Hartwig, who was at the helm of a 30-member European monitoring team, told the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague that he had no knowledge of or any reports about Serb forces expelling Albanians from Kosovo.
The German officer also claimed that the Serb forces and police had usually only responded to acts of provocation from Kosovo Liberation Army guerillas, after which civilians would find themselves in the cross-fire and had to flee.
Prosecutor Nice presented the witness with reports by other international organisations on the causes of the refugee crisis in Kosovo, including those by the Human Rights Watch and the OSCE mission, which spoke about the systematic violence committed by the Serb security forces.
To corroborate his statement that the witness was favouring Serbs, the prosecutor spoke about Hartwig's attempt to underrate the gravity of the crime in Gornje Obrinje, where the bodies of 20 members of an Albanian family were found in a mass grave. He added that the witness was a friend of Serbian General Sreten Lukic, indicted by the tribunal for war crimes in Kosovo.
Hartwig denied his pro-Serb attitude and his friendship with Lukic.