Krajisnik Denies Arming Bosnian Serbs

Momcilo Krajisnik this week denied claims that he played an important role in establishing a Serb-dominated system of government that would later be responsible for coordinating a campaign of ethnic cleansing across large swathes of Bosnia.



In his second week testifying at his Hague trial, the former Bosnian Serb parliamentary speaker also sought to explain how statements made by his colleagues before and during the conflict in Bosnia were misinterpreted as warmongering



He also denied accusations that he had been involved in arming Bosnia’s Serb population.



Krajisnik faces charges of genocide and a series of other war crimes, in connection with atrocities committed against non-Serbs during the conflict. His testimony is expected to last several weeks and to form a major part of his defence.



The accused told the court that the establishment of a Serb assembly in Bosnia in 1991, separate from the central parliament which already existed in Sarajevo, was not part of an effort to set up a parallel legislative institution. In fact, he said, it was only meant to address issues of key interest to Bosnia’s Serb population.



Krajisnik said he had recommended that all Serb deputies with seats in the Sarajevo parliament should continue to attend its sessions and fight for what they thought was right.



He told the court that the formation of Serb municipal assemblies at grassroots level was just an attempt to stop local Serbs being outvoted and ignored by their Muslim and Croat counterparts.



Presiding Judge Alphons Orie asked Krajisnik to clarify whether the Bosnian Serb parliament had hoped to keep the Serb-dominated parts of Bosnia within Yugoslavia, or whether the plan at the time was to reorganise Bosnia and Hercegovina into a federal unit divided into separate entities along ethnic lines.



The accused replied that he was “totally shocked” to discover how little attention was paid to a plebiscite in November 1991 in which Bosnian Serbs voted to remain part of Yugoslavia. He added that after the then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and Montenegrin president Momir Bulatovic formed a new Yugoslav state consisting exclusively of their own two republics, “we realised that we had to seek a political solution [based on] remaining within Bosnia and Hercegovina.”



Krajisnik also sought to explain the “broad context” behind several well-publicised statements made in the early Nineties by wartime Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, who is still on the run after being indicted for genocide by the Hague tribunal.



The first, and perhaps the most notorious, of these statements was made to the Bosnian national assembly in Sarajevo in October 1991. On that occasion, Karadzic declared that if Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats continued to press for independence from Yugoslavia, it would “lead Bosnia and Hercegovina into hell, and Muslim people into annihilation, because they are not going to be able to defend themselves if there is a war”.



Krajisnik said it was important to understand that this was an answer to a speech made immediately beforehand by the Muslim politician Muhamed Filipovic, who had drafted an inter-ethnic agreement which he hoped would be signed by Muslim and Serb representatives. Filipovic himself, Krajisnik explained, had warned that Bosnia’s Muslims risked annihilation if they chose not to give their support to the document.



In court, Krajisnik also talked about a speech in which Karadzic said that Bosnia would benefit from having separate, ethnically divided systems for sectors such as education and healthcare, and added that “the more separate they are, the better things will be”.



The accused dismissed this as “a political slogan without real intention” and as a piece of “marketing” intended to discourage Muslim and Croat politicians from pushing for independence by warning them what the consequences might be.



He also said various other radical-sounding statements made by deputies in the Serb assembly were little more than “propaganda” or “philosophising”, while some were “benevolent”, “poetic” or just “reckless”.



Krajisnik went on to deny having known anything about the acquisition of weapons by Bosnia’s Serb population prior to the outbreak of war. He dismissed an allegation made in the indictment that he was involved in “encouraging, assisting or participating in the acquisition of arms or in the distribution of them to Bosnian Serbs”.



“Serbs were not about to attack anyone, and we were pro-JNA,” he explained, in reference to the national army of Yugoslavia, whose job he said it was to ensure peace in Bosnia.



At the same time, he acknowledged that Bosnia’s Serbs were not “sitting on their hands”, and noted that documents he had seen since arriving in The Hague confirmed that in late 1991 and early 1992 Serbs were arming themselves.



But he denied that the Bosnian Serb authorities had ever made preparations for war or distributed weapons among the population. “If it happened, it would be logical that I would have been informed, but I want to assure you that it did not happen,” he said.



He also said that his Serb Democratic Party, SDS, had received information from various intelligence sources suggesting that Muslims and Croats were stockpiling weapons.



Although Krajisnik is the most senior Bosnian Serb politician ever to appear in court in The Hague, his time in the witness stand appears to have had little impact in Bosnia so far.



Dragan Jerinic, the editor in chief of Banja Luka-based newspaper Nezavisne Novine, told IWPR that, his trial “is not a top issue right now, because people are tired of the tribunal”.



Branko Todorovic, the president of the Republika Srpska Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, agreed. “Basically, there is no interest in this case in Bosnia and Hercegovina, no front-page titles, no prime time news with Krajisnik reports,” he said, adding, “The audience has totally lost interest in this case, and it seems that many people have totally forgotten about Krajisnik.”



Adin Sadic is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.