According to Judge Bonomy, the accused Milosevic “either is not able to conduct the re-examination” in which case the assigned counsel should be called upon to continue, or “is deliberately abusing it” which can be “solved by stopping the re-examination”


The judges today put a stop to Milosevic’s re-examination of Vojislav Seselj. They were very close to doing the same with his next witness, General Bozidar Delic.

The judges tried in vain to explain to the accused that the purpose of re-examination is to rehabilitate the witness on points where his credibility had been brought into doubt during the cross-examination. As Judge Robinson warned him, “long re-examination can create an impression that the prosecutor has done a good job and cast serious doubts on the credibility of the witness and his testimony.”

In the ninety minutes of his attempts to conduct the re-examination, Milosevic asked Seselj questions about the Ustasha crimes in the 2nd World War and the Ustasha émigrés who returned to Croatia in the early nineties, causing fear among the Serbs in Croatia that there would be another genocide against them resembling the one they witnessed in the Independent State of Croatia. He asked him about the Bosnian “pan-Islamists” and their alleged plans, also in the early nineties, to revive the notorious Handzar Division and to slaughter the Serbs in Bosnia in collusion with the 4th Reich. Seselj did not have the opportunity to answer most of Milosevic’s questions, because the judges would cut them short, labeling them as “leading”, “inadmissible” or “irrelevant”.

After Seselj left, General Bozidar Delic took the stand once again. His marathon testimony was interrupted on 20 July because the court went into summer recess. At the beginning, Milosevic revisited the issue of what Lord Ashdown could see during his tours in Albania and Kosovo in 1998. To this end, he tendered new “3-D images” prepared for the purpose of his defense by the Military Land Survey Institute in Belgrade. Those images show, Milosevic claims, that Ashdown could not have seen VJ tanks in action and burning Kosovo villages, contrary to what he claimed during his testimony. Milosevic also tendered an article from the Birmingham Post, where claims are made that Ashdown is “an agent of the British secret service, the MI-6”. When the judges asked him why that was relevant, Milosevic replied that Ashdown “supported the terrorists in Kosovo and today he is supporting everything that is being done against the Serb people in BH”.

Judge Bonomy offered two explanations and their consequences for Milosevic’s re-examination. The first is that the accused “either is not able to conduct the re-examination” in which case the assigned counsel should be called upon to continue, or “is deliberately abusing it” which can be “solved by stopping the re-examination”.

Milosevic continued with questions about the ties between KLA and NATO. General Delic spoke about the “Atlantic Brigade”, made up of “American citizens of Albanian origin,” who wore the KLA insignia on one shoulder and the American flag on the other. Milosevic’s interpretation is that the “American citizens” fought in Kosovo “under the American flag”, compelling the prosecutor to note that “the witness did not say what the accused is claiming he did”.

General Delic’s re-examination will continue tomorrow.

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