Prosecutor Nice claimed during his cross-examination of Professor Avramov that if Milosevic had accepted Carrington's plan on 18 October 1991, there would have been no victims in Vukovar, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Brcko and in other killing fields in the wars in Croatia and BH. Milosevic intervenes to protect the defense witness against prosecutor's "attempts to confuse" and "abuse" her


Slobodan Milosevic again refused the offer repeated several times by the Chamber to ask additional questions to his first defense witness, but intervened four times to protect Professor Smilja Avramov against questions asked in the cross-examination by prosecutor Geoffrey Nice. Milosevic claimed that Nice was trying to "confuse", "mislead" and "abuse" the witness. After his fourth intervention, Presiding Judge told the accused that he would have to deliver any such interventions and all other questions and comments through his defense counsel, Steven Kay.

In his cross-examination of Professor Avramov, prosecutor Nice contended that the victims from Vukovar, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Brcko and other places in Croatia and BH listed in the indictments against Slobodan Milosevic would have been alive today had the Serbian delegation accepted Lord Carrington's proposal for the settlement of relations of the republics in the former Yugoslavia, presented at the peace conference in The Hague ion 18 October 1991.

In Nice's view, Milosevic did not accept Carrington's plan at that time – a plan guaranteeing the Serb minority in Croatia "special status" and a high degree of autonomy – in order not to be forced to grant the same or similar rights to the Albanian minority in Serbia. In proof of his contention, Nice quoted from Lord Carrington's notes which state that at the session of 18 October 1991 Milosevic insisted that only Serbs could have "special status", not other minorities in other states. Smilja Avramov, who also participated at the Hague Conference, countered by saying that Carrington's notes were "not authorized texts" and that there were no "official minutes" from the conference which would show who said what.

The other reason why, in Nice's opinion, Milosevic refused to accept Carrington's plan in October 1991 was the motto "All Serbs in one state," discussed at length yesterday during Smilja Avramov's cross-examination. Nice stated today that Milosevic and people working with him – including Professor Avramov – "wanted an enlarged Serbia in which all Serbs would live and were ready to do battle in order to get it."

Nice illustrated their "readiness to do battle" with several video clips showing Milosevic's speeches from the late eighties in which he announced new "struggles" and "battles". According to Smilja Avramov, what Milosevic meant in those speeches were struggles and battles "in the spheres of psychology, information and politics, not in the military sphere."

According to Nice, however, "the key problem was the desire for all Serbs to live in one state and to put their interests above the interests of others." Nice tried to prove that this was the official policy of Milosevic's socialists at the time when Carrington's plan was rejected by showing a map published in the SPS magazine Epoha, which depicted the "desirable demarcation lines between the Third Yugoslavia and Croatia." As the map shows, the borders of the "Third Yugoslavia" would include large portions of Croatia: from Eastern and Western Slavonia, through Krajina and parts of Dalmatia to the so-called Dubrovnik Republic. Professor Avramov, however, ascribed all this to the "freedom of scholarly opinion" on the part of the map's author, for which, in her opinion, "the accused could not be blamed." After all, Avramov added, those borders were offered to Serbia in the London Agreement in 1915, under the condition that it give up Yugoslavia, which Serbia refused to do.

Since Professor Avramov described the arming and military organization of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia in 1991 as "fear of a new genocide, such as the one they experienced in 1941-1945," Nice placed on the ELMO the so-called Moljevic map from 1941. This map is almost identical with the "desirable map" published in the SPS magazine fifty years later. When the Moljevic map was published, Nice noted, the genocide against Serbs in Croatia had not begun yet, but "the concept of a single state for all Serbs was already in existence."

Professor Avramov replied that, "in her scientific work", she "based all her views on official documents, not on inter-party quarrels or such proposals that were put forward between the two wars.”

After Professor Avramov was excused, James George Jatras, former analyst of the American Republican Party was called to take the stand. He will testify about the "American green light to Iran" for the operation of radical Islamic elements in Bosnia.

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