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FORMER VENEZUELAN U.N. AMBASSADOR TESTIFIES IN MILOSEVIC TRIAL

THE HAGUE, Feb 10 (Hina) - A former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations appeared as a prosecution witness in the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic before the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Tuesday.
THE HAGUE, Feb 10 (Hina) - A former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations appeared as a prosecution witness in the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic before the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Tuesday. #L# Diego Enrique Arria, who served as an ambassador to the UN in 1992 and 1993, gave his testimony after a week-long break in the trial caused by the ill health of the accused. Arria said that the July 1995 massacre of some 7,000 Muslims by Serb forces in the UN-declared safe area of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia had been preceded by a two-year period of "slow genocide", of which he said the Yugoslav authorities were aware at the time. Milosevic's responsibility for the massacre is one of the key elements in proving the charge of genocide. "It was just a matter of time when genocide would happen," Arria said, adding that he had come to that conclusion after he visited eastern Bosnia with a UN mission in late April 1993. He said that the mission had been horrified at the situation on the ground and had submitted a report about it to the then UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali. Although the mission brought Srebrenica to Ghali's attention, the secretary general never changed "the atmosphere of impunity", the witness said, adding that the same report had also been sent to the Yugoslav authorities. Arria criticised the international community for giving an impression in weak resolutions that nothing would be done to stop the course of events. He stressed that no one could say they had not known what was really going on in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that the UN Security Council was not prepared to accept the collective knowledge of those terrible events. The witness said the UN Security Council had been poorly informed officially and that permanent members of the Council had provided selective information. He added that it was the biggest operation of concealment on the UN's part. Arria went on to say that it had been well-known unofficially that the UN did not matter much and that it was Serb forces that called the shots on the ground. He described an agreement on the demilitarisation of Srebrenica, which entered into force on April 18, 1993, as an act by which the town was completely disarmed and in no position to withstand the Serb siege. "It actually became a camp, and UNPROFOR served as police," Arria said. During the cross-examination, Milosevic repeatedly pointed out instances when ethnic cleansing had been condemned as a criminal act, including the London peace conference that took place in the summer of 1992. The accused quoted British peace mediator Lord David Owen as describing the conflict in the former Yugoslavia as a civil war in which no one was innocent and in which all sides committed crimes. Arria said that it was "aggression, territorial conquest and ethnic cleansing, a war in which one UN member attacked another, weaker, member of the UN". (Hina) vm sb

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