“Brutal fighting techniques” ???
Op-ed: read – massacre of unarmed population
Assassin testifies against Milosevic
Slobodan Milosevic has returned to court after a three-week break to hear testimony from a former member of the Serbian Red Berets paramilitary group.
Milosevic, sought to discredit the witness – named only as K-2 – by forcing an admission from him he was involved in an assassination after the end of the Balkan wars.
During cross examination, K-2 acknowledged his involvement in the 2001 murder of the Serb warlord Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan.
Arkan’s assassination triggered speculation Milosevic had ordered him silenced because he could be a potential witness against him.
K-2 told the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague he had served in the Special Operations Unit of the Serbian Interior Ministry during the Bosnian war, a group he said operated under the direct command of Milosevic’s regime.
Pay slips or cash wages came in envelopes from the Serbian Interior Ministry, he said, and Milosevic had been the man in charge.
The Red Berets, a hard-line nationalist Serb group known for its brutal fighting techniques in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
“Our unit had to do whatever it was asked to do. There was no possibility to say no. The doors of the president were open to us,” said the witness, whose image was blurred on court monitors..
Asked which president he meant, he replied “as far as I was able to gather, there was only one president and that was President Milosevic.”
Milosevic, on trial for war crimes including genocide, claimed the witness “doesn’t know what he is talking about,” and that the Red Berets were a “regular unit” that wore the hats commonly used by police and army forces.