⁴⁹⁷

Tuesday, 17 December 2002

[Sentencing Hearing]

(Open session)

[The accused entered court]

--- Upon commencing at 9.33 a.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. Mr. Harmon, are you calling the next witness?

MR. HARMON: Yes. Good morning, Mr. President, Your Honours, my learned friends from the Defence. I am. The next witness will be Dr. Madeleine K. Albright.

JUDGE MAY: I understand we have a representative of the United States Government here in Court.

MR. HARMON: Yes, that's correct, Judge May. I was going to introduce Mr. Clifton Johnson, who represents the United States Government and whose presence has been authorised by the Trial Chamber. Mr. Johnson is seated at the amicus bench.

[The witness entered court]

JUDGE MAY: Yes, if the witness would stand, please, to take the declaration.

THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

JUDGE MAY: If you would like to take a seat.

WITNESS: MADELEINE ALBRIGHT

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Harmon. Examined by Mr. Harmon:

Q. Good morning, Dr. Albright. ⁴⁹⁸

A. Good morning.

Q. I thank you very much for attending these proceedings to assist the Trial Chamber in this sentencing hearing. I will commence my examination by asking you to focus on certain elements of your professional career. You are and have been a professor. Could you describe to the Trial Chamber your work in academia.

A. Yes. I have been a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, the School of Foreign Service, where I concentrated on generally international relations but also the study of changes in communist systems. And that has been my academic interest my whole life.

Q. And you have been a professor at Georgetown since 1982 through 1992?

A. That is correct. And I am there again, having started teaching as an endowed professor this last semester.

Q. What position did you hold with the United Nations?

A. I was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from the period of 1993 through 1996, the permanent representative.

Q. What position did you hold with the United States Government?

A. I was Secretary of State of the United States from 1997 until 2001.

Q. Now, Dr. Albright, you've had a lifelong interest in the Balkans. Could you tell the Trial Chamber about your personal background and about what precipitated that interest in the Balkans.

A. Yes, thank you. Mr. President and Your Honours, I have spent my life in many ways interested in the former Yugoslavia. My father, who was ⁴⁹⁹ a Czechoslovak diplomat was the press attache to Yugoslavia from 1937 to 1938, and then he returned as the Czechoslovak Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1948. I lived there as a child from 1945 to 1947, when I then went to school in Switzerland.

And I think in terms of countries that I feel most closely knowledgeable of and associated with, beyond the United States and Czechoslovakia, it's really Yugoslavia. And after -- as I grew up, it became a constant academic interest to me, and I obviously spent a lot of time, both in undergraduate and graduate school, looking at events in Yugoslavia and then followed it very closely throughout the years.

Q. Dr. Albright, before I get into my next line of questioning, to put into context the plea of guilty in this case: As you know, Mrs. Plavsic has entered a plea of guilty to count 3 of the indictment, persecutions. That count entailed a policy of ethnic separation by force and was implemented through events and crimes such as killings, detentions, unlawful detentions, destruction of cultural property, destruction of non-Serb homes and residences and businesses, forced labour and the like. I bring that to your attention because the period of the indictment ends in December of 1992 and you commenced your duties at the United Nations in 1993.

But my first question, then, is: When you arrived at the United Nations and while you were serving in that capacity, can you describe to the Trial Chamber the UN's level of interest and concern in the events that were occurring in the former Yugoslavia.

A. Well, first of all, let me say that I followed very carefully all ⁵⁰⁰ the events that preceded 1992, because basically we were watching the disintegration of Yugoslavia; the war with Slovenia, then Croatia, and the whole effect of what was going on in the region on not only the Balkans but in terms of Europe and generally how these issues would be dealt with. We were besieged in many ways by endless photographs and news stories about the horrors that were taking place throughout the region. When I -- in 1992, before I took office, it became very evident to anyone really watching what was going on were reminisces of pictures that reminded one of World War II. I am a child of Europe, having been born in Czechoslovakia, and spent the war in England. I'm very familiar with the horrendous pictures that came out during that time, and it seemed to me a repeat of seeing people herded into buses and trains, being taken away, families separated, and horrendous stories coming out in terms of the crimes that were taking place. So when I arrived at the United Nations, I was fully familiar with the brutality that had been taking place in the region.

What was evident when I arrived at the UN was that it was going to be the major subjects of our discussions at the Security Council. Obviously, with the peacekeeping operations taking place, that was a major subject for the Security Council practically on a daily basis, in terms of getting reports from the ground that went to the Secretary-General's representative, who would appear -- or she would appear sometimes in Security Council briefings to tell us what was going on. So obviously, then, the Security Council major effect.

Then every part of the UN was somehow engaged in trying to deal ⁵⁰¹ with this horrendous story. The High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, would come in to the Security Council and describe the terrible things that were happening to people in terms of the loss of their homes, the necessities to set up camps for them, the problem of feeding them, the whole host of humanitarian activities; and then the Human Rights Commissioner would also describe some -- the terrible things that were happening to people in terms of the rapes that were taking place, the separation of families, the killing of people in front of their families. So that was a major subject of discussion.

The General Assembly also was concerned in terms of general debate. So every part of the UN was involved in dealing with the Bosnian issue.

Q. And why, Dr. Albright, did the international community perceive that the events that were occurring in the former Yugoslavia were a threat to peace and security?

A. Well, I think that what became evident was that the disruptions within the Balkans themselves were causing us to think about what the effect of that was on regional security; people fighting each other in Europe at the end of the twentieth century, huge numbers of immigrants that were leaving the former Yugoslavia, questions about deepening ethnic strife that in fact were of a level that we hadn't seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War. And there was a question as to how this was not only affecting the Balkans but the neighbouring region. I always believed that the Balkans were of strategic interest to the United States and to the world community in terms of its closeness to the Middle East as ⁵⁰² well as its importance in terms of Europe itself, so this kind of ethnic fighting in Europe at this time was something that was disrupting the regional stability.

Q. And, Dr. Albright, I know you touched on, briefly, the violations of human rights in international humanitarian law that were occurring in Bosnia and in the former Yugoslavia and that you were receiving some sorts of reports, both from the media and from UN sources. Can you expand on the concerns specifically about violations of human rights that were being addressed in the United Nations.

A. Well, I think that what was most evident were the crimes that were being committed against women in terms of their being raped and raped in front of their families and then removed from their families. There were issues also of people being tortured. We saw pictures of people being taken into what could only have been labelled as concentration camps and beaten and general types of torture that were evident. It also was clear that property was being destroyed, that people were being driven from their homes only because of who they were, not because of anything that they had done, and just general atrocious conditions in terms of human beings and crimes against humanity, and their specific human rights in not being able to exist within the societies where they had come from.

I met with a lot of victims and victims' families, who would describe at great length the kinds of horrors that were being perpetrated that seemed to me unimaginable in the second half -- or the 1990s of the twentieth century. It was unimaginable that these kinds of things could ⁵⁰³ be going on and that they were being done, it seemed from everything that I was hearing, in a deliberate way, not by accident of some drunk soldiers or something, marauding, but as part of some kind of a plan to eradicate a group -- various groups of people.

Q. Dr. Albright, in response to the types of crimes that the media was reporting and in order to achieve a fair and objective picture, did the United Nations ask that a commission of experts, first of all, be formed to investigate violations of human rights and crimes in the former Yugoslavia? And in addition, did they ask for a special rapporteur to examine and investigate human rights violations in the former Yugoslavia?

A. What was happening was the following when I arrived: I know that there had been a great deal of interest already exhibited by the international community in terms of trying to deal in a judicial way with the problems that were going on, and material was being accumulated, and then it was decided that it would be useful to have a commission of experts come together in order to assess the material. And I was very pleased that one of my first votes when I arrived -- I arrived in February, and during that month, we voted in order to make sure that a War Crimes Tribunal was established based on the work of the expert commission, so that there was very much a move in order to try to assign guilt and also to make sure that there was punishment for the crimes that were being committed. So there was a systematic way to put together a judicial proceeding. We did, in fact, talk about the precedent of Nuremberg and the fact that this was a very important step in the international system to be able to create a judicial way of dealing ⁵⁰⁴ with these horrendous crimes.

Q. I will come to the issue of the creation of the Tribunal in just a few minutes, and I'd like to deal with that in greater detail. I'm quite interested, Dr. Albright, in your experiences in Bosnia, your travels to Bosnia. And perhaps if you could discuss other representatives who were members of the United Nations who also travelled and their reactions to seeing what was occurring in Bosnia.

A. Well, first of all, I think that it was very important to see on the ground what we had been hearing of from the victims. And I had travelled not only in Bosnia but also in Croatia and other parts of the region. And actually, my first -- one of my first trips was in Croatia, to Vukovar where I saw mass graves. And then in Bosnia, on my first trip there, seeing the destruction in Sarajevo - a place that Americans had gotten very used to seeing on television during the Olympics and seeing a peaceful Sarajevo - seeing that completely destroyed. I went to the marketplace that had been blown up and saw the destruction there, and basically again met with victims on my various trips to the region. And it was so evident, the scars that were being borne not only by the physical parts of Bosnia but by the people who were terrified. And I met with various groups, and I met with Serbs and non-Serbs at times to listen to what they were describing as pure chaos and mayhem, as they had been moved out of their homes in the middle of the night and transported to various places, and just a complete sense of dislocation. It was very hard for me as somebody who had not only lived in Yugoslavia as a child but I had gone back to visit at various other times ⁵⁰⁵ in the 1960s when Yugoslavia was viewed as the most progressive of the communist countries, to all of a sudden see that it had fallen back into barbarity, and that kind of barbarism that was evident everywhere.

Q. Now, the UN addressed the humanitarian disaster that took place in the former Yugoslavia. You touched on it briefly by discussing Mrs. Ogata and her reports. Can you describe to the Trial Chamber the dimensions of that humanitarian disaster as it was reported in the United Nations.

A. Well, Mr. President and Your Honours, what we heard were, practically on a daily basis, reports from various representatives of the UN system come in to say that hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced. There was great concern, obviously, during the winters that it would be difficult to get food to them. There were issues of how to do air drops and to make sure that actually they went to the right places; that there were people totally without homes. I used to talk about the fact that people would be moved from one home to another. Nobody was in their right house, and then there was not a house at the end of the line, so that there were many, many homeless, and the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands. So it was complete displacement, and obviously a lot of people tried to get out. Some of them were able to escape to Western Europe and come to the United States, but for the most part, people were wandering around in a hapless and dazed way throughout the country.

Q. Now, to address the level of suffering that was occurring as a result of the crimes that were being committed in Bosnia, UNHCR responded, the United Nations responded. But also, there was a huge effort by ⁵⁰⁶ nongovernmental organisations as well to respond to the humanitarian crisis. Is that correct?

A. That is correct. And I would meet with a variety of nongovernmental organisations in order to assess their needs. Doctors Without Borders were there, Oxfam, a variety of organisations that were trying to be involved in the feeding of people and in trying to make sure that there was not a duplication of effort, and that people -- that there was good coordination with the United Nations.

The very hard part that we found, not only in Bosnia but generally in peacekeeping operations, was how to make sure that the people were continually fed and taken care of, even as fighting was going on, and trying to do it, I think, in a most neutral way. I think that was the part about Mrs. Ogata's effort, was that she and her people was nondiscriminatory in terms of trying to help everyone that had in fact been displaced.

Q. I'd like to turn your attention to the issue of another matter you touched on, and that is the creation of the Tribunal. Could you share with the Judges why the member states of the United Nations voted for the creation of a Tribunal, what the concerns were, what issues it hoped to address, what goals it hoped to achieve.

A. Well, I think that all of the people that were involved in it - the permanent representatives and the Security Councils, the nonpermanent ones and others who were not on the Security Council - were very much aware that we were involved in something new, though discussing the Nuremberg precedents, that this was not a war of victors, that we were ⁵⁰⁷ really dealing with a situation that was ongoing, that the procedures had to be established that would not only identify individual guilt and expunge the collective guilt but make sure that proper punishment was meted out. And it was in many ways being present at the creation of a brand-new organisation.

I must say that we ran into a great deal of scepticism. It was easy enough to take the first vote in February to get the Tribunal created, but nobody really believed that it would work. There were questions about how the Judges would be selected. I must say that especially the women permanent representatives of the United Nations wanted to make sure that there would be women Judges because so many of the crimes had been committed against women in terms of rape and horrendous crimes. And so the Judges were then selected by the entire UN system.

And then the question was how to get a prosecutor. And that was very complicated, and nobody thought that would happen. And then nobody thought that there would ever be a court that actually functioned, that would be set on what the precedents were going to be. And we then in May voted on how the -- 1993, voted on how the procedure of the Tribunal would work. And then still nobody thought it would work. They said that there would never be indictees, and then they said there would never be any trials, and then they said there would never be any convictions, and there would never be any sentencing. And at each part along the way, I would point out that they were wrong.

And one of the reasons that I think that it is so important that ⁵⁰⁸ this procedure is going forward is to show that they were all wrong, that this -- that the Tribunal is very much a part of the international judicial system that is playing a very essential role, I think, in making sure that this individual guilt is assigned, that punishment is meted out, and that there can be reconciliation. I think that was the whole purpose behind having such a Tribunal, so that there could ultimately be the reconciliation of the various people that were innocent as a part of this.

Q. All right, Dr. Albright, thank you very much.

MR. HARMON: That concludes my portion of the examination. I'll turn over to Mr. Pavich the remaining portion of the examination. Thank you.

THE WITNESS: Thank you. Examined by Mr. Pavich:

Q. Good morning, Dr. Albright.

A. Good morning.

Q. I think we just ended on a note of reconciliation, and I'd like to take that and talk for a moment about another effort, I believe, that was made by the international community to ultimately try to heal what you've described. And I believe that's the Dayton Peace Agreement and the peace talks.

Can you tell us a little bit about the period immediately before those negotiations: At that point, what the situation was and what you hoped to achieve in these negotiations that took place in Dayton.

A. Well, first of all, I think that everyone needs to know about the ⁵⁰⁹ fact that throughout this entire time there were efforts to try to find a political solution to what was happening in Bosnia, a way that would enable Bosnia to be a multi-ethnic state that respected the various groups that were within it. And there were a number of efforts made. And Dayton was really the final effort that was made to reconcile various differences, to create a -- the new structure of Bosnia-Herzegovina in which it was going to be possible for there to be political reconciliation. I must say that a very complicated political structure was set up which would allow the Republika Srpska to function and the Croatian/Bosnian Federation to function, and then to have them work together through a series of unified political structures. No question that it was very difficult, but it did create the platform for the kind of reconciliation that we were looking for in multi-ethnic approaches.

Q. I think we'll be hearing from Mr. Carl Bildt a little bit later today, and I think he can probably tell us a bit more about the details about those negotiations, so I won't take our time this morning to discuss that at this point.

I was very interested in your speaking a bit about your background, especially how your background affected your perception of what was happening in 1991 and 1992. In preparing for the negotiation and in these negotiations, was it also, I think, important to consider the background from World War II that had occurred? In order to bring the parties together, was that an important element to take into consideration?

A. I think that as somebody who knew the history of the whole region, ^{510BLANK PAGE 511} I think that it was important to understand what the differences were among the people. But from my perspective, and I say the reason that I was so horrified by what I saw, was that I had actually seen the people in Yugoslavia live together and intermarry and saw it as a place where there had been a certain amount of respect for the various ethnic groups. So for me, when I saw the fact that there was systematic elimination, non-Serb minorities in various places or majorities in others, and the suffering that people were going through simply because of their ethnic identification, I found it repugnant.

I also must say that there were many Serbs that I met with, innocent Serbs, that I felt were also caught up in something that became much larger than they were. But my own background, I think, taught me a lot about the history of the country, the importance of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious aspect of it, and I was deeply saddened and moved by the fact that that was all being destroyed.

Q. Were there still some wounds from World War II that were -- had been unhealed, either through the communist period and right up until 1990 and 1991 that you took into consideration in the negotiations?

A. Well, I think that there had been a sense that the way that Yugoslavia had been set up was that there had been discrimination against the Serbs, that they had been, from their perspective, seen as victims. I think the part that was difficult to absorb was that the Serbs were in fact -- practised victim-hood in a certain way as a result of what had happened in World War II, but I think it led them in the wrong direction. And, in fact, while there could be a great deal of sympathy for things ⁵¹² that happened in World War II, they never were or could have been or should have been an excuse for the kinds of things that happened later. And the truth is that for all countries and all post-communist countries there's a question about how much you can live in the past and how much can be rectified out of World War II. So I was deeply troubled by what I saw and I felt that Serb dominance was not an adequate way to respond to some of the trauma that had happened in World War II.

Q. You mentioned that a large number of refugees -- by the time that the Dayton peace talks had taken place, there were a large number from all sides?

A. There were. There were clearly people from all ethnic groups wandering around. And I remember various meetings that I had with Serbs in various parts of the region where they felt that in fact they, too, had been moved out of their homes, which they had been in the Krajina, for instance, and the question was how people could get back to their rightful places.

I think the problems that exist in many ways have to do with then the governmental policies which exacerbated or played up on some of the very human feelings that existed among those people who were just being moved around. And I think that -- that was what concerned us as government people, to see what the policies had been that made this come about.

Q. You mentioned the Krajina. Did you have an opportunity to talk to some Serb victims in the Krajina?

A. I did. And in Krajina, the issue had been -- is that there had ⁵¹³ been -- the Serbs had been moved out by the Croats. The question was whether they would be able to come back in. I went to a village where in fact it was now time to move the Serbs back into that area. The houses had already been marked by Bosnian Croats who had decided that they would go back there, and I remember one of the most poignant meetings was with a family that had tried to move back into this village and their -- the old grandmother had managed to stay there. She had been in hiding for a long time. And when I met with the family, they were multi-ethnic themselves. I mean, the Serb was married to a Croat whose brother was married to a Muslim. And yet they were not able really to recreate their lives. And that was the most poignant part of what was going on.

Q. So the Dayton Agreement, what were you hoping to accomplish by implementing the Dayton Agreement? What were the goals? What were the priorities?

A. I think that what we were trying to accomplish was to figure out a political way that would allow a variety of minority rights to be properly respected for a governmental structure to be able to exist which allowed various groups to live together and have a certain amount of autonomy in their decision-making but at the same time create a country whereby democratic procedures would be inherent, where there would be elections where people lived up to what they had agreed to, where there would be a functioning judicial system, police, and there would be some ability to return to some sense of normalcy. And I think, to a great extent, that slowly was able to be accomplished.

Q. And were there certain key people that you worked with and had an ⁵¹⁴ opportunity to observe in working toward the implementation of Dayton?

A. There were. And I think that the issue here was that there were those people who determined that the best way to accomplish what they wanted was to work through Dayton; and Mrs. Plavsic was one of those people. I must say that my first impressions of her were based on what I had read and was very disturbed by the fact that she --

Q. You don't believe everything you read.

A. No. But I know what I saw and I know what I heard, actually, in her own words of being a spokesperson for some of the policies that came out of Banja Luka and that represented Republika Srpska. And I found them repugnant, and I didn't understand why she would be involved in things like that. So when -- but on the other hand, it was very -- it became evident that she was one of the people who saw the Dayton Accords as a way to achieve some sense of justice and normalcy, so -- and that became evident in some of the meetings that we had.

Q. You said initially you were very reluctant and sceptical to work with her. Can you describe how your relationship with her developed over time, please.

A. Yes. As I said, I mean, I had only heard her on television or read comments that she made. And we were first in the same place in Central Portugal in the spring of 1997, when there was a meeting about -- one of those PIC meetings where we talked about the reconstruction of Bosnia. I was not very eager to have any contact with her at that point. Then we began to talk about how to implement Dayton, and Mr. Galbraith, who was in charge of the Dayton implementation, said that ⁵¹⁵ he -- there were indications that Mrs. Plavsic was interested in pursuing a positive approach.

I went to Banja Luka to meet her. We had a very formal meeting in the town hall there, and she responded in a very proper but, I think, kind of strained and constrained way. I didn't feel that I had a chance to really understand what was happening and whether she would be supportive. So I asked whether I could meet with her separately.

We then went into her back office, and we talked at some length about what her intentions were, and it was at that stage that it became evident to me that she understood all the things that had gone wrong; never, however, giving up on the idea -- I mean, she's a pro-Serb nationalist. I think that was very evident. But she felt that Dayton was something that was worth supporting, that might in fact bring about in a peaceful way some of the things that she wanted, which was dignity for the Serbs. So I think that was a very important meeting and that was one where I could see that she wanted to have -- wanted to go about this in a democratic way. I must say I was surprised, given what I had read about her. But in later months it became evident to me that she had decided to follow this path and that she was doing it at some risk to herself.

Q. And can you tell us a little bit about those later months, the path that she followed and the risks that she took.

A. Yes. Well, first of all, we engaged then in a number of telephone conversations over the months; some of them where we actually agreed and many where we did not agree. But, for instance, one of the issues that happened a month after we met -- during that summer in July, there had ⁵¹⁶ been arrests of some Serbs that had been involved in crimes, and she called me or we had a conversation in which she objected to what had gone on, and I described to her why we thought the people were guilty. She was interested in the information, I think accepted the fact that she had not had all the facts. She, however, said that some of the people that had been picked up have been innocent. We then did -- she was right about that, and those people were returned. So we had -- you know, we had pretty tough conversations, but they were very straightforward and she said what she thought and I said what I thought, and I thought it was good that we were able to have those -- those kinds of conversations. She then -- the succeeding part of this was -- had to do with the election for presidency, and she had decided that she really did want to publicly state that her position was for -- in support of Dayton, which was not easy in the Republika Srpska, given the fact that the more radical elements of the Bosnian Serbs were very much around and were also running for office. And I met her, and we -- during that campaign she again made it very clear that she wanted to support Dayton; and as a result of it, she lost the election. So I think that from my perspective, she did what she said she would do. She was a woman of her word on what she stated she was for, in terms of Dayton, believing ultimately that what she wanted accomplished for the Serbs could best be done through the Dayton process.

Q. Did you have any sense during your conversations, meetings, work with her that at any time she had anything other than the Serbs' interest at heart?

A. I think she had the Serb interest at heart. I think she -- she ⁵¹⁷ admitted many times that what she really wanted to see was justice for the Serbs. I mean, she was never a person who hid that fact, and that was a major element for her. I think she was supportive of the Serbs. But she was also supportive of Dayton, and I think that is where the difference lies. But in the conversations that we had, she would always make very clear that she was pro-Serb. I don't think that there was a time we got together that she didn't give me a book about Kosovo and that it was Serb, and we had discussions all the time about that, but --

Q. About Kosovo?

A. About Kosovo and about Milosevic and about the importance of living -- of the Serbs having what was rightfully theirs. But my feeling really was that the reason that I spent time talking with her and dealing with her is that she was the vehicle in Republika Srpska for making sure that the Dayton Accords were carried out. That was what we were interested in. That was what the international community was interested in. And she stood up for that at times when it was very difficult, when there were those who wanted to destroy the Dayton Accords.

Q. In addition to working toward the implementation of Dayton, did she take every opportunity to bring to your attention the plight of the Serb victims?

A. She did. She did. And I also talked about the plight of the other victims. But we did talk about the victims, and I think that there was an understanding about the horrors that had taken place. And, you know, I found her a very kind of conflicted individual, if I might say, in terms of knowing that she wanted to make sure that Serb interests were ⁵¹⁸ protected but at the same time understanding the necessity of going through with the Dayton process, which I think she really stood up for in many different ways. But she has -- I think she obviously was involved in horrendous things prior to that and then began to see that the Dayton Accords were the best way to accomplish what was necessary.

Q. Did you ever -- there's been a description of your relationship with her on many occasions that she basically was a puppet of yours, someone that had abandoned her people's principles in order to follow whatever the West at that point was pushing Serbs toward for her own benefit. Can you tell us whether there's any truth to that.

A. Well, I would completely disagree with that, and I think our conversations would indicate it. This was not a person who would simply say, "Yes, you're doing the right thing." I mean, we would have very complicated conversations about whether this was appropriate or not. She thought that a lot of the actions we were undertaking were actually strengthening Belgrade, and I said I didn't think so. I mean, we had very intense discussions, some pleasant and some unpleasant. I definitely think that she is a woman with her own mind, a very strong one, some of which worked positively and some of which previously had been quite negative. So I would never describe her as somebody that was my puppet. I think that's a ridiculous description.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Pavich, can you tell us who described her in that way.

MR. PAVICH:

Q. Dr. Albright, I think you're familiar with a number of ⁵¹⁹ descriptions along those lines.

A. If I might say, Your Honour, I think that there were people generally -- I don't think that I was particularly highly regarded in Belgrade and that there were descriptions within the Serb papers that described me that way, that described Mrs. Plavsic that way. People that were trying to discredit both of us.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you.

MR. PAVICH:

Q. Obviously, it's no simple matter for you to be here this morning. Can you tell us, Doctor, why you've made the effort to come to this sentencing hearing.

A. Well, there are a number of reasons, sir. And that is that, first of all, I feel very strongly about the War Crimes Tribunal. I felt when we created it at the United Nations that it was the international community's way of dealing with the horrendous crimes at the end of the 20th century in a way that reflected the best of our various legal systems and our desire to assign this individual guilt, so that collective guilt could be expunged and so that the victims would, in fact, have some vindication. There's no way, for instance, to ever walk anything back. People can't be unraped.

But I think that I saw it as a process that would help people and make sure that the proper punishment was given and that there could be reconciliation. So I have been very much in favour of this Tribunal, and I wanted to show, in fact, that it is the only method whereby we can deal with some of these terrible crimes and to make sure that future crimes ⁵²⁰ don't happen. It has a deterrent aspect, I hope, also. And I wanted to show my support for the process.

But I also think that we have to show respect for those who have pleaded guilty, who have, in fact, accepted that personal responsibility and are prepared for the appropriate punishment. So I think that it is a very important step to make sure that this procedure, that this process really works. And it's my respect for the Tribunal that has brought me here because I believe it has played and will continue to play a real essential role, not only in terms of mending things in the Balkans, but obviously the work that is being done in Rwanda. And then the work that it just shows can be done when people of goodwill decide that there is a legal process and that it is the civilised way to deal with issues. So that is why I believed it was important. I think the reconciliation aspect is key, the punishment is important, and then I really did it, finally, for the victims. I met with so many of them, and I think that it is important that they know that there is justice.

Q. And in talking about the victims, Dr. Albright, as you've said, all the victims, Serb, non-Serb victims, do you believe that this hearing, acceptance of responsibility, the hearing, helps us to help them to move past what's happened? Not only the victims but their children and children's children?

A. I do believe that. People always talk about closure, which I think is probably a concept that we all understood in some form or another in terms of personal travail. And I think it does help. And I think that there is a sense that their stories will have gotten out and that there is ⁵²¹ personal responsibility accepted for their crimes, that it isn't just a faceless group of people that are responsible. Now, everybody knows that you can't rectify all the injustice that was done, but I think it goes a long way to having that happen. And so I do think that that is a very important part.

I felt also, from my own perspective, that having been invited by the Prosecutor as well as you to appear, that it was important to show that the process does work on behalf of the victims, that in fact that both sides of the Court is determined to make sure that the victims' tragedies are in some way recognised and, in the words of Elie Wiesel, who says them so often, that these kinds of things don't happen again. Unfortunately, they do. But I think that the more we try to remind ourselves that they cannot happen again, that is essential.

Q. When you speak of victims, you speak of victims throughout the former Yugoslavia, in Krajina, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, all of those, with regard to the Tribunal's charge?

A. I do think, you know, while it is a well-known fact that most of the victims were non-Serb, I think that it is evident that there were victims among all parts of the ethnic communities. And as I said, I made a special effort, both when I was Ambassador at the United Nations and then as Secretary of State to recognise the fact that there were victims from all of the ethnic groups. And I made it a point of meeting with Serbs and with Croats and with Bosniaks and various of their representatives.

I met a number of times with the Serb religious representatives, ⁵²² with -- whether it was various bishops and patriarchs, because I felt that there were victims on all sides. There's no question. And that people were being murdered and raped. I do think - I know - that there was more systematic effort in terms of getting rid of the non-Serbs.

Q. You mention Serb bishops. Do you remember Bishop Artemije from Kosovo?

A. Yes, very well. Yes.

Q. He has probably given you a few Kosovo books as well.

A. Yes, he has given me a lot of Kosovo books, and I visited with him in his monastery and, in fact, was given many pictures of destroyed monasteries. But the problem here is that a tragedy of the kind that took place in the Balkans is that it knows no end unless there is a political solution, which I think Dayton was the beginning of. And I think in Kosovo, we are in the process of working out and that ultimately there can be some reconciliation among the people. And to repeat myself, the reconciliation can only come when it is evident that there is an impartial judicial system that is assessing who is guilty and who is innocent, and then metes out the proper punishment.

Q. And through that, reconciliation can be done?

A. I believe so, and I think that if ordinary Serbs and Bosniaks and Croats can look at each other say, "I didn't do it, but this was directed from the top," or, "This particular person is responsible for it," I think that it helps in terms of the reconciliation. And I think a recognition of this Court is essential. And what Mrs. Plavsic has done is to plead guilty and has recognised the authority of this Court. I think that is ^{523BLANK PAGE 524} very important.

Q. Thank you very much, Dr. Albright.

A. Thank you.

JUDGE MAY: Dr. Albright, thank you for coming to the Tribunal to give your evidence. We are grateful. You are free to go.

THE WITNESS: Thank you so much.

[The witness withdrew]

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Pavich.

MR. PAVICH: We're prepared to proceed when the Court is ready, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: We're ready.

MR. PAVICH: We're prepared to call Mr. Carl Bildt, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: While we're waiting for the witness, it occurs to me we may be able to deal with one or two procedural matters. Mr. Pavich, we seem to be making good progress through the evidence in terms of time.

MR. PAVICH: We do.

JUDGE MAY: Yes. We wondered if we might not finish today.

MR. PAVICH: That would have to be a joint, I think, decision among the colleagues. I think that we are prepared to do whatever the Court feels is the most appropriate way to proceed.

JUDGE MAY: We'll see what progress we can make. We've got another case, as you may know, which we're going to hear tomorrow morning. And the longer we can spend on that, obviously the better. But we'll see.

But there is one matter we would wish to be addressed about today, ⁵²⁵ and that is the issue of provisional release which has been raised by the parties. And we would be grateful if we could hear your submissions about that today.

MR. PAVICH: I don't think there's any difficulty in being able to do that, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. Yes, we'll have the witness.

MR. PAVICH: Your Honours, we've supplied the Courts with certain exhibits. Tab 2 that has been provided to you this morning contains the curriculum vitae of Mr. Carl Bildt. We don't intend to have him go through it in detail; we'll simply highlight it when he takes the stand.

[The witness entered court]

JUDGE MAY: If the witness would take the declaration.

THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

JUDGE MAY: If you'd like to take a seat.

THE WITNESS: Thank you.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Pavich.

WITNESS: CARL BILDT Examined by Mr. Pavich:

MR. PAVICH:

Q. Good morning, Mr. Bildt.

A. Good morning.

Q. Mr. Bildt, we've already supplied the Court with a copy of your extensive curriculum vitae. I would like, however, for you to just give ⁵²⁶ us a summary of the past ten years of your professional career. Actually, a bit more than that; going back to 1991, please.

A. Yes. You would be aware of the fact that my background is primarily one in Swedish politics for quite some time, serving as member of parliament for a quarter of a century and Prime Minister in the early 1990s, and fairly heavily involved in international affairs and European affairs during that entire time period.

I was Prime Minister in the early 1990s - that's part of the picture - between October 1991 and then up until the autumn of 1994. In that capacity, although quite a lot of issues are on the table of a Prime Minister, needless to say - and these were somewhat dramatic times in the history of Europe - the issues of the conflict in former Yugoslavia was fairly high up on my list. We were involved in the initial discussions concerning the questions of recognition or how to handle the breakup of former Yugoslavia. We were also involved from the Swedish side, needless to say, in the different peacemaking efforts, be that within the context of the United Nations or within the context of the OSCE. We played an active role in the OSCE summit, I think, it was December of 1992. Sweden was the chairman-in-office of the OSCE during 1993, played a fairly active role on the different issues at that particular time. We supplied forces for all of the different UN missions. That was in Croatia somewhat more limited, in Macedonia, and of course in Bosnia during that particular period. And even more significantly, we took probably a great number of refugees, in relation to the size of the country, than any of the other European countries outside of the region. ⁵²⁷ And the burden of receiving that continuous inflow of refugees was, as a matter of fact, one of the key political issues in my country at that time. I had to deal extensively with that and paid a number of visits to the region itself as part of that also during my time as Prime Minister. Then, of course, ending that, I was asked in the spring of 1995 to take over from David Owen, Lord Owen, who had been the European Union co-chairman of the International Conference on former Yugoslavia, since, if I remember it rightly, August of 1992, when he succeeded -- when ICFY was set up and he succeeded Lord Carrington. I was asked initially and formally both by the US and the UK, when I was formally approached and formally appointed by France that had the presidency of the European Union at that particular time, and I started that assignment in early June of that year. That brings us up to my more formal and direct involvement with the affairs.

Q. You mentioned, Mr. Bildt, your visits to the region during the period that you were Prime Minister of Sweden. Can you tell us a little bit about those visits, sir.

A. Well, I paid a couple of visits down. And those were, of course, primarily visits where I went to the -- to the UN command, which was in Zagreb at the time, but also field visits. Those were somewhat restricted because of all the security concerns associated with that. But I had the occasion then to meet with all of those that were responsible for the international efforts as well as to see, primarily in Croatia then, the carnage that had been brought by the war and also meet some of the refugees. ⁵²⁸ I remember going up to the Bosnian border in December 1992, Bosanska Gradiska, and meeting a huge column of refugees coming across. And one of the oddities of history is that one girl was obviously, when we tried to retrace history, that was in that column, is now as a matter of fact sitting as a member of parliament in -- in Sweden. So I was there on a number of occasions.

Q. So you did have some direct experience, then, in 1992 with the refugee situation, both in Sweden and in Bosnia itself.

A. Well, needless to say, we had a huge inflow of refugees from the entire area but primarily, needless to say, the Bosnian war at that time, but also from other areas.

Q. And were these refugees from any particular group, or were they from all the ethnic groups?

A. It differed according to how the conflict was developing. And as those of you here who have been dealing with the refugee issues knows, it tends to be -- it's somewhat difficult to explain why different groups go to different areas. There could be historical factors, there could be that there was a rumour in one part of a country or one part of a conflict zone that you're supposed to go to a particular area. I don't think there was anything in particular. We did receive people from all over the region, from all faiths, all nationalities. Some were different in different times. I don't have any firm numbers on that. But the numbers were extremely high and the inflow -- the rate of inflow into the country was demanding for the local capacity to absorb during part of the period. So we had -- apart from everything else, we ⁵²⁹ had -- apart from the humanitarian and moral imperative to make peace, we did see very clearly how the conflict was impacting upon the possibilities of other European societies to continue to live their normal lives, primarily, of course, those societies that took a very large number of refugees. Sweden, I think Austria, I think Switzerland were at the top of the list, if I remember. Somewhat -- somewhat different groups in the different countries -- Norway as well.

Q. You spoke, of course, of the importance to make peace. I think you've actually written a book called "Peace Journey." I'd like to speak a moment now about the Dayton Peace Conference and the efforts to make peace through that conference. Can you tell us what your role was in that conference.

A. Well, could I ask, for the sake of --

Q. And you may want to give us a bit of background in order to explain that role.

A. Yes, I can give a lot of background on that. But yes, for the sake of completion, I served then as -- as the EU Special Representative and Co-chairman of the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia, including then the Dayton Peace Conference and co-chairman of that. Then as High Representative of Bosnia up until the summer of 1997. Then I would have formally left the Balkans - although, you never leave the Balkans, as some of you may be aware of -- but was called back in the spring of 1999, when I was asked by the UN Secretary Annan, Kofi Annan, to be his special envoy to the Balkans, and served in that capacity with numerous, different issues, including an element of Bosnia, up until last ⁵³⁰ summer. That, for the completion of the record.

Dayton. I think it will take some time until there will be written a complete and honest account of the different efforts that were undertaken from 1991 and onwards to prevent war and later on to make peace in the different conflicts. It's not necessarily the most honourable record of the international community ever. That just said for the record without going into the details.

When I entered in late spring 1995, the ICFY effort was concentrated primarily on the other areas of the conflict. The direct peacemaking efforts in Bosnia had been taken over since a year back, roughly, by the so-called contact group of the leading countries. That was Russia, Germany, France, the UK, and the United States. And although I was formally ICFY, I was reporting more directly to the contact group and I was also asked to be the lead of the negotiations for a while since the United States had decided to step back after a rather intense period of engagement during the spring.

Now, my task then was to complete some of the negotiations underway, primarily with Mr. Milosevic in Belgrade, to try to facilitate a somewhat more -- somewhat more comprehensive approach from the international community to making peace in Bosnia. I think one of the problems we had up until that time was that since the international community was not united on the shape of a possible peace in Bosnia, it was somewhat difficult to get the warring parties to agree. And I was very firm in my conviction that if we can't get agreement within, say, the contact group on the shape of a peace deal, our efforts to try to ⁵³¹ negotiate the warring parties was not likely to be successful. Now, the summer of 1995 turned out, as you are aware of, to be the worst period of the war since late spring and summer of 1992. And I think one of the reasons for that was that there was a feeling that the war must end and peace must come. So all of them were playing the last part of that particular game, and we know all of the horrors and all of the brutalities associated with that.

That speeded up the agreement in the international community on a more comprehensive approach to peace and that led directly to Dayton and the decisive meeting, in my opinion - that was in September, September 7th in Geneva - where we, under the chairmanship of US Ambassador Holbrooke, got together the Foreign Ministers of Yugoslavia, of Croatia, and of Bosnia, and also members or representatives of the more directly warring parties of Bosnia, in an agreement that set out the framework for what later turned into the Dayton Peace Agreement.

Then in Dayton, of course, we had to deal with all of the details, and as you are aware, the devil is in those details. That was how to divide up territory according to the principle of 49/51. There had been action on the ground, as you are aware of, during the late summer, early autumn, primarily in Western Bosnia by the Croat army - it was the regular Croat army - and by the Bosnian army, the Bosnian Muslim forces that had made it somewhat easier, it has to be said, to reach that particular agreement.

Then it was a question of setting up the details of the construction of this Bosnia, which should be a united, independent, ⁵³² sovereign country composed of two very autonomous entities: The Federation, which had already been forged in January of 1994; as well as the Republika Srpska, which was recognised really for the first time September 7th at that particular Geneva meeting; and then united by common Bosnian institutions.

Q. Would you please remind us -- and I'm uncertain that I've asked you this, but what was your position at the Dayton Peace conference itself?

A. Well, I was, formally speaking, co-chairman. The formal structure of the Dayton Peace Conference was that there was a chairman, and that was the US representative to the contact group. That was Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. There were two co-chairmen. There was myself, representing on some sort of way -- representing the European Union. That was a difficult issue, since the European Union didn't have any legal personality at the time. But I was de facto coordinator of European efforts, working very closely with Ambassador Holbrooke on quite a number of issues. And there was then a second co-chairman, which was Mr. Igor Ivanov, who was at that time the First Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation and as, of course, being during last year as a Foreign Minister for the Russian Federation. The three of us worked extremely closely together and dealt with all of the issues with the exception of the issues of military implementation that were dealt with exclusively by the NATO countries. And coming from Sweden, I was only an observer to those particular negotiations.

Q. You mentioned the parties that were directly involved. I'd like ⁵³³ to point you for the moment to the Bosnian Serb delegation. Was Mrs. -- was Mrs. Plavsic a member of that delegation?

A. No, as a matter of fact, there was no Bosnian Serb delegation. I mean, one of the things that perhaps made Dayton possible was the fact that we had then devised a new mechanism for dealing with these particular issues. I mean, the -- history is a complex business. In the summer of 1994, the contact group had effectively failed to get negotiations going between what we can call Sarajevo and Pale, to simplify things beyond what you can really defend to history. And there was no way that could be done.

Then we have been operating with what we refer to as Plan B. That was Milosevic in Belgrade. Get Belgrade to recognise Bosnia, the borders and sovereignty and the principles for a political settlement and then to have that sort of imposed on the Bosnian Serbs the one way without -- in Dayton or prior to Dayton we sort of compressed both of these approaches into a model, whereby we sort of relied -- historians would have [indiscernible]. But anyhow, this was the only way at the time. We relied on Tudjman in Zagreb to deliver the Bosnian Croats and we relied on Milosevic to deliver the Bosnian Serbs, and then Sarajevo in the middle. That meant that there was no Bosnian Serb delegation.

Q. There were Bosnian Serbs attending --

A. There were Bosnian Serbs that were attending as part of the joint delegation that had been set up, and those were, if I remember it right -- I mean, the number one was Mr. Krajisnik, who was there. There was a military representative, General Tolimir, if I remember correctly. There ⁵³⁴ were probably others that I can't remember. I think Mr. Buha might have been there as well. They played a rather limited role in the proceedings.

Q. I'm interested in the absence of Mrs. Plavsic. In the years that you were observing and involving yourself in this conflict, did you have an opportunity to determine what her involvement in the leadership was?

A. Well, I was -- when I took over - and that's always essential when you do these things - I was -- I had, of course, to study the entire -- what you might call the paper trail of the peace efforts in all of Yugoslavia and all of Bosnia. So I had to go through all of their -- all of the negotiations that had been going on. So on paper I knew the positions of everyone concerned during all of those negotiations. And then concerning the role of Mrs. Plavsic, it was obvious to me that she had not been a real part of the RS leadership for that entire time period because she had never been brought in in any of the discussions and any of the decisions and any of the meetings that had been asked to deal with critical issues of war, peace, and power. And that applied, of course, to these particular ones as well.

Q. I'd also ask -- like to ask you to explain to us in your approach to Dayton, in your preparation for Dayton -- I think you've written that it's not possible to understand this conflict unless you understand 1941. Can you explain that for us, please.

A. Yes, I think I can. Well, in all fairness to all of you and to myself, I don't think I had that recognition at the time, when you talk about the preparation for Dayton. I don't think I was as aware of that as ⁵³⁵ I became later on. And primarily when I lived in the country -- I mean, I moved to Sarajevo literally in the last days of December and early days of January 1995/1996 and lived then for a year and a half --

Q. As the high representative?

A. -- as the high representative throughout the country and, of course, had extremely many occasions to sit down and talk with persons concerning their personal history and their personal faith in all parts of Bosnia. And I was -- I mean, I was horrified then.

And when I noted that so many times you could see that where something had happened during the '40s, atrocities, brutalities, ethnic murders, ethnic cleansing, all of it. You are aware of it. We saw the things coming back at the same place. And I think I've written about this. And my -- the conclusion I draw from that was that without a thorough process of reconciliation, there's always a risk of the horrors coming back.

And I think one of the great failures of Yugoslavia of Tito was that for reasons that had to do with the political nature of the regime and with the great power policies at the time, that process never took place, with some exceptions he put the lid on and there was no discussion of what really happened during the 1940s. And that meant that stories, sometimes true, sometimes not, were passed on from mother to daughter, from father to son, were never able -- were never allowed to be discussed in public. And when the lid was off and there was no state structure to contain and when everything was up for grabs again in the early 1990s, all of those stories came back and made it far easier to inflame nationalist ⁵³⁶ and -- or extreme nationalist and ethnic passion. So it was -- I found during my years living in Bosnia of extreme importance to know that history and of extreme importance to the future to learn from it the importance of the process of reconciliation for preventing one or two generations from now from going through this again.

Q. Was it your hope at the conclusion of the negotiations in Dayton that you had created something that might ultimately lead towards reconciliation?

A. Yes. Of course. Of course it was. But -- we knew, all of us, that that was not enough. I mean, Dayton was a start, and Dayton was -- Bosnia is only part of the picture. In my opinion, there was no way that we can be successful with sorting out the one bit after the other of the entire Posavina region. It's really for the people living there more than it is for us. So it has to be in the region as a whole. It has to a comprehensive political settlement; it has to be a comprehensive reconciliation; it has to be over time a comprehensive integration to the structures we have in the rest of Europe.

Dayton was a compromised peace. I think that was necessary. These sorts of, essentially, to a very large extent civil conflicts can only be sorted out by compromises, but compromises by their nature are difficult. No one loved Dayton. And our task was to get them on, all two sides, all three sides, or however many sides you want to see it as, as to gradually not love Dayton but accept Dayton as the way forwards, as the part of trying to sort out the problems of the entire region. Reconciliation, reintegration, stop forces of disintegration in other ^{537BLANK PAGE 538} areas as well.

Q. Following the conclusion of the negotiations and the signing of the agreement, you then were given another responsibility; to actually work toward the implementation of which you had worked to create. Can you tell us how you came to take that position, please.

A. Well, I was then asked to take on the position of high representative, and that was a position that had been set up during the Dayton negotiations. It had been preceded by some discussions in the NATO council, if I remember it rightly, where there had been a sort of difference of emphasis between the Americans and the Europeans. The Americans had been very much stressing the military part of the implementation, NATO forces moving in after the end of the war and staying there for one year. That was the doctrine at the time. The Europeans somewhat more, without sort of denying the forces of military implementation, separation of forces and all of that, stressing more of the complex issues of long-term political and civilian implementation. And while the Americans were then taking command of the military implementation structures, it was seen as natural to have a European to take care of the civilian political aspects. And I was then asked, both by the US and the Europeans, to take on that responsibility. I was somewhat reluctant, knowing the complexities of the issue and the fact that Dayton was just a fragile start. But at the end of the day, I accepted and moved to Sarajevo, and I -- for all of the difficulties involved in that, I don't regret that decision.

Q. What authority were you given in order to try to accomplish -- ⁵³⁹

A. Well, essentially none. That's one of the -- and you don't need to rely on me, you can read the book by Richard Holbrooke who agrees that that was one of the mistakes of Dayton, that there was overemphasis on the military issues, and the authority given to the high representative was essentially only authority -- it was a moral authority, political authority, but to coordinate the different efforts. Of course, I sort of extended that authority in different ways on my own.

And later on, in the late autumn of 1997, well after I had left, the decision was taken to give the high representative also more direct executive authority in Bosnia. I didn't have that. Whether I should have had it or whether I shouldn't is a matter for the historians.

Q. Before we break - and after the break, I think we'll cover with you the actual implementation of Dayton - you mentioned some of the mistakes -- or you mentioned at least one of the mistakes of the agreement. And I think we'll be talking after the break about the first problem that confronted you; that was the problem of Sarajevo. Can you tell us how the negotiations either failed to solve that problem or built it into what you would ultimately be dealing with as the high representative.

A. Well, the Dayton -- I believe we spent three weeks in Dayton. It seemed like an eternity at the time. But of course, it was a very short period in view of all of the issues that we had to deal with. A lot of those days were really spent on I would even call it inter-Western issues of the details of the command structures for military implementation. So a lot of the issues that we were then confronted with on the ⁵⁴⁰ ground hadn't really been gone through with sufficient detail in Dayton. And one of them, which was the first one that confronted me, was the question of transfer of authority in different areas. When the so-called Interentity Boundary Line was established, that followed to a very large extent the line at which hostilities had ceased. But there were important areas where we had to sort of transfer, move from the line of confrontation to the new Interethnic Boundary Line.

And in some of those areas, there were sizeable populations; roughly, I would say, up to a hundred thousand people. That was primarily but not only in the Sarajevo area. And we were asked, the military command, the commander of IFOR, and myself, to undertake that transfer of authority or transfer of those territories within 90 days. So we had 90 days to build reconciliation in some of the areas that were most hotly fought over during the war.

Q. Did you feel that that was a practical or realistic amount of time, and did you encourage the parties to reassess that?

A. Well, the parties had no way of reassessing it because it was in the agreement.

Q. I'm sorry, I'm talking about at the time of the agreement, in the negotiations themselves.

A. We did, but there was -- we did. There were numerous -- this goes back to the Sarajevo issue. There were numerous different approaches to Sarajevo on paper discussed in Dayton. You might remember that in the Vance-Owen Peace Plan, remnants of that one was still with us, because to some extent that's the most elaborate piece of paper that had been done. ⁵⁴¹ The idea was to have Sarajevo under separate administration under the UN; Mostar under European Union administration. The Mostar thing happened; the Sarajevo thing did not happen. That was one of the plans that was discussed in Dayton. That did not happen.

At the end of the day, I think that was shut down by Mr. Milosevic, if I remember it rightly, and one of the reasons was also that it was a highly complex structure, the government structures of Sarajevo that we then had to set up. And there was simply not the time available.

Q. Did Mr. Milosevic have an opportunity in these negotiations to extend, or at least to advocate to extend, that 90-day period to a more realistic period?

A. Mr. Milosevic, whom you know, is a fairly ruthless negotiator --

JUDGE MAY: I think, Mr. Pavich, we may be moving into an area which is more appropriate in another trial - namely, Mr. Milosevic and his conduct - I think less appropriate in this one.

Perhaps we could adjourn now and resume at half past. Mr. Bildt, would you be back then, please.

--- Recess taken at 10.59 a.m.

--- On resuming at 11.30 a.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Pavich.

MR. PAVICH: Thank you, Your Honours.

Q. Mr. Bildt, I'd like to draw our attention now to the actual implementation, the work on the ground, the details, as you say, of the Dayton Accords. Can you tell us what the situation was when you took your ⁵⁴² position in Sarajevo.

A. Well, as I said before the recess, Dayton was just a rather fragile beginning of the process of trying to overcome the divisions of the country. And the Dayton deal was strange in a way which I think was unavoidable, but it left us with a Bosnia that was essentially three states or three statelets, or the two of them supposed to sort of make up a Federation. Now, these three states were effectively three armies and police structures. And the immediate task was the military implementation, to separate the Federation forces from the Serb forces and to implement a new IEBL, Interentity Boundary Line. But that was the easy part of it. I mean, you can send in huge military forces and separate armies, because effectively you can say to them, "If we don't -- if you don't move your forces, we bomb you," and people normally take notice concerning those arguments.

But my task was really to bring people together, and I couldn't threaten them with bombing if they didn't love each other. And I didn't have very many other instruments. The task was also somewhat difficult in that the provision was that it was only after elections were held that we could start the process of setting up the first institutions of Bosnia, the council of ministers and the presidents. So I had first to facile all of the military implementation issues and the transfer of authority in the different areas, then to try to make some sort of reasonably decent elections. They were no more than that, but they were reasonably decent elections.

And then after that -- and now we are nearly a year later, to have ⁵⁴³ the first meetings trying to set up the common Bosnian institutions. So it was -- and in the meantime, of course, enormous humanitarian issues. We had very large numbers of refugees in the countries and displaced persons and outside of the country. The country was thoroughly devastated; not all of it, but most of it. And --

Q. And we spoke before the break about Sarajevo.

A. That was the -- that was the immediate task, because the -- it was obvious that that was going to be a major challenge. We were going to transfer authority over territory where perhaps up to 100.000, in this particular case as a result of the war, Serbs lived. And that was really the test case. Was it possible for those to stay when that was transferred to Federation authority, or were we to be confronted with a new massive refugee problem? In this particular case, not refugees from war but refugees from peace, which would then vastly complicate, of course, the entire issue of refugee return, which was central to long-term implementation and acceptance of the Dayton Agreement. And right from the start after the signing of the peace agreement in Paris, I sent my later first principal deputy, Michael Steiner, down to start the process of negotiations and --

Q. Mr. Steiner is now the United States representative in Kosovo --

A. Well, not the United States; United Nations.

Q. I'm sorry, United Nations. Excuse me.

A. There's a distinction to be made. He's there in -- head of UNMIK in Kosovo, and he was my first principal deputy high representative, I think, was the rather extensive ⁵⁴⁴ title.

Q. Did you have any contact during this period with Mrs. Plavsic?

A. Yes. He started. When I came down, we established the office. On my second day, I went to Banja Luka for a number of reasons. One of them was that, of course, from the very start, I saw as one of the major challenges to establish links with those in the Republika Srpska that were likely to have a more positive attitude towards the implementation of the Dayton agreement than I knew I was going to encounter going up the road to Pale. So I went there to meet with the Prime Minister at the time, Mr. Karadzic, and Mrs. Plavsic. The reason I wanted to see Mrs. Plavsic was also that in order to see if something could be done for the Sarajevo transition, I wanted to have a person on the Serb side in those Sarajevo suburbs that was credible and credible to the Muslim authorities in Sarajevo, credible to the Serbs, and that could not be easily just put aside by the Pale authorities.

Q. Why did you choose to meet with her?

A. Well, she was vice-president of Republika Srpska, but I was also recommended to talk with her by a rather senior - then senior and still senior - politician on the Bosnian Muslim side who said: "Go to Mrs. Plavsic. She is reliable on these kinds of issues. You could talk with her and get a name from her." And I did get a name from her. And that particular person, then, which we established contact with, then established contact with the Muslim authorities in Sarajevo and did everything that he could in order to facilitate.

That entire thing, has to be said, failed, and failed miserably. ⁵⁴⁵ And we got roughly up to hundred thousand refugees. But it has to be said that we were not helped either by the provisions of the peace agreement nor by the authorities, neither in Sarajevo nor Pale. I mean, the leading voices in Sarajevo really wanted to take over these areas Serb-free. And the leading authorities in Pale wanted to bring all of the Serbs out; first, to consolidate Republika Srpska with Serbs; and secondly, of course, to demonstrate that one couldn't live together. And what was striking with my first meeting with Mrs. Plavsic, and that is - it's not something I'm saying now; I wrote about it at the time - was that the line that she took with me in private meetings was distinctly different in that she said that she wanted to help in preventing a new wave of refugees for humanitarian reasons, but that she also wanted to preserve the possibilities of Serbs and Muslims and Croats living together again in Sarajevo. And it was obvious that if you were going to start peace implementation with a massive new wave of refugees and with further disintegration, then that was going to complicate the task. That eventually happened. And that was a failure by everyone concerned. But I think it's worth noting that Mrs. Plavsic, from that very early day, took a different line. It also has to be said that that line had no consequence. She was sitting in Banja Luka, far away from the centres of power, without any executive authority whatsoever concerning the actual conduct of events.

Q. Did you continue to work with Mrs. Plavsic in the course of carrying out your responsibilities as high representative?

A. I did. During the different phases of -- we're talking about the ⁵⁴⁶ long period that stretches more -- well, a year and a half of continuous challenges of different sorts. It did develop during the latter part of the spring of 1997 into a major confrontation with Mr. Karadzic. From April and onwards, my first priority, which was not widely known at the time, and all of the activities were outside the -- what was available to the media at the time, was directed towards getting Mr. Karadzic away from the position as president of Republika Srpska. Because he was still fully in control and formally in command of everything.

Q. This was in early 1996, Mr. Bildt?

A. That was in early 1996. You can say from April onwards, up until we secured two agreements. If I remember, the first one on June 22nd, where it was agreed that he should not be seen, not be heard, not be noted. And the second agreement on June 30th where he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to put it rather mildly, to transfer all of his authorities as president of Republika Srpska to Mrs. Plavsic in accordance with the rather elaborate provisions of the Republika Srpska constitution. This was a result of very extensive pressure, and I threatened the position of fully fledged sanctions by the UN Security Council on Serbia if that did not happen. That led to Mr. Milosevic being fairly active, although he was not particularly in favour of Mrs. Plavsic assuming that particular position. He had another candidate. But it ended up with Mrs. Plavsic assuming that responsibility. In the first days of July, I think, of 1996, she took over as acting president of Republika Srpska; was then, of course, later confirmed in an election in September, if I remember it right. ⁵⁴⁷

Q. When she accepted that responsibility, was it clear that it would entail personal and political risk?

A. I don't think that -- well, I don't know, obviously, her judgement of that situation. I was not fully aware at that time of the magnitude of the challenges and the risks that we were going to be faced in the confrontation inside Republika Srpska during the following, I would say, 14, 15, months, which brought us to the brink of armed confrontation, coups, and perhaps even some sort of civil war at that time.

Q. Before we get that far along, can you tell us what other projects were your priorities during these early months once or at the same time you were working on an agreement for Mr. Karadzic's removal?

A. We were working on a quite a number of things. To be complete, I have to add that a lot of our attention was taken up by what I call the Federation issues, relationship between the Muslims and the Croats. I did not work very much with that. That was the responsibility primarily of Mr. Steiner, working in cooperation with US Ambassador John Kornblum. While I was dealing more with the BH relationship, Sarajevo and Republika Srpska, as well as the internal issues in Republika Srpska. We had all of the humanitarian issues. We had the beginning of economic reconstructions. We were still dealing with some of the regional issues. I mean, I had still remaining responsibilities for the region as a whole, and I was at that time also, strangely enough, trying to encourage the leading international activists to take a somewhat more proactive approach on the issue of Kosovo. That was a thing that did not result in very much at that particular time. But those issues also took ⁵⁴⁸ up some amount of time.

And we had all of the daily coordination issue between the different international activists, the military forces, the IFOR, NATO command, OSCE, Ambassador Frowick, the preparations for the elections, which was a very complex issue, UNHCR. We had the police issues, would return to those --

Q. The election issues -- I think the election issues we can deal with Ambassador Frowick --

A. I think that is more appropriate. That is more appropriate because they were under his direct responsibility. I was having a coordinating and supporting role.

Q. You mentioned the police issues. Can you tell us a bit about that, please.

A. That comes somewhat later. That's really -- that's what really caused the major confrontation a year later, spring 1997, summer 1997, and early autumn 1997. Because the police issues are -- we have seen that in other -- we have seen that in Kosovo and other areas as well. They are really critical. If you haven't got decent police forces, you can never establish a rule of law. And if you don't establish rule of law, you can never have a functioning democracy; you can never have refugee return. So the police forces that we inherited, so to say, in Bosnia was, of course, police forces that had been built up to support the political ambitions of the respective leadership to a very large extent. There were elements of old Yugoslav police, but there was also substantial elements of rather speedily recruited local thugs that had been brought in to do ⁵⁴⁹ the nasty work on all sides of that particular war. And later on we saw the necessity and had the possibility to work very actively on trying to reform police. That -- we started in Sarajevo, by the way - but that's a separate story - and then Mostar. That's also a separate story. But then on --

Q. It seems that -- I'm sorry, but it seems as though refugee return and reform of the police structure were very much connected.

A. They were very much connected. I mean, refugee return was connected with most things. It was connected with the very structure of the deal, whether we were going to accept de facto mono-ethnic areas or whether we were trying to recreate something that had been lost through the war. I was always of the opinion that I don't -- I never believed that everyone was going to move back because I was extremely firm in saying that if everyone wants to move back, we are not going to deny the right of anyone to move back. But for that to be possible, there was a necessity of safeguarding the environment. And in the beginning, everyone that tries to move back -- and I'm talking about moving back to areas where they were going to be a minority. Most of the return of the refugees were to areas where your own people, so to say, were in the majority. But really all of the instances of minority returns in the beginning were met with violence. It doesn't make much of a difference which area we're talking about. Nearly all of them were met with violence, sometimes very brutal violence; houses being blown up, people being threatened. Massive action was taken.

And the only way that we could deal with that was essentially to ^{550BLANK PAGE 551} long-term reform police forces, long-term -- try to get some sort of rule of law in those particular areas so that the Muslims could return to Republika Srpska, Serbs could return to Sarajevo, Croats could return to Sarajevo or to other areas. And this, of course, struck at the heart of, if we are now in Republika Srpska, to the power structure of Pale they were dependent less on the military - the war had ended - more on the police, also in order to operate these sort of smuggling networks and the other networks that were essential for financial purposes but also to operate the sort of structures of political intimidation that were essential for the political power in -- not only there but primarily there.

Q. How would you describe Mrs. Plavsic's role in working with you in dealing with these critical problems of refugee return and reform of the police structures? Was she helpful or was she more than helpful?

A. Well, she was starting with refugee issues, she was very much concerned with the refugee issues; primarily, it has to be said, all of the refugees that were in the Republika Srpska. At the end of the war, there was a vast refugee problem primarily in the western parts of Bosnia, and that was the -- both the Krajina Serbs. I can't remember, 200.000, 300.000, of that order. And then the --

Q. That was from the Croatian Krajina?

A. That was from the Croatian Krajina. Sorry.

Q. And when did they become refugees?

A. Well, that's the August 1995.

Q. I think you'd mentioned that as being one of the most difficult ⁵⁵² periods of the entire war.

A. That can be said. I mean, the entire summer: We had Srebrenica; we had the Croatian Krajina offensive and all of those hundreds of thousands of people fleeing in; then there was the subsequent fighting in Western Bosnia. I mean, that left a huge number of refugees in the Banja Luka and Western -- Western Bosnia, Western Republika Srpska. And to that was then added the -- up to 100.000 further displaced persons coming out of the whole -- the Sarajevo fighting. So there was an immense immediate refugee and humanitarian issue that she was obviously very concerned with.

To that came the issues of what we could call minority return. I use that phrase, although, in some cases, the question of people returning to areas where that particular nationality had been the majority before the war, but we called it minority return at the time. And those were very tricky, as I said.

I remember -- or I re-read my book -- the conversations I had with President Izetbegovic in Sarajevo and President Plavsic in Banja Luka, and they were fairly similar in the sense that we first had to get the court to recognise the right of property, that this apartment belongs to that person, not to the person that is living there. That was difficult in itself. We managed to do that somewhat earlier in Banja Luka than in Sarajevo. Then it was a question of getting the police to --

Q. I'm sorry, Mr. Bildt, you say you managed to do that a bit earlier in Banja Luka. Did Mrs. Plavsic play any role in helping you to do that?

A. I don't think so, no, because that was essentially a question for ⁵⁵³ the -- however that was done. I can't give you the details of it, but I don't think so.

But the second stage was of course then to get the police forces to evict those that were living in those particular apartments in favour of those that had reclaimed the apartments, and that was a difficult issue. And I discussed it extensively with Mrs. Plavsic as well as Mr. Izetbegovic.

Now, it has to be said that both of them had their number one concern for those people that were living in those particular apartments because very often it was a question of people who had lost everything somewhere else and had nowhere to go. So if we sent in the police, we were effectively putting them on the street with nowhere to go. And we had problems with the police forces, both in Sarajevo and in Banja Luka. At the end of the day, Mrs. Plavsic accepted the logic and the law and tried to help in getting those -- some of those early evictions. Numbers were very small in the beginning, but it was the start that was horrendously difficult. It's always the start that is difficult. Now we are talking, of course, in all parts of Bosnia -- or fairly significant numbers of refugees. So the -- but we broke the ice, and she was part of that process.

Q. Now, you've mentioned reforming the police structures. That, you've told us, was a bit of a more long-term project.

A. Yeah, that can be said.

Q. Was Mrs. Plavsic an integral part of that, and did that involve her exposing herself to political and personal risk? ⁵⁵⁴

A. It did. It did. Because then we entered the sort of spring or -- now we are late winter or spring of 1997, and our attention - I'm now talking about the international side - during the latter part of 1996 had been concentrated more on setting up the common Bosnian institutions. I mean, lengthy negotiations in this particular case on the Serb side with Mr. Krajisnik, who was the elected Serb member of the Bosnian Presidency; less immediate focus then on the Republika Srpska internal issues. But then it shifted very much to those.

And there was also the increasingly -- increasing confrontation between Mrs. Plavsic, the president in Banja Luka, and the Pale powers, if I use that particular term. That was heating up by the day and centred around quite a number of different issues where we increasingly needed to support -- I wouldn't say her, but needed to support what was, after all, the constitution of Republika Srpska and the constitution of Bosnia. She was the elected president, and she was clearly under threat. The first -- the first instance that I noted or I was aware of when she was threatened was in -- we became aware of a plan to unseat her at the meeting of the SDS main board in Pale I think on March 22nd, according to my notes. We considered that positively dangerous and took proactive measures to both safeguard the place where she was staying and, at the end of the meeting where they could not move forward with their plans because we had also taken some other action that was disturbing, the plans that were there from the Pale power side, we judged that it would be too dangerous to have her travel by car from Pale to Banja Luka because of the risk of her being apprehended, attacked, and worse than that perhaps, ⁵⁵⁵ was too great, and we offered her -- that was the first time we offered her NATO helicopters. And she accepted that offer and was then lifted out of Pale de facto and to safety in Banja Luka. That was the first time. And then there were -- I had three or four cases where there were what we judged at the time as serious, direct, also physical threats against her as part of attempts by Pale to get rid of her, because they -- they judged that Dayton -- full Dayton implementation was a threat to them. They were right in that. While others judged that full Dayton implementation was a benefit to Bosnia and to the Serbs, and that was the nature of the confrontation.

They managed in the spring of 1996 to get rid of the then Prime Minister Karadzic, which caused a major confrontation. But he was not a major figure, it has to be said. It was courageous up to -- up to a point. But Mrs. Plavsic, of course, had another credibility and another position, as elected president of Republika Srpska. She was then, from their point of view, a far greater threat, far more difficult to deal with. And of course, accordingly, the measures that we had to take to protect the constitutional authority of Republika Srpska were also more significant.

And I don't know if you want me to go into the different other instances, but ...

Q. Well, I'd like to have you discuss with us the efforts that you and she, if you were working in coordination, were making in order to continue to undertake and accomplish the reforms that were required under the Dayton implementation. And if there were risks associated with that ⁵⁵⁶ continued effort, please tell us.

A. Well, it was -- the thing that became the crunch was the police issues, as we indicated. And here it was not only myself - I was coordinating - but it was a joint approach taken by -- there was then a new SRSG of the UN mission, Mr. Ky Eide.

Q. Please tell us what those -- that acronym represents.

A. All right. SRSG is Special Representative -- this is UN language, Special Representative of the Secretary-General. So he was heading the UN mission in Bosnia. The UN mission mandate was, to a very large extent, an IPTF mandate - IPTF being the International Police Task Force - which was monitoring and overseeing the reform of the police forces. Then I was working very closely together with the IFOR, or at that time SFOR commander, commander of the stabilisation force, which was also in the UN at that time. That was General Crouch. He was a commander of the 7th Army, the US Army in Europe.

Q. That's the military force.

A. That's the military force. And the three of us sort of made up a sort of calendar on the police reform issues. And here we had, during April, May, June, extensive meetings with Mrs. Plavsic and the Minister for Police Affairs, Mr. Kijac, in which we tried to get those reforms accepted. And it was -- it became rather obvious fairly early that Mr. Kijac was playing another game, and that led to a very serious confrontation with us and between Mrs. Plavsic and Mr. Kijac. And the final crisis was -- one of the final crises was -- I had then formally left but I was in touch on more than a daily basis in order to support my ⁵⁵⁷ successor as high representative, Mr. Westendorp, in late June, when I think it started with Mr. Kijac firing one of the key police heads in Banja Luka who was effectively supporting the constitutional rule, Mrs. Plavsic then firing Mr. Kijac, and Mr. Kijac then again firing the police in Banja Luka, and that led to the situation when Mrs. Plavsic was off to the UK on an official visit. I think we advised her that it was unsafe to return to Banja Luka.

Q. She was in London?

A. She was in London on an official visit, if I remember it right. She was then advised to go back via Belgrade. It turned out to be less good advice because she was apprehended at Belgrade airport by police. And that led to - because we were then aware of this - heavy diplomatic intervention.

Q. Mr. Dodik told us a bit about this yesterday, but was only able to tell us as much as that she had been apprehended in Belgrade. Can you tell us what happened after that?

A. She was apprehended in Belgrade. Diplomatic intervention from UK, US, I would say, helped to sort out the situation on Belgrade airport. And she was escorted, I would assume, by Yugoslav police to the border of Bosnia. We were then aware that the plan was to transfer her to Republika Srpska, that is, to Pale police, and the intention was then to take her into some sort of detention. And I'm not quite certain, but I mean, there were obviously plans to take her into sort of what they call psychiatric treatment to get rid of her the one way or the other, to get her out of the picture. ⁵⁵⁸ But we were lucky in that our forces got to the place quicker than the Pale police forces. So we were able to protect her from that. That was effectively done by my office in coordination with SFOR, the NATO forces, and then to bring her safely back to Banja Luka. That did not sort out that particular issue, of course, because that led to the confrontation continuing. And during the days that followed, we had to take further steps in Banja Luka to protect in different ways, because then we had also information at some point in time during those very days that forces of a rather special kind had been sent out from Pale in order to get at her.

And we - and by this strange phrase "we," I mean the sort of collective international community - deployed certain forces and certain resources to interdict and prevent, and we did interdict and we did notice and we did prevent different sorts of activities. We cannot be certain what would have happened if that had not been the case, but that was the case. It was clearly a very threatening situation. This was to be repeated later on with the Brcko riots and, of course, came to a head in early September confrontation in Banja Luka, which was also bordering -- "on the verge of open warfare" is to carry it somewhat too far, but extensive use of violence at that particular time. But at the end of the day, constitutional rule in Republika Srpska prevailed.

Q. Was she a necessary part of that?

A. I think she was essentially. Would not have -- you never know. History is a strange thing that happens only once. I would say that -- I mean, take the theoretical experiment of taking her out of the picture and ⁵⁵⁹ say that the Pale people would have dominated the entire period. Would we have been able to do the things we did in terms of peace and implementation? I would say not without significant use of force and most probably not with insignificant bloodshed, when it came to both refugee return and the internal confrontation of Republika Srpska. The fact that she was defending constitutional rule in Republika Srpska and we were able to support that and we were able to protect it when it was clearly under attack facilitated things.

Saying this, I'm not saying that we sorted out everything. We did not. A lot of things we did not sort out. There were numerous issues on which Mrs. Plavsic and myself had disagreements. We were not satisfied with the pace of implementation. My task was to pressure the authorities all over Bosnia to do more every day. My task was never to be satisfied. But without her, it would have been very different and more dangerous and almost certainly more violent.

Q. You told us about the work to reform the police structure. Do you recall whether there was any effort made to replace or remove the general of the army Republika Srpska, the commander?

A. Oh, yeah, that was earlier, when she -- that also goes to the issue of constitution rule. She, in whenever that could have been, late 1997, of course, fired the commander, the then-commander, General Mladic. And the reason was I think that he was really not -- he was really not part of the constitution structure. He was not obeying political demands and was accordingly fired. That led to rather tense situation where he took military action or threatened military action. That was then in the ⁵⁶⁰ eastern parts of Republika Srpska. He was from Han Pijesak, setting up roadblocks, taking over television transmitters, and threatening to march on Pale, of all places. That did not happen. And he, in some sort of way at that time, accepted that he was fired.

Q. And who was it that took the responsibility of doing that?

A. Well, the president of Republika Srpska has rather extensive authority, including that one. So it was only she who could, according to the constitution, take that particular decision. And the fact that -- the fact that the constitution of Republika Srpska had been written with very extensive authority to the president - I mean, you can speculate why that had been the case, but that was the case - made it possible for her to take increasingly robust action in favour of peace implementation. I say "increasingly" because it was -- in the beginning, it was, of course, a situation where all real power was in Pale, in spite of all formal powers being in Banja Luka. And at the end of this particular process, or when I sort of left the more active scene, there was far more real power in Banja Luka, but it was not complete. This was a struggle of the two Republika Srpskas, or the two competing visions; one in cooperation with the international community, and one in confrontation both with Dayton and the international community.

Q. Was it in the Serbs' interest to cooperate with the international community insofar as the future of the Serbian people was concerned? I know you've written about this in your books.

A. Well, in my humble opinion, all of the peoples of the area had an interest in first ending the war. It was a horrible war, truly horrible ⁵⁶¹ war. But they also had an interest in setting up, and we had an interest in setting up, constitutional structures that could gradually facilitate a reconciliation and gradually facilitate them living together and gradually finding a new form of equilibrium in the entire region. I'm not quite certain we have succeeded with that yet. But that is clearly in the interest of everyone in the region.

Then by the nature of things - and I said that earlier and I think it's important to understand - the Dayton peace was a compromised peace; it was not the victory of the one over the one. Everyone seeks victory in war. But at some point in time, one often has to accept a compromise. And that meant -- as I said, no one loved Dayton. And the warring parties, if I use that particular phrase, in much the same way as I think it was Klauzevic who once said that, "War is the continuation of politics by other means." I quickly learned that peace implementation to the former warring parties was the continuation of war by other means. They all continued to work for their particular war aims, although in peace, and my task was then to try to -- I shouldn't say "my" -- of the international community, to try to get them to reconcile to the fact that this compromise is the best available. Not perfect; the best available. The only alternative is further conflict, and that is clearly in the interests of be they Serbs, or be they Bosnian Muslims or Bosnian Serbs or Bosnian Croats or Kosovo Albanians or whatever, and gradually facilitate the economic reinvigoration of the region and people moving back from other parts - Sweden, for example, or wherever - and moving back inside the country. ⁵⁶² But it was not easy, and we are not there yet. I mean, I'm here. We're all here as part of the process of reconciliation. If we don't succeed in that, we would succeed in really nothing, just -- a cycle of revenge and retribution will never bring peace; only reconciliation can bring peace.

Q. Mr. Bildt, you say that we're all here contributing to the process of reconciliation. Biljana Plavsic's acceptance of responsibility and this hearing, your presence here, can you tell us how in your view that contributes to this process.

A. Well, first, and I've said this in my UN capacity also to the Security Council, I think several times, that I think the task of this Tribunal as first time really in international history of this sort is of immense importance. To establish justice, but justice not as an instrument of revenge and retribution, because that, we can go on forever and forever with; but justice as an instrument of reconciliation. We mentioned before - you led me to talk about the importance of the events of the 1940s to what happened in the 1990s - and I think the great failure of Tito's Yugoslavia to achieve more than very superficial recognition -- there was the slogans of brotherhood and unity; but below those slogans, there wasn't the true reconciliation. They hadn't really sorted out what happened, so to be ready to sort out what happened so that one could say that: "Right and wrong, this is what was done, and we accepted the responsibility, and the truth is of immense importance." And for all of the -- for all of the immediate importance, of course, of all of the peace implementation issues, refugee return and the setting up of ^{563BLANK PAGE 564} institutions and economic revitalisation and all of that, is really success or failure of reconciliation that will decide. And I do think, as I've said, that Mrs. Plavsic - and I'm dealing with the history from early 1996 and onwards, or 1995 and onwards -- she was courageous in supporting peace implementation. She was not a supporter of the Dayton agreement; there were hardly any of those around in the first days. But later on, she accepted. She was a firm supporter of constitutional rule. She took great personal risk with that. Others must judge the issues of the Tribunal. I think the fact that she has been speaking very openly about these issues and what happened does contribute to reconciliation in a way that few other of the then-active political leaders of the region have done.

MR. PAVICH: Thank you very much, Mr. Bildt.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Bildt, on the question of reconciliation, that the trial process in itself contributes to reconciliation, the trial process at the Tribunal, irrespective of the outcome, whether it ends in conviction or acquittal. I think what I would be interested to hear from you is why does a guilty plea make a contribution to the process that is special? Because the trial process, in any event, is a contributory factor, and the guilty plea is a part of that process.

THE WITNESS: Your Honour, I completely agree with particularly the statement that the trial process in itself is a contribution to reconciliation in that when you, in other cases, go through details of what happened and gradually get that accepted by all of the people on the ground, if I might use that phrase, it over time contributes to ⁵⁶⁵ reconciliation. It is not easy; it is not always working like that. It's not always successful initially. But that is the aim. And I do think - I have views on this - but I do think that overall, that contribution is made.

I think a plea of guilty, of course, provided that it's seen as credible - and credibility is not something that Mrs. Plavsic lacks in her convictions - does contribute substantially to reconciliation as well. That political leaders -- I mean, I belonged to those -- I wasn't there in the early 1990s, as you are aware of. But of course, I have been living with all the early 1990s, when I have been living with a lot of the people who were there and I have been talking with them, I mean, my view, her role was more symbolic than substance in the decisions and in the structures and all of that.

But anyhow, she was vice-president of Republika Srpska. And she has now sort of accepted responsibility publicly for things that happened that we are all aware of. No doubt, that is a significant contribution to reconciliation. I mean, the Tribunal proceedings in the cases where you don't have an admission of guilt should also and could also and does also contribute to reconciliation, although it's a far more difficult process because it's then contentious, as you are aware, and it sometimes results in more of a propaganda battle. But of course, when there is an admission, it's a completely different ball game in terms of the effect on reconciliation, in my opinion.

JUDGE ROBINSON: And I would imagine that her leadership role would also be significant. ⁵⁶⁶

THE WITNESS: Yes. Yes. It would be. I mean, she was -- you could, of course, argue that the fact that she is sitting here today is a result of the fact that she -- that the international community and Mrs. Plavsic had cooperated very closely. I have described some of the events during the 1996 and 1997 time period. When I left, this continued. When she somewhat late in the day was informed that she was the subject of what was I think a sealed indictment - I wasn't there at the time, but I have spoken to the people who were - her immediate reaction was to come to The Hague. Justice needs to be done. She has not been brought here. She came here. And that is -- there has been no other senior political leader, senior military leader that I am aware of of that case. I was involved in the early discussions, of course, when we -- during the period when I was in Bosnia when there was a question of both apprehending people who were indicted and getting some people transferred here under different circumstances or difficult circumstances.

But when she was late in the day informed, she said: "I'll go to The Hague." And then, of course, this has resulted in this particular proceeding with her pleading guilty on one of the counts.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Bildt, that concludes your evidence. Thank you for coming to the Tribunal to give it.

THE WITNESS: Thank you.

[The witness withdrew]

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. O'Sullivan. MR. O'SULLIVAN: Our next witness is Robert Frowick. While he's ⁵⁶⁷ being brought in, Your Honour, I'll point out that in the blue folders we provided you this morning, at tab 3 is Mr. Frowick's previous affidavit; and at tab 4 is his curriculum vitae.

[The witness entered court]

JUDGE MAY: Yes, would the witness take the declaration.

THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

JUDGE MAY: If you'd like to take a seat, Mr. Frowick.

WITNESS: ROBERT FROWICK Examined by Mr. O'Sullivan:

Q. Good afternoon, sir. Would you please state your name, for the record.

A. Good afternoon. Robert Frowick.

Q. Thank you. Sir, the Chamber has received a copy of your curriculum vitae, which you provided to us. And I will not go into great detail on that, but I will ask you some questions about your background and ask you to confirm a few things for us.

Is it correct that you have worked in the foreign service of the United States government from 1960 to 2001?

A. Not continuously. I retired from the career service in 1989, but I've been repeatedly called back to assignments and some considerable effort in Bosnia-Herzegovina in recent years.

Q. And your diplomatic postings over the years have taken you to Europe and in particular Eastern Europe and Asia; is that correct?

A. Well, yes, I would say the bulk of my career centred on East-West ⁵⁶⁸ relations in Europe. I've had a few trips to the Asia Pacific region to discuss the East-West phenomenon in Europe.

Q. In 1986, you received the personal rank of ambassador, I believe.

A. Yes.

Q. Of particular significance to these proceedings, I'd like to just confirm two things with you: In 1999 and 2000, you were the Deputy Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State for Dayton implementation?

A. That's correct.

Q. And from 1995 to 1997, you were the Head of Mission -- OSCE mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A. Yes.

Q. In fact, I believe you were the initial Head of Mission in Bosnia following the Dayton Agreement.

A. That's right. And we had to set up that mission from scratch.

Q. Well, can you briefly tell the Chamber of your mandate with OSCE under the Dayton Agreement.

A. Under the Dayton Agreement, OSCE was asked to assume three principal tasks in that peace process: One, to supervise the electoral process for early post-war elections at all levels of governance; secondly, to take a leading role in democratisation efforts in the country and to work along various United Nations agencies to strengthen respect for human rights. And the third task centred on regional stabilisation, political and military efforts: First of all, to offer the auspices of the OSCE for negotiations and confidence in security-building measures and ⁵⁶⁹ then help implement those measures; and secondly, to work on arms control efforts. In the early months of the -- of the peace process, for example, we succeeded in reaching agreement on a subregional arms control agreement, which was, I think, quite significant in helping to stabilise things.

Q. You said that one of your objectives was supervising elections. Under your mandate, were there any conditions that you set for holding free elections?

A. Well, frankly, I thought that the Dayton Agreement, however important and vital it was in stopping the war, laid out a prescription for electoral process which was quite unrealistic. It called for the holding of free and fair and democratic elections within six to nine months from the signing of the peace agreement - the signing took place on 14 December 1995 in Paris - and for elections of all levels of governance, that is, for a joint Presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a parliamentary Assembly of the House of Representatives of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the House of Representatives for the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, for the Republika Srpska Presidency, the Republika Srpska National Assembly, and if feasible, it was said, for cantonal assemblies and municipal governing bodies as well, and to do all of this under conditions of freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and in a neutral political environment.

Now, I think it was illusory to think that we could do all of that within just a few months, but I took the position as the head of the mission and ex officio the chairman of the Provision Election Commission ⁵⁷⁰ that we would have to do the best we could.

Q. I'd like focus for a few minutes on the September 1996 elections, which I believe were elections for the Presidency of RS and the National Assembly of RS; is that correct?

A. They were included in the list that I just gave.

Q. What position -- did you hold any specific position in connection with the September 1996 elections?

A. Well, yes. Under Dayton, it was our responsibility in OSCE to create a Provision Election Commission. We did so before the end of January 1996. Then we used that commission to establish rules and regulations to govern the process. As the head of the mission, I was also overseeing the build-up of cadre all over the country, really - we had a very extensive presence - to be able to gain enough strength and momentum so that we could possibly hold elections within some months after the signing of the agreement. So I was centrally involved in the whole process.

Q. In the period leading up to the September 1996 elections, did you meet with Mrs. Plavsic?

A. At first I don't recall meeting with her. I met with President Krajisnik, the Bosnian Serb member of the joint presidency of the country on numerous occasions, and Mr. Buha and various others. But my first recollection of meeting with Mrs. Plavsic was when she was with a group in the summer of 1996 after the 14 June Florence meeting and about the time that the high representative, Carl Bildt, had begun to act to strip Mr. Karadzic of some of his authority as the President of Republika ⁵⁷¹ Srpska. I recall seeing her in meetings at that time.

Q. Was Mrs. Plavsic in the meeting with other members of the SDS? Is that correct?

A. That's right.

Q. And what was your message to the SDS leadership in relation to these elections and Mr. Karadzic?

A. Well, the reason I was meeting with him at the time -- this -- and we're talking about late June, early July 1996, I had taken a position, the firm position at the Florence meeting that something had to be done about Mr. Karadzic continuing to hold public office even though the constitution of the country agreed that Dayton indicated that anyone indicted by this Tribunal and refusing to answer a summons to come to the Tribunal could not hold public office. I remember talking with Carl Bildt about that, and he indicated that he was -- he had a plan underway. At the end of June, it became clear that action had taken place to strip Mr. Karadzic of his authority as the president of Republika Srpska but nothing was happening vis-a-vis his role as the head of the party. My view as the head of the Provisional Election Commission was that something had to be done about that before we started the campaign. I couldn't countenance a situation in which the SDS party, headed by Mr. Karadzic, would simply go forward with a normal electoral campaign. So I indicated that either he had to step aside or we would disenfranchise that SDS party.

Q. Now, you've mentioned that Mr. Karadzic was both president of RS and the president of the SDS party. How powerful a position was it in ⁵⁷² that part of the world and at that time being the party leader?

A. Well, you know, it brings to mind debate I had with certain individuals there who took the position that public office refers to -- only to governmental office, and I thought the reality was we were dealing with a continuing effectively communist kind of order in Republika Srpska under the authority of Pale; and in that kind of a system, the party really rules. And to be head of a party was tantamount to being the most significant public office in that entity, and I was determined to interpret the constitution that way and use -- use this as the basis for my action to possibly have to disenfranchise the SDS.

Q. Now, during those meetings with the SDS leadership where you put forward the position that Mr. Karadzic should step aside, did any members of the SDS react?

A. Well, yes, all of them tried to -- tried to resist. I would say in those, Mrs. Plavsic seemed to be studying that question and myself and I guess I was studying her to some extent too. I'd heard that she was the iron lady of Republika Srpska during the war, and I guess we both kind of approached one another cautiously to try to understand what each of us was attempting to do. She did not try to resist this in any way. I think that was the main distinction between her and her colleagues.

Q. How was Mr. Karadzic eventually removed from his position as President of RS and SDS and from public life generally?

A. Within a few days of the end-of-June events, when it was announced that, as Carl Bildt has indicated, that Mr. Karadzic was relinquishing his powers of the Presidency to Mrs. Plavsic - and I took the view that he ⁵⁷³ would -- that Karadzic would also have to relinquish his prerogatives as head of the party - I started a whole series of steps to get across that this was a firm position by OSCE.

For example, within days I met with the SDS leadership. Then I went to Stockholm where there was the annual meeting of the OSCE parliamentary assembly, and I took this position to the public. While I was there, I got a call to attend an urgent meeting of the contact group in London to discuss the matter. I agreed to do that but indicated that I'd had an appointment immediately after Stockholm with Mr. Milosevic in Belgrade to discuss the matter. At the time, I was the beneficiary of tremendous support from Switzerland as chairman-in-office of OSCE, and that support included the use of a Lear jet so I could move quickly from one place to another.

I met with Mr. Milosevic. I tried to persuade him to have -- to induce Karadzic to step aside. Essentially he said this was going to take some time, and I felt that I didn't achieve much with him. I went to the contact group in London to discuss it, and then I wanted to meet with the Russians at an authority -- authoritative level. At the time, Moscow was busy with a visit from Vice-President Gore of the United States, as I recall. But within a few days I was asked to go to Moscow, and I discussed it with Foreign Minister Primakov in his office on the very eve of the commencement of the campaign, which had been rescheduled to start on the 19th of July.

Now, in the meantime, on the 16th of July, Richard Holbrooke - so important to the Dayton negotiations - appeared in Sarajevo and wanted to ⁵⁷⁴ do something to strengthen the Bosnian Serb compliance with the Dayton Agreement, and he fastened upon this endeavour to remove Mr. Karadzic from public office. He went to Belgrade, and on -- late on the 18th he was hammering out an agreement under which Mr. Karadzic would relinquish once and for all his powers of the Presidency as well as the Presidency of the party and remove himself from public office. So I was able to announce on the 19th, as the campaign got underway, that we suddenly had a boost to its integrity.

Q. How did the results of the September 19th, 1996 elections affect the political life in Republika Srpska?

A. Well, the -- within the various institutions that were brought into being as a result of the elections -- again, we had the Republika Srpska Presidency. Biljana Plavsic had been elected President. And the National Assembly had been elected. I think the fact that Mrs. Plavsic then had that authority put her into a whole new situation. There had already been indications that she wanted to accept the Dayton Peace process, I think, more than just about any of the other leading colleagues of the SDS. So it seemed as if there was some hope for a greater progress. Because my experience had been that the two sources of major resistance to the whole peace process were in Pale, on the one side, and then West Mostar, among ultra-nationalist Bosnian Croats there. With regard to the election of the National Assembly of Republika Srpska, I might note that going into those elections, the SDS party had totally controlled the Assembly and had used it to thwart various efforts toward peace in previous years, but coming out of those elections, that ⁵⁷⁵ 83-seat Assembly found the SDS controlling only 45 seats, enough to control events but not to fully dominate it as it had before.

Q. Do you recall Mrs. Plavsic's inaugural speech as president of RS in October 1996? And if so, what do you recall about that speech?

A. Yes. I recall also meeting Mrs. Plavsic shortly before the September elections, and the first time I really spoke with her and asked her for a special mandate for holding the municipal elections, because in August we'd made a decision that we should postpone the municipal elections in order to ease the burden that we had in organising elections at all levels of governance. All the rest of them went forward. But on the municipal elections, we decided to wait a while. And she agreed to that mandate.

Then the next time I saw her was, I think, October 19th in Banja Luka when she gave her inaugural address. And I sat there and listened carefully to what she said, and I was impressed with the fact that she was getting across to all concerned that the Dayton Agreement was a compromise. It didn't meet all of Bosnian Serb concerns, but it was something that should be honoured, as I recall her arguing, in part because it had legitimised the creation of the Republika Srpska and given the Bosnian Serb people a chance for peace with stability.

Q. Once elected president of RS, did Mrs. Plavsic work with you and the OSCE?

A. Yes. I would say rather infrequently at first, but throughout 1997 we had increasingly close contacts with all of the things that she was involved in and challenging in Pale. ⁵⁷⁶

Q. Perhaps we can come back to that in a few minutes. You've already mentioned a couple of times the municipal elections, and perhaps we can discuss this for a moment or two. You said that these elections did not take place in 1996 as planned. Could you tell us why.

A. Well, the -- in the municipal scene, we had had during the war the main military struggle over the cities of Sarajevo under siege one after another, key localities like that. And although the war was over, the political struggle continued and it was going to be very, very contentious to hold elections which, under the rules of the game, would enable people who used to live there - for example, let's say Muslims in Srebrenica - to be able to vote themselves back into a municipal Assembly. We decided to wait a while to face that particular challenge.

Mrs. Plavsic, in the fall of 1996, in a situation in which there was increasing stability across the entire country over efforts by some to go back, to sort of push their way back into where they had lived before, and violence was flaring, she decided, she told me, that there was too much instability and that, therefore, she was withdrawing her mandate. But shortly after that, her legal counsel and ours from OSCE were engaged in intensive efforts to write a new mandate, and on the 30th of November we reached agreement on a new mandate, which included Republika Srpska in the effort to go forward with municipal elections in due course. That was significant in its timing because the following day, the 1st of December, in Lisbon there was an OSCE summit at which all these issues were discussed and considered, and the summit in turn was followed ^{577BLANK PAGE 578} by a peace implementation conference meeting in London, where agreement was reached that the municipal elections should take place in summer 1997.

Q. When, in fact, did those municipal elections take place in 1997?

A. They took place 13/14 September 1997.

Q. I'd like to move now to 1997. And early in that year, did Mrs. Plavsic tell you anything about her relations with the SDS at that point?

A. Yes. In the spring, I began to see Mrs. Plavsic increasingly frequently and she was beginning to engage in a manifest struggle with Pale and expressing concern to me about the fact that in Pale those that still remained around Radovan Karadzic, although he was out of the public eye, were engaged in illicit trade, were refusing to pay ordinary customs revenues or taxes on what they were doing, and in a way denying the treasury of Republika Srpska funds that she needed to help her people. I was struck by the fact that her central focus was on trying to do things for the Bosnian Serb people. And she wasn't quite sure how to deal with this, but she was increasingly frustrated and, I think, angry over that situation.

Q. In what way did the lack of funding affect life in RS, as she saw it?

A. Well, because of the obstructionism from Pale, the international community basically was refusing to provide much funding to Republika Srpska. I remember at the London meeting in 1995, sitting beside Madeleine Albright, who was then the US permanent representative at the ⁵⁷⁹ time, and she and others argued that unless the parties complied with the peace agreement, the peace process, the international community would not agree to provide the massive funds that were manifestly needed to rebuild the country. The Bosnian Serbs were -- the ordinary people there were victims of this lack of funding month after month, although a great deal of funding was going in elsewhere in the country, and this was something she was trying to deal with.

Q. By the middle of 1997, did Mrs. Plavsic decide to take steps to deal with these problems?

A. Yes, she did. In the summer -- we've already heard of how she took the decision to remove police authority and begin -- and she began to make some changes.

On the 3rd of July, she called me into her office in Banja Luka and said she was considering options and one of them was to dissolve the Republika Srpska National Assembly that had only been elected the previous September. And she said, "Now, if I do this, will OSCE agree to supervise this?" Because there was no clear mandate for that. And I said I couldn't tell her immediately, that this was -- it would have to be a decision of the OSCE permanent council in Vienna. I was reporting every three weeks or so to the permanent council in Vienna. But I kind of signalled to her that I would try to be helpful to her in her quest.

Q. And did Mrs. Plavsic in fact dissolve the Assembly?

A. Then she did. She acted to dissolve the Assembly. This was an act that enraged Pale. I can remember talking with Mr. Krajisnik, who said, "There is no way that we will agree to going forward with new ⁵⁸⁰ elections of the Assembly." The first time I talked to him about it, there was a great deal of resistance to it. The RS -- Republika Srpska constitutional court took up the matter. I think one of the persons in the court tried to more or less support the position of President Plavsic, and he was beaten up by thugs. I met with him. I saw how severely beaten he was. So we were into a rather dramatic confrontation between her and those in Pale.

Q. Did Mrs. Plavsic's decision to dissolve the National Assembly and hold these elections put her at personal and political risk?

A. Well, very much so. I remember meeting her not long after that and from then on in situations in which she was clearly at risk, and on some occasions she was staying in her office around the clock and I had heard that IFOR troops were helping to secure the situation there for her in Banja Luka, although IFOR was -- these were SFOR troops by then. SFOR was most reluctant to engage in police activity; nevertheless, it was taking some extraordinary steps to help her.

Q. What was the international community's reaction to the initiative taken by Mrs. Plavsic to hold these extraordinary elections?

A. Well, if you consider myself part of the international community, I was, I think, the first off the mark to try to be supportive and to argue with the OSCE permanent council that yes, there were risks involved, but in order to make the peace process go forward, sometimes one had to take risks. We'd already proven in the case of Karadzic effort that that was a way to advance, and I thought here was another opportunity. I argued the same kind of thing in contact group meetings and so on, and ⁵⁸¹ gradually momentum developed to support the idea of the new elections. The contact group agreed in September 1997, as I recall, to support the idea.

Q. Was there a body called the Venice Commission which was involved in this process?

A. Yes, after the debate over the prerogatives of the constitutional court and its decisions within Republika Srpska, pressure mounted for an international body to move into the picture. The Venice Commission was prevailed upon, and a decision was taken there to uphold Mrs. Plavsic's right to dissolve the Assembly.

Q. Can you tell us briefly what the Venice Commission was.

A. As I understand it, it was a legal body to which the Europeans, the European Union and Council of Europe, referred in order to make a judgement of this kind.

Q. In this period, did Mrs. Plavsic break with the SDS and form a new political party?

A. Yes, with events moving quickly that September, after the contact group agreed to support the idea, and with considerable turmoil, tension in Republika Srpska, she created a new party in late September, as I recall, the SNS, the Serb National Alliance. Late September. And the elections were to be held that fall, so she didn't have much time. But she was able to attract some members of the SDS and others to join her.

Q. You mentioned earlier that it was in this period leading up to the November elections that your contacts with Mrs. Plavsic increased. Could you tell us a bit about those contacts. ⁵⁸²

A. Well, yes, they became very intensive, indeed. And in fact, I was meeting with her more than anyone else in the country, although I continued to have to meet with the political leaders on all sides and attend various international gatherings to generally move things forward. But I was seeing her quite frequently and trying to work out modalities for these extraordinary elections, settle a time frame and so on.

Q. The fact that Mrs. Plavsic had created a new party so late in the process, at that time, was it -- I assume that it was not a foregone conclusion that she would win at the polls?

A. There were many who were very worried about what might happen because the SDS had all of the advantages of financial resources, control over media, and, you know, prior controls over elections with Kaderja [phoen], to man polling stations and all of those things. And there were some who asked the question: If the SDS feels as if it's going to lose something here, maybe it wouldn't cooperate and maybe we can't have a proper election and maybe she'll be defeated. But I argued, while the SDS had those levers of power, she had something that seemed to me - and this was simply subjective - but it seemed to me, she had a message for the ordinary Bosnian Serb people that was gaining increasing resonance. And that fall, when she created the party, she went out into a vigorous campaign to emphasise, above all, her concern over the corruption, the illicit trade of the people in Pale, how they were avoiding paying their due taxes and so on, lining their own pockets, while most of the Bosnian Serb people were suffering, and she was trying to do something about it. And so I thought she did have the potential of the ⁵⁸³ votes.

Q. What were the results of the National Assembly election --

THE INTERPRETER: Microphone, please. Please repeat the question.

THE WITNESS: Mrs. Plavsic achieved a stunning victory. It did not seem apparent at first because it took a while for the definitive results to come in. But for example, the SDS, which prior to 1996 had controlled the National Assembly, had emerged from 1996 with 45 of the 83 seats. In 1997, in these extraordinary elections, the SDS presence dropped to only 24 seats and even with the Radical Party could not form a government any longer.

MR. O'SULLIVAN:

Q. Did this mean that Pale had lost its power base in the Assembly?

A. Yes, it had lost its power base. And Mrs. Plavsic, as the results became clearer, was the architect at putting together what was in effect a multi-ethnic coalition of 44 members of the National Assembly against the 39 combined SDS and Radicals and was able to shift power effectively from Pale to Banja Luka and in fact began shifting all of the agencies of government to Banja Luka.

Q. And the shift -- the transfer of government offices from Pale to Banja Luka took place after these elections?

A. Yes. And I should add that I was leaving my position as the OSCE Head of Mission in December. As you say, the elections were 22/23 November. My finale in a way was at the Bonn Peace Implementation meeting in December; and even then, we weren't entirely clear what the results ⁵⁸⁴ would be.

Q. What was the ethnic of this Assembly after those elections?

A. There were 18 Muslim and Croat deputies in the Assembly, and they joined the Sloga coalition that Mr. Dodik has spoken about, which included a variety of parties from the different ethnic backgrounds. And it was a very heterogeneous group. I thought -- I should add, there's some misunderstanding, I've noticed, by writings of people who should know better that in 1996, we already had a result of 18 Muslim and Croats elected to that National Assembly, but they had absolutely no power at all. And they were in the opposition to the SDS. This time, they were in the governing coalition. And while they were checkmated effectively by many of the Bosnian Serb deputies, still, they were part of the governing coalition.

Q. Did the results of these elections have any impact on financial assistance to RS?

A. The results of those elections, in my opinion, represented a very significant breakthrough and an advance for the Dayton peace process because of what I have been just been discussing, and it opened the way to much closer working relationship between the Bosnian Serb leadership of Mrs. Plavsic and her colleagues and the international community. And finally, in early 1997, the international community started bringing in substantial funds to help her and to help this effort, and at last the Bosnian Serb people were beginning to become beneficiary of such help.

Q. Let me conclude by asking a few questions about Mrs. Plavsic. How important was she to you and your work as the Head of Mission in Bosnia? ⁵⁸⁵

A. I would say that she became increasingly important in the over two years that I was involved in that position. I think what I've just indicated should demonstrate that fact. She was decisive in making these changes in Republika Srpska. And remember, what I'm talking about is the electoral process; peaceful democratic change through elections. That is the instrument she was in support of.

Q. To that extent, she supported the Dayton agreement?

A. Yes, she was singular on the Bosnian Serb side in supporting the Dayton agreement.

Q. In your view, did she show political courage and conviction?

A. Well, from the very beginning, she always had political courage. It was tested mightily in the summer and fall of 1997 when she confronted Pale, as she did. She didn't waiver. She saw it through, and she won.

Q. And finally, in your view, did she support democracy and the rule of law?

A. Yes. Because of the nature of her attack against Pale, I have thought of her as, in a way, attacking corruption, injustice, and becoming the champion within Republika Srpska of a struggle against criminality. MR. O'SULLIVAN: Thank you. I have no further questions, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Frowick, thank you for coming to the International Tribunal to give your evidence. You're free to go.

THE WITNESS: Thank you very much.

JUDGE MAY: We'll adjourn now. Half past 2.00.

--- Luncheon recess taken at 12.58 p.m. ⁵⁸⁶

--- On resuming at 2.32 p.m.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Tieger.

MR. TIEGER: Thank you, Your Honour. The next witness is Dr. Alex Boraine.

[The witness entered court]

JUDGE MAY: If the witness would take the declaration.

THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

WITNESS: ALEXANDER LIONEL BORAINE

JUDGE MAY: If you'd like to take a seat. Yes, Mr. Tieger.

MR. TIEGER: Thank you, Your Honour. Examined by Mr. Tieger:

Q. Good afternoon, Dr. Boraine. Thank you for joining us today. Can we begin, please, by having you state your full name and spell your last name for the record.

A. Alexander Lionel Boraine, B-O-R-A-I-N-E.

Q. Dr. Boraine, I'd like to begin by covering some aspects of your background. As I understand it, you grew up in South Africa during the time of apartheid and your reaction to and abhorrence of the injustices of apartheid led you first to the ministry of the Methodist Church in South Africa; is that correct?

A. That's correct.

Q. And is it correct, sir, that you were eventually elected head of the Methodist Church in South Africa? ⁵⁸⁷

A. Yes.

Q. As I further understand it, your service in that position provided you with an even greater understanding into the destructive nature and injustices of apartheid and to strive to do more to directly combat it, and for that reason you left the ministry and entered politics. Okay. What role did you have in politics and where did you serve and for how long?

A. I was elected as a member of parliament in Capetown, one of the constituencies in that city, and started in 1974 and served for 12 years.

Q. And did you leave the parliament on your own accord? And if so, what were your reasons?

A. I went into parliament thinking that by confronting the people who were oppressing the majority, that one could make some difference, offer some alternatives, oppose. But things got steadily worse, and by the middle of the 1980s South Africa was a military state. There was an atmosphere in the country which was violent, and I didn't think there was any point in continuing to debate issues when my country was on fire, so I walked out of parliament, yes.

Q. And after that, did you found an institute?

A. Yes. I wasn't sure what I should be doing. It seemed so utterly hopeless to try anything at the time. But after consultation with a lot of people who were being hurt most, I started an Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa, IDASA, whose main purpose was to try to shift away from the politics of oppression and the politics of resistance to the politics of negotiation as a way forward for my ⁵⁸⁸ country. And we did exactly that, both inside and outside the country.

Q. And did you participate in the negotiations that precipitated the end of apartheid?

A. Yes. For that very difficult four years, yes.

Q. Now, in the aftermath of apartheid and its end, did it become apparent that the legacy of the past abuses would have to be addressed for the country to be sustainable?

A. Yes. It seemed to me that if this fragile democracy had any chance of succeeding, then you really had to come to terms with the past, which was often cloaked in darkness, in propaganda, in lies. And so I actually started a new institute called Justice In Transition, with a focus mainly on dealing with the past for the sake of the future.

Q. And at some point did President Mandela ask you to become the co-chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

A. Yes, that's right.

Q. When was that?

A. That was in 1995.

Q. And in that capacity, you worked with Bishop Tutu; is that correct?

A. That's correct, yes.

Q. Now, I'll ask you more about your experiences with and the insights gleaned from your work with the commission. But since leaving the commission, have you taught at the law school at NYU?

A. Yes, for the last three years, I have been teaching there. First, as a visiting fellow; then as a full-time teacher while I was trying to ⁵⁸⁹ write a book; and then now on a part-time capacity, but I still teach there, yes.

Q. I understand your book is entitled "Country Unmasked" and it details the work of the commission and the relevance of the commission to other parts of the world.

A. That's right, yes.

Q. As a result of your work, did you become involved with assisting other countries in their efforts to come to grips with the legacy of past abuses following mass atrocities and conflict?

A. I think because the South African Commission was public and televised and on radio, it was noticed in many parts of the world. And I think that some countries that were in transition themselves thought they may be able to learn something from our own experiences. Some of them seemed to imagine that you could simply take the South African experience and duplicate it, which of course you can't. But it did mean that I was constantly being asked to visit many countries to advise incoming presidents or ministers or human rights groups about the nature of transition, how to tackle the past, and how to build a future based on a human rights culture.

Q. In an effort to expand that contribution, did you become the founding president of another institute?

A. Yes. The institute for -- the Centre for Transitional Justice. This was only about 18 months ago. We have grown remarkably, and we now work in about 15 different countries: Latin America, Africa, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, and Southeast Asia. ^{590BLANK PAGE 591}

Q. Dr. Boraine, as you know, one of the issues raised and discussed during the course of this hearing has been reconciliation and the contribution to reconciliation that Mrs. Plavsic's acknowledgement of crimes and acceptance of responsibility may have. For that reason, both the Defence and the Prosecution have asked you to come here to assist the Court in understanding that issue of the hearing.

Let me ask you, first, then, sir: Based on all your experiences, what role does accountability generally play in the process of reconciliation?

A. I would have to say that if accountability was not present, then the reconciliation would be a contradiction in terms. I think systems of criminal justice exist not simply to determine guilt or innocence, but also to contribute to a safe and peaceful society. And therefore, these systems are absolutely critical in the process of reconciliation. They are not at odds. They are not a contradiction. In my experience, accepting responsibility for terrible crimes can have a transformative and traumatic impact on the perpetrator, but also on the victims and the wider community. Such acceptance, whether by a guilty plea in a criminal case or in some other forum, can, I believe, be a significant factor in promoting reconciliation and creating what I would call space for new attitudes and new behaviour. It has that potential; I'm not saying it's always realised.

But the ICTY was established not only to determine guilt or innocence of individual accused, but, and I quote: "To contribute to the restoration and the maintenance of peace," and again, I quote: "To ⁵⁹² contribute to the settlement of wider issues of accountability, reconciliation, and establishing the truth behind the evils perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia." And in the case of the accused, Ms. Biljana Plavsic, these objectives, I think, take on special meaning. After all, Mrs. Plavsic is -- was the former president of Republika Srpska, has pled guilty to the crime of persecutions on political, racial, and religious grounds for acts committed in more than 30 Bosnian municipalities in 1992. And with this act, this act of acceptance of guilt, she assumes responsibility for those horrors that many Serb leaders continue to deny. We should, therefore, never forget or seek to minimise the crimes for which she has assumed responsibility. And the list of crimes is almost like a litany of death: A killing of defenceless civilians, torture, physical and psychological abuse, sexual violence, the forced displacement of entire communities, the existence of detention camps where thousands of prisoners were kept in inhumane conditions and many killed, the razing of entire villages. Thus, any effort to achieve justice and reconciliation that fails to recognise the enormity of these crimes will, I think, jeopardise the transformative potential of Mrs. Plavsic's actions.

Q. What would you consider to be the significance of a plea of guilty by someone like Mrs. Plavsic for reconciliation or, for that matter, of the statements that she made accompanying that plea?

A. I think, very briefly, four things: One, as a Serb nationalist and former political leader of some significance, her confession sends out a very crucial message about the true criminal character of the enterprise ⁵⁹³ with which she was engaged. It really takes very seriously what happened.

And secondly, it also sends a powerful message about the legitimacy of this Tribunal and its functions. It's important to recognise that Mrs. Plavsic surrendered herself to the Tribunal, voluntarily travelled to The Hague. Too often, this Tribunal has constituted the focus of anger and grievance among leaders and large segments of the public in Serbia and Republika Srpska, rather than focussing on the war criminals in their midst.

In the third place, Mrs. Plavsic has apologised and called on other leaders to examine their own conduct. I think this is particularly significant.

And fourthly, this acceptance of responsibility may demonstrate to victims that at long last someone has acknowledged their own personal suffering.

Genuine reconciliation, in my view, in the former Yugoslavia will remain illusive until responsibility is accepted by those who through defiant declarations or silent indifference explicitly or implicitly endorse these atrocities. Mrs. Biljana Plavsic has taken this crucial first step, so different from so many other leaders from that part of the world.

Q. And in what way do you envision this as a first step?

A. I think that any acknowledgement as significant, as grave, as public as this doesn't happen just once or instantaneously. I think it's a series of steps. We have been reminded that appropriate weight should ⁵⁹⁴ be given to her role in ending a war and seeking to implement the Dayton Peace Accords. Her role in seeking to steer her people away from the violent nationalism that she herself helped to foster should be recognised as one of a series of steps.

I think that another step which would help this Tribunal and probably help so many of us outside of this Tribunal as to how it was possible for such madness to occur at such a rate and in such deep intensity. And I think a further act of contrition would be for her to tell the world how this really came about; not because we are merely curious but I think because it would assist people in the region to have a better understanding in helping them to come to terms with this, but more especially that it could help in helping other countries to avoid the same mistakes. So I think that this is a -- this is a process and could have enormous impact if it was followed through.

Q. Now, in the context of a couple of earlier remarks, you referred to the impact on victims. Let me ask you what -- what role victims play in this process of accountability and dispensing justice.

A. I think that victims ought to be at the very centre. The problem is we don't like victims very much because they make demands. They cry to be heard. And in the very nature of things, in criminal justice it's -- it's very difficult to find the time and the energy and the place so that they do become central and are very often marginalised. If we are going to try and blend accountability with

reconciliation or to strike the right balance between punishment and forgiveness, to focus on a sordid past but also on a more hopeful future, ⁵⁹⁵ then it's imperative that we should be guided first and foremost by those who have borne the brunt of past injustice. Full justice cannot ever be delivered if it is done at the expense of the victims. They need to be heard. And I think all of us have to learn to listen much more than perhaps we do right now. Reconciliation can all too easily be undermined if victims feel that their pain and suffering has not been given sufficient recognition in both judicial and non-judicial processes established to respond to gross violations of human rights. I must caution, however, that respecting the experiences and views of victims does not mean putting words in their mouths or characterising them as either insisting on retribution or being amenable to lenience. The fact of the matter is that victims are as complex and veiled as human beings themselves and they demand proper consideration of their pain and their different perspectives, but to be heard in terms of accountability and reconciliation is imperative.

Q. I want to turn to your understanding based on your work with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the importance of confession, acceptance, reconciliation, and particularly accountability in a process such as this.

A. Well, I think the first thing I have to point out, I suppose is fairly obvious, is that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a commission and not a court. Many do confuse the two sometimes, but truth commissions are neither the same as judicial bodies, nor, I hasten to add, an adequate substitute for them. Truth commissions are non-judicial bodies and have -- and as such have far fewer powers than ⁵⁹⁶ do courts. They have no power to put people in prison. They cannot even enforce their recommendations, even though they may be quite good. But on the other hand, it's my experience not only in South Africa but elsewhere that truth commissions can potentially complement the work of courts in several ways: First, by establishing the broad causes and consequences of past abuses; by gathering, organising, and preserving evidence that can be used by the commission and in prosecutions; providing a public platform for victims through public hearings. In South Africa, we heard over 22.000 victims, and obviously other truth commissions have heard lots of people as well. But I make that point because a commission is geared to do just that. And fourthly, it can make far-reaching recommendations regarding victim reparation and necessary legal and institutional reforms.

Now, the commission in my own country was unique in that unlike any other commission, it had the authority -- in fact, it was bound by the draft constitution to grant amnesty to perpetrators of politically-motivated crimes. I don't think that this kind of commission would be desirable or constructive in the former Yugoslavia. These amnesty provisions were arguably the greatest but also the most controversial innovation of the commission.

Ultimately, we received over 7.000 applications for amnesty, which came as a considerable shock because the general view was that no one would come forward. Why would they? But of course there was both the carrot-and-the-stick approach, and that, I think, brought many of the perpetrators to come and to confess. But we, perhaps rightly or perhaps ⁵⁹⁷ wrongly, did not ask of them that they should apologise or show contrition. The reason why we did that was because we thought it could be so easily abused and contrived. And it was far better if it was a much more spontaneous --

Q. Dr. Boraine, excuse me --

A. I just want to finally underline that in truth commissions, when people come and ask for amnesty, there is a degree of accountability. And one of the conditions of the South African legislation was that the full account had to be given in order for amnesty to be considered. And if the judges of the supreme court who sat on the amnesty committee felt for any reason whatsoever that full accountability had not been given, then amnesty would obviously be withheld. But I do think that there is a very clear distinction between a court, and certainly a Tribunal, and a truth commission.

Q. What did you find to be the impact on victims and even on the perpetrators themselves of acknowledgements of responsibility and confessions?

A. I think one of the positive features of the South African commission was that it responded to a plea by victims, and it's the same cry that I've heard all over the world in so many different cultures and different languages, and it goes something like this, quite simply, and yet desperately: "I want to know what happened. I want to know why it happened. I want to know where the body is of my loved one. I want to know." And this was certainly a very strong plea and an articulate cry from thousands of victims in my own country because so many people had ⁵⁹⁸ been spirited away, so many people had disappeared, so many assassination squads had been at work. And I think the fact that perpetrators came and told sometimes very grizzly stories of what they had done was almost a relief to the victims. They actually faced the perpetrators, because obviously they were encouraged to attend the amnesty hearings and, indeed, were provided with transport and provision to do. And I think that victims were saying: "We are anxious for information or for knowledge, but we want more than that. We want acknowledgement. We want an acknowledgement that someone was responsible for what happened to our loved ones." And this knowledge and acknowledgement, I think, was extremely important. But also through personal story-telling, a public process got underway, a silence was broken, and this led to multiple story-telling exercises throughout the society at community level.

It has to be acknowledged that, of course, perpetrators who came forward to give confessions did so with the expectation of getting something out of it. It was a kind of quid pro quo. They hoped that by making full confession, they would be saved from appearing in court or going to prison. But I have to admit that sitting and watching and listening for two and a half years, I was struck by the number of perpetrators who actually did confess and apologise; many broke down, quite literally, as they gave their public testimonies and asked of the commission that we organise meetings between themselves and their victims. Sometimes the victims agreed; sometimes they refused. But the instances where they agreed, I must say it was quite a remarkable experience for me. ⁵⁹⁹ One could go on and on about this, but let me stop there.

Q. Now, I asked you about the impact on victims and perpetrators of the process of accountability and particularly acknowledgements of responsibility. Can you give us some greater understanding of the potential impact on societies at large.

A. Well, I think the uniqueness of the South African experience was that it was the first ever commission not to be held behind closed doors. This meant that there was total access to the public, but also to the television cameras and radio and the print media. And this meant, of course, that a whole country participated in this exercise. The simplest and the poorest country in my country, who were amongst the greatest victims, had access to a little transistor radio and could hear the translation into their own language and could participate. And it became, I suppose, a kind of national catharsis. It created debate and argument and difference and acknowledgement and denial all over the country. And I think truth-telling by victims and perpetrators struck a very powerful blow against amnesia in my country.

Let me perhaps summarise the relevant lessons which come to me as I think about that process as it relates to people who confess and apologise. First, full disclosure in confessions is critical. The absence of detail can render a confession vacuous and insignificant. Second, all victims will not react to the same way to confessions by their victimisers; but in some cases, and in many cases, reconciliation becomes possible through confession. Thirdly, expressions of remorse, when genuine and voluntary, can sometimes provide a measure of closure for ⁶⁰⁰ victims. And fourthly, broad publicity of the causes, the nature, and the extent of the gross violations of human rights is extremely important. In South Africa, we, as I already referred to, did not ask for any public apology or act of contrition. I think we were probably wrong in that. And as you may know, one of the countries, East Timor, that we work in, low-level perpetrators are able to avoid prosecution provided that they participate in community reconciliation processes whereby they confess, apologise, and agree to perform an act of reconciliation, community service. And I'm convinced that confessions and apologies can be cheapened if they are not accompanied by the appropriate remedial action.

Q. Now, we've heard some references in earlier testimony to the impact that acknowledgements of responsibility might have in reducing tensions or further potential conflict. Has your work provided you with any insights into the -- into any linkage between acceptance of responsibility and reduction of tensions or the potential for further violence?

A. Well, I have no doubt that admissions of responsibility, particularly from civilian and military leaders, I think that's key, can help prevent basic points of fact from continuing to be a source of conflict or bitterness. And this, of course, in turn, can help to reduce tensions in society and thereby facilitate peaceful coexistence or reconciliation, so there is a potential to break the cycle of violence and create a more sustainable peace as a result.

I think confessions can also help to expose the hypocrisy and the ⁶⁰¹ lies of others; and I think also on an individual level, confessions, especially remorseful ones, have the potential to generate a kind of forgiveness on the part of victims and help to deter private acts of vengeance.

On the other hand - and I really do want to underline this - one must not overstate the potential, the individual, the social impact of confessions. Reconciliation and healing, whether it be at an individual or societal level, generally requires much more than confessions in both short term and long term. In the circumstances here, it certainly requires judicial punishment for wrongdoers, and there are those who argue that the 1960 domestic trials in Germany helped the international community and even the holocaust survivors to see Germans in a different and more positive light as a direct result of that -- those criminal trials.

And then secondly, in addition to confessions, I think victim compensation programmes - and one looks at Chile for their reparations programme for the families of murdered and disappeared - helped to restore for some victims, at least, a greater trust in the state and the society in these more different and positive light as a result of the removal of abusers from office.

I think, too, that in many countries the process of reconciliation cannot really start, even though some make confessions, until the war is at an end. And Mozambique is a classic case.

In my own country, where -- an almost miracle took place, where everybody - including many of us - in the country expected the end to be ⁶⁰² more of a bloodbath than anything else. And through negotiation, we were able to find a new way forward. But even that -- even the measure of reconciliation which took place there -- unless the vast black majority are given access to decent housing, education, healthcare, jobs, well, you can kiss reconciliation goodbye. In other words --

JUDGE ROBINSON: Dr. Boraine, I think you have come to a matter that I wanted to raise. It is: How do you measure the effect of reconciliation? For example, in your own country - and South Africa is quite often referred to as an example in this respect - but to what extent is it the outcome not just of reconciliation but of a wider negotiating process of which reconciliation is but one part? And I wanted to ask you whether any surveys or studies have been done to measure the effect of acknowledgement of guilt in the reconciliation process. Is it something that has been scientifically measured?

THE WITNESS: Your Honour, I think that some people have mistakenly talked about the South African model as political negotiations and then a Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- my own view is that reconciliation started when former enemies stopped killing each other and sat round a table and started negotiating a new constitution. For me, that's -- that's a kind of litmus test, that it was not merely words but people who actually hated each other, people who were trying to kill each other, sat round this table, as I said, and negotiated a new constitution. And it was extremely difficult.

I remember the security police in my country who had a list of people who were -- who were, as they saw it, legitimate targets; the ⁶⁰³ African National Congress, for example, by name, by photograph. And a year later -- this was 1989 in a state of emergency. A year later, these same security policemen were now having to guard and protect the people they were given licence to kill. And that's a huge change. It is not something, however, that I think you can ever say has arrived or been accomplished. It's always a process, and there will be setbacks, and there certainly were in my country and there are still -- there's still much to be done. The baggage that we carry there after 300 years of colonialism and racism is enormous, and it's extremely tense at times --

JUDGE ROBINSON: If I can interrupt you. I think the question that is before us is much more specific. I mean, if there has been reconciliation in South Africa, to what extent has truth-telling, acknowledgement of past wrongs contributed to that? Has it been a significant factor? Because the claim that is being made here is that the plea of guilt, of guilty, will contribute significantly to the reconciliation process in Yugoslavia, and that is the specific issue which I think we have to grapple with. So in looking at South Africa, I ask the question: If there has been reconciliation, to what extent has truth-telling and acknowledgement of past wrongs been a significant factor in that process?

THE WITNESS: I am -- I have a bias as someone who participated very directly in the shift which took place in South Africa, so I'm subjective. But I have to say that I have no doubts that the opportunity to break the silence, for people to tell their stories, both, ^{604BLANK PAGE 605} interestingly enough, victims and perpetrators, have played a significant role in easing the very real tensions and even hatred in my own country. I think the fact that whites, who were largely responsible for this, apartheid, denied over and over again that the horrific things which were published all over the world - but not in my country - denied that this could ever have happened. And when they -- once they had listened first to the victims -- and even then they said, "You're exaggerating." But when the perpetrators came -- and no perpetrator is going to come and talk about things which throw a very, very bad light on him or her unless they are true. And I think that absolutely devastated many, many people and broke the denial in many instances and I think did -- and I don't want to exaggerate: There were many other factors, but I do think that the exercise brought a very significant measure of reconciliation to South Africa.

Whether that is true elsewhere or whether it's appropriate here or in the former Yugoslavia, I cannot tell. But everywhere I have been in the world, I have found that one - only one - of the aspects which have been extremely helpful in creating a climate where people can begin to co-exist is this act of truth-telling, of truth delivery.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Thank you.

MR. TIEGER:

Q. Dr. Boraine, can I follow up on His Honour Judge Robinson's question and ask you, if I can, if you have any thoughts on the specific -- the specific role that Mrs. Plavsic's plea or her actions can have on reconciliation in former Yugoslavia, particularly with regard to the ⁶⁰⁶ general possibilities that you mentioned earlier.

A. Well, firstly, I hope very much that Mrs. Plavsic's actions will prompt other leaders responsible for similar crimes to acknowledge their culpability, to recognise the jurisdiction of this Court, and to accept the appropriate punishment. I think this is a factor which has been so lacking in former Yugoslavia. And I've been to that region on many occasions and talked with people from the highest to the lowest. And there does seem to be a stubborn resistance and a denial. I think that when someone who is in a significant leadership position actually makes the break, as has been done in this case, and can prompt - and who knows whether this will help or not - but there is a potential, at least, of prompting other leaders to come forward. And I hope very much that that happens.

I think it's also true that her statements could - could - help catalyse or initiate a process of honest truth-telling and acknowledgement throughout former Yugoslavia. So I don't think it's necessary for a handful of people to be indicted and tried when one accepts all the limitations which exist. But I think the problem is much more deep than that; and therefore, if there could be some form of truth-telling, which may be very different from the South African model, but in order to achieve justice and truth and reconciliation, if her actions can help precipitate that, then I think it would be very significant indeed. Truth-telling and truth-recovery should be a part of a comprehensive effort to deal with the past. And so I think in those ways, her own acknowledgement, her own apology, her own appeal to leaders could play a ⁶⁰⁷ role.

Q. Dr. Boraine, I just want to ask you one last question, and I want to therefore provide you with the opportunity to share with the Court any last observations or comments that you would like to make about the issues that you see as significant in today's hearing.

A. Yes, I'll try. Your Honours, the courts have an important role to play in the creation of accurate historical record. I listened with great interest to President Jorda in Sarajevo last year when he and I shared a panel where he made the point that a Tribunal can't try everyone - it's just impossible - and that a Tribunal can't listen to every victim, even though they need and deserve to be heard; that a Tribunal can't always calculate the patterns and the causes of the horrendous crimes which took place; and it's difficult for a Tribunal on its own to pull together and piece together a collective memory where people begin to agree at least on some certain basic facts. And that is why I think that - and I think he was correct in what he said - a multiplicity of efforts are going to be required. And if Mrs. Plavsic's contribution can assist in that, then I think we should be ready to encourage others to do otherwise. I want to, in conclusion, very strongly support her call to all leaders on all sides in the past conflict to examine their own conduct. There have been a limited number of apologies, but they have been partial at best and have not been backed up by reparative programmes in favour of victims. Instead, apologies have generally been accompanied with noncooperation with the ICTY, one-sided trials at a national level, and ongoing intimidation of local minorities. If the region's citizens and ⁶⁰⁸ leaders are not prepared to seriously confront the demons of the past, the next generation will bear the consequences.

And it does seem to me, in my final sentence, that looking at Mrs. Plavsic's record, both in terms of the seriousness of her crime, and also in her change of behaviour and her acknowledgement and confession, that in some way, she seems to have grasped a second chance, and is to be commended for that, but much more importantly, I think the people of former Yugoslavia deserve a second chance and to move away from the prejudices and the hatreds of the past to a more tolerant, a more decent future with human rights as its centerpiece. And if her behaviour and her actions and her words can assist the people of that part of the world who have suffered so much, then I hope that with time and courage, the cause of narrow nationalisms will wane, and pluralistic societies grounded in human rights and the rule of law will emerge. The reality is there is no other choice that can guarantee sustainable peace in the region.

MR. TIEGER: Thank you, Dr. Boraine. I have nothing further, Your Honours.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Pavich, any questions?

MR. PAVICH: No, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Dr. Boraine, thank you for coming to give evidence to the Court. We are grateful. You are, of course, free to go.

[The witness withdrew]

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Pavich.

MR. PAVICH: Mrs. Plavsic would like an opportunity to address the Court. ⁶⁰⁹

JUDGE MAY: Yes, she may do so. If she wishes to stand, she can; or if she wishes to sit, she may sit. As she wishes.

THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. President, Your Honours, Madam Prosecutor, Counsel: I'm thankful to have this opportunity to speak today. Nearly two years ago, I came before this Tribunal, having been charged with participating in crimes against other human beings, and even against humanity itself. I came for two reasons: To confront these charges and to spare my people, for it was clear that they would pay the price of any refusal to come.

I have now had time to examine these charges and, together with my lawyers, conduct our own investigation and evaluation. I have now come to the belief and accept the fact that many thousands of innocent people were the victims of an organised, systematic effort to remove Muslims and Croats from the territory claimed by Serbs. At the time, I easily convinced myself that this was a matter of survival and self-defence. In fact, it was more. Our leadership, of which I was a necessary part, led an effort which victimised countless innocent people. Explanations of self-defence and survival offer no justification. By the end, it was said, even among our own people, that in this war we had lost our nobility of character. The obvious questions become, if this truth is now self-evident, why did I not see it earlier? And how could our leaders and those who followed have committed such acts? The answer to both questions is, I believe, fear, a blinding fear that led to an obsession, especially for those of us for whom the Second World War was a living memory, that Serbs would never again allow themselves to become ⁶¹⁰ victims. In this, we in the leadership violated the most basic duty of every human being, the duty to restrain oneself and to respect the human dignity of others. We were committed to do whatever was necessary to prevail.

Although I was repeatedly informed of allegations of cruel and inhuman conduct against non-Serbs, I refused to accept them or even to investigate. In fact, I immersed myself in addressing the suffering of the war's innocent Serb victims. This daily work confirmed in my mind that we were in a struggle for our very survival and that in this struggle, the international community was our enemy, and so I simply denied these charges, making no effort to investigate. I remained secure in my belief that Serbs were not capable of such acts. In this obsession of ours to never again become victims, we had allowed ourselves to become victimisers.

You have heard, both yesterday and today, the litany of suffering that this produced. I have accepted responsibility for my part in this. This responsibility is mine and mine alone. It does not extend to other leaders who have a right to defend themselves. It certainly should not extend to our Serbian people, who have already paid a terrible price for our leadership. The knowledge that I am responsible for such human suffering and for soiling the character of my people will always be with me.

There is a justice which demands a life for each innocent life, a death for each wrongful death. It is, of course, not possible for me to meet the demands of such justice. I can only do what is in my power and ⁶¹¹ hope that it will be of some benefit, that having come to the truth, to speak it, and to accept responsibility. This will, I hope, help the Muslim, Croat, and even Serb innocent victims not to be overtaken with bitterness, which often becomes hatred and is in the end self-destructive.

As for my own people, I have referred today to their character. I think it, therefore, important to explain what I'm speaking of. There now stands in the centre of Belgrade a great domed church, still under construction, the construction begun in 1935. Our people have persevered in building this church as a monument to a man who more than any other formed the character of the Serbian people. That man was the great St. Sava. The path he followed was marked by self-restraint and respect for all others. A great diplomat who gained the respect of his people and the world around him, a man whose character has become deeply ingrained in the Serbian people. It is the path and example of St. Sava that the great Serbian leaders have followed, even in our own times, demonstrating a noble endurance and dignity, even in the most difficult circumstances. One need only point to Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic, who to this very day is a voice crying out for justice in what has become for Serbs the wilderness of Kosovo. Tragically, our leaders, including myself, abandoned this path in the last war. I think it is clear that I have separated myself from those leaders, but too late. Yet, this leadership, without shame, continues to seek the loyalty and support of our people. It is done by provoking fear and speaking half-truths in order to convince our people that the world is against us. But by now the fruits of this ⁶¹² leadership are clear. They are graves, refugees, isolation, and bitterness against the whole world, which spurns us because of these very leaders.

I have been urged that this is not the time nor the place to speak this truth. We must wait, they say, until others also accept responsibility for their deeds. But I believe that there is no place and that there is no time where it is not appropriate to speak the truth. I believe that we must put our own house in order. Others will have to examine themselves and their own conduct. We must live in the world and not in a cave. The world is always imperfect and often unjust, but as long as we persevere and preserve our identity and our character, we have nothing to fear.

As for me, it is the members of this Trial Chamber that have been given the responsibility to judge. You must strive in your judgment to find whatever justice this world can offer, not only for me but also for the innocent victims of this war.

I will, however, make one appeal, and that is to the Tribunal itself, the Judges, Prosecutors, investigators; that you do all within your power to bring justice to all sides. In doing this, you may be able to accomplish the mission for which this Tribunal has been created. Thank you.

JUDGE MAY: Is that your case, Mr. Pavich?

MR. PAVICH: It is.

JUDGE MAY: Then that concludes the evidence, then. It's too late to hear speeches, but there are two matters on which ⁶¹³ you could perhaps help us. The first is provisional release. The other is the point of cooperation which I raised yesterday. Yes, Mr. Harmon.

MS. DEL PONTE: [Interpretation] Excuse me, Mr. President. I thought it was the Defence who was going to speak regarding provisional release. But if you give me the floor, I'm ready to do so.

MR. PAVICH: I'm perfectly willing to defer.

JUDGE MAY: Well, there are two issues. The first is provisional release; the second is cooperation. Now, it may be better if we dealt with the cooperation first and then moved on to provisional release. Perhaps the Prosecution can help us on that first one.

MS. DEL PONTE: [Interpretation] Yes, Mr. President. Regarding cooperation, it should be said that the accused, Madam Plavsic, did not cooperate and has not cooperated. Up to today, we have no indication of cooperation on the part of Madam Plavsic. But as the Prosecutor of this Tribunal, I wish to add nevertheless that I continue to believe and hope that Madam Plavsic will decide to cooperate with us.

I wish to tell you, Mr. President, that Article 101 of our Rules of Procedure and Evidence, which speaks of serious and continuous cooperation, is naturally -- substantial cooperation is not applicable in this case because, as I have just said, up to this point, there has not been any cooperation. That is what I wish to say by way of information for the Chamber. Thank you, Mr. President.

JUDGE MAY: Mr. Pavich, is there anything you would like to add to that? ⁶¹⁴

MR. PAVICH: No, Your Honours.

JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

[Trial Chamber confers]

JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Pavich. We'll hear you on provisional release.

MR. PAVICH: Mr. O'Sullivan will address the Court, Your Honours, with your permission.

JUDGE MAY: Yes, of course. MR. O'SULLIVAN: The Chamber will have had the opportunity to see our filing on provisional release and the documents in annex and support thereof. I don't think it would be beneficial to repeat our submissions, which are relatively short, but we submit that this is a case which is appropriate for a continued provisional release in light of the precedent as well that are cited in our filing, the Gruban case. The Prosecution does not oppose the provisional release, the continued provisional release of Mrs. Plavsic. Security measures are in place. And we submit that the continuation of her release after the guilty plea of October 2nd, the circumstances having not changed in that regard but for the undertaking by the government to supply and provide adequate protection for her warrant in favour of you granting this request.

JUDGE MAY: Effectively, you're asking that the status quo continues, although it is, of course, exceptional to grant provisional release in these circumstances.

MR. O'SULLIVAN: That's correct, as it was on October 2nd. And as you say, we are asking for the continuation of the status quo. ⁶¹⁵

JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

MS. DEL PONTE: [Interpretation] Mr. President, we agreed that Madam Plavsic be provisionally released once she pleaded guilty. In fact, the legal situation of the accused has not changed; therefore, as Defence counsel has said, we are not opposed to Madam Plavsic being able to remain in provisional release until the Trial Chamber has rendered its judgement.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Madam Prosecutor, you say the circumstances have not changed, as did counsel for the Defence. But wouldn't you consider the hearing a significant factor of change, the hearing that has taken place today?

MS. DEL PONTE: [Interpretation] No, Your Honour. I believe that the situation is the same from the moment she pleaded guilty. Today, we just heard witnesses that can assist the Trial Chamber in rendering their judgement, which will be when you consider it opportune. Therefore, in fact, what we have been doing during these two or three days is to hear not witnesses of guilt; these were witnesses which illustrated, as you saw, various conditions and, above all, other elements, mitigating elements, because we were able to hear facts regarding the conduct of the accused since 1995, the Dayton accords, and all that. That hasn't really changed anything regarding her pleading of guilty, but the situation until a decision is rendered by your Chamber seems to me to remain unchanged.

JUDGE ROBINSON: [Previous interpretation continues]... bring one closer to the determination of sentence.

MS. DEL PONTE: [Interpretation] That's true, Your Honour. But ^{616BLANK PAGE 617} until the sentence is determined and pronounced, in my humble opinion, the position of the accused remains the same.

JUDGE ROBINSON: Very well.

JUDGE MAY: We'll consider the position and give our decision on that matter tomorrow.

We're to hear final submissions. It's fairly late, Mr. Harmon. Would you rather start tomorrow morning?

MR. HARMON: Yes, Your Honour, we would.

JUDGE MAY: Tomorrow afternoon.

MR. HARMON: That's correct. And Your Honour, we have some housekeeping matters that would conclude the evidentiary portion of the evidence.

JUDGE MAY: Yes.

MR. HARMON: I have two additional submissions to make to Your Honours. They would be Prosecutor's Exhibits 14 and 15. Prosecutor's Exhibit 14 is the annex to our submission on our sentencing brief. In my opening statement, I mentioned to Your Honours that we would be augmenting the testimony of the witnesses with illustrations of testimonies from eight different trials. They were selected to be representative of the crimes that are described in the indictment and to which Mrs. Plavsic has entered a guilty plea. They are, as I say, illustrative only. They cover the broad sweep of illegal acts that are described in the indictment, including killings, rapes, illegal detentions, deprivations in camps, burnings of villages, et cetera. So we would be submitting these, Your Honour, as an exhibit to Your Honours for ⁶¹⁸ your consideration.

And the last exhibit, Exhibit 15, is a report prepared by two demographers, Ewa Tabeau and Marcin Zoltkowski. And this report is entitled "Ethnic Composition and Displaced Persons and Refugees in 37 Municipalities in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1991 and 1997." And I would direct your attention particularly to two illustrations in this exhibit, figures 12 and 13. And therefore, with the submission of these last two exhibits, we would move into evidence Prosecutor's Exhibits 1 through 15.

[Trial Chamber confers]

JUDGE MAY: Yes, very well. Yes, Mr. O'Sullivan.

MR. O'SULLIVAN: We have five exhibits we would wish to tender, and perhaps the...

When the person from registry is finished, she can assist us in giving numbers to these five exhibits.

THE REGISTRAR: Your Honours, the affidavit of Mrs. Madeleine Albright will be S16; the curriculum vitae for Mr. Bildt will be S17; the curriculum vitae for Mr. Frowick will be S18; the affidavit of Mr. Frowick will be S19; and the statement of Mr. Larry Hollingworth will be S20. MR. O'SULLIVAN: And we move for admission of those five exhibits, Your Honour.

JUDGE MAY: Very well. If there are no further matters to raise, we will adjourn now. Half past 2.00, tomorrow afternoon.

--- Whereupon the hearing adjourned ⁶¹⁹ at 3.50 p.m., to be reconvened on

Wednesday, the 18th day of December, 2002, at 2.30 p.m.