Reluctant Witness Implicates Krajisnik
Defendant said to have put pressure on Bosnian Serb official to destroy Banja Luka’s mosques.
Reluctant Witness Implicates Krajisnik
Defendant said to have put pressure on Bosnian Serb official to destroy Banja Luka’s mosques.
The trial of former top Bosnian Serb official Momcilo Krajisnik was dominated this week by the testimony of an important insider witness, who described the accused as “a skilful leader” and reluctantly implicated him in ethnic cleansing in the north-western Bosnian town of Banja Luka.
Predrag Radic, wartime president of the Banja Luka municipal assembly and de facto mayor of the town, showed obvious contempt for the proceedings and even earned himself a stern warning about perjury from presiding judge Alphons Orie.
The witness admitted he had been admonished for not properly cleansing Banja Luka of its non-Serb citizens at a meeting with Krajisnik and the Bosnian Serb war-time leader Radovan Karadzic. And he grudgingly confirmed testimony he gave at a previous Hague trial, which suggests that the defendant put pressure on him to destroy the town’s mosques.
Radic first appeared at the tribunal in November 2003 as a defence witness in the trial of Radoslav Brdjanin, a senior Bosnian Serb official who was recently sentenced to 32 years in prison for ethnic cleansing in the north east of the country.
This week he was called by the prosecution – and his reluctant answers and defiant posture made it quite clear he was far from happy with the situation.
The 63-year-old Radic has good reason to feel awkward in the presence of tribunal judges. He was one of the highest-ranking Bosnian Serb officials in Banja Luka at a time when thousands of the town’s Muslims and Croats were evicted, their homes and shops looted and all 16 of the area’s mosques destroyed.
In an interview published in the Banja Luka weekly magazine Nezavisne Novine in 1999, Radic said he thought he himself had been indicted for war crimes, although tribunal prosecutors never confirmed this suspicion.
Radic tried to present himself throughout his testimony this week as a moderate politician. And the court heard excerpts from two interviews between Radic and tribunal investigators in 2001 and 2002, in which Radic insisted that Banja Luka was “an oasis of peace” in war-torn Bosnia and said it was his duty to do everything he could to maintain “harmony” in the town.
But prosecutor Alan Tieger played a video from a rally held in Banja Luka in the summer of 1994, which featured a speaker, whose voice Radic identified as that of the defendant Krajisnik.
“We want to separate [from Muslims and Croats] because we can not live together with them… It would take a big war to force us to live together,” Krajisnik was heard saying. “We want our own state.”
The defendant listened carefully to his own words, playing with his glasses and gazing ahead.
When asked about his own experiences with the Bosnian Serb leadership during the war, Radic became evasive. He said that during one meeting with Krajisnik and Karadzic, a complaint was voiced that Banja Luka had not been “properly cleansed”, and that there were “still too many Muslims and Croats living in the town”.
But when the prosecutor pressed him to clarify exactly who it was that said that, Radic dismissed the statement as a “common complaint” made by “lots of people”.
In the end, he grudgingly admitted that it was Karadzic who had said it.
But when Judge Orie and defence counsel Nicholas Stewart put the same question to the witness, his answers appeared to vary. At one point he claimed the meeting in question had never actually taken place.
After a while, Judge Orie’s patience apparently ran out. He described Radic’s various answers as “difficult to reconcile”, and underlined that if one were not true, “this could be understood as false testimony”.
The witness subsequently said the complaints hadn’t been made at a “sit-down meeting”, but during a rather less formal discussion.
Prosecutors scored a more direct blow against Krajisnik by forcing Radic to implicate the defendant as being part of a group putting pressure on him to destroy Banja Luka’s 16 mosques, including the 410-year-old Ferhad Pahsa complex.
Radic claimed he had resisted pressure to destroy the mosques in the early months of the war. And prosecutors produced a transcript from his earlier testimony in which he said “everybody, even those in the highest authority” had criticised their continued existence.
In another section of the transcript, Radic was asked whether those “in the highest authority” included Karadzic and Krajisnik. He is recorded as replying, “They are wise enough not to say it out loud, but they had their emissaries who they sent [to Banja Luka] all the time.”
When Tieger asked Radic to confirm the truth of this earlier statement, the witness pressed his lips together hard and then half-heartedly replied, “If that’s what is written there, then it’s true.”
The trial continues next week.
Merdijana Sadovic is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.
