Krajisnik Testimony Complete

Rounding up his marathon testimony as a witness in his own genocide trial, the former Bosnian Serb assembly speaker Momcilo Krajisnik continued to argue this week that Muslims instigated the conflict in Bosnia and that he was a powerless bystander to any crimes that might have been committed by Serbs.



It was a hectic few days in court as all the parties sought to mop up outstanding issues. And questions from the prosecution, Krajisnik’s own defence lawyers and the judges hearing his case touched on a diverse range of subjects.



One focus was the question of how war broke out in Bosnia and whether a peaceful resolution could have been found for the problems at the root of the conflict.



Krajisnik said that under the old Yugoslav order, he personally had been brought up in a traditional and religious family, and had always been taught to respect his Muslim and Croat neighbours even more than Serbs.



But he argued that, in general, people of different ethnicities had mixed only because they were forced to do so by the communist authorities. The old slogan of “brotherhood and unity” was “just an illusion”, he said, and as soon as war broke out, “we separated as water and oil”.



At the same time, he suggested that it was the Muslim community and its political leaders who were most to blame for the explosion of violence, as they sought to manipulate the new system in an attempt to “impose their will”.



“Before the war, Muslims were peaceful and honest people,” he told the court, “and then suddenly they appeared radical.”



He claimed that the last ambassador of the United States to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, had encouraged the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to reject the so-called Cutiliero peace plan, which he said the Serbs, Muslims and Croats had already agreed on.



The Muslims were not overly interested in the outcome of such negotiations, he said, since they had achieved their aim of an internationally recognised Bosnia, and they were trying to cosy up to the international community and were hoping for a military intervention by NATO.



“Muslims wanted to present themselves as victims,” he said, claiming that they had even resorted to bribing foreign media organisations to paint them in a favourable light.



During his testimony, Krajisnik repeated many times that the referendum held on February 29, 1992, which secured Bosnian independence was an “unconstitutional act”.



He admitted that a Serb-organised poll on the future of Bosnia in November 1991 was similarly unconstitutional. But he argued that that particular vote had only been conducted in order to allow his Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, to “check the legitimacy of its ideas”.



Krajisnik was asked to explain how it came about that the Bosnian Serbs in fact declared the existence of their own entity, the Republika Srpska, on January 9, 1992 – before the central authorities in Sarajevo held their referendum on the question of independence.



In response, the accused insisted that at that stage, the RS was “just a fiction” and existed only on paper. He also said he personally had argued at the time that it should only be declared an entity in its own right if Bosnia was declared independent from Yugoslavia. It was other Serb deputies, he said, who had pressed for the formation of the new entity regardless of this outcome.



Again this week, Krajisnik asserted that “ethnic cleansing” was not the best term to describe what happened in Bosnia after war broke out. Reports by the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, about ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs from RS in 1992 and 1993 was “extremely one-sided”, he said.



Many Serbs and Muslims, Krajisnik argued, had in fact left their homes out of choice. “They signed the papers stating that they wanted to leave,” he said of Muslim refugees, “and after that claimed that they were ethnically cleansed!”



Krajisnik’s testimony also touched on the scarcity of non-Serb officials in the ranks of RS authorities during the war years.



“The door was always opened for Muslims,” the accused insisted, adding that he personally was opposed to a decision by the Bosnian Serb assembly to expel non-Serb judges from the RS judiciary, but that there was nothing he could do to prevent it.



He insisted that the Serb leadership would in fact have been pleased if non-Serb officials had decided to stay on, “because a monolithic single-ethnic administration was politically damaging for Serbs”.



At the same time, he claimed that Izetbegovic had “paid Serbs to remain in positions in Sarajevo with pure gold”, purely to give the impression that the central authorities were in favour of a multiethnic society.



A number of questions by Judge Claude Hanoteau touched upon Krajisnik’s own powers as the speaker of the Bosnian Serb assembly.



Judge Hanoteau asked the accused, for instance, whether he had ever intervened in parliament to address issues such as the existence of brutal Serb-run detention camps or the exodus of non-Serb judges, since the parliamentary procedure made clear that it was within his rights to do so.



Krajisnik replied that no question or initiative could be placed on the assembly agenda without there being relevant material to hand, such as a report by a government body.



At the same time, he was keen to make it clear that he had no real powers during the war years to issue orders to anyone or to punish anyone for their actions. “I could have done as much as ordinary citizen,” he said.



He added that at the time, much legislation was passed outside of the assembly. Ideas were simply drawn up by members of the government, he said, signed by the Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic and then published as law without him having any knowledge.



Also this week, the trial chamber rejected arguments by Krajisnik’s defence team that a decision by the UN Security Council to extend the term of one of the judges hearing his case – Judge Joaquin Canivell – was invalid and that he should be forced to withdraw from the trial. The chamber ruled that the Security Council had acted properly in extending Judge Canivell’s term.



Adin Sadic is an IWPR intern in The Hague.