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British journalist testifies for defence at Milosevic trial

ZAGREB, Feb 3 (Hina) - British journalist Eve Ann Prentice said at thetrial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic on Friday thatKosovo Albanians were fleeing Kosovo in large numbers in 1999 due topressure from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighters from Albaniaand the NATO shelling.
ZAGREB, Feb 3 (Hina) - British journalist Eve Ann Prentice said at the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic on Friday that Kosovo Albanians were fleeing Kosovo in large numbers in 1999 due to pressure from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighters from Albania and the NATO shelling.

Prentice, who testified for the defence, reported about the war in Kosovo for The Sunday Times as the daily's correspondent from Belgrade. She frequently visited Kosovo in 1998/99, and her longest stay there was in May and June 1999, at the end of NATO's 11-week air campaign.

She said that Albanian civilians had told her that the KLA was calling on them to leave the province in large numbers in the interests of the Albanian cause and to use the opportunity to make Kosovo part of Albania.

The journalist also testified about the NATO shelling, including an incident on 30 May 1999, when she and three other foreign reporters were victims of an attack by two NATO planes bombing the Prizren-Djakovica road. The witness said that the man who drove the reporters was killed in the attack and that she, the other three reporters and their interpreters were injured.

Prentice said that they were helped by Yugoslav Army soldiers who took them to their field medical station.

NATO told a news briefing in Brussels that there had been no attacks in that area and that the reporters were probably attacked by Serbian forces, which was broadcast by the BBC, she said.

We clearly saw NATO planes at the height of some 500-600 metres. The Portuguese reporter filmed them and the Portuguese television showed the footage, she said.

Based on this and other examples, Milosevic asked the witness if there had been an anti-Serb propaganda campaign in the West at the time.

Prentice said that since the start of the 1990's the West had a one-sided approach, with the Serbs being the main culprits attacking innocent victims.

The anti-Serb campaign was headed by politicians and generals, who were helped by too many reporters, she said, adding that many of them painted a black-and-white picture of the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, with the Serbs being the only ones who killed and others being unarmed.

She added that some Western politicians spoke about 100,000 Albanians killed in Kosovo, which they described as genocide, while in reality the total number of victims was 2,800, of which many were victims of NATO.

The judges conducting the trial objected to the relevance of such questions, but Milosevic's court-appointed attorney Steven Kay said that Milosevic had the right to put them because the prosecution had introduced witnesses such as General Wesley Clark, commander of NATO forces in 1999, who justified actions in which they had taken part.

Prentice also spoke about seeing numerous civilian victims of the NATO bombing, particularly in housing facilities located close to military targets.

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