Plavsic Testifies Against Former Colleague

The ex-Bosnian Serb president Biljana Plavsic, who is serving an 11-year prison term after pleading guilty before the Hague tribunal to persecuting non-Serbs, was obliged to return to the court this week to testify against her wartime political ally Momcilo Krajisnik.



Krajisnik is accused of involvement in ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs from large parts of Bosnia, which in some areas is said to have amounted to genocide.



Plavsic was included on the same indictment as Krajisnik but the bulk of the charges against her were dropped as part of an agreement she made with prosecutors prior to confessing to persecutions as a crime against humanity in 2002.



With the prosecution and the defence having finished presenting their respective cases in Krajisnik’s trial, the judges have spent the past two weeks calling witnesses of their own in order to tie up loose ends before issuing a judgement by the end of September.



From the moment that Plavsic appeared in court on July 5, she made it clear that she was not there out of choice. Looking significantly older than when she was last seen in The Hague, she complained of health problems.



She also told the court that she was on bad terms with Krajisnik and objected to the idea that she might be asked to testify in his case at all, stating that, “People who are not free cannot speak freely.”



She raised the issue of Milan Babic, a former Croatian Serb leader who also pleaded guilty to persecutions and testified in other war crimes trials before committing suicide in the Hague tribunal’s custody earlier this year. “What Babic did was just a consequence of the pressure,” Plavsic declared.



But Presiding Judge Alphons Orie prevented her from expanding on this subject, reminding her that she was in court to give truthful answers to questions that were put to her, and nothing else.



Plavsic’s appearance in court came as something of a surprise – especially given that there was no requirement in her plea agreement with prosecutors that she would give evidence in other trials – and her testimony pulled a sizeable crowd into the largest of the court’s public galleries.



Dressed in a denim shirt, jeans and brown sports shoes, she brought with her a yellow plastic bag containing a statement she had given to tribunal investigators, some notes of her own and a copy of her book, “I Testify”, which she published from her Swedish jail cell. She seemed a world away from the Biljana Plavsic who in the past strode the world stage as an elected member of the Bosnian presidency, and who was previously the dean of Sarajevo University and a Fulbright scholar.



She told the court that after she received the order to testify in Krajisnik’s case, her blood pressure had risen and became unstable. She described feeling a “drum sound” in her temples and a constant noise “like a waterfall” in her head. She wanted to “finish this unpleasant task as soon as possible”, but said she was not sure she could withstand the pressure and warned the judges that they were “taking a risk” by asking her to testify.



Plavsic also said the negative psychological effects that the experience was having on her could reduce her ability to concentrate and the quality of her testimony.



Krajisnik remained calm throughout her objections, constantly taking notes while not looking at her.



After outlining her complaints, Plavsic suggested that they “try to continue” with her testimony. But Judge Orie ordered a break while a doctor was consulted concerning her health. The doctor reported back the following morning that Plavsic’s high blood pressure was a result of stress and was not an obstacle to her testifying, from a medical point of view.



Plavsic herself made it clear that she was dissatisfied with the conclusion, expressing doubts that the doctor had thoroughly examined her medical records, written in Swedish.



Her legal advisor, Eugene O’Sullivan, asked for another medical examination. He suggested that it was not in the interest of the tribunal and the trial to hear testimony from a person whose life would be endangered in the process.



Krajisnik’s defence lawyer, Nicholas Stewart, agreed that further consideration of Plavsic’s health was necessary and that “important witnesses - as Mrs. Plavsic is - should not give their testimonies under pressure”.



Plavsic had tears running down her cheeks as Judge Orie asked her one more time if she felt confident going ahead with her testimony. Announcing that they would take all the circumstances into consideration, the chamber said that her testimony would go ahead with caution.



Plavsic spoke about the slapdash nature of some aspects of the Bosnian Serb leadership, claiming that the Republika Srpska presidency looked like a “village party”. As an academic who had worked at a university and knew how things ought to be organised, she was always wondering about informal nature of such meetings.



At the same time, she declared that Krajisnik’s practicality and his firm grip on reality made him a powerful person, to the extent that “he dominated over Karadzic sometimes”. Part of Krajisnik’s defence case has involved suggesting that he was sidelined on many key issues during the war, and that the Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic wielded a great deal of power.



Plavsic said the accused was involved in domestic and foreign policy in the Republika Srpska, as well as in all peace negotiations and conferences abroad. “I was never consulted before the conference, never heard what happened there after they came back,” she said.



She further explained how Krajisnik constantly coordinated with deputies and municipal authorities. And his office, she said, was “always full of people” who wanted to speak with this “simple, powerful and influential man”.



Plavsic also asserted that Krajisnik and Karadzic often went to Belgrade to visit the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, while she was neither invited on such trips nor informed of their results.



And she confirmed a quote from her book that “everyone who would not show loyalty to Radovan and Momo [Krajisnik] would be gone soon”.



At the end of the week, Krajisnik himself was given an opportunity to put his own questions to Plavsic. He was reminded that he would have to comply with strict rules, including refraining from making statements. After a couple of attempts, the judges said he was not making sufficient effort to stay within these restrictions, and cut off his questioning.



Plavsic’s testimony finished on July 7, in time for her return to Sweden on schedule over the weekend.



Just before she left, Judge Orie thanked Plavsic and said he understood that it hadn’t been an easy experience, especially given that her last day in court was also her 76th birthday.



“No need to thank me,” replied Plavsic, “I was forced here.”



Also this week, the court heard testimony via a video link from Belgrade from Velibor Ostojic, who was the minister of information of the Republika Srpska in 1992. Ostojic’s name had been mentioned during previous testimony in the Krajisnik case, as a man who had escorted international journalists on tours of detention camps in July of that year.



“I never visited a single camp,” Ostojic insisted in his testimony. “There were no concentration camps in Republika Srpska - just columns of refugees from the war affected areas.”



He dismissed reports in the British media which first carried images of the now infamous Omarska detention camp as “false and propaganda”.



Pressed on the question of Omarska, he repeated, “Republika Srpska did not have camps. That is what I said and what I believe to this day!”



Prosecutor Mark Harmon sought to undermine Ostojic’s credibility by reminding him of allegations he had made in an interview with TV Belgrade in 1992. Ostojic apparently claimed at the time that the “lions in Sarajevo Zoo were fed with Serb children by Muslim fanatics and butchers”, that in Gorazde Serbs were nailed to crosses, that 6,000 of them were killed in a horrible way, and that 40,000 Serbs had been detained in stadiums so they “have to eat the grass”.



The former minister admitted that he had not checked the information himself, since he received it from the ministry of police. But he added that he still believes that “something to that effect really happened”.



At the end of Ostojic’s testimony, the defence lawyer David Josse asked for his views on Mark Thompson, who gave evidence as a prosecution expert witness on the media and communication. Thompson claimed in his expert report that the media in Republika Srpska were used as the megaphones of Krajisnik’s Serbian Democratic Party, blocking and marginalising any opinion that was not in line with its policies.



Ostojic described Thompson’s testimony as “superficial, untrue and inexpert”. He said that a look through the archives reveals a “diversity of different ideas and thoughts” published in the Republika Srpska media.



Earlier in the week, the trial chamber requested the suspension of an arrest warrant that had been issued against the former Bosnian Serb prime minister, Branko Djeric, after he failed to appear to give evidence in Krajisnik’s trial.



Djeric has apparently since contacted the court, expressing his willingness to travel voluntarily to The Hague and testify.



The judges have called a further witness who will begin testifying next week.



Adin Sadic is an IWPR intern in The Hague.