October 14
The defense plans to present the testimony of several witnesses via a video link to Banja Luka, Bosnia, beginning Oct. 15.

Defense attorney Michail Wladimiroff and prosecutor Michael Keegan traveled to Bosnia over the weekend to oversee the link.

Court officials say most of the witnesses who will testify via video will be heard in open court, and most of them will do so without having their images on the TV screen distorted.

October 15
On the first day the video link to the Bosnian town of Banja Luka was up and running, two defense witnesses testified that Dusko Tadic was a member of the Prijedor region's traffic police and worked at a traffic checkpoint nearly every day in June and July of 1992, a time when the prosecution claims Tadic was committing war crimes at prison camps in northern Bosnia.

Zeljko Maric, a Serb from Prijedor, said he has been a traffic policeman since 1980 and worked with Tadic at a checkpoint on the Prijedor/Banja Luka road, between Prijedor and Kozarac, in June and July of 1992.

He and Tadic were usually on different shifts at the checkpoint. But occasionally they worked together, and they saw each other there almost every day, he said. Tadic and the other traffic policemen at the checkpoint carried pistols and automatic rifles. At first they wore regular police uniforms. Later they wore camouflage, he said.

This witness also said that he and the defendant had a common friend in Emir Karabasic, whom Tadic is charged with killing in Omarska. Maric testified that he had known Karabasic since they had attended the police academy in Sarajevo together, and that Tadic and Karabasic were close friends.

As other witnesses have said, Maric claimed that Tadic never express any nationalistic sentiments during conversations they had.

On prosecutor Grant Niemann's cross-examination, Maric testified that Tadic never expressed any interest in politics, insisting that what the defendant really loved was sports. He claimed not to be aware of the fact that Tadic had been one of the first members of the Prijedor SDS, that he had organized an SDS-sponsored plebiscite prior to the conflict, or that he had held a political party position in Kozarac starting in the fall of 1992.

The SDS -- or Serbian Democratic Party -- was formed in 1990 by Radovan Karadzic, the former Serb leader who is indicted by the tribunal for genocide and other war crimes.

Maric also admitted on cross-examination that after April 1992, the Prijedor police department was under the control of the municipality's Serb-run authorities and that the police would have been obligated to follow the orders of this administration. He denied, however, that these authorities were carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing of Muslims. If police were involved in carrying out the murders and tortures of inmates in the area's detention camps, he was not aware of it.

Duro Prpos, a Serb and the commander of the Prijedor traffic police in April 1992, testified that he first met Dusko Tadic in June 1992, when Tadic was mobilized as a reserve policeman. He identified redacted traffic police department records -- such as log books and payroll documents -- that seemed to confirm that the defendant had worked at the traffic checkpoint between June 16 and August 2 in 1992. Prpos admitted he did not personally fill out these records. But he insisted that they were filled out under his supervision and were "100% accurate." He also said he never received any complaints about Tadic missing duty or being absent from his post.

On cross examination by prosecutor Brenda Hollis, Maric admitted that he had originally been deputy commander of the traffic police under a Muslim commander, and was promoted after the April 1992 Serb takeover of Prijedor.

He also testified that Muslims who left the force following the April takeover did so because they refused to sign a "solemn declaration to accept and enforce the laws of the Republika Srpska," something he called an "usual kind of declaration." He did, however, admit that all reserve policemen who were mobilized into the force after the takeover did sign the declaration (which would include Dusko Tadic).

The cross-examination of this witness will continue Wednesday.

October 16
Five witnesses testifying via video link from the Bosnian town of Banja Luka claimed that defendant Dusko Tadic was elsewhere at the time prosecutors charge he was rounding up, torturing, and killing Muslims in northern Bosnia.

Under cross-examination, Duro Prpos, the former commander of the Prijedor region's traffic police, was questioned about documents that he said showed Tadic was working at a traffic checkpoint in 1992. He admitted that the documents were not kept in his personal custody but insisted that they were accurate.

Prpos gave several answers that may have cost him some credibility with the Tribunal judges. He repeatedly denied knowing of Serb plans to take over Prijedor in April of 1992 until the night it happened, even though he was a deputy police commander at the time.

He maintained that no policemen in the Prijedor region had taken part in any rounding up of non-Serbs and insisted that the thousands of Muslims who were expelled from the area left voluntarily. He also claimed to have no knowledge of the busloads of non-Serbs being moved around the region.

Other highlights:

• Mirko Vujanovic, a Prijedor policeman in charge of records, identified documents that show Dusko Tadic worked virtually every day between August 7 and September 9, 1992 as a reserve policeman in the town of Prijedor. On cross-examination, he admitted that he maintained the records based on documents supplied to him by other police supervisors and didn't have personal knowledge that the defendant actually worked on the days and times reflected.
• Dragoljub Savic, an economist with the Bosnian railroad, introduced timetables showing there was regularly scheduled train service that operated between the towns of Prijedor and Banja Luka on the dates May 23 and June 15, 1992, dates on which others have testified that Dusko Tadic traveled that route by rail.
• Trivo Reljic, a retired Serb medical technician who lived across the street from the Tadic family in Prijedor, said his family took Tadic in their car when they left Kozarac on the morning of May 23, 1992, the day before the city was attacked. According to Reljic, they dropped Tadic off in Prijedor later that day.
• Stojan Smoljic, a Serb refugee who settled with his family in the town of Kozarac in October of 1992, said Tadic was the secretary of the local commune and helped him find a home. Smoljic said he saw Tadic in town nearly every day throughout the rest of 1992. Smoljic said Dusko Tadic was in charge of distributing humanitarian aid to the refugees and did so regardless of a person's ethnic origin.

October 17
During the third day of video link from Banja Luka, the defense continued to call witness to account for the whereabouts of Dusko Tadic in the time period after May 1992. Technological problems with the video link shortened the court session.

Highlights:

• Stojan Smoljic, a Serb refugee who settled with his family in the town of Kozarac in October of 1992, took the stand for continued his cross-examination. He said that he knew that Dusko Tadic was involved in the local SDS in Prijedor, but claimed that he knew nothing of SDS business. He repeatedly described Tadic as a man who treated both Serbs and non-Serbs fairly and hated war. All the Kozarac townspeople were shocked when they learned that the defendant had been arrested for war crimes, he said.
• Jelena Gajic, a nurse at the Prijedor hospital and the defendant's sister-in-law. She testified that the defendant came to her home in Prijedor on the morning of Saturday, May 23, 1992, the day before Kozarac was attacked, and left to rejoin his family in Banja Luka. This story is consistent with the testimony from Trivo Reljic, who testified a day earlier that his family drove Tadic to Prijedor that morning. Gajic also said she knew Tadic worked as a reserve policeman that summer and saw him in Kozarac when he was secretary of the local commune there.
• Duro Prpos, the former commander of the traffic police in Prijedor, returned briefly to the stand to identify some copies of pages from the department's daily work schedule in 1992. When he originally testified October 15 and 16, this witness identified redacted copies of these documents, with all entries other than those relating to the defendant removed. The court has since been able to obtain unredacted copies of some of these records and the defendant took the stand to identify them.

October 18
The video link phase of the defense case came to an end. In all, the defense used the satellite link between The Hague and Banja Luka to call eight witnesses over four days. Next week, alibi testimony on behalf of defendant Dusko Tadic will resume in The Netherlands.

Mirko Vujanovic, a Prijedor policeman in charge of records, who originally testified on October 16 to identified documents that indicate Tadic worked virtually every day between August 7 and September 9, 1992 as a reserve policeman in the town of Prijedor, returned to the stand for continued cross-examination.

In his testimony on Wednesday, Vujanovic referred to documents which had been highly redacted. Prosecutors confronted Vujanovic with apparent discrepancies between the redacted and unredated versions.

The redacted schedule of the Prijedor police for August 21, 1992 shows that Tadic worked a shift between the hours of 14:00 and 21:00. But the unredacted version reflects that the defendant worked a shift from 6:00 to 14:00.

Certainly, prosecutors would like the judges to infer that these records, which the defense is counting on to bolster Tadic's alibi, are best unreliable.

But Vujanovic suggested something much less sinister. He claims the discrepancy is most likely just a typing error, and that the date recorded on the work list should actually be August 12, not August 21. The daily schedule seems to show that the shift hours Tadic was set to work on August 12 match the ones set down in the disputed August 21 entry.