Krajisnik Says War Rhetoric Needs Context

That was nonsense,” Bosnian Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik admitted this week when confronted by Hague prosecutors with statements he himself had made back in 1993. In January that year, he described the idea of a Bosnian Muslim nation as an “artificial and communist creation” and an “infidel sect of Turkish provenance”.



In transcripts of the same session of the Bosnian Serb parliament, over which he presided as speaker, he was also recorded urging his colleagues to “take the Muslims out of Serbism, now and forever”.



In court in The Hague this week, the apparently contrite defendant said, “If I could distance myself from that Momcilo Krajisnik, I would.”



Krajisnik is currently under cross-examination by prosecutors, having spent the past few weeks giving evidence as a defence witness in his own trial for war crimes charges including genocide.



Prosecutors allege that during the war, he played a key role in a “joint criminal enterprise” aimed at removing Muslims and Croats from large parts of Bosnia through the use of mass murder, deportation and persecution.



An important part of the evidence against him takes the form of records of statements made by him and his political colleagues at the time, in which they appear to endorse just such a plan.



But apart from this instance of what seemed to be regret, Krajisnik spent much of the week systematically dismissing other such statements and seeking to show that, when viewed in their proper context, they were not really all that bad.



Even the anti-Muslim comments he made to parliament, he explained, could only have been “rhetorical” remarks intended to “sell” his policies to the assembled deputies and secure their backing for peace agreements. He insisted that peace proposals bearing his signature were a much better indicator of his state of mind during the war than any such remarks.



Before the parliamentary transcripts were placed before him, Krajisnik claimed that he had never denied the right of Bosnian Muslims to consider themselves a nation. And he said he only ever used derogatory terms for Muslims “once or twice”, in the context of a particular bitter conversation about the Muslim takeover of his own village.



But once confronted with his comments in parliament, he told the court that he did not even recall making them, and joked that, in the light of prosecutor Alan Tieger’s “discovery”, he wouldn’t be surprised if there were more to come. There was.



Tieger went on to show Krajisnik records of a rally of his Serb Democratic Party, SDS, in Banja Luka in August 1994, which showed him hailing speeches made by colleagues including Radoslav Brdjanin, since convicted for war crimes, in which they denied that Bosnian Muslims constituted a nation and insisted that Serbs had an obligation to triumph over non-Christians. Krajisnik was recorded as lending his support to these “wonderful words” and underlining that Serbs and Muslims “simply cannot live together”.



Once again, when confronted with these remarks Krajisnik insisted that they could not be taken at face value. “I said ‘wonderful statement’ simply to gloss over Brdjanin’s statement, which I did not agree with,” he told the judges.



It is not just Krajisnik’s own wartime declarations that are at issue in the case, as the prosecution seeks to prove that ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs during the war in Bosnia did not just happen spontaneously - as Krajisnik has claimed - but was instead planned and supported by an array of senior Serb leaders.



In support of this contention, Tieger presented Krajisnik with a statement by the Bosnian Serb minister of reconstruction and development in late 1992, in which he appeared to insist on preventing the return of Muslim refugees to Serb-dominated territories in order to keep the “Serb ethnic space as Serb as possible”.



Krajisnik told the court that Milojevic – a university professor and a “wonderful man” – had simply been taking “the scientific point of view”. Far from backing a policy of ethnic homogenisation, he was in fact only describing and analysing the facts of refugee movements in Bosnia and the “reality that people would not come back.”



The accused insisted that official Serb policy included advocating the right of all refugees to return to their pre-war homes.



Tieger also showed the court statements made by the Yugoslav foreign minister Vladislav Jovanovic at a meeting in January 1993, which was attended by the then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and the Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadzic, as well as Krajisnik himself. Jovanovic apparently used the meeting to insist on the importance of ensuring ethnic homogeneity in the Bosnian Serb territories through processes such as “stimulating migration”.



Tieger said that at this meeting, Krajisnik presented plans for the division of Bosnia and Hercegovina which would ensure that the Serbs were left with control of mines and refineries located in municipalities with Muslim and Croat majorities. He apparently justified this at the time by noting the “countless treasures taken from the Serbs”.



Krajisnik explained in court that those present at the meeting had been interested in negotiations, not violence. “None of the members of the Serb leadership was enthusiastic, because migration of population had happened,” he said.



He added that when discussing control of resources like mines and refineries, he had been speaking as an economist rather than an ideologue and was only looking for a way to divide Bosnia’s wealth equitably.



The prosecution also pressed Krajisnik for his reactions to a number of statements made by Karadzic during the war, including the notorious occasion when he thundered before the Bosnian national assembly in October 1991 that efforts by non-Serb politicians to secure independence for the republic would lead “Bosnia into hell… and the Muslim people into annihilation”.



Earlier in his testimony, when questioned by his own defence lawyer, Krajisnik had dismissed this statement as merely paraphrasing arguments offered by the Muslim academic Muhamed Filipovic in favour of a political solution to the Bosnian crisis. This week, Tieger pointed out that Filipovic himself has dismissed this interpretation as “completely untrue” and has insisted that in his opinion, “Karadzic was making a threat and a call to genocide”.



But Krajisnik continued to insist that Karadzic’s statement, far from being intimidation, was in fact only a plea to Muslim deputies not to lead the country into war. “I am sure that Karadzic rather hoped that Muslims would be scared by his words and not vote for their platform of independence,” he explained in court.



He offered similar explanations for intercepts of telephone conversations in which Karadzic said there would be “rivers of blood” in the event of a conflict, and that Bosnian Muslims would “disappear from the face of earth”.



“Europe will be told to go and fuck itself and we will not stop the job until it is finished,” Karadzic said in one such conversation.



While Krajisnik acknowledged that these were strong words, he insisted that he still understood them as a plea to non-Serbs to drop their plans for Bosnian independence.



Also this week, Tieger asked the accused about a key document setting out “Variants A and B”, which prosecutors say laid out the methods by which local branches of the SDS were to grab power in municipalities where Serbs were in the majority or in the minority, respectively.



Krajisnik denied being aware of any such document.



The trial will continue next week with further cross-examination of Krajisnik by the prosecution.



Adin Sadic is an IWPR intern in The Hague.