Krajisnik: Refugees Left Willingly for Safety Reasons

Momcilo Krajisnik, the former speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament now on trial at The Hague, this week denied that massive refugee movements during the Bosnian war were the result of plans to expel Muslims and Croats from Serb-held territory, saying they were a “logical” result of people’s desire to seek safety amongst their own. Krajisnik was testifying in his own defence at the Hague tribunal, in a case that has now been going on for more than two years. He has appeared tired in recent sessions, occasionally sighing heavily before embarking on a new answer. Unable to remember a particular detail at one point, he joked, “I’ll soon forget my own name.” Krajisnik stands accused of playing a key role in a campaign of violence against non-Serbs during the war in Bosnia which included the use of murders, mass deportation and persecution to ethnically cleanse huge swathes of territory. Krajisnik said plans for the forcible transfer of non-Serbs from Serb-controlled territory in Bosnia and Hercegovina “neither existed nor… happened”. He suggested that people left of their own accord when war broke out because they were afraid and wanted to be with members of their own ethnic group “for safety reasons”. His testimony spanned a wide array of topics, including efforts by the Bosnian Serb leadership to resolve the crisis through negotiations, and the mechanisms in place at the time for the investigation of war crimes. In his testimony so far, Krajisnik has argued that statements made by Serb figures in the early Nineties about breaking up Bosnia in order to unite Serb-dominated territories with Serbia and Montenegro were nothing more than political rhetoric. Exploring the issue further, he argued that the Bosnian Serb leadership was not in fact opposed to an independent and internationally recognised Bosnian state in which each of its constituent peoples would enjoy a degree of autonomy. “All we suggested and wanted was internal independence for Muslims, Croats and Serbs in Bosnia and Hercegovina, within one state and with no internal borders,” he said. Krajisnik said in order to sell this idea to the Serb population, who were broadly opposed to becoming part of an independent Bosnia, it was necessary to take a gradual approach. In this context, he spoke of the six strategic goals outlined by Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic in May 1992, widely viewed as being the framework for the war that followed. These objectives included separating Serbs from Bosnia’s other ethnic groups, integrating Bosnian Serb territory with neighbouring Serbia, and dividing Sarajevo along ethnic lines. Krajisnik described the six-point plan as no more than a “political move and a starting point for further negotiation in the transformation of Bosnia and Hercegovina”. He described a relatively civil negotiations process between Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Mate Boban, the president of the self-proclaimed Croatian Community of Herceg Bosna, during the early stages of the war. The two, he said, had known one another for a long time and were able to come to an agreement on certain key issues. The Croat and Serb sides, Krajisnik explained, agreed to swap certain areas of Bosnia, with Karadzic promoting the idea of more compact, manageable territories and giving the Croats control of Mostar, most of the Neretva Valley area and the whole of the Kupres region in southwest Hercegovina. The Bosnian Muslims, on the other hand, were less amenable to negotiation and “violated ceasefires constantly”. As the crisis continued and negotiations failed to bring about a resolution, Krajisnik explained how the Bosnian Serb leadership came to establish its own military. In fact, he said, the Serbs would have liked the Yugoslav People’s Army, JNA, to stay on for five years after Bosnia declared independence in 1992 and received international recognition as a sovereign state. But the insistence of the United Nations on the withdrawal of the JNA left the Serb leadership “in a quandary”. It was Slobodan Milosevic, he said, who suggested that the Bosnian Serbs form their own army. Belgrade even grudgingly agreed that JNA members would be able to transfer to the new Army of Republika Srpska, VRS, while continuing to receive their wages from the Yugoslav coffers. Krajisnik said the Bosnian Serb leadership had pressed for this latter concession by arguing that as a constituent part of Yugoslavia up to that point, they had invested in its national defence system and had a right to use it in the wake of the recent crisis. Though he confirmed that as a member of the Bosnian Serb leadership, he did play a role in establishing the VRS - which is implicated in ethnic cleansing in Bosnia - Krajisnik said he was never involved in controlling its activities. Several prosecution witnesses have testified that recorded intercepts of telephone conversations between Krajisnik and VRS chief Ratko Mladic during the war show that the accused was well informed of events on the ground and did exercise control. But Krajisnik said such statements either contained serious misinterpretations, ignored important contextual facts or were outright lies. In one such telephone conversation, Krajisnik is heard suggesting that Mladic ought to send military police to protect a Volkswagen car depot in the Sarajevo suburb of Vogosca from looting. The accused noted that the general had not been particularly helpful on that occasion, responding that this was the job of the interior ministry and prosecutor’s office. He also pointed out that Mladic addressed him by the nickname “Momo”, which was hardly a way to address a superior commander. In fact, Krajisnik said, Mladic probably only phoned him that morning as a last resort, having failed to get hold of Karadzic. He explained that while he was always punctual in arriving at his desk, Karadzic and other top Serb officials – including Nikola Koljevic and Biljana Plavsic – invariably turned up late to work. Krajisnik’s testimony implied that Karadzic was a clear authority figure within the Serb government and that he coordinated key bodies including the defence ministry and the interior ministry. One of the most controversial actions carried out by the VRS during the war in Bosnia, the prolonged siege of the capital Sarajevo which included shelling and sniping against civilian targets, was explained away by Krajisnik as merely an effort to protect Serb settlements in the area. Sarajevo itself, he said, was perceived by most Serb politicians as being a Muslim town and not a key issue. In fact, Krajisnik added, fighting in the area was not instigated by the Serb military but always broke out after Muslim forces attacked the Serb front lines. Their aim, he said, was to provoke international criticism of the Serbs in order to encourage western intervention in Bosnia. Krajisnik denied that at the time, he heard of war crimes committed by Serbs. The only abuses reported to him were those carried out against Serbs, he said, and any rumours of crimes against Muslims were always portrayed as just enemy propaganda. He said a commission was set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities to investigate war crimes but that despite two or three efforts to reform it, it never functioned properly. The interior ministry was also actively engaged in investigating abuses, he added, but never reported any information on the matter to him. Towards the end of the week, Krajisnik had an opportunity to answer claims by an earlier witness, Milorad Davidovic, a former police chief in Bijeljina who was involved in supplying weapons and aid to Serbs in Bosnia. During the prosecution stage of the trial, Davidovic said Krajisnik had issued written authorisation for the “humane relocation” of Muslims from Bijeljina in northeast Bosnia in 1992. But the accused this week insisted, “there is not one thousandth part of truth in that claim”. Davidovic, he said, was clearly motivated by “some personal animosity towards me”. The same went for Davidovic’s claim that Krajisnik had participated in the distribution of property looted from Muslim households and that he and his brother had a monopoly on the import and export of certain products to and from the Republika Srpska. In a separate development this week, Krajisnik’s defence lawyers argued that one of the judges hearing the case, Judge Joaquin Martin Canivell of Spain, should be required to withdraw. After Judge Canivell’s term at the tribunal came to an end in June last year, the United Nations Security Council gave him special permission to finish sitting in the Krajisnik case, which at the time was expected to end by April this year. Following a series of delays, a judgement is not now expected until September. If this latest move from the defence team were to prove successful, the trial would either need to start over from scratch or else be put on hold long enough for a new judge to familiarise him or herself with thousands of pages of transcripts and documents. Adin Sadic is an IWPR intern in The Hague.