Zupljanin Not Responsible for Soldiers in Serb Police Unit

A protected witness in the trial of former Bosnian Serb police officials Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin this week drew a distinction between policemen and soldiers serving in a special police unit which is accused of crimes in northwestern Bosnia in 1992.

Defence witness SZ-002, who also testified last week, was previously an officer in the State Security Service of Republika Srpska, RS, in Bosnia. He stressed that it was the unit’s military personnel, not its regular police officers, who committed crimes, and that it was therefore military commanders who were responsible for their actions and any failure of control.

Zupljanin, the former chief of the Regional Security Services Centre, CSB, in Banja Luka, RS, and Stanisic, the former Bosnian Serb minister of internal affairs, are accused of crimes committed between April 1 and December 31, 1992, in 20 municipalities throughout Bosnia, as part of an alleged joint criminal enterprise to permanently remove Bosniaks, Croats and other non-Serbs from the territory of an intended Serb state.

For a few months starting in May 1992, the witness was part of a special police detachment of the Banja Luka CSB, which was composed of one platoon of police officers and two platoons of soldiers. Members of the detachment were later accused of committing the war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide for which Zupljanin, as CSB chief, is accused of being responsible.

The witness’s job was to investigate special detachment members accused of both more serious crimes and lesser infractions, based on dispatches from the Banja Luka CSB and other security stations, to determine whether disciplinary action was necessary.

He said disciplinary measures for minor crimes and violations usually consisted of removing offenders from combat assignments and reassigning them to other units. More serious crimes sometimes led to prosecution.

According to the witness, it was mainly the military members of the detachment who committed crimes and infractions. He ascribed this to their lack of police training and the perception that they nevertheless had the right to behave like policemen.

The prosecution has tried to show that the perpetrators of the crimes were all part of the special detachment under Zupljanin’s control and authority, and that offences went unpunished.

But the witness said Zupljanin was not responsible for offences because they were committed by soldiers, not police officers.

Prosecutor Joanna Korner questioned the witness about whether he was aware of abuses committed by the special police detachment, including killing of unarmed men, entering civilians’ homes and beating people, and launching reprisals against Muslim and Croat families for actions committed by the other side in the conflict.

The witness said he did not investigate many complaints because no one gave him copies of the complaints or told him about the alleged abuses.

Korner asked the witness whether he would agree that a list of members of the special unit described as reserve police. “Whatever they came from, whether it was the military police or the SOS [Serb Defence Forces], they became, did they not, reserve policemen? That was their wartime assignment,” he said.

The witness responded that the names were categorised that way merely for the purposes of paying their wages.

Arguing that all those serving in the unit – regardless of what kind of units they originally came from, were on “wartime assignment as members of the reserve police, Korner went on to ask, “Legally, if they were assigned to the police or the reserve police, then they came under, did they not, the authority – indirectly – of Stojan Zupljanin?”

The witness replied, “If they were placed on the wartime assignment list, then they did have some connection to Stojan Zupljanin, but I’m talking about the actual situation on the ground. They were part of the [military] command.”

Korner asked the witness to clarify the description he gave last week of the special unit members’ identification cards. He had described the cards as “[not] really official IDs” but more like “certificates with the same text that could be found on real police IDs”.

He had also said the soldiers who were part of the special police detachment “basically were police officers because they were issued IDs by the centre, but in essence they were a military unit”.

Korner pressed the witness on this point, saying, “Either they’re police officers with official identity cards, or they’re military people. Which was it?”

The witness responded that in order to prevent possible abuses by people impersonating police officers, the special police unit was issued with IDs that differed from standard police ones, but still created a sense of feeling of responsibility among unit members. They were, in his words, a “transitional measure”.

Korner asked the witness whether he agreed that members of the special detachment were granted the powers of police officers.

The witness agreed with this, and said that in response to abuse of the identification cards, it was later decided that only people who completed six months of training and understood what rules they were bound by would be accepted into the force. Despite this, there were still members of the unit who were inadequately trained and broke the law, and who ended up facing criminal charges.

“I’m not disputing that at all, sir,” Korner said. “I accept entirely that because you were in a time of conflict, they accepted people into the police who otherwise they would not have. But the fact is that these men, however ill-trained, however criminal, were in fact police officers – described as police officers, issued with identity cards as police officers.”

“I said that it was an identity card. They didn’t get police IDs,” the witness replied.

According to the witness, the special detachment was disbanded in mid-July 1992, but its police officers and soldiers did not return to their normal units until August 10. In the interim, the unit was temporarily placed under the control and authority of military commanders in the field.

The witness told the court that all the special police were re-subordinated to the military “in combat activities,” which he said “went on all the time”.

When asked, he denied that the term “re-subordination” had been suggested to him by Zupljanin. Rather, it was the technical, legal term used by the military.

The witness described Zupljanin as just a “paymaster” for the special police detachment, with no other responsibility for it. This is contrary to the prosecution’s assertion that Zupljanin organised, formed, and was in charge of the detachment.

Korner referred to a May 1992 document addressed to Zupljanin, which proposes candidates to serve in the special detachment, and also to another document bearing his signature approving candidates. She asked why Zupljanin’s approval was needed if the detachment was in fact a military unit and not under his authority.

The witness said the prosecutor obviously had an incorrect translation of the documents, because they actually said that the candidates were already part of the detachment and had applied for a transfer to permanent posts as active duty police with the Banja Luka CSB.

“This document shows that this was a formality,” he said.

Stanisic surrendered in March 2005, while Zupljanin was arrested by the Serbian authorities in June 2008, after 13 years as a fugitive. Both defendants, whose indictments were conjoined in September 2008, have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The trial began in September 2009, and is due to continue in December.

Alexandra Arkin is an IWPR intern in The Hague.