WELCOME TO IWPRS TRIBUNAL UPDATE No. 528, November 30, 2007 SERBIA UNLIKELY TO OPEN ARMY ARCHIVES SOON Despite increasing pressure from legal experts and human rights groups, Serbian officials say military documents will remain confidential for many years to come. By Slobodan Kostic in Belgrade
BOSNIA KEEN TO HOST ICTY ARCHIVE Sarajevo-based NGO representative says sending the archive anywhere else would amount to stealing history. By Brendan McKenna and Denis Dzidic in Sarajevo COURTSIDE COURT HEARS ALL ADULT BOSNIAKS IN HERCEG-BOSNA TREATED AS SOLDIERS A witness testifying at the trial of six Bosnian Croat officials claims the only crime of the detained Bosniaks was to be of working age. By Goran Jungvirth in Zagreb WITNESS CLAIMS TRBIC IDENTIFIED DEATH SITES Accused maintains, though, that he was tricked into revealing evidence of war crimes to investigators. By Brendan McKenna in Sarajevo DELIC DEFENSE BLAMES MILITARY COURTS FOR NOT PROSECUTING WAR CRIMES But a court official refutes the claims, saying he and his colleagues did a good job. By Simon Jennings in The Hague BRIEFLY NOTED GOTOVINAS PROVISIONAL RELEASE REQUEST REJECTED Tribunal judges decide risk of him absconding is too great. 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For more information about how you can support IWPR go to: http://www.iwpr.net/donate.html **** www.iwpr.net ******************************************************************** SERBIA UNLIKELY TO OPEN ARMY ARCHIVES SOON Despite increasing pressure from legal experts and human rights groups, Serbian officials say military documents will remain confidential for many years to come. By Slobodan Kostic in Belgrade International scholars, legal experts and rights activists have stepped up efforts to persuade Belgrade to open up the archives of armed forces and let them study the 1990s transcripts of its Supreme Defence Council, SDC, the highest military authority. Some of those transcripts have already been handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, where they were submitted as evidence in the trial of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, but most documents remain unavailable to historians and researchers. Experts believe that without these documents it is impossible to make any real conclusions on the role of Serbia in the conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia. At the SDC sessions in the Nineties, top officials mainly discussed security issues, but experts believe they also talked about helping Serb rebels in Bosnia and Croatia. Although many would like to get unimpeded access to these documents, Miladin Milosevic, director of the Archives of Serbia and Montenegro, says the files would not be thrown open any time soon. Those documents are available to the Hague tribunal, but not to researchers . Documents that belong to the highest national institutions cannot be available before the legal deadline has expired, which is 30 years, he said, drawing comparisons with many countries where confidential documents are not released for decades. In many countries, national institutions documents, including those relating to defence, security and foreign affairs, are not available for much longer periods of time, for 50 years and even longer. Belgrade, for example, refused to hand over the documents to the International Court of Justice when it was trying the accusations Bosnia made of genocide against Serbia. Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee in Serbia, believes the Serbian government had very close ties to Serb rebel forces in the other countries of the former Yugoslavia, and thus must share some of the blame for their crimes. She claims that the documents could well show that. The Hague tribunal prosecution and the Serbian government made a deal not to show those documents to experts and the public, because those transcripts clearly show that Serbia was deeply involved in the war in Bosnia, she said. The existence of such a deal between Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte and Belgrade has long been rumoured, but the spokeswoman for the ICTY denied it was possible. That is not and cannot be the responsibility of the tribunal or one of its bodies, including the prosecution. In accordance with the rules on procedures and evidence, only tribunal judges can make decisions on protection measures which would prevent the public display of documents, so any claim that the prosecution is involved in hiding evidence is completely false, said spokeswoman Olga Kavran. The Milosevic trial ended when he died in detention in The Hague in March last year, so those documents are no longer being used. Since Serbia was acquitted of genocide charges in the case brought to ICJ, rights activists wonder why Belgrade still insists on their confidentiality. Biserko said many members of the current Serbian government were involved in the activities of the 1990s, when led by Milosevic, and suspected that was a main reason why the documents are still held hidden from the public eye. Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power but his ideas survived, which is evident from the situation in which Serbia is today, she said. The Serbian government still hasnt given up on Republika Srpska or Kosovo, which shows it has not given up on Milosevics aspirations either, only now they are trying to reach them without open conflicts with the international community. Slobodan Kostic is a reporter with Radio Free Europe and IWPR journalist in Belgrade. BOSNIA KEEN TO HOST ICTY ARCHIVE Sarajevo-based NGO representative says sending the archive anywhere else would amount to stealing history. By Brendan McKenna and Denis Dzidic in Sarajevo Bosnians are pushing hard to have the permanent archive of International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, housed in Sarajevo, saying the iconic status gained by the city during the war makes it the perfect candidate. However, the court, which is due to close in 2010, would not be drawn on discussing the future home of its records. On November 23, members of the Bosnian state presidency met delegates from the United Nations commission tasked with investigating options for the archive. They argued for the documents to be stored in Sarajevo so they would be convenient for local officials investigating crimes. It would be irrational not to place the archive at the domestic judiciarys disposal, the officials said, in a statement released after the meeting held in the Bosnian capital. The delegates, however, countered that other courts and judicial organs in the world will still need access to the archives after 2010, according to the statement. Despite that, State Prosecutor Marinko Jurcevic said he still thought Sarajevo, as the most central of all the former Yugoslav capitals, was the obvious location for the archives. Its very important that all sides in the conflict have an equal ability to access the old files, Jurcevic told IWPR in an interview. If it should be located in the region, it should be in Sarajevo. The relocation of the archive will not be simple, whatever the outcome. Prosecutors have amassed millions of pages of evidence, and court sessions are recorded on thousands of hours of tapes. For ICTY spokesman Refik Hodzic, who attended the meeting, ensuring people have access to the documents is of great importance. The tribunal is placing a huge deal of importance on accessibility as one of the elements in this decision on where the archives will be stored, Hodzic told IWPR. It is of crucial importance for any future developments in transitional justice, be they prosecutorial or focused on establishing the truth, that archives of the tribunal are accessible to people here [in Sarajevo]. Florence Hartmann, a former spokeswoman for the ICTYs chief prosecutor, who also attended the meeting, said she believed security must be paramount. She suggested making copies for all the capitals in the region to ensure they could not be tampered with for political purposes. If you dont have the archives here, if you have them in a basement in Geneva or in The Hague or in New York then create a fund for those people to be able to get a hotel and work there, said Hartmann. But if you dont want to give money to the students, the historians, then you bring the archives here. But neither of those compromise solutions goes nearly far enough for Mirsad Tokaca, president of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre, who also met the delegation during their visit. If they send the archives to New York, if the archive will stay in the Netherlands I call that stolen history, he told IWPR in an interview. Sarajevo was besieged by Bosnian Serbs from 1992 to 1995, and its plight captured the attention of the world. That, he said, gave it the moral right to house the archive, It is our history, one of the most important parts of our history, although its a bloody one. Its a period in which terrible things happened and we should remember. Tokaca said he would not trust foreigners to keep the documents safe. He pointed to Hartmanns recent book Peace and Punishment, which provoked international controversy over claims of political interference in the apprehension and prosecution of indicted war criminals. He envisioned the archives forming the heart of a broader memorial for the wars of the early 1990s, which would be an important tool for helping the whole region come to terms with the past and promote reconciliation. This memorial could host conferences, be toured by school children and scholars and enable discussions that would be a far richer experience than sitting in front of a computer screen and reviewing the archives alone, he said. But he cautioned that the staff of the memorial must be kept absolutely free of political influences, especially Bosnian nationalists. If we hide the truth from the people of this region, we will have war again and again. We will have conflict again and again, he said. Without justice, without truth, there is no peace. There are no changes to the political situation. Brendan McKenna and Denis Dzidic are IWPR reporters. COURTSIDE COURT HEARS ALL ADULT BOSNIAKS IN HERCEG-BOSNA TREATED AS SOLDIERS A witness testifying at the trial of six Bosnian Croat officials claims the only crime of the detained Bosniaks was to be of working age. By Goran Jungvirth in Zagreb A Bosnian Croat on trial for war crimes at the Hague tribunal this week considered all Bosniak men between 18 and 65 to be potential soldiers who should be locked up, according to a man who used to negotiate for their release. Amor Masovic, director of Bosnias Institute for Missing Persons, told judges that he met the defendant Berislav Pusic around 50 times in the 1990s to discuss the hand-over of prisoners. Pusic is accused along with five other Bosnian Croats of conspiring to expel Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks, and other non-Croats from Herceg-Bosna, the area of Bosnia under the control of Croats between 1991 and 1994. Pusic was in charge of all prisons in the statelet, and the other defendants had various other leading roles. They are indicted for unlawful deportation, displacement and detention of civilians. Masovic described how former detainees had told him that prison camps in Herceg-Bosna were crammed with Bosniaks whose only crime was to be of working age. But not only them, in prisons were young men under 18 and some men older than 65 years, he said. He testified that at one point he didnt insist on the release of 13 Bosnian soldiers who had been captured during a Croat attack on the town of Mostar in May 1993 because he knew they were not alive any more, and did not want to hold up the release of another 1,000 men in Croat detention. The 13 men, who were shown by the prosecutor on a video taken shortly after their capture, were recently found in a mass grave. Masovic described how Pusic had been reluctant to free Bosniaks even though the 1994 Washington peace agreement required Herceg-Bosna authorities to do so. Croatian president Franjo Tudjman had to send a representative to the statelet to force the authorities to release the detainees, some of whom where on hunger strike at the time. The defence lawyers tried to demonstrate that the Bosnian government itself used illegal detention as a means to ethnically cleans and control the population. Masovic confirmed the Bosnian authorities had detained people of Croat ethnicity, but never to anything like this extent. He said no more than 1,100 Croats were detained on government-held territory. Despite these small numbers, he said Pusic publicly advocated the idea of moving all ethnic Croats into area under the control of Croat forces to prevent them being taken prisoner. Masovic did confirm that the government had sanctioned the removal of Bosniak civilians from their homes where it was determined that lives were under threat, a practice that he said the United Nations also advocated. The [UN] High Commissioner for Refugees pressured the government in Sarajevo to evacuate groups of endangered civilians but a moral dilemma got in the way, said Masovic. He said the government had not wanted to participate in ethnic cleansing via the exchange of civilians that was advocated by the Serbian side and later by Mr Pusic as well. The defence lawyers accused Masovic of being one-sided, and the lawyer for Jadranko Prlic, formerly the prime minister of Herceg-Bosna, said he would try to get the evidence ruled out. Slobodan Praljak, who is one of Pusics co-accused and was a general during the war, kept up the attack on the testimony and said many Serbs and Croats went missing during the siege of Sarajevo, and that many Serbs had been killed by Bosniaks in Srebrenica later to be the scene of the murder of 7,000 Muslim men and boys. Masovic confirmed that around 320 Bosnian Serbs are still missing from Sarajevo, according to their families. Lawyer Senka Nozica, who is defending ex-Herceg Bosna defence minister Bruno Stojic, confronted Masovic with the conclusions of the case of Hadjihasanovic and Kubura, where the court ruled that Bosnian government forces had indulged in the mass detention of Croat civilians. Nozica singled out the case of the village of Mehurici, where 250 civilians were imprisoned to be exchanged for Croat-held prisoners. After Masovics testimony, the trial continued in closed session. Goran Jungvirth is an IWPR journalist in Zagreb. WITNESS CLAIMS TRBIC IDENTIFIED DEATH SITES Accused maintains, though, that he was tricked into revealing evidence of war crimes to investigators. By Brendan McKenna in Sarajevo A war crimes investigator told a Bosnian court this week that a former Bosnian Serb army officer accused of involvement in the massacre at Srebrenica showed him the sites of murders and pointed out where mass graves had been. Alistair Graham, a former senior investigator with the Hague tribunal, told judges that Milorad Trbic led him and another tribunal investigator on a tour of sites in and around Srebrenica where some 8,000 Bosniak men were detained, killed and buried in mass graves. However, the defence team argued that the conversations described by Graham were held after Trbic had been assured he was being treated only as a witness and would not face prosecution. They also said their client had been pressured into identifying the mass grave sites. Trbic, a former captain in the security detachment of the Zvornik Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, VRS, is accused of conspiring with others, including top war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, to kill men from Srebrenica who had either surrendered or been captured. He is also accused of trying to conceal the killings by reburying bodies exhumed from mass graves. He was initially indicted by the Hague tribunal for genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, extermination, murder and persecution for his role in the ethnic cleansing of Srebrenica and the murder of the Bosniak men and boys. The case was transferred from the Hague tribunal to the War Crimes Chamber of the Bosnian state court in April. In his testimony this week, Graham denied making any promises that Trbic was safe from prosecution, and said he had advised the Bosnian Serb of his rights to have a lawyer present and to refuse to answer questions in relation to events at Srebrenica. He said he warned Trbic many times that he could be treated as a suspect under the jurisdiction of the Hague tribunal. I believe he fully understood the questions and answered of his own free will, said Graham. As photographs from the trip were displayed on computer monitors in the court, Graham said that Trbic had identified a stadium wall bearing bullet marks, in front of which he said Bosniak prisoners had been shot. The accused had also identified several mass grave sites, he said, although these locations were already known to the tribunal. According to the witness, Trbic also identified mass grave sites which were not known to the court. But subsequent forensic testing turned up no evidence to verify his claims. While Graham insisted that Trbic led the investigators to the sites, the accuseds lawyer Milan Mladojevic said his client insisted that it was them who had led him there. During cross examination, Trbic tried to show the court that he had been pressured by Graham. He alleged that the former investigator told him he could continue to live peacefully after telling the investigators what he knew. Judge Patricia Whalen asked Graham if he had ever promised Trbic anything in return for his testimony. The witness strenuously denied this. Absolutely not. I never gave guarantees such as that, which would have been way beyond any authority I had, said Graham. Miodrag Dragutinovic, former deputy chief of staff for operations and planning in the Zvornik brigade, also testified this week. He told the court about the military structure of the brigade, its practices and military duties, as well as the reaction of its commander after the fall of Srebrenica. Dragutinovic maintained that both he and the brigade commander were away from headquarters during the executions of Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica. He said they had arranged safe passage for civilians from areas controlled by the encircled Bosnian governments 28th division to other government-controlled territory. It was only after they returned to the brigade headquarters that they discovered there were 3,000 Bosniak prisoners and an additional 7,000 in the woods, and he and his commander sent off a communique of protest to their superiors, he said. The commander protested that with all of his other problems the Zvornik brigade was now burdened with the prisoners of war," said Dragutinovic. Brendan McKenna is an IWPR reporter. DELIC DEFENSE BLAMES MILITARY COURTS FOR NOT PROSECUTING WAR CRIMES But a court official refutes the claims, saying he and his colleagues did a good job. By Simon Jennings in The Hague Lawyers for a Bosnian general accused of not investigating the murders of Croat and Serb civilians and prisoners of war sought to show this week that the army had reported the crimes, and that he could not be blamed if no probe had followed. At the time relevant to the indictment, from 1993-95, General Rasim Delic was commander-in-chief of the Bosnian army and, as such, according to prosecutors, ultimately responsible for the El Mujahed detachment, which was largely made up of foreign Muslim volunteers, or mujahedin. According to the indictment, mujahedin killed a number of Bosnian Croat and Serb prisoners in Central Bosnia. Some of these crimes were committed in the villages of Bikosi and Maline. The indictment further alleges that despite knowing about the murders, Delic did not have them properly investigated or bring the perpetrators to justice. Muris Hadziselimovic, who was a deputy district military prosecutor in Zenica, Central Bosnia, in 1995, told the Hague tribunal that no such crimes were reported to the prosecutor. The witness backed the conclusion of a report which referred to archived documents in the military prosecutors office in Zenica. According to this document, no crimes against Croats or Serbs were reported to have taken place in the villages of Bikosi and Maline or other parts of Central Bosnia. Hundreds of foreign fighters, many of whom had seen action in Afghanistan, volunteered to fight for the Bosnian government in the war, when Bosnian army forces fought both Croats and Serbs. They operated in several units, some of which were largely autonomous and have been accused of mistreating prisoners and civilians. The indictment alleges that mujahedin executed more than 40 Bosnian Croats by firing squad at Bikosi and that the mujahedin also ran the Kamenica camp where prisoners were mistreated and murdered. Alleged abuses include administering beatings, electric shocks and decapitation. The witness said he did not know why there were no criminal reports relating to the crimes committed across Central Bosnia among the documents, and that he had only found out about them from the international war crimes investigators. During her cross-examination of the witness, the defence counsel for the accused, Vasvija Vidovic, said the prosecutors report was not a definitive record of all the criminal cases. She insisted some cases involving the foreign Muslim volunteers had actually been brought to trial. The witness countered by saying that criminal reports received by the military prosecutors office were carefully registered. Everything that ever reached the prosecutors office was recorded, he said. But Vidovic then pointed out that a box of 22 cases had been found in the archives that had gone unregistered. Acknowledging the existence of these 22 unlogged cases, Hadziselimovic still maintained that the registers are accurate Everything that ever reached the prosecutors office was recorded with the exception of this one box. To which Vidovic asked, Then how can you tell us we have accurate registers? She went on to argue that Hadziselimovic had received a report about burying corpses of Croats killed in Maline in June 1993, but that the event was never actually recorded. The inference being there were obviously events that were not recorded by the prosecutors office, she said. Simon Jennings is an IWPR reporter in The Hague. BRIEFLY NOTED GOTOVINAS PROVISIONAL RELEASE REQUEST REJECTED Tribunal judges decide risk of him absconding is too great. By Merdijana Sadovic in Sarajevo Tribunal judges this week denied Ante Gotovinas request for provisional release, saying they were not convinced that he would return to The Hague for his trial. In their response to Gotovinas request to be allowed to return to his hometown of Pakostane pending trial, which was filed in August this year, the judges pointed out that he had not surrendered to the tribunal voluntarily and also that he had actively evaded arrest for a significant period of time. Although Gotovina agreed to remain under house arrest, judges decided the risk of him absconding would be too great, since the accused had already proven his ability and determination to avoid arrest. Gotovina also proposed to wear an electronic tag at all times, which would enable the police to track his whereabouts and would immediately alert them to any violation of the terms of his house arrest. However, in their decision announced this week, the judges said this device would have a limited effect to prevent an escape and would not eliminate the flight risk as it would merely help to determine that the accused has escaped. The Croatian general is indicted for war crimes committed against Serb civilians during the Croatian military offensive Operation Storm of 1995. He was arrested in December 2005 in the Canary Islands after being on the run for four years, and has been in the Hague detention unit ever since. Gotovinas submission for provisional request was supported by a guarantee given by the Croatian government, signed by Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, that Gotovina would return in time for his trial and would not pose a danger to anyone. This week, tribunal judges agreed to allow six former Bosnian Croat officials currently on trial for war crimes to return home during the tribunals winter break, scheduled to start on December 17. The six former high-level officials of the Bosnian Croat wartime entity Herceg-Bosna are on trial for their alleged responsibility for war crimes against Bosnian Muslims and other non-Croats from areas in south-western and central Bosnia during the countrys 1992-95 war. Jadranko Prlic, Bruno Stojic, Slobodan Praljak, Milivoj Petkovic, Valentin Coric and Berislav Pusic surrendered voluntarily to the tribunal in April 2004, and their trial started two years later. The prosecutions case should be wrapped up on January 24, 2008, and the defences case is set to commence in March. Provisional release was also granted this week to former Bosnian army chief General Rasim Delic, who surrendered voluntarily to the tribunal in February 2005. Delic will be allowed to spend the winter holidays with his family in Bosnia and will return to the court on January 11. Merdijana Sadovic is IWPRs tribunal programme manager. **** www.iwpr.net ******************************************************************** TRIBUNAL UPDATE, the publication arm of IWPR's International Justice Project, produced since 1996, details the events and issues at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, at The Hague. These weekly reports, produced by IWPR's human rights and media training project, seek to contribute to regional and international understanding of the war crimes prosecution process. The opinions expressed in Tribunal Update are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the publication or of IWPR. Tribunal Update is supported by the European Commission, the Dutch Ministry for Development and Cooperation, the Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and other funders. IWPR also acknowledges general support from the Ford Foundation. TRIBUNAL UPDATE: Editor-in-Chief: Anthony Borden; Managing Editor: Yigal Chazan; Senior Editor: John MacLeod; International Justice Senior Editor: Merdijana Sadovic; Translation: Predrag Brebanovic, and others; Project Director: Duncan Furey. IWPR Project Development and Support: Executive Director: Anthony Borden; Strategy & Assessment Director: Alan Davis; Chief Programme Officer: Mike Day. **** www.iwpr.net ******************************************************************** IWPR builds democracy at the frontlines of conflict and change through the power of professional journalism. IWPR programs provide intensive hands-on training, extensive reporting and publishing, and ambitious initiatives to build the capacity of local media. Supporting peace-building, development and the rule of law, IWPR gives responsible local media a voice. 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