STEVANOVIC DAY 11: SKORPIONS, RACAK, AND THE CORPSES FROM IZBICA
www.slobodan-milosevic.org – June 6, 2005

Written by: Andy Wilcoxson

The marathon testimony of Gen. Obrad Stevanovic entered its 11th day as the trial of Slobodan Milosevic resumed on Monday.

Stevanovic, who is Serbia’s former Assistant Interior Minister, testified for almost seven days in chief, and has been cross-examined by the prosecutor Geoffrey Nice for more than four days now.

Over the course of the cross-examination, a videotape was played depicting the killing of six men who Mr. Nice claims are Muslims from Srebrenica. Mr. Nice claims that the men carrying out the executions were members of a group known as the Skorpions.

In spite of massive evidence to the contrary, Mr. Nice persisted in the lie that the Skorpions were a unit of the Interior Ministry of Serbia at the time of the killings.

Gen. Stevanovic strongly denied that the Skorpions were a unit of the Serbian Interior Ministry. The testimonies of prosecution witnesses, such as Milan Milanovic, corroborate Stevanovic’s claim that the Skorpions were not a unit of the Serbian Interior Ministry. The Skorpions are not even from Serbia; they’re all men from Eastern Slavonia.

Stevanovic says that the Skorpions were never a unit of the Serbian Interior Ministry, although he does claim that several members of the Skorpions served as volunteers in a reserve unit of the SAJ during the 1999 NATO bombing. Stevanovic denied that the Skorpions had been accepted by the SAJ as a whole unit.

Stevanovic also pointed out that the SAJ unit that some members of the Skorpions belonged to was expelled from Kosovo after two of its members were implicated in the massacre of 19 Albanian civilians in Podujevo.

In an apparent effort to mislead the court and the public, Mr. Nice misrepresented the evidence of Milan Milanovic. Mr. Nice wrongly claimed that Milanovic had testified that General Djordjevic invited the Skorpions back to Kosovo after initially expelling them.

Milanovic never said any such thing. Milanovic said that the Skorpions were expelled by Djordjevic and that only Slobodan Medic came back. He certainly did not say that Djordjevic invited the Skorpions, or even Medic, to return. All he said was that Medic went back after the Skorpions were expelled, not that anybody invited him back, or that anybody other than Medic went back.

The prosecutor continued his cross-examination asking Gen. Stevanovic questions about Racak. Mr. Nice claimed that the fact that police found no weapons on the bodies in Racak meant that they could not have died in combat.

Stevanovic had to repeat, until he was blue in the face, that the police did not have access to the bodies until after the villagers moved them to the mosque. There was never a chance to directly investigate the actual scene to see if weapons there. All the police could do was go by the fact that somebody was shooting at them, that they shot back, and that gunpowder was on the hands of these corpses.

Mr. Nice wasted a lot of time asking the witness questions that he knew could not be answered. For example, he showed the witness a paper that Natasa Kandic wrote, and then asked him to find the police report proving that an investigation had been conducted regarding the crime alleged by Ms. Kandic.

It is impossible that anybody could know about each and every police report filed at the Serbian Interior Ministry. The witness is the former assistant interior minister; he’s not Rainman.

Mr. Nice did bring-up something interesting regarding the transport of bodies from Izbica to graves in central Serbia. One of the corpses exhumed at Izbica was found at Petrovo Selo. The Serbian authorities have a written record of exhuming the corpse in order to perform a post mortem; they even issued a death certificate, all of this information is in the public record.

The fact that the body of this person was taken to Petrovo Selo and re-buried is really incredible. There is no reason on Earth for Serbia to hide the body after they performed an autopsy, took pictures of the corpse, and issued a death certificate, and then put all of the information in the public records for anybody to find it.

There can’t be any motive to hide a body after you put it in the public record that the person was killed. This example shows that the motive to bury bodies in central Serbia was to incriminate Serbia, not to hide evidence of killings.

Mr. Nice will continue with the cross-examination when Gen. Stevanovic continues his testimony tomorrow.

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