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Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic tried to compel the authorities in Bosnia’s Serb-led Republika Srpska region to accept an international peace plan in the spring of 1993 although it meant that Serbs would have to return a third of the territories they had occupied, Franko Simatovic’s defence lawyer Vladimir Petrovic told the Mechanism for International Tribunals in The Hague on Thursday.
“The plan practically foresaw the disappearance of Republika Srpska,” Petrovic suggested, adding that the Belgrade authorities cancelled all sorts of help, except humanitarian aid, when the Bosnian Serbs refused to accept the agreement.
Prosecution witness John Wilson, the chief of the United Nations military observers in 1992 and 1993, concurred that in the spring of 1993, Milosevic advocated the acceptance of the peace plan drawn up by UN Special Envoy Cyrus Vance and EU representative Lord Owen, which the Republika Srpska leadership rejected.
Milosevic also “assured” the acceptance of the peace plan by rebel Croatian Serbs in the Kninska Krajina region of Croatia, Wilson said.
He said the claim by Simatovic’s defence lawyer that the Vance-Owen plan did not envisage changes in the borders of Croatia and Bosnia was correct.
But Simatovic’s defence rejected Wilson’s allegations about ethnic cleansing by Serb paramilitaries in Bosnia in the spring of 1992, saying they originated from a biased media.
Wilson responded by saying he did not take reports published by local and international media for granted, but cross-checked them with information he obtained from the European Union and United Nations personnel as well as from other organisations.
According to the charges against Jovica Stanisic, the former chief of the Serbian State Security Service (SDB), and his assistant Franko Simatovic, alias Frenki, Milosevic led a joint criminal enterprise aimed at forcibly and permanently removing Croats and Muslims from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina for the sake of achieving Serb domination.
The indictment alleges that Milosevic’s criminal enterprise was implemented by Stanisic and Simatovic through the Serbian SDB.
Stanisic and Simatovic are being retried for the persecution, murder, deportation and forcible resettlement of Croat and Bosniak civilians during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Both men pleaded not guilty in December last year after the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia overturned their acquittal in their first trial.
The tribunal ruled on December 15 that there were serious legal and factual errors when Stanisic and Simatovic were initially acquitted of war crimes in 2013, and ordered the case to be retried and all the evidence and witnesses reheard in full by new judges.
The defence will complete its cross-examination of Wilson on Tuesday.
