MILOSEVIC TRIAL ENDS FOR THIS YEAR

ZAGREB/THE HAGUE, Dec 18 (Hina) - Wednesday's testimony of former Dubrovnik mayor Pero Poljanic marked the end of the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic before the Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal for this year. The trial of Milosevic for war crimes committed in the area of the former Yugoslavia resumes on January 9, 2003, after the Christmas and New Year holidays. #L# Before the completion of this year's hearing, presiding judge Richard May said the court would not appoint an attorney to represent Milosevic despite the prosecution's request to do so in order to speed up the trial. The trial chamber also stated that it had refused Milosevic's request that he be released for the duration of the trial. During the part of the trial which refers to crimes in Croatia, the prosecution called 16 witnesses to the stand, including Croatian President Stjepan Mesic, a former Montenegrin foreign minister, Nikola Samardzic, Croatian Serb leaders, Serb reporters and intelligence officers, and members of Serb forces. The prosecution judged that the testimony of former Croatian Serb rebel leader Milan Babic was so incriminating for Milosevic that it decided not to question 14 other witnesses. The prosecution introduced through Babic several dozen secret recordings of phone conversations between the main participants in the war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which prove Milosevic's role in the implementation of a plan of ethnic cleansing in parts of Croatia in 1991 and 1992 and their subsequent annexation to Serbia. The witnesses, most of whom were Serbs, described the military and financial involvement of Serbia and its citizens in crimes in Croatia and Milosevic's control of the events. While the prosecution was piecing together the jigsaw of Milosevic's responsibility, the former Yugoslav president, who considers the tribunal illegal and the prosecution "an Orwellian ministry of the truth", insisted that the war was caused by external forces (the Vatican-Bonn-Washington axis), with the support of internal secessionists and forces that were defeated in World War II, while the Serbs had waged only a "defence war". During the trial for crimes in Kosovo, the prosecution called 124 witnesses, mostly victims, who described how the Yugoslav army expelled 800,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo at the beginning of 1999. The prosecution also called a number of international representatives, from William Walker and Klaus Nauman to diplomats Wolfgang Petritsch, Knut Vollebaek and Paddy Ashdown, who stated that Milosevic had been warned about the crimes in Kosovo and his duty to investigate them and punish the perpetrators. They also claimed that Milosevic had the last say with regard to the decisions of the Yugoslav authorities. The trial chamber also heard the testimonies of several prominent Kosovo Albanians, including Ibrahim Rugova and Mahmut Bakali, and several insider-witnesses, who described the chain of command which they said ended with Milosevic. The trial of Milosevic started on February 12 this year and was adjourned several times due to Milosevic's health problems - from high blood pressure to exhaustion. The trial chamber eventually decided to slow down the pace of the trial and introduced four-day breaks every two weeks. The trial chamber lost one of its three friends of the court in the first year of the trial - Michail Wladimiroff, who ended his career with the tribunal after he stated in an interview with a Dutch daily, according to experts correctly, that the prosecution had proven a significant part of the Kosovo indictment, and that its chances of proving Milosevic's responsibility for crimes in Croatia were equally good. (hina) rml sb