Bosnian Serbs ‘Weren’t Responsible for Looting and Theft’

Defence witness Vladimir Lukic, who was prime minister of Republika Srpska from January 1993 to August 1994, told Mladic’s war crimes trial at the Hague Tribunal on Wednesday that large numbers of people came to Bosnia at the beginning of the war in neighbouring Croatia and started creating problems and committing crime.

“When the war broke out in Croatia, we just had a rush of people with questionable morals who wanted to get rich. They were performing all the acts of [sexual] indecency and other [criminal] acts, and they were not from Bosnia, and definitely not from Republika Srpska,” Lukic said.

“We as the local authorities had many problems with those people,” he added.

He said that the authorities in Republika Srpska sometimes used weapons seized from enemy forces for their own defence, but never looted and sold ordinary non-Serb people’s property.

“It is well known that there are different kinds of seizures and looting in the war. However, we considered something to be a trophy of war only if it did not belong to any citizen – something we took from those who seized it illegally and what we took away from the enemy,” Lukic explained.

“Private property could not be considered as a trophy of war and no one could distribute it or allocate to someone else, not even to the army,” he said.

Lukic also testified on Tuesday that he heard that individual Bosnian Serb soldiers committed crimes during wartime, but insisted that the army itself did not.

Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, is on trial for the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, genocide in Srebrenica and seven other municipalities, terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

The trial will continue on September 16.