THE HAGUE: The US presidential hopeful, Gen Wesley Clark, has told the Hague Tribunal about the moment when Mr Slobodan Milosevic indicated his support for massacres in Kosovo.
In testimony released yesterday after being screened by American officials, Gen Clark, then NATO commander, said he met Mr Milosevic in 1999,shortly before the alliance went to war to protect the battered southern
province. He described the encounter:
"Gen Clark ’,he said, ‘We know how to handle these murderers,these rapists,these criminals.
"He said, 'We've done this before.' I said:'Well,when? 'He said: 'In Drenica [a Kosovo province ]in 1946 . And I said, 'What did you do? 'He said: 'We killed them '.He said: 'We killed them all '. I was stunned."
It was the final conversation between the two men before Clark unleashed Nato air power on the Serbs. Mr Milosevic 's response was to order his security forces into an ethnic cleansing operation that saw more than 5,000 Kosovo Albanians butchered and nearly one million expelled.
Gen Clark is one of the handful of western officials to meet the secretive Mr Milosevic. Anxiety among prosecutors to get his evidence meant they were willing to bend the rules.
For the first time in Hague Tribunal history, Gen Clark gave evidence behind closed doors, demand by the United States, which also insisted on vetting the evidence.
Certainly, this evidence may be vital. Despite nearly two years of trying, prosecutors have struggled to find witnesses who remember Mr Milosevic actually ordering the atrocities he is accused of.
The general told the court that Mr Milosevic, despite being presi-
dent of Yugoslavia, had control of the Bosnian Serb leadership and bullied them into accepting what became the Dayton Peace Agreement.
And, he revealed, Mr Milosevic confided that he had had advance
knowledge of the worst massacre of the war, when the Bosnian Serb commander, Gen Ratko Mladic, killed 7,000 unarmed Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.
"I said,'Mr President, you say you have so much influence over the Bosnian Serbs, but how is it then, if you have such influence, that you allowed Gen Mladic to kill all those people in Srebrenica '?
"'Well, Gen Clark ',he said, 'I warned Mladic not to do this, but
he didn't listen to me '."
Typically of this trial, the encounter cuts both ways. It shows as prosecutors insist that Milosevic was closely bound up with the Bosnian Serb leaders, but equally, that he could not control their wilder instincts.
Time is running out for the Milosevic prosecutors, who after nearly two years of trying have failed to provide conclusive evidence that he ordered the crimes he is accused of.
Milosevic is likely to be ruled responsible for these crimes. But without such "smoking gun "the trial seems destined to finish under a cloud.