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The chief judge ordered Mladic’s removal from the courtroom on Monday after he applauded the testimony of defence witness Vojo Kupresanin, a former official from the Serb Democratic Party in Bosnia, who praised his courage and leadership during the 1992-95 war.
“It is the truth that this general sitting here stood up to defend the Serb people at the exact moment when all other Yugoslav army generals ran away,” Kupresanin testified.
“If it wasn’t for this general here, there wouldn’t be any trace of the Serb people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That is why the Serb people are grateful to general Mladic and they will talk about him forever and he will enter Serbian history as a positive person,” he said, after which Mladic started clapping.
Former Bosnian Serb military chief Mladic is accused of genocide in Srebrenica, the persecution of Muslims and Croats across Bosnia and Herzegovina, which reached genocidal proportions in seven municipalities, terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
Kupresanin, who was a senior Serb Democratic Party official in Bosanska Krajina, confirmed that Serb forces killed 68 non-Serbs in the village of Brisevo near Prijedor in July 1992.
“The truth is that they were not punished for it,” the witness said, but insisted that the crime, which is listed in Mladic’s indictment, didn’t happen during a Bosnian Serb military operation.
Kupresanin said that Bosnia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia was the cause of the war.
He said that the October 1991 declaration, which was adopted amid a boycott of the Sarajevo parliament by Serb MPs who opposed independence, was “unconstitutional” and “humiliated the Serb people”.
The trial continues.
