Court Hears All Adult Bosniaks in Herceg-Bosna Treated as Soldiers

A Bosnian Croat on trial for war crimes at the Hague tribunal this week considered all Bosniak men between 18 and 65 to be potential soldiers who should be locked up, according to a man who used to negotiate for their release.



Amor Masovic, director of Bosnia’s Institute for Missing Persons, told judges that he met the defendant Berislav Pusic around 50 times in the 1990s to discuss the hand-over of prisoners.



Pusic is accused along with five other Bosnian Croats of conspiring to expel Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks, and other non-Croats from Herceg-Bosna, the area of Bosnia under the control of Croats between 1991 and 1994. Pusic was in charge of all prisons in the statelet, and the other defendants had various other leading roles.



They are indicted for unlawful deportation, displacement and detention of civilians.



Masovic described how former detainees had told him that prison camps in Herceg-Bosna were crammed with Bosniaks whose only crime was to be of working age.



“But not only them, in prisons were young men under 18 and some men older than 65 years,” he said.



He testified that at one point he didn’t insist on the release of 13 Bosnian soldiers who had been captured during a Croat attack on the town of Mostar in May 1993 because he knew “they were not alive any more”, and did not want to hold up the release of another 1,000 men in Croat detention.



The 13 men, who were shown by the prosecutor on a video taken shortly after their capture, were recently found in a mass grave.



Masovic described how Pusic had been reluctant to free Bosniaks even though the 1994 Washington peace agreement required Herceg-Bosna authorities to do so. Croatian president Franjo Tudjman had to send a representative to the statelet to force the authorities to release the detainees, some of whom where on hunger strike at the time.



The defence lawyers tried to demonstrate that the Bosnian government itself used illegal detention as a means to ethnically cleans and control the population.



Masovic confirmed the Bosnian authorities had detained people of Croat ethnicity, but never to anything like this extent. He said no more than 1,100 Croats were detained on government-held territory. Despite these small numbers, he said Pusic publicly advocated the idea of moving all ethnic Croats into area under the control of Croat forces to prevent them being taken prisoner.



Masovic did confirm that the government had sanctioned the removal of Bosniak civilians from their homes “where it was determined that lives were under threat”, a practice that he said the United Nations also advocated.



“The [UN] High Commissioner for Refugees pressured the government in Sarajevo to evacuate groups of endangered civilians but a moral dilemma got in the way,” said Masovic.



He said the government had not wanted to participate in ethnic cleansing via the exchange of civilians that was “advocated by the Serbian side and later by Mr Pusic as well”.



The defence lawyers accused Masovic of being one-sided, and the lawyer for Jadranko Prlic, formerly the prime minister of Herceg-Bosna, said he would try to get the evidence ruled out.



Slobodan Praljak, who is one of Pusic’s co-accused and was a general during the war, kept up the attack on the testimony and said many Serbs and Croats went missing during the siege of Sarajevo, and that many Serbs had been killed by Bosniaks in Srebrenica – later to be the scene of the murder of 7,000 Muslim men and boys.



Masovic confirmed that around 320 Bosnian Serbs are still missing from Sarajevo, according to their families.



Lawyer Senka Nozica, who is defending ex-Herceg Bosna defence minister Bruno Stojic, confronted Masovic with the conclusions of the case of “Hadjihasanovic and Kubura”, where the court ruled that Bosnian government forces had indulged in the mass detention of Croat civilians. Nozica singled out the case of the village of Mehurici, where 250 civilians were imprisoned to be exchanged for Croat-held prisoners.



After Masovic’s testimony, the trial continued in closed session.



Goran Jungvirth is an IWPR journalist in Zagreb.