Witness Mitar Balevic, a Kosovo Serb and local official of Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia, who said that he had left Pristina in 1999 due to pressure after having lived most of his life there, said that tens of thousands of Serbs had been expelled from Kosovo in the 1990s and that 200,000 Albanians from Albania were settled in Kosovo with the aim of creating a greater Albania.
Pressure against Kosovo Serbs ranged from discrimination in employment and health care to murder, robbery, assaults and the destruction of Serb cemeteries, he said.
A senior official of the former Yugoslav Counterintelligence Service, Mustafa Candic, who testified at the Milosevic trial two years ago for the prosecution, said that he had heard of a directive from Belgrade under which Serbs were to leave the province to prove how much they were threatened there.
Witness Balevic said that Kosovo Serbs responded to the pressure from Albanians by "organising themselves to oppose the pressure and terror and remain in Kosovo".
Milosevic is charged with the expulsion of more than 800,000 Kosovo Albanians in 1999. At the beginning of the trial, the prosecution introduced a number of witnesses to prove that political decisions had paved the way to the systematic discrimination of Kosovo Albanians.
Milosevic's witness accused the Kosovo Albanian leadership of staging incidents against local Albanians to attract the attention of the international community to the injustice they claimed was done to them.
Milosevic is charged with crimes against humanity in Kosovo and Croatia and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.