Milovan Bjelica to testify in the Hague

Milovan Cicko Bjelica, the notorious businessman and wartime member of the Serb Democratic Party, SDS, is set to appear later this week before the Hague tribunal as a defence witness in genocide proceedings against his former political colleague Momcilo Krajisnik.

On Monday Bjelica arrived in the Hague court’s detention unit from a prison in Doboj, where he is awaiting trial having been charged with embezzlement and other financial crimes.

Few in Bosnia were surprised when criminal charges were originally brought against Bjelica. In fact, many have long expected him to face further charges in connection with a massacre which is also mentioned in the indictment against Krajisnik.

During the war in Bosnia, Krajisnik was the speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament and a prominent member of the SDS.

Bjelica was the chairman of the local branch of the same party in Sokalac, a Serb-dominated municipality to the east of Sarajevo. He was also a member of the municipality’s crisis staff – one of the ad hoc bodies formed by the breakaway Serb authorities in the early days of the war to handle everything from employment issues and the distribution of food to the enforcement of curfews and the arming of Serb civilians.

Crisis staffs also controlled military operations carried out by local police and paramilitaries, and liaised closely with the command structures of the Bosnian Serb Army, VRS.

Besides Bjelica, those in charge of the Sokalac crisis staff included Milan Tupajic, the president of the municipality, and Colonel Radislav Krstic, commander of the Second Romanija Brigade of the VRS.

For the most part, the few Muslim villages scattered around Sokolac town in the Romanija mountains were ethnically cleansed in the early months of the war.

One village, Novoseoci, remained intact until September 1992. But in that month local Serb troops rounded up its inhabitants and killed the majority of its male population at the local mosque.

In all, 45 men between the ages of 14 and 68 were murdered. The mosque itself was later blown up and the rubble, mixed with the remains of the victims, transported to a nearby rubbish damp.

The role played in the massacre by the Sokolac crisis staff was documented last year in a BIRN/IWPR investigation named Justice Yet to be Done a year ago. LINK HERE

While no one has yet answered for the crime in Novoseoci, it receives a mention in an appendix attached to the charge sheet against Krajisnik. The reference reads simply, “In the village of Novoseoci, approximately 44 non-Serb men were killed.”

In an interview with BIRN/IWPR in March last year, Bjelica admitted that crimes were committed against Muslims in villages in the Sokalac municipality, including Novoseoci. But he denied playing any part in them.

During the same interview, he also noted that he had maintained close relations at the time both with Krajisnik and with the former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, who has also been charged by the Hague tribunal but remains on the run.

“I was the person closest to Karadzic,” he boasted. “I enjoyed his full confidence and that of his deputy Krajisnik.”

An intelligence document published as part of the BIRN/IWPR investigation showed that Karadzic was in regular touch with Bjelica, with whom he frequently discussed the situation on the ground and “future moves”.

In one such conversation on December 27, 1992 – a transcript of which is in BIRN’s possession – Bjelica tells Karadzic that “Tupajic is doing a good job” and that the “municipal authorities are functioning well under Tupajic’s command”. This was three months after Novoseoci.

Following the Novoseoci massacre, Tupajic went on to become the deputy head of the Serb Autonomous Region of Romanija, which comprised much of eastern Bosnia.

Krstic became the deputy commander of the Drina Corps of the VRS, which played a major role in the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys in the Srebrenica enclave in July 1995. He is currently serving a 35 year prison term, having been convicted by the Hague court for his role in that atrocity. The indictment against him did not touch on the events in Novoseoci three years before.

Tupajic, who is also recorded as having been present in Srebrenica during the notorious massacre, has also appeared as a witness in the Krajisnik trial – but in his case, it was for the prosecution.

Tupajic testified in July last year about how the SDS controlled the various local civil and military authorities within the Serb-dominated parts of Bosnia during the war. The local SDS branch headed by Bjelica in Sokalac, he told the court, received its instructions from the party’s main board – of which Krajisnik was a key member.

He also testified that Krajisnik and Karadzic had made public references to the strategic goal of dividing the three main ethnic groups in Bosnia – the Muslims, Croats and Serbs. In addition, he said he was aware of plans to link Serb-dominated parts of Bosnia with Serbia proper.

“These goals could not have been implemented without the forcible transfer of the non-Serb population,” Tupajic added.

As evidence of such claims, prosecutors in the Krajisnik trial have presented the court with a report from the Belgrade-based Tanjug news agency, which makes reference to a meeting led by Tupajic on May 17, 1992, at which Krajisnik was present. The accused is quoted as saying, “The time has come so the territory between three peoples can be divided.”

Tupajic also claimed in court that he was the first official from the Republika Srpska to speak publicly about the massacre in Novoseoci. He insisted that he had been unable to do anything to prevent such crimes during the war, because the civilian authorities did not have “good relations” with the military, which was the body responsible.

Bjelica, for his part, explained during last year’s interview with BIRN/IWPR, that there was a possibility that the massacre in Novoseoci was carried out in revenge for the battlefield death of the young son of “a local respected Serb inhabitant”.

While Bjelica has not yet been charged with war crimes, sources in the state prosecutor’s office say they do not rule out the possibility that this might occur in the future.

Local media in the Republika Srpska have reported that relations between Tupajic and Bjelica have been severed since the war, with some claiming that the pair hope to “set each other up” for the crimes in Sokolac.

Most recently, the weekly magazine Slobodna Bosna, claimed that Tupajic has gone into hiding because of threats from Bjelica. The latter was said to want to rule out the possibility that Tupajic might appear as a prosecution witness in his own trial, should he be charged with war crimes in Sokalac.

Bjelica is not the only witness in the proceedings against Krajisnik to have had problems with the law.

The first person to testify when Krajisnik’s defence case got underway last year was Nemanja Vasic, a businessman from Prnjavor whose premises have been raided by international troops seeking to break up the networks responsible for supporting Hague fugitives.

During the prosecution stage of the case in 2004, the court heard evidence from Momcilo Mandic, a Serb businessman who is currently awaiting trial for the same financial crimes as Bjelica.

Krajisnik himself has previously complained to the court that defence witnesses are hard to come by, since many of those who he would like to testify were either on the run having been charged with crimes or had “secret indictments” against them.

Nerma Jelacic is BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina’s country director. [email protected]