(Mirror.)

There is no doubt that May did often ‘rein Milošević in’. He made something of a habit of it, repeatedly intervening to stop Milošević from pursuing lines of questioning when they got too near the bone.

In one dramatic piece of testimony, Radomir Marković, a witness for the Prosecution and a former head of the Yugoslav secret services, alleged that he had been tortured by the new government in Belgrade in order to force him to come to The Hague and testify against Milošević.

In particular, he alleged that the new interior minister had taken him out of his prison cell, where he was facing trial for corruption, and told him over dinner that he could walk free if he agreed to testify against the former Yugoslav president.

The evidence he gave was a disaster for the Prosecution because he testified that there had never been any plan to drive the Albanians out of Kosovo and that, on the contrary, the Yugoslav armed forces had been given specific orders to protect civilians.

The exchange went like this:

Milošević: Did you ever get any kind of report or have you ever heard of an order to forcibly expel Albanians from Kosovo?
Marković: No, I never heard of such an order. I never heard of such an order, nor have I seen such an order, nor was it contained in the reports I received. Nobody, therefore, ever ordered for Albanians from Kosovo to be expelled.
Milošević: Did you receive any information which would point to such a thing, to the existence of an order, a plan, a decision, a suggestion, or a de facto influence that Albanians from Kosovo were to be expelled?
Marković: No, I never heard of such a suggestion. I know of no plan or design or instruction to expel Albanians from Kosovo.
Milošević: And at the meetings that you attended […] is it true that completely the opposite was said; we always insisted that civilians should be protected, that civilians should be taken care of, so that they are not hurt in the course of anti‐terrorist operations?
Marković: Certainly. The task was not only to protect Serb civilians, but also the Albanian population and citizenry. […]
Milošević: Didn’t we try, from the very top down […] to stop this flow of refugees who were leaving, that we tried to explain to them, to convince them, through good arguments, that the army and the police would protect them […] ?
Marković: Yes, that was the instruction, and those were the assignments. […]
Milošević: And do you know that the KLA carried out propaganda, that as many civilians as possible should leave Kosovo and thus stage an exodus […] ?
Marković: Yes, I’m aware of that.³⁸

But when Milošević started to question Marković about the ‘deal’ offered him by the Belgrade authorities, which he characterised as ‘torture’ because the UN Convention on torture includes precisely this kind of behaviour, Judge May intervened to stop the line of questioning: ‘This doesn’t appear to have any relevance to the evidence the witness has given here, none at all […] We’re not certainly going to litigate here what happened in Yugoslavia when he was arrested.’³⁹

Milošević protested but May stopped him again.

(Emphasis added.)