here - Humanitarian Law Center/Fond za humanitarno pravo

Analysis of proceedings
Defense witnesses who testified in the course of the trial in 2012 came across as unconvincing
and biased, particularly given that evidence presented earlier clearly showed that the majority of
the accused were members of the 177th VTO, present at the places where the offences were
committed.
Particularly striking were the testimonies of the then officers and members of the VJ, who, at the
time of the 1999 armed conflict in Kosovo, belonged to the same military formations as the
accused, who nevertheless attempted to present themselves as completely uninformed about
events or any particular crimes committed on the territory of the municipality of Peć/Pejë.
Minimizing their own roles and clearly worried that they might find themselves linked with the
events that the accused were charged with, they emphasized that they had acted in accordance
with the rules of engagement. Consequently, all of them claimed not to have heard at the time
about the events that occurred in the village of Ćuška /Qushk and to have learned of them only
from the media, in the aftermath of the conflict in Kosovo. Some even claimed to have learnt
about the events only upon the commencement of criminal proceedings against the defendants.
Their veracity of their testimonies is further called into question given that the job descriptions of
some of these witnesses included field monitoring and information collection, given the positions
they held in the military formation. An example which illustrates this was the testimony of Dejan
Bulatović, commander of the Security Service of the Military Department of Peć, at the time of
the 1999 conflict. He testified that the security office he managed was a sort of secret service
tasked with collecting information on unlawful engagement of VJ units and responding to such
conduct. Despite the fact he was a defense witness for the accused Popović, he claimed to have
never met him and not to know anything about the crimes committed on the territory of the
Peć/Pejë municipality. The accused then asked him: “Who are you protecting” while his lawyer
said in surprise: “The man knows nothing, such an intelligence officer should lose his job!”
In 2012, the indictment was expanded to include the events that occurred on 1 April and 14 May
1999 in the villages of Ljubenić/Lubeniq, Pavljane/Pavlane and Zahać/Zahaq. A decision to do
this was expected from the TRZ, given the evidence presented in this case but revealed certain
omissions in the work of the TRZ. It is unclear why the TRZ took nearly one year to expand the
indictment, given that the testimonies of protected witness Zoran Rašković taken in December
2011 and January 2012, made it clear that the indictment needed to be expanded. Even the way in
which it was done – the deputy prosecutor filed the expanded indictment only at a hearing held
on September 27, after three months of summer break, and then filed the consolidated, amended
indictment at a hearing on 17 December – reflects the tardiness of action on the part of TRZ.
Thus six months were lost due to the delay in taking procedural actions that could have been
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