Hutsch, 41, who covered the Kosovo war for German newspapers and Stern magazine in 1998/9, was the fourth witness called by the defence since they began presenting their evidence on August 31. The trial adjourned on September 15 to allow Milosevic's court-appointed defence counsel to contact and prepare the witnesses.
Defence attorneys Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins had meanwhile filed an appeal against their appointment, saying among other things that many witnesses were refusing to come to The Hague until Milosevic was given back his right to self-representation.
According to unofficial sources, the court-appointed counsel have contacted 97 witnesses over the last month, only five of whom agreed to give testimony under the present circumstances.
The Appeals Chamber has not yet decided on the appeal by Kay and Higgins, with whom Milosevic refuses to cooperate.
Hutsch described his view of the conflict in Kosovo, where he stayed from September 1998 to December 1999, mostly with members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
Noting that before becoming a journalist he had pursued a military career in the Bundeswehr, which he left with the rank of major, the witness analysed the developments in Kosovo, particularly the emergence of the KLA, its logistics and tactics in the areas of Pristina, Malisevo and Prizren.
Hutsch said that at the beginning the KLA was a spontaneous movement that undertook only small-scale terrorist attacks. After a visit of US envoy Richard Hobrooke in the summer of 1998, it underwent reorganisation, receiving freshly trained and armed reinforcements from Albania and Macedonia and setting up brigades that gradually took control of various areas in Kosovo.
He also pointed to the role of the US military consulting firm MPRRI, which he said had infiltrated between 80 and 120 Arab Mujaheddin mercenaries, who were trained in Turkey, from Bosnia into Kosovo.
The witness cited a case that occurred in October 1998 when the KLA took advantage of an agreement between Holbrooke and Milosevic to gain new ground as the Serb forces had withdrawn to their barracks.
Hutsch said that Albanian civilians had fled their villages on a massive scale due to attacks by Serb forces, but also at the urging of the KLA. He said he got the impression that a lot of things in the Kosovo war had been staged and that the KLA had received good advice from public relations experts. He cited cases of refugees emerging from woods when there were foreign journalists and of Albanian girls selling stories of how they had been raped.
That was quite different from my experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hutsch said, referring to his stint in Bosnia in 1995 to cover the war there.
Hutsch described an incident that occurred in the village of Racak on 15 January 1999, where 45 Albanians were found killed. He said that the victims were mainly elderly men and that many of the bodies were disfigured by bullets. He noted that the KLA did not recruit men of that age.
The witness said that the head of the OSCE Verification Mission, William Walker, was shocked by the scene in Racak, but pointed out that Walker had nothing against reporters shifting the dead bodies around in order to take more effective photographs, whereby they destroyed forensic evidence.