Courtside: Stakic Trial

Defence counsel Branko Lukic said, “Rumours are spreading that defense witnesses are badly treated before this court."

He explained that witnesses were deterred by the fact that the presiding judge Wolfgang Schomburg often reminds those who are testifying that they promised to speak "nothing but the truth" or else they risk being found in contempt of the court.

“Almost every defence witness received such warnings, whereas none of the prosecution witnesses has been warned in this way, although it has been established for twenty of them that they did not tell the truth in the courtroom,” Lukic said.

Judge Schomburg said the chamber "has understood that some of the witnesses deliberately forgot about the crimes they knew about”.

But he added, "If a witness changes his or her testimony within few minutes, it is the duty of the judges to remind them of the consequences of an untruthful testimony."

Schomburg last week warned two witnesses that in case of untruthful testimony they can be fined with 100,000 euro and/or imprisoned for up to seven years, and urged them to “think it over whether they wanted to change their testimonies”.

One witness, former head of police telecommunications in Prijedor, Milos Jankovic, claimed he knew nothing about the work of the local crisis staff or Stakic's connection with police chief Simo Drljaca.

Even after he was reminded by the judge that he was the man “who received various orders and decisions”, Jankovic persisted in his claim that he “did not read” the documents he received.

Another witness, Stakic's former secretary Stoja Radakovic, at first claimed the police chief Drljaca “was not visiting Stakic's office".

Later, however, she remembered that Drljaca did, indeed, attend and remembered that he and Stakic had "a bitter verbal fight" in the latter’s office.

Milomir Stakic, former head of crisis staff, is accused of genocide against the Muslim and Croatian population of that municipality.

His defence is presenting evidence to prove that Stakic did not control or even cooperate with either the army or the police.

The prosecution used Stakic's statement from 1992, in which he characterised Muslims "as an artificially created nation" to prove his participation in a discriminatory propaganda leading to ethnic cleansing.

Cedomir Vila, former delegate in the municipal assembly of Prijedor, explained to the trial chamber that what Stakic had in mind was “the historical origin and genesis of the Muslim people in Bosnia and Hercegovina” according to which Muslims were Islamicised Serbs and Croats.

"I do not think that Dr Stakic said it with discriminatory intentions," said Vila.

Vjera Bogati is an IWPR correspondent in The Hague and a journalist with SENSE news agency.