Witness: Milosevic Got E-Mail Reports

Slobodan Milosevic was sent reports cataloging Serb human rights abuses against Kosovo Albanians by post, fax and e-mail, the former Yugoslav president's trial heard Monday.

As U.N. prosecutors sought to show Milosevic had known or must have known of crimes that his forces committed in the south Serbian province, a human rights activist told of the horrors he witnessed in Kosovo and the reports he helped compile on them.

"I know for a fact that all our reports were sent to the accused...I personally remember adding his e-mail address to the e-mail list: slobodan.milosevic@gov.yu," said Fred Abrahams, a former researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Abrahams said reports by Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental organization that documents human rights violations around the world, were always made public as well as being sent to government officials and alleged perpetrators.

To convict Milosevic over Kosovo — one of three indictments he faces at the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague — prosecutors must prove not only that atrocities were committed against ethnic Albanians, but also that he knew or should have known and did nothing to prevent them or punish the perpetrators.

Abrahams's appearance followed a bizarre setback for the prosecution early in the day, when a Serbian witness expected to give important evidence abruptly refused to testify.

The protected witness, known only as "K12," said he had been a driver during his 1988-1989 Yugoslav army military service and had then worked for years as a truck driver, but then broke down and said he could not give evidence without elaborating.

"You're here to tell the truth," presiding Judge Richard May admonished, prompting K12 to retort, "The truth is that I cannot testify and there is no other truth than that."

When prosecutor Geoffrey Nice asked whether "some men came into your home in 1999 and demanded you to do something," the witness faltered, his voice broke and he said he could not answer.

"Why are you so stubborn? Don't you understand I don't want to cooperate?" the witness said.

He did not say why he had changed his mind about testifying.

Serb media reports had said prosecutors intended to call a driver involved in exhuming and removing bodies of ethnic Albanians from mass graves in Kosovo in an attempt to cover up alleged atrocities by Milosevic's troops before they withdrew under pressure of a prolonged NATO bombardment in 1999.

Earlier, the man spoke for about 30 minutes in a closed session before the trial was reopened to the public.

Abrahams told the court of Serb-inflicted murder, rape, torture and destruction of Kosovo Albanians' mosques and homes, as well as of humanitarian violations by NATO and Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas.

NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign in March 1999 to curb a violent Serb crackdown on Kosovo which Human Rights Watch also investigated along with KLA atrocities.

Milosevic objected bitterly to Abrahams as a witness, saying the fact he had worked briefly as a research analyst for prosecutors meant he "wrote the indictment" against Milosevic.

Milosevic is accused of crimes against humanity and genocide in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He has refused to plead, prompting judges to enter a not guilty plea, and is defending himself.

Abrahams insisted on Human Rights Watch's impartiality, saying it had criticized all sides in the Balkan conflicts. But Milosevic cast doubt on that, speaking of the group's "role to provide alibis for the interference of international organizations in other countries."

His suggestion during cross-examination that Abrahams had seen nothing first-hand drew an impassioned response.

Abrahams recounted his experience investigating the September 1998 murders of 21 civilians of the same family in Gornje Obrinje in Kosovo's Drenica valley.

"I was present in that forest and I will never in my life forget the smell of the bodies that I saw," he said.

Abrahams followed K12 in the witness box. The court was in closed session for most of K12's half-hour in the stand and went into open session only briefly before his abrupt exit.

Pressed by judges on why he could not testify, K12 said it could "jeopardize other people." Judges asked to look at a magazine that had apparently been mentioned in closed session.

Further details of K12's identity were not clear. But a story last year in the Belgrade weekly Vreme quoted a Serbian truck driver who said he was drafted in February 1999 to drive a sealed refrigerator truck back and forth from Serbia to Kosovo.

The story was published in June 2001, just after Serb police discovered mass grave sites near Belgrade and said they were believed to contain bodies of dead Kosovo Albanians.

After driving a dozen such trucks, the driver known in Vreme under the false name "Nikola" said he had unsealed the truck to find corpses, mainly of civilians, piled up inside.