Delic Defence Blames Military Courts for Not Prosecuting War Crimes

Lawyers for a Bosnian general accused of not investigating the murders of Croat and Serb civilians and prisoners of war sought to show this week that the army had reported the crimes, and that he could not be blamed if no probe had followed.



At the time relevant to the indictment, from 1993-95, General Rasim Delic was commander-in-chief of the Bosnian army and, as such, according to prosecutors, ultimately responsible for the El Mujahed detachment, which was largely made up of foreign Muslim volunteers, or mujahedin.



According to the indictment, mujahedin killed a number of Bosnian Croat and Serb prisoners in Central Bosnia. Some of these crimes were committed in the villages of Bikosi and Maline. The indictment further alleges that despite knowing about the murders, Delic did not have them properly investigated or bring the perpetrators to justice.



Muris Hadziselimovic, who was a deputy district military prosecutor in Zenica, Central Bosnia, in 1995, told the Hague tribunal that no such crimes were reported to the prosecutor.



The witness backed the conclusion of a report which referred to archived documents in the military prosecutor’s office in Zenica. According to this document, no crimes against Croats or Serbs were reported to have taken place in the villages of Bikosi and Maline or other parts of Central Bosnia.



Hundreds of foreign fighters, many of whom had seen action in Afghanistan, volunteered to fight for the Bosnian government in the war, when Bosnian army forces fought both Croats and Serbs. They operated in several units, some of which were largely autonomous and have been accused of mistreating prisoners and civilians.



The indictment alleges that mujahedin executed more than 40 Bosnian Croats by firing squad at Bikosi and that the mujahedin also ran the Kamenica camp where prisoners were mistreated and murdered. Alleged abuses include administering beatings, electric shocks and decapitation.



The witness said he did not know why there were no criminal reports relating to the crimes committed across Central Bosnia among the documents, and that he had only found out about them from the international war crimes investigators.



During her cross-examination of the witness, the defence counsel for the accused, Vasvija Vidovic, said the prosecutor’s report was not a definitive record of all the criminal cases. She insisted some cases involving the foreign Muslim volunteers had actually been brought to trial.



The witness countered by saying that criminal reports received by the military prosecutor’s office were carefully registered.



“Everything that ever reached the prosecutor’s office was recorded,” he said.



But Vidovic then pointed out that a box of 22 cases had been found in the archives that had gone unregistered.



Acknowledging the existence of these 22 unlogged cases, Hadziselimovic still maintained that “the registers are accurate…Everything that ever reached the prosecutor’s office was recorded…with the exception of this one box”.



To which Vidovic asked, “Then how can you tell us we have accurate registers?”



She went on to argue that Hadziselimovic had received a report about burying corpses of Croats killed in Maline in June 1993, but that the event was never actually recorded.



“The inference being there were obviously events that were not recorded by the prosecutor’s office,” she said.



Simon Jennings is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.