⁷⁶¹ Wednesday, 15th July 1998

(Open session)

(The witness entered court)

(The accused entered court)

--- Upon commencing at 9.31 a.m.

THE REGISTRAR: Good morning, Your Honours. Case number IT-97-24-T, the Prosecutor versus Kovacevic.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Keegan.

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you, Your Honour. If I could first have this tape and transcript passed out? That would be Prosecution Exhibit 48. 48A would be the tape and 48B would be the transcript.

I should state, Your Honour, this tape contains a number of sequences which we will be referring to throughout the testimony today, beginning now. It contains as well the meetings which the witness had in Prijedor with Dr. Kovacevic. The transcripts you're getting are the transcripts of the statements of the accused at various points on the tape.

WITNESS: EDWARD VULLIAMY (Resumed) Examined by Mr. Keegan:

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, before we start, I would just remind you for the benefit of the translators to please ⁷⁶² slow down your rate of speech this morning. Yesterday, you described being in the Loznica camp and being able to see across into Bosnia to the town where the people in the camp are come from. If we could roll the tape, please, the first segment?

(Videotape played) Do you recognise that building?

A. Yes, that was the school in Loznica where the people were being kept.

Q. This view here which the cameraman is shooting, what is it that he was shooting at here?

A. That's the view from where the school was, over the border into Bosnia, and the hills you could see in the background were in Bosnia and just above the village from whence the people had come.

Q. The young man who is in the video now, do you recall who that man was?

A. He was one of the people who had been deported from the village of Sepak across the border to Loznica.

Q. And Sepak was in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

A. Yes.

Q. And Loznica is in the territory referred to -- or the territory of the Republic of Serbia?

A. Yes. ⁷⁶³

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you. If we could stop the tape now, please?

I would note, Your Honour, that that interview -- this young man spoke English. The interview is conducted in English on the tape.

Q. Now, after Belgrade, where did you travel to once you got your accreditation and were authorised to leave?

A. After three days waiting in Belgrade, we went to Pale, the Bosnian Serb capital near Sarajevo.

Q. How did you travel to Pale?

A. We were transported there by a helicopter belonging to the JNA, the Yugoslav People's Army, a troop-transporting helicopter.

Q. Are you aware of who arranged for that helicopter?

A. It's hard to know exactly, but it must have been a combination of Dr. Karadzic who was waiting to greet us at the other end and the JNA who flew the helicopter, I can only presume.

Q. Once you arrived in Pale, what was the first event?

A. We were first greeted by Dr. Karadzic himself as we made to arrive at his headquarters. He, in fact, came out and greeted us in the street outside, and ⁷⁶⁴ there was a conversation with him, some of which I believe ITN filmed. When I use the word "we," from now on I mean ITN and myself unless otherwise stated.

MR. KEEGAN: Could you run the next segment of the tape, please? Could you fast-forward to the next segment, please? Forward, please. Fast-forward to the segment of the interview. Thank you. You can run the tape at normal speed.

(Videotape played) You can also turn up the sound, please?

If you could stop the take there, please?

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, is this the meeting that you referred to earlier out in the street?

A. Yes, it is. He did say a number of things. He, first of all, challenged us to embark upon the same project that we were hoping to embark on now on the other side. As you heard in the video, he wanted us to go to camps in which Serbs were being held as well. He came up with this strange line that he thought he was afraid for our safety and thought the Muslims might try to kill us and blame it on the Serbs and said this was very usual. That seemed a very odd remark, and he did promise that we would go wherever we wanted to.

Q. Later in your journey, in fact, during your trip to the camps in the Prijedor area, was there an ⁷⁶⁵ incident of an attack?

A. Yes. Just as we were arriving at Omarska later on the following day, there was an attack on our convoy, or a supposed attack, which the escort told us was an attack by Muslims or, as they put it, "Mujahedin," in the woods, but I have since and at the time suspected that that was a prank and I am now convinced it was a prank.

Q. Is that supposed attack shown later on in this videotape, as a matter of fact?

A. Yes, I believe it was filmed, yes.

Q. Now, after this interview with Radovan Karadzic, what was next on the agenda in Pale?

A. We had the meeting with Karadzic and then we had lunch with Professor Nikola Koljevic, his deputy president, and various others who came in and out of our company.

Q. After the lunch, did you travel to one of the camps which the Bosnian Serbs wanted you to visit?

A. Yes. We went to Kula, which was a prison just outside Sarajevo behind the Serbian lines, and were taken to see the prisoners there. This was a prison that Mr. Karadzic had told us was for people who had murdered Serbs.

Q. Did you have the opportunity to speak to some ⁷⁶⁶ of the people held in that camp?

A. Yes, we did.

Q. What did they tell you was the reason they were there?

A. We were able to speak to them in relative freedom, although always in the presence of a guard. Almost always in the presence of a guard. They left us alone for a short time.

They were basically currency in the war, they were waiting to be exchanged, they hoped. They had come from a satellite community outside Sarajevo called Hadzici and had gone first to a sports complex where they said they had been maltreated and beaten but were now in this prison where the conditions were harsh but not that bad. They had beds to sleep on, for instance. And we did talk to them, they were upset, but this was not such - all relatively speaking - such a terrible place.

Q. When did you finally begin your journey to the Prijedor Opstina?

A. We began the long journey the following morning from accommodation that we took in Pale.

Q. What route did you take to get to Prijedor?

A. It was a journey, could not be direct, of course, because of the military situation. We went up ⁷⁶⁷ through eastern Bosnia to a town called Bjeljina and then through a corridor which Dr. Karadzic had told us was relatively safe and through a town called Brcko, and from there across secure Serbian-held territory to, that night, Banja Luka.

Q. Can you describe some of what you saw along the way, what struck you during this trip through eastern Bosnia?

A. Yes. Along the road --

JUDGE MAY: Just one moment, Mr. Vulliamy.

MR. OSTOJIC: Excuse me, Your Honour. Yesterday the Court, respectfully, during an objection, made a point of reference as to how remote Mr. Vulliamy's testimony may be. He's speaking of Brcko, which is remote and far away from Prijedor. I know counsel is trying to show the trip he made. However, the charges against Dr. Kovacevic in this case do not involve these other camps and does not, as the Court respectively knows, does not involve the areas which Mr. Vulliamy may have seen after his visit to Prijedor. So I'm asking the Court, respectfully, if you may give us some guidance and perhaps remind counsel for the Prosecution to move to areas that the Court itself stated were more relevant, and that is the Prijedor areas. ⁷⁶⁸

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Keegan, we haven't done the courtesy of allowing you to reply, but we have considered the matter. I think we know your argument about widespread practice and the like, which you have to prove. Nonetheless, we have come to the conclusion that we are not going to be much assisted by evidence of what was happening elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia at the time, although it is relevant in terms of time.

So would you take this part - we will allow you to mention it, of course - but would you take it briefly and come as quickly as possible to Prijedor.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour, that was, in fact -- our intent was to do it briefly but again, we do believe, without specific guidance as to what the limits of widespread and systematic proof are, for example, that absent guidance that what happened in Prijedor is sufficient for widespread and systematic or with respect to the intent for genocide, what may or may not be relevant in establishing when that intent was formed, when it began --

JUDGE MAY: But you're going to rely presumably on circumstantial evidence to prove that.

MR. KEEGAN: Exactly right, Your Honour, which would include events -- we're going from the top ⁷⁶⁹ leadership of the Republic of Srpska down to the region into Prijedor. We believe there is a direct link in all of this which, of course, we would make at the end of the case once all the evidence is in, but we are attempting to bring in those issues outside of Prijedor which we believe are relevant in as brief a manner as possible. We are mindful of the Court's --

JUDGE MAY: I said at the outset what was relevant were the events in Prijedor and what had a direct bearing on those events.

MR. KEEGAN: Correct, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: And that remains the ruling. So would you abide by that?

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Would you take this journey then as briefly as possible?

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour, I will.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, I believe I had asked you what, during this journey, struck you about the area that you were viewing?

A. The appalling destruction in the town of Brcko which we were told was a Serbian town destroyed by the Croats, which I now know not to be true, and a pattern which continued all the way to Prijedor --

MR. KEEGAN: Could we run the next -- could ⁷⁷⁰ we run the next segment of the video, please, that showing the destroyed buildings? It begins at 11.38 on the tape.

(Videotape played) You can turn the sound down.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, is this the film that was taken during your journey from Pale through the corridor?

A. Yes, it is, and it shows the sort of damage to houses that -- and buildings that you could see along the way.

One of the oddities that struck me was the way in which you would sometimes see rows of intact houses, or houses that were untouched, and then suddenly adjacent to them or a little along the road you would see houses that were charred, burned out, or, in some cases, strafed with machine gun fire or damaged in some other way like that. Sometimes you would have great clusters of damaged buildings or rows of charred or burned houses, and then maybe one or even -- one or two untouched houses in among them, and it was quite bizarre. You would see people perhaps gardening or hanging out their washing surrounded by all these destroyed houses. It was a strange sight and continued, well, all the way through into the Prijedor-Banja Luka area. ⁷⁷¹

Q. The segment that is being shown now, is that an example of what you were just describing as the camera continues to move?

A. Well, here are intact houses, houses under construction. Yes, that's the sort of thing. Sometimes it would be the other way around, you'd see a row of damaged houses and then an intact one next door.

MR. KEEGAN: If we could stop the tape there, please?

The next segment will begin at about 13.30.

Q. Now, Mr. Vulliamy, you indicated that you went, during the trip from Pale, to Banja Luka. How long did you remain in Banja Luka?

A. We arrived in Banja Luka fairly late that night because it was a long journey, and we stayed overnight in Banja Luka, and the next morning, early, set off -- we were met by a military official in Banja Luka and made to depart for Prijedor.

Q. Do you recall the name of the individual who met you?

A. Milutinovic. He was a Major Milutinovic, in some way responsible for liaison on behalf of the Bosnian Serb army in Banja Luka.

Q. And he was the escort to Prijedor?

A. He accompanied us to Prijedor, yes, from ⁷⁷² Banja Luka, we set off early that morning.

MR. KEEGAN: If you could just pause the tape there, please? Thank you.

Q. Now, as you were on your way to Prijedor, what struck you about the nature of that trip?

A. As the -- as we --

JUDGE MAY: Have you got a new point, Mr. Ostojic?

MR. OSTOJIC: I do, Your Honour, and I apologise. If we look on the map, we see Brcko to the right, west here, by this shaded green area -- east, and he travels through and again, Banja Luka, to show homes that were destructed or items and things that may or may not have occurred in Banja Luka, in Brcko, later in Jajce, in Sanski Most, I don't believe respectfully is compelling in any manner, much less relevant, to the charges brought against Dr. Kovacevic here, and I understand the film depicts those items, and my concern is that either I'm misunderstanding the Court's limiting instruction and guidance to us, but I can't find how the homes in Banja Luka are at all relevant to Dr. Kovacevic and what they've alleged occurred in a very small town in a limited area of Prijedor and the camps that we've referenced, namely, Trnopolje, where he visited. ⁷⁷³

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Keegan, are we coming now to Prijedor? We are the same day.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour, we are. We are now -- this segment of the tape and the next description will be the area between Banja Luka and Prijedor as they're driving there, and we are now proceeding into the meeting in Prijedor.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Well, let's get on towards Prijedor.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, the question was: As you were on that drive between Banja Luka and Prijedor, what was it that struck you about what you were seeing along that drive?

A. The damaged houses and the proportion of burned, shelled, or blown-out houses became worse. In particular, there was a hamlet, a community on the main road and a village stretching up to the north of the main road to our right, and we were talking about history with Major Milutinovic at that point, he was talking about Mount Kozara and its history and we were asking what the place was, it was a town called Kozarac which is a just few miles or on the outskirts of Prijedor, and the damage visible even from the main road in Kozarac was quite shocking. It was extensive. ⁷⁷⁴

Q. You indicated in the first part of your answer, on that part of the trip the destruction got worse. What, if any, difference did you notice between the area immediately near Banja Luka as compared to the area as you got closer to Prijedor?

A. Well, the destruction was worse. There were some people out and about in the fields and some houses were still intact. I remember asking Major Milutinovic, "Are the intact houses -- do they belong to the Serbs?" And actually he didn't answer, he grunted and went "Hmm." I took that to be an affirmative or, at least, not a denial --

Q. In the area of Banja Luka, in fact, in the area immediately adjacent to Banja Luka, was there any destruction of the homes as you were passing?

A. Not a great deal, that I recall. Nothing like what we saw when we got to Kozarac anyway.

MR. KEEGAN: Can you run that segment of the tape, please? Can we run the tape, please?

(Videotape played)

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, is this the area in the vicinity of Kozarac and the vicinity of Prijedor that you were referring to?

A. That's coming towards it, yes.

Q. You mentioned people being out and about in ⁷⁷⁵ the fields. Did you ask Major Milutinovic about those individuals in the fields?

A. Yes. I said, "Who are they?" He said some were --

Q. Pause the tape, please.

A. -- some were Serbs, some were, he said, Muslims and Croats who have accepted the new order, and we asked where all the other people had gone, and he said that 40.000 refugees had left the area. To be honest with you, I didn't want to get into an argument with him over who they were or why at this point. We had an object in mind, which was to get to Omarska, and I didn't really see any point in crossing him at this point, so we just talked about, well, history, actually.

Q. Now, the building that's now being shown on the videotape -- and you can run the videotape, please -- did you become aware of what that building was?

A. I became aware later. I now know that that is a place called Keraterm on the edge of Prijedor, but I wasn't --

Q. Pause the tape, please.

A. -- until later that afternoon.

Q. This building that is now on the screen, do ⁷⁷⁶ you recognise what that building is?

A. Yes. That's the station, the police station, at Prijedor. We pulled up just across the road from here outside the civic centre, and obviously our attention was attracted by this line of women who were waiting outside the police station.

Q. Did you have an opportunity to speak with some of those women?

A. Yes, we did, both now and at another point later.

Q. Why did they tell you that they were queued up outside the police station?

A. They were desperate for information about their menfolk, in the main, who had been taken from them, sons and husbands, and they wanted to know where they were. We heard the name "Omarska" mentioned by a number of these women. They were also having to, and one in particular whom I interviewed, were having to make a very difficult choice because they were also, while waiting for information, also waiting to talk about leaving Prijedor.

The woman I interviewed had -- her home had been attacked by the people who had been shooting into her home, they had taken some of her property, and said they wanted her house and that she could, at a price, ⁷⁷⁷ leave, and she didn't know whether to leave for her own safety or to stay and wait for news of her husband who had disappeared and who she thought was in Omarska, and her story was typical of others that were being told both to me on another occasion and to the television crew at that time.

Q. When you were having your conversation with Mr. Milutinovic about Kozarac, did he describe to you what he believed to be the significant history of Kozarac?

A. Yes, he did. He was looking at -- this is back before we arrive in Prijedor now from the car, and he was looking up at Mount Kozara, and he was telling the story of the Jasenovac concentration camp which had been established in the 1940s by the Nazi puppet Croatian regime for a very large number of Serbs, some gypsies, Jews, and Croat dissidents, and he was telling the history of suffering in that camp and said that some of the people who had attacked the Serbs on that occasion had been Croats and Muslims from this area.

Q. Now, did you ask the Major about the camps in the Prijedor area that you wanted to see while you were driving?

A. Yes. Frequently -- we were talking about Omarska mostly, and he was anxious that we go to ⁷⁷⁸ another camp called Manjaca, and he said, "I think I can get you into Manjaca. It's an interesting camp," he said, "It's run by the military, and there are prisoners of war in Manjaca." He said, "I think that's where you're going to be going." And we said, "Well, no, I think we're going to Omarska. That's our plan. That's what Dr. Karadzic said we could do."

MR. KEEGAN: The next segment of the tape will be at 18.07.

Q. Now, once you arrived at the police station and went inside, how did the next series of events occur?

A. Well, we were introduced to the -- by Major Milutinovic at first -- downstairs firstly to the police chief, a man called Simo Drljaca and to other local dignitaries and leaders of what I later know was called the Crisis Staff of Prijedor.

Q. Who were you introduced to?

A. We were introduced to police chief Drljaca, we were introduced to the mayor, Milomir Stakic, to his deputy, Milan Kovacevic, and to the man Mr. Milutinovic obviously knew very well, Colonel Arsic, Vladimir Arsic, who was obviously the military man for the area.

MR. KEEGAN: Could you forward the tape to the beginning of the meeting, please? Right there. ⁷⁷⁹ Thank you.

(Videotape played)

Q. Is this the beginning of the meeting as you just described?

Could you pause the tape right there, please?

Mr. Vulliamy, can you identify the people that we now see on the screen, please, beginning from left to right?

A. Yes. On the left is Mr. Stakic, the mayor of Prijedor; next to him, one along, is Mr. Kovacevic, introduced as his deputy; next to him is, in the middle, is Colonel Vladimir Arsic, in charge of the army in the area; next to him, the last man on the right, is Simo Drljaca, introduced as the police chief -- introduced himself as the police chief, actually; and a woman named Mrs. Nada Balaban who seemed to act as interpreter, spokeswoman, and sort of assistant to the men.

MR. KEEGAN: If we could run the tape, please?

Q. How did the meeting actually begin once you were in the room?

A. Well, it was a very long meeting, longer than we had planned. It began with brief opening remarks ⁷⁸⁰ without questions from us from --

MR. KEEGAN: Pause the tape there, please. Sorry.

A. Well, from the main players, Mr. Drljaca, Kovacevic, and briefly Stakic made opening remarks.

MR. KEEGAN: If you could run the tape with the sound, please?

And, Your Honour, this is where you'll also have the transcript to assist you in this initial part.

THE INTERPRETER (interpreting audio): "Although we have negative experience with the International Community, I ask, not because of the propaganda, but because of the ..."

"There are two things why I disagree with your visit ..."

(Videotape played)

MR. KEEGAN: Stop the tape, please.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, during this meeting, did you form an opinion as to who was in charge of the meeting, who was running the meeting?

A. Well, thus far it seemed that the man doing most of the talking up until this point was, if you like, the chairman of the meeting, or at least he was the one who was making the most pertinent remarks, and ⁷⁸¹ I found them interesting remarks because even before we had asked a question, we were talking about concentration camps and now he was defining what we were about to see is not concentration camps but transit camps and talking about British Intelligence's failure to identify the Nazi camps in the '40s, I mean, I thought we were in the domain.

Sorry. To answer your question, "Mr. Kovacevic" is the answer.

Q. What part of the meeting gave you the impression, beyond the fact that he was giving you introductory remarks, that he was in control of the meeting?

A. In control of the talking, certainly yes, I got the impression that he was the man who was opening the proceedings and chairing the meeting, yes.

Q. Did he exercise the -- did you note him, for example on the film, exercising control over the conduct of the meeting with the other participants?

A. Yes. There's a moment where his boss, mayor Stakic, tries to make a contribution and he shuts him up. Yes, he was delivering this monologue and --

Q. How is it that -- you indicated he tried to shut him up. What, in fact, did you see him do and what gave you that impression? ⁷⁸²

A. He waved a hand without looking at him as if to say, "Be quiet, I'm talking."

Q. Did Milomir Stakic then, in fact, stop talking?

A. Yes.

Q. After the introductory speeches --

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Keegan, I'm going to raise something before we move on.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: The transcript which we have consists of a translation of what the accused said and then the interpretation as it appeared on the tape at the meeting. There is, in parts, a difference between what it is said here that Mr. Kovacevic said and the way the interpreter interpreted it on the tape. Clearly we need to be sure that what it is alleged that the accused said is agreed as to what he said, and I would be grateful if you could perhaps, rather than stopping things at the moment, whether you could agree that with the Defence. If there is any dispute, let us know.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour. The way -- the instructions given to -- this is a final translation from the translation unit here at the Tribunal. The instructions are simply to put down ⁷⁸³ everything that's said on the tape rather than trying to differentiate between people, so they will note any word which they can decipher which is said on the tape, so that is the complete tape.

Anything attributed directly to the accused is the official translation from the ICTY translation unit as they interpret what they hear on the tape. They then simply put down whatever it is the interpreter said, what the English reporters are saying as well, so it is a complete transcript. In fact, what you have in this packet, Your Honour, are two separate transcripts on the same interview on the same comments because there were, in fact, two camera crews there and so there are two different recordings. They differ only in respect that one camera started rolling, you know, seconds before the other and may have gone a bit longer than the other, but we provided and both segments are on the videotape so you can view it for yourself and hear the words for yourself, so we provided both cameras. But that is the way -- but I will meet with the Defence per your instructions to see if they have any question about the interpretation as provided by the Tribunal.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, if the Defence would do ⁷⁸⁴ that, please?

MR. OSTOJIC: We will, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

MR. KEEGAN:

Q. Now, Mr. Vulliamy, after the -- is that all, Your Honour? I'm sorry.

Mr. Vulliamy, after the introductory remarks, how did the meeting then proceed, the meeting in main?

A. Well, it proceeded at length. The first to speak after that was Colonel Arsic who gave quite a long talk or question-answer session. He wanted us to go to Manjaca, a camp nearby, another camp nearby, and he said it would be interesting for us, he said there were prisoners of war there, that he had the authority to take us straight there, and he thought it would be interesting for us, and we said, "No, we want to go to Omarska," and he said he thought Omarska would be boring for us because there were only civilian refugees there and that Manjaca would be much more interesting. But we didn't want to go to Manjaca. And the more he wanted us to go there and not Omarska, of course, the more we realised that Omarska was the place to go, and our instincts were right.

Q. Were there other reasons or objective reasons why you did not want to go to Manjaca? ⁷⁸⁵

A. Well, yes. There were professional reasons, frankly. Manjaca had already been photographed from the outside. The Red Cross, International Red Cross, had been inside Manjaca, deemed it to be a pretty awful place, they were very worried about it, and -- pardon this element but it is of consideration for us -- Mr. Gutman of News Day, a rival newspaper, had been to get in there and our feeling was that if he was going to get into Manjaca, we should go for Omarska, and that was just a professional consideration, but by and large we had come to go to Omarska, and that's where we intended to go.

Q. After your question-and-answer segment with Colonel Arsic, how did it end, his participation?

A. Well, after a while, Colonel Arsic gave up on his Manjaca idea, he shrugged and said, "Well, I can't give you permission to go to Omarska. If you want to go to Omarska" -- and Trnopolje was also being mentioned but Omarska mainly -- he gestured to his right and said, "You need to talk to these men because they're in charge of Omarska and Trnopolje."

Q. Who was on his right?

A. Mr. Kovacevic and Mr. Stakic. He also said that we would need to speak to Mr. Drljaca, but his gesture was in this direction. ⁷⁸⁶

Q. How did the meeting then proceed?

A. Mr. Stakic spoke next, and he gave us some general history of what had been going on in the area. He said that his authorities had been trying to make peace with the Muslims, but they weren't interested in making peace. He talked about the situation in Kozarac and told us that 3.000 or 3.500, I'm afraid I can't remember, weapons had been found in Kozarac, that his authorities faced -- well, he gave the belief an insurrection in Kozarac, but he said that the local people wanted peace but that Muslim extremists were coming in from the outside and agitating the local Muslims into an insurrection, and he described this situation.

Q. Did he specifically address the idea of getting into Omarska? Did you specifically ask him about the camps and who was in the camps?

A. Yes, we did, and he -- well, he disliked the word "camp," he said, "These are not camps, they are transit centres." It was a round robin, this conversation, if you understand. We were calling them "camps" - it was a "transit centre" at this point, a "collection centre" another time - but he said that they were civilians and it was not interesting for us to go, and he also said that it wasn't safe for us to ⁷⁸⁷ go.

Q. Who then picked up the discussion after Mr. Stakic?

A. Mr. Kovacevic then made his main -- well, we had our main discussion with him, and -- well, this I found very interesting because he told us that he had been born in Jasenovac, the Croatian concentration camp for Serbs, when he was a boy, and I sort of -- I was getting very impatient, but I remember waking up at this point and I was interested because here was clearly an interesting man born in a concentration camp, and here we're in the rather strange situation of asking to see a camp that he has just been introduced to us as running, and I wanted to -- in fact, I even tried to have a sort of private conversation with him at that point, but it wasn't possible. But he talked about that. He said that "There is nothing that you can tell us, the Serbs, about camps because, you know" -- well, he said, "I was born in one." And I thought that was a fair point and I was interested in him.

He then went on to talk about, as Mr. Stakic had done, the problems facing his authorities and some of the atrocities which had been committed against the Serbs in the area. ⁷⁸⁸

Q. Did he describe -- you mentioned atrocities -- some of the atrocities that had been committed against Serbs. Did he mention any specifics?

A. He said that 20 Serbs had been shot at a nearby village, Hambarine, or Hambarina or something, and that some of his people had been killed there by Muslims. He said with at one point that Serbian babies had been seen nailed to crosses floating down the Drina river with their eyes gouged out.

Q. Had you heard a similar remark during the same trip?

A. Yes. Dr. Karadzic had said the same thing about the Drina (sic) river over the other side of Bosnia the previous day, and I had read that as well. It was quite a favourite allegation.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, when you're referring to the comments by the accused, you indicated he said, referred to the Serbian babies, also floating down the Drina, and then now you said Dr. Karadzic mentioned the same thing on the Drina on the other side of Bosnia. You referred to the same river for both.

A. Sorry. Dr. Kovacevic was talking about the Una, Dr. Karadzic was talking about the Drina.

Q. After this discussion about atrocities, how did the conversation then proceed? ⁷⁸⁹

A. The same as before. We wanted to go to Omarska. Dr. Kovacevic said that he was worried about our security if we went to Omarska, and at this point I remember thinking: This is getting silly. Every time Manjaca is mentioned, our security -- there was no mention of security, it's fine. If we want to go to Omarska, they can't guarantee our security because of the Muslims.

The more this went on, the more we got impatient, frankly, probably quite discourteous, and said, "Look, we're going to Omarska. We're going to stay here until you give us permission to go to Omarska," and it got less polite, if you like.

Q. There was a mention on the tape of a video by the accused. Did they, in fact, show you a video?

A. Yes. At one point Mr. Stakic got out a video which he showed us to fill us in on the local situation.

Q. What are the significant events on that video that you recall?

A. If you'll forgive me, I didn't pay much attention to the video. I remember a shot of them finding the Koran in somebody's house that I didn't find very interesting, they found some ammunition in somebody's house, which I suppose was more ⁷⁹⁰ interesting. I remember it was in a JNA ammunition box, and -- I don't remember much about the video. The idea of the video was that there was an Islamic Jihad going on in Prijedor.

Q. After the video, did the discussion then get to history of the area and what they were achieving here?

A. Yes. After the video, we had moved seats by this stage, and Mr. Kovacevic got out some maps -- a map and was talking about what the Serbs were trying to achieve, and the map -- I remember the map was from 1940 or 41, I had seen it before, and he talked about how the Serbs needed to protect themselves in the territories on which they lived and the tenor slightly changed as he turned round, I remember to us, and said, "You are lucky to be here at a great moment in the history of the Serbs."

Q. After the history lesson and the statements by the accused, did you then leave the meeting?

A. There was a bit more of "We want to go to Omarska," "It's not safe," and then we were asked to leave the room, indeed leave the building and wait outside in the street.

Q. For about how long do you believe you waited outside? ⁷⁹¹

A. I think it was about 20 minutes.

Q. During that time, did you carry on interviews with the women out in the queue that you referred to earlier?

A. Yes, we were waiting just outside and the film crew went and did some interviews. I did one or two more, yes.

Q. As you formed your convoy to leave the area, did anyone attempt to join your group at that point?

A. Yes. To my professional annoyance, a colleague called Tim Judah of the Times of London and a friend of mine arrived with a French journalist in his car, and we greeted each other, and it was sort of -- pardon me for purporting the conversation in a vernacular way. "Well, so what are you doing?" "We're hoping to go to Omarska, actually." "Well, I never. That's what I'm here for. Do you mind if we join you?" Publicly to him, of course, I said, "Sure, great, why not." Privately I was thinking "Damn." So they tried to join the convoy but they weren't allowed to because --

Q. Sorry. Who prevented them from joining the convoy?

A. The soldiers, the escort.

Q. Were they given a reason why they were not ⁷⁹² allowed to join the convoy?

A. Well, they actually did sneak in behind us and then they were thrown off the convoy because the soldiers said, "Are you a member of Dr. Karadzic's party or part of his invitation," or whatever the soldier said, and Judah of The Times said, "No." And the soldier said, "Well then get off the convoy. You're not coming."

MR. KEEGAN: The next segment of the tape we're going to use will begin at 27.42.

Q. Now, can you describe what this convoy was made up of that you were on, Mr. Vulliamy?

A. There was our bus, our military bus. By now -- which we, by the way, had been on all the way since Pale, there was also by now ITN's fixer, we call them, translator, fixer, logistics man from Belgrade had brought down a vehicle of his own, a red bus, as I recall, and there were various other cars belonging to the local authorities.

Q. Besides the ITN teams and yourself, what other media accompanied you on this trip?

A. There was another, believe it or not, yet another film crew, this was a crew from Pale who had been with us all the way, they were Bosnian Serb television -- if you can believe it, making a film ⁷⁹³ about us making a film about the camps.

(Videotape played)

MR. KEEGAN: The clip that we want is, I believe, at 27.42, please? If you could just simply fast-forward the tape?

Okay. The times apparently are not matching. It's once they're out on the road. Thank you.

Q. Is this the camera now showing the convoy leaving Prijedor?

A. Yeah. Here we go.

Q. And during this segment of the trip, were you taken directly to Omarska?

A. No, we weren't. I was rather alarmed when we passed the turn-off to Omarska as we left Prijedor, it's fairly soon after you leave Prijedor, and the turn off to Omarska is signed to the right, and we didn't go down it. I now know Omarska to be about two minutes up that road, but we didn't, we carried on and went round a -- turned off instead down a dusty track and drove along a sort of maze of smaller roads for some time.

Q. The segment of the video that is being shown here now, do you recall what is going to occur now on this video, what part of the trip is this?

A. Yes, I think what's about to happen now is ⁷⁹⁴ the supposed attack on our convoy by what we were told were Muslim fighters in the woods.

Q. How did the course of this attack proceed? What did the escorts actually do here? What did they tell you?

A. Well, it was quite -- a rather unconvincing drama, really. Some soldiers alighted from their vehicles, one I remember went down into a ditch to wait in the bushes, another was running along over the bridge, but all the while -- there was some firing, there was some shooting, and the APC that you can see up front did fire its turret gun towards the woods, so there was shooting, but all the while one of the soldiers who had got out was just sort of standing around in the field.

Q. The vehicles stayed right where they were on the road?

A. Yes. There was no instruction to take cover or anything.

MR. KEEGAN: You can continue to run the tape, please.

Q. Are these the scenes that you have just previously described?

A. This is part of it. He's actually -- I think he left the convoy at an earlier point and is running ⁷⁹⁵ back across the bridge.

Q. Did you have a conversation with Major Milutinovic while this was going on?

A. Yes, well, Major Milutinovic said that it was unsafe, that we were about to be attacked by Mujahedin, and it wasn't safe for us to go on.

Q. Did he make any specific references to journalists?

A. Yes. Well, later on, during the conversation -- we talked about it amongst ourselves. Some of our party were extremely worried. One said, "Well, you remember what Dr. Karadzic said about Muslims shooting journalists and blaming it on the Serbs --"

MR. KEEGAN: Excuse me, could you pause the tape there, please?

A. "What about the other way around? What about if the Serbs shoot the journalists and blame it on the Muslims?" I was not feeling very cautious at this point; I was just cross. I said, "This is a prank. Can we continue, please? This is all nonsense." And Major Milutinovic said, "But they shoot journalists around here, you know?" And I -- ill-advisedly, I said, "Well, this is silly. I want to go to Omarska. Can we hurry up, please?" ⁷⁹⁶

Q. Did you continue on to the camp?

A. Yes, the battle evaporated and we carried on.

Q. Did you go straight -- from that battle, did you go straight into the camp?

A. No, we wound around more of these back roads and we had seen, the previous day, some of the houses in which people were living draped with white flags or sheets or white tea towels hanging from the trees or the window boxes and I asked Major Milutinovic what this meant, and he said that these were Muslims and Croats who accepted the new order.

In these back roads around Omarska, in the approach to Omarska, there were large numbers of these houses hanging sheets or pillowcases from their buildings or the trees, and Major Milutinovic told us something different today, he said that these were now people, Muslims and Croats, waiting to leave.

MR. KEEGAN: If we could now run the next section of the tape, please, just where you stopped?

(Videotape played)

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, is this the arrival of the convoy into the camp Omarska?

A. Yes. We went through the gates or back gates, I now know them to be of Omarska which was --

Q. If you could stop the tape there, please? ⁷⁹⁷

A. -- an iron ore mine.

Q. Could you back it up just a bit so the three men are in the frame, please? Thank you. Now, can you identify those three men,

please, from left to right?

A. Yes. On the left is Major Milutinovic, our escort from Banja Luka; in the middle is the man who had been at the meeting in the police station, Simo Drljaca; and the man on the right was introduced to us as the commander of the camp or centre, as they were calling it, a Mr. Meakic.

MR. KEEGAN: If you could roll the tape, please?

Q. After your arrival here at the camp, where was it that you were first taken?

A. Well, we came through the gates which identified where we were, Rudnik Omarska, Omarska mine. We then went around the side of this building to a sort of courtyard, a courtyard that's behind the man with the camera there, and from that courtyard we could see a number of buildings, the most prominent of which was a large red, rusty red, what looked like a hangar or a warehouse of some kind.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, at this point were you making any requests to the people who were escorting you in ⁷⁹⁸ the camp -- to the prisoners?

A. Well, we said we wanted to act upon Dr. Karadzic's guarantee, we wanted free access to the camp, and we wanted to be able to interview the prisoners, and we were told initially, "Well, they don't want to talk to you." We were told that by Mrs. Balaban, who I think translating an instruction from somebody else.

Q. The scene that is now showing on the video, where is this taking place?

A. Well, this is later on. What we saw were a group of about 30 men coming out of this large hangar building being lined up by men with guns, armed guards, and in a fairly pathetic and obviously well-rehearsed drill, jogging across the yard into this building, which was the canteen.

Q. Pause the tape right there, please. Now, on the tape earlier, we saw you joining Penny Marshall here at this table during this discussion with this individual. Do you recall what struck you the most about the conversation that you had that was going on with this young man when you asked him questions about the camp?

A. Well, yes, we were trying to ask questions about the camps as best we could with these men as they ⁷⁹⁹ sat down to have their lunch which they were eating like very, very hungry men. We were trying to ask them about conditions, and I remember this man saying something I'll never forget, he said, "I do not want to tell you any lies, but I cannot speak the truth."

MR. KEEGAN: Can we run the tape, please, forward?

(Videotape played)

Q. After your discussions here in the canteen, where thence did you go?

A. Well, we stayed there a while, watched them line up, and their condition was such that we were all the more anxious to see wherever they were sleeping and wherever they were quartered, and we asked to go and see the sleeping quarters, and I specifically asked a number of times to go into the hangar, warehouse building from whence they had emerged. The fact that they had been blinking into the sunlight made me think that must be a dark place for a start.

However, we were not allowed to go there yet, they said that would be later, and instead we were taken upstairs to an office area, as I recall, directly above the canteen or at least on a storey above the canteen.

Q. Of the men that you talked to in the ⁸⁰⁰ restaurant area, did you ever subsequently meet any of those individuals later during your travels in Bosnia?

A. Yes. And that was how I was able to learn -- we were able to interview them rather better later than in there.

They were very obviously too terrified to talk, the guards were patrolling, and we -- one of them, who I tried to speak to, had a wound to the side of his face -- right side -- and I asked him how he got the wound, and he said, "I fell over." And I said, "Is everything all right?" And he said, "Yes." And I met him, actually, in a trench three years later on a front-line, and it was an extraordinary meeting. He said, "I know you." I said, "I don't think I've met you before." He sort of doubled in weight. And he said, "Do you remember the man with the wound down the side of the face who said he had fallen over?" I said, "Of course. How could I forget him?" He said, "Well, that was me. I didn't fall over, I was struck. That's how I got the wound, but you could not see the guard behind you staring at me." And on that occasion, I realised how difficult it had been for those men in the canteen to speak their mind. Sounds maybe a little silly, but their stares told us some of what we needed to know, the sheer fear in their eyes ⁸⁰¹ and their physical gaunt condition.

Q. From the canteen, where did you then go?

A. As I said, having failed to get where we wanted to go and had asked to go, which was into the hangar, we were taken upstairs to an office administration area.

Q. What took place in the -- upstairs in that administration area?

A. The second lengthy briefing of the day.

Q. Who was this briefing -- who was this brief given by?

A. It was given mainly by the man you see here, Simo Drljaca, the chief of police, whom we had already heard at the police station, and his assistant here, Mrs. Balaban.

MR. KEEGAN: If we could run the tape, please?

(Videotape played)

Q. What was the nature of the briefing that you received?

A. They were going through what they were calling the procedure and the role of the centre, as they were calling it. They were explaining how the prisoners or inmates, internees, they wanted to call them, were being divided up into categories, screened ⁸⁰² and investigated, investigation centre was another description of the place, with a view to separating them into three categories. We were first told about Category C. These were men suspected of being fighters, Muslim fighters, but who they decided were not Muslim fighters and they were allowed to go to Trnopolje. Later I asked, "Well, what are Categories A and B?" I wasn't quite clear as to the answer. It seemed to be -- frankly, I got the impression all of this was fairly ad hoc, but it seemed to be Category A were people found guilty of being in the Muslim militia, if there was one, and Category B I think were people who were, but had surrendered their weapons or something. I wasn't -- to be honest with you, I wanted to see this camp and was unimpressed by all these details of Categories A, B, and C. I wrote it all down and all the numbers down faithfully, but I was anxious to get on with what we were doing here, which was not to listen to these two.

Q. In addition to the questions regarding the categories of prisoners, did you ask questions regarding whether international organisations, such as the ICRC, had been admitted to the camp?

A. Oh, indeed. We all asked, "Have the International Red Cross seen this place? Are they ⁸⁰³ allowed to see this place? Should they see this place?" And Mrs. Balaban, in translating, I think, Mr. Drljaca, said, "Yes, of course they can come. Why not? This is not a camp, it's a centre. They're welcome here." And she said at another point in the same conversation, "There's no need for them to come here because this is not a camp, it's a centre."

Q. Had you, by that time, already had discussions with ICRC representatives prior to getting to Prijedor about Omarska and the camps?

A. We all had. I had and all of my colleagues had been talking to the ICRC who had been very worried about Omarska for a long time now and had been trying its best to get in without success, and still had not been when we arrived.

Q. Now, what occurred as you left the office?

A. As we left the office, we said we wanted to talk to the prisoners, and Mr. Drljaca said, "Well, yes, you can. Here's one." This was in the corridor outside the office. "You can talk to this gentleman. He's the head of the local SDA." That's the Muslim political party. And I'm afraid I was rather brusque at this. I said, "Well, no thanks. I don't want to interview anybody that you put forward for an interview, let alone from a political party." We want ⁸⁰⁴ to -- I mean, we still had it in mind on Dr. Karadzic's authority, we were going to be able to inspect this camp, and I said, "Look, I don't want to interview your nominee, frankly," because I would imagine either he's going to be too terrified to talk, like the men downstairs had clearly been, or he's going to talk a lot of pap. So I said, "Well, thank you, we'll choose our own interviewees, if that's all right, rather than your selections and we'll do that in the sleeping quarters, if we may?" So we went downstairs and prepared ourselves to go into the hut, into the sleeping quarters, to inspect this camp at last.

MR. KEEGAN: Could you stop the tape there, please?

Q. Now, as you went outside, was your request to go into the sleeping quarters granted?

A. No.

Q. What were you told about your trip to the camp at that point?

A. We were told a number of things. We were told that it wasn't safe for us to go into the sleeping quarters.

Pardon me for backtracking, if you'll forgive me. Cut me off if you think it's not important. But up in the office, another of these ⁸⁰⁵ battles had started outside, and shooting in the woods. I was in a pretty bad mood by then and I hope it isn't reflected now. And I was saying to my colleagues, "Look, just forget the battle. It's a lot of nonsense." But the Bosnian Serb television crew did an interview with Mr. Drljaca, and he said, "Look, the Muslims are shooting in the woods. We're not safe here." By the time we get downstairs again, he says, "It's not safe for you to stay in the camp." We joked with him a bit and said if they're shooting in the woods, surely we're safer in here than we are out there. And he said, "No, you're not."

At one point, Ian Williams and I -- I said "Let's walk towards the hut and see what happens," and we did, and a couple of guards moved around so as to block us so that seemed perhaps not a good line to cross. I think one of them took his safety catch off. Then we got into an argument with

Mrs. Balaban, and she invoked a new argument, which was not our security, it was Dr. Karadzic's, what she called protocol. And we said, "Well, he said we could see the camp." The television reporters, for professional reasons, were doing most of the talking on camera, but we all said, "He said we could see the camp. That's the guarantee." And she said at one ⁸⁰⁶ point, "Well, our instructions were different. He said something different to us. He said you could see this and this but not that." So the instructions, his guarantee to us, had obviously been different from his instructions to the authorities in Prijedor about what we could or couldn't see.

This argument went on in the courtyard adjacent to the canteen opposite this hangar for quite some time.

MR. KEEGAN: Could you run the rest of that tape, please? That segment.

Q. Is this the segment you were just referring to when you're outside?

A. Yes. Here are the two guards who moved around after we had just started to walk over there. On the right is Ian Williams, one of the reporters for ITN, and his interpreter is the man in the jeans, and the sunglasses. That's Mr. Drljaca there.

Q. From this point, after the conversation about the protocol for the visit, did you then leave the camp?

MR. OSTOJIC: Excuse me. Your Honour, the question presupposes that we heard the question, and I don't have a translation, nor did we hear the audio portion of this, and I think it may be significant ⁸⁰⁷ since the witness specifically discussed this conversation with a Ms. Balaban and what was said, and now he's saying after this discussion what occurred. So I think it might be at least interesting for all of us to see it, the court as well -- hear it.

JUDGE MAY: Well, it may be interesting. Is it relevant? But it may well be, yes. In fact, the witness referred to the conversation about the protocol, and that's, no doubt, why counsel spoke in that way.

Mr. Keegan, I'm concerned -- no doubt, in order to speed things up, you're not, in fact, playing the tape with the sound on.

MR. KEEGAN: That's correct, Your Honour, but if the court would wish it now, we're certainly happy to play the audio portion of this tape to hear that conversation with respect to the change -- the difference in the instructions from Dr. Karadzic between what the reporters were told and what the people, the camp authorities, the Prijedor authorities, told.

JUDGE MAY: That's on the tape.

MR. KEEGAN: It is, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Well, let's go back and hear that, yes, bearing in mind that we're going to break ⁸⁰⁸ about 11.00.

(Videotape played)

THE INTERPRETER: We're going into Trnopolje or into Banja Luka. Let me tell you something --

MR. KEEGAN: If they turn up the volume, we can actually hear the tape.

THE INTERPRETER (interpreting audio): "I explain that we will go to our staff and we will show this and that and we can't show anything beyond that. They have all the medical facilities and services here. You were able to talk to them openly." (English interview continues)

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you. You can stop the tape --

THE INTERPRETER (interpreting audio): "We're going into Trnopolje now."

JUDGE MAY: Carry on. Play the rest of that.

(Videotape played) THE INTERPRETER (interpreting audio): "Let's go to Trnopolje. Let's go." "I don't know what they want here." "They haven't spent more time in any other centre." (English interview continues) "Tell them to leave. They're not safe anymore. If they stay here, they're not safe anymore." "They're shooting around ⁸⁰⁹ there. There's a war going on here." (English interview continues) "I've told them that this is what the protocol is for the day."

MR. KEEGAN: If you could stop the tape, please?

Yes, Your Honour, the next section of the testimony relates to moving into Trnopolje. It might be a convenient time to break just a couple of minutes early and pick up when we resume.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. We'll adjourn now. Twenty minutes.

--- Recess taken at 10.57 a.m.

--- On resuming at 11.20 a.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Keegan.

MR. KEEGAN:

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, where was your group taken after you left Omarska?

A. We continued in the convoy. The hurry and security risk evaporated to another camp called Trnopolje.

MR. KEEGAN: Could we run the video, please, where it had stopped?

(Videotape played)

Q. How is it, Mr. Vulliamy, that you came to enter the Trnopolje camp from this position that was ⁸¹⁰ shown on the video?

A. Well, we were driving towards it and Penny Marshal, the television reporter who you can see -- saw earlier in the picture, she was in the bus ahead, and we beheld this extraordinary sight. Her van pulled over, the red van pulled over, she was out within seconds of that. We were behind as they pulled over and I think we were alighting before it even stopped to make for this remarkable sight.

Q. If you could pause the video, please? You indicated earlier that the ITN film crew had a vehicle of their own; is that correct?

A. Yes. By then the military bus had been joined by one of their fixer's vehicles. It had come down from Belgrade, yes.

Q. What vehicle were you riding in?

A. I was in the military bus behind with the second ITN crew, that of Ian Williams.

Q. As you approached the area that you now know to be Trnopolje camp, what specific -- what were the specific series of events that led the camera crews to film that first area of the camp that we saw?

A. Well, we were coming towards the camp, this was one of the first things that you saw on the left, Penny's vehicle stopped, she got out to make towards ⁸¹¹ this group of men, some of them in appalling condition, emaciated behind the barb wire fence, and my bus stopped as well. We said, "Stop, stop," and we got out and followed her.

Q. Did the van that Ms. Marshall was riding in, that stopped without any of the escorts or any of the authorities stopping it first?

A. Indeed. I think one of the escort vehicles went on ahead and had to come back because I don't think we were meant to stop at that place, we were -- I think the plan was probably to take us past that compound to another bit of the camp, but Penny's van stopped, well, for obvious reasons, upon seeing what we saw on the film just then, on seeing that compound of men.

Q. And how were you able to get out of your, the military bus you were riding in, to join immediately behind her?

A. Well, our van was pulling up behind Penny's, the door was open anyways, it was a hot day, and we just pulled up behind Penny's van and got out.

Q. Did the escorts and other Serbian television crews have to run to catch up to you?

A. I can't remember what happened to the Serbian crew at that time, but they were around after a while, ⁸¹² yes.

Q. Now, if you could -- once you arrived in the camp area, how did the interview process and the tour of the camp, if you will, proceed?

A. Well, we began our conversations with the prisoners on the other side of the fence, it was an extraordinary sight, and they were saying some extraordinary things. We interviewed the man you saw shaking hands with Penny, his name was Fikret Alic, and we began our conversations with them. He and another prisoner whose name I think was Icic, referred to a place of which I had not heard, Keraterm, from whence they had come that morning, they said. They told us that there had been -- that the conditions there were very much worse than here --

Q. When you say "here," where are you referring to?

A. Trnopolje, where we were then. And Mr. Alic and Mr. Icic both talked about massacres of large numbers of men in Keraterm, there was talk of a massacre of 150 men in one night, and -- well, one's head was spinning. We had beheld this remarkable sight of these men and now they were talking about somewhere else. And we conducted those interviews, first of all, by that fence, the barbed wire fence that you saw. ⁸¹³

Q. Were you then guided around the camp by a guard?

A. Yes. Well, I was -- first of all, we went around different parts of the camp. We conducted interviews around another fence, around the side of that compound with some other prisoners. I then managed to slip the guards, which was more easily done in Trnopolje than it was at Omarska, and went into the main compound around the back of the area that you saw in that film, with a man called Ibrahim who was an inmate of the camp, and he showed me round. The conditions were appalling, although

nothing as bad as I now know Omarska to have been, but open latrines stinking, it was a school building and you could see into the rooms crammed with people, listened to various testimonies, which I have written up --

Q. Did you ask some of the prisoners about that camp and a comparison to Omarska?

A. Yes. There was agreement -- some people had come from Omarska and from Keraterm in the compound that we had visited first, and they both said that the conditions in Omarska and in Keraterm were worse and more frightening and more dangerous than this place, Trnopolje. ⁸¹⁴

Q. Did they talk, did any of the prisoners reference the treatment of women in Trnopolje?

A. Yes. And here I confess a professional failing, because it was made clear to us and to me in the stories that were being told that there was some sort of abuse of women, Ibrahim said "They're very hard on the girls." There was one story about a girl who had a golden locket taken from around her neck and talk about, well, sort of sexual overtures towards her. It wasn't just me, it was the women in the party too. We were slow to pick up that element, I admit. We were trying to make sense of what was going on and what we had seen and did not pick up on that. It's been since, I believe, ascertained that there was sexual abuse of women going on.

They were talking -- I mean, people were talking in general terms, "They do whatever they want to do to us," and that sort of thing. In those early days, one was less good at decoding that kind of remark.

Q. Did you ask Fikret Alic, Ibrahim, and the other people you met what ethnic group or nationality they were?

A. They were almost exclusively Muslim, with a few Croats as well. ⁸¹⁵

Q. And all of the authorities who accompanied your party as well as the guards, did you ask questions about what ethnic group they were?

A. They were all Serbs, but -- oh, I didn't ask each and every one of them, no. I assumed that for the most part.

Q. Did you ask the prisoners in the camp how they had arrived at the camp?

A. Yes, indeed, and they had arrived from various places and for various reasons. Some had, as I have said, come directly from Omarska and Trnopolje, others mostly in different bits of the camp, had come voluntarily, indeed, and the reason they gave for that was that their homes were either under shell fire or attack or had been burned, and I think the idea there was a safety in numbers in that place, that they did not have had they stayed at their own homes which were under attack.

Others had been marched or transported there, either on buses or, in some cases, on foot.

Q. Did you have the chance to tour what was referred to as the medical facilities in the camp?

A. Yes, we did. There was a makeshift medical area with a Muslim doctor, himself, I suppose, sort of part inmate, part doctor, with one or two assistants. ⁸¹⁶ It was very makeshift. A few bottles of medicine around. The temperature was very, very high, and he was a man clearly stretched to his limits and not really free to talk.

MR. KEEGAN: Could we run the video, please?

(Videotape played)

Q. The film we're now seeing, Mr. Vulliamy, this is again footage shot on that day during your time at the camp at Trnopolje. In your discussions with the doctor in the camp, did you ask about whether there had been beatings or maltreatment?

A. Yes, I was actually behind the camera, Penny was doing the interview, again for professional reasons she has to be on the screen, and she was asking about beatings and maltreatment, and the doctor answered, as I recall, more with gestures than with words. He did suggest that he was having to deal with maltreatment, yes.

Q. Did he, in fact, provide you with any proof?

A. We were given a roll of film, undeveloped, which we then did get developed when we got to -- well, out of Bosnia, and it showed the torsos of men, mainly torsos, at least, and limbs showing very serious bruising indeed.

Q. Now, the men that we're seeing here in the ⁸¹⁷ pictures as you've been discussing, are these representative of a number of prisoners that you saw there and spoke to that day?

A. A number, yes. The prisoners were in varying conditions and varying states of decay. Some looked like this man on the right, others again looked like this man we're watching now, in better condition, but the skeletal figure is certainly representative of a large number, yes.

Q. Was there a distinction between the physical condition of the men who had indicated they had come from Omarska or Keraterm and those who had been in Trnopolje with their families?

A. There was certainly a difference between those who had come from the other two camps or at least most of them and those who had fled or been frogmarched or come to the camp of their own accord, yes.

Q. If you could pause the tape there, please? If you could leave it on the screen?

Is that the doctor whom you referred to earlier?

A. Yeah, that's him.

Q. If we could run the videotape with the sound, please?

(Videotape played) ⁸¹⁸

MR. KEEGAN: Pause the tape there, please.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, were you able to hear the exchange there in that interview with regard to the question about beatings being conducted?

A. Yes. I was just behind at the back.

Q. And the reaction of the doctor there to that question?

A. Yes. I saw it and I understood it, I think. He was a man trying to do his very, very best, he clearly felt unable to speak or to detail --

Q. Why was he unable to speak? Who was with you in that room?

A. The guards.

MR. KEEGAN: If we could run the remainder of the tape, please? I'm sorry, without the volume.

(Videotape played)

Q. After this interview with the doctor in the clinic area, how much longer did you remain in the Trnopolje camp?

A. It's hard to put an exact time on it. I should say about another 45 minutes or so.

Q. And from the camp, where were you taken?

A. We left. We went direct from Trnopolje, we concluded our visit. I did an interview with a man from the Yugoslav Red Cross who introduced himself as ⁸¹⁹ being from the Yugoslav Red Cross, and then we left.

MR. KEEGAN: Could you hold the tape, please?

Q. I'm sorry, you were referring to the interview with the man from the Yugoslav Red Cross and then you indicated you left. Where did you go to after that interview?

A. Belgrade.

Q. And how did you get to Belgrade?

A. In the vehicle that belonged to the ITN fixer, Misa.

Q. So on that day, you did not return to Prijedor?

A. I think we might have gone through Prijedor. I can't remember. We drove back to Belgrade.

Q. Did you ever return to Prijedor?

A. Yes, I did, several years later in 1996.

Q. What did you do upon your return to Prijedor in 1996?

A. Well, I was curious to visit Mr. --

MR. KEEGAN: Just a moment, Mr. Vulliamy.

JUDGE MAY: Yes?

MR. OSTOJIC: I'm sorry, Your Honour, I have to respectfully make this objection again. We're now going into 1996, and if we look at the indictment, the ⁸²⁰ charges are clearly for a period from April through approximately August of 1992, and I'm not sure -- again, it might be interesting conversational discussions with Mr. Vulliamy, but at this point, I respectfully think that discussing what he saw and what he may have characterised and created some assumptions and summations would not be at all helpful and indeed is not relevant to the charges which are made against Dr. Kovacevic in this proceeding.

So, I'd ask that we move on either with the conclusion of his testimony or that we at least have some instruction as to how long his discussion in 1996 and other years will take place.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Ostojic, there is a reference in the Tadic transcript to an interview with the accused in 1996. Is that right, Mr. Keegan, is that what you're dealing with?

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour. It was simply going to be a question of who did you speak with when you went back and why, and then we will actually deal with the details of the interview near the end of the testimony. This is simply a reference to put it in context that he did return.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Have you any objection to the interview with the accused in 1996 which would at ⁸²¹ least prima facie seem to be relevant?

MR. OSTOJIC: Yes, I agree with that portion, Your Honour. The only slight -- and I didn't realise counsel was going into that, and if we look at the Tadic case, they were allowed enormous latitude to go into other areas throughout Yugoslavia, Mr. Vulliamy and his group, and I was anticipating that's where they were going. I do not have an objection to this preparatory comment, but I do have a comment to make, and that is with respect to the tapes.

Our client, during the break, insisted that he did not see what I believe is this subsequent tape in 1996 that they may try to introduce, so in all fairness to him, I am obliged, through my client to at least share that with the Court and to be given an opportunity for him to view that tape. Quite frankly I think what we have done, is yesterday, through the registrar's office and through the warden, if I'm calling him by the right designation, at the prison, we made an attempt at 5.30 or so to make accommodations so our client could view this tape with us and other tapes, and it was formally written by Mr. D'Amato and it was rejected summarily. We didn't get an explanation for that. We didn't know when it would be appropriate, I didn't want to disturb the proceedings ⁸²² this morning with that, but I think since we're going into 1996, it may be timely at this point.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Keegan, what's the position about this tape?

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour. None of the tapes are from 1996. All of the interviews which are on tape, videotape, are all 1992. The interview in 1996 will simply be described by the witness from his memory. There are no tapes of interviews from 1996 that we're certainly aware of and certainly none being introduced into evidence.

JUDGE MAY: Well, are you going to ask to deal with anything else in 1996 besides the interview?

MR. KEEGAN: Well, to the extent that, as Mr. Vulliamy as already indicated, he didn't get into some areas of eastern Bosnia until after the Dayton Agreement, but the dates he will be referring to occurred in 1992 through 1995. But in other areas of Bosnia. But again, we believe they are directly relevant to the issues and the elements which the Prosecution must address in this case.

JUDGE MAY: We will hear what it is that you're going to try and adduce, and we'll make a ruling. As far as 1996 is concerned, it would seem to me that you are limited to the interview with the ⁸²³ accused.

MR. KEEGAN: There is also an interview with Milomir Stakic at the same time which we also believe is relevant because they speak of events in 1992, so there is more than, in fact, just the interview with the accused.

JUDGE MAY: What is it that you're going to ask the witness about 1992 to 1995?

MR. KEEGAN: The sequence of events as he -- the witness basically indicated on the map, after this trip, he then proceeded to investigate camps where Serbs were victims. From there, he then, in fact, joined a convoy of Bosnian Muslims who were being forcibly expelled from Sanski Most. He, in fact, joined that convoy in Prijedor.

JUDGE MAY: When was that?

MR. KEEGAN: That was in August 1992, only weeks after the events which we're seeing now on the tape. Those -- that convoy was joined in Prijedor, it was, in fact, under escort by Prijedor police, and it takes him through the Bosnian Serb territory as they're expelled towards Travnik, which he's described. In Travnik he will describe the interviews and experiences he had with refugees, many of whom were from Prijedor. He will then describe some of the other ⁸²⁴ areas he visited in Bosnia in '92-'93, describing similar attacks on civilian populations conducted by forces in a similar nature, a similar type of propaganda. He then is back in Travnik in 1995 and witnessed again refugees from the Prijedor area, the Autonomous Region of Krajina, being expelled over the same route with the same kind of stories in numbers, and we believe all of that is relevant in establishing the kinds of legal requirements for the various charges which we have in this case.

JUDGE MAY: I can see how evidence of events beforehand may be relevant; however, how do you say that the events afterwards are relevant?

MR. KEEGAN: Because, Your Honour, for example, the same specific types of events, either occurring in Prijedor in the areas around Prijedor, in the Autonomous Region of Krajina, which, as we have indicated already through evidence, we believe is directly linked again, this goal of forming a Serbian Republic which would -- or Serbian area which would be part of the new Yugoslavia or new Greater Serbia, that there was a continuing criminal enterprise, if you will, to forcibly remove, to kill, and to eradicate Muslim and -- Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat populations throughout that area in order to effect ⁸²⁵ that goal of achieving territory. We believe those are directly relevant to the charges here because it shows that continuing course of conduct.

In addition, there will be evidence about specific atrocities committed against Prijedor area Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, including massacres which occurred after the International Community was even aware of the camps.

JUDGE MAY: What dates are you talking of there, of the atrocities?

MR. KEEGAN: I'm sorry, the atrocities?

JUDGE MAY: The atrocities, yes.

MR. KEEGAN: The specific ones I'm referring to happened in August.

JUDGE MAY: 1992.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, in the weeks following these visits to the camps.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Ostojic.

MR. OSTOJIC: Thank you, Your Honour. I think the point is, if he's trying to establish mens rea, and the intent that he has the burden to do that. He's taking a witness, quite frankly, and he's trying through hindsight have this witness talk about the entire region and to try to implicate our client with respect to what may have occurred in a much broader ⁸²⁶ region. It was never allowed, it was prohibited, I believe, with your words and your question to him: What relevance, if any, do the events post the time period set forth in the indictment, the time period set forth that was asserted against Dr. Kovacevic, what Mr. Vulliamy did afterwards is not relevant at all, it cannot be relevant at all, to establish intent or any other element of this crime.

What Mr. Keegan, and I say this respectfully to him, wants to do is to incorporate and expand the civil war that occurred, and he tried doing it, unfortunately, yesterday, and I believe the Court limited him by the discussions on what occurred in Croatia and what occurred in other aspects within former Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. If we look at the map that was produced in evidence and the reference that Mr. Keegan makes to Sanski Most, we must look at that in reference to Prijedor and see the distance of this map, how far away these two are, and I direct the Court's attention to merely find Prijedor and to draw a line directly to the south of that at 90 degrees, and you'll find Sanski Most there. Then if you go to the east, again near the letter B in the word Bosnia there, you'll find right below it, I should say, Travnik, which is the other ⁸²⁷ town he's discussing.

Again, I must stress, it might be interesting for conversation pieces and it might be interesting for other persons in another courtroom, but certainly as it relates to Dr. Kovacevic, this testimony is not either relevant and, quite frankly, it's immaterial, and all he's trying to do is sweep with a rather broad brush, that we think is inadmissible and should not be discussed here. He has witnesses. The charges are specific against Dr. Kovacevic, and he should present witnesses who can assert those charges specifically against him. As he brought Mr. Vulliamy to discuss and show various portions of the tape -- and we'll have an opportunity to cross him on that -- but everything subsequent to that and the fact that Mr. Vulliamy may or may not have joined the convoy south of Prijedor is totally irrelevant in this case. So I ask that an instruction or at least some clarification to our request be made. Thank you.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Keegan, we have to attempt to limit the evidence to what we think is relevant and helpful, and what we are going to have to do is give a rough and ready ruling. It can only be that. We do have in mind the burden which you bear to show a pattern and a systematic practice and also ⁸²⁸ that you have a burden to show, in relation to genocide, a specific intent. Because you have those burdens, we are going to widen the admissibility of evidence in a way that we otherwise would not, and we are not going to restrict it purely to events in Prijedor.

But doing the best we can, bearing in mind your burden but also the rules of evidence and the objections which are made, we've come to the conclusion that we shall restrict the evidence to 1992 and events in Bosnia. About those events you may adduce evidence. But beyond that, we think it is going beyond the limits necessary for a case of this kind, and it is our duty to make sure that the case does remain within limits. With that ruling in mind, perhaps you would adduce the evidence?

MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, just so I may be clear. Did you indicate that the limitation is in Bosnia in 1992 or events in 1992 and events in Bosnia?

JUDGE MAY: No, 1992 and Bosnia.

MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, with due respect, there is one other aspect which I believe Judge Cassese may be familiar with, and that would be the issue of international armed conflict. Certainly one of the issues there, for example, to prove that, is ⁸²⁹ involvement of forces from another State after the supposed withdrawal of the JNA in May of 1992. Now, to the extent that we may have direct evidence of their involvement in '92 or '93 or '94, it seems to us that is directly relevant to our proving the issue of international armed conflict in Bosnia even in 1992, because the evidence would be to show a continuous involvement post-May 1992.

JUDGE MAY: But is this evidence you wish to adduce from this witness?

MR. KEEGAN: There is -- yes, Your Honour, there is, in fact, evidence.

JUDGE MAY: What does that relate to?

MR. KEEGAN: During his investigations in eastern Bosnia in '95 and '96, he interviewed ECMM personnel. They spoke of events they witnessed to include evidence of crossings of the Drina where pontoon bridges were brought in at night, troops would cross over, and then of course the pontoon bridges were removed, so during the day during the "flyovers" no violations of the then prohibitions on Serbia would be witnessed.

JUDGE MAY: But the Drina is where in relation to where we're dealing with.

MR. KEEGAN: The Drina forms part of the ⁸³⁰ border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, the Republic of Serbia. If you look at the area on the right which would be the eastern border of Bosnia-Herzegovina along the towns of Zvornik and Visegrad, et cetera, you will see the Drina river indicated.

JUDGE MAY: No, we are against you, Mr. Keegan, on that latter point. We think it is too remote for our purposes.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, where we left off was, then you drove directly from Prijedor to Belgrade. When you arrived in Belgrade, what did you then proceed to do?

A. We got to Belgrade late that night, August the 5th, and the next day was a combination of writing the story, a fairly explosive response both in Belgrade and internationally. I did some ridiculous number of radio and television interviews, writing the story and tea with Professor Koljevic, the Vice-President of Bosnian Serbs.

Q. What was the reaction to the publication of your stories and the ITN stories from Professor Koljevic?

A. Well, the story was published on the 7th of August, the next day. Professor Koljevic invited me ⁸³¹ for tea. We were not particularly popular in Belgrade but he invited me for tea at the Hyatt Hotel, and I was happy to accept, and he, in a way that was half amicable mocked us, he said, "So you found them, you'll do well out of this young man. Took it a long time, didn't it? All that happening --" I remember him saying, "so near Venice," and he joked at our expense, the media's expense, with reason.

All you cared about was poor multi-cultural Sarajevo with its university. None of you had your holidays in Trnopolje, no winter Olympics at Omarska." It was a mockery that they had been managing to do this for so long without anybody knowing, [and he had a point.]

Q. After the publication of the stories, did the ITN crew and others return to Trnopolje?

A. Yes. I think they all --

MR. KEEGAN: Just a moment, please. MR. D'AMATO: Objection. At the end of his testimony, he said, "And they had a point," and that's not in the transcript and I'd like to call your attention to that. It's an important concession.

THE WITNESS: "And he had a point," I think I said.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, the transcript should show ⁸³² the witness finished by saying "And he had a point."

THE WITNESS: "And he had a point," yes.

MR. KEEGAN:

Q. And what was the point that he had there, Mr. Vulliamy?

A. The point was that we, and by "we" I suppose I mean the media, had concentrated very much on the siege of Sarajevo, for reasons that I think are justifiable, and as I understood his point, it was that these camps, that which we had discovered the previous day, had been, as it were, by the media, allowed to operate for a long time, as he put it, "so near Venice," without endeavours or without interruption, and I think he was having a go at our obsession with Sarajevo. He was crowing slightly, I think, that "we were able to do that all near Venice and you never got there until now." That was, I think, the point that I would concede to him.

Q. Now, did the ITN crew and others then return to Trnopolje and the Prijedor area?

A. Yes, they did. Penny Marshall and one crew certainly, I don't recall whether Ian and the second crew went back, but there was a terrific descent of mass media from all over the world onto that area and they joined it, yes. ⁸³³

MR. KEEGAN: Could we run the video, please, with the sound?

(Videotape played)

THE INTERPRETER: "It helped us a lot because the situation improved immensely right away. They took down the wire, they started bringing food around ..."

(interview continues in English)

MR. KEEGAN: Stop it there.

Q. While the ITN crew went back to Trnopolje, Mr. Vulliamy, where did you then go to?

A. Well, I was torn as to what to do because I had offers to go back and to, as it were, continue with all this, but I made a different decision. Professor Koljevic and others had told me they had a list of camps over on the other side where Serbs were being held, and I thought that, having set the agenda with regard to Omarska and Trnopolje, I'd let the circus descend on -- do all that, and I wanted -- I thought it was a point they had, they had a list of alleged camps, and I thought, well, the right thing to do was to go over onto the other side -- to take that point from Belgrade seriously and to go over to the other side to start from square one over there and to try and endeavour to make inspections of the camps in which Serbs were being held prisoner. ⁸³⁴

Q. Did you, in fact, report on such camp?

A. Yes, I did. One of the worst was said to be near the Croatian Herzegovinan town of Capljina, and I managed, with a colleague from the Associated Press, to negotiate a way in there using the access to Omarska and Trnopolje as a yardstick and a challenge to the Croatians running that camp. It was being run by a militia called the HOS. We eventually got into this camp at a place called Dretlej, and it was in a very unpleasant place. There were women, there was a shed full of women in that camp, in the baking heat packed into a shed, and that was the most important thing there. The commander of the camp, a Major Hrskic, made a veiled threat [on my life] if I published that fact, which I did, and indeed The Guardian gave it prominent coverage.

Q. After your reporting on the camps where there were Serbian civilians being detained, what was the next story that you covered in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

A. Well, back from -- after the Croatian camp for Serbs at Capljina, I went back to Zagreb for what I hoped would be a bit of a rest, get cleaned up a bit, but that was not going to happen because the night I arrived in Zagreb, the frontier between

Bosnia-Herzegovina, just north of Prijedor, and ⁸³⁵ Karlovac on the Croatian side, this border across which the great influx of deportees which I mentioned yesterday had moved was closed by two -- on two counts.

MR. KEEGAN: Just a moment, please. MR. D'AMATO: Excuse me. Again, the

translator [sic] seemed to have left out a veiled threat "on my life," he said, but the "on my life" is missing from the transcript.

JUDGE MAY: We will get that put right. If there are matters which you notice, Mr. D'Amato, as we are going along, by all means raise them. MR. D'AMATO: I only do the most important ones, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, of course. But, at the same time, there is a facility at the end of the day for transcripts to be corrected, and you should be aware of that.

MR. D'AMATO: Yes, sir.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Keegan.

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you, Your Honour. Part of the problem may be my asking the next question too quickly and they can't keep up, so I will endeavour to put some space between my questions and the answers.

Q. Now, Mr. Vulliamy, you were mentioning the border between Bosnia and Croatia being closed. What ⁸³⁶ were the circumstances of that closure?

A. The circumstances were that for some months now, as I said, very large numbers of people had been coming from the Prijedor and Banja Luka areas across that frontier into the, as it were, the crook in the horseshoe shape of Croatia, and the frontier was shut for two reasons and by two sets of people: Firstly, the UNHCR, United Nations High Commission for Refugees, said that "We will no longer cooperate" with what had by then become known as "ethnic cleansing," "That by letting all these people through in flight, we're simply helping the authorities, the Serbian authorities, in achieving their goals, and so we're going to seal the frontier. No more allowed through." The second reason for the closure was the Croatian government in Zagreb who said simply, "We have got too many people now. We can't feed and accommodate any more."

Q. So what did you decide to do?

A. Well, I had a conversation that night in Zagreb with a colleague from Reuters and a colleague from the Associated Press, the colleague from Reuters being a Yugoslav and we, as we put it, "Well, that's the front door shut," but we were unconvinced that the ethnic cleansing was going to stop because of that and, ⁸³⁷ as one of us put it, "We wonder where the back door is," and it dawned on us - a rather unwelcome realisation - that the only way to find that out was to go to Prijedor and to get "ethnicly cleansed" ourselves, to become part of whatever these forcible deportations were and to join one and to find out what happened.

Q. Did you, in fact, do just that?

A. Yes. Next morning, we got up and drove through the Krajina area into Bosnia-Herzegovina and to Prijedor and stopped at the police station for papers to be there, and just outside Prijedor, almost immediately, at a small hamlet, I think it's called Lamovita, stumbled upon a great convoy parked up on the side of the road marshaled by uniformed police with automatic weapons, and the convoy was itself an extraordinary sight of buses, trucks, and private cars, brimmed full with people and belongings that they had obviously mustered aboard these vehicles, and we slipped into the convoy.

Q. Now, you indicated that you had gone to the Prijedor police station to get authorisation papers. While you were at the police station, did you have some interaction with a group of Serbian forces?

A. Yes, a rather curious group of Serbian ⁸³⁸ forces. I had never seen before the groups of paramilitaries or irregulars known as "Chetniks" who wear long beards and are known for their scraggy hair and long beards, and this is actually the civic centre bit that we had been in before, and there were some people there having a sort of picnic lunch and hunkered down, and we did, for a short while which we were allowed to, which was not long, have a conversation with them, yes, or, rather, my Yugoslav colleague did and translated what they were saying.

Q. Did he indicate that he had asked where they were from?

A. They were from Serbia and the ones we spoke to were from a town called Nis in the south of Serbia.

Q. What is the approximate date of this interview, what is the date you're in Prijedor now?

A. I think it's August the 17th, 1992. If not, it's a day either side of that. I'm pretty sure it's the 17th.

Q. Where were you when you were speaking?

A. We were just inside the entrance to the civic centre building in a room slightly to the right in Prijedor.

Q. You indicated that you spoke to them for a period of time that you were "allowed." Who was it ⁸³⁹ that interfered and would not allow you to continue interviews with these men?

A. The police officers on the door of the civic building.

Q. Were you, during that day, able to see what kind of transport those paramilitary forces were using?

A. Yeah, they were on military buses.

Q. What type of military buses?

A. Fairly sort of ramshackle coaches but painted in camouflage, in camouflage green.

Q. Were you able to tell, from the nature of your interaction with them, whether they were there with the approval of the local authorities?

A. Well, we ascertained they were there with approval -- with the approval of the local authorities because they were having sandwiches and lunch in the local authority building, but -- and -- but -- yes, I mean, that was the assumption.

Q. Did those men indicate where they had come from and where they were going to?

A. They were going back to Serbia and they had been in a place called Kljuc, which is to the south of Prijedor.

Q. If you could please just slow down in your speech? ⁸⁴⁰

A. Apologies to the translators.

Q. Based on your involvement in that area at the time, were you able to determine whether there was fighting going on in the area of Kljuc at that time?

A. There was violence going on in the area of Kljuc. I was in no position to know whether or not they were meeting any resistance or whether they were just bullying.

Q. Now, referring to the convoy at Lamovita which you joined, were you able to determine where that convoy had come from?

A. Yes, further along the way. They were, for the most part, from the town of Sanski Most which is -- your friend has said was to the south of Prijedor, and they were on their way to -- they didn't know where, nor did we. That was why we joined them, to find out.

Q. Were you able to establish approximately how many people were in that convoy?

A. A mixture of our calculations and what they were saying, I think about 1600 in some 55 cars and a dozen or so buses and a dozen or so trucks.

Q. Were you able to determine the ethnic group or nationality of the people involved in that convoy?

A. Overwhelmingly Muslim, with a few Croatians.

Q. Who, if anyone, was escorting that convoy? ⁸⁴¹

A. We spoke to one or two of the police officers later on. They were, for the most part, uniformed police and some were in a thing called the MUP from the Prijedor area and were armed.

JUDGE MAY: Yes.

MR. OSTOJIC: Once again, I apologise, Your Honour, but if you look at the map, Sanski Most is to the south directly, and he said these people came from there, and it is an interesting story, and I'm sure Mr. Vulliamy has reported it and talked about it, but for this proceeding, I believe we're concerned with Prijedor, and with Prijedor and what occurred there and what he saw there. Now he's talking about three or so weeks or two and a half weeks after his visit to Trnopolje and the other centres, and now we're talking about what he specifically said, "refugees," and I'm trying to give a little latitude, but I just must insist that there may have been, as he said yesterday, different years, different times civil wars erupting at different places, and this might be an example where there was another war that cannot and never will -- I think counsel for the Prosecution can stipulate -- had nothing to do with Dr. Kovacevic because he wasn't in the area, he was in Prijedor, and I'd like for us to at least try, respectfully, to stay with your instruction ⁸⁴² earlier. Thank you.

JUDGE MAY: Well, the ruling which we made was that we would admit evidence relating to Bosnia and in 1992, and Sanski Most, it seems to me, is within that ruling. You can, of course, cross-examine about it.

MR. OSTOJIC: Thank you.

JUDGE MAY: Just help me with this, Mr. Keegan. Where is the village or the hamlet in which this convoy was joined? I have Sanski Most. We're dealing with an area near Prijedor, I think.

MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, if you use, I believe it's Exhibit 35 --

JUDGE MAY: I have it, yes.

MR. KEEGAN: If you look west of Prijedor, you should find the village of Lamovita.

JUDGE MAY: In fact, Judge Mumba points out that on Exhibit 47, Lamovita does appear.

MR. KEEGAN: Okay, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: It's somewhere in the Omarska-Trnopolje area, if that's right. Yes. Can we go on?

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you, Your Honour.

Q. I believe my last question referred to who was escorting the convoy. Did you, in discussions ⁸⁴³ with -- did the individuals on the convoy indicate to you how this convoy had been organised or initiated?

A. Yes. They, for the most part, had to leave their homes that morning, the morning having been preceded by various attacks on their homes, grenades through the windows, shooting into the houses, and they had been told that the Muslims from that particular part of Sanski Most had been told to rendezvous at a car park, either with their own transport or with buses, and that they were to leave that morning. This, as far as I could gather, these instructions were put out over the radio.

Q. Did they indicate they had been told where they were supposed to be going on this convoy?

A. Well, it was a mixture of some who thought that -- or who had been told that, papers had been secured for them to go to Germany, Austria, or Hungary, and others, like us, who had absolutely no idea at all where we were going.

MR. KEEGAN: Now, if Prosecution Exhibit 47 could be given to the witness, please, and placed on the ELMO?

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, if you would take a moment, familiarise yourself again with the map? What I'm going to ask you to do is generally trace the route ⁸⁴⁴ that the convoy actually took on that day? If the overhead could be turned on, please, and put on the monitors? There we are.

Yes, if you're prepared, could you please indicate where you started and then generally the route?

A. Yes.

COURT REPORTER: Sorry, I can't hear.

MR. KEEGAN:

Q. You're going to need to speak into the microphone?

A. My apologies. Yes, Lamovita is indeed marked, and that's where we picked it up. There was a wait, I think it was a shift change or something, and we lurched off down this road towards Banja Luka with a curious response from the bystanders, either hostile or nonchalant, and then set off down -- well, the tarmac road becomes a less-well-mettled road here and you climb into hilly ground towards this town here, Skender Vakuf. There were only brief stops on the way to Skender Vakuf.

Q. You described a mixed reaction as you went through the Banja Luka area, hostility or nonchalance. What do you mean by "a hostile response"?

A. The odd curse thrown at the convoy, people ⁸⁴⁵ shouting this word, the translation for which I believe we're still waiting, "balija," and others would shout, "Go to Alija," meaning Mr. Izetbegovic, the President of Bosnia. But for the most part, I have to say the overwhelming majority of people were looking at this as though we were just going out for a stroll, and we discussed this, and my own personal conclusion was they had seen it so many times before that it was an unsurprising sight to them. This was not the reception in Skender Vakuf, however.

Q. Please describe what occurred in Skender Vakuf.

A. Skender Vakuf was a much more militarised town - as you can see, it was closer to the front-line - and there the atmosphere was much more menacing. The convoy was -- there were military and semi-military people lounging around, and they were stopping the convoy at various points and harassing its members, kicking the cars and so on, denting the cars, spitting and things, cursing. And, well, they stopped my car, and that was an alarming moment, I must say.

Q. What happened on that occasion?

A. Well, I was worried that if I spoke in a foreign language, I would blow our cover and that would either get us thrown off the convoy or something ⁸⁴⁶ worse. So I feigned deaf and dumb. I started doing a nonsensical deaf and dumb language, which, thankfully, he didn't understand, and my colleague, who is a Yugoslav, said, "Oh, he can't understand a word you're saying. He's deaf and dumb." And we cobbled together some story about coming from Australia, "We're caught up in this, it's all a terrible mistake," and with that this chap, who was pretty drunk, and his friend, they gave me a Chinese burn on my arm. For some reason, he pulled off the windscreen wiper and gave the car and partly myself, as I shut the door, a kick, demanded cigarettes, and sent us on our way.

Q. Now, after Skender Vakuf, what was your next stop?

A. After Skender Vakuf, we -- the tarmac ends after Skender Vakuf and it becomes a mountain track and became more frightening because we could see far more troops around; we were getting near to the front-line; the insults were getting more common, trucks of soldiers hurling abuse at us; and we kept pulling over at what looked like industrial or factory farm installations and we thought maybe we were all going to a camp.

One of our number during one of the breaks said, "I hope this isn't going to be some kind of ⁸⁴⁷ massacre." My friend said, "I think the unspeakable has just been spoken." But it wasn't. We carried on. And we got to a place called Vitovlje, which was the last village on the Serbian side of the line.

MR. KEEGAN: If that would be -- sorry, Mr. Vulliamy.

If that would be a convenient moment, Your Honour?

JUDGE MAY: Two o'clock.

--- Luncheon recess taken at 12.30 p.m. ⁸⁴⁸

--- On resuming at 2.05 p.m.

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you, Your Honour. Your Honour, just before I begin with this witness because it will impact somewhat on his testimony and just to clarify, the ruling with respect to -- that you made this morning, does the limitation of; in Bosnia in 1992 also apply to the issue of international armed conflict?

JUDGE MAY: Yes.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes. Thank you, Your Honour.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, when we left off before the lunch break we were discussing the convoy of which you were a part and you had described how you were arriving at a village named Vitovlje. Could you please describe what occurred as you arrived in that village?

A. Yes. Vitovlje was a mountain village. As the convoy began to enter it, inhabitants of the village, among them women and children, some of them running across the fields to do so, lined the road and, if I could demonstrate, were slicing their fingers across their throats (indicated) at us and shouting something in Serbo Croat which my colleague from Reuters who is a Serb said meant "Slaughter them, slaughter them," using a word which apparently is used to describe animals in an abattoir rather than murder ⁸⁴⁹ of human beings. It wasn't a comfortable place to drive through, but we did, and came out the other side climbing a hill, and as we did so, the rear of the convoy was stopped and the whole convoy then stopped. This is quite a long snake of vehicles.

There was a lot of arguing going on. It was at this point, actually, that we were able to count the vehicles. The row was because two young women had been taken from one of the cars, prisoner. Again, one pleads one's inability to fully understand what was going on. I'm now fairly sure why two young women would be taken out of cars and held prisoner, but was not at the time, and eventually we went on --

Q. Were those women, to your knowledge, returned to the vehicle or to the convoy before it moved on?

A. I really don't know. We found out about this argument as we were pulling off and getting into our cars. To my knowledge, not, but I don't know. I can't definitively answer that.

Q. Were any of the vehicles or other property also stolen or taken from the convoy at that point?

A. Property of those driving their own cars was being taken on and off at most of the stops of which there were several, and these stops became more frequent towards unwelcomed darkness and by which time, ⁸⁵⁰ as dusk came, the first shooting was beginning, and during one stop, one of the buses broke down, as night fell, in fact, and dark fell as we were stationary behind it for quite a long time, and during that stop, groups of -- a mixture of irregulars and camouflaged troops, not the police, who watched on, went down the convoy taking property. In the car behind us, they took a lady's wedding ring, I remember, and they were interested why we had petrol in the back of our car. Yes, I got the impression that property was being taken as they proceeded further down the convoy, but I couldn't actually see beyond the car behind us.

Q. And throughout this whole time, was the convoy still being accompanied by police that you had picked up in Prijedor and along the way?

A. Yes. Shortly after this bus-stopping event, this became quite frightening, actually, because there were bushes on either side of the road and you could hear men moving in the bushes and there were clearly firearms nearby, they were shooting at, in some cases, over the heads, over the convoy, or had been in the fields just before the bushes started, and it was shortly after that and before we got to the end of the, as it were, the vehicle bit of the -- stage of the convoy, that the police, who had joined during what I ⁸⁵¹ think was this shift change at Lamovita all turned back, and one of them had clearly, pardon the expression, "clocked us," and who we were and realised that we weren't Muslims from Sanski Most and said, "They're taking cars on ahead. You had better tell them you're journalists." And we were, I suppose, quite pleased -- I was quite relieved to have been discovered by someone who was in at least some form of authority, and as we proceeded to the last Serbian line, by now dark, we did declare ourselves, yes.

Q. Where was that final destination for the vehicle point -- travel of the convoy?

A. This would be the Serbian front-line manned by what appeared to be irregular or semi-regular soldiers, and this would be a place called Smet.

Q. During this convoy, up to the area of Smet, had you found or had you witnessed the same type of array of heavy weaponry behind the irregular forces which you had noted in Croatia at the beginning of the conflict there and elsewhere in Bosnia during your travels?

A. Yes. During the period that the convoy was just preceding and after Vitovlje, we were able to get a rare and quite a good view of the guns and some tanks but mostly dug-in guns and mortars arraigned along the ⁸⁵² high ground, and an impressive quantity of ammunition for those guns, yes.

Q. What happened in the village of Smet?

A. At Smet -- and it was a long process -- each vehicle -- well, each car was taken from its owner, they were yanked out of the vehicles at gun point, told to take whatever possessions they felt they were able to manage on foot, and the vehicles then turned around and driven away by members of this, as I say, irregular, semi-regular unit or other chaps who were hanging around.

So the convoy was being laboriously, it took a long time, sent out on foot into the night. Those on buses were simply told to get off the buses and walk again with whatever possessions they could manage and again at gun point, and similarly those on trucks, riding on the trucks, were told to get off and their trucks taken away.

Q. Were any vehicles allowed to proceed across the line from Smet?

A. Six. Five belonging to other people -- I don't know why they were allowed through -- and the sixth was ours. We declared ourselves, as advised by the police officer, and got into some banter with the guards. My Yugoslav colleague from Reuters doing most ⁸⁵³ of the talking, we were joking with them about the Belgrade soccer team, in way of ingratiating -- we were quite keen to be their friends at this point, and they allowed our car through.

Q. At Smet were people also forced to turn over valuables?

A. Yes, one or two instances of property being taken, but then, on the other hand, most of the stuff that people had packed in their cars, I think presuming they were going to be able to take that all the way to wherever they were going, were being driven away in the vehicles as well as valuables, people were losing whatever they had packed to take with them.

Q. From Smet, where were the members of the convoy, now mostly on foot, where were they sent?

A. Well, out onto the road, and we were, for the first couple of miles, in our car, by this time laden with other people and their belongings with others on foot.

I had been covering this war and others for enough time by now to know that Rule No. 1 is that you never cross the front-lines, and our greatest fear was what's called "friendly fire" whereby any sensible soldier on the other side, if he saw this procession coming towards him, would probably open fire. So we ⁸⁵⁴ elected one of our number to carry a white T-shirt with a torch shining on it as though to signify that we were not hostile to whoever was ahead of us in the darkness, and, well, the procession began, us initially in the car along with the five others that I couldn't see and a large crowd of people.

Q. Was there any military activity going on, any firing going on at this time?

A. There had been some small arms fire going on, night time was usually fighting time in these places, and the heavy firing began just as we got to a barricade in the road made of rocks that designated the -- not the front-lines but the actual border between the two territories controlled by the two opposing sides.

By then, yes, there was a lot of mortar fire going on, and we could see, quite clearly, tracer fire coming over our heads, down into a village below, I think called Cosici, and you could tell where it was going because the tracer bullets are, by definition, lit. Yes, there was quite a lot of fighting starting up.

Q. Did you see any indications that people had recently been killed on the ground that you were now walking or covering? ⁸⁵⁵

A. Yes. Mostly after this border of rocks that I hoped to describe, but first signs of, not actually cadavers of any kind, but sticky blood and signs of blood that had been shed on the road were just before this demarcation boundary. Yes, there had obviously been some people wounded on the way.

Q. How did people get across this demarcation line which you've described?

A. Well, it was a high barricade of boulders and there were mines -- there was a slope in the road to the left hand, north side, and although there was land around which you could travel in a car to the right, that was layered visibly with mines, so the last of the vehicles were left there, including ours, abandoned, and these 1600 people were clambering over the rocks, and this is something I won't forget. I remember there was a man in a wheelchair and he and his wheelchair had to be separately hoisted over, I remember babies being handed down to their parents along with possessions that they had taken, teddy bears and toys and mementos and so on. These were families, and of course the old people, and of them were a good number, only got over with some difficulty, helped by younger people.

Q. As you carried on walking on this road, were there indications that there had been people killed on ⁸⁵⁶ that part of the ground?

A. Yes. We obviously weren't the first to come this way because there was blood and it was semi-fresh, if I can describe it was "sticky underfoot," and there was evidence that there had been bodies on that road, yes. I at one point stepped on the side of the road and there was a human forearm on the side of the road.

Q. Approximately how long do you recall having to carry on until you reached the Bosnian government lines?

A. A long time. I can't recall exactly how long, but we were marshalled by one of the deportees to walk in single file. It was explained to us that if a mortar were to hit us, this would create less damage. Some women and children simply sat down on the side of the road, unable or unwilling to continue because the fighting was getting heavier ahead of us and down in the valley below, so this held us up, as some of the younger men tried to marshal them to continue. The older people were obviously moving much more slowly than the rest which delayed us further and, with some difficulty, one man was in his slippers, I later found out that he died along the way.

So it took a long time to get the procession as far as the first sign of the forces on the other ⁸⁵⁷ side, the Bosnian army soldiers, who were actually blocking the road. I don't know how long it took, but it must have been two or three miles on, and they said that the fighting in the village below was too heavy that night for us to continue on the road and they were pointing up a track up the side of a mountain, saying we would have to climb that and continue on our -- along that route. So people did. They left the road at that point to climb this mountain track as directed, with the fire continuing.

Q. After you made your way up the mountain track, how was the group then carried on to its final destination?

A. The track continued for some time. Then we reached a cattle trough for water for cattle, which some people felt able to stop and rest, including us, for a while because the fighting -- we were now leaving the fighting down below us, and people started to take water, had a rest, we talked to them about what a long day it had been, some stories about how they had left their homes, and continued into the first habitations which we had seen since Smet or before Smet, actually, and I remember someone saying I don't know where we are but it looks like somewhere, and that is where some Bosnian army and Croatian soldiers said -- well, his ⁸⁵⁸ words were, welcome to Travnik. We have buses to take you the rest of the way.

Q. And after you found those buses, what was the reaction of the people who had been on that forced convoy?

A. Sort of bewildered relief, sort of bittersweet, I suppose. I remember the women touching the patch on the side of this man's uniform, which was the Bosnian army insignia, like a sort of talisman. I suppose they had never seen it before. A mixture of relief and bewilderment, I'd say.

Q. Can you then describe your impressions as you entered the town of Travnik on the buses?

A. I didn't know where on earth I was. I had never heard of Travnik. We arrived and went with our fellow deportees on from our march to their billeting quarters which was a gymnasium school, it was called, and others were taken to other buildings, they were registered, and it became clear as we went into their sleeping accommodation that they were simply joining many thousand other people to whom the same thing had happened from other parts of the Bosnian Krajina region. They found what places they could on the floor to sleep with their belongings in plastic bags, and we chatted to some of them for a while. Then asked to be ⁸⁵⁹ taken to whoever was in charge around here, which was the Bosnian army headquarters.

Q. Among the people that you found in the gymnasium and the school, were there people from the Prijedor area?

A. Oh, yes. Most of these people were from the Prijedor region, some from Banja Luka, and the areas to the south of Prijedor.

Q. The following day, did you have an opportunity to speak with the people from the convoy about what had occurred to them in Sanski Most?

A. Yes. That was the first thing we did, was to get up and go and talk to them again after what had been about two or three hours' sleep, and they -- we spoke to a doctor who talked about people throwing -- someone threw a grenade into the front room of his house and some women had been killed while they were having coffee in the front room, and they talked -- repeated the story we had already heard about the radio instruction to assemble in the car park for deportation, and a lady who had had a fashion boutique talked about her property being damaged and her threatened. Yes, it was variations on the theme of it being made intolerable and, indeed, very dangerous for them to stay, and others being killed. ⁸⁶⁰

Q. Did you also have an opportunity to speak to people in the gymnasium who had come from the other areas you've referred to?

A. Yes. As I said, the people were from, in the main, our people were from Sanski Most, others were from Prijedor, there were people from Kozarac in particular, and people from the villages around the Prijedor and to the west of Banja Luka.

Q. Did those individuals relate similar stories to the ones that you heard from the people from Sanski Most?

A. Yes, it was all the same theme: harassment, shooting into their houses, grenades in houses, and others talked about being asked to sign over their houses to the authorities with a promise never to return, others talked about going through something called the office for population exchange, or something in Prijedor, which they had to register with, signing away their properties, to organise their departure. There were variations on a theme, but they all came down to the same basic point: they were to leave and were not to come back.

Q. Had they all been transported down that same route which you had travelled and did they relate stories that were similar to the experiences which your ⁸⁶¹ convoy had gone through?

A. Yes. My main conversations about all that were on a later visit to Travnik the following month, but they had come from -- I mean, if I can -- the series of conversations to answer your question properly, that road, apart from being quite a bond between those who had travelled it, was sort of -- was an important chord in the war because everybody knew it, everybody knew how frightening it was, and indeed a lot of the people whom I met the following month back in Travnik -- this is in September 1992 -- had come along that same road in those same circumstances from the Trnopolje camp that we had visited, and their stories, their accounts illuminated, for me, considerably what the Trnopolje camp was for. We had heard all these different accounts of how people had got to Trnopolje, and now here was a common, as it were, sequal to the chaos we had seen that day in the camp. They had all been herded, for want of a better word, over that same road, through that same gauntlet, into Travnik.

Q. How long did you stay in Travnik on that occasion?

A. We left the following day after a briefing with -- we went to see the Bosnian army commander and ⁸⁶² his opposite number at the Croatian HVO, they were in alliance at the time, and we were told that -- we got some figures on the numbers of refugees who had come into Travnik along the road we had travelled, some 36.000, I believe, by that date which was by then the 18th of August, 1992, and we became aware for the first time on the scale of the problem. I introduced this phase by saying we wanted to know where the back door was. We now knew.

Our priority then was not to tarry but to arrange transport as quickly we could and to get to a telephone to report what we had seen, and that involved going down to Croatia.

Q. Now, subsequent to your experience on that convoy to Travnik, did the ICRC issue a document which described similar accounts of treatment of non-Serbs in the Banja Luka region?

A. Yes. I remember them putting out material on this subject.

MR. KEEGAN: This would be Exhibit 49, Your Honour.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, do you recognise that report?

A. Yes, I do.

Q. Is that the report issued by the ICRC?

A. It was a little while after our trip across ⁸⁶³ the mountains. Yes, I remember it.

MR. KEEGAN: We tender that exhibit, Your Honour.

Q. At the same time, during this same period that we're speaking of, were there statements also being made by Bosnian Serb officials in the Banja Luka region and by the Serb media which reinforced the impression you spoke of, that this was a dangerous and organised activity that would continue?

A. Well, I remember my colleague from Reuters, from Belgrade, getting a copy of a magazine called Epoka, which basically said that if you -- it illuminated the whole business of the sheets and white flags a little more because it said in the article that Muslims and non-Serbs were obliged to fly these -- something white or a white flag from your building or face the consequences or some such expression, I don't recall the exact wording. It was a report in a Serbian magazine about this discomfort that people were intended to feel if they didn't leave.

Q. Were there also statements being made by Serbian authorities from Banja Luka about the transfer of population?

A. Well, there was certainly -- there were various decrees being put out locally by villages in ⁸⁶⁴ the area. There was one village near Prijedor called Celinac where a decree was put out and Muslims were not allowed to congregate in more than groups of three, were not allowed to make phone calls except from the post office, were not allowed to go fishing in the river or swimming, not allowed to collect and not allowed to talk to relatives unless they were from the village, that sort of thing. Yes, there were various official decrees being put out. That was just one I saw in a village actually nearer Prijedor than Banja Luka.

Q. Do you recall statements referring to the numbers of Muslims which the Banja Luka authorities hoped to remove from Banja Luka?

A. No, I don't recall any specific intentions to sort of -- I don't recall any specific numbers, "We want this number out by how many." My colleague and trainer did write an article in my own newspaper in which he quoted some officials from this office for population removal saying that they wanted to get rid of, I think, 40.000 to Zenica by a certain date. That was reported by a colleague, and I can certainly find the report for you. I did not get directly in Banja Luka anything like that, but those figures were being reported, yes, particularly from this, I think, office ⁸⁶⁵ for population exchange and a man called Vukic in particular.

Q. And later in October of 1992, did the ICRC from the Banja Luka region issue statements about the -- what was being referred to as ethnic cleansing of Muslims and non-Serbs from the Banja Luka area?

A. Yes, they did. The ICRC protestations and reports became more frequent and, for them, more vociferous as time went along, and I do remember those reports. The ICRC does not use this kind of language lightly, they're very restrained, and they have to be, so that's why their reports were particularly notable.

Q. Do you also recall a report from the special U.N. rapporteur Mr. Mazowiecki?

A. I certainly do remember a report from Tadeusz Mazowiecki. I recall a number of reports from him and especially that on Trnopolje. We were in close contact with him and I believe these reports led to his resignation.

MR. KEEGAN: If these could be marked as the next three exhibits, I believe it would be 50, 51, and 52.

JUDGE CASSESE: Mr. Keegan, could you please give us the date of this document, P49, the date and the source, the ICRC document? ⁸⁶⁶

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour. That was, in fact, issued by ICRC headquarters from Geneva, and I'm sorry, you'll have to -- it's in my notes, but I don't believe I have that with me, the actual date. I will provide that to you later, Your Honour.

JUDGE CASSESE: Thank you.

MR. KEEGAN:

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, if you could briefly review each of those three documents? Are those the statements that we just referred to?

A. Yes. With regard the Red Cross one, this is an interview with Beat Schweizer by the Austrian radio. I don't know this particular interview, I didn't hear him being interviewed on Austrian radio, but I spoke to Beat on a number of occasions and he said the same things.

Q. His position at that time was?

A. He was head of the Red Cross in the area, the International ICRC, International Red Cross.

Q. In the Banja Luka region?

A. Yes. As regards the AFP report on ethnic cleansing being nearly complete, again, this is a report in the Agence France Presse, I didn't see this particular one, but Sylvana Frote, the UNHCR spokeswoman, was widely reported and I certainly saw ⁸⁶⁷ other accounts of her statements. The third sheet is Tadeusz Mazowiecki's -- it's a report of his report, again on the AFP. I didn't see this particular report of the report, but I did see his report itself.

Q. Does that article accurately summarise his conclusions?

A. Yes, yes.

MR. OSTOJIC: I was trying to object before. I think it's highly speculative, so I was going to object to the form. I understand we are giving great latitude but ...

JUDGE MAY: Yes. This is probably a matter for us to decide.

MR. OSTOJIC: Thank you.

JUDGE MAY: Before we leave these documents, I am told by the Registry they are numbered as follows: The last document which was referred to which has on the left the figure 00543284 is, I think, Exhibit 50. I confirm that that's right with the Registrar.

The document headed "Red Cross Director says Muslims must be moved," 00543283 is 51, and I have that confirmed.

THE REGISTRAR: If you will allow me just to check with the ... ⁸⁶⁸

JUDGE MAY: Yes, if you could, please.

A. Sorry, Your Honour, they reached me in a different order.

JUDGE MAY: I'll ask the Registrar to read out the figures so that we've all got the same.

THE REGISTRAR: So the document "Red Cross Director Says Muslims Must Be Moved," is Exhibit 50, the document entitled "Ethnic Cleansing In Banja Luka Nearly Complete," Exhibit 51; and "Mazowiecki: Ethnic Cleansing Intensifying," is Exhibit 52.

JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

MR. KEEGAN:

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, did you return to Travnik some weeks later?

A. Yes, I did, about a month later.

Q. And what were your main impressions that you recall from that return visit?

A. Firstly, that the town, full enough of deportees when I first arrived there that night, was now full to bursting. The numbers being given out by the various authorities of refugees needing settlement had been 36.000 in mid August during that first visit, if "visit" is the right word, and were now something like 75.000 to 80.000, so it had more than doubled. All of them along that road, all of them from that ⁸⁶⁹ area. So one's first impression is that the place was heaving with people from around Prijedor and Banja Luka.

Q. Did you --

A. It was also under pretty heavy shelling, I omitted to say. Sorry to butt in.

Q. Did you have conversations with some of those people regarding the convoys that had followed the one that you had been on?

A. Oh, yes, indeed, with a great many of them, because, as I said before, that road was something of a bond between those who had been on it, and it was, I think, quite surprising to some that a foreigner, an outsider, had been along it, and, yes, we shared stories about the road and the journeys, and indeed where the people had come from, and -- forgive me if I tried to pre-empt this earlier -- but by this time, there were very much larger numbers of people in Travnik who had come along that road from the Trnopolje camp, and I later learned that -- on that visit that one of them had been Mr. Alic who we had met that day in Trnopolje.

Q. Was there also a number of reports about any massacres on any of those convoys?

A. This was the main -- the main thing, was that ⁸⁷⁰ four nights after we had travelled, which was the night from the 17th into the 18th of August, on the night of the 21st of August, there had been, so the authorities said and so some of the people who were encamped said, the killing of some 200 men at a ravine near Smet. I remember the ravine, we skirted it although couldn't see into it because it was dark but the road curved round and there was talk in town of this massacre. I endeavoured to find eyewitnesses to the massacre but was unable to do so. The two people who had reported it, or they said had survived it, had gone elsewhere, but there were reports beginning to circulate of this massacre, yes.

Q. And where had that particular convoy originated from the reports?

A. I understand that the men had come from Trnopolje.

Q. Did you have conversations with individuals who had been in camps of some type or another from other areas, areas other than Prijedor or Banja Luka?

A. Yes, and there's one in particular which I found alarming. As you can imagine, you know, I was being introduced as the man who had seen Omarska, and one man, by way of informing me, and in a way reprimanding me at the same time, told me about a shed ⁸⁷¹ that he had been kept in along with 100 other prisoners from his village which was near a town called Donji Vakuf just over the other side of the front-line, and the gist of his argument was, "Well, you found Omarska and Trnopolje. They were just the famous ones. There were other little camps all over the place," or "camps" may be not the right word, but in his shed where men had been beaten to death and abused. The commander, the man running it, had come up to them that day and said, "Ha, ha, the journalists have found the big camps up near Prijedor but they'll never find you up here." This man managed to get to Travnik with five others on a prisoner exchange, but his testimony, which I believed, led me into a fairly despairing thought, really, that these little places could be all over and that we really were not going to be able to find them.

Q. From Travnik, where was the next area which, in 1992, which you then travelled to?

A. Towards the end of September, I went into what is called the Bihac pocket, which is the area to the extreme northwest of the country just west of Prijedor.

Q. At that time, how was that pocket being held?

A. Well, with some difficulty. Although the maps that we've been looking at don't indicate it, the ⁸⁷² Bihac pocket was completely surrounded, sealed off. To the east and south by the Bosnian Krajina, what we're calling the Prijedor-Sanski Most area, and to the north and west by the Croatian Krajina area, which, although it's in Croatia, was under Serbian control. So Bihac was completely surrounded and defending itself with some difficulty.

It was strategically very important to both sides, specifically to the Serbs, because it was like, as one man put it to me, "a bone in the throat." In the area that linked the Bosnian Krajina and Banja Luka with the Croatian Serbs in the Croatian Krajina, it was an awkward aberration for them.

Q. Where did you go first in that area?

A. I went to a place called Bosanska Krupa on the river Una.

Q. Upon your arrival at Bosanska Krupa, what did you find?

A. Bosanska Krupa is separated from the Serbian-controlled area just to the west of Prijedor and Sanski Most by the width of a river, and it was one of the most terrifying places I have been during the entire war, frankly. You had to get to it by parking your car quite a way back and walking down a steep track to get into the town, what was left of the town. ⁸⁷³ There I found a population of either, in the main, elderly people who were unable to get up the track fast enough without being shot at, because you were shot at as you went up the track or down it, or people who just wanted to stay -- there were always those people in every place. Or a small number of police defending the town or, for the most part, refugees from the area over the other side of the river towards Sanski Most and Prijedor.

Q. How would you describe the area of Bosanska Krupa at that time?

A. I described it before. I will do so again. It was like a shooting gallery because the snipers were just over the other side of the river, and to move around the town, you had to run between the houses, rather like prey. You would crouch behind a house, run to the next house; as you did so, the gunners would shoot, "Crack, crack," you'd get to the safety, hopefully, of the next house, and continue thus along the river. This is how people had to live if they were to get fruit then on the trees in order to live. Neither the U.N. nor the Red Cross or any other agency had, at the time I arrived in Bosanska Krupa, been there.

Q. How many forces -- you mentioned some ⁸⁷⁴ police. How many forces were present in that town?

A. It's hard to say. I'd estimate minimum of 20, maximum of 50, taking casualties. We asked how many people, you know -- how many people get killed running between the houses like this? And they said, "Oh, 56 in the last two weeks." And a lot of those I think had been so-called defending forces. But it was a pretty token defence.

Q. How were those police armed?

A. Rifles, one or two machine guns, not much.

Q. What was the ethnic background of all of the people whom you met in that village?

A. I think they were all Muslim in this case. If there were any Croats, I don't recall meeting them. I think they were all Muslims.

Q. Did you, on some occasion, have the opportunity to discover what forces were aligned on the other side of the river?

A. Well, yes. Obviously there were large numbers of snipers with rifles and machine guns because they were shooting at us all day. It was towards nightfall that they started shelling Bosanska Krupa with mortars and artillery fire, and that's when we stopped running about between houses and joined the population of the town in the places where they had ⁸⁷⁵ become accustomed to live, which was their cellars, or if they had no cellar, other people's cellars.

Q. And the forces on the other side of the river, did you later determine who they were aligned with or what army, what forces, they belonged to?

A. It was the Bosnian Serb army.

Q. How long did you spend in that town?

A. Two days with a night in between.

Q. And how did you get out of the town?

A. Well, back into the chicken run -- pardon me -- and running between the houses, the bullets coming pretty close to us, and running up the track at the back of the town up back onto the road towards Cazin and to the car, being shot at.

Q. From Bosanska Krupa, did you move into the town of Bihac itself?

A. Yes.

Q. Can you describe the situation that met you there?

A. It was similar to Travnik for the same reason. According to -- there were some UNMO, military observers, United Nations military observers in Bihac, and they told us that the population of the pocket was 300.000 of whom some 36.000 were refugees from the Prijedor area, and the -- well, it was the same ⁸⁷⁶ conditions, public spaces were packed with these people bedded down on the floor of schools. Some had -- some refugees had taken accommodation, most memorably for me, in a series of tunnels and underground accommodations that were built by the Germans during the Second World War beneath a school. The school had been gutted, it was too exposed for them to stay in any longer, so they had found these tunnels beneath it. We went down into the tunnels to spend quite a bit of time down there with the people.

Most of them were elderly. There was one old lady aged 84, I took her name and interviewed her -- I can't recall her name at the moment. I can get it for you if you like. She was scared out of her wits preparing, I think, to spend the rest of her life down there. She made some remark about how it was never as bad as this even in the Second World War. There was a young girl down there called Bahra, I can't remember her second name, Klagic, I think, who rather touchingly went away to make herself up before being interviewed, despite the circumstances. She told a story of how she had been burned out of her house in a town just north of Prijedor called Bosanski Novi and described a very frightening 90-kilometre round robin hike sometimes with fellow deportees. She said she saw them killing ⁸⁷⁷ people by the road.

Eventually she said she and her friend had been taken in by some Serbs to make coffee for them for a while before being allowed to cross the river Una into Bosanska Krupa and then to Bihac. I wrote down and have written that she made coffee for the Serbs. I know now what that meant.

Q. The town itself, was it under attack during the time you were there?

A. Yes, under fairly heavy attack.

Q. Was the town being shelled during that time?

A. Yes, it was, especially towards nightfall, and the United Nations military observers were pointing out that it was being shelled not only from the Bosnian Serb side but also fairly intensively from the Bosnian Croat side as well -- sorry, from the -- forgive me, the Croatian Serbian side, that is to say, the Croatian Krajina, from the west as well as from the east and south, that is to say.

Q. Did you personally have an opportunity to observe the formations of the Croatian Serb military forces on the other side of the confrontation line?

A. Yes. The United Nations military observer who was from the Royal Air Force of my country, actually, a man called Millington, he was very, very ⁸⁷⁸ angry indeed about this, angry at his own employer as well, and he advised us to go to a Bosnian army encampment on a high plain above Cazin where there's a turkey farm and from which he said you could see quite clearly from whence the fire was coming into Bihac from the Croatian Serbian side, in addition to from the Bosnian Serbian side.

Q. Could you, in fact, see those positions?

A. Yes, you could see the guns firing.

Q. What, if anything, did you note was happening at that turkey farm with regard to the Bosnian military forces at that point?

A. The Bosnian so-called army at that point was quartered on this turkey farm and I didn't spend a great deal of time there, but the -- the single memory I have of the place was that bullets were being issued and signed for singly, one round at a time, which gave some kind of indication of the weaponry that they had at their disposal. The men went to the front-line from the farm and from the centre of town on the bus, on civilian buses, and they were unarmed when they went up there and I remember we said to them, "Well, where are your weapons?" They said, "Oh, they're on the front-line already. The shift that comes off gives us the guns and we take over from them that way." So ⁸⁷⁹ there were more men than weapons.

Q. Do you recall any particular attacks during the time that you were in Bihac?

A. Two. One -- if there was any debate from whence the firing was coming, we were driving back into the town on the western side and were shot at from Croatia, in effect, but the most memorable attacks were around and on the hospital.

Q. And what occurred at the hospital?

A. The hospital was working as best it could to treat people. Like many hospitals that I visited in Bosnia, it was -- they were having to work often without anaesthetic, and there was one -- a shell was levelled at the hospital on one occasion while I was there, but the occasion I'll -- I remember most vividly was the admission into the hospital of a seven year old girl who had been hit in the head by a sniper's bullet, and I was told this was while she was running across her back garden with her mother, their house having been hit by a mortar, and this girl was bandaged up and they asked us to come over and have a look, and she was almost unconscious, her eyes were shut, and I just put my hand under her shoulder, I was -- I wasn't thinking professionally at the time, and there was this horrible shudder and that was, it turned out, the ⁸⁸⁰ moment of her death. That's the most memorable attack on Bihac.

Q. During -- at the same time as the attacks on Bihac were being conducted both from within Bosnia and from Croatia by the Croatian Serbian forces, did you become aware that there were also attacks in the south of Bosnia by Yugoslav Army forces?

A. Sorry, in the --

Q. I'm sorry. Did you become aware that at the same time that -- during the same period that you were in Bihac, there were attacks by the Yugoslav Army in the south of Bosnia?

A. Yes, down in southeast -- Montenegrin -- the Montenegrin divisions where colleagues had been reporting that.

Q. If you could briefly review that exhibit, Mr. Vulliamy?

I believe we ...

MR. OSTOJIC: Thank you, Your Honour. With respect to this exhibit, we have an objection. Clearly in accordance with the Court's ruling confining at least some of the different conflicts, different flare-ups and wars that occurred in Bosnia, this particular one, Prevlaka, or Dubrovnik area, and if you look on your respective maps, I think Exhibit 43, the ⁸⁸¹ map, you will see that Dubrovnik is clearly designated in the Croatian side all the way in the centre of your map, significantly -- right by the sea there, if not extensively-- and Prevlaka is in that area, removed from the Prijedor area which we're concerned with here, but definitely it's outside the scope of your instruction as well, so we object on those grounds.

MR. KEEGAN: Your Honour, if I might? The report which of course is an article by the Belgrade press agency TANJUG, which was the state news agency in the former Yugoslavia, is reporting the statement by the president of the Serb Autonomous Region of Herzegovina, which, as you heard in earlier testimony, is within Bosnia and Herzegovina, was one of the Serb Autonomous Regions declared by the Bosnian Serbs. They are discussing here members of the Yugoslav Army Podgorica corps, which is the capital of Montenegro, being deployed east of Dubrovnik -- it's actually in Bosnia-Herzegovina territory, and the town specifically mentioned is Trebinje, which you will note on that map is, in fact, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. So this is within 1992, it is within Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it does relate to international armed conflict.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, we'll admit this. ⁸⁸²

MR. KEEGAN:

Q. Now, Mr. Vulliamy, from Bihac, where was the next area in 1992 that you went to cover?

A. Well, for a number of weeks, I was preoccupied with the emergent conflict between the Muslims and the Bosnian Croats, and then, fairly suddenly, our attention was drawn back to Travnik by the fall of the town of Jajce.

Q. And where, in relation to Travnik, is the town of Jajce?

A. Jajce is to the northwest of Travnik and was under heavy siege. It's a mixed Muslim and Croat town -- was -- and was under Serb siege. We had tried to -- or I with colleagues had tried to get to Jajce a number of times through a very narrow sort of umbilical corridor which serviced the town. By night ammunition and supplies and food would be taken up. We tried to go up that corridor a number of times but were prevented from doing so by very heavy fire across it. So I never actually got to Jajce, but it fell during the very last days of October and the first days in November.

Q. At some point was the evacuation of Jajce ordered?

A. Yes, I think at a certain point the Croatian ⁸⁸³ HVO army first realised that the town was under such heavy fire it was now indefensible and pulled off the lines, the Bosnian army followed, and they ordered the people to leave, such was the intensity of the bombardment.

Q. And did you witness, in fact, the evacuation of Jajce within that corridor?

A. Yes. Late one evening, we went up as far as a village called Turbe on the frontlines, and the first few people started straggling in from Jajce with stories of their town ablaze. It was the next day, Saturday, I think November the 1st, something like that, it was the Saturday that we went out to a midpoint called Karaule, between Turbe and Jajce, and beheld this scene of some 40.000, according to the UNHCR, people coming down the lanes with carts, horses, sheep, farm animals, a defeated army, beating this pathetic retreat. They were under fire as they did so, and I know that because in a fairly quiet moment between Karaule and Turbe, there was a sudden shot and a man wounded in the arm while he was riding on the back of a horse-drawn cart.

Q. The people that you witnessed being evacuated from Jajce, what type of people were coming down that road? Were they all military forces or related to the ⁸⁸⁴ military?

A. Oh, no. The military were a small minority. They were as anxious to hitch a ride on the carts, the horse-drawn carts, as anybody else, but for the most part, this was -- these were rural people, civilians, families, children, old people, anybody. It was the population of the town.

Q. Did you speak to the people that were in this column or convoy coming down this road?

A. We spoke to them mostly -- yes, a few on the convoy, but mostly when they encamped in the streets of Travnik and any open space they could find. I remember thinking and writing at the time this looked like something out of Tolstoy, these broilers, horses, sheep wandering everywhere, people were bringing their farms literally with them. This was an incredible sight, Travnik, as I've said, already very full, and we talked to them, yes, about the intensifying bombardment of their town and the way in which they had, towards the end, been mostly living in cellars and had to come out to get food when the two defending armies had boarded up the corridor for them to collect and going down into the cellars to eat it again, they talked about attacks on their fleeing convoy, and we spent the rest of the day having conversations along those lines. ⁸⁸⁵

Q. Did you determine the ethnic groups of the people to whom you spoke?

A. Yes. And they were divided about 50-50 Muslims and Croats.

Q. You indicated that they described to you the intensifying shelling of the town. Did they describe to you how the siege of the town had been conducted?

A. Yes. Well, it was mostly artillery and mortar fire, and the -- it was the military people rather than the civilians who told us that they had heard word that the time had really come for them to surrender because reinforcements had been brought, they had been told, from Belgrade, JNA reinforcements, to finish off the job. The Serbs were anxious, I think, to -- Jajce was something of a promontory jutting into their territory, and they were anxious to clear it out of the way and clean up their frontline so as to better lay siege to Travnik.

Q. Did they -- you referred to statements that the -- people as they were evacuating the town had been shelled.

A. Yes. There was quite a lot of discussion about how, as the convoys were being formed, one man talked about having to scramble up a mud bank because it was a wet weekend and that they were open-fired upon ⁸⁸⁶ when they tried to scramble up this mud bank to form the convoy to get out of town.

Q. In the very few days after these events which you just described, did the ICRC issue a press release on the situation in Jajce?

A. Yes, I believe they did. I think -- I remember reporting it at the time.

MR. KEEGAN: May I have that marked as the next exhibit, Exhibit 55, Your Honour.

THE REGISTRAR: 54, that will be.

MR. KEEGAN: Excuse me, I'm sorry, 54.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, do you recognise --

A. Yes, I do.

Q. -- that press release?

A. Sorry to interrupt. Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

Q. Is that the press release issued by the ICRC?

A. Yeah.

Q. And it's dated ... The date of the press release?

A. The 4th of November.

Q. Now, the final area in Bosnia with respect to events in 1992 I'd like to cover with you deals with the area -- the areas of Sarajevo and Visegrad. Can you please describe your experiences in Sarajevo in 1992? ⁸⁸⁷

A. Yes. Like everybody covering this war, I was in and out of Sarajevo, although mostly after the dates that we're going to talk about.

But during 1992, I was able to visit both sides of the siege. I was able to -- I got quite a tour of the Serb siege lines on the day that we were in Pale, while we were waiting to go down to Kula. We were taken on a tour by two soldiers, and so we were able to tour with them and look down on the town from the hills from which the siege was being laid.

Q. From the viewpoint of those gun positions, could you see the various sections of the city below?

A. Very easily. Sarajevo is in a bowl, surrounded by mountains, high ground and, yes, it's laid out like a map, a city plan beneath you. You can see it very easily.

Q. Could you pick out particular landmarks within the city from those positions?

A. Oh, indeed. You can see the various churches, the Holiday Inn, the library, which by then had been destroyed, and various landmarks, well-known, yes. With binoculars, of course, even better.

Q. Could you see clearly apartment buildings and homes?

A. Yes, absolutely. With binoculars you could ⁸⁸⁸ almost see cars and people, if they were powerful enough.

Q. Did you, while you were up at those Serbian gun positions, have conversations with the people who were escorting you?

A. Yes, we did. There was a gesture of bravado by one of the soldiers, he made to spray the whole city with his -- he didn't actually shoot, he just pretended to spray the whole city with his gun and said the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim and various jokes about how many wives they have.

Q. Now, when did you actually begin to study the area of Visegrad and report on what occurred there in 1992?

A. After the war, it was the only time I was able to get into Visegrad to research what had happened in that area. It was a roundabout route, some men had been taken from Srebrenica to Dublin and I was invited to talk to them. One clearly seemed much to young to be in the army. I said; "What were you doing in 1992? How old were you?" He said he was 13. I asked him what did he do then as he was then in the pocket of Zepa. He said my job was to get the bodies out of the river. And I said which bodies? He said the bodies that were being thrown off the bridge in Visegrad. And ⁸⁸⁹ I was amazed at what he was telling me and how many bodies were involved and the condition they were in. Some of them, he said, decapitated and many of them children, and because the bridge in Visegrad is so famous, I made it my business to try and investigate what had been going on there in what would have been the spring to summer months of 1992.

MR. KEEGAN: Just a moment.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Your usual objections?

MR. OSTOJIC: Actually, I'm a little more disturbed, Your Honour, and quite frankly I want the Court to direct its attention, if you have the Tadic Exhibit 1423 and that page, specifically Mr. Vulliamy states it was in the Visegrad area and he describes the same scenes here he's telling us or sharing with us here, but those were made -- I know he's trying to reference what occurred several years ago, but he was there during this visit and during this conversation in 1996, and he plainly states that in Tadic, and just so that we're clear, and I'm only asking this Court to perhaps adopt this, that if he's discussing something that he saw, that he's more explicit with the dates that he claims he's discussing it, because clearly in Tadic, there's a grave inconsistency, and --

JUDGE MAY: You can cross-examine about that ⁸⁹⁰ in due course, Mr. Ostojic.

Mr. Keegan, I think what we should be clear, is the witness describing something he saw himself or merely something that he had reported to him rather later, which seems to be the understanding which I have of it.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour. The testimony describes events which occurred in '92. The witness, in his testimony, is talking about reports given to him in '96, and then he'll talk about travelling to Visegrad and speaking with Bosnian Serbs on the other side about 1992.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. We shan't admit this evidence. We're really getting too far away from the subject matter, and it being a report by somebody about events which happened in Visegrad, we're not inclined to admit it.

MR. KEEGAN: If I might, Your Honour? I would at least respectfully request a proffer on where the evidence will go because I believe that, in fact, if the witness confirmed with Bosnian Serbs that hundreds of bodies were -- of Muslims were killed and thrown into the river during the same period in 1992 as we're talking about in Prijedor to the point where it was plugging up the culverts of the hydro electric dam, ⁸⁹¹ then that does describe events that would be in consideration on the question of the widespread nature of the attack and the purpose of the attacks going on.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. The evidence we've been hearing from the witness has been about events in 1992 in Bosnia which he witnessed or was very close to or were reported to him at the same time. Now what you're trying to admit is the evidence of somebody who was 13 at the time -- that may not matter much -- but a report given four years later referring to events in 1992 in Visegrad, the other side of Bosnia.

Now, we have said throughout that we will admit hearsay and we have done, and we allow great latitude in the evidence which is admitted, but we are ruling that this particular piece of evidence is too remote and too much hearsay and too far from Prijedor to be admitted.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour. Your Honour, I note that it's just about 3.30. The remainder of the testimony then would be the interviews in 1996 with the accused and with Milomir Stakic. It might be better to begin that after the break.

JUDGE MAY: That would be appropriate. How long do you think you will be?

MR. KEEGAN: Thirty minutes maybe, Your ⁸⁹² Honour.

--- Recess taken at 3.30 p.m.

--- On resuming at 3.50 p.m.

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you, Your Honour.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, in 1996, did you return to Prijedor to conduct some interviews?

A. Yes.

Q. During the time you were there, did you interview both Milomir Stakic and the accused?

A. Yes, I did.

Q. Where is it that you found Milomir Stakic?

A. I met him -- we met him, I was travelling with a colleague, at the health centre in Prijedor, of which I believe he was the director, a day care health centre.

Q. Was there anyone else present with him in the office for the interview?

A. Yes. With Dr. Stakic there was a man called Mr. Kondic who was variously introduced with a number of titles and with me was a colleague from the New York Times.

Q. Now, during the course of this interview, did you ask him generally about what had happened in Prijedor?

A. Yes, and he had argued that the Serbs were ⁸⁹³ defending themselves, but that most of the conversation, what I wanted to talk to him, out of curiosity, really, was about Omarska.

Q. What did he say about Omarska?

A. Well, initially he said that there was no one collected into Omarska, that -- we asked him about the television pictures, and he said that they were pictures of Serbian prisoners in Muslim gaols and that the story was fabricated. He said, "If you're a journalist, you have to be on the spot to know what's going on," and I remember biting my tongue at that point because I had not declared myself as having been there personally. But he said that Omarska -- "No one was collected into that place," he said. And Mr. Kondic interrupted and said, "Omarska was a mine, nothing else," is as accurate as I recall.

Q. Did they later change their version of what had occurred in Omarska?

A. Yes. Almost immediately there was this curious negation of what he had just said. Dr. Stakic said that, "In Omarska, there were only those Muslims who were under interrogation for," and I paraphrase here but I can produce the exact words, if asked, "They were under interrogation for possession of arms or military activity, and that once a proper prisoner of ⁸⁹⁴ war camp had been established, only those arrested with illegal weapons were kept in that place."

Q. Did you ask him whether there had been any killing at Omarska?

A. I don't recall asking Mr. Stakic that. I might have done. But we moved on from Omarska to the general theme of camps and the Serbian experience of camps.

Q. Did he make any reference to Jasenovac during your interview?

A. Yes. All conversations about Omarska refer back to Jasenovac, and he said that it was wrong to make any comparison between the two, that Omarska was not a concentration camp, he said, and he said that the Serbs fight when their freedom is threatened, and Mr. Kondic added at this point, "Unfortunately, we, the Serbs, have learned to defend our freedom in concentration camps," which was a reference to Jasenovac. So there was this invocation of the camp experience throughout the conversation.

Q. Did they make reference to the conditions that the prisoners had in Omarska in the context of this conversation regarding Jasenovac?

A. Yes. Mr. Stakic said, "You can't compare them." He said that in Omarska, the prisoners, they ⁸⁹⁵ had food. He said the prisoners in Omarska had doctors; they didn't work. And then he said -- and I remember this well -- he said Omarska was not a hotel, and he smiled a rather unpleasant smile and said, "But it was not a concentration camp."

Q. Did he make a reference to when or if the Serbs will go to extremes?

A. Well, he said, "The Serbs will go to extremes when their freedom or if their freedom is threatened."

Q. Was there a discussion about the relationship of the Serbian people in Yugoslavia during this conflict?

A. Yes. Like Mr. Kovacevic back in Prijedor four years before, he said that the Serbs -- and he specified the Serbs in this area -- are arriving at a great moment in their history, and he said that, quote: "When the Serbs have been at war for four years, there are no Krajina Serbs, Bosnian Serbs, or Serbian Serbs, there are just Serbs."

Q. Now, why is it that you chose to reinterview the accused, Dr. Kovacevic?

A. Well, I was curious to know what kind of people had been introduced to me as being responsible for Omarska, I was curious to know what kind of people -- on whose authority we had gone to the camps. ⁸⁹⁶ I then thought, and was corrected, actually, because he said, in 1992, that he had been born in Jasenovac. I found this an intriguing situation. Omarska and its inmates had, in a way, followed me throughout the war, I kept bumping into them in various places within the war and beyond it --

Q. The question was why, of the other people in the Prijedor area that you met, why did you specifically choose to interview, re-interview, Kovacevic? What was it about him or your experiences with him that led you to re-interview him?

A. Well, it was a result of the meeting in the civic centre in Prijedor. We had gone through this recap only briefly, we had gone through this -- Colonel Arsic had wanted us to go to Manjaca. We said no. He said, "Oh, well, if you want to go to Omarska, talk to these people," and he gestured, Mr. Kovacevic and next to him Mr. Stakic. Mr. Drljaca I also tried to interview on that trip but he was not available. I wanted to see them all, but Kovacevic in particular because he had opened the meeting, he had chaired the meeting, he had been the man who, when the television journalists went back to Omarska after I had left Serbia, had been put up to defend the place on television, he was well-known; and indeed, at the end ⁸⁹⁷ of Mr. Stakic's presentation, when he was saying, "Go to Manjaca" and we said "No," he shrugged and said, "Well, if you want to go to Omarska, talk to this man."

Q. Who was he referring to when he said that?

A. Kovacevic, who was sitting next to him. And so I wanted to see him.

Q. Now, during your earlier evidence regarding the meeting in 1992, you referred to a map which the accused got out and discussed. Do you recall that?

A. Yes, the map was by the video.

Q. Can you please describe what that map was and what was the general statement made by the accused with respect to that map?

A. To the best of my recollection, the map was published or -- I mean the original dated from the early 1940s, 1941, and was a map of Serbia as envisaged at that time wherever the Serbs lived -- I don't recall whether it said Greater Serbia or not, but that's the term used to describe the area covered. It comprised most of -- a lot of Croatia; as I recall, all, if not most, of Bosnia-Herzegovina and what is now Serbia and Montenegro; and we were shown this map.

Q. How did the accused refer to the map at that time? What was the point of him showing it to the ⁸⁹⁸ group of reporters?

A. Well, I think it is, "This is where the Serbs are. This is Serbia. This is the idea."

Q. Did he relate it to why the conflict was being conducted at that time?

A. Not specifically, but I understood it to mean "This is what we're fighting for."

Q. In this interview in 1996, did you discuss with him or did you raise the issue of the causes of the conflict?

A. Oh, yes. It was a long conversation, and he was very candid and interesting on the subject. He said he thought it was a civil war, basically a religious war, but he said there were economic factors - which was interesting to hear him say that because it was an interesting dimension - but he was most interesting on the sort of psychiatric dimension, and he said at one point, "It's all very well if your view is from New York, but here on the ground, when everything is burning and breaking apart in people's heads, this was something for the psychiatrists." And he was very lucid on that.

Q. Did he describe what the point of the conflict was from his perspective, what his point in the conflict was? ⁸⁹⁹

A. Yes, very, very candidly. He said that "I wanted to make this Serb land." One of us asked him, "What do you mean? Without Muslims?" And he said, "Without Muslims, yes. We cannot live together."

Q. Did you ask him questions relating specifically to Omarska?

A. Absolutely.

Q. What was his comment about the purpose of Omarska?

A. He said that Omarska was intended as a collection centre but, he said, "It turned into something else because of this loss of control." I think we asked him something like, "What loss of control?" And he said, "I cannot explain this loss of control," and I think I've already said it's "when everything's breaking apart in people's heads." He said, "I would call it collective madness."

Q. Did you ask him about how many people had been killed in Omarska?

A. Yes. This was during a section of the conversation again about Jasenovac, which we discussed at length because of him having said earlier he had been born there. He said that in Omarska, only 100 people -- well, at first he said, "Whether it was ten or 100, it doesn't matter." And then we said, "Were ⁹⁰⁰ only 100 people killed in Omarska?" And he said, "I said 'killed,' not died.'" And we said, "How many died?" And he said, "I don't know. You'll have to ask the doctors." And then said, "Oh, I don't know how many people were killed in Omarska," and I quote, "It's like a hurricane around" -- sorry. He said something about, and I quote, "The hurricane blowing to and fro around here."

Q. You mentioned Jasenovac. Was there, in fact, conversations comparing Omarska and Jasenovac?

A. Yes, at length. He recalled his childhood in Jasenovac. He hadn't actually been born there, he said, in the event, he had gone there with his aunt and gave a very credible and vivid description of his mother being led away and he went to Jasenovac where his aunt saved him. The comparison or contrast, to be fair, he made was that he said that in Omarska, maybe people were killed if somebody got drunk and got mad, but -- and at this point he said, "But if it was ten or a hundred, it doesn't matter." "But Josenovac was a killing factory," he said, "Omarska was not a killing factory."

Q. Did you ask him what the link was between what had occurred between the Ustasha and the Serbs in Jasenovac and the Serbs and the Muslims in Omarska? ⁹⁰¹

A. Yes, and on this again he was very lucid. He said that there was a direct connection between Jasenovac and Omarska, but, he said, it is a thin one. He said the fact that there were Muslim soldiers in the Greater Croatia during the war had had an effect on what happened to the Muslims in this area. He said -- he had a rather -- we said to him back, "But hold on. Jasenovac was run by Croats. What has that got to do with the Muslims?" And Mr. Kovacevic came up with quite a bon mots. He said, "If you're bitten by a snake, you can still be afraid of lizards, but a snake is still a snake and a lizard is still a lizard," to which my colleague from The New York Times said, "Oh, you mean the Muslims are the lizards, but you're still scared of them?" And he said "Yes."

Q. Did you ask him questions about the responsibility for what had occurred, who had the responsibility for what had occurred?

A. Well, in the historic sense, he went back to the war. He said that "There were Muslims in the Ustasha, and if they committed war crimes against us, then now it is the same the other way around." And he had the insight to say that "Who knows? In 50 years' time, it could happen the other way around again." And then I remember we asked him, "This ⁹⁰² collective madness, Doctor, were you part of it?" And he said, "If I was to be acquitted of being a part of this collective madness, that would not be right, but I would want to ask myself what my part in it was." And then he said, "If Dusko Tadic killed people and I did not, then that is not the same thing." And he added, "If things go well in this hospital, if everything is fine in this hospital, then I am to be commended, but if things go wrong in this hospital, then I'm guilty." He went on to talk about why he left

political life and was clearly -- he was most articulate on that. He said he had left politics because he saw too many "evil things." Then I think we said, "Well, what things?" He said, "That is my personal secret. If you have to do things by killing people, that is my personal secret." I think it was my colleague from The New York Times who said, "Do you ever have nightmares about your personal secrets, sir?" And he said, quote: "My hair is white. I do not sleep too well."

Q. Did you ask him about comparisons between the situation in the Balkans and talking about the perspective of people in Europe?

A. Yes, he made some joke about the Una being a border. He said "This isn't Europe, this is the ⁹⁰³ Balkans." At one point he said, "We don't have evolution here, we have revolution," and became chatty about it. He said, "I want to get out." He said, "I'm like an animal in a cage. I want to go to Paris or Berlin to work and practice my profession."

Q. Did you bring the interview down onto a more personal level? Did you discuss his personal experiences or that of his family with the Muslims who formerly lived in the area?

A. Yes, quite apart from Jasenovac. And, yes, he talked about his father and how he had been a farmer and had dealt with the Muslims and had sold cattle to the Muslims, and how he had always -- his father always called them Turks, and then conceded, he said, "Well, actually, they aren't really Turks at all. They come from here."

MR. KEEGAN: We have no further questions, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Mr. Ostojic?

MR. OSTOJIC: Thank you, Your Honour. May it please the Court.

Cross-examined by Mr. Ostojic:

Q. Good afternoon, Mr. Vulliamy.

A. Good afternoon.

Q. Is it Valumay (phonetic) or Vulliamy? ⁹⁰⁴

A. It's whatever you like, sir. It's Vulliamy.

Q. Vulliamy? Thank you. Mr. Vulliamy, you spoke a little bit about the notes that you kept and records. To whom, if anyone, did you give those notes regarding the various interviews and regarding the various times that you spent in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

A. To whom did I give them?

Q. If anyone.

A. Well, when I was called to appear here, I gave them to the court -- well, I was asked for them, but I didn't -- I haven't handed them around to anybody else, no.

Q. I can appreciate that. When was the first time that you handed your personal notes that were taken involving the Yugoslavia - Bosnia and Herzegovina civil war?

A. I would have to consult and come back if you want an exact date, but it would be when I was first called to testify in 1996 for the Prosecution of Dusko Tadic in this court. It would have been sometime during the spring, I imagine, of that year, if not slightly prior.

Q. Is that '96?

A. Yes.

Q. That's what I thought. Now, did you give ⁹⁰⁵ them the originals or copies of those notes?

A. Of my shorthand?

Q. Yes.

A. Yes, the books, yeah.

Q. Did you recreate from your shorthand notes a typewritten form of those notes?

A. In some cases, yes.

Q. Now -- and I asked a compound question and you answered it properly, and it was my mistake. I asked if you gave them the original or a copy, and I think you answered in the affirmative, and again, it's my mistake.

Did you give the Prosecutors your original notes involving what you had seen and experienced in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the civil war in 1992 through whatever period it was?

A. Yeah.

Q. Now, you're a journalist by profession; correct?

A. Indeed.

Q. From where did you obtain your journalism degree?

A. In England, we don't really have journalism degrees like you do in America. You have what's called an indenture and you go on a training; and in my case, ⁹⁰⁶ this was a company owned by the Mirror Group who had a series of "stable newspapers," as they're called, in the West of England, in Devonshire.

Q. The name of the group was Mirror Group?

A. Mirror Group.

Q. When did you obtain that -- or the completion of that study or course?

A. 1978.

Q. And I apologise for going in your history a little bit --

A. Not at all.

Q. -- because I actually didn't get all the notes --

A. Don't worry.

Q. -- and I apologise to the Court as well. You mentioned the study of philosophy. Do you recall that early on in your testimony? What year did you obtain your philosophical degree -- or philosophy degree?

A. I got my degree from Oxford in 1976.

Q. Now, you also mentioned political science. What year did you obtain or confer that degree?

A. They're coupled together. It's a degree at Oxford called PPE, which stands for Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Q. And then you mentioned Florence, that you ⁹⁰⁷ studied in Italy. Did you obtain a degree from a university in Florence?

A. It's a diploma from Florence which I started in '73 but I didn't go back to collect it until '76.

Q. What degree was that?

A. It's not a degree, it's called a diploma in Renaissance Studies. It would be wrong to call it a degree.

Q. Thank you. I apologise. What diploma was that?

A. It's called Renaissance Studies. It's a fairly minor thing.

Q. During your studies of political science at Oxford, did you study at all Eastern Europe?

A. Yes. The Soviet Union in great detail, yes.

Q. Did you study at all Yugoslavia or what has now been referred to as the former Yugoslavia?

A. Yes, it was part of the Eastern Bloc bit of the course. "The Political Institutions of the USSR," it was called, but we had to learn all about non-alignment and Tito and the Warsaw Pact and so on, yeah.

Q. How many courses would that have been that you studied, just out of curiosity, about Eastern Europe and particularly Yugoslavia? That's what ⁹⁰⁸ interests us, I believe.

A. "The Political Institutions of the USSR," which was the title of the course into which Yugoslavia came, would have been one part of eight papers, one of eight papers that you took over a period of two years.

Q. Now, you shared with us some of your professional --

A. Three years, sorry. You had a thing called prelims for the first year and then you did that.

Q. You shared with us a little bit about your professional experience, and I want to just expand upon that a little bit. Other than a journalist, do you have any other professional experience?

A. No, not really. I left university, Oxford University, in the summer of '76; I went to Italy, to Florence, until the spring of '77; I came back and I started with the Mirror Group in the summer of 1977. I went to Granada Television in 1978, and since then -- unless you count television as a different profession, it's all I've done.

Q. I can take just from your testimony that you haven't been educated at all -- and I say that respectfully just because you haven't mentioned it -- in any medical disciplines at all?

A. Medical disciplines, no. ⁹⁰⁹

Q. Can I take, from your professional background and history, that you've never been an elected official of any either municipality or any community or anything like that?

A. Certainly not.

Q. How about an appointed position? Have you ever been in an appointed position?

A. Clearly none important. I was the Secretary of the Hartford College Oxford Arts Society. I think that's the only office I've ever held or ever want to.

Q. Is that a political --

A. About as apolitical as you can get.

Q. That's what I thought. I'm just concerned with appointments in a political nature, if any?

A. Absolutely none whatsoever.

Q. And with respect again to your background both professional and personal, any military experience?

A. No. I have military in the family, but not me.

Q. So you had never served either voluntarily or involuntarily in any military unit at all?

A. No. I have a general and a colonel in the extended family, but I have no military experience, although I have had experience of wars. ⁹¹⁰

Q. Now, the experience on wars is actually a topic that I want to discuss with you. I know, just from your discussions here today, you talked about the civil war in Yugoslavia and Bosnia, and you talked about Northern Ireland, I think, a little bit, here and in the Tadic trial.

Did you cover the war at all in South Africa?

A. No, I didn't.

Q. Did you cover the war at all in the Middle East?

A. Yes, I did.

Q. What period of time did you?

A. 1993, I was in Israel, the West Bank, and very briefly in southern Lebanon.

Q. In 1993, when you were in Israel, for what period of time were you there?

A. Sorry. This is -- 1983. Forgive me. 1983, I'm sorry.

Q. I thought you said '93 --

A. The year after the Lebanon war, right? Sorry about that. 1983.

It was for about a month or so, month or two.

Q. How about any civil wars or the break-up of the old Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union?

A. I was in Romania in the Christmas period of ⁹¹¹ 1989.

Q. Was there during Caucescu --

A. That was the downfall of Caucescu and the, as was thought at the time, revolution against the Communists.

MR. OSTOJIC: May we have a moment, Your Honour? Excuse me.

Just so the court knows, I've been instructed to slow down the speech, and I apologise to the interpreters.

Q. Sir, in 1983, did you, during the Israeli and south Lebanon and your experiences in 1983, did you report on any detention centres or camps occurring at that time at all?

A. No, not at such.

Q. Any time in your experience, other than the experience that you've had currently through 1992, currently, have you reported on such detention centres or camps?

A. Yes, in Northern Ireland, in Ulster, but I would -- this is a court of law, not a seminar -- I would not wish to call the internment arrangements and prisons in Northern Ireland and Ulster in those terms. But, yes, I worked in Northern Ireland a great deal, but I don't think I want to call those "camps." ⁹¹²

Q. Have you ever -- that's why I phrased them "detention."

A. Yes, the Mayes Prison is a detention centre of sorts, but I'm not going to call it a camp.

Q. I'm not asking you to. I was just curious to know how you reported those events, if at all --

A. At length in Northern Ireland, yes. I mentioned earlier that I had won a prize called The Royal Television Society Award. That was for a film exposing Jerry Adams, his pretense that he had never been a member of the IRA, which we proved he had been.

Q. Now, Mr. Vulliamy, you gave us some testimony earlier today and a little bit yesterday. Have we exhausted your recollection of all the events that you have for the period concerning Prijedor?

A. I don't know that you've exhausted all of my recollections, but I'm mindful of the court's request that I be as relevant and brief as possible. I'd say we've covered the main ground, yes.

Q. And with respect to the conversations that you had with Dr. Kovacevic both in 1992 and in 1996, have you told us everything about those conversations?

A. The conversation in 1996 was a long one, and I'm sure there was more, but I think -- I've faithfully reported the gist of both conversations, yes. ⁹¹³

Q. Now, during the time period that the '96 conversation took place, were you taping the conversation at all, videotaping?

A. No. I'm not a cameraman. The ITN pick and chose as they picked and chose in 1992; and in 1996, I was taking shorthand notes.

Q. Did you have a videotape cassette player during the interview in 1996 between you and Mr. Kovacevic?

A. No, I don't carry a video camera.

Q. So it's your copious notes and your recollection that is assisting you relying here today about the conversation that you had with Dr. Kovacevic on or about the 1996 period; correct?

A. Absolutely, and a colleague who was with me.

Q. And what was his name from New York --

A. His name is Roger Cohen.

Q. Can you spell the last name just so we have it correctly?

A. C-O-H-E-N.

Q. And I asked you about those copious notes and the records that you kept, handwritten copies, et cetera. Would those notes regarding the 1996 conversation you had with Dr. Kovacevic, were those also turned over to the Prosecution? ⁹¹⁴

A. Yes, they were.

Q. At the same time you turned over all the other notes; correct?

A. I think maybe slightly after.

Q. Was it --

A. I'm not sure about that. I don't remember which books I gave them when. I mean, I gave them what they asked for, and I'm not sure of the exact order, but I think I gave them the notes that they said they would need to have for the Tadic trial before those pertaining to the latter period.

Q. Was it before or after the Tadic trial that you turned over these books or notebooks? How would you like to refer to it so we make sure we're on the same line? Were they books or notebooks with your notes on them?

A. Notebooks.

Q. With respect to these notebooks, did you turn them over to the Prosecution after the Tadic trial or before the Tadic trial?

A. After the Tadic trial.

Q. To the best of your recollection --

A. Sorry. After my appearance in the Tadic trial.

Q. That's fair, and I note that distinction. ⁹¹⁵

A. Yes, definitely.

Q. So sometime in -- what? -- mid 1996 or ...

A. No, after that. This would have been last year, 1997, Kovacevic, after the Tadic trial, yeah.

Q. I'm going to have to ask you this, it may seem boring to you --

A. Quite all right.

Q. -- trying to determine a little more about these notes, for obvious reasons perhaps. How long were these notes? How many pages were included in them, in this notebook?

A. To the best of my recollection, the notes on the interview with Mr. Kovacevic, '96, about -- these are full A4 and slightly bigger notebooks, I mean, they're not pocket notebooks like this, and that -- I'd say five or six pages of shorthand.

Q. Just so that I have a complete understanding. I'm holding a notebook. Would you classify this as a notebook?

A. Yes, a hardcover notebook. Thicker than that and bigger than that.

Q. So when you say "bigger," it was longer and wider?

A. A tiny bit longer, half an inch wider.

Q. The five or six pages that you referenced, ⁹¹⁶ was that exclusively the notes that you kept with your meeting between you and Dr. Kovacevic?

A. Yes. My notes of that conversation are about five or six -- I mean, maximum eight, minimum five A4, slightly larger than A4 pages of fairly close-knit notes.

Q. Because I note the Prosecution asked you questions about Mr. Stakic, and I was curious to know if, within that notebook, you also had notes relating to your conversations with him and the other individuals --

A. Yes, it's in the same book. It was the same day.

Q. I recognise that it was the same day. How many handwritten pages do you have in these notes, including Dr. Kovacevic's notes that you took contemporaneous with the meeting as well as any notes you may have had from other meetings during that period?

A. How many notes in the notebook altogether?

Q. How many pages? Sorry.

A. How many pages of notes in the notebook altogether? Oh, a hundred, I should think.

Q. And were all 100 pages used to keep these contemporaneous notes and records of your discussions ⁹¹⁷ between certain individuals?

A. Yes. I like to keep big books which can often last me a month or so.

JUDGE MAY: If this notebook is available, we should have it, shouldn't we, before the witness leaves?

Are you going to finish this afternoon, Mr. Ostojic?

MR. OSTOJIC: I agree with the former part. I think they should produce it, in the spirit of cooperation. I didn't get the last part, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Are you going to finish this afternoon?

MR. OSTOJIC: No, Your Honour. Unfortunately, I am not.

JUDGE MAY: Well, Mr. Keegan, have you got the notebook?

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour, they were provided to us, and we have kept the notebooks for safekeeping, as Mr. Vulliamy, in fact, and part at his request, because he moved around, we retrieved them from Italy, in fact, where they were in storage, and he left them with us because he moved around so much.

JUDGE MAY: Where are they now?

MR. KEEGAN: They are upstairs locked away, ⁹¹⁸ Your Honour. We have never used them. And the typewritten portions referred to by the Defence were the draft articles for the interviews which were published in the newspaper, and they were provided to the Defence because they formed part of the supporting material of the original indictment in this case. So the typed part he referred to were, in fact, the draft stories he submitted to his own newspaper. Those form part of the supporting material. The Defence has been in possession of those since the time the accused was arrested and the materials were turned over.

But as to the notebooks, we have never used them. They are his personal notes in shorthand, and they were only kept here so that, when he arrived, in preparation for testimony, he would have his notes available.

MR. OSTOJIC: If I may briefly respond? Although we are interested in the notes that he took during his preparation period for the trial of Tadic and this one, I think Mr. Vulliamy testified that he kept contemporaneous notes during his interview, and I believe, based on my discussions with Mr. D'Amato and Mr. Vucicevic, those notes were never produced to us, those notes were never interpreted for us in any ⁹¹⁹ language, they were not given to our client so that he could review them, and I say this respectfully to Mr. Vulliamy, in order to verify the testimony being given and what's considered within his notes.

JUDGE MAY: Well, the notes would be the best evidence of what was said at the time since they were made contemporaneously.

MR. KEEGAN: Of course, Your Honour. As the Trial Chamber directs, we would provide them, but we were acting on the prior decisions of Trial Chambers of this Tribunal that those kind of things do not constitute statements of witnesses and that's why they were not disclosed.

JUDGE MAY: Clearly, they don't constitute statements, but they are contemporaneous notes, and I should have thought that from that point of view, if the witness -- if there is an application to cross-examine the witness on the notes, then that was something which we might well allow.

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour, certainly, and as the application is now being made, we would certainly turn them over.

MR. D'AMATO: We would like to apply to do that, and I think the best thing would be to recall the witness because it obviously can't be done between ⁹²⁰ today and tomorrow, so would it be possible to have the Prosecution recall the witness at the point at which we are given some way of translating the shorthand and going over the notes?

JUDGE MAY: I'm not sure that's very fair on the witness. If we can avoid recalling him, we should. It may be that overnight, the notes can be produced, the witness can have them --

MR. D'AMATO: They're in shorthand, I think. Right?

JUDGE MAY: No doubt the witness can read shorthand, his shorthand.

THE WITNESS: Yeah. I mean, they're in a mixture of a thing called T-line, an abbreviated ordinary longhand. I mean, if anyone reads T-line -- MR. D'AMATO: It's perhaps possible that the witness might be able to read them into a video cassette or something like that at his own leisure and pace overnight, and then we would have them in the morning?

JUDGE MAY: Well, whatever is a convenient way of dealing with it, or to read them in court, but that may take rather a long time.

MR. KEEGAN: That would, we believe, Your Honour, perhaps be the most efficient and effective way ⁹²¹ for the Court to get the benefit as well. If the Defence has a particular question, based on the questions, for example, that I asked today, and the witness would have the notes, could read the full passage of that particular area, if that's what they're interested in. That seems to me to be the most effective way to deal with it so everyone gets the benefit of the full notes and we maintain some schedule of the trial.

But we will produce the notes as soon as court is over today, Your Honour, if that's requested.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. MR. D'AMATO: We will need some preparation time after we receive whatever form the notes are given to us.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Keegan, you can show the Defence the notes and perhaps give them photocopies?

MR. KEEGAN: Yes, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: It may be you'll have to ask the witness what the relevant pages are in the notes.

THE WITNESS: I'd be delighted to help to find them, yeah. I can find them very easily, very quickly.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Thank you very much. We'll try, if we can, to deal with the matter tomorrow. ⁹²²

MR. OSTOJIC: Thank you, Your Honour. I apologise for having to re-address this issue again, just so that I'm clear, it's not just his notes that were produced last year after the Tadic trial, I think -- and I'm just saying it because I was unclear during our caucus here -- it was the notes that he produced prior to the Tadic trial that he also tendered to the Prosecution -- I don't know how many pages those notes are. We only know, and my questioning was only limited to, the notes involving his '96 visit and conversations with Dr. Kovacevic.

JUDGE MAY: Yes.

MR. OSTOJIC: But I'd like both just so that our request isn't mistaken to be a narrow one.

JUDGE MAY: The relevant notes, surely, are those which were taken contemporaneously. If other notes were made, for instance, if a witness makes a note at some stage in order to assist him to give evidence, which sometimes witnesses do but way after the event, then that's of no significance. What is of significance is any note which is made contemporaneously, and it's those notes which I had in mind, of the 1966 (sic) conversation.

MR. OSTOJIC: '96 and '92.

JUDGE MAY: If any. I think it's the '96 ⁹²³ conversation that notes were taken.

MR. OSTOJIC: If I may inquire on this because it is a little confusing and I just want to clarify it --

JUDGE MAY: Clarify it with the witness, please.

MR. OSTOJIC: Thank you. Thank you. May I proceed?

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, again, not to belabour the point, the notes of 1996, the conversation that you had with individuals at the Prijedor --

A. The pages of shorthand of that conversation, I can find them easily.

Q. -- and of the other individuals that you had that you contemporaneously took and reduced to shorthand or writing, that was approximately 100 pages, that whole period of 1996 and the conversations that you had; correct?

A. A hundred pages is the whole notebook. I mean, that goes on to deal with a whole lot of other subjects and other places too. That's -- I mean, I don't change notebooks every time I change place or anything. I mean, the -- if I can help. The pages -- it's a thick book, and the pages with the interview with Dr. Kovacevic are six of some, I think it's ⁹²⁴ 100-page or so book which is full of a lot of other stuff too, and -- but I can easily find the six pages which have Dr. Kovacevic, you know, written down on them. Likewise, the, I think, two or three pages that have Mr. Stakic and, yeah, I can tear them out or photocopy them or whatever.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Ostojic, what we're going to order is this: That the contemporaneous notes of the 1996 interview are produced, not the book, because the book is the witness's property and nobody else's, and it seems to me the rest of it is irrelevant. But, Mr. Vulliamy, if you would please identify the six pages or whatever, the six pages plus --

THE WITNESS: I can identify it already. It's clearly done.

JUDGE MAY: Once that is identified, it can be photocopied, and a photocopy will be given to the Defence. Tomorrow the book itself can be in court but, as I say, any examination of it is going to be limited to those relevant pages.

So that I'm clear, having said that about the 1996 notes, have you any relevant contemporaneous notes of the 1992 conversation?

THE WITNESS: Of the meeting in Prijedor?

JUDGE MAY: Yes. ⁹²⁵

THE WITNESS: I've got some pretty scanty ones, yes. I'll have a look.

JUDGE MAY: Thank you. Yes. We'll consider those in the morning.

MR. OSTOJIC: Thank you. May I proceed?

JUDGE MAY: Yes.

MR. OSTOJIC: Thank you.

Q. Mr. Vulliamy, we're done with the notes, and thank you. I think your one mic doesn't have a red circle around it, so perhaps if you'd depress the button -- it's okay?

A. Is that better?

Q. Thank you. Sir, your duties as a journalist, can you generally describe them to us?

A. Chronologically?

Q. No, just generally, actually, not your professional experience as a journalist, but I'd like to know, not being a journalist myself, what your duties and obligations are when you do reports or when you report the news, if you will?

A. Yes. You are assigned as your editors -- your editors assign you to work or as you recommend to your editors and then they agree in terms of place, theme, and your duties are to impart, when it was working for the television, it was research and set up ⁹²⁶ and make films and to film whatever was going on, and for the print, to make the, now famous, as many -- as detailed and accurate notes as you can and to write it down and dispatch it, and then there are things called news stories, there are things called features, and there are interviews, profiles, book reviews, and they all require their own different styles, but the principles remain the same. If you're asking me about facts, the answer is you stick with them.

Q. Would you agree with me that you stick with the facts because, at the end of the day, the facts are one of the most important things during your process of being a journalist?

A. Absolutely.

Q. You mentioned these separate categories of the types of journalists there are, the feature journalists. There's also an investigative journalist; correct?

A. Yes. Most journalists do investigations at some point or other in their career, yeah.

Q. And there's journalists who conduct documentary-type interviews; correct?

A. In television?

Q. Yes.

A. Yeah. ⁹²⁷

Q. How about in print?

A. You don't -- well, documentary interviews in print? No, that's a term we wouldn't use.

Q. What type of journalist were you, if you could categorise it for us, in 1992?

A. Well, I was an all around reporter. I was responsible -- I was assigned to go to Italy, to be based there in 1990, and my brief -- my geographical brief was Italy and south-east Europe, and that included Yugoslavia. I think at the outset the idea was I would spend some time in Yugoslavia, I ended up spending a lot of time in Yugoslavia. I don't quite understand your question what kind of a reporter was I? I was a foreign correspondent.

Q. I think you've answered that. I wanted to know what particular title that you had, and that would have been foreign correspondent; correct?

A. Yeah.

Q. Now, you mentioned 1990. Prior to 1990, where were you stationed? You said 1990, if I can use the word "stationed" in Italy, but where were you prior to 1990?

A. I was in London before then. I was the editor of the weekend section of The Guardian, until the end of '89. ⁹²⁸

Q. How long were you the editor of the weekend section of The Guardian?

A. Only a short time editing -- it wasn't the best thing for me at that time -- until the spring of 1989, I was a general reporter on the news desk at The Guardian, based in London.

Q. Forgive me. I'm not as familiar with The Guardian as you are or perhaps I should be. What is the weekend section of The Guardian?

A. It's a magazine section that comes out in the weekend paper, Saturday edition.

Q. Staying with this theme just for a few minutes because I'd like to -- is it fair to say that a reporter or a foreign correspondent such as yourself is required and under an obligation ethically, morally, and in every way possible, is under the obligation to report the news; correct?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you have an obligation at all to make the news?

A. No, you don't have an obligation to make the news.

Q. And isn't it fair that a journalist, a foreign correspondent, is not supposed to make the news but merely just report the news? ⁹²⁹

A. Now and then unavoidably you do make the news. This is particularly true of some of the more celebrated television reporters. You do make the news. Sometimes other radio stations or newspapers will want to interview you because of the sort of things that you do, but it's not an obligation, no, certainly not.

Q. The translating -- if I may just explain, we're waiting for the completion of the translation. Is it fair to say, sir, that the worst thing a foreign correspondent can do is distort the news?

A. Indeed. That would be very serious.

Q. Is there anything worse than that?

A. Well, you could get killed in Bosnia, I suppose, but that would be an unfortunate thing, yes.

Q. I couldn't agree with you more. And, quite frankly, I was -- my question was, and I apologise for not narrowing it, it was limited in your professional duties. There are other risks and things that are worse than that, but I'm saying professionally as a journalist, there is nothing worse than a foreign correspondent or a journalist of any kind to distort that which he has seen and that which he has heard; correct?

A. That would be a fairly serious matter, yes. ⁹³⁰

Q. You mentioned during your testimony, I believe yesterday, during the latter part of the hour, Serbs and then you started to describe that there were different types of Serbs and then I think you shared with us those concepts. Now, when you say "different kind of Serbs," historically, and having taken those classes, do you break them down into any time period or do you just collectively include all Serbs from 10 centuries ago or longer?

A. No, I've learned much more about Serbian people from my own personal experience than I have from books, and the point I was trying to make was that, too often, when people talk about "the Serbs" or "the Serbian view" of something or what "the Serbs" did, what they mean, and it's a forgivable shorthand, I think, they mean those Serbs who accepted this call-to-arms and to accept an ideology which I have described as nationalist. What I wanted to do with that remark was to make it clear that there are very large numbers of Serbs -- people of Serb origin, who find the nationalistic ideology associated with their people or which some of their leaders claim to adopt, or do adopt, as obnoxious, and there are very large numbers of Serbs who indeed fought against that in this war, so that's the point that I was trying to ⁹³¹ make, and I was wanting to, as it were, infuse my testimony with that rider so if I say , "the Serbs were shelling Bihac," what I don't mean is that all Serbs -- well, obviously some of them were shelling Bihac -- that all Serbs approved of the shelling of Bihac when it was quite obvious to me that very large numbers of them thought that was an appalling thing to do.

Q. Just going back, and I have one question on this. When you do an investigative report, isn't it fair that you would take as much information prior to completing your report, try to summarise it, have an understanding of a region or an area, distil that information, and then report that which you've actually seen and experienced?

A. Yes, you have to equip yourself, you know, as best you can. If you're sent to Belgrade at the end of July to report on camps on the 5th of August and you are to file -- I mean, there is such a thing as a deadline, and that story had to be filed, written on the 6th. So, yes, but the answer is: Yes, you equip yourself and you should be knowledgeable, absolutely. I mean, I could be sent to Lagos tomorrow. There's not much I can tell you about Lagos now, but obviously I would endeavour to inform myself about Lagos as much as I possibly could. ⁹³²

Q. Sir, I merely asked you a general question and I'm not sure if your reference was to the August 5th and August 6th deadline that involved some of the articles and the picture that was ultimately shown regarding the Prijedor area. Is that what you were referring to when you said August 5th and 6th? Were you under a deadline at that time?

A. No, I was giving you an example of how -- you know, you can't sit around -- if you've got a story, you can't sort of sit around reading library books for a few days before writing it because your editor will not allow you to do that.

Q. What was your deadline, if any, for the story on the Prijedor investigation that you did in 1992? Was it August 5th and August 6th?

A. Well, we found the camps on August the 5th. I -- this was a news story. I wrote it on the 6th and it was published on the 7th, as -- that's -- yeah, that's the kind of -- that's what would be expected of me. You're asking me about my professional modus operandi and certainly to write that story would -- I mean, that was part of my professional obligation, certainly.

Q. I didn't mean to inquire on your modus operandi, I just merely wanted to inquire, since you ⁹³³ raised it in the issue when we talked about these deadlines, whether it included the August 5th and 6th, because I was confused as to what year you were talking about. Whatever the motives may be, I'm sure we'll discuss it. I'm sure Mr. Keegan may or may not ask you about that.

Isn't it part of your investigative work to when -- preparing a story, when attempting to convey it to, let's say, the world or a nation or a country, that you should do an exhaustive investigative work?

A. I don't understand the question.

Q. I want to know if you -- with respect to any investigative work that you did, including 1992 and Prijedor, during your visits there, and you've testified on that, I understand, but including any other ones, how exhaustive is your investigation before you actually arrive at the scene and begin to write about the various entities that are involved in the civil war?

A. I thought I had answered that question. As exhaustive as possible given the constraints of the need to write the news and report it and the requirements of my superiors at any newspaper.

Q. Specifically with respect to your reporting in Prijedor in 1992, prior to your assignment in ⁹³⁴ Prijedor -- strike that. How long prior to your actual visit to Prijedor did you know you were going to visit Prijedor?

A. I was sent -- I was -- the -- Dr. Karadzic's challenge was made the day before my departure.

Q. And that would have been what, sir? August 2nd?

A. No, no. Towards the end of July, something like the 28th or the 29th.

Q. Did you know or have any background about the history of the various groups in Prijedor prior to this assignment on or about July 28th, 1992?

A. Yes. I had been following the war in the papers closely.

Q. And that was during your assignment in Croatia and the war in Croatia; correct?

A. Well, you asked me about Prijedor. Yes, I had covered the war in Croatia, as I said, first-hand, on the ground from both sides, and although I was not in Bosnia when the war began there, I was following it closely in the newspapers and on the television.

Q. In 1990, were you following the war closely, the civil war in Bosnia and the war that was erupting in those regions?

A. To the best of my knowledge, there was no ⁹³⁵ actual war in 1990, but, of course, I was following the increasing tension rather than the war. There was no war until summer '91.

Q. That's an excellent distinction. I was referring to the war in Croatia.

A. That began in June 1991.

Q. I agree. You started following the news in Prijedor. How much actual work did you do to have an understanding of what the different political groups were that were involved in that area?

A. Well, I, as I said, I had followed the war closely in the papers, so I knew what Dr. Karadzic's SDS was, and I knew what the SDA was, and knew what the HDZ was and I knew who the players were, yes.

Q. Did you consult with anyone in reaching your conclusions who the SDS were, the SDA, and the HDZ?

A. Consult with who exactly?

Q. With anyone. I'm asking whether or not you did.

A. The war was certainly talked about, both among friends and among colleagues. If that's what you mean by "consultation," then, yes.

Q. What I really mean by "consultation," and at all times if you don't understand, just allow me to probably -- or attempt to explain the question, I'll do ⁹³⁶ that for you. I meant did you have anyone who would guide you to have a more complete understanding of what the different political parties were that were involved in the Prijedor area? Did you rely on any one or two or ten individuals for that?

A. I would have -- yes, I talked to colleagues a great deal who had been in the area longer than me, many for some years, and once we got to Belgrade, we were waiting around for a number of days, impatiently, and were given any number of briefings as to the situation. There was a woman from something called the Serb Jewish friendship society called Klara Mandic who gave us very full briefings of what, in her view, was happening in Bosnia, and I think she was a political figure of some kind.

Q. The time period I'm referencing is prior to that July 28th visit in Belgrade and ultimately in Prijedor, prior to that, I believe your testimony is that you did consult with colleagues regarding at least attempting to define exactly who the different parties were and the elected offices of those parties. What I'd like, Mr. Vulliamy, is the number of colleagues that you discussed this with and if you can recall their names?

JUDGE MAY: Well, I think the witness has ⁹³⁷ really dealt with all this. If you'd like to move on?

MR. OSTOJIC: May I have a moment?

JUDGE MAY: Well, you can have till tomorrow morning. We're adjourned. We will adjourn now, half past nine tomorrow morning. Mr. Vulliamy, will you be back then, please?

THE WITNESS: I will, sir.

--- Whereupon proceedings adjourned at 4.59 p.m., to be reconvened on

Thursday, the 16th day of July, 1998, at 9.30 a.m.