Belgrade ‘Supported Creation of Bosnian Serb State’

Radosa Milutinovic

The prosecution’s expert witness, US historian Robert Donia, told the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Tuesday that the authorities in Serbia and Bosnia’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity shared the same goal during the war but had different strategies for achieving it.

Donia said the difference lay in the fact that Slobodan Milosevic’s administration in Belgrade wanted to accept peace plans that would “gradually lead to creation of a homogenous Serbian state in Bosnia”, while Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic wanted the territories taken through ethnic cleansing to be recognised as part of a Serb state immediately.

Donia said the goals they shared included a “demographic and political” separation of Serbs from Bosniaks and Croats, the connection of Serb territories in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to Serbia via the Posavski corridor, the removal of “the border between Serbs” along the River Drina that runs along Serbia’s border, and the division of Sarajevo.

Donia claimed that towards the end of 1991, Stanisic was already aware of the Bosnian Serbs’ intention to create their own state and supported it.

As evidence, he cited an intercepted conversation between Stanisic and Karadzic after the Serb assembly in Bosnia had “undertaken preparations” to declare Republika Srpska a republic in December 1991.

“You have got the republic,” Donia quoted Stanisic as saying.

Jovica Stanisic, the former chief of the Serbian State Security Service, and his deputy, Franko Simatovic, are accused of participating in a joint criminal enterprise aimed at permanently and forcibly removing Croats and Bosniaks from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which would then be incorporated into a unified Serb state.

They are charged with having responsibility for the persecution, murders, deportation and forcible transfer of non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The prosecutors allege that the joint criminal enterprise was led by the former Serbian President Milosevic, while other protagonists included Karadzic and Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic.

The defendants both pleaded not guilty in December 2015 after the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia overturned their acquittal in their first trial.

The appeals chamber ruled 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.

Donia also testified on Tuesday that the establishment of separate Serb authorities in Bosnia was rooted in the creation of a union of Serb municipalities in the spring of 1991, which soon turned into Serb autonomous regions.

He described how Serb parliamentarians then formed a separate assembly after Bosniak and Croat delegates in the Bosnian parliament adopted a declaration on sovereignty in October 1991.

Prosecutor Douglas Stringer cited Karadzic’s speech in which he “begged” the majority of delegates not to do it, warning them that it would lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into the “hell” of war, in which Bosniaks would “disappear”.

Stanisic and Simatovic’s lawyers will cross-examine Donia on Wednesday.