the deliberate shooting at your vehicles at Decani on the 15th of January and setting out how it was that the KLA forces in the area had acknowledged that it was their forces that were responsible for the shooting and the wounding and that it was due to a misunderstanding.

A. Yes. This came out sometime later, as you see from the date, 21st of January. At the time that we had our two people wounded, it was not clear who had perpetrated it, and I was very suspicious of everybody at this stage and so was -- was quite convinced it could have been either -- ²⁸⁸⁰ either of the parties in this particular dispute. As a result of a lot of discussion with the Kosovo Liberation Army, they eventually admitted that it was their people, and eventually we then said, "Well, you should admit it publicly," and we gave them a day in which we wanted them to publicly state it, and they did not feel able to do that. And so at that point, we -- we issued a statement in which we said that this had happened, and it was the Kosovo Liberation Army were responsible for it, but it took us five days to track that one down. And of course, while all this was going on, other things were happening elsewhere.

Q. All right. 172: On the 15th of January, Ciaglinski and others were having discussion with the MUP in the Decani area.

A. Yes. This was -- this is the detail of the shooting and the wounding of the two verifiers, and I think this -- I think I've covered this in broad detail.

Q. And 173, we come to Racak itself.

A. Yes.

Q. What happened on the 15th of January was that it appears there was an offensive in the village, and according to you, information coming to you, VJ tanks and Pragas were sighted on the hills around the village.

A. Yes. This was an operation that started in the morning of the 15th and involved firing not only into Racak but into several other villages in the area and consisted at first of tanks and Pragas, which are anti-aircraft artillery which was used in -- heavy anti-aircraft cannon which were used in a ground role and were very rapid firing, being used to ²⁸⁸¹ fire at Racak and other villages in the area, and it appeared to those who were around and who heard it described that the VJ were firing from the hills, and the police, the MUP, were then going in on foot on the ground. And you can only do this if -- if the people who are going forward are confident that the people who are doing the covering fire are fully aware of your actions on the ground. It does require a very high degree of coordination.

Q. Depending on how time goes, I may ask you to look in due course at a large special map that has been prepared. It may not be a map as much of a photograph, I think, but for the time being, can we look, to deal with things swiftly, at Exhibit 22. Really it's the top left-hand bit of it we need trouble ourselves with, having seen its comparative position in relation to Urosevac. And we can see --

A. That's Urosevac. That is Stimlje. You can see the two roads joining at Stimlje and then the road going west into the Dulje Heights and on to Suva Reka. The village of Racak is here to the south-west, and the offensive was taking place with the VJ tanks and Pragas firing at this string of villages along the west -- the eastern edge of the high ground that goes away to the west.

So the VJ were -- positions were broadly parallel to the main road to the north, and the villages were in a line really north-west to south-east along the edge of the high ground.

Q. Well, we -- as I say, we may be able to help the Chamber even today with larger scale maps, but we must press on. Having got that general account, reported back to you by ²⁸⁸² Maisonneuve - paragraph 175 - that on his arrival at Racak, he noticed what?

A. Yes. Maisonneuve drove straight to Racak, which took him, I suppose, just over an hour from -- from leaving me, and when he got there at the end of the afternoon, he saw that the VJ were withdrawing from the area. So he went into the village, and there he was advised by the villagers that there had been some deaths but it was not specified how many, but it wasn't said that there were a lot, that some people had been arrested and there were a number of wounded people. At that point, he asked what could be done to help the people and was told that it was the wounded who needed looking after, and that was what he got on with as night fell and the light went.

Q. Now, the report of people being arrested, which was in due course to be -- shown to be in complete account of what happened, was that an unusual event?

A. It was not unusual at the time. We on various occasions heard of people being arrested, detained, questioned, and then they would turn up later, having been interrogated to quite a degree in -- in security forces' custody, considerably bruised but certainly alive. So the problem, as he saw it, as he arrived on the Friday evening, was one of wounded people rather than anything else.

Q. This we -- or part of this we find reflected, I think, in the next exhibit, which we can look at briefly, tab 23, the OSCE's report of the 15th of January. It deals with the arrested men, I think, or the alleged arrested men. ²⁸⁸³

A. Yes. Sorry, I'm -- yes. There we are. Right. I've --

Q. On page 2, I think.

A. On page 2, about halfway down, in the middle of the small paragraph, it says that there were five injured, that a female and a young boy were transferred to Stimlje hospital. The KLA spokesman was asked what the OSCE could help to do most and his firm assurance was that they needed -- they needed to know that they could bring in the women and children from the hills, where they had taken refuge, without further VJ attacks that night, and then later that three other wounded civilians were evacuated.

If you go back to the front page of this document, you can see the head of RC Prizren comment, that is comment of Maisonneuve, that, "The incident in Stimlje detailed below is a clear breach of the agreement as per our assessment." And that was a very strong statement to come from a Regional Centre head, because I've already mentioned that words of "compliance" and "non-compliance" were reserved very much for the Head of Mission.

Q. The same document happens to record the total number of KVM at the time. I think it's probably on the last page, is it?

A. Yes. It's also of note that one of the patrols on the ground took a statement from a villager who gave him a list of 21 men who had been detained by the MUP and taken to Urosevac gaol.

Would you like me to find that?

Q. Yes, please. Well, not necessarily. It's a repeat, isn't it in?

A. Yes, it is. ²⁸⁸⁴

Q. Then don't bother.

A. Right.

Q. It can be found, if necessary. But just as a matter of interest, against the 2.000 mandated KVM manpower force, by this time I think we can work out it's about 854 is the number you derive as being there at the time?

A. Sorry, can I see that again?

Q. On the last page.

A. There was always two figures. Yes. One was -- no, it's the one before. That's personnel status. No. That's -- no, that's Regional Centre Prizren. That's Regional Centre Prizren personnel, which is 285, rather than the total strength of the mission.

Q. It may be in here somewhere, but perhaps you can help us. Were you remotely up to full strength by that time?

A. Sorry, I think that is -- I think what we've got is -- you're referring to the next document in which is the report from Pristina, from the --

Q. I'm sorry. Yes.

A. -- the head of the OSCE, in which we stated ourselves as being 854 strong at that moment. Yes, you're correct.

Q. The -- you've referred to the strength of opinion expressed in these reports. Becoming concerned at what you were learning about?

A. At this stage, it was serious, but it was not the most serious thing that we felt we had faced, and so I think that was reflected in the reports that were put together overnight. ²⁸⁸⁵

Q. So we come to Exhibit 24, OTP reference 1598.

A. And this is the report that would have been compiled late on the Friday evening, after the reports from the Regional Centres had been received, and that would be sometime after 9.00 at night, and then we would send it up to Vienna in the early hours of the morning. And so this is really our perception around about midnight in Pristina. And it is, I think, worthy of note that we were trying to stick to the facts that we knew rather than -- rather than speculate, because we often found that the first report could be exaggerated. So it was better only to stick to what you really knew.

Q. So on page 2, paragraph 4, where you deal with what's coming out of Racak, it says, "Verifiers saw," third line --

A. Yes.

Q. -- "one dead Albanian civilian and five injured civilians."

A. Yes. "The KVM also received unconfirmed reports of other deaths in the area. Residents claim that the men had been segregated from the women and -- from the women and children and that 20 males had been arrested. This remains unconfirmed."

So there was, as I say, great stress in sticking to what we really knew.

Q. Yes.

A. But you can see further down that we witnessed VJ tanks and armoured vehicles firing directly into houses near Malpolje and Petrova, again villages in the area.

Q. This document - my mistake - sets out your international staff -- ²⁸⁸⁶

A. Yes.

Q. -- of 854 against the mandated 2.000.

A. Yes. And that really sort of, I think, indicates that there we were, three months into a 12-month mission, and we were still not yet at half of our mandated strength.

Q. And since your evidence is, we hope, going to give an account of the developing picture, can we now look at another document of the same --

JUDGE MAY: I wonder if that would be a convenient moment.

MR. NICE: Yes.

JUDGE MAY: We will adjourn now. Would you be back, please, General, at half past two. Thank you.

--- Luncheon recess taken at 1.00 p.m. ²⁸⁸⁷

--- On resuming at 2.31 p.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Nice.

MR. NICE:

Q. General, Exhibit tab -- start again. Tab 25, OTP reference 1602. Now, this is, I think, an example of an OSCE morning situation brief; is that correct?

A. That is correct. This is the brief that was given at 9.00 to the Head of Mission on the morning of Saturday, the 16th of January. So this is what we were -- what we had distilled as the mission's official view of the situation as at the start of that Saturday morning. It's perhaps worthy of note that there's more than one entry on this, and so it was seen as being the morning after a difficult day, when a number of things were going on, all of which were quite important. It was not at this stage seen that Racak was by far the most important event going on.

Q. Very well. Now, just look at the format of it. It comes in several pages. You have the map with the identified problem areas, significant events, as reported on a few following pages.

A. And then on each page afterwards, the particular serial of the box on the main map, there is the text of the words that we used for briefing. If we go to number 5, you can see the description that was used at the time that the attack had started in the vicinity of Stimlje at approximately 7.00.

"Racak and three other villages came under attack. The fighting and shelling were heavy throughout the day, and this attack follows the build-up in the area which occurred last week, after the KLA ambushed a ²⁸⁸⁸ MUP patrol. It's expected this battle will continue tomorrow. KVM patrols are for the most part being denied access to the battle area."

Q. There's also a reference to Racak on number 4, Prizren. There's reference to the battle in the area of Stimlje.

A. Correct. Correct.

Q. This was to do with the rotation of police, isn't it?

A. Yes. The concern there was whether or not police were being moved to reinforce in the Stimlje area or whether this was a normal changeover of people, because the police stations tended to be manned on a continuous basis by the same crew for a number of days and then they would be rotated; they would be changed with another lot who would come in and the original ones would go off for a rest. So that's the point behind that entry.

Q. Thank you. And I think you had a conversation --

A. Yes. Late on the Friday night, I was attempting to phone General Loncar, couldn't get him, and got Colonel Kotur instead.

Q. Tab 26. Is this the one?

A. Yes. And in this -- in the middle of a note of -- and I think this is a -- I know this is a record of what I said that was taken down by one of the people with me at the time, saying:

"The second area I'm concerned about is Stimlje. We're hearing alarming reports of anti-aircraft artillery being used in the ground role and being directed into villages. This is not police action, as we understand it. This is very close to the sort of action that was so bad in the summer." That's referring to 1998. "This sort of action must ²⁸⁸⁹ cease immediately. You are to pass this message from me to the top of your chain of command. The operations in these areas must be ordered to cease immediately. Firing anti-aircraft weapons into villages with women and children in them is not police action. This must be ordered to stop. Ambassador Walker will be contacting your superiors tomorrow, after I have briefed him on this conversation that I am having with you now at 2320, on the 15th of January."

THE INTERPRETER: Could the witness please slow down when reading. Thank you.

A. -- these things as they were beginning to unfold might well need to be officially recorded.

JUDGE MAY: General, you're being asked to slow down when reading.

MR. NICE:

Q. What we've seen over the recent bits of evidence and exhibits, that your mission was cautious in its approach, mindful of its experience that reports were sometimes initially worse than reality, even if this was one which was going to turn out to be the reverse.

A. Correct. We were, I think, very -- very conscious that you can sometimes make a situation worse by overreacting to -- to an initial -- an initial report. And there had been instances of that certainly in December of 1998 when alarming reports came in which, upon investigation, were less awful than the first report. And we had spent a lot of time stressing to our people on the ground to report the facts and only what they saw. And if someone rushed up to them and said, "Something awful has ²⁸⁹⁰ happened," to make sure that they were reporting it as something that had been told them and distinguish between that and what they had seen.

Q. Let's move on. Paragraph 180. On the 16th of January, were you getting reports of more casualties?

A. Yes. The reports started to come in as we -- as we started the day on the 16th, that the situation at Racak was indeed worse than we had first thought. Each of these reports on its own was not in itself an immediate trigger to action, but the fact that they were coming in from so many different sources and appeared to be independent was clearly very worrying. And simultaneously, the situation over in the west at Decani was also hotting up, was also becoming a problem again, and exchanges of fire were being reported. And so we appeared to have two separate bad situations at the beginning of the day.

Q. Now, I'm going to ask you to deal with paragraph 181, but if you can get the heart of it out quite shortly. This is 11.15 in the morning of the 16th, and you have a conversation with Ciaglinski and Loncar.

A. Yes.

Q. The topic is Decani, Racak, and Podujevo.

A. At this time, I walked over to General Loncar's office with Richard Ciaglinski, and I had, in setting up the meeting, indicated that I wanted to talk about the three issues. And literally as we were starting to walk out of our building on the walk across to General Loncar's building, we were getting more and more reports that indicated that it was Racak that was the really big problem.

I was still concerned about Decani, because it was there that we ²⁸⁹¹ had had our two people wounded, and I was of the opinion at that stage that these people had been wounded by the -- by the Serbian police and that this had been an attempt to -- to wrongly implicate the KLA. This was a wrong view, as we eventually found out, but that was my view at the time.

Q. You challenged Loncar, and that was what? With the Decani matter rather than with anything else?

A. No. We started off on Decani, but we quite quickly moved on to Racak. As I indicated, we had -- we had started to get these extra reports in, and so I said, "I need to talk about what is going on at Racak," and he assumed an air of innocence and was extremely cool in the way he dealt with this, which was not the normal way he dealt with things.

Q. You, I think, said to him or he read your comments as allegations of knowledge and he said, "Who, us? No way."

A. Yes, or similar words.

Q. To which you replied?

A. To which I replied, "Look, this sort of behaviour is the way that people end up in The Hague." He was quite angry and said, "How dare you. How dare you say that to me." And I said, "Look, you know, this is getting really serious, and this is the way it is going. You need to understand this."

Q. So let's look at tab 27. OSCE report. And it's -- deals with Decani.

A. Yes.

Q. It deals with a meeting involving Loncar and yourself? ²⁸⁹²

A. If we go down to Stimlje, at paragraph 4 --

Q. There it sets out how you explain --

A. Yes.

Q. -- how you and Walker were going to investigate and that, "The next stop for your people will be in The Hague."

A. Yes. I stated that reports had been received from the villages of the killings of, and at this stage I described it as women, children, and old men. I said on behalf of Walker, because Walker had made it clear that I was to adopt an extremely uncompromising attitude in this matter, I said that he and I were going down to look at this personally, and again this is recorded as, "The next step for your people will be The Hague." If those are not the words, they're very close to the words.

Q. And we --

A. And over the page, the top of the page --

Q. Yes. We can read it, actually, fairly swiftly. You said that -- he said --

A. Loncar said that we shouldn't refer to regular police work as provocative. I came back and said that, "This is not regular police work, firing anti-aircraft cannon into villages." And -- and he then stated that what had happened at Decani when we'd got our guys or when our guys had been wounded was as a result of ourselves setting it up, to which I responded quite vigorously. And we then discussed the various versions of the -- of the events. At this --

Q. You indicated at paragraph 7 that you were going to Stimlje.

A. Yes. ²⁸⁹³

Q. You had verified that there was no more -- there was more provocative action in Decani, which was stopped, that the situation wasn't helped by force around Podujevo, and you reminded the general of the statement he made that if the VJ prisoners were released, the troops would return to barracks. The VJ prisoners had, of course, now been released, and they hadn't gone back to barracks.

A. Yes. That was the firm impression we had got at the end of the situation, which was only a couple of days earlier where we had got the people off the top of the mountain, that this was then going to be allowed to calm down and that troops would be returned to barracks. And obviously this had not happened in that on the Friday there had been this action in the Stimlje-Racak area. And so again I went through the formula of how many forces were allowed out of barracks and how many were out of barracks.

Q. Yes. We're going to have to move fairly swiftly, General. I think that you also dealt with the disproportionality and inappropriateness --

A. Yes.

Q. -- of using anti-aircraft cannon in an internal security situation.

So if we just look at the other side -- not the other side, because they weren't another side, but the other side of this meeting's record of it. It's tab 28, a document you've only seen very recently.

A. Yes.

Q. Your view, I think, expressed in paragraph 183, is that it mixes ²⁸⁹⁴ up events of Decani with those of Stimlje and Racak.

A. Yes. I believe that this happened because the person who was acting as the secretary and signs the document is not the guy who normally did it, and I'm pretty sure that the normal supporting people who General Loncar normally had were not all there at this meeting, because this meeting was called at short notice, was not a pre-arranged meeting in the normal course of events, and so there's evidence of mix-up in this.

Q. At the foot of the first page and beginning of the second, we can see you adopting a harsh approach, according to Loncar's notetaker: "Attempting to make points he wished to make to General Loncar, one by one, as urgently as possible, endeavouring in this manner to prevent our side from setting out our own arguments and facts." Just pausing there for a minute, of course in looking at the other side of the meeting's records and looking at the VJ's record of events, we'll be interested to see if there is, in fact, any contemporaneous account of what happened at Racak.

A. Yes. As I recall it, I don't think there is a lot.

Q. So they go on in their record to note that: "With respect to the note which General Loncar sent to Walker, asking the KVM members to secure the return of weapons," and so on, "General Drewienkiewicz said he had no intention of exposing the lives of his verifiers to danger."

And then a demand that army members be withdrawn from Podujevo. Then a demand that operations about Decani be halted. Then a reference to the two injured or wounded KVM members, you saying you didn't know who the ^{2895 BLANK PAGE 2896} perpetrator was. Then focusing on the operation in the area of Stimlje. It records your information that civilians, including children, women, and the elderly, had been killed, and saying that you were going to go to the scene, as indeed you were. And then at the next page, saying that it would be bad for your side.

A. Yes, indeed.

Q. A summary of Loncar's pos