Milosevic Denies Envoy's Bloody Tale
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic challenged the testimony of an American ambassador Wednesday, reaching back to the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s in an attempt to discredit the U.S. envoy.
At his War Crimes Tribunal, Milosevic cross-examined William Walker, the former U.S. head of a Kosovo peacekeeping mission, about his testimony that he saw piles of bodies at Racak, a massacre that focused world attention on atrocities by Serb forces.
As head of the mission for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in the late 1990s, Walker was charged with monitoring human rights abuses.
Before joining the OSCE, Walker dealt with Central American issues at the State Department from 1985-88 and later served as ambassador to El Salvador from 1988-92. During that period the U.S. government became embroiled in financing anti-communist Contra fighters in Central America with proceeds from secret arms sales to Iran.
"In Kosovo, you supported a different kind of Contras," Milosevic said. "The Contra Kosovo Liberation Army." He also suggested Walker was involved in the murder of Jesuit priests and nuns in El Salvador.
Walker denied involvement in the affair, saying he had only supplied humanitarian aid to rebels forces in El Salvador from the same air base used by U.S. authorities to provide illicit arms to the Contras.
Milosevic alleged that OSCE verifiers had been recruited by the CIA. Walker said his main goal was "to get people to calm down and not provoke further violence" in Kosovo.
In his testimony, Walker told the U.N. Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that a day after the Racak massacre of around 25 ethnic Albanians on Jan. 15, 1999, he saw the bodies of mostly elderly men lying in pools of blood from bullet wounds.
Milosevic claimed the men were killed in clashes with Kosovo rebels and displayed photographs of the scene that he said proved it was fabricated.
"You are talking about pools of blood and on the soil there is no blood at all," Milosevic said to Walker. "Do you see blood on this picture?"
"No, not on this picture," Walker replied. "I saw blood on the ground. I saw blood on the wounds. These were horrific sights and there was a lot of blood."
"I am absolutely convinced those people died where I saw them. None of these bodies were brought from elsewhere," he said.
In another development, prosecutors declined to comment on a report Wednesday in the Financial Times of London that the State Department was trying to keep former special envoy to Yugoslavia Richard Holbrooke from appearing in open testimony at the Milosevic trial.
The paper cited unidentified officials at the United Nations in New York as saying chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte was considering not calling Holbrooke as a prosecution witness if he could only speak behind closed doors. Holbrooke, the main architect of the 1995 Dayton peace treaty that ended the Bosnian war, has said he is willing to give evidence against the former Yugoslav president, who is accused of genocide and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.
Prosecutors and tribunal officials in The Hague declined comment on the report.
The Bush administration is wary of setting any precedent by letting Holbrooke or other senior U.S. officials testify in international courts before the creation of the Hague-based International Criminal Court, which it opposes, the paper said.
U.N. officials said transparency was a key issue, and Del Ponte wanted to avoid the appearance of a show trial. Milosevic may call Holbrooke later to discuss the former Yugoslav leader's role in negotiating the 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian war.