.....Lord Owen, criticised for underplaying the role of Serbian aggression, appeared as a neutral "court witness" because he wanted to protect the position of international mediators. "...
What about telling the truth and protecting the rule of law? http://www.guardian.co.uk/yugo/article/0,2763,1077258,00.html Ian Black in The Hague Tuesday November 4, 2003 The Guardian Owen rails at Milosevic over failure to sway Serbs Slobodan Milosevic fatally failed to pressure fellow Serbs to end the Bosnian war, Lord Owen, the former president's old negotiating partner told the UN war crimes tribunal yesterday. But he depicted Mr Milosevic, facing genocide charges for his role in the war, as a pragmatic nationalist who made a "massive mistake" a decade ago in not exerting what influence he had. Lord Owen, a former foreign secretary, spent three years mediating in the Balkan conflict. The former Serbian and later Yugoslav president is charged with shared responsibility for ethnic cleansing, the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since the second world war. "Milosevic is not fundamentally racist," Lord Owen told the Hague court, now in its 21st month of hearing the case. "He is a nationalist, but even that he wears very lightly. He's a pragmatist who wanted the Serbs to be in the majority. I don't think he was an ethnic purist." Lord Owen stepped down in 1995, shortly before the US-led Nato intervention that led to the Dayton peace agreement, where he acknowledged Mr Milosevic's "helpful" role. Lord Owen, criticised for underplaying the role of Serbian aggression, appeared as a neutral "court witness" because he wanted to protect the position of international mediators. Under cross-examination, Lord Owen addressed Mr Milosevic directly, saying the defendant had tried to make the world believe that the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic - both wanted for genocide and still at large - were beyond his control. "I think you knew perfectly well that I knew that that was not the truth," he said. The prosecution is seeking to produce more evidence of clear links between Mr Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb leaders in Pale, their capital. Establishing Mr Milosevic's responsibility for Bosnia is difficult, since at the time he was president only of Serbia, unlike in the Kosovo conflict in 1999, when he was president of federal Yugoslavia. Lord Owen said Mr Milosevic should have cut off fuel and other supplies to the Bosnian Serbs in 1993 when they failed to accept the peace plan he co-authored with Cyrus Vance, the US envoy. The plan, dividing Bosnia into 10 ethnic cantons, was accepted by the Muslims, but the Serbs said it gave them too little territory. "I don't mind admitting that I failed to mobilise the western world to interdict the supply lines," Lord Owen told Mr Milosevic. "But why did you fail to use your influence to cut the supplies off?" The defendant answered: "I endeavoured to wield my influence, but quite obviously that was not strong enough." Mr Milosevic denies 66 charges of war crimes, which the prosecutors say were part of a conspiracy to create a pure "greater Serbia". Lord Owen testified that in April 1993, Mr Milosevic had expressed concern about a confrontation between Muslim and Serbian forces at Srebrenica, where more than 7,000 Muslims were murdered in 1995. "He feared that if the Bosnian Serb troops entered Srebrenica there would be a bloodbath, because of the tremendous bad blood that existed between the two armies," Lord Owen said. Srpska Informativna Mreza [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
