Karadzic: Propaganda about Greater Serbia

Jovanovic said that Serbia did not have any territorial pretensions towards any of the former Yugoslav republics, “particularly not towards Bosnia and Herzegovina”.

According to the witness, “the maximum goal” of Karadzic and Bosnian Serb leaders was to “remain in a joint state”, i.e. Yugoslavia. “You never expressed a wish to separate Republika Srpska from Bosnia and Herzegovina and annex it to Yugoslavia,” Jovanovic said, responding to Karadzic’s questions.

When asked whether he noticed that Karadzic had any aspirations towards forming a Greater Serbia, Jovanovic said that “the Greater Serbia project was made up and imposed on Serbia as a propaganda instrument”.

Karadzic, former President of Republika Srpska, is charged with genocide in Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, terror against civilians in Sarajevo and taking UNPROFOR members hostage. The indictment alleges that the crimes were committed within a joint criminal enterprise, whose member, among others, was late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, with the aim of permanently and forcibly removing the non-Serb population from Bosnian territories, which would then become parts of a new Serbian state.

The former Minister of Foreign Affairs of SRJ described relations between Milosevic and Karadzic as “a marriage out of necessity”. Jovanovic said that Karadzic “did not have a regressive attitude towards Muslims”. “Bosnian Serbs did not express hatred towards Muslims and Croats,” he said.

Jovanovic told the Tribunal that “50,000 Muslim and 20,000 Croat refugees” were present in Serbia in 1993. When asked what he thought about it in the context of accusations related to a joint criminal enterprise aimed at deporting non-Serbs, the witness said that the accusation was “obviously forced and politically motivated”.

During his testimony Jovanovic suggested that the predominantly Muslim side was responsible for the death of hundreds of civilians in Sarajevo. Besides Bosniak and Croatian leaders, Jovanovic blamed the war in the former Yugoslavia upon the international community.

During the cross-examination Prosecutor Alan Tieger confronted Jovanovic with a series of statements from Karadzic about the union with Serbia as the main goal of Bosnian Serbs. While saying that he did not even notice those statements, Jovanovic suggested that they were “a euphoric reflection of a dream about a union”.

When asked whether the establishment of a Bosnian Serbs’ state was the goal of the official policy, Jovanovic underlined that, in his opinion, the Serbs’ goal was what Belgrade officially suggested, i.e. reaching an agreement, “which would bring freedom and equity”, with the two other peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

When asked whether he knew about the international community’s protests due to the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks, the witness answered affirmatively, but he said that Bosnian Serb leaders convinced him that it was “a natural fear among the population”, who “sought refuge, because they lived surrounded by the other side”.

After Prosecutor Tieger faced him with the fact that, in 1993 he advocated for “the ethnic homogenisation” of occupied territories in Bosnia and Herzegovina “as soon as possible”, Jovanovic said that did advocate for ethnic homogenisation, but not “for using forcible tools, and certainly not for committing crimes”.

Prosecutor Tieger is due to continue cross-examining Jovanovic on Wednesday, February 27.