July 11, 2006
War Crimes Trial Begins for 6 Milosevic Aides
By MARLISE SIMONS
PARIS, July 10 — Four months after the death of Slobodan Milosevic, the trial of six of his top aides opened Monday, beginning a process that may finally render a verdict on the sweep of Serbia’s actions during the 1999 war in Kosovo...
Much of the evidence the prosecution will present is believed to be similar to that already used in the Milosevic trial. But to obtain a verdict, prosecutors must demonstrate to the panel of three judges — from Britain, Pakistan and Bulgaria — that Belgrade had a “criminal plan” to permanently expel a large portion of the Kosovo Albanians and, as prosecutors put it, “to change the ethnic balance of Kosovo.”
The world has seen many images of Kosovo refugees flooding into Albania and Macedonia, of caravans of bedraggled, frightened people on tractors, trailers, buses and trucks.
But lawyers familiar with the tribunal proceedings said prosecutors must prove there was a Serbian plan to expel them. Prosecutors may resort to insiders or documents, but admit that they have few. They may try to make their case by “inference,” one of the lawyers said in an interview on Monday, by using the facts on the ground. The lawyer insisted on not being identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
In his opening statement on Monday, the lead prosecutor, Thomas Hannis, said “there was a clear plan directed from the top” to drive out ethnic Albanians. The people were not combatants; many were women, children and older people, and their identity cards and vehicle licenses were destroyed to make sure they could not return, he said. To hide their actions, prosecutors said, Serbian forces buried their civilian victims in secret mass graves, often many miles outside Kosovo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/world/europe/11serbia.html