WAR CRIMES

	June 18, 1999
	Terree Bowers, a Justice Department attorney who has worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia from1994-1998; and Eric Stover, director of the Human Rights Center at University of California at Berkeley and author of The Graves: Srebrenica And Vukovar, discuss war crimes and the law.

JIM LEHRER: Now, building a case against accused war criminals in Kosovo, and to Margaret Warner. MARGARET WARNER: And for perspective on the task ahead, we turn to two men with extensive experience in investigating and prosecuting war crimes. Eric Stover has investigated numerous mass killings, particularly in the former Yugoslavia, and he has written several books on the subject. He just spent three weeks in Albania taking testimony from Kosovar refugees. He's also director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley. And Terree Bowers was a prosecutor for the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia from 1994 to 1998; he served as acting chief of prosecutions his final year. He's now with the Justice Department. Welcome, gentlemen. Eric Stover, how will investigators go about trying to figure out who committed all these killings that are now being unearthed in Kosovo? ERIC STOVER: Well, it's going to be a process that really -- it is going to be a stop and go. They are going to have a number of teams going out to seven sites throughout Kosovo. These teams are all going to come from Canada, the United States, Britain and possibly Norway, if I'm right. And as they move into the country, they are going to go in with KFOR protection. They are going to be brought up to the seven sites. MARGARET WARNER: Excuse me. These are the seven sites that were named in the indictment of Mr. Milosevic and the four others. ERIC STOVER: That's right. There are seven sites that have been designated by the war crimes tribunal. When they arrive with KFOR troops - MARGARET WARNER: We have a map. You can't see it but we have a map showing those sites. Go ahead. I'm sorry. ERIC STOVER: That's all right. As they move in, the KFOR troops are going to de-mine the sites. That's extremely important. If it turns out there are mines, it is going to be stop and go because they'll have to wait until the areas are cleared. And then the teams are going to move in and they are going to survey the site, essentially marking in where the graves are, where there might be buildings that people may have been held. It's a very slow, methodical process. And once that is done - and they are going to be looking for bullet casings and other things that may be there -- they'll slowly begin exhuming the graves, and in this process they'll bring an archeologist who will do this very painstakingly. The remains will be taken out and they will be taken to a morgue, usually a makeshift morgue somewhere where the autopsies will be performed. MARGARET WARNER: Now, in addition to this physical evidence, what kind of other evidence do the investigators needs? ERIC STOVER: Well, there are three types of evidence. It doesn't matter if it is in South Philadelphia or Kosovo. That is first of all documentary evidence. This is what the tribunal already has. From human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights and the tribunal's only investigators, they've collected testimony about these sites. And then with the second type of evidence, which is documentary evidence, these can be radio broadcasts, it's the proverbial paper trail. It can be intercepted between commanders. They've received quite a bit of information from NATO governments through intelligence. That is information that is important because it takes you up the chain of command eventually to Slobodan Milosevic. Now the third, and this is where they're going in -- where the teams are going in now, that's physical evidence. Physical evidence is really the corpus delicti. It is finding the bodies, the victims, exhuming and identifying the victim - and that's very important, and determining the cause of death. What you want as a prosecutor is really to have evidence from each of those three categories. That gives you your strongest case. MARGARET WARNER: All right. Mr. Bowers, you are a prosecutor. How, given all the sites, all the evidence, all the testimony, how do investigators decide what to concentrate on, which crimes to concentrate on? Do they concentrate on high profile killings or killings of high profile people such as we just saw, Mr. Kilmende, or do they go to the mass graves? What's the standard? TERREE BOWERS: Well, in this particular case you have to take into account the existing indictment. So I think the initial effort will be to focus on the charges in that indictment against the five primary architects of the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. So you'll go to those sites and you'll try and bolster the evidence of the actual alleged atrocities so that you can really strengthen the case to present at trial as far as the crime base is concerned. The other thing, as Eric mentioned, you want to try and develop as much evidence as possible with regard to the command understand control exercise ed by these five individuals charged in the indictment. That can be through the testimony, people witnessed what was happening as the troops and the police came into the villages and took over, so there can be visual representations of the exercise of command. If we're fortunate, we may actually uncover documentation that will help us with command and control. In Bosnia, we found out after the Dayton agreement, when the crime scenes were secured, we were very, very fortunate in developing some actual documentary evidence that assists us in formalizing the chain of command in proving that these leaders are actually responsible for the activities on the ground. MARGARET WARNER: Okay. Let me ask you about that, though. We just heard the widow of Mr. Kilmende say that he she saw the three Serb policemen that came in. They did not have masks on. A lot of these killings were done, according to testimony anyway, by bands of military and paramilitary. Are they not also targets? Or not? TERREE BOWERS: Well, they are targets as well. But one of the things you have to understand is the tribunal has very finite limited resources. So it will be impossible for the tribunal to handle all of the atrocities which occurred in Kosovo. What will you focus on is developing as many strong cases as possible against mid-level commanders, mid-level leaders and ultimately the five primary architects, including Milosevic, charged in the existing indictment. So it's a difficult selection process. You can't develop cases that might just involve a single murder, a neighbor on a neighbor for example. But it may be very important to take a particular local commander who is responsible for a large massacre and develop a case against him individually and plug that in as a component against the overall case against Milosevic. MARGARET WARNER: I see. Okay. Eric Stover, let's go back to the physical evidence and the sites that are being looked at. Now, we've had reports that, for instance, even during the Serb occupation, sometimes the bodies were just left and the Kosovars who were hiding would come out at night, take the bodies of the neighbors and family members and go bury them, but move them and bury them. Now of course you have the Kosovars going back and surely want to bury bodies they are finding. Does that disturb the evidence too much? What's the effect in terms of from an investigating point of view? ERIC STOVER: I think the important thing is to remember that, you know, this is a process involving human beings. And many of the families of course once they were killed, their loved ones were killed, they wanted to bury them. And, you know, there is really no stronger force on earth than a mother or a father who has lost a daughter or a son. Family members want to come back find the dead. They are going to go to the sites. In a criminal perspective, you of course want to keep the site as uncontaminated as possible. So I think it is going to be a very important task for the War Crimes Tribunal and other humanitarian organizations to ensure that when those families arrive, if you've cordoned off the site if they've come, is to in some way keep them informed because through all of the experience that I've had in a number of countries, it's critical that the families feel part of the process. And it's important from an investigator's point of view as well because they are the ones that are going to have anti-mortem information, which includes dental X-rays or medical records. And they're going to help in the identification process. But it is extremely important they feel that they are involved. So I would hope that the tribunal will have a system in place that will deal with the families in that regard. MARGARET WARNER: All right. Mr. Bowers, at what point do authorities, and I suppose this will be NATO forces, start actually arresting people? TERREE BOWERS: Well, I'm sure knowing prosecutor Louise Arbour, she is already discussing potential strategies for the arrest and detention of the war criminals. Just as an aside, there were already approximately six or seven indicted war criminals in Serbia before the events in Kosovo began. MARGARET WARNER: I'm sorry. Let me interrupt you. I'm talking about people who committed atrocities in Kosovo or accused of it, many of them being military and paramilitary who were on their way back to Serbia. TERREE BOWERS: Right. I mean, that's the difficulty. If they make their way back into Serbia, it's more difficult to launch some sort of arrest campaign to get them out of Serbia. If they're still in Kosovo and are still within the control of the troops who are now taking over that area, then there are different strategies we can pursue to arrest them. One of the things that we have used very effectively is the sealed indictment. So if we encounter opportunities where there may be Serbs accused of war crimes or, for that matter, Kosovo Albanians accused of war crimes and they are still within the area secured by the troops, we can develop strategies to try and go out and arrest those people. For us to get custody over the individuals in Serbia, it's going to require a major international commitment to embark upon a variety of mechanisms to try and force those people either to self-surrender or to try and affect some sort of campaign to gain custody over them and have them transported to the Hague. MARGARET WARNER: All right. But in the Bosnia case, for instance, have you all -- has the US Government or the Hague really, the War Crimes Tribunal, been successful at all in extraditing anyone from Serbia? TERREE BOWERS: We've had no success in extraditing anyone from Serbia. Milosevic has used the bogus argument that the constitution prevents that. However, we did successfully lure the former mayor of Vukovar, Dakmanovic, we lured him out of Serbia and arrested him in Croatia and he actually went to trial at the tribunal. So we explore all mechanisms that may be available. And I'm sure Louise Arbour is talking with a lot of people right now trying to figure out the best ways to get some of these people in custody. MARGARET WARNER: Eric Stover, quickly before we go, if there are say 10,000 killings in Kosovo which the British are saying they think there are, how many of those do you think the killers will even be identified much less prosecuted? ERIC STOVER: I think quite a few of the killers will be identified. Remember, these were local police. There were some paramilitaries wearing masks and so on. They may not be identified but certainly the leaders of those paramilitary groups will be identified. But from the testimonies I heard, people knew who the killers were. Many of the police, Serbian police, local police in the beginning, carried out these killings. Then they also will know the military units. People are used to, you know -- they'll remember what sort of insignia they were wearing. So, I think it's very possible to identify a large number of those who were responsible for these killings. MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, Eric Stover and Terree Bowers. Thank you very much.