Court Discusses Population Movement Terms

Friday, 13 May, 2011

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Rachel Irwin

Senior Reporter

The testimony of a demography expert this week in the Hague tribunal trial of former Bosnian Serb police officials Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin sparked a lengthy court discussion on the meaning of deportation, ethnic cleansing and population transfer during the Bosnian war.

Defence witness Stevo Pasalic, a professor of demographics and social geography at the University of East Sarajevo, told the court that there was a difference between ethnic cleansing and what he called the voluntary migration of people before or during a war.

Judge Frederik Harhoff remarked that he had “difficulty in understanding this correctly”.

“My assumption would be that people don’t just give up their houses, farms, and places of residence without there being very specific reasons for doing so,” the judge said. “…My assumption would be that the majority of people that move [do so] because of the war.”

The judge added that he wouldn’t characterise this as voluntary movement.

Pasalic responded that the word voluntary should be put “in quotations”.

“In war psychosis, there is no voluntariness,” he continued. “If there is any kind of intimation that certain areas will be engulfed by war, and then that is what starts ‘voluntary migrations’.”

Pasalic, a Bosnian Serb, used himself as an example to illustrate this point.

“I and my family left our town where we lived due to that psychosis, though no one expelled us,” he said, adding that the “transfer of the population is not ethnic cleansing” and that the latter is done “quickly and by force”.

“Are you suggesting that … [some] people who move away do so because they are targeted, and in that case you call it ethnic cleansing, and [other] people move out not because they are targeted but by the inconvenience caused [by war] and other psychological reasons, but for those, you call them voluntary movements?” Judge Harhoff asked. “Is that correctly understood?”

“Ok, that is the essence basically,” Pasalic responded, but added that reports on the subject don’t distinguish between individuals in the military and those who are civilians.

“I wasn’t really making the distinction between military and civilian persons,” Judge Harhoff responded. “If you belong to a targeted group and an attack is coming, then you would try to escape by moving away and do so regardless of whether you were a military person or civilian person…If you belong to a targeted group and you are a military person, then you might stay on to defend area.”

Pasalic responded that the “military will stay behind to defend the area if they can”.

“However, if certain territory falls, a selection among the undesirable population, in most cases children, women and elderly, are deported,” he continued. “In most cases, that is what happened in Bosnia Hercegovina. That is what I characterise as population transfer, not ethnic cleansing. That is what led to mass transfer, or ‘voluntary migration’.”

The witness noted, however, that “sometimes no selection was carried out and there were a great many civilians who were victims, by military or paramilitary formations”.

“I think we are getting close to core of matter,” Judge Harhoff remarked. “I would have thought that if the purpose of a military operation was to drive away people who belonged to targeted group, then once the area had fallen as result of the attack, the deportation of women, children and the elderly would in my view be the perfect example of ethnic cleansing. Do you not agree?”

“I do not agree, if we start from the qualification that ethnic cleansing is only what is carried out quickly and by force,” Pasalic replied. “However, since deportation is underway, we cannot see that as ethnic cleansing.”

He said that the war in Bosnia was “partly a civil war, a religious war and in part a fight for certain territories”.

“We cannot consider all of it to be ethnic cleansing,” Pasalic continued. “…I am one of many thousands who left a certain area…but it was not done quickly or by force.”

At that point, Judge Guy Delvoie joined the discussion.

“I wonder if we have translation error here,” he remarked. “When you talk about deportation, what do you mean by that word?”

“Deportation means expulsion of the population…” Pasalic said. “It’s expulsion, but not by force” which would mean “you can take the minimum and have to leave”.

“Deportation has nothing to do with forcible transfer?” Judge Delvoie asked. “It has nothing to do with forced removal of the population? So for instance your personal initiative to move out of fear, you qualify that as deportation?”

The witness responded that “we have not understood each other”.

He said that in wartime, “any movement of the population comes under forced migration in the wider sense”. However, he said that in his opinion, there are four subcategories of this: ethnic cleansing, genocide, deportation and population transfer.

“The essence of my efforts was to prove that in the territory of Bosnia Hercegovina, what is often described as ethnic cleansing is not always that, there are less severe variants,” he said.

After the judges’ intervention, the defence concluded its questioning. During the cross-examination, the prosecution pressed Pasalic on his qualifications and the methods he used while preparing his expert report for the defence team.

Stanisic and Zupljanin are charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the murder, torture, cruel treatment and the deportation of non Serb civilians. They are also charged with failing to prevent or punish crimes committed by their subordinates.

Stanisic was the minister of internal affairs in the self- declared Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska during the war, while Zupljanin was chief of regional security services in Banja Luka and an adviser to ex-Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, who is currently standing trial at the tribunal.

The proceedings continue next week.

Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.