First Witness Takes Stand in War Court

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic heard the first prosecution witness in his war crimes trial testify Monday about a Yugoslav scorched-earth plan to kill Kosovo Muslims.

Mahmut Bakali, an ethnic Albanian and former head of Kosovo’s Communist Party, said he heard of the plan for a Serb invasion of Kosovo from the Serbian head of security in 1997, David Gajic.

“It was the plan of Serbia, or a plan of Milosevic,” he said. “This would be insanity on a large scale.”

The testimony moved the trial into its second phase after prosecutors and Milosevic spent a week laying out their cases in opening statements. Earlier Monday, Milosevic ended a three-day tirade against “new colonialism” by the West. He is on trial on 66 counts of war crimes during the 1991-99 Balkan wars.

With its first witness, the prosecution began to build its case that Serb brutalities were premeditated and well planned.

Bakali said the plan he heard from Gajic was intended “to destroy 700 Kosovo Albanian-populated settlements and to destroy property and to destroy people.” He said he warned the security chief that the blitz would result in war.

Bakali was fired by the Yugoslav leadership in 1980 for allegedly organizing pro-independence protests by ethnic Albanians. He disappeared from public view until 1998, when he became a member of an ethnic Albanian delegation that negotiated the reopening of Albanian-language universities in Kosovo. He met several times with Milosevic that year. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

Describing one of the meetings, Bakali said: “I told him, ‘You are killing women and children,’ ” referring to a police action in the village of Prekaz that left more than 40 people dead in early 1998.

Milosevic apparently replied, “We are fighting against terrorism.” He said the police had given the residents two hours to flee, but they didn’t, according to Bakali.