Karadzic: Discussions about Division of City

As he continued his testimony, Nedjeljko Prstojevic, wartime President of the Crisis Committee in Ilidza municipality, on the outskirts of Sarajevo, expressed distrust in transcripts of intercepted conversations.

He said the conversations were “partially wrongly translated and incomplete”, asking the Court to replay the conversations in the courtroom in order to give him a chance to point to “disputable details”.

Hague Prosecutor Alan Tiger replayed an intercepted conversation from January 1995, in which Prstojevic, Karadzic and Serbian Democratic Party, SDS officials discussed the division of Sarajevo.

Prstojevic confirmed the authenticity of the conversation, telling the Court that an option for division of the city was considered during the war, adding that Serbs wanted to keep the territories where they “had lived for ages”.

“Every Serb who lived in Srpsko Sarajevo or Ilidza during the course of the war wanted those territories to remain under Serb control. Those people had lived there for ages and those were their ethnic territories.

“I do not see any disputable matters here,” the witness explained, adding that Serbs moved en masse to Ilidza at the beginning of the war because they were “discriminated against and feared for their lives” while living in Sarajevo.

Karadzic, former President of Republika Srpska and Supreme Commander of its armed forces, is on trial before the Hague Tribunal on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and violation of the laws and customs of war.

The indictment alleges that Karadzic participated in a joint criminal enterprise, in collaboration with other Bosnian Serb leaders and members of paramilitary formations, with the aim of persecuting the non-Serb population in 20 municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Indictee Karadzic began his cross-examination of Prstojevic by asking him to give the date on which the SDS was formed in Ilidza.

Prstojevic said that the “SDS was formed with a delay”, considering the fact that other parties, like the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, and Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, had already been formed.

“I must say that we had good working relations with Muslim and Croat officials in Ilidza municipality. Our relations were friendly and we did not have any problems with each other. The biggest problems were caused by Muslim extremists and fundamentalists, who appeared during the course of the war,” the witness said.

Antony Banbury, former assistant to the UN’s Special Envoy in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, completed his testimony at the hearing held on Thursday.

During the course of cross-examination, Karadzic read minutes of meetings of senior UNPROFOR officers in an attempt to show that UNPROFOR, NATO and the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina cooperated in attacks on positions held by the Republika Srpska Army in the second half of 1995.

Nedjeljko Prstojevic’s cross-examination is due to continue on March 18, 2011.

D.E.