New Twist in Deronjic Trial

Weeks after he thought the proceedings against him were finished, top Bosnian Serb politician Miroslav Deronjic was unexpectedly summoned for an additional hearing later last week, throwing yet another twist into a case that has already roused considerable controversy at the tribunal

In a surprisingly tense court session on March 5, the judges said they had doubts about whether Deronjic knew exactly what he was pleading guilty to when signing the controversial plea agreement with the prosecutor’s office last autumn.

The judges also said that the proceedings held so far had failed to paint a clear picture of Deronjic’s role in, and responsibility for, the events he was accused of, and added they still had misgivings about contradictions between his guilty plea and the numerous statements he gave in the trials in which he testified so far.

The heated courtroom exchanges fuelled the on-going debate over plea agreements and exposed other structural problems that the tribunal is grappling with - most notably the deep differences between the proponents of the continental and Anglo-Saxon legal systems.

Deronjic, 49, was accused of persecuting Bosnian Muslims in the eastern Bosnian village of Glogova in May 1992. At the time, he was head of the Bosnian Serb local administration in the Bratunac municipality – the so-called crisis staff. He allegedly ordered the attack on the village, which had already been systematically disarmed. Almost 2,000 of its inhabitants were expelled and 65 unarmed men were executed.

In September 2003, Deronjic signed a plea agreement with the prosecutor’s office in which he admitted to persecution, a crime against humanity. He also agreed to testify against other political and military officials on trial at the tribunal and provided an extensive, 70-page witness statement about events in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia from early 1991 through 1996. In exchange, the prosecution recommended a reduced sentence of 10 years.

Since pleading guilty, Deronjic slowly became one of the most significant witnesses for the prosecution in many high-profile trials, including that of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and one of the top Bosnian Serb leaders, Momcilo Krajisnik.

During his testimony, he described in detail the complex political preparations the Serb leadership made in order to ethnically cleanse much of Bosnia in the spring and summer 1992 and he directly implicated Belgrade in the arming of the Bosnian Serbs.

He also provided substantial details on the worst crime of the Bosnia war - the 1995 summary executions of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys around Srebrenica in 1995.

But there were some inconsistencies in his testimony and the information he provided in his plea agreement, and this provoked the judges to question whether or not Dernonjic knew what he was doing when he pleaded guilty to the massacre in Glogova.

In his plea, Deronjic said that although he did not physically kill any of the 65 murdered civilians, he was responsible for their deaths. “Given the purpose and objective of the attack, the existing political climate, and the units that were to participate in, it was foreseeable to him and he was prepared to take the risk, that innocent Muslim residents of Glogova could be murdered,” stated the plea agreement.

However, when testifying against Krajisnik, Deronjic said that he had not even known for certain that the killings actually took place until tribunal prosecutors told him in the late 1990s.

Prior to that, he said he had heard about the killings in Glogova only second hand, or even “from a book” he had read some years after the attack.

“Some inquiry was done by my lawyers in the course of the preparation of my defence, and then we learned .. that there were killings, and we even discovered the location where it happened. However, we were not able to get any firm proof, and I accepted the allegation of the Prosecutor,” Deronjic said.

In other testimony, as well as in interviews with prosecutors, Deronjic said that he “did not consider himself directly responsible” for what happened in Glogova and “never ordered or wished that people be killed”.

These discrepancies prompted the presiding judge, Wolfgang Schomburg, to question whether the plea agreement was equivocal and informed. Schomburg also questioned whether Deronjic was as culpable as he stated in the plea agreement.

“If he only learnt that people were killed from books it’s difficult to ascertain that he had the necessary state of mind before the murders were committed [to imagine that they would result from the attack he ordered],” Schomburg said, expressing his concern that the bench could not sentence an innocent person.

But in a striking show of unanimity, both the prosecutors and the defence stood firm behind the guilty plea. Deronjic himself remained silent, although showing clear signs of nervousness.

It wasn’t hard to see why.

After Schomburg questioned whether Deronjic was responsible for the killings in Glogova, the judge suggested that the accused might have been involved in crimes for which he was not indicted.

Schomburg pointed out that in the prosecution’s initial indictment, Deronjic was accused of being present at the spot where some of the executions took place – an allegation that does not appear in the second amended indictment.

The mention of this episode sparked another show of solidarity between the defence and the prosecution who launched a joint rebuke and complained that if these claims were provable, they would have been present in the current, second amended indictment.

The judge complained that it was unusually difficult for him to sentence a man for a crime with a wide factual and political background, which suddenly gets limited to only one episode of a much bigger picture.

In his interviews with the prosecutors, Deronjic described that the expulsions continued in the days after the Glogova attack in the whole Bratunac area. He also mentioned that not all residents of Glogova were expelled and released in the Muslim-held territory, but that some were taken prisoner and brought to the Bosnian Serb capital, Pale. Their fate remains unclear.

When both the defence and the prosecutors admonished Schomburg for citing some of these sentences “out of context”, the judge appeared to grow angry.

“Out of context is the word I just wanted to use myself,” Schomburg replied, before launching into a criticism of the way the prosecutors handled the indictment.

“It is very difficult to identify why you stopped at this crime when much more serious crimes were committed later in the municipality of Bratunac,” he said, referring the Glogova massacre. “The events continued and we have no gist of what happened to the population of Glogova in its entirety.”

This exchange reached into the very heart of one of the key issue that the court seems to be struggling with – the differences in approach between the representatives of continental, or civil law traditions and the Anglo-Saxon, or common law tradition.

The tribunal’s rules and procedures are a hybrid of the two systems, but their application depends very much on the legal background of the key participants in a particular trial.

With the looming closure of the tribunal in 2008, the common law approach seems to be taking the upper hand in one crucial aspect: that which provides for plea agreements as an expeditious way of disposing of a case. In comparison, the civil law approach, which aims to establish the truth in a case, appears time consuming and expensive.

Responding to Schomburg’s criticism, prosecutor Mark Harmon reminded the court that limited but easily provable indictment to which Deronjic pleaded guilty was a good way to fulfil the tribunal’s mandate within the existing time and financial constraints.

“We could have made a wider indictment that would take 25 months of trial to prove and use huge resources of this tribunal, constrain other trials and prevent the prosecution of other equally or more important cases,” Harmon said, adding that the other option was to have an limited indictment that saves resources and still covers an important enough event.

Harmon said the second option seemed to be more in the spirit of the tribunal.

However, many at the court have questioned why Deronjic was not indicted for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. When testifying against two of the Bosnian Serb officers on trial for the massacres, Deronjiic appeared to implicate himself in the killings.

His testimony appeared so self-incriminating that Schomburg was compelled to inquire both at the initial and the additional sentencing hearing whether the prosecution had made any promise to Deronjic not to indict him for Srebrenica in exchange for his testimony.

Deronjic, somewhat calmer than he was when the hearing commenced, thanked the court for making an additional effort to “establish the truth” and apologised for causing them problems with his inconsistencies.

Before proceedings concluded, both the prosecution and the defence restated their sentencing recommendations – ten and six years respectively.

Judge Schomburg told them his chamber would try to hand down sentence at the end of March, but warned the sides not to be surprised if it takes longer.

Ana Uzelac is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.