Former Bosniak Police Officer Describes Detention

Velma Šarić

IWPR-trained journalist

Friday, 13 January, 2012

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After a short winter break, the trial of former senior Bosnian Serb police officials Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin continued this week with the testimony of a prosecution witness brought to court to refute arguments made by Stanisic’s defence.

Mirza Lisinovic is the first in a series of rebuttal witnesses invited by the prosecution to testify in relation to claims made during the presentation of the defence case for Stanisic.

Lisinovic, a Bosniak who served as a police officer in the northern Bosnian town of Doboj at the outset of the country’s 1992-95 war, currently works as a senior official in Bosnia's unified police agency, known as SIPA.

The prosecution hoped his testimony would rebut that of Stanisic defence witness Andrija Bjelosevic, given in April last year. In 1992, Bjelosevic was Lisinovic’s commander at the Security Services Centre, CSB, Doboj. In his testimony last April, he maintained that the police had done its best to treat all ethnicities equally.

Zupljanin and Stanisic are alleged to have participated in a joint criminal enterprise aimed at the permanent removal of non-Serbs from the territory of an intended Serbian state.

They are accused of crimes committed between April 1 and December 31, 1992, in municipalities throughout Bosnia and Hercegovina, BiH, including Doboj.

Zupljanin, who became an adviser to the then Bosnian Serb president and Hague indictee, Radovan Karadzic, in 1994, is accused of extermination, murder, persecution, and deportation of non-Serbs in north-western BiH between April and December 1992.

Stanisic is charged with the murder, torture and cruel treatment of non-Serb civilians, as well as for his failure to prevent or punish crimes committed by his subordinates. The indictment against Stanisic states that he was appointed minister in charge of the newly-founded Bosnian Serb interior ministry, MUP, in April 1992 and was also a member of the Bosnian Serb government.

Lisinovic told the court this week that at the outset of the war, Doboj’s initially multi-ethnic CSB was taken over by Serbs, and that Bjelosevic, being an ethnic Serb, “remained in command”. The witness described the atmosphere in the CSB at that time as “tense and strained”.

“It all started in early 1992,” he said. “The CSB in Doboj became a frequent gathering place for Serb personnel from the army and paramilitary, who came to hold meetings with Bjelosevic.”

According to the witness, among those who regularly came to CSB were Milan Stankovic, a major in the Yugoslav People's Army, JNA, and Predrag Kujundzic, who the witness described simply as an “armed man”.

“Nobody quite knew what Predrag Kujundzic was doing, except that he had an armed unit which he commanded,” Lisinovic said. “But it wasn’t quite sure whether they were part of the army, the police, or something else.”

He said the tension built up until May 2, when “the Serbs overnight decided to take up authority in Doboj and submit the town and its authorities to their control”.

Lisinovic explained, however, that he “didn't quite know who exactly had given the order for the Serbs to take over the town. But the fact is that it did happen”.

The witness also recalled that on May 2 he had been on duty.

“I was in my office when some time around midnight, three men assaulted me. They arrested me and forced me down to the ground floor of the building, where I saw that some other colleagues of ours had been detained as well,” he continued, adding that he recognised all his fellow detainees as Bosniaks and Croats.

“We were beaten while we were tied up, by people wearing camouflage uniforms,” he told the court, adding that he was then transferred with others to the town’s prison, where he shared his cell with “a colleague I knew worked in the same jail where we were imprisoned”.

Once he left the prison, the witness said, his former commander Bjelosevic invited him for a conversation and said that “unfortunately, it was not permissible anymore for [Lisinovic] as a non-Serb to work in the police”.

Bjelosevic also allegedly said that it was not his decision, “but rather an effect of the times”.

The witness claimed that Bjelosevic also said that he should consider himself “fortunate to have been imprisoned [while on duty] and thus survived, because who knows what might have happened had [the witness] been found in his apartment”.

“It was a difficult time for all non-Serbs in the police,” Lisinovic said, stating that they experienced “constant fear”.

During cross-examination, the defence attorney for Stanisic, Slobodan Zecevic, asked the witness whether he knew about conditions on the ground in the area under the jurisdiction of the Doboj CSB, or about the efforts being made to maintain order.

Lisinovic said that “it was quite clear that there were problems in communication between the different police offices, that there was not enough staffing and that the personal relations seemed unstable, which all had its effect on the day-to-day police work. Nevertheless, the police could and should have acted with more consistency.”

Stanisic surrendered to the Hague tribunal in March 2005. Zupljanin was in hiding until June that same year, when he was arrested in the town of Pancevo just outside the Serbian capital Belgrade.

The trial began on September 14, 2009 and continues next week.
 

Velma Saric is an IWPR-trained reporter in Sarajevo.