Mladic Witness Says Bosnian Conflict was Civil War

Testifying in Mladic’s defence in The Hague on Monday, historian Kovic said the Bosnian Serbs’ key actions during the war were forced on them by Bosniak and Croat secession, because they made the first moves with their aspirations for sovereignty.

“That was a secessionist civil war in which the Serbs tried to stay together and respond to the secessionist moves,” Kovic told the UN-backed war crimes court.

He accused prosecution experts Patrick Traynor and Robert Donia, who testified earlier in the trial, of presenting evidence to the court, “taking the facts out of context of history”.

Because of this lack of context and their analysis of the conflict from a one-sided perspective, “it could have been proved that Great Britain threatened Hitler’s Germany [during WWII]”, he argued.

Bosnian Serb Army chief Ratko Mladic is charged with the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats across the country, which allegedly reached the scale of genocide in six municipalities.

He is also on trial for genocide in Srebrenica, terrorising the population of Sarajevo during the 1992-95 siege and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

Kovic said it was “shocking” that Donia had written about the battles for Sarajevo without a mention of the Serb victims, suggesting that the prosecution expert saw the fighting in the city as “a war between good and evil”.

According to Kovic, the Bosnian Serb Army’s actions in Sarajevo were provoked by blockades of the Yugoslav People’s Army barracks in the city in 1992 and by the creation of armed militias by the Bosniak-led Party of Democratic Action, which evolved into Bosnian Army.

During cross-examination, prosecutor Arthur Traldi asked the witness if he denied that there had been Muslim victims in Sarajevo.

“I do not deny the suffering of the Muslim civilians in Sarajevo and Bosnia,” Kovic responded, but complained again that Donia did not mention Serb victims in the capital.

Asked if he accepted that the Bosnian Serb Army terrorised the population of Sarajevo with a shelling and sniping campaign while it besieged the city, as stated in the indictment, Kovic claimed that the opposite was true.

“There was indiscriminate shelling and sniping… but against Serbs,” he alleged.

The trial continues.