Krajisnik is charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide for his alleged role in a campaign to drive the non-Serb population from large swathes of Bosnia in 1991 and 1992.
Stjepan Kljuic – a former member of the Bosnian presidency – confirmed in court in September that the accused was one of the key figures behind the plan to carve out ethnically pure Serb territories in Bosnia and join them with other Serb-ruled territories in the former Yugoslavia.
He also told the court that the accused was kept well-informed about how the campaign was progressing.
Defence counsel have argued that a lack of communication between local authorities and the headquarters of Krajisnik’s Serb Democratic Party, SDS, in Pale meant he was often ignorant of what was happening elsewhere in the country.
Later in the week, judges heard from another prosecution witness, a Sarajevo-based reporter who – while not specifically mentioning Krajisnik himself – attested to the fact that he had personally seen another important member of the Bosnian Serb leadership on the ground in an area where key developments were taking place.
In the event, the beginning of Kljuic’s cross-examination this week took a rather surreal turn as defence counsel Nicholas Stewart set about questioning the witness on how his luggage got lost in transit from Vienna to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.
Besides Kljuic’s own clothes and personal belongings, the suitcase also apparently contained notes the witness had taken from various meetings he and Krajisnik took part in just before the war broke out.
The defence had planned to build a large part of their cross-examination around these papers, and a clearly dismayed Stewart sought to have the questioning postponed further until they had been found.
“Your Honour, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, frankly,” he told Presiding Judge Alphons Orie.
But the request was denied.
In his first round of testimony last September, Kljuic – who at one stage was also president of the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, party in Bosnia – appeared respectful of Krajisnik, describing him as a “really serious, measured personality”.
This week, he confirmed in court that his relations with the accused were “very correct, apart from several key meetings where we disagreed on the issue of the general policy to be pursued in respect of Bosnia”.
He said Krajisnik – who he praised for his “serious approach to work” – was the “driving force of the SDS party” and the brain behind it. And he said the accused was probably responsible for producing all its key documents, including its statute.
In comparison to Krajisnik, he said, the SDS party founder and president Radovan Karadzic – who is still at large having been indicted by the tribunal – was “more of a spokesperson who liked to appear in public”.
The witness described Karadzic, whose behaviour was “very infantile and rude”, as “a priori against any Bosnia and Hercegovina”.
Among the most significant aspects of Kljuic’s testimony in September was his evidence that Krajisnik was kept up-to-date on developments on the ground by top Bosnian Serb military officials, including Hague fugitive General Ratko Mladic.
“Obviously, he was well informed if the chief commander of the Serb army was reporting to him and seeking instructions very often, if not every day,” Kljuic told judges last year.
Quoting from this part of his testimony in court this week, Stewart demanded to know how the witness had come to this conclusion.
“When I said every day, that was my assumption,” Kljuic said. “As for the rest, they are based on intercepts I heard here in The Hague and in Sarajevo.”
Later in the week, reporter Sead Omeragic testified about his visit to Bijeljina on April 4, 1992 along with Krajisnik’s close associate Biljana Plavsic – who pleaded guilty at the tribunal two years ago to persecution, a crime against humanity, for her own role during the war.
A special Muslim-Serb delegation from Sarajevo was supposed to investigate the situation in Bijeljina, following media reports that the town had been taken over by ethnic Serb forces led by the notorious Serbian paramilitary commander Zeljko Raznatovic, also known as Arkan.
Though Krajisnik’s name didn’t come up during the questioning of this second witness, prosecutors apparently hoped to show through his evidence that the Bosnian Serb leadership as a whole were well-informed about events on the ground right from the beginning of the war.
Several video tapes from the day of the April 4 visit were played in court, including one showing a meeting of civilian and military officials in Bijeljina city hall, at which Arkan appeared in person.
In another video, shot the same day, Plavsic was depicted giving Arkan a kiss and thanking him “for saving local Serbs from being massacred by the town’s Muslims”.
Prosecutors issued an indictment against Arkan in September 1997, but the document was still under seal when he was assassinated in Belgrade in January 2000.
Merdijana Sadovic is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.
