Bosnian Serb Army ‘Didn’t Run Detention Camps’

Savo Sokanovic, who was in charge of ‘moral and religious issues’ at the Bosnian Serb Army’s main headquarters during wartime, told Mladic’s trial at the Hague Tribunal on Tuesday that the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje detention camps near Prijedor were under police rather than army control, so Mladic was not responsible for any crimes committed there.

“Those three camps were run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the [police] Public Security Centre,” said Sokanovic, who visited the camps in August 1992 with a group of foreign journalists.

Mladic is charged, as the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s main headquarters, of organising the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, which allegedly reached the scale of genocide in Prjiedor and several other municipalities in 1992. He is also on trial for the Srebrenica genocide, terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

During cross-examination, prosecutor Arthur Traldi claimed that Sokanovic knew that a large number of civilians were detained in the camps with no legal basis.

“I cannot claim that, since the prisons and prisoners of war were not in our jurisdiction,” Sokanovic replied.

When the prosecutor showed him a document from the Bosnian Serb Army’s First Corps which said that “a large number of people were detained without cause”, Sokanovic responded: “That’s what it says, but I don’t know who arrested them… It also says that this situation was made worse by the Prijedor police and their head, Simo Drljaca”.

Drljaca was charged with war crimes by the Hague Tribunal but was killed in 1996 during an attempt to arrest him.

Asked whether he knew that 150 prisoners were killed at Keraterm a few days before he visited, Sokanovic replied: “Your honour, I have no knowledge about what happened, that ten days before the International Red Cross and the journalists arrived, some killings took place in Keraterm.”

He also denied that he saw the room in which the killings allegedly took place.

“I didn’t see signs of blood in any of the rooms,” he said.

The trial continues on Wednesday.