Vladimir Matovic, witness at the Radovan Karadzic trial

Through Vladimir Matovic’s evidence Radovan Karadzic wanted to prove that in July 1995, when they met in Pale, he had not received any reports about the events in Srebrenica. Matovic is a former home affairs advisor to President Dobrica Cosic and later to the Presidency of the FRY.

Matovic was called to The Hague to confirm that during his visit in July 1995 Karadzic didn’t have the information about the events in Srebrenica. The witness confirmed it, adding that he had tried to get additional information about those events from Karadzic and from the VRS. As he explained, he learned nothing because Karadzic himself did not know anything.

According to the written statement to the defense team, Matovic went to Pale in July 1995 to hear from the Republika Srpska President about the events in Srebrenica. Also, Matovic wanted to warn Karadzic that the US and German ‘hawks’ in NATO were setting up a ‘trap’ for the Republika Srpska Army: they planned ‘massive Muslim civilian casualties’ to justify air strikes against the Bosnian Serb troops. Matovic stated that he had received the information from a woman named Nadia. According to Matovic, Nadia was an ‘operational contact between the Serbian leadership and a friend of Serbia in NATO’. The contact with the friend was established through French general Gallois.

Because of the confusion caused by the witness’s inconsistent and unclear answers and translation errors in his statement to the defense, after an hour of examination, the judges decided not to admit the witness’s statement into evidence. If the defense wanted, Matovic could be called to testify viva voce, in the examination-in-chief and the cross-examination, the judges said.

Karadzic began Matovic’s examination-in-chief with a series of leading questions, to the effect that in July 1995 in Pale Karadzic had not known about the events in Srebrenica, presiding judge Kwon took over the examination. As Matovic explained, from their conversation in Pale he understood that the US TV network CNN was Karadzic’s main source of information about Srebrenica. In the cross-examination, the witness avoided a direct answer to the prosecutor’s question if Karadzic had told him anything about the reports from Srebrenica he had received from the army, police, local Serb authorities and visitors from the Serb émigré community he had met at the time in Pale. ‘I didn’t ask him about that’, Matovic replied, explaining that he had been preoccupied with the ‘disturbing news that should have ended up in the headlines’ he had received from the mysterious Nadia, ‘the operational contact with the friends of Serbia in NATO’.

Matovic denied that about 7,000 Muslim men and boys had been killed in Srebrenica. He asked how there could be so many people in such a small town. In a series of half-finished sentences, the witness gave his theory about the Muslim ‘demographic bomb’: Muslims ‘adopted the Albanian policy of high birth rate as the best weapon in fighting against Europeans’, the witness explained.

After Matovic completed his evidence, Karadzic called the war-time president of the Srbac municipality Milos Milincic.

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