Milomir Stakic’s Regrets

However, testifying in defence of Radovan Karadzic, Stakic said that, at the time he did not know about most of the crimes against the non-Serb population and that he was not “the key responsible” person for the commission of those crimes.

According to Stakic’s testimony, there was never a plan to make Prijedor a mono-ethnic Serb municipality. He said that he had never heard Karadzic advocating for the deportation of the non-Serb population or creating a mono-ethnic Serbian state.

In 2006 The Hague Tribunal pronounced a second instance verdict, sentencing Stakic, former President of the Municipal Assembly in Prijedor and local Crisis Committee, to 40 years in prison for having committed persecution, extermination and murder of Muslims and Croats in Prijedor.

According to the indictment against Karadzic, former Republika Srpska President, charging him with the persecution of Muslims and Croats, Prijedor was one of the seven municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina in which the persecution of non-Serbs reached the scale of genocide.

Stakic said that, in 1992 he knew about two mass crimes against Muslims in Prijedor municipality, namely the murder of about 120 people in Keraterm detention camp and the shooting of about 200 men at Koricanske Stijene on Mount Vlasic.

“During my trial I found out about many other crimes, which, unfortunately, happened in Prijedor municipality. I agree with what the verdict says about those crimes. Neither I nor my defence team tried to deny or underrate those crimes, but we wanted to prove that I was not the big and important player,” Stakic said.

After that he expressed “deep regrets for everything that was done to my fellow citizens in that period”. “However, at that moment I did not know about those crimes,” he said.

Stakic told the Tribunal that the Crisis Committee, whose president he was, could not issue orders to police and the Army, which were in charge of the detention camps. According to Stakic’s testimony, “criminals” too committed crimes in those detention camps for the sake of robbing people.

Karadzic then presented the judges with VRS colonel Ljubisa Beara as his Defence witness. The Tribunal sentenced Beara, under a first instance verdict pronounced in 2010, to life imprisonment, finding him guilty of genocide in Srebrenica.

Karadzic too is charged with genocide against about 7,000 Srebrenica Muslims in the days that followed the occupation of the United Nations protected enclave by the VRS on July 11, 1995.

The most part of Beara’s brief testimony was closed to public, because he refused to answer two Karadzic’s questions in order not to incriminate himself.

Karadzic asked Beara if he had ever informed him, either orally or in writing, “that the captives from Srebrenica would be shot, that they were being shot or that they had already been shot” and whether he had ever written or read any such document about that.
In line with the Rules, the judges then obliged the witness to respond to the questions, guaranteeing him that his answers would not be used against him. Beara answered the questions, but it happened behind closed doors. Karadzic’s legal counsellor Peter Robinson then requested the Court to allow Beara’s answers to be published, considering the fact that the witness did not say anything that would incriminate him. The judges said that they would render a decision concerning the request during the cross-examination of Beara, which is scheduled for January 22 next year.

During the open part of the hearing Karadzic asked Beara if they had ever talked to each other during the war. “We did see each other, but I think that we did not speak to each other,” Beara said.

The trial of Karadzic is due to continue tomorrow, December 18.