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