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Under cross-examination at the UN-backed court in The Hague on Monday, defence expert witness Zoran Stankovic said he didn’t assure Mladic in autumn 1995 that British intelligence officers had promised to remove the war crimes indictment against him, and insisted he was actually trying to get the Bosnian Serb military chief to give himself up.
The Hague prosecutors played a recording of a conversation in which Stankovic was heard telling Mladic that British intelligence officers might “back him up”, that they were “extremely powerful” and that they could “lift the indictment”.
Explaining that he knew Mladic was recording their conversation, Stankovic said he knew that the indictment could not be withdrawn prior to the trial.
“I was actually inviting Mladic to surrender to the Tribunal,” he said.
Although he said during the recorded conversation that he had met “the chief of the English intelligence section” in London, Stankovic told the court that this was not exactly true.
Instead he said that he had actually spoken about Mladic and the indictment with some men whose names he didn’t know but presumed were British spies at the apartment of Nora Beloff, who worked for the British foreign office’s political intelligence department during WWII before going into journalism.
“At that time Mladic was already distrustful towards everybody. I knew he was recording our conversation as soon as he told me I should speak louder,” Stankovic said.
“I conveyed the message to him. I was a courier. He made his decisions on his own,” he added.
The recorded conversation took place in Banja Luka in October 1995, after Mladic had already been indicted by the Hague Tribunal. The audio tapes and Mladic’s wartime diaries were confiscated during a search of his apartment in Belgrade in 2008.
As the prosecution sought to suggest that he was not a reliable witness because of his friendly relationship with Mladic, Stankovic denied that the fact that he performed the autopsy on the Bosnian Serb military chief’s daughter Ana after she committed suicide in 1993 meant that he was a close friend.
“I can say I was available 24 hours a day should he or people like him, who lost their children, whose autopsies I performed, need me,” Stankovic said.
“I pray to God that no one has to develop a friendship under such circumstances,” he added.
After he said that, Mladic wiped his eyes with a handkerchief in the courtroom.
Stankovic also insisted that his relations with Mladic did not affect his objectivity during the analysis of autopsy reports at the trial.
Last week expert he gave testimony calling into question reports by Hague prosecutors on the results of autopsies carried out on victims’ bodies exhumed from a mass grave at the Tomasica mine near Prijedor, as well as graves containing the remains of Srebrenica victims.
Mladic is on trial for genocide in seven Bosnian municipalities, including Prijedor, in 1992, as well as genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, terrorising the civilian population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
The trial continues on Tuesday.
