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Kovac told the Hague Tribunal on Monday that former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic’s Islamic Declaration, originally published in 1969 but republished before the war in 1990, formed the ideological basis for what he claimed was the Party for Democratic Action’s fight for an Islamic state.
The SDA “fought for a state which would be based on Islam and excluded other religions and did not allow them influence on the government”, Kovac told the UN-backed court.
Kovac alleged this was “the trigger for the fight between the other two peoples”, the Serbs and Croats.
Mladic’s lawyer Dragan Ivetic quoted the Islamic Declaration as saying that the “Islamic movement must take over the government as soon as it is powerful enough not just to remove the non-Islamic authorities, but to build an entirely Islamic system”.
“This means that armed formations must be created which will be active in the Islamic state,” said Kovac.
In 1991 the SDA created the Patriotic League and the Green Berets, which the witness alleged were “armed paramilitaries”.
Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb army, is charged with the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats which reached the scale of genocide in several municipalities. He is also on trial for terrorising the population of Sarajevo, genocide in Srebrenica and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
Kovac denied that the Bosnian Serbs held Sarajevo under siege, saying that the Bosnian capital was a “divided city with blockades by both Serb and Muslim forces”.
The military expert claimed that Sarajevo was “under military occupation”, because it was home to 40,000 to 50,000 members of the Bosnian Army.
The amount of ammunition fired by the Bosnian Serb Army on the city was within ‘normal limits’, Kovac insisted.
Commenting on the Srebrenica genocide charges, he alleged that despite UN orders to demilitarise the enclave in 1995, more than 10,000 Bosnian Army fighters remained inside.
Mladic’s presence in Srebrenica on July 11, 1995 does not mean that he commanded the troops who carried out the massacres, Kovac said. He said that Mladic was definitely not in charge of the troops responsible for the killings while he was in Belgrade between July 14 and 17, 1995.
The trial continues on Tuesday.
