General’s Arrest Sparks Anger and Praise in Bosnia

Bosnia’s main Bosniak-led party, the Party of Democratic Action, reacted angrily to the arrest on Friday of former general Atif Dudakovic and 11 other Bosnian Army Fifth Corps ex-soldiers, saying it was an attempt to equate crimes committed by Serbs during wartime with those committed by Bosniaks.

“On this occasion we must remind people that the Bosnian Army systematically stopped and punished perpetrators of crimes in its own ranks. On the other hand, the forces which conducted the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina systematically planned, organised, encouraged and committed crimes,” the Party of Democratic Action said in a statement describing the Bosnian Serb forces as wartime aggressors.

Dzevad Malkoc, the minister for war veterans in the Una-Sana Canton, said Dudakovic’s arrest constituted “an attack against the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina”.

Bosnian Army war veterans also expressed dismay

“We have heard that our general, who we are so proud of, was arrested… We condemn what has happened to him, give our full support to the general and send a message to him to hold out,” said the president of the Association of Disabled War Veterans of Bihac, Dzafer Alibegovic.

The alleged war crimes committed by Dudakovic and the 11 others involve several hundred casualties, including civilians and captured Serb soldiers from Bosnia’s Western Krajina municipalities in 1995, as well as crimes against Bosniak civilians from the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia, a self-proclaimed Bosniak-led wartime breakaway statelet, in 1994.

The arrests drew praise from some Serb politicians, with Dragan Cavic, the former president of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity, saying he hoped Dudakovic would be found guilty.

“That man was the key person, on the basis of his command responsibility, for war crimes against Serbs, as well as Bosniaks in the zone of responsibility of the Fifth Corps, particularly at the end of 1995. The day has finally come for him to be deprived of liberty, and that pleases me,” Cavic said.

Milorad Kojic, director of the Centre for Investigation of War, War Crimes and the Search for the Missing Persons of Republika Srpska, said he thought the charges against Dudakovic and the others should be classified as “a crime against humanity and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs”.

“It’s about the planned murder of prisoners… The case is so solid that no attorney can contest it,” Kojic said.

“We submitted 8,000 pages of evidence [to the investigators], as well as original video recordings depicting the crimes,” he added.

Mirvet Beganovic, a Labour Party MP in the Bosnian parliament’s House of Peoples, argued that all war crime perpetrators should be brought to justice.

“When it comes to war crimes, there are no untouchables, and such crimes never become obsolete [pass the statute of limitations]. Individual and command responsibility should be determined,” Beganovic said.

But he urged people not to rush to judgment in the Dudakovic case.

“Nobody is guilty until proven otherwise. It is up to the judicial and investigative bodies to prove if they are guilty. It is a pity that all this was not done earlier, so we could turn towards the future,” he added.