Bosnian Serb Police Service in Army Explored
Witness claims police engaged by the army were obliged to follow military orders.
Bosnian Serb Police Service in Army Explored
Witness claims police engaged by the army were obliged to follow military orders.
Andrija Bjelosevic, former chief of the Security Services Centre, or CSB, in the northern Bosnian town of Doboj, provided testimony this week at the Hague tribunal on who Bosnian Serb police took orders from when they were drafted into the army.
Bjelosevic was continuing his evidence in the trial of former senior Bosnian Serb officials Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin.
Zupljanin, former chief of the Banja Luka CSB, who became an adviser to the former Bosnian Serb president and Hague indictee Radovan Karadzic in 1994, is accused of extermination, murder, persecution, and deportation of non-Serbs in northwestern Bosnia between April and December 1992.
Zupljanin’s co-accused Stanicic, the former Bosnian Serb interior minister, is charged with the murder, torture and cruel treatment of non-Serb civilians, as well as for his failure to prevent or punish crimes committed by his subordinates.
The witness stated that policemen engaged by the military in combat operations were under the control of the army not police commanders – a claim that’s also supported by the Stanisic defence.
The prosecution claims that any crimes committed by police personnel acting under the military should have been investigated and prosecuted by the competent police institutions, and not the military.
Bjelosevic’s testimony at the tribunal has so far lasted fifteen days.
Defence lawyer Slobodan Zecevic showed Bjelosevic a letter which he wrote to army commander Slavko Lisica asking for police personnel to be removed from combat activity, so that they could be used to ensure security and public order in urban areas, to which Lisica replied that “he would not allow such a removal of police personnel”.
Bjelosevic confirmed the authenticity of this letter and said that it showed how the military was actually entitled to freely engage police units.
The defence also claimed that during military engagement, police were unable to follow normal procedures for dealing with crime.
“This means that if a policeman is on the frontline and sees a crime being committed, he was not allowed to arrest the perpetrators. He would be thus violating military discipline,” Zecevic said, to which Bjelosevic agreed.
To counter these claims, prosecutor Joanna Korner said that the witness himself, “in May and June of 1992, used his own engagement in the army as an ‘excuse’, and that [Bjelosevic] was hiding behind his military obligation to evade responsibility for dealing with crimes in Doboj, leaving this to Obren Petrovic, who was the then commander of the police station”.
Petrovic now serves as the mayor of Doboj.
Relations between Bjelosevic and Petrovic were discussed in connection with a paramilitary unit called Predo’s Wolves, whose commander, Predrag Kujundzic, was initially sentenced by the Bosnian state court in October 2009 to 22 years imprisonment for crimes against humanity. Kujundzic’s sentence was later reduced to 17 years.
Predo’s Wolves was cited as an example of a paramilitary group which had “put itself” under “police command”, since Kujundzic was an employee of the CSB in Doboj, the witness explained.
It was not clear how many of the other members of the group were employees or reserve members of the police.
“I spoke to Petrovic many times and tried to direct his attention to this [paramilitary group], and he kept telling me how he was afraid of them and of what they would do, so he made his own decision to station them at a reserve police station in Suvo Polje,” the witness said.
Korner then pointed out that there was a defence document – without mentioning its date or number – in which a CSB Doboj report mentions how “employee Predrag Kujundzic” had collected “70 kilos in gold and other valuables”.
The witness said that he had not seen such a report before, but that he had heard of “other reports demonstrating the criminal activities of this group.
“Exactly because of that I spoke to Petrovic to try to get him to eliminate this group from the CSB reserve, and because they knew it, they directed threats at me, telling me I would be eliminated etc.”
To underline how dangerous these alleged threats were, the witness said that he “didn’t sleep in [his] apartment, but at the army hostel, it was a very dangerous group indeed”.
“If the group was so dangerous, why didn’t you have the army help you to have them arrested?” Korner asked.
“If I tell you that Predrag Kujundzic had put a pistol against [army] major Stankovic’s head, then maybe you’ll grasp the answer to that question,” Bjelosevic answered.
He further added that “it would’ve been a very bloody thing if someone had started to deal with them, arrest them or something like that. Obren’s [Petrovic] tactics was to disperse them in different units, to locate them in different areas so as to dissipate their strength.”
Korner then said, “If I understand correctly, the combined police forces in the army and the army, or the mixed total of armed forces in Doboj was not able to arrest his man and his group, because they were afraid of him?”
“It probably could have been done,” the witness answered, “but the question is at what price and with how many dead people in the aftermath.”
The trial continues next week.
Velma Saric is an IWPR-trained reporter in The Hague.
