Clark set to testify at trial of Milosevic
WASHINGTON -- Retired Army general Wesley K. Clark agreed to take a brief hiatus from his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to go to the Netherlands in mid-December and testify at the United Nations war crimes trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.
Clark said yesterday that the chief prosecutor in the trial at The Hague,
Carla Del Ponte, has asked him to appear to testify against the deposed Serb
leader. "Because of the historic importance of this proceeding, the first trial of a head of state before a war crimes tribunal, I have agreed to appear," Clark said in a statement.
He said the US government has authorized his participation, and lawyers from the State Department and the Pentagon would accompany him.
His appearance at the trial raises the possibility that questions that have arisen about a 1994 meeting between Clark and a Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect could be resurrected at a sensitive time, just weeks before the start of the leadoff presidential primaries.
As the former supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Clark led a 78-day bombing campaign in 1999 aimed at expelling Yugoslav forces involved in a bloody crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Clark also served as director of strategy, plans, and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the mid-1990s when the United States was trying to negotiate an end to the war in Bosnia.
Clark told the NBC news program "Meet the Press" that during his work for the Joint Chiefs and later as NATO commander, he spent dozens of hours in negotiations with Milosevic.
"These are conversations that the prosecutor says would be significant," Clark said. "This is about what Milosevic knew, when he knew it, what his intent was, how he viewed situations, how he operated."
Milosevic is facing 66 counts alleging war crimes, including genocide in Bosnia. He contends he had no power to stop Bosnian Serbs from committing massacres in the republic after it seceded from Yugoslavia.
On NBC, Clark defended his 1994 meeting with Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic. Clark was photographed with Mladic in a picture that showed the two men wearing each other's military caps. He had also accepted gifts from Mladic, which Clark conceded yesterday was a mistake.
At the time, an unidentified US official was quoted as saying, "It's like cavorting with Hermann Goering," a German general convicted after World War II as a Nazi war criminal but who poisoned himself the night before his scheduled execution.
Clark said that the meeting itself was not a mistake and said that he had never been warned not to see Mladic. After the talks, Pentagon officials said there had been a "breakdown in communication" between the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
While saying Mladic was a "bad guy," Clark pointed out that the Serb general had not yet been indicted when they met. Clark said the talks were appropriate because Washington was trying to get the Serbs to sign a peace treaty.
