International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia



  1. 1 Tuesday, 5th May 1998.

    2 --- Upon commencing at 9.11 a.m.

    3 (In open session)

    4 JUDGE RODRIGUES: Good morning, ladies and

    5 gentlemen. Good morning, interpreters and

    6 technicians. Are you ready? Thank you.

    7 Before beginning with this matter before us,

    8 please remind us about the matter we have before us.

    9 THE REGISTRAR: This is case IT-95-14/1-T, the

    10 Prosecutor against Mr. Zlatko Aleksovski.

    11 JUDGE RODRIGUES: I see now, Mr. Prosecutor,

    12 you have Mr. Niemann, I see, in the Prosecution.

    13 MR. NIEMANN: If Your Honour pleases, my name

    14 is Niemann. I appear with my colleagues, Mr. Meddegoda

    15 and Ms. Sutherland for the Prosecution.

    16 JUDGE RODRIGUES: And for the defence,

    17 Mr. Mikulicic?

    18 MR. MIKULICIC: Good morning, Your Honours.

    19 My name is Goran Mikulicic, and together with my

    20 counsel, co-counsel, Mr. Joka, we act on behalf of the

    21 accused.

    22 JUDGE RODRIGUES: Before beginning, we were

    23 informed that it would be appropriate for the Defence

    24 and for the Prosecution that we change the calendar to

    25 some degree, and so the last week of June, we're not



  2. 1 going to be sitting, and we could perhaps transfer that

    2 week to the month of August. We were going to end with

    3 this case in June or perhaps in July, but if this case

    4 goes quite quickly, it must also be fair. And so what

    5 we are going to do is try to make this change; you will

    6 see what possibilities you might have to drop the last

    7 week in June and to move that week to the 3rd of

    8 August. After that, we will see what possibilities

    9 exist because we must also look at the calendar with

    10 the other judges, so we cannot make that decision now

    11 here; but as far as these judges are concerned, that is

    12 convenient.

    13 With that said, Mr. Niemann?

    14 MR. NIEMANN: Your Honours, yesterday

    15 Mr. Mikulicic raised the question of whether or not he

    16 could have a break in the weeks because of the

    17 difficulties he has arranging witnesses. My position

    18 on it was that I had certainly no objection to that

    19 course, but I said to him that if he was to obtain

    20 another date, could he obtain in the second week of

    21 August, not the first week of August, because I would

    22 be away throughout August -- throughout July and the

    23 first week of August, and I only have my colleague,

    24 Mr. Meddegoda, now on this case, and because he would

    25 be alone on the matter, I had requested that that be



  3. 1 the case. If nothing else can be arranged, well, I'm

    2 sure Mr. Meddegoda is very capable and able to do in my

    3 absence, but I would rather be here, if that was

    4 possible.

    5 Of course, the dates in June are suitable and

    6 acceptable to me because I am here, but it is just in

    7 July and the first week of August. So if it is

    8 possible, if we could make it that second week in

    9 August. I don't know how the progress of matters will

    10 go, whether all the time will be consumed with

    11 witnesses. I don't know what the position is going to

    12 be. I don't expect that, from the Prosecution's point

    13 of view, there's going to be much evidence that we will

    14 be seeking to call in rebuttal; but, of course, I can't

    15 make a judgement about that at the moment because I

    16 haven't heard the defence case. But it is possible

    17 there will be some rebuttal evidence depending on what

    18 emerges as a consequence of the defence case. So it

    19 could well take us into August, in any event.

    20 JUDGE RODRIGUES: Mr. Mikulicic, do you have

    21 anything you would like to comment on?

    22 MR. MIKULICIC: Your Honours, as my

    23 distinguished colleague, Mr. Niemann, has said,

    24 yesterday, in respect of the circumstances that were

    25 presented, I tried to agree about that with The



  4. 1 Prosecution's Office. First of all, as far as the

    2 Defence is concerned, it agrees fully with the OTP's

    3 proposal that the week in June be transferred to the

    4 second week in August as will be convenient for

    5 Mr. Niemann because, in the long run, I believe that we

    6 will be best proceeding with our cause if we have a

    7 consensus between the OTP and the Defence counsel.

    8 JUDGE RODRIGUES: Yes. We will take note

    9 then of your proposals, but I must tell you in advance

    10 that there might be some difficulties for the second

    11 week because some of the judges have already planned

    12 some travel for that week. So there may be some

    13 difficulties in that area, but we will inform you

    14 thereof.

    15 With that said, let us now begin.

    16 Mr. Niemann, I give you the floor.

    17 MR. NIEMANN: If Your Honour pleases, might

    18 the witness, Professor Bianchini, be brought to the

    19 court? He's in the Prosecution room. The witness room

    20 is not available, not open.

    21 Your Honours, I have taken the liberty of

    22 asking the Registrar to kindly place on the table the

    23 exhibits that we tendered yesterday so that they can be

    24 at the disposal of Professor Bianchini, so they are

    25 there now, and I have asked Professor Bianchini to use



  5. 1 the facilities of the overhead projector when referring

    2 to exhibits so that it can be easier for all of us to

    3 follow.

    4 (WITNESS, STEFANO BIANCHINI, continued).

    5 JUDGE RODRIGUES: The last time, I believe it

    6 was the 26th of February, something like that, you made

    7 a solemn declaration to speak the truth, the whole

    8 truth, and nothing but the truth. This same solemn

    9 declaration is in force. Thank you for coming and

    10 thank you also for answering to the questions which

    11 will be put to you by Mr. Niemann. Thank you.

    12 Examined by MR. NIEMANN.

    13 Q. Professor, on the last occasion, we had

    14 reached the point in our discussion where you had told

    15 us about a plebiscite that was held in Slovenia on the

    16 23rd of December of 1990. Did there follow in Croatia

    17 similarly a plebiscite on May the 19th of 1991?

    18 A. Not exactly similar. It should be correct to

    19 speak about referendum more than the plebiscite, because

    20 the concept of a plebiscite was not included in the

    21 Constitution. They hold -- the Government, the

    22 Government of Croatia, held the referendum in May 1990.

    23 This referendum was based on two questions instead

    24 of one, as was the case in Slovenia. The two questions

    25 were related to the two proposals submitted in the



  6. 1 second half of -- in the previous, 1989, on the

    2 confederative and federative perspective of the

    3 country. So the Croat people were asked to opt for the

    4 confederative proposal submitted by Croat and

    5 Slovene leaderships, and the federative proposal

    6 prepared by Mr. Jovic.

    7 The outcome of the referendum was that

    8 less than 83 percent of the eligible voters voted, and

    9 of these, 83 percent, 94 percent voted for the

    10 perspective of a confederation while only 5 percent and

    11 a bit voted for the federative proposal of

    12 Mr. Jovic.

    13 Q. Did Croatia and Slovenia then subsequently

    14 issue Declarations of Independence?

    15 A. Yes, they did, in June.

    16 Q. When did they do that?

    17 A. In June, 25th June, 1991. The position of

    18 the two republics was different. Slovenia made the

    19 decision -- the Parliament of Slovenia -- the Parliament

    20 made a decision on the same date. Then Croatia,

    21 considering that they had -- according to their

    22 position -- wanted to implement the decision of the

    23 referendum. The referendum, as you remember,

    24 invited the population to vote for an independent

    25 sovereign state within six months. So at the end of



  7. 1 the six months, they wanted to vote on this independence,

    2 because any agreement was joined in order to create a

    3 confederative Yugoslavia. They voted immediately on a

    4 new constitution; they were prepared, from the

    5 military and the administrative point of view, to

    6 implement the decision immediately.

    7 Q. When you say "they," you're referring to

    8 Slovenia?

    9 A. For Slovenia. For Croatia, it was

    10 different. It was different in the sense that Tudjman

    11 wanted to maintain a strong lead over the decision, the

    12 decision-making with Slovenia. Slovenia decided to

    13 declare independence. Tudjman wanted to declare

    14 independence on the same day while he was aware that

    15 Croatia was not able to implement immediately the

    16 decision because it didn't have the military and

    17 administrative organisation already prepared for

    18 independence. So, for instance, a lot of policy makers

    19 in Croatia spoke about that day as the beginning of the

    20 process of the session instead of the concluding act of

    21 such a decision.

    22 Q. Now, what ensued as a result of the issuing

    23 of these declarations of independence?

    24 A. In Slovenia, the result was that the

    25 Government immediately order the Slovenian army,



  8. 1 supported by the Territorial Defence, to take

    2 control of the air space, of the customs, and the

    3 borders. And the army did this because it was ready

    4 to do this. The reaction of the federal government was

    5 very strong because they declared immediately the act,

    6 both the act of Slovene aggression, particularly the

    7 act of Slovenia, as an illegal act, because it was not

    8 agreed upon with the government, and at the same time,

    9 because they emphasised the fact -- the decision of

    10 Slovenia to take control of the borders was

    11 affecting the interests of the other five republics,

    12 because through the borders with Italy and Austria,

    13 hard currency enters Yugoslavia. This was the reason

    14 why the federal government immediately reacted, and

    15 then ordered the JNA, particularly the JNA in Slovenia, to

    16 take control again of the borders.

    17 Q. Now, you mentioned the JNA. Can you, moving

    18 back, tell us what the structure of the armed forces of

    19 Yugoslavia was prior to 1990 and then we'll move

    20 forward into its role in these events?

    21 A. The structure of the armed forces in

    22 Yugoslavia was very specific indeed. You know, it was

    23 based on two elements: The first, the JNA, which is

    24 the armed forces, and the second was the Territorial

    25 Defence.



  9. 1 Q. Just to say for the benefit of the people

    2 taking down the transcript, by the "JNA," you're

    3 referring to the JNA?

    4 A. JNA, is the Yugoslav army, the Yugoslav

    5 army, and this was a regular army, and the Territorial

    6 Defence. This system was adopted by Tito, by a law

    7 approved in February 1969, as a consequence of the

    8 Soviet and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia,

    9 when the spring -- the Prague spring was over. They

    10 feared that Yugoslavia was -- could be -- would be

    11 threatened by the Soviet Union. Nikola Lubicic, he was

    12 head of the military -- of the defence at the time,

    13 was encouraged to re-think, with the support of Tito, the

    14 system of defence of the country, in order to make

    15 Yugoslavia, because they didn't have the nuclear [sic],

    16 a country where it was impossible to have, for a long

    17 time, an army, an occupation army within.

    18 And so they re-thought the experience of the

    19 partisan period, and they set up the Territorial Defence

    20 as a structure able to defend the territory when -- in

    21 the event of an attack on the country -- with the typical

    22 system of the partisan war. In this sense, for

    23 instance, the JNA, the high command of JNA,

    24 was the president of the presidency of Yugoslavia.

    25 This meant Tito, when Tito was living. And then the



  10. 1 president of the presidency, according to article

    2 32A second paragraph of the Constitution 1974. And

    3 the Territorial Defence was -- the JNA was -- the JNA

    4 was equipped, trained, organised, armed by the federal

    5 government, and the Territorial Defence was equipped,

    6 trained, and organised by the republics and autonomous

    7 regions. So this made possible that in some of the

    8 constitutions, the republics’ constitutions, that the

    9 presidency of the republic had the power to establish

    10 plan for defending the republics. This was the case in

    11 Croatia, in the article 3A3 of the Croatian

    12 Constitution of 1974, the Socialist Republic of

    13 Croatia, it was clearly stated. While this was not the

    14 case for Bosnia. It was only -- it was included in the

    15 Constitution only in 1989 after -- when an amendment,

    16 the 51 amendment was -- changed the article 349 of the

    17 Bosnian Constitution, the Socialist Republic of Bosnian

    18 Constitution.

    19 So this was the structure of the defence,

    20 and, if you want, I can show you the ethnic composition

    21 of the army with --

    22 Q. Yes. I think that you might describe to us

    23 the basis of this ethnic key, if you would, and how it

    24 operated with respect to the army and perhaps by

    25 reference to exhibit 105, which I think is there beside



  11. 1 you. And you can put it on the overhead projector.

    2 Yes, we have it now. It will be on the screen in front

    3 of you.

    4 A. This is just a table showing the ethnic

    5 composition of the JNA in military, professional

    6 military and recruits. The source -- this is a table

    7 that I prepared on the basis of the figures available

    8 in an article written by Anton Bebler. Anton Bebler is

    9 the son of the famous diplomat, Yugoslav diplomat, and

    10 he is a scholar -- diplomat himself of Slovenian

    11 independence, Slovenia in Geneva, and he is

    12 particularly known as an expert on military issues.

    13 So Anton Bubler prepared this table and, as

    14 you can see, you have here three lines: one gives you

    15 a picture of the percentage of the population according

    16 to the 1981 Yugoslav census. This is a picture, of

    17 course, related to the last period of socialist

    18 Yugoslavia. So you have here the percentage of the

    19 population of each ethnic group of nationalities of

    20 Yugoslavia; and then, in the second line, you have the

    21 percentage of the professional military in the army.

    22 As you can see, for instance, the Serbs were the 36.3

    23 percent in the census 1989 of the whole population of

    24 Yugoslavia, but they had a percentage of 60 percent in

    25 the professional military; while, as you can see in the



  12. 1 third line, you have the percentage of the recruits.

    2 This is the recruits, the normal recruits, for the

    3 period that they have joined the army, and you can see

    4 that the percentage decrease to the 31 percent more or

    5 less respecting the percentage of the population,

    6 Serb population. You see, for instance, the Croats

    7 were 19.8 percent of the population. They had 12.6

    8 percent of the population of military and 18.55 percent

    9 of the recruits. If you see the Slovenes, the 7.8

    10 percent of the population, only 2.8 percent in the

    11 professional military, and the 7 percent of the

    12 recruits.

    13 Interesting enough is the figure of

    14 Albanians, for instance. 7.7 percent of the

    15 population, 0.6 of the military, professional military,

    16 and 9 percent of the recruits.

    17 Q. Now, what was the consequence, if any, of

    18 this disproportionality of representation in the

    19 professional ranks of the JNA?

    20 A. This is very important to take into account,

    21 that generally, generally, before the great wave of

    22 nationalism was growing in Yugoslavia, that is, until

    23 1986-1987, the main reason why the Serbs joined --

    24 Serbs and Montenegrins -- this is also an interesting

    25 data -- the Montenegrins were only 2.5 percent of the



  13. 1 population but they had the 6.2 percent of the

    2 professional military.

    3 So if you can consider this, you see that

    4 Serbs and Montenegrins were over-represented in the JNA

    5 and the others were underrepresented in the

    6 professional military, and the reason was generally

    7 because Serbs and Montenegrins shared a tradition in

    8 the army, and the second reason was because the army

    9 granted a career, a good wage, and prerogatives in

    10 areas, particularly for areas -- attractive for areas

    11 and developed as it was one part of Serbia, not

    12 completely Serbia, but one part of Serbia and

    13 Montenegro.

    14 In a sense, this kind of approach was

    15 confirmed by the Croats in the sense that the Croats

    16 particularly -- overwhelmingly joined the navy thanks

    17 because of-- its the stronger nation. So this was the

    18 reason why you have this kind of picture when you are

    19 still this period.

    20 The number of the army, of the JNA, decreased

    21 from the beginning of the '80s today and of the case

    22 from 220,000 people to 180,000, and the air forces were

    23 around 33,000 people. Then we have no figures,

    24 exact figures, we didn't have the exact figure about the

    25 navy, while the navy was a small part of the JNA, a small



  14. 1 one.

    2 About the Territorial Defence, we have

    3 different figures. According to Slovene sources,

    4 they were around 500,000 people involved in whole

    5 Yugoslavia, and according Bosnian sources, they were

    6 around 700,000.

    7 So this was generally the picture of the army

    8 structure of JNA until the beginning of the '90s.

    9 What is interesting enough, it seems to me,

    10 is to compare this general structure with the high

    11 commands of the Yugoslav army.

    12 Q. Perhaps you could tell us about that and, at

    13 the same time, place on the screen exhibit 106? Would

    14 you keep the exhibits in order, Professor, so we

    15 don't ...

    16 A. Sorry. Yes. I prepared this also. I

    17 prepared this picture just to show you the structure of

    18 the commands of the JNA at the time when Ante Markovic

    19 was the Premier, so in second half 1989 and in 1990.

    20 As you can see, the ethnic composition of

    21 the communists is still very Yugoslav. The federal

    22 Minister of Defence was General Kadijevic. Kadijevic,

    23 at the time, declared himself as a Yugoslav, which was

    24 a very disputed declaration because, in a sense, those

    25 who declared themselves Yugoslavs, as you remember,



  15. 1 were put at the end of the list of ethnic groups.

    2 But just to make it clear, the origin of

    3 Kadijevic, his father was Serb, his mother and wife

    4 were Croats. He came from, the soldiers were from

    5 the area of Krajina, Croatian Krajina. The

    6 vice-minister was the Admiral Stane Brovet, a Slovene.

    7 The head of the general command of the General Staff, as

    8 you can see, General Stevo Mirkovic, who was a Serb,

    9 and when he retired -- he retired in the period of the

    10 government of Ante Markovic, -- so he was

    11 replaced by Blagoje Adzic, again a Serb.

    12 The president of the communist organisation

    13 of the army, this is a very important structure, was

    14 Admiral Petar Simic, a Croat from Bihac. He is from

    15 Bosnia-Herzegovina. The communist organisation of the

    16 army was very important. They had 100,000 members in

    17 that period, so this was more or less, as I mentioned,

    18 half or more than half of the people involved in the

    19 army. I mentioned between 220,000, 180,000 people. So

    20 this was a powerful organisation, with hardly any control

    21 by the civilian organisation of the League of the

    22 Communists on. So they acted as a closed organisation

    23 within the league of Communists.

    24 The head of the Air Forces was Anton Tus, a

    25 Croat. The heads of the four military areas were from



  16. 1 the Skopje area, Zivota Avramovic, a Serb. From

    2 Zagreb, the Zagreb area, Martin Spegelj, a Croat. When

    3 he retired in the period of the Markovic government, he

    4 was replaced by Konrad Kolisek, a Slovene. In the

    5 Split area, the head was Admiral Bozo Grubisic, a

    6 Croat, and in Belgrade area, Anton Lukezic, a

    7 Croat, and when he retired, he was replaced by

    8 Alexandar Spirkovski, a Macedonian.

    9 As you can see, this picture offers you a

    10 different image than that presented before. As you can

    11 imagine, the 60 percent of professional military of

    12 Serbs were -- particularly in the middle, the officials

    13 in the middle ranks, while the top of the JNA

    14 composition was very Yugoslav, according to the

    15 principle that started in the period of Tito, the

    16 Second World War, until 1990.

    17 Q. Now, did the break-up of the former

    18 Yugoslavia, and we've referred to the declarations of

    19 independence of Slovenia and Croatia, have any, and if

    20 so what, impact upon the JNA? And the forces of these

    21 changes that were to take place, did they impact upon

    22 the JNA?

    23 A. The impact during the '80s was very

    24 significant. The significant impact on the position of

    25 not only Slovenia and Croatia but even of Serbia. If I



  17. 1 can just mention here one event, a significant event in

    2 the context of Slovene area. This happened in the

    3 second half of the '80s when the editorial board of

    4 Mladina, a very known and popular magazine in Ljublijana

    5 and Janez Jansa was one of the members of the editorial

    6 board when they published and were charged by the army

    7 of spreading military secrets. So this is the reason

    8 they were arrested and a trial took place in

    9 Ljublijana. The trial was carried out in Serbo-Croat and

    10 not in the Slovene language. This was particularly

    11 considered a demonstration -- this was considered by

    12 the leadership, the Slovenian leadership, by Kucan,

    13 particularly, but the whole Slovene leadership, as a

    14 demonstration of the wish of the Serb leadership to

    15 control Yugoslavia and to have a dominant position, a

    16 dominant position in the army and in Yugoslavia. Kucan

    17 started his charges in a meeting of the presidency, of

    18 the federal presidency, and for the first time, because

    19 he never did this before, he spoke in the Slovene

    20 language during the presidency and then he reported the

    21 same speech in a meeting of Ljublijana in the Slovene

    22 language.

    23 This was one element that created a great

    24 conflict between the Slovene leadership and JNA

    25 command. Other elements that created conflicts were



  18. 1 the requests coming particularly from the organisations

    2 of the youth in Slovenia to have legitimised their

    3 conscious objectives -- conscious objections --

    4 Q. Conscientious objections?

    5 A. Yes, sorry. Later, the government and the

    6 Slovene leadership tried also to diminish the defence

    7 budget and the financial support of the Yugoslav

    8 Federation towards the army. These elements created

    9 tensions between the JNA command and the Slovene

    10 leaderships. This was one event.

    11 Another event about Croatia, about Croatia, a

    12 very significant event took place in January 1991 when

    13 the ministry -- at the time, the Ministry of Defence,

    14 Martin Spegelj, who had been one of the Generals in the JNA

    15 army, you can find his name, he was the command head of

    16 the Zagreb area, but once retired, he was called as a

    17 minister -- by Tudjman as minister of Defence of

    18 Croatia. Martin Spegelj was filmed by the Secret Service

    19 speaking with the Croat Minister of Interior

    20 about the importation, illegal importation, of a great

    21 amount -- a great number of weapons from Hungary. This

    22 film was broadcast on television and the army tried

    23 to arrest him. He was protected by Tudjman and this

    24 situation created such strong tensions between the

    25 Croat leadership and the JNA army that a temporary



  19. 1 compromise was found at the end of the month when the

    2 army remained in its headquarters in Croatia and the

    3 Territorial Defence of Croatia was, at least, partially

    4 dismantled.

    5 But let me say that a very important impact

    6 was also the Serb attitude towards the army in that

    7 period. My personal belief is that the Serb

    8 leadership when Milosevic controlled it completely,

    9 that after Stambolic, the President of

    10 Serbia, was compelled to resign. After 1987 the

    11 first real goal of the Serb leadership was not the

    12 control over the whole of Yugoslavia.

    13 If you read carefully, the Memorandum of the

    14 Serb Academy of Science in -- particularly, the last

    15 sentences -- you can see that the last sentences are very

    16 clear in this sense because it's claimed that if

    17 Serbia, whether Serbia cannot have its own role in

    18 Yugoslavia based on its demographic strength,

    19 its historical legacy, on its state which was denied

    20 by the constitution in 1974, and so on. So it was

    21 better for Serbia to have an alternative to Yugoslavia,

    22 as well as Croatia and Slovenia had in the past, which

    23 means that the real proposal of the memorandum was to

    24 take into account the possibility for Serbia to abandon

    25 the federation.



  20. 1 You know, to change the constitution, the

    2 Yugoslav constitution, you need consensus. So the

    3 agreement of the leadership of Croatia or Slovenia or

    4 Macedonia, it is quite difficult to think that these

    5 leaderships, communist or partly communist after the

    6 election of 1990, were able to accept to diminish their

    7 own rights or the rights of their republics in order to

    8 follow the request of the silent/secret memorandum. This is

    9 very difficult to realise, but there are other elements,

    10 of course, that show that this was particularly the

    11 orientation of Milosevic. This had a particular impact

    12 in relations between Serbia and the army in the

    13 months to come. If we think that Serbia really wanted

    14 to abandon the federation, we have other elements that

    15 can confirm this orientation.

    16 For instance, in January 1991, six months

    17 before the war erupted in Yugoslavia, Milan Kucan and

    18 Slobodan Milosevic met in Belgrade. It was in the

    19 second half of the month. They had delegations, so I

    20 received information from one of the witnesses in this

    21 delegation, a Slovene. During this meeting, Kucan

    22 asked Milosevic to abandon Slovenia without any war and

    23 Milosevic agreed to this position under the condition

    24 that, in a way, Kucan publicly recognised the right of

    25 Serbia to have its own state with only the Serbs



  21. 1 included in this state.

    2 In fact, if you check the day after this

    3 meeting, the newspapers published -- all the newspapers

    4 in Yugoslavia published a declaration in which -- in a

    5 not completely clear way, but anyway, it appears that

    6 Kucan accepted the idea that Serbs had the right to

    7 live in the same state. This created great tensions

    8 between Croatia and Slovenia. The Slovene leadership

    9 was accused by the Croatian public opinion of stabbing

    10 Croatia in the back.

    11 Q. Why? Why?

    12 A. Why? Because, as you can imagine, if

    13 Slovenia -- Slovenia was, as you remember in the table

    14 presented at the beginning last time, Slovenia was more

    15 or less -- 90 percent of the people living in Slovenia

    16 were Slovenes. So, Slovenia was more or less a

    17 mono-ethnic republic, the only mono-ethnic republic

    18 in the former Yugoslavia, while in Croatia, 11 percent

    19 of the population was made up of Serbs in Krajina, in

    20 the cities, in Dalmatia, in Slavonia. If you recognise

    21 the right of Slovenia to leave Yugoslavia peacefully,

    22 and at the same time you recognise the right of the

    23 Serbs to live all together in the same state, all you

    24 move is all the population from Croatia and from Bosnia

    25 to Serbia proper or you have to take into account the



  22. 1 issue of borders as open -- within the other parts of

    2 -- so this was the reason of the election of Croatia.

    3 Our state is now under threat from

    4 Belgrade, from the republic’s leadership in Belgrade,

    5 to lose one part of his territory, of this republic’s

    6 territory, because it was occupied predominantly in

    7 some parts by Serbs. This was the case of the area of

    8 Krajina. This was the reason why Croatia was afraid

    9 for this.

    10 Then, consider that it was very, very

    11 peculiar how the war was conducted in Slovenia. The

    12 war was very short and in this case, immediately after

    13 four or five days of war, the mothers of the Serb

    14 recruits went to Slovenia to pick up their children and

    15 came back home. This happened only in

    16 Slovenia. This didn't happen in Croatia. It didn't

    17 happen in Bosnia.

    18 This is important because I think that

    19 Milosevic didn't allow this to be repeated, though it was

    20 allowed once, because it was an agreement

    21 with Kucan to leave Slovenia peacefully and the

    22 decision was made about other subjects, the government,

    23 the army, which had no similar goals at the beginning

    24 as Milosevic.

    25 Third, let me say again, in other elements,



  23. 1 in July 1991, when the presidency met for the first

    2 time after several months complete with the Slovenia

    3 representative, Drnovsek, the current

    4 president of the Slovenian government, they voted on

    5 role of the JNA in Slovenia. Jovic, the Serb, and

    6 Drnovsek agreed immediately about this while a Croat

    7 representative, Mesic, voted against and this request,

    8 the decision to withdraw the army from Slovenia, was

    9 not requested by the international community. This was

    10 a decision made in the presidency with the agreement of

    11 the members of the presidency but with the negative

    12 vote of the Croat representative.

    13 The outcome was clear because upon withdrawal of the

    14 army from Slovenia, the army went to Croatia and

    15 created the condition for the war in Croatia, while

    16 Croatia was not prepared militarily nor

    17 administratively, to implement the

    18 declaration of independence of June. They wanted to

    19 join Slovenia only because of the period at the time.

    20 These were the elements that make it clear, from

    21 my point of view, that the Milosevic’s real goal was

    22 the cessation of Serbia from Yugoslavia. This is not

    23 something crazy or something that appeared strange.

    24 Yeltsin, at the end of the 80's also threatened

    25 Gorbachev to withdraw Russia from the Soviet



  24. 1 Union.

    2 This was one interesting aspect of this

    3 cessation -- this was the cessation of the main republic

    4 and the main demographic republic from the Federation,

    5 instead of the others.

    6 This had also impact on the military because

    7 the military, you know, they had a different -- just at

    8 the beginning, particularly the commanders,

    9 not the middle ranks, but the commanders had a different

    10 position. They were communists. All these people you

    11 have here, they were communists. They were members of

    12 the communist organisation in the army. They believed

    13 in Yugoslav communism and they wanted to preserve

    14 communism. Also, you know, they had privileges,

    15 prerogatives, they had played a peculiar role in

    16 Yugoslavia for a long period -- during the 40's, the

    17 50's, the 60's, they had a very good image in the

    18 country, they were appreciated as the army which had

    19 liberated the country. It was the army which protected the

    20 country against Stalin.

    21 These elements created the positive attitude

    22 of the population towards the army. These old commanders

    23 were, in this sense, very attached to the idea of

    24 Yugoslavia, to the idea of communism, and they wanted

    25 to preserve it while communism was collapsing all over



  25. 1 Eastern Europe and not only in Yugoslavia.

    2 Then they also had, all the military, may I

    3 say, an actual bent for Jovic, so they wanted to

    4 open -- they wanted to -- and they are afraid about

    5 the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, but from the point of

    6 view of the communist integration system. So this was

    7 their approach at the beginning. The situation changed

    8 in the following months.

    9 Q. I might ask you to speak a little bit slower,

    10 if you would, because it is hard for the interpreter.

    11 Why then could Milosevic have an agreement

    12 with Kucan when it involved the JNA which wasn't

    13 directly under his control? How was it he was able to

    14 do this?

    15 A. You know, at the beginning, Milosevic didn't

    16 have complete control of the army. He could have

    17 control of the army only through changes in the

    18 military. Changes started when, for instance, between

    19 the end of 1989 and 1990, many Generals retired because

    20 they reached retirement age. So the ranks, the

    21 middle ranks, had the opportunity to have a career. These

    22 ranks were particularly attracted by Milosevic's

    23 strong attitudes.

    24 Let me say that in 1988 Kadijevic had already

    25 submitted a proposal to the federal presidency in order



  26. 1 to amend the Yugoslav constitution and to create a

    2 strong presidency. They were, at that time, already --

    3 they already feared for the future of the country and they

    4 particularly opposed the idea of having a weak federal

    5 presidency.

    6 The proposal was rejected, but it is

    7 interesting anyway this time, because at the beginning

    8 this showed their attitude of the army towards

    9 hierarchy and order.

    10 We can also consider that at the beginning,

    11 in 1986 and 1987 when the policy of meeting -- the

    12 so-called national political meeting, anti-bureaucratic

    13 revolution organised by Milosevic in Kosovo first, and

    14 then in Vojvodina, and then in Montenegro created a

    15 negative attitude in the army.

    16 But the sensitivity towards the criticism

    17 coming from Slovenia was much more higher than the

    18 criticism towards the attitudes of Milosevic. So when

    19 Milosevic because had this strong attitude and the

    20 Generals retired, the middle ranks had the opportunity

    21 to have a career and they were much more sensitive and

    22 reacted much more positively to the attitude of

    23 Milosevic than thinking that Milosevic in such a way

    24 would preserve Yugoslavia or at least would save the

    25 role of the Serbs within Yugoslavia in a very --



  27. 1 protecting their role within Yugoslavia as the Serbs

    2 were, according to the propaganda of Serbia, threatened

    3 by the other republics -- which was not true -- but

    4 this was the general attitude.

    5 Q. Did Kadijevic fear the existence of the TO

    6 during this period and why?

    7 A. Kadijevic in January 1990, in an article

    8 written by -- not an article, a journal of the army

    9 published an article where he wrote about -- he wrote

    10 about the risk that the Territorial Defence might be

    11 transformed into a Republican army. I mentioned that,

    12 on the basis of some constitutions, it was not only in

    13 the case of Croatia, but in Bosnia in 1989. The

    14 Republic had the right to prepare plans for

    15 defence of the Republic and the Republic had the task of

    16 training, and arming and equipping the Territorial

    17 Defence.

    18 So for this reason, Kadijevic feared that the

    19 Territorial Defence would become the Republican army

    20 and suggested the possibility of dismantling it.

    21 This was one reason. The other reason was

    22 generally the JNA since 1969 hadn’t accepted very

    23 positively the creation of the Territorial Defence, but

    24 this is also another aspect of this.

    25 Anyway, it was only on May 23rd, 1990, it is



  28. 1 when the change of the president of the presidency was

    2 over and Drnovsek ended his period, and Borisav Jovic,

    3 and this was the time of Borisav Jovic, that he was a

    4 man close to Milosevic, a Serb, that it was possible to

    5 establish an order from the president of the presidency

    6 to move all the weapons from the stores of the

    7 Territorial Defence to the stores of the JNA.

    8 This was a decision suggested by Kadijevic

    9 and approved by Jovic in May 1990. So this was the

    10 period. And according to the memoirs published later

    11 by Kadijevic, it was more of a general -- this was

    12 published in Belgrade, it is written that this attempt

    13 at moving the weapons from the stores of the JNA to the

    14 -- from the stores of the Territorial Defence to the

    15 stores of the JNA was successful everywhere in

    16 Yugoslavia, except in Slovenia.

    17 Q. Now, we've spoken of events that occurred in

    18 both Slovenia and in Croatia in 1991.

    19 Did that also have an impact on the ethnic

    20 composition of the JNA during the course of 1991?

    21 A. In 1991, in the first half of 1991, it's

    22 difficult to say because some changes were in the army

    23 but not, for instance, in the high command.

    24 It was not, for instance, by chance, this is

    25 interesting, that when the war occurred in Slovenia,



  29. 1 the first people who died in Slovenia from the JNA side

    2 were Slovene recruits.

    3 So in this sense, the army had still -- at

    4 that point, they still had a Yugoslav structure, but

    5 immediately after the end -- when the war in Slovenia

    6 erupted the recruits were -- flew recruits from

    7 Slovenia first, and then the recruits from Croatia, from

    8 Bosnia, Macedonia, through the camp, the army, so the

    9 army became the normal Serb army while the other

    10 changes in the commands had to take -- had to be

    11 imposed by Milosevic, particularly during 1992, in

    12 order to reorganise the army.

    13 So this was again a period where the

    14 mentality -- the mentality of the army, while already

    15 influenced by the Milosevic approach, thought and

    16 wanted to operate in order to save the communist

    17 Yugoslavia which was, in fact, over.

    18 Q. Now, moving on to Bosnia, did there come a

    19 time when the Bosnian Serbs proceeded to clear

    20 autonomous regions in Bosnia.

    21 A. Yeah. The Serbs -- may I just offer -- show

    22 a map?

    23 Q. Yes. Tell us the exhibit number that you are

    24 looking at. It's on the back. Okay. That's exhibit

    25 107.



  30. 1 And the map that you have there, exhibit 107,

    2 what's that about?

    3 A. This is a map -- I can't see on the monitor.

    4 It doesn't matter.

    5 Q. You need to press "Computer Monitor." Can

    6 you see on your -- the button there?

    7 A. Ah, sorry. Yes, okay. Thank you. This map

    8 has been prepared by me with the help of the office.

    9 Q. Try "Computer Monitor."

    10 A. Yes, sorry. This prepared -- was prepared

    11 here in -- by the officers of the Tribunal under my

    12 direction and was prepared on the basis of the

    13 documents I collected from Serb side about the

    14 Constitution of the Serb autonomous region, the

    15 so-called SAO. This was the political process known as

    16 Saoizacija, the transformation of Bosnia in SAO

    17 regions. There were six regions. It started in second

    18 half of 1991. It started with -- in the area of

    19 Banja Luka creating a series of -- community of

    20 municipalities it was called, like this, and then

    21 later, from September, in the period from September to

    22 January -- from September '91 to January 1992, six

    23 Serb autonomous regions were created. You see here

    24 on different colours these regions. The first one was

    25 the area of Herzegovina, this is the blue part, and



  31. 1 then was created the area of Banja Luka, the SAO

    2 Bosanska Krajina, and then you have the SAO Romanija,

    3 on the back of Sarajevo, the SAO Semberjia area in the

    4 area of Bijeljina and then SAO Sjeverne Bosnia, and

    5 then you see also the area that were not -- this I

    6 wanted to include as Bosansko Grahovo, Bosanski Novi,

    7 Bosanska Dubica and Bosanska Gradiska. You see in

    8 these areas in grey colour, these areas were not

    9 included in the official documents I collected, so

    10 officially they were not part of these regions, but

    11 they were, in fact, under the control of the Serbs.

    12 This is very interesting in reality --

    13 actually, the documents were -- of the Serbs were

    14 not very precise in explaining the areas they claimed

    15 exactly because, for instance, the municipality of

    16 Visegrad, here on the eastern side of Bosnia close to

    17 the River Drina belonged to two different SAO areas, so

    18 it was claimed by one and by the others.

    19 So this was a picture -- a picture just to

    20 give you an idea of this process of areas which is

    21 interesting, more or less, in order to understand the

    22 areas claimed by SDS -- SDS was the Serb Democratic

    23 Party led by Karadzic and who was in the government in

    24 Bosnia at the time, and this showed the area in a sense

    25 that the SDS claimed as area under the control -- that



  32. 1 must be under the control of the Serb authorities.

    2 Q. Was there reaction in Bosnia to these

    3 declarations of autonomous regions that occurred?

    4 A. Oh, the reaction was generally very negative,

    5 very negative because -- and it was considered a

    6 decision -- an illegal decision. There were no regions

    7 included in the Constitution. The Constitution of

    8 Bosnia -- Bosnia was, at that time, a socialist

    9 republic, the Constitution was amended but not changed,

    10 so the change of the Constitution was, in a way,

    11 declared only in 1993 when the war between -- not only

    12 between the Serbs and the Muslims, but even between the

    13 Muslims and the Croats was on.

    14 So this was, in this sense, this was the step

    15 for preparing a dismemberment of Bosnia and this was

    16 the area that Muslims and Croats considered the claims

    17 of Serbs over the part of Bosnia.

    18 Q. What did the Muslim and Croat members of the

    19 Bosnian parliament do about this issue?

    20 A. In October --

    21 Q. Yes.

    22 A. -- in October 1991, in the parliament, the

    23 Croat and the Muslim representatives of the HDZ, SDA,

    24 Croat party, and as they are the party led by

    25 Izetbegovic voted a resolution on the sovereignty of



  33. 1 Bosnia. The SDS representatives didn't participate

    2 in the vote, so the SDS didn't recognise the vote as a

    3 legal vote. The Croats and Muslim representatives,

    4 HDZ, SDA, voted for a sovereign Bosnia in -- during -- so

    5 this was another element of tension between two -- the

    6 two groups. While it's important to say that SDS, HDZ

    7 and SDA shared power at the time.

    8 Q. And did the SDS subsequently, in November,

    9 then proceed to have a referendum or ...

    10 A. Yes, in November 9, the SDS, as a reaction to

    11 the decision on the vote in the parliament by the

    12 Muslim and the SDR, vote claim -- organised a

    13 plebiscite, plebiscite for establishing the wish for --

    14 declaring the wish of the Serb people to maintain

    15 close ties and to remain in the Yugoslav framework, so

    16 close ties with Belgrade confirmed. And, of course,

    17 the vote was not -- the vote was overwhelmingly in

    18 favour of the Serb SDS position while we have no --

    19 any demonstration proved that the vote was fair and

    20 democratic, of course.

    21 Q. In this atmosphere of rising tensions in

    22 Yugoslavia and in the environment of Eastern Europe

    23 generally at this period of time, did the European

    24 Foreign Ministers meet in Brussels in December for the

    25 purposes of setting guidelines?



  34. 1 A. Yes. You know, the situation, the general

    2 situation in autumn 1991 was very peculiar, a lot of

    3 things were changing. In the context of Yugoslavia,

    4 the war was characterised by the bombardments of

    5 Dubrovnik, of Vukovar, and the battle in Osijek; this

    6 is Slovenia and Dalmatia.

    7 In this context, we had also the coup in the

    8 Soviet Union and the beginning of the process of

    9 dismemberment of the Soviet Union. So many states

    10 claimed in this context recognition of their

    11 independence from the former federal frameworks.

    12 On the other side, you had -- at the

    13 beginning of -- this is interesting enough -- at the

    14 beginning of December, 10th, 11th, a meeting of the

    15 representatives of the European Union in Maastricht

    16 when they made the decision to increase integration

    17 processes, and they made the decision -- the decision

    18 when -- when start to do with the single currency in

    19 1998.

    20 So in this context of changes, of

    21 contradictory changes in the European framework, the

    22 Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the European Union

    23 met in the midst of December, 16th of December, and

    24 they made a decision to write down guidelines of -- for

    25 recognition of new state of Eastern Union -- of Eastern



  35. 1 Europe and Soviet Union, so this was a general

    2 framework.

    3 Interestingly enough, in this framework, it

    4 was established that the request to be recognised by

    5 the new state had to be followed by the recognition

    6 that borders were -- about the inviability [sic] of the

    7 borders, which meant that, in fact, the administrative

    8 borders of the republic within the federal frameworks

    9 had to be accepted as international borders, and then,

    10 of course, this recognition about the inviability of

    11 borders had to be followed by the recognition of

    12 democracy, of human rights, of all these crucial

    13 elements that characterise the transition towards

    14 democratic states.

    15 On the basis of this, it was also -- prepared

    16 a specific document for the Yugoslav context, and the

    17 Yugoslav republics claiming recognition were

    18 invited to submit an application form, may I say,

    19 application form to the European Union, deadline was

    20 December the 3rd, explaining the reason why they wanted

    21 to be recognised as independent states with,

    22 interesting enough, guarantees that they accept, not

    23 change -- they accepted the borders not to be changed

    24 with violence, and so only through negotiations in the

    25 case, and according to the international standards of



  36. 1 respecting human rights, democracy, and so on.

    2 Q. These applications, when submitted, had to

    3 be scrutinised and analysed by anyone in particular?

    4 A. Beg your pardon?

    5 Q. When these applications, submitted by the

    6 republics of Yugoslavia, when they were submitted, were

    7 they then to be scrutinised by a person?

    8 A. Yes -- no, no. Yes, sir, they appointed a

    9 commission of five lawyers, constitutional lawyers.

    10 This was an international European commission led by a

    11 lawyer Badinter, a French lawyer, who had the task to

    12 refer to the commission by January 10th.

    13 Q. Did Badinter then subsequently receive the

    14 applications?

    15 A. Badinter received four applications; that is,

    16 the applications of Slovenia, Croatia,

    17 Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia. They didn't receive

    18 any application from Serbia or Montenegro.

    19 Q. And when did Badinter commence his work?

    20 A. The Badinter Commission ended its work in

    21 January. You know, this was a decision made because

    22 there were many tensions within the European

    23 Commission, particularly between the French position

    24 and the German position. France wanted to

    25 have, in a way, a common decision about recognition.



  37. 1 Germany wanted and applied pressure to have a unilateral

    2 recognition of Slovenia and Croatia. So

    3 Badinter received the application and the Commission

    4 met, and then they suggested to the Commission that, on

    5 the basis of the documents presented and the guarantee

    6 requested, they suggested recognising the independence

    7 of Slovenia and Macedonia. This was the proposal.

    8 Q. And did the Commission, headed by Badinter,

    9 do this by a way of a number of opinions that were --

    10 A. Yes. They received from Badinter a series of

    11 opinions. Each opinion was related to a country, so

    12 you had the opinion number 2 about Croatia, another

    13 opinion about -- the number 4 was about Bosnia, the

    14 number 6 on Slovenia. So they had several opinions,

    15 and from each opinion, the evolution of the situation

    16 followed the countries. So they suggested the

    17 independence only for -- the recognition of

    18 independence only for Slovenia and Macedonia while the

    19 decision of the Commission was different.

    20 Q. Now, what was the position with respect to

    21 Bosnia?

    22 A. About the position of Bosnia, the Commission

    23 stated that a clear option for an independent sovereign

    24 state in Bosnia at the moment didn't exist. They

    25 noticed that, in the meantime, when the



  38. 1 Badinter Commission was looking at the forms, the

    2 assembly of the Serbs, so-called assembly of the

    3 Serbs. It was, in fact, an assembly adopted by the

    4 SDS party outside the Bosnian parliament, started in

    5 the end of December and at the beginning, the 9th of

    6 January; that is, one day before the

    7 Badinter Commission -- had to defer to the Commission,

    8 they informed that they created -- they proclaimed the

    9 Republic of the Serb people in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

    10 So this was the first aspect.

    11 The second aspect was that in the amendments

    12 in the Constitution of Bosnia was stated that people

    13 wield the power through the mediation of an assembly or

    14 a referendum. So for this reason, they proposed --

    15 submitted a proposal that the position was not clear

    16 because the Serb part had a different opinion

    17 that -- the part expressed by the other ethnic groups

    18 of Bosnia. And in this sense, Badinter Commission

    19 suggested holding a referendum in Bosnia in order to

    20 know the exact position -- exact opinion of the

    21 population of Bosnia on the basis of the Constitution,

    22 Bosnian Constitution, on the issue of an independent

    23 sovereign state.

    24 Q. And when did Badinter suggest this, that a

    25 referendum be held?



  39. 1 A. Referendum was suggested after the 10th of

    2 January when the Commission had to make the decision

    3 about the recognition, when the so-called "Avis" -- the

    4 original were written in French -- they were made

    5 public and were discussed by the Commission. So it was

    6 embodied in the addendum numero 4, avis number 4.

    7 Q. And what was the question, can you remember,

    8 that was to be asked of the people?

    9 A. The decision was made in January, in the end

    10 of January, by the parliament, Bosnian parliament, to

    11 order referendum, and decision was made with the

    12 agreement of the HDZ, SDA, and (indiscernible) position

    13 parties in the parliament, while the SDS

    14 representatives didn't take part to the decision, they

    15 were not in the parliament when the decision was made.

    16 So this was the position of those who claimed

    17 the referendum, and the -- may I refer to my notes just

    18 to read the question, the question, the exact term of

    19 the question submitted?

    20 MR. NIEMANN: Might the witness have

    21 permission to refer to his notes?

    22 A. Yeah. They submitted was this one: "Are you

    23 in favour of an independent and sovereign

    24 Bosnia-Herzegovina as a State" -- this is very

    25 important -- "of equal citizens?" This is the first



  40. 1 sentence, "equal citizens." "People of

    2 Bosnia-Herzegovina," second sentence, then "(Muslims,

    3 Serbs, and Croats) and members of other peoples living

    4 in it?"

    5 This was the sentence approved by the

    6 parliament and submitted to the referendum in 1992,

    7 March 1992.

    8 Q. And what was the outcome of the referendum?

    9 A. Yes. We have --

    10 Q. Perhaps you might --

    11 A. Yes.

    12 MR. NIEMANN: This, Your Honours, for the

    13 record, is exhibit 108.

    14 A. The outcomes -- because the outcome of the

    15 referendum was very interesting. As you can see, the

    16 voters were only the 65.31 percent.

    17 Q. And that's because the Serbs didn't

    18 participate.

    19 A. The Serbs -- we can presume that

    20 overwhelmingly the Serbs didn't vote, but because the

    21 non-voters were 35.69 percent, and according to the

    22 census, the Serbs were 34 -- 31 percent or less, this

    23 means to one part of others, we don't know, maybe

    24 Yugoslavs, maybe Jews, maybe others. We don't know.

    25 We can't be sure. Then we can be totally sure that



  41. 1 overwhelmingly the Serbs didn't vote and the others

    2 voted. This is just to give you a picture.

    3 And this is interesting. 99.44 percent

    4 of those who voted, voted in favour of the question for

    5 a sovereign Bosnia of citizens and peoples. This

    6 means -- and this is the percentage I wanted to include

    7 in the end of this table -- that if you consider the

    8 impact of this 99.44 percent of "Yes" on the framework

    9 of all the eligible voters of Bosnia, that is

    10 including the non-voters, you have a percentage of

    11 "Yes" for the state -- for independent state of 63.95

    12 percent of population of Bosnia who accepted the idea

    13 of independence.

    14 So this means that all but the 35 people

    15 didn't vote. If we state that this was a negative vote,

    16 we have, in any case, a large majority of people

    17 claiming independent sovereignty of Bosnia in 1992.

    18 This was between February and March 29 -- 3rd of March.

    19 Q. After this referendum, and particularly after

    20 the results of this referendum became known, what was

    21 the Serb response, the Bosnian-Serb response?

    22 A. You know, immediately after -- when the

    23 assembly, the assembly of Bosnia made a decision to

    24 order referendum, SDS leadership made clear that

    25 because the decision was made without their representative,



  42. 1 SDS representative in the Serb parliament, the

    2 referendum had to be considered an instrument that

    3 obliged only Croatian and Muslim population but not the

    4 Serbs. The Serbs considered this as a referendum not

    5 in -- not involving Serb population, so as a decision

    6 made that it was not of -- within the interests and

    7 within the orientation of the Serb population.

    8 Then the -- on the basis of this decision,

    9 the municipalities of Bosnia were -- mayors or the

    10 Serbs were in general a majority, they boycotted the

    11 referendum; in fact, they didn't support -- they didn't

    12 accomplish their duties in order to make the vote

    13 possible.

    14 So the Republican Electoral Commission had to

    15 set up and appoint new members of the local electoral

    16 commission in order to create election stations, voting

    17 stations, all over the country, and, in fact, they

    18 succeed in it except for Drvar and Bosansko Grahovo,

    19 they're the only two municipalities where the voting

    20 stations were not created. This was the reaction

    21 before.

    22 Q. Now, what happened after?

    23 A. Immediately after, on -- on March, two, three

    24 days after the referendum, barricades were set up in

    25 Sarajevo, and the tension was very high in the



  43. 1 country. Then the tension diminished and an attempt of

    2 mediation started again with the European Union before

    3 the parliament of Bosnia proclaimed independence of

    4 Bosnia. Bosnia was recognised on April 6th by

    5 the European Commission and followed, the day after, by

    6 the recognition of the United States which recognised

    7 not only Bosnia but even Croatia and Slovenia. The

    8 United States recognised only the day after the

    9 recognition of Bosnia by the European Union, even

    10 Slovenia and Croatia.

    11 Q. Now, as a consequence of all of these events,

    12 did military hostilities then ensue?

    13 A. Yes. You know, we don’t have a clear -- an

    14 exact date of the beginning of the war. We can

    15 consider that the official date is April 6th when

    16 snipers, Serb snipers, shot at a peaceful

    17 demonstration for peace in Sarajevo from the rooms of

    18 the Holiday Inn Hotel in Sarajevo in 1992, but tensions

    19 already arose before.

    20 It's true that these tensions were sporadic

    21 events. They didn't create a real process. But if you

    22 look back chronologically, this is interesting to see,

    23 this evolution of events. As, for instance, in

    24 September 1991, a mobilisation of the JNA was

    25 proclaimed in Bosanska Krajina which is an area



  44. 1 inhabited predominantly by Serbs.

    2 In October, irregulars, Serb irregulars

    3 backed by JNA, destroyed -- burned and destroyed the

    4 village of Ravno close to Trebinje. Ravno was a

    5 village inhabited by Croats and other villages around

    6 Ravno. And then in -- this was in October. In

    7 November, the bridges on the Sava River were -- if you

    8 want, I can show you on the map. Again, we can show

    9 the same map just to show what is Ravno.

    10 You see Bosnia in the blue, blue area, this

    11 area, this is the area of Trebinje, and Ravno is more

    12 or less in this area.

    13 So it started -- the mobilisation, the

    14 Bosanska Krajina was here, the area of Banja Luka, this

    15 was the area. And then you had this attack against

    16 Ravno by irregular Serbs in October. In November, the

    17 bridges of the Sava River here were mined. Between

    18 February and March of 1992, there were several explosions.

    19 Tensions occurred in Slavonski Brod on the north of

    20 Bosnia, then in Banja Luka, then in Mostar, and then I

    21 think that probably the most critical situation was

    22 that in Bijeljina at the beginning of April, the 3rd of

    23 April, 1992. It is here in the corner, in the

    24 north-east corner of Bosnia. When irregulars, Serb

    25 irregulars, the so-called Tigrovi, the Tigers,



  45. 1 organised by Arkan, from other sources, particularly

    2 HVO sources spoke about also the participation of

    3 Cetnici, which were the members of the group led by

    4 Seselj, the current Vice Premier of the Serb

    5 government.

    6 Anyway, both -- the Tigrovi came from Banja

    7 Luka after having participated in the attack against

    8 Vukovar, and they arrived in Bijeljina and they

    9 attacked the city and they killed a hundred of the Muslim

    10 population, forcing the other part of the population to

    11 abandon the city.

    12 So this was the most serious event that

    13 happened before the so-called "official" starting of

    14 the war April 6th, 1992.

    15 Q. Were these irregular forces, headed by Arkan

    16 and Seselj, in any way supported by the JNA?

    17 A. Generally, the Arkan, the Tigrovi, as well as

    18 the Cetnici, were supported by JNA, were backed by JNA,

    19 sometimes backed and supported directly from Serbia or

    20 Montenegro. The, for instance, events in Ravno were

    21 particularly backed by people coming from Montenegro.

    22 This is understandable -- if you look on the map, this is

    23 the area where Bosnia has its border with Montenegro.

    24 In addition, the army, the JNA army, supplied

    25 Tigrovi, Cetnici, and other irregular groups, the Beli



  46. 1 Orlovi, the White Eagles of Ante Markovic, from a

    2 little extremist party, the Serb Renewal Parties,

    3 and they received weapons, ammunitions. They were

    4 supported particularly -- we had also document, a very

    5 interesting document, by -- signed by General Blagoje

    6 Adzic, who was the -- in fact, he was the new Minister

    7 of Defence of Yugoslavia at the time, where he ordered

    8 the JNA to establish command over all these irregular

    9 Serb groups.

    10 So this was the reason why we can -- yes,

    11 we -- the JNA supported and helped these irregular

    12 units, irregular units in this period.

    13 JUDGE RODRIGUES: I'm sorry to interrupt

    14 you. It is now eleven o'clock, or a quarter to eleven

    15 o'clock, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. We

    16 know that Mr. Bianchini is speaking with a great deal

    17 of enthusiasm about this matter, but we also know that

    18 he can become tired, and I see that Mr. Aleksovski is

    19 also becoming fatigued.

    20 Perhaps it would be wise to take a recess for

    21 one hour because we're going to see the inauguration

    22 ceremony for the second courtroom.

    23 So around a quarter to noon, perhaps, we will

    24 resume? Are you in agreement with this? Very well.

    25 We stand in recess.



  47. 1 --- Recess taken at 10.45 a.m.

    2 --- Reconvened at 12.03 p.m.

    3 JUDGE RODRIGUES: Well, the official

    4 inauguration of the second courtroom took place.

    5 However, tomorrow, you will have the opportunity to

    6 inaugurate the work in the second courtroom, I can tell

    7 you now that it is a very nice courtroom, very

    8 beautiful courtroom, and it shows that justice can

    9 indeed be carried out, particularly with very good

    10 communication because one is very close to the other in

    11 that courtroom, and so at 9.00 tomorrow we will be

    12 working in that courtroom, and I think that is

    13 definitely an improvement for the Tribunal.

    14 Mr. Prosecutor, Mr. Niemann, you have the floor. We

    15 are going to continue the hearing with a great deal of

    16 attention, the testimony given by the professor.

    17 MR. NIEMANN: Your Honours, please.

    18 Q. Professor, before the adjournment, we had

    19 been talking about the referendum that was held in

    20 Bosnia-Herzegovina relating to the issue of

    21 independence of Bosnia. I ask you what the position of

    22 the Bosnian Serbs was to this referendum. What was the

    23 position, if any, to the referendum, by the Bosnian

    24 Croats?

    25 A. This is a very interesting issue because the



  48. 1 HRZ, the Bosnian-Croat party, while it voted for the

    2 referendum -- for holding the referendum in January and

    3 approving at the beginning the question, as I read in

    4 the former session, in February 9th, in a meeting in

    5 Livno, they proposed to change the question. The

    6 question was very interesting. May I refer to the

    7 notes and read the second version of the question?

    8 Q. With Your Honours' permission?

    9 A. The second question submitted at that meeting

    10 was the following: "Are you in favour of an

    11 independent, sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina, community

    12 state of titular, sovereign peoples, Croatian, Muslim

    13 and Serb, in their own national areas," and in brackets

    14 "cantons", which means that -- take into consideration

    15 the former question. The other question added the term

    16 "citizens" first and then "the peoples," and no

    17 connection, no relation between people and territory.

    18 While in this question, you don't have any mention of

    19 the role of citizenship of the individuals, but only

    20 they stressed the collective right of the groups in

    21 connection with the question of the territories. They

    22 envisaged, in fact, what was one of the possible

    23 strategies of the evolution of Bosnia in a kind of

    24 union of crusades.

    25 This question created a lot of tensions



  49. 1 between Croats and Muslims before the vote, so when you

    2 take into account the result -- may I just show again

    3 here the table with the results of the referendum?

    4 Q. And this is --

    5 A. This is, sorry. This is exhibit 108. When

    6 you see this list of eligible voters of 64.31 percent

    7 or, if you want, the 99.44 percent of the "yes" votes

    8 are of those who went to vote, you have to take into

    9 account that because of the tensions which arose around

    10 the question, the two parties, SDA and HDZ, went to the

    11 referendum having in mind two different things about

    12 the future of Bosnia. They agreed about the

    13 independence, but how to organise after this

    14 independence, how to establish the contacts and the

    15 relations within the ethnic groups, and maybe with the

    16 tables, this was a completely different question. This

    17 was a vote, but having in mind the two parties had in

    18 mind two different perspectives. This is clear because

    19 of the tension which arose in February 1992, which is a

    20 very interesting month because this was the month when

    21 the president of HDZ, Stjepan Kljujic, was forced to

    22 resign and Mate Boban became the new president.

    23 Q. You then went on before the break to speak of

    24 the commencement of hostilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina

    25 which ensued after the results of the referendum were



  50. 1 known. Can you, in summary, tell us the forces that

    2 were arraigned against each other in relation to this

    3 conflict and have the composition of them?

    4 A. Of the three armies?

    5 Q. Yes.

    6 A. We have a new table in this sense, but I

    7 would like to stress -- this is the exhibit 109. It's

    8 very difficult, however, to have an exact picture of

    9 the forces right, so that's why I thought that it was

    10 better to offer to you a picture where you can see

    11 different evolution from different sources. The

    12 sources are German or British or in Croatian from

    13 Nedjeljna Dalmacija, which was and which is a very

    14 popular journal, newspaper, weekly -- daily, sorry, in

    15 Split. Connecting all this data, you can have very

    16 different pictures about the forces. As you can see,

    17 Bosnian-Muslims were on the basis of -- for instance,

    18 they reported 210,000 while there were even 1,000 on

    19 the status administered by McNeil-Lehrer or even

    20 164,000 by Jane's Defence Weekly. As you can see also,

    21 the number of the Bosnian Serbs changed drastically.

    22 If you wanted to see, you can move from 20,000 --

    23 60,000 people, sorry, the International Institute for

    24 Strategic Studies from London and to 102,000, according

    25 to the Jane's Defence Weekly.



  51. 1 But it seems to be very interesting, the

    2 studies of the International Institute for Strategic

    3 Studies, because it's very known and famous in Britain

    4 and very serious. These dates are from 1993 -- 1994,

    5 sorry, and as you can see, for Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian

    6 Croats and Bosnian Serbs, they are not only the number

    7 of the soldiers belonging to each party, but they are

    8 the reserve units or the back armies, the armies that

    9 backed the organisations, for instance, the Croatian

    10 army and the army of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

    11 that served in Montenegro.

    12 This was their evolution. What is very

    13 interesting, that in their evolution, you have at least

    14 15,000 soldiers of the official Croatian army were

    15 fighting in the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina as well

    16 as 20,000 people of the official army of Serb

    17 Montenegro Federation. This is just to give you a

    18 picture so that when you have different evolutions of

    19 different sources about how the forces arranged and

    20 facing each other during the conflict, at least

    21 before -- this is the picture before the Oluja

    22 offensive. This is before the offences of 1995, the

    23 period until 1994.

    24 Q. Now, you spoke of the various factors

    25 influencing the outbreak of the conflict. Can you draw



  52. 1 those together for us and give us your opinion of what

    2 gave rise to the commencement of the armed conflict in

    3 Bosnia-Herzegovina in summary form?

    4 A. You know, it's a common opinion, largely

    5 shared by policy makers, as it's called, public

    6 opinion, that the forces who gave rise in the conflict

    7 were particularly linked to Serb nationalism. And

    8 this is true. However, I would like to stress

    9 immediately that it's impossible to consider the

    10 Bosnian conflict as a conflict separate of the general

    11 framework of the Yugoslav dismemberment. My firm

    12 belief is that no war in Bosnia were possible whether

    13 Yugoslavia didn't disintegrate. The war in Bosnia has

    14 to be considered an episode, a tragic episode, the most

    15 tragic episode until now, but always an episode of the

    16 Yugoslav disintegration in the Yugoslav war.

    17 You can take into consideration the political

    18 situation of Bosnia before the war erupted. After the

    19 election in 1990, you had three parties who won the

    20 elections, SDA led by Izetbegovic, SDS led by Graz and

    21 HDZ led by Njivice. Muslim, Serb and Croat parties,

    22 they were forced to govern together in Bosnia in

    23 November, December 1990 when Ante Markovic was still

    24 the premier and a presidency, a Yugoslav presidency,

    25 existed with six, plus two members. But they had since



  53. 1 then three different perspectives, political options.

    2 SDS, the Karadzic party, wanted to close ties with

    3 Belgrade and claimed these closed ties, possibly to

    4 saving and maintaining the Yugoslav Federation in any

    5 case, while the HDZ claimed to have closed ties with

    6 Zagreb. Even SDA had no clear option in this sense, in

    7 the sense they wanted to establish close connection

    8 with another part of Yugoslavia where Slav Muslims were

    9 the majority. This was Sandzak. Sandzak is an area in

    10 between Montenegro and Serbia, and divided by

    11 Montenegro and Serbia, where a majority of Slav Muslims

    12 as the Muslims of Bosnia are, are living there. They

    13 had this idea and, in fact, in the Sandzak, it existed,

    14 a party, with the same name of the Izetbegovic party,

    15 the SDA. In this sense, you see, you have the HDZ in

    16 Croatia and the HDZ in Bosnia with the same name. The

    17 SDA, the Izetbegovic party in Bosnia, and the SDA party

    18 in Sandzak between Montenegro and Serbia, and then SDS,

    19 the party of Karadzic, which has no connection with the

    20 SDS, the senior party in Serbia led by Micunovic and

    21 then by other leaderships. He had much more strong

    22 ties directly with Milosevic.

    23 The three options of the party, it clashes

    24 urgently. It was evident that if a coalition were

    25 prepared at that time in 1981, only including two of



  54. 1 these three parts, immediately would create the

    2 condition for the war. But because Yugoslavia existed,

    3 the three parties were forced to stay together and, in

    4 a way, to manage the situation while, in fact, it was

    5 impossible to organise something because one of the

    6 parties blocked out the other two, when they had to

    7 vote.

    8 When Yugoslavia collapsed, the war was

    9 important because it was a part of the tensions that

    10 arose generally in the Yugoslav framework. The

    11 Yugoslav events and the Bosnian events are strictly

    12 connected and can't be considered separately.

    13 Q. Now, in all this, what role, then, during

    14 1992, in the course of 1992, did the JNA play?

    15 A. The JNA had a very crucial role -- a very

    16 crucial role in that period. They played a very

    17 crucial role because they were particularly interested

    18 in the Bosnian area for different reasons. First,

    19 because Bosnia backed -- they proclaimed Serb

    20 autonomous and then republic of Krajina, which was part

    21 of Croatia, but its border was a large part of Bosnia

    22 -- just if I can show you again?

    23 Q. You're looking at exhibit number --

    24 A. No, no, coming back to exhibit 107 just to

    25 give -- this is the map. This was the area of the



  55. 1 Serb Krajina while Sandzak was here, just to give

    2 you the reference point on the map. This was the

    3 reason why the JNA was interested in this area. When,

    4 for instance, in January, February 1992, the process of

    5 independence of Croatia was over and Croatia was

    6 recognised by the European Commission, and the

    7 cease-fire was complied with. The army had to withdraw

    8 from Croatia and they withdrew into Bosnia but knowing

    9 that they were back in an area which was not under the

    10 immediate control of Croatia. This was the Krajina

    11 area of Croatia.

    12 Secondly, in Bosnia, there were a lot of

    13 military industries from the time -- from Tito's time.

    14 They were a lot of military facilities. For this

    15 reason, it was important, Bosnia, for JNA.

    16 In addition, JNA started later to support,

    17 particularly, Serb regulars. This happened

    18 particularly in January, February 1992 when they

    19 started to distribute weapons, when they started

    20 ammunition and when they were backed by this document I

    21 mentioned before, this secret order coming from Blagoje

    22 Adzic, the acting Minister of Defence of the federal --

    23 federation, the federation where the army had to put

    24 under its own command all the regulars in Bosnia. But

    25 I mentioned also in September 1991, the JNA called for



  56. 1 mobilisation in Bosanska Krajina, the yellow area in

    2 the map, and this area was predominantly inhabited by

    3 Serbs. This created great concern and tensions between

    4 JNA and Izetbegovic and Izetbegovic and the

    5 government.

    6 After this mobilisation, which was followed

    7 by tanks and air explosions, incidents provoked by the

    8 Serbs in the area around Banja Luka, it follows in

    9 October the decision to declare the sovereignty of

    10 Bosnia. To make things worse, Izetbegovic didn't have

    11 inside connections, relations with the JNA.

    12 Communications with the command of JNA and Izetbegovic

    13 were very difficult. They didn't have connections. In

    14 this sense, they judged the position of the others, not

    15 having specific possibility of context to know what was

    16 going on. When the army, for instance, considered the

    17 action of Izetbegovic and the Parliament in Bosnia to

    18 declare the sovereignty of Bosnia, they reacted

    19 negatively and they started to organise, more or less,

    20 in the areas -- in various areas, just to keep the

    21 control around villages or around the towns.

    22 In addition, the JNA had several changes in

    23 that period. We are at the beginning of 1992. In

    24 1992, January, in the beginning of January, a

    25 helicopter of the European Union was shot down near



  57. 1 Cakovec, close to Cakovec, by Serb aircraft.

    2 This was the opportunity used by the Yugoslav

    3 leadership to compel Kadijevic to resign.

    4 Kadijevic was forced to resign and Blagoje Adzic became

    5 the acting Minister of Defence for the Yugoslav

    6 Federation. It was still existing while in December

    7 Markovic resigned. The federal government didn't exist

    8 yet.

    9 Blagoje Adzic was removed because he was

    10 known for his commitments in 1991 against Serb and

    11 Croat claims of cessation. This explained why Blagoje

    12 Adzic immediately in February sent this famous order,

    13 the order to the army in Bosnia, in order to keep the

    14 control immediately of the regular Serbs that had to

    15 act with the help of the JNA and receiving, of course,

    16 the military support of the JNA.

    17 Then, in May 1992, 38 Generals were forced to

    18 resign in Serbia. This was a very great change. This

    19 change also was followed by great pressure from the

    20 international community to withdraw Serb soldiers

    21 and arms from Bosnia. We are in May 1992. This means

    22 that the war already officially erupts all around

    23 Bosnia. According to Serb democratic sources, only

    24 20 percent were aware of these arms and, generally,

    25 this was a cosmetic change. But because they started



  58. 1 to say, okay, all people living in Bosnia and bordering

    2 Bosnia is a Bosnian citizen, so we can't oblige them

    3 not to fight for the Serb rights in Bosnia. This

    4 was the justification of the Serb government.

    5 However, they withdrew one part of the army.

    6 They changed 38 Generals in this period. This means

    7 that even on that occasion, even until May, there was

    8 resistance and difficulties in the Yugoslav Army,

    9 particularly in the high command, to completely adhere

    10 to the Serb policy of cessation from Yugoslavia.

    11 In demonstration, there is a very interesting

    12 document we have. In March, April, before the war in

    13 Croatia, a document from the General Milutin Kukanjac who

    14 was in charge in Bosnia, and he sent a document, a

    15 report, how the situation was in Bosnia during that

    16 period. He claimed and made clear that the Serbs were

    17 threatened and the army was ready to protect the Serbs

    18 from threats coming from the Croats and the Muslims,

    19 but he added, and this is very interesting, he added

    20 that, however, there are many attempts from the SDS

    21 leaders, so the Serb Democratic Party, the party of

    22 Karadzic, and from there it was entered into the local

    23 municipalities to have direct contacts with the Serb

    24 government in order to receive supplies, arms, health

    25 supplies and so on. This has to be stopped because the



  59. 1 only relation can be through the federal government,

    2 not this direct relation of the local municipalities

    3 with a republic which is only part of the federation.

    4 In the mentality of this soldier, it's clear

    5 that he was thinking, again, of Yugoslavia, and he was

    6 writing to the federal Minister of Defence, not to the

    7 government -- and he asked the federal Minister of

    8 Defence to intervene with the government -- and speak to

    9 the government of Serbia in order to ask them to stop

    10 immediately this kind of direct connections between the

    11 government of Serbia and the local municipalities,

    12 which means that this was an odd mentality. These were

    13 people that were set aside after May 1992. This was a

    14 demonstration that's still in that period. There was a

    15 link, a communist link, with the idea of the

    16 federation. The idea of the federation in the army was

    17 different than the goals of the partition of Yugoslavia

    18 which was on the basis -- a real basis of the Yugoslav

    19 and Milosevic's goals, in my opinion.

    20 Q. You have spoken of the JNA. What was the

    21 role played by the Territorial Defence in 1992 in

    22 Bosnia-Herzegovina?

    23 A. The Territorial Defence in 1992, in

    24 Bosnia-Herzegovina, didn't play any significant role,

    25 didn't play any significant role because on the basis



  60. 1 of the orders, you remember, the orders of the

    2 presidency, 23rd May, 1990, when Borisav Jovic was the

    3 president of the presidency of Yugoslavia, in Bosnia,

    4 the weapons protected in the stores in Bosnia on the

    5 chance of war was moved to the stores of the JNA and

    6 moved to the stores of the JNA with the approval of

    7 Izetbegovic. In this sense, the Territorial Defence

    8 was largely dismantled in Bosnia. They didn't have

    9 significant arms, weapons, ammunition, only just the

    10 remnants joined the army -- the remnants of the

    11 Territorial Defence joined the Bosnian army and created

    12 the Bosnian army in April, May 1992 when the war

    13 erupted and they must have had to create it and the

    14 Bosnians had to create an army.

    15 But this position of Izetbegovic was, in a

    16 sense, suggested by Izetbegovic because Izetbegovic at

    17 that time, 1990 and 1991 -- 1991, he supported the idea

    18 that Bosnia could remain in a Yugoslav Federation,

    19 whether both Croatia and Serbia will remain in this

    20 federation. This was his position. He changed often

    21 his opinions on this topic. This is one aspect in that

    22 period. This was one of the reasons why he didn't want

    23 to face -- to confront, to face immediately the army,

    24 the JNA, and accepted this dismantlement of the

    25 Territorial Defence.



  61. 1 In addition, while the HDZ opposed strongly,

    2 the JNA was an occupational army. In this sense, they

    3 had two different positions.

    4 And what is interesting is that later,

    5 Izetbegovic was charged, I think -- I'm thinking

    6 even after the date when agreements were signed -- was

    7 charged for taking this decision, because he was accused of

    8 having dismantled Bosnia and of having offered Bosnia as a victim

    9 to the aggression of the Serbs without any weapons and

    10 without any arms. But the charge is based on the

    11 evaluation what happened afterwards. As a policy

    12 maker, evidently Izetbegovic tried to change or to make

    13 some difference at that moment and try to reduce the

    14 possibility of importing the war into Bosnia. So this is

    15 a very disputed evaluation that we can have in order to

    16 consider the decision of Izetbegovic in 1991 to accept

    17 this.

    18 Q. What was the military and political

    19 involvement, if any, of Belgrade or the Republic of

    20 Serbia in the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the

    21 course of 1992?

    22 A. The involvement was, as I can say,

    23 double-face, from one side in the military -- from the

    24 military point of view and from the political point of

    25 view. From the military point of view, Serbia offered



  62. 1 the real basis for the army, the army involved in

    2 the war in Bosnia. When the famous 20 percent of the

    3 army was withdrawn from Bosnia, the other army

    4 remained, and this was why the reason was cosmetic,

    5 as the army remained, not any more the JNA in Bosnia

    6 but the army of the Serb people in Bosnia fighting

    7 for their rights.

    8 And so Serbia offered real basis of -- sent

    9 drivers, sent weapons, fresh soldiers, ammunitions. We

    10 have a lot of documents. Even documents were published

    11 in Sarajevo showing that people fighting in Bosnia

    12 received their own wages and wages from the Serb

    13 government. So this -- clear military support offered

    14 from Serbia and Montenegro to the army, the Serb

    15 army, involved in the war in Bosnia.

    16 From the political point of view, this is a

    17 very important topic because this was connected to the

    18 idea of the meeting, the meeting -- or the idea of

    19 partition of Bosnia with Croatia. Before the war

    20 started in March 1991 in Karadjordjevo -- the Croat Tudjman

    21 and Milosevic met. We don't have, of course, the note

    22 verbal of the meeting.

    23 But after this meeting, when they made a

    24 decision to divide Bosnia in two parts, one for Croatia

    25 and the other one for Serbia, two Commissions were



  63. 1 appointed by the two Presidents to meet and to

    2 discuss with the maps how to divide Bosnia.

    3 One of the person appointed to this

    4 Commission -- the members of the Serb Commission

    5 didn't give any information or any public report on

    6 this, while from the Croatian side, yes. This was

    7 Professor Dusan Bilandzic, a well professor and

    8 very old friend, personal friend, of Tudjman. I

    9 met him. I know him quite well, I met him in 1992, and

    10 he explained to me what happened during these meetings.

    11 But anyway, he gave an interview to the weekly --

    12 Croat weekly "Nacional" last year, and he explained

    13 openly what happened. They met several times. They

    14 had opportunity to compare maps. They were unable to

    15 find a partition of Bosnia.

    16 So they tried to discuss how to divide Bosnia,

    17 but it was very difficult to establish the

    18 exact borders for -- under the interest of the -- of

    19 Croatia and Serbia. So this was the reason they tried

    20 to establish this agreement. They didn't succeed in finding

    21 a compromise

    22 But attempts to come to this agreement

    23 continued during the Bosnian wars. For instance, in

    24 May 1992, Boban and Karadzic met in Graz and tried --

    25 this was May 1992, when the war in Bosnia had



  64. 1 already erupted, and they discussed a

    2 possible agreement between the two. They met again in

    3 Njivice, which is an area close to Herceg-Novi in

    4 Montenegro, to find an agreement in 1993.

    5 So this was an attempt to come to an

    6 agreement between the two parties to divide

    7 Bosnia. In this sense, Serbia backed, of course,

    8 -- politically -- Karadzic and the military

    9 actions in Bosnia with the aim, evidently, of dividing

    10 Bosnia.

    11 Q. I think, Professor, you have some maps there,

    12 not the next two, which point to the potential division

    13 of Bosnia-Herzegovina; is that right?

    14 A. Yes. There are -- we can take -- I wanted to

    15 explain to you in this sense the potential division

    16 because -- okay. If you want, we can take into

    17 consideration the maps included in the exhibit number

    18 116 H, B, C, D.

    19 Q. A, B, C, D.

    20 A. A, B, C, D. Yes. 116A -- I will show you.

    21 Ethnic division. This was an attempt of --

    22 Q. Can you just tell us, on the back of each

    23 one, it indicates --

    24 A. This is A.

    25 Q. 116A, fine. That's fine.



  65. 1 A. These maps can -- are interesting,

    2 particularly, when you compare the maps. So this was

    3 the ethnic division of Bosnia as it was agreed by SDA, HDZ,

    4 SDS. When they finally -- in the Konak. This is in

    5 Villa Konak; it happened immediately before the war

    6 erupted so -- and after the referendum, so

    7 February-March 1992, when the European Union,

    8 particularly under the direction of the Troika

    9 Cutiliero from Portugal, tried to establish the

    10 cantonisation of Bosnia, a cantonisation which was

    11 opposed by the leader of HDZ, Stjepan Kljujic. And for

    12 this reason, in February, he was compelled to resign

    13 from HDZ, and Mate Boban, who had at that moment the

    14 confidence of Tudjman, took over the direction of the party.

    15 And they tried to make this division of

    16 Bosnia, which didn't work particularly because the

    17 Democrats and part of the SDA were against

    18 any ethnic partition inside Bosnia, so they didn't

    19 oppose.

    20 But what is interesting is also, if you make

    21 a comparison of the three following maps, B, C, D,

    22 where you have first (indiscernible) Muslim-Croat

    23 concept, when you see that the Croat area is

    24 particularly related with Herzegovina and Posavina,

    25 these two areas, and the Muslim part is the Central



  66. 1 Eastern -- connected with the Central Eastern Bosnia

    2 and the area of Bihac, this is the area of Bihac, this

    3 is the north-western part of Bosnia.

    4 So you can see that to the Serbs, according

    5 to the Muslim-Croatian concept of the division of that

    6 period, the Serbs had only north-western Bosnia and just

    7 some parts in Herzegovina and in the eastern -- on the

    8 right bank of the Drina River, in this area. While the

    9 Serb Democratic option -- this is Exhibit C -- clashes

    10 eminently with the other one. I don't know if it is

    11 possible to show comparatively. No.

    12 Q. Yes, you can.

    13 A. Yes, it's possible? Okay. Very good. You

    14 see the proposal, the Serb proposal, the Serb

    15 canton was -- it included all the north-western part of

    16 Bosnia plus a large part of the eastern part of Bosnia,

    17 which was -- in the Muslim Croatian idea was

    18 predominantly Croatian and Muslim. For Croatia you

    19 see only one part of Herzegovina close to

    20 Dalmatia, plus some islands in Central Bosnia and in

    21 Posavina.

    22 But you have also, and this is the case of

    23 "D" --

    24 Q. 116.

    25 A. "D" map. In the event that it was not



  67. 1 possible to find an agreement with the Muslims, the

    2 Croats had their own map, and this map included, as you

    3 can see, it's not exactly the same area agreed between

    4 the Muslims and the Croats in the first -- in Exhibit

    5 B. If you make a comparison between Exhibit B and

    6 Exhibit D. You see that they claim toward the Central

    7 Bosnia is much more clear in the Croatian option than

    8 in the Croatian Muslim proposal.

    9 So if you compare these maps, prepared at the

    10 last moment when already the referendum was made,

    11 Bosnia was awaiting recognition from the European

    12 Union, the Serbs who are preparing to go to war, because

    13 Karadzic clearly stated, clearly stated that --

    14 immediately after the referendum that Bosnia was facing

    15 a war.

    16 By the way, I can say that I met him

    17 personally in -- before the election in 1990 in the

    18 Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, and I had personally the

    19 impression that he already wanted a war at the time.

    20 So before the election, he was ready to provoke a war

    21 in Bosnia, and he was preparing himself for a war.

    22 I'm not personally -- personally, I'm not

    23 surprised at this declaration by Karadzic immediately

    24 after the referendum.

    25 But if you compare all these maps, you see



  68. 1 how difficult it was. Even in the case of a partition

    2 -- this was not a partition, this was just to create

    3 ethnic cantons in Bosnia. It was not clear if the

    4 Serbs accepted independence of Bosnia or not, but

    5 anyway -- or to prepare the ethnic cantons in order to

    6 divide Bosnia later. This is different. But you can

    7 see from these maps how difficult the job was. I

    8 can imagine Dusan Bilandzic or the others discussing

    9 after March 1991, in June-July, so when the war

    10 erupted, a partition with Bosnia, when Bosnia was not

    11 in a war, just how difficult it was for them to divide

    12 the area.

    13 Taking into consideration that the sources of

    14 legitimisation for the claims were different, because

    15 they were based on demographic reasons, on historical

    16 reasons, on geo-political interests, communications and

    17 so forth. So different reasons interacted together in

    18 order to make these maps, and they clashed with each

    19 other as sources of legitimisation. So this was the

    20 real difficulty for policy makers and advisors of

    21 policy makers to find an agreement, an agreement amongst

    22 them, in order to find an ethnic solution, ethnic

    23 partition of Bosnia.

    24 Q. What then was the position taken, if any, by

    25 the international community to this conflict in 1992 in



  69. 1 Bosnia-Herzegovina?

    2 A. Generally, the international community, in my

    3 opinion, had a very weak reaction. It was, in my

    4 opinion, unable to understand the dimension of the

    5 general disintegration of Yugoslavia. They were

    6 unable to understand what went on before the Yugoslav

    7 crisis and during the Yugoslav crisis, so before the

    8 war erupted in June 1991 and later on.

    9 There are many reasons why they were so

    10 weak and why they offered a weak solution for a long

    11 time. The first reason is a cultural one, in my

    12 opinion. They were unable to face a strong,

    13 national, even if national ethnic legitimisation of

    14 powers for the new secession State of Yugoslavia for

    15 policy makers, and probably we can't ask policy makers

    16 to have a clear distinction of biological and voluntary

    17 -- natural and voluntary idea of nations as I spoke

    18 when -- last time.

    19 So maybe -- the question is nation. Nation

    20 is a concept, very unclear concept. The claim

    21 for nationality, independent full nationality,

    22 prevented, in a sense, policy makers to understand

    23 immediately the real dimension of the war and of the

    24 claims to divide all Yugoslavia. This was one

    25 of the things.



  70. 1 But the other thing is that the

    2 international community as a whole was very weakened

    3 because it was -- it had no common position. As,

    4 for instance, Germany and France, at the beginning,

    5 supported respectively Croatia and Serbia, albeit

    6 it's true that their support to these two countries

    7 diminished in the months to come.

    8 Italy. Italy was weakened dramatically because

    9 its own internal crisis of legitimation [sic]. It was

    10 the period when the corruption crisis started and

    11 a ruling class was completely set aside in that

    12 period.

    13 Great Britain. Great Britain had a very weak

    14 position because many aspects of the questions

    15 connected to the Yugoslav framework had links with the

    16 situation in Ulster, and so the question had elements

    17 in this sense and they were not so interested to

    18 discuss this topic.

    19 So this is -- inside the states, the member

    20 states of the European Community which is, as is

    21 well-known, a community without a defence, a common

    22 defence and foreign policy. So they had to agree

    23 all together to find a common position in order to have

    24 then -- to have then a relation with the others.

    25 So considering this division within these countries,



  71. 1 it's very difficult for them to find a compromise

    2 rapidly as the situation required.

    3 United States. The United States had made a

    4 decision -- decided for a long time to consider the

    5 Yugoslav question as a European issue. It didn't

    6 want to be involved in this question. It charged

    7 Europe to find a solution for this, but Europe

    8 wasn't able for the reasons I mentioned.

    9 The Islamic community. The Islamic

    10 community, albeit speaking about the Muslims threatened

    11 in Bosnia, they generally spoke about this, but they

    12 were very aware that any move they made in

    13 order to protect the Muslim community in Bosnia would

    14 be considered a confirmation of a showdown between

    15 Christianity and Islamic fundamentalism, as it was the

    16 propaganda of the Serb nationalism.

    17 So considering -- in addition, you have to

    18 consider that Saudi Arabia and Turkey had a different

    19 position than Iran, and so they controlled each

    20 other and division were very strong within the Islamic

    21 community too.

    22 So in this context, we have to take into

    23 consideration why the international community reacted

    24 so weakly and so poorly when the war erupted.

    25 Otherwise, when Communism collapsed, policy



  72. 1 makers particularly in Europe were so happy, let me

    2 say, to have won the Cold War. They didn't understand

    3 immediately that with the collapse of Communism, a new

    4 question was arising. This question was the

    5 question of the legitimisation of powers in the new

    6 successor states or in the states -- former Communist

    7 states. This was very difficult for them to

    8 understand culturally.

    9 This is not because I wanted to make a clear

    10 justification. I just wanted to make clear why it is

    11 understandable, their weakness, and it is not a moral

    12 evaluation. This is not the question. This is just to

    13 understand the reason.

    14 So in this context, the United Nations, in

    15 the end, in September 1991, made a decision to impose

    16 an arms embargo on the whole of Yugoslavia which was, in fact

    17 -- which had, in fact, a negative impact particularly

    18 on the Muslim community because they were surrounded.

    19 They didn't have possibility to contact the external

    20 world through sea or boat, while it was easier even for

    21 the Croat and the Bosnian communities to receive

    22 weapons and army from Croatia and Serbia and through

    23 the borders anyway illegally to receive weapons and

    24 ammunition from outside.

    25 This was in September 1991. This was one



  73. 1 of the reasons why this was often under discussion.

    2 The United States, particularly during the Clinton

    3 Presidency, tried to -- and asked to leave the

    4 embargo, the arms embargo. This was one of the

    5 discussions in the United States for a long time.

    6 Then the United Nations in 1992 -- this was

    7 in 1991. In 1992, the United Nations first, in the

    8 beginning of April, for the first time, deployed

    9 peace keepers in Krajina. This was the first

    10 military intervention of the international community in

    11 the conflict when the UN peace keepers had to be

    12 deployed in the areas between Croatia and Krajina and

    13 in Krajina.

    14 And then, as it was established later in May

    15 1992, the end of May, with Resolution 757,

    16 sanctions were established against Serbia and

    17 Montenegro. These sanctions were later strengthened.

    18 This was an attempt to isolate Serbia and Montenegro

    19 completely as they were recognised as being most responsible

    20 for the war.

    21 Immediately after -- this was at the end of

    22 May. In June, Resolution 758 established a -- the

    23 action -- the participation of UN peace keepers in the

    24 airport of Sarajevo as an airport, an international

    25 airport; and later in October, another resolution



  74. 1 established a no-fly zone over Bosnia, over the skies

    2 of Bosnia. So in this sense, because they -- and then

    3 the UNPROFOR representatives had opportunity to send

    4 reports to the United Nations when illegal flights from

    5 Serbia and Croatia often were noticed by time --

    6 particularly during the night.

    7 So this was the first reaction of the

    8 international community in that period.

    9 Q. Now, on the 26th of August, 1992, were the

    10 participants in the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina

    11 summonsed to a peace conference in London?

    12 A. Yes. This was a conference in -- it was the

    13 consequence of the conference -- the continuation of

    14 the conference chaired by Lord Carrington in

    15 The Hague in 1991 and it was continued in London in

    16 1992, and then, because no agreement was found in

    17 London, this conference moved to Geneva in September

    18 1992.

    19 There were attempts at calling all the

    20 parties, Milosevic, Tudjman, and representatives of the

    21 Bosnian leaderships, to find a solution, but the

    22 solution was not found at that time. These were

    23 the international conferences organised with this in mind.

    24 Q. But were new mediators appointed as a

    25 consequence of this conference held in August and



  75. 1 September of 1992?

    2 A. In which --

    3 Q. Were Robert Owen and Cyrus Vance appointed as

    4 mediators?

    5 A. Yes, yes, okay, because they were charged to

    6 prepare a proposal for a solution to Bosnia, and they

    7 prepared a plan that was submitted to the members -- to

    8 the parties, the conflicting parties at the beginning of

    9 January, 1993, the 2nd of January, the proposal for

    10 partition -- for the reorganisation of Bosnia.

    11 Q. Now we want to move to the area directly

    12 involved in this particular case, the conflict between

    13 the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Croats, and can you

    14 tell us when tensions first occurred between these two

    15 groups, the Bosnian Croats and the Bosnian Muslims and

    16 how it developed, and I think you have to go back some

    17 time in order to --

    18 A. Yes, we have to go back again, sorry,

    19 chronologically. Yeah. Officially, openly, tensions

    20 started to arise in autumn 1991 when -- in October,

    21 after the 15th of October, the declaration of

    22 sovereignty was voted by HDZ and SDS leaderships. A

    23 few days after, the President of HDZ, Stjepan Kljujic,

    24 gave an interview to the Croatian newspaper from Rijeka,

    25 "Nova List," and this interview was particularly



  76. 1 interesting because it envisaged a change of strategy

    2 for the HDZ.

    3 We have to consider the period. We are in

    4 October 1991. This is the fall 1991. This is the

    5 period when Dubrovnik was bombarded and Vukovar was

    6 besieged and then the Serb army entered

    7 Vukovar.

    8 So in this context, Stjepan Kljujic started

    9 to explain that probably it should be better for the

    10 Muslims and the Croats to distinguish their fate from

    11 that of the Serbs even in Bosnia.

    12 A few days earlier, I mentioned the

    13 declaration of sovereignty was voted only by Croats and

    14 Muslims. So he suggested this, and he suggested that

    15 this distinction of the fate had to be considered in

    16 the framework of a possible future confederation with

    17 Slovenia and Croatia, with Slovenia, or otherwise

    18 creating an independent separate state.

    19 Speculation and discussion immediately

    20 followed in Bosnia about this position of Kljujic, and

    21 some weeks later, at the beginning of November, it was

    22 maybe much more clear why Kljujic started to speak to

    23 this when the first Croatian autonomous region was

    24 created. So in this moment, when this declaration of

    25 Kljujic in "Novi List" was reported by the newspapers



  77. 1 and by public opinion in Bosnia, tensions between

    2 Croats and Muslims arose, and this was the first

    3 official tension that emerged between the two

    4 communities in 1991.

    5 Q. I think you have a map there, do you not,

    6 exhibit 110?

    7 A. Yes, I have a map of the Croat -- this is

    8 the map, exhibit 110. This is the map of the process

    9 of creating -- of creating the areas of the Croat

    10 community, autonomous communities, the so-called --

    11 Croat community, Hrvatska Zajednica. Because

    12 the process was similar to that of the Serb

    13 autonomous region, the so-called SAO. Later in the

    14 political terminology, this was called the HAO process,

    15 so the SAO and the HAO. HAO is the Croat,

    16 Haoizacija. So Haoizacija and Saoizacija were the two

    17 terms used by political scientists to speak

    18 about this process of reorganisation of ethnic

    19 communities in Bosnia.

    20 The first community that was established was

    21 Bosanska Posavina, the yellow one in the north close to

    22 the Sava River. This was established on -- 12th,

    23 November 12th, 1991, and reactions were -- the concerns

    24 particularly between Muslim community and those of the

    25 Bosnian who share the idea of a -- Bosnians of citizens



  78. 1 and the whole Bosnia to be defended, their concerns

    2 dramatically increased.

    3 What is interesting was the reaction of a

    4 part of the HDZ leadership. The head of HDZ Mostar

    5 reacted -- explained that, "Okay, this is just an

    6 attempt of organising the Serbs locally for economic

    7 and cultural reasons, but it doesn't mean anything

    8 because the majority of the population emotionally

    9 related -- connected to the idea of Croatia, and

    10 Croatia is in Herzegovina -- it's around this area.

    11 And there are no proclamation of Herzegovinian Croat

    12 community at all, so this was just in that area, and

    13 the demonstration -- they wanted to show that this was

    14 not the process.

    15 Unfortunately, two days after this

    16 declaration, the Croat community of Herceg-Bosna

    17 was proclaimed, and it was created, you will see, in

    18 this red area. This is the red area. This is an area

    19 with a long border with Croatia. This is Dalmatia in

    20 this area and the Dubrovnik area, while this -- also

    21 Slavonia for the Posavina. So both regions had

    22 borders with Croatia, albeit Posavina was separated by

    23 a river and there was no division, geographical

    24 division, between Herceg-Bosna and Croatia.

    25 And then, late in January, another Croat



  79. 1 community, the Croat community of Srednja Bosnia,

    2 was created. This is the blue one.

    3 So three Croatian communities were

    4 established between November and January while the

    5 Serb communities were established between September

    6 and January 1991.

    7 Q. Now, I think the next map, exhibit 111, what

    8 does that relate to?

    9 A. Yes. This was a map -- I wanted -- I

    10 prepared myself. This one. It was -- this area is a

    11 comparison between the two previous maps, exhibit 110 and

    12 107, between the two -- the two claimed -- between the

    13 two maps with the areas claimed by the Croat community

    14 and the Serb autonomous community.

    15 Just to give you an idea of the areas

    16 claimed by both the two communities, the two, the

    17 Serb and the Croat communities, all not claimed

    18 by both, the two communities. So the green areas in

    19 this map, the green areas, are the areas not claimed

    20 either by Bosnian Serbs or Bosnian Croats, and you see

    21 it is just one area in the Bihac area which was

    22 surrounded by the Serbs because this route here was

    23 the -- Drina River, this was the area claimed by the

    24 Croats -- by the Serbs, sorry, and just some islands

    25 around Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Virovitica, and Tuzla,



  80. 1 just these areas. While the red one were the areas

    2 included both in the Serb autonomous region and in

    3 the Croat community.

    4 This can explain, for instance, the reaction

    5 of Karadzic when HDZ started to create these

    6 communities. He supported the idea. He was not

    7 against the idea of creating Croat community in

    8 Bosnia. He was against the pretension [sic] of the

    9 Croat community on some areas, Kladanj, on the other

    10 side, by Karadzic himself. So this was the question.

    11 This was about the two -- so this can also

    12 offer a picture to you in order to understand why it

    13 was so difficult to establish a partition, a division,

    14 of the maps of Bosnia, because even in a context --

    15 even in a peaceful context, at least for Bosnia, the

    16 two maps claimed by Croat community and Serb

    17 community clash with each other at least in one, two,

    18 three, four, five areas, which means more districts.

    19 Q. Was there any historical foundation to these

    20 respective claims by both Serbia -- by both the Bosnian

    21 Serbs and perhaps even Serbia and the Bosnian Croats

    22 and perhaps Croatia, and do you have any maps there

    23 that touch upon this historical claim?

    24 A. Yes, yes. As I told you previously, when the

    25 question of the creation of the new state was on the table,



  81. 1 the issue of legitimisation of powers became a crucial

    2 issue, and it was based on different clashing claims,

    3 historical, demographic, economic reasons, claims,

    4 legitimisation. History played a very important role

    5 because history is considered on the basis of the

    6 natural idea of nation, on the basis of -- the

    7 biological idea of nations. It is based on the state

    8 or ancient state created in the Middle Ages and then

    9 destroyed by the great empires or on the basis of some

    10 kind of recognition, international recognition,

    11 received in the past.

    12 So, for instance, I have here different maps

    13 that I can show you in this sense. These are the

    14 exhibit number 112, 113, 114, 115; that can be also

    15 considered in a comparative way just to understand the

    16 different idea.

    17 You know, when Mate Boban spoke about --

    18 immediately after the creation of the Croat

    19 community of Herceg-Bosna, he wanted to stress in his

    20 public reports, meetings, he wanted to stress the right

    21 of the Croat people to live in the historical and to

    22 create -- the historical borders, to implement the

    23 historical dreams of the Croats to live in a state, in

    24 a Croat State.

    25 So when you speak about history, historical,



  82. 1 you know something because immediately -- although it

    2 can be strange for us -- immediately you create a

    3 condition from the other side, the Muslim, the Serbs,

    4 to react in the same way. So history is a very -- or

    5 the manipulation or the interpretation of history is

    6 often a political tool in order to establish a

    7 legitimisation on some area.

    8 So, for instance, exhibit 112 can offer one

    9 of the areas claimed by Boban when he supported and he

    10 explained the reason why the Herceg-Bosna community,

    11 Croat community, was created. He mentioned in his

    12 speeches the so-called Banovina, Croat Banovina, of

    13 1939. This is the area you can see -- it is the

    14 red-line area -- this was the Banovina of Croatia.

    15 This Banovina of Croatia was created after an

    16 agreement, an agreement in 1939 between the Serb and

    17 the Croat representatives of the so-called

    18 agreements, Sporazum Cvetkovic-Macek, the two persons

    19 who agreed to create this map.

    20 They decided -- this was in 1939, please,

    21 just on the eve of the beginning of the Second World

    22 War when Hitler was already threatening Poland, so it

    23 was in August-September -- July-August, something, and

    24 this area was created as an autonomous banate.

    25 "Banate" means the area of a province, from the term "Ban"



  83. 1 who was the governor of Croatia in the ancient past.

    2 So this Banovina was an autonomous

    3 province created from some of the previous

    4 Banovina. When King Alexander carried his coup in

    5 1929, the first thing was to create administrative

    6 reform of the country, and he wanted to destroy the

    7 different -- Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and create

    8 Banovina on the main tributaries of the rivers, so you can see

    9 here Banate of Drava, Banate of Vrbas -- these are

    10 rivers -- Banate of Drina. So Banate of Sava was the

    11 River Sava and Banate of Primorje -- "Primorje" means

    12 the coast, the shores. And so this was the reason why

    13 he made this. And then King Alexander was killed by a

    14 terrorist Ustashe in 1939, and later, in -- sorry,

    15 1934. And in 1939, an agreement was reached by the

    16 Serb and Croatian representatives to create

    17 an autonomous Banate of Croatia including Sava and

    18 Primorje, plus some area of Bosnia, you can see, on the

    19 south of Sava and on the north of Primorje, these two

    20 areas.

    21 So this was the -- one -- in this sense, as

    22 you can see, particularly this part, is not so far from

    23 the autonomous region of Herceg-Bosna if you make a

    24 comparison with the exhibit 110 just -- you can make a

    25 comparison and you can see this sense and you can see



  84. 1 this part and this part.

    2 So when Boban spoke about Banovina, he had a

    3 clear idea in his mind and it was very well understood

    4 by people, by Croats and by the others, of course.

    5 Otherwise, if this was a claim by Boban in

    6 that period, the claim of the Chetniks, particularly

    7 Serbia, Serbs, Chetniks, you can see in this map was

    8 more or less similar to these --

    9 Q. That's exhibit --

    10 A. Sorry, that exhibit is 113. Just to -- this

    11 is an historical map. It's not just a map of the

    12 claims of Seselj. Seselj was, and still is, the

    13 President of the Radical Party of Serbia, the party which

    14 claims historical links with the Chetnik movement. The

    15 Chetniks were, in fact, the soldiers of the King of

    16 Serbia, so they were Serb nationalists.

    17 And, in fact, immediately after the first

    18 dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1941, when the Nazi army

    19 enter Yugoslavia, the Chetniks or, better, the soldiers

    20 and the officials loyal to the King who was in exile in

    21 London, organised themselves in Chetnik groups, and

    22 they joined the area between Serbia and Bosnia, and one

    23 of them, a lawyer, the lawyer, Stefan Moljevic, prepared

    24 a map for the future re-establishment of Yugoslavia,

    25 moreover a (indiscernible) of the Chetniks, and you can



  85. 1 see in this map the idea of Yugoslavia, of the Chetniks

    2 of Draza Mihajlovic and the Chetniks fighting during

    3 the Second World War, which was re-used by the Chetniks

    4 and by Seselj after, in 1991, 1992.

    5 So they wanted to -- they claimed a possible

    6 Yugoslavia for the end of the Second World War with a

    7 Great Serbia, which included, as you can see,

    8 Macedonia, increasingly and interestingly enough a part

    9 of Albania, you can see, (in foreign language) -- I

    10 don't know in English "Scutari." This is the area

    11 denoted by Albania and Dalmatia, you can see, and even

    12 a part of Slovenia, while Croatia was the great victim

    13 of this map. As you can see, Croatia was divided in

    14 two areas only, two areas not territorially connected,

    15 this one part in Slovenia, one part in Croatia proper,

    16 and he was punished, even losing control of the Rijeka

    17 port which was offered to Slovenia, and this reason was

    18 because, from the Chetnik point of view, Croatia

    19 supported during the war the enemy, German Nazis, so

    20 Croatia had to be punished for this reason, and for

    21 this reason, Croatia was restricted to this part.

    22 So this map offered an idea of what was the

    23 claim, the historical claims, of the Chetniks when the

    24 war was yet to be started, and the idea was to leave

    25 Croatia and Slovenia abandoned and to flee the



  86. 1 country. But, in comparison -- Croatia, Serbia had

    2 been established on this area, including also Dalmatia

    3 and this was the famous line from Virovitica, Karlobag

    4 and Karlovac that had to divide Croatia from Serbia,

    5 from Serbia. This was the war goal of the Chetniks.

    6 But, you see, often Chetniks and the Serbs

    7 claimed that, just to give you an idea, this was one

    8 claim. But otherwise they insisted that everywhere where

    9 there is a Serb monument is, is Serbia. And for instance --

    10 this is a joke, but interesting enough, Ratko Mladic,

    11 during the war, claimed that Trieste is a Serb town

    12 because -- and, in fact, it's true -- there is a Serb

    13 Orthodox Church in Trieste. But, as you know, in

    14 Trieste you have also a synagogue and Greek Orthodox

    15 Church and other churches, so it's very difficult in a

    16 sense if everybody pretended to run on the business of

    17 the monuments. But, anyway, it can be a joke for us,

    18 but it was serious for them and it was dramatically

    19 serious in this sense.

    20 Q. Now, Professor, we only have five minutes

    21 less --

    22 A. The last two maps.

    23 Q. The last two maps, if we could quickly just

    24 dispose of those, I think --

    25 A. Yes. I just wanted to show a map of Croatia



  87. 1 in -- this is the -- exhibit number 114, how Croatia

    2 was in -- when Croatia joined the Yugoslav State in

    3 1918 on -- this was the Croatia in 1918, but you have

    4 to take into account that Croatia was unified under

    5 Yugoslavia. This is very important to stress this.

    6 Croatia was unified because Dalmatia was part of the

    7 Austrian Empire while the other part of Croatia was

    8 under the Hungarian part of the Empire, and after the

    9 agreement, the agreement between -- after 1867, only

    10 the dynastic union was the element of unification for

    11 the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

    12 So the unification of Croatia was possible

    13 within Yugoslavia, and you can see even that one part

    14 of Banja is not in Croatia, it was a part of Hungary,

    15 now Banja is in Croatia, while Croatia controlled

    16 completely the area of Srjem just to Belgrade, because

    17 this was the frontier -- the border between the

    18 Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire and

    19 Serbia, later on.

    20 So sometimes when you find also the claims of

    21 Croatia to join -- to have its own rights, to have the

    22 borders on the Danube River, it does mean that only

    23 Danube is Banja, is Banja or the area, this area that

    24 is Vukovar or Osijek, but can be interpreted also, if

    25 not clarified, to control all Srjem until Belgrade,



  88. 1 which is one of the reasons of possible clashes between

    2 the two, Croatia and Serbia, when they speak about

    3 history.

    4 Q. And finally --

    5 A. And finally.

    6 Q. -- exhibit 115.

    7 A. Yes. Yes. This was the last exhibition map,

    8 this 115, and this was the Croatian independent state

    9 established by Nazis and Fascist powers during the

    10 Second World War. You can see on this map, what is

    11 very interesting is that Dalmatia, large part of

    12 Dalmatia, was not included in Croatia because it was

    13 claimed by Italy, and this is one of the reasons why

    14 the Ustashe, which was supported by Mussolini before

    15 the war, became much more -- leaned and aligned with

    16 the Germans because they were disappointed with this

    17 claim of Italy, while they included completely all

    18 Bosnia, as you can see, and the border is Drina, so

    19 Drina has been claimed often as the correct and regular

    20 border between Serbs and Croats. This is Drina.

    21 It's interestingly enough to have also two

    22 terms when you speak about the Serbs. The Serbs on the

    23 left bank of Drina and the Serbs on the right bank of

    24 Drina have two different names. They are called

    25 "Serbi" when you speak about the Serbs in Bosnia -- or



  89. 1 in Croatia, and "Serbianci" when you speak about the

    2 Serbs in Serbia. And so this -- interesting enough.

    3 And this is the Drina River, and this includes also, as

    4 you can see, Srbija completely, just join the area

    5 close to Belgrade. This is until -- this is the suburb

    6 of Belgrade. You can -- new Belgrade would be part of

    7 this area where it is today, new Belgrade.

    8 So it is just to give you an idea how

    9 complicated it is when you speak about the historical

    10 dream on -- the historical borders of Croatia. This is

    11 something quite -- that create immediately concern on

    12 the others as well as you have the same reaction when

    13 the Serbs claim their own -- Great Serbia and the

    14 dream of the Serbs to live in the same state, you

    15 know? This is -- when you manipulate the maps in the

    16 past in order to legitimise a political claim of today.

    17 MR. NIEMANN: Thank you, Professor.

    18 JUDGE RODRIGUES: Thank you very much. I

    19 think we have finished for today, and tomorrow we will

    20 resume in the second courtroom.

    21 Good afternoon to all of you.

    22 --- Whereupon proceedings adjourned at 1.33 p.m.

    23 until Wednesday, May 6, 1998, at 9.00 a.m.

    24

    25