Jatras said that the Clinton administration led such a policy toward the former Yugoslavia that anathemised the Serbs and portrayed the Kosovo Albanians, who he added had links with international terrorists including al-Qaeda, as victims.
In this context, the witness said that the Clinton administration first decided to bomb Serbia and then waited for months for a convenient cause, which then occurred in the form of the Racak event. Jatras questioned whether the massacre of Albanians was really committed at Racak in January 1999.
During the cross-examination led by the chief prosecutor in the case, Geoffrey Nice, Jatras expressed his sympathies with the Serb lobbyists in the United States.
The cross-examination also revealed that Milosevic had called Jatras neither as an expert witness nor as a person with a first-hand experience of the war in the former Yugoslavia, because the closest the witness ever got to Kosovo and Serbia was a few years ago during his sole trip to Macedonia and Albania.
Nice questioned the credibility of the witness, asking him whether his affiliation with the Greek Orthodox Church influenced the objectivity of his testimony. The prosecutor cited several examples of the witness's active involvement in lobbying for the Serb cause in the US.
The cross-examination showed that Jatras's parents had been active for years in the work of the Serb lobby in Washington.
Milosevic refused to question Jatras, just as he had Smilja Avramov, a retired professor of international law from Belgrade who appeared as the first defence witness earlier this week. The accused again called on the tribunal to give him back the right to defend himself on his own rather than be represented by court-assigned counsel.