Karadzic: Unfulfilled Agreements

Prosecution witness Hussein Ali Abdel Razek told the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, that Radovan Karadzic told him in the winter of 1992 that Serbs and Muslims could “no longer live together”.

When asked by Karadzic if the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina kept civilians in Sarajevo as hostages “with an aim of victimising the city”, Ali Abdel Razek, the former commander of UNPROFOR, said the United Nations forces did not interfere with the population movement processes.   

“The tension was high,” he said. “We first wanted to stop the fire and shelling of civilians, it was our priority, and then to see who would go and where. We wanted to ensure the cessation of fire first but not according to ethnic borders. I noticed that people in Sarajevo were in good relations, but people were afraid. They used to come to us looking for protection, but we had to tell them we did not have a mandate to rescue them as we did not want to facilitate the ethnic cleansing.”   

Karadzic, the former President of Republika Srpska and Supreme Commander of its armed forces, denied saying that “Serbs did not want to live with Muslims.” He said that he said “they did not want to live under Muslim power”, adding he regretted not having expressed his opinion in a clearer way.  

Karadzic is on trial for genocide, crimes against humanity and violation of the laws and customs of war committed from 1992 to 1995 and participation in persecution of the non-Serbian population in the areas controlled by Bosnian Serbs.  

The indictment alleges that Karadzic participated in the implementation of a military strategy consisting of shelling and sniper fire with the aim of killing, mutilating and terrorising civilians in Sarajevo. These actions resulted in the killing and wounding of thousands of civilians.

Ali Abdel Razek repeated his earlier statement that he concluded “several excellent agreements on reconstruction of the Sarajevo city infrastructure” with Karadzic and Bosnian Serb leaders in 1992 and 1993, adding “those agreements were unfortunately not fulfilled”.  

“The UN tried to help reestablish the basic water, electricity and gas infrastructure…on both sides alike. However, the efforts we invested were disabled by shelling, military operations and sniper fire, so our technical teams could not even reach the areas in which the works were supposed to be done,” he said. 

Ali Abdel Razek explained that local Serbian military forces in the field “acted in a hostile manner and showed no discipline” despite the assurances received from Karadzic and other leaders that this would not be the case. He added that this obstructed the efforts to improve the conditions in Sarajevo.  

Ekrem Suljevic, former member of counter-sabotage protection with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, MUP, of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, also began his testimony at this hearing. He explained that his unit was tasked with “collecting unexploded projectiles in Sarajevo”.  

“We were involved in collecting and removing the projectiles,” he said. “The unit members would take out the explosive charges from those projectiles. Those charges were then left aside to be compared with samples we collected during the course of explosion location inspections in order for us to determine whether the parts matched each other,” Suljevic explained.

Suljevic was presented with several wartime documents related to requests for “provision of means needed for military activities” by the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps of the RS Army. The witness said those requests matched the samples collected by his unit members.

Suljevic will continue his testimony on July 22.

D.Dž.