Bosnian Serb President Defends Mladic on War Crimes

“I can say today that I am totally confident that the official policy of that time was not ethnic cleansing,” Dodik told the UN-backed court in The Hague on Monday.

Now president of Republika Srpska, Dodik was a lawmaker during the war in the entity’s parliament, although not a member of the governing Serb Democratic Party founded by Radovan Karadzic.

Asked by Mladic’s lawyer Branko Lukic if he ever heard of a plan to expel Muslims and Croats from Republika Srpska, Dodik replied: “No, that was never given as a goal.”

On the contrary, Dodik said that there “were attempts to involve Bosniaks and Croats in the Assembly of Republika Srpska”.

Asked about the fact that the Republika Srpska Assembly adopted a strategic goal during the war to separate itself from Bosniaks and Croats, Dodik said that “the separation was already ongoing in 1992 – the Muslims and Croats had politically and institutionally separated themselves”.

“We never said the Serbs did not want an agreement and consensus with the other two peoples. It was not our intention to divide ourselves based on ethnic cleansing and killings,” he added.

Although he did not deny that killings did take place later, Dodik said that “no political decision was made with the goal of physically separating the Serbs from all the others”.

Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, is charged with the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats in territories under Serb control, which allegedly reached the scale of genocide in several municipalities.

He is also on trial for genocide in Srebrenica, terrorising the inhabitants of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

During his testimony on Monday, Dodik also claimed that the Bosnian war was caused by the “unconstitutional secession of the Muslims and Croats from Yugoslavia, despite the objections of the Serbs”.

Dodik alleged that the wartime leader of the Bosniak Party for Democratic Action, the first Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic, was a “religious radical” whose extreme views led to the war breaking out.

During cross-examination, prosecutor Alan Tieger insisted however that the Bosnian Muslims were a “very European people and not religious fanatics”.

Dodik replied: “Maybe that’s how you see it, but why did they follow Izetbegovic and his politics? I am not saying all Muslims are radical, but Izetbegovic’s politics were widely accepted. They knew about his extreme religious views.”

The prosecution will continue cross-examining Dodik on Tuesday.