Presidency Was “Camouflage”, Claims Witness

“Instead of through Presidency and government, Izetbegovic ruled through his Party of Democratic Action, through a narrow religious and ethnic group of convicts, which, including him, was before the war serving prison time for the Islamic Declaration,” said Kecmanovic. He said that Izetbegovic’s expectation that NATO would intervene on behalf of the Muslims negatively affected his readiness to compromise as soon as in summer 1992.As a cause of war in Bosnia, Kecmanovic stated the Muslim-Croatian “outvoting of Serbs” in the Bosnian Parliament during the making of decision on the referendum on independence of Bosnia in October 1991.
The witness said that in summer 1992 at a meeting with the Serb leadership he addressed the issue of the shelling of Sarajevo, which was “arbitrary” and “non-selective”.Serb artillery, he added, was forced to respond to the fire from Muslim artillery, which was positioned in the city’s most densely populated areas.
“Inside Sarajevo, which they could not leave after May 1992, Serbs were being locked up in private prisons under false accusations that they held arms or sent signals to the Serb artillery,” said Kecmanovic.In the cross-examination, the prosecutor, Hildegard-Uertz Retzlaff, reminded Kecmanovic that Karadzic called him a “private Serb of Alija Izetbegovic”, comparing him to “the private Serbs of Ante Pavelic.”
“I did not know about the latter and that is a serious insult”, said the witness, adding, however, that it was propaganda and that he did not believe Karadzic sincerely meant that.Kecmanovic denied he was under pressure from the leadership of Republika Srpska to leave the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Having been presented with the claim from Karadzic and other Serb leaders that they “did not want to live with Muslims and Croats,” Kecmanovic replied that “Muslims and Croats made that life impossible by outvoting Serbs in the Presidency and government.”Asked whether he was a victim of the artillery fire from the Army of Republika Srpska on Sarajevo, the witness replied he was not a victim, but that he witnessed that fire and that he was horrified by it just like other citizens of Sarajevo.
Prosecutor Retzlaff then quoted Kecmanovic from his own work, including an expert report used at one of The Hague trials, that “Muslims were the biggest victims” in Bosnia.“I was a victim of propaganda there”, replied the witness, claiming he wrote that based on the information that 300,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in Bosnia, and that later it turned out that the real number of victims was around 100,000 and that all three nations were proportionately represented by it.
Asked whether in one of the texts he equalised the outvoting of Serbs in the Parliament with the fire from Serb artillery, Kecmanovic replied: “The first is the cause, the second consequence. The Muslim side caused the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina by domineering over Serbs. Everything else is consequences.”The trial of Karadzic, charged with genocide in Srebrenica, expulsion of Muslims and Croats across Bosnia, terrorising citizens of Sarajevo and taking international peacekeepers hostages, is to resume on Tuesday, June 4.