Krajisnik Determined to Fight On

Slogging his way through a seventh week testifying as a defence witness in his own genocide trial, the former Bosnian Serb parliamentary speaker Momcilo Krajisnik was none too pleased when his lawyer David Josse put it to the court on June 8 that he might be flagging.



“I am struggling for my freedom and my honour here,” exclaimed Krajisnik, rejecting Josse’s call for a long weekend to allow him to get some rest. “I am not even interested in my health or in my life.”



As the reason for his concern, Josse cited his client’s demeanour, the deteriorating quality of his answers to prosecutors’ questions and the slowing pace of his testimony as the prosecution pressed ahead with their second week of cross-examination.



Krajisnik acknowledged that he was tired and that it took a great deal of effort to prepare for court every day, but he insisted, “I want this trial to be over as soon as possible.”



As a high-profile Serb political figure during the Bosnian war of the early Nineties, Krajisnik is charged with playing a key role in a campaign to drive non-Serbs from large parts of the country.



He spent much of this week continuing to deny involvement in any such plan and arguing that he knew very little about some of the horrors that were occurring on the ground in Bosnia.



One line of attack employed by the prosecution this week was to present Krajisnik with records of a meeting of the Bosnian Serb parliament in May 1992, which he himself presided over and at which General Ratko Mladic – now on the run, having also been charged with genocide – was appointed commander of the Army of the Republika Srpska, VRS.



The records show that at the meeting, Mladic demanded that 300 artillery pieces and rocket launchers should be “densely planted” around Sarajevo in order “to get the Muslims to surrender”. The siege of the Bosnian capital and the shelling of civilian targets there has been well documented in other trial proceedings in The Hague.



During his speech at the same parliamentary session, Mladic was also recorded as saying that the Serb military should not “play games with taking prisoners”.



Asked by Judge Claude Hanoteau why he, as parliamentary speaker, had failed to interrupt such “heavy statements”, Krajisnik insisted that there was nothing he could do.



“People thought democracy means being allowed to say what they please,” he said, adding that he had heard hundreds of speeches worse than Mladic’s.



He explained that Mladic’s comment about prisoners was a reference to mercenaries, who in the general’s understanding were not protected by the Geneva conventions.



The accused said he had understood Mladic’s strong words as a “propaganda statement, made for the benefit of the media and his own appointment”, and he was quick to point out that the general had also offered some “nice words” at the meeting.



The court has heard testimony from a protected witness that Krajisnik was present on another occasion in May 1992, when Mladic is heard in an intercepted telephone conversation telling the commander of Bosnian Serb troops around Sarajevo to “use artillery so they can’t sleep… roll up their minds and drive them crazy!”



In the same conversation, the general apparently ordered his subordinate to concentrate fire on parts of the city not predominantly populated by Serbs, and to ensure that the presidency building and national parliament were also shelled at intervals.



Krajisnik denied having heard Mladic say these things.



Prosecutor Alan Tieger went on to present the court with evidence that the assault on Sarajevo – described by Serb politician Biljana Plavsic in another intercepted conversation from the time as a “disaster and horror” – was known about across the globe, as a result of news agency footage showing artillery shells slamming into the city every ten seconds.



But Krajisnik said that at the time, he trusted VRS reports which said the fire was justified as a response to attempts by Muslim infantry to break through Serb lines.



Tieger also confronted Krajisnik with a statement by Dragan Kalinic, a former Bosnian Serb politician, at a private session of the Bosnian Serb parliament in May 1992. At the parliamentary meeting, Kalinic appeared to argue for calling a unilateral ceasefire as a means of tricking the West into believing that the Serbs had peaceful intentions, when in fact they were confident of their military might.



Krajisnik insisted that Kalinic’s desire for peace was genuine. “Kalinic was saying this in resignation,” he said, explaining that the politician’s wife had gone missing and his family was forced to hide in the basement.



“I know it is incomprehensible to you because you live in peacetime,” he added, “but this was war.”



Another prosecution lawyer, Mark Harmon, confronted Krajisnik with evidence that the Yugoslav People’s Army, JNA, cooperated with local Serb forces and provided them with weaponry in the early stages of the war in Bosnia.



In the past weeks, Krajisnik has argued that the JNA played a “neutral role” in the conflict, and has said that all he knew about the arming of Serbs in Bosnia was based on “rumours”. He has insisted that he did not recall ever discussing arms distribution with Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, who is currently on the run from Hague prosecutors.



Among the evidence that Harmon put before the court were documents from a JNA unit under the command of one Colonel Branko Basara, in which the officer recorded that “we had to resort to a trick to make it possible for us to arm the Serbs”.



As evidence of JNA collaboration with the Serbs, Harmon noted that Basara’s wartime documents recorded that his unit was involved in operations in the Bosanska Krupa municipality. Following this operation, the Serb politician Miroslav Vjestica is recorded as telling a Serb assembly session presided over by Krajisnik that Muslims had left Bosanska Krupa.



Krajisnik at first denied having been aware of Vjestica’s statement, but later said that while it was possible he did hear it, this wasn’t something he recalled. Eventually, he told the court, “I understood Vjestica’s contribution as exaggeration.”



As part of his effort to show that Krajisnik was aware of the arming of Bosnia’s Serb population, Harmon also questioned him about an incident in which Serb politician Dusan Kozic was arrested for illegally importing automatic weapons and ammunition. In July 1992, Kozic was elected to the main board of the Serb Democratic Party, SDS, along with Krajisnik.



Krajisnik said he had taken part in an “unofficial debate” with Kozic about the arms smuggling affair but considered that it was none of his business.



Also this week, the prosecution demanded to know Krajisnik’s attitude to links between the VRS, the JNA and paramilitary forces notorious for committing atrocities.



Krajisnik drew a distinction between such paramilitary groups and the volunteers who signed up to the JNA. As for the paramilitaries themselves, he said he deeply disapproved of them but had no specific knowledge about them.



Asked about one of the most notorious paramilitary leaders of the war, Zeljko Raznatovic - more commonly known as Arkan - Krajisnik claimed he had only ever come into contact with him for five minutes at a meeting in Banja Luka in 1995, and that the only other information he had about the man came from a report by Plavsic, who met him in April 1992.



Presenting him with a number of articles from the press about Arkan, Tieger put it to Krajisnik that the paramilitary leader was infamous both locally and internationally during the war.



“You are not right,” replied the accused, “I am not among people who knew anything about Arkan.”



He also dismissed as a “pure lie” Tieger’s suggestions – based on a report by the Bosnian Serb interior ministry – that he once stayed in the same hotel in Pale where 20 of Arkan’s men were located.



Krajisnik defended efforts to bring paramilitary units under the control of the Serb military, despite assessments such as that found in a confidential document signed by Zdravko Tolimir - the VRS’s assistant commander for intelligence and security, and now a Hague fugitive - which described them as “genocidal elements”.



The accused agreed that members of the paramilitary formations held strong hatred towards non-Serbs and were inclined towards crime. But that, he said, was in fact part of the reason that it was important to place them under the control of the military, to ensure that they acted properly.



Krajisnik was quick to point out that responsibility for the paramilitaries rested with their commanders and with the members of the Bosnian Serb presidency - Karadzic, Plavsic and Nikola Koljevic.



The prosecution’s cross-examination of Krajisnik will continue next week, and his testimony is due to finish by June 20. The judges have set aside four days during this period in which to put their own questions to the accused, though they are waiting for cross-examination to end before deciding exactly how much time they need for this.



Adin Sadic is an IWPR intern in The Hague.