GEN. DELIC CONTINUES TO DESTROY THE PROSECUTION CASE
www.slobodan-milosevic.org - July 5, 2005

Written by: Andy Wilcoxson

The trial of Slobodan Milosevic resumed on Tuesday with the continued testimony of Gen. Bozidar Delic. Delic is the former commander of the 549th Motorized Brigade of the Yugoslav Army (VJ) based in Prizren. The 549th was responsible for the southern part of Kosovo along the Macedonian and Albanian border.

Gen. Delic is testifying about the activities of the Yugoslav Army in Kosovo. He is testifying on the basis of his own experience - what he personally saw in his unit's area of responsibility, and he is testifying on the basis of reports that he received from VJ field commanders throughout Kosovo. All told he has brought more than 600 documents and videotapes to corroborate his testimony.

Over the past six days of Gen. Delic's testimony Slobodan Milosevic has taken him through the Kosovo indictment, and the testimony of prosecution witnesses, on a detailed point by point basis.

Today, for example, Delic gave evidence about the activities of the Yugoslav Army in the village of Jeskovo. The prosecution claims that VJ troops, led by Gen. Delic, massacred civilians in Jeskovo. Two prosecution witnesses, secret witness "K32" and secret witness "K41" testified that Yugoslav Army troops massacred civilians, that there was no KLA in the village, and that Delic gave orders to "leave no one alive."

Delic knew who K32 and K41 were. He testified that K32 was a criminal who was hiding out at K41's house. He theorized that K32 testified so that the tribunal would give him a new identity, which would allow him to escape justice. He said K32 was not even in the village and could not possibly have been the sort of eye witness he claimed to be.

Gen. Delic then proceeded to destroy the testimony of K41 and K32. He read from a report of the OSCE/KVM. The report explained how KVM monitors found the dead bodies of uniformed KLA soldiers in the village. He also read from a KLA document which listed the names of the "fallen heroes" of the 125th Brigade of the KLA who had died in Jeskovo.

Delic denied ordering the killing of civilians, and said that there weren't any civilians in the village when the army got there anyway.

Gen. Delic also testified about events in Suva Reka. The indictment claims that forces of the FRY and Serbia surrounded the town of Suva Reka and expelled 80,000 of its inhabitants to the village of Bellanice. The indictment also says that this group of 80,000 refugees was shelled by the army when it got to Bellanice.

Gen. Delic said that the assertions put forward by the indictment were nonsense. He said that if 80,000 people had been the target of shelling in Bellanice, then hundreds or perhaps thousands of them would have been killed. He said that there was no such mass-killing. He refuted the hearsay testimony of prosecution witness Shefqet Zogaj who lived in Bellanice and testified that he had heard second-hand that 150 people had been killed.

Relying on VJ documents, Delic refuted the testimony of Argon Berisha who claimed that Suva Reka had been attacked with tanks on March 26, 1999. According to the documents there were no tanks in Suva Reka.

The village of Nagafc was another topic that Delic testified about. The indictment claims that Yugoslav troops mistreated a group of 8,000 Albanian refugees who were seeking shelter at on "a mountain near the village of Nagafc," and that the army shelled the village of Nagafc on 2 April 1999, killing a large number of people.

The first thing that Delic pointed out was that there is no mountain near Nagafc. He pointed to Nagafc on a map and showed that there were no mountains anywhere around it. The village is on a sort of plateau, the ground is generally flat except for some small rolling hills in the area. Obviously the prosecution failed to check even the most basic facts when it wrote the indictment; facts such as the very existence of the place where the crime is said to have been committed.

The witness read out VJ field reports that spoke of approximately 200 refugees in the area, which is a far cry from the 8,000 alleged by the prosecution.

Delic also denied the indictment's assertion that the Yugoslav Army shelled Nagafc on April 2, 1999. Delic claimed that NATO had bombed the village, and to prove it he played a videotape showing the NATO attack. On the videotape you could see the result of the NATO bombing, the village was decimated and fragments of NATO bombs, which had English writing on them, could be seen on the tape. Gen. Delic, being a military man himself, was even able to identify the types of bombs that NATO used just by seeing their fragments.

Nagafc, just like the Dubrava Prison, is another example of NATO (and the ICTY prosecution) trying to blame Milosevic for the people that NATO killed when it bombed Yugoslavia.

In addition to the specific points raised by the indictment, Gen. Delic also gave some more general testimony today. He explained that the objective of the Yugoslav Army was to combat terrorism, not ethnic cleansing. He said that civilian houses were only destroyed if they were used by the KLA.

He also explained how the KLA would force civilians to leave their homes in order to put them in front of its positions and use them as human shields. He said that the KLA tricked the population into being human shields by saying that they were "protecting" them.

Gen. Delic will continue his examination-in-chief when the trial resumes on Wednesday.

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