Court Hears of Serb Paramilitary Looting
Bosnian Serb witness describes how militia groups were able to steal from civilians.
Court Hears of Serb Paramilitary Looting
Bosnian Serb witness describes how militia groups were able to steal from civilians.
A former Bosnian Serb police chief testifying in the Hague tribunal trial of Radovan Karadzic said last week that Serbian paramilitary formations were permitted to enter and loot residential areas because of their personal and political connections.
“What kind of political connections would these units have had to go into areas of [Bosnian Serb] military control?” prosecuting lawyer Carolyn Edgerton asked.
“They didn’t need to have any other ties other than those based on personal friendship for them to come to a certain area,” responded prosecution witness Tihomir Glavas, who was appointed chief of police in the Hadzici municipality, south-west of Sarajevo, after it was taken over by Bosnian Serb forces in April 1992.
In August of that year, he was transferred to Ilidza, where he served as deputy chief of the security services.
Glavas added that because of these “personal friendships” there was “no need for any subordination or leadership from any state organs” when it came to which paramilitaries would be allowed where.
“Those [paramilitary units] were welcomed under [certain] circumstances,” Glavas said. “Very soon we realised we didn’t have much use [for] these men … we came into conflict with these formations due to some of their activities. They never wanted to go to the separation lines in forests, but preferred to go into residential areas.”
“You say the reason they went into those areas was so they could steal and loot,” Edgerton said. “How did you know they were stealing and looting?
“At the time it was a generally known thing,” Glavas replied. “It was a show of force on their part. We had terrible problems. We could not oppose them because they threatened us with weapons.”
“What happened to loot they acquired?” Edgerton asked.
“It was basically used for their own purposes,” Glavas said.
Glavas went on to speak about the late president of the municipality and local crisis staff in Hadzici, Ratko Radic.
“In his capacity as crisis staff head, was he subordinate to any organ or individual?” Edgerton asked.
“I think that the crisis staff in every municipality acted independently and … it [had] the authority to take all decisions in its area of responsibility,” Glavas said.
Glavas said that Radic would talk about meetings he had with Karadzic.
“After a while, I gained the impression that he was misinforming us or abusing his contact with Dr Karadzic, due to the fact that when he was so keen to implement his [own] ideas, he would say he had discussed and agreed those things with Dr Karadzic,” Glavas said.
Glavas added that Radic would “say one thing to us and do something completely different”.
When it was Karadzic’s turn to cross-examine the witness, he asked a number of questions regarding politics in the former Yugoslavia.
“These questions more or less have to do with high-level politics,” Glavas remarked at one point. “I was never a politician—I was an ordinary policeman.”
“Did Serbs take over the entire municipality or just their own part?” Karadzic asked later on.
Glavas confirmed that it was just the Serb parts. At one point, he spoke at length about the involvement of Croatian forces in the conflict between the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosniaks.
“This evidence has gone so far from being relevant,” Edgerton interjected.
“This is a prosecution witness, right?” presiding judge O-Gon Kwon asked.
After Glavas finished his testimony, two witnesses testified about events in the Novi Grad municipality. Earlier in the week, a victim of sniper fire in Sarajevo, Sanija Dzevlan, had also testified.
Prosecutors allege that Karadzic, the president of Bosnia's self-declared Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1996, is responsible for crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer which “contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory”.
He is also accused of planning and overseeing the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left nearly 12,000 people dead, as well as the massacre of some 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in July 2008 after 13 years on the run.
The trial will continue this week, but will be suspended from March 21 until May 5 so Karadzic can review a large amount of material the prosecution recently disclosed to him.
Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.
