Page 47819

 1                           Wednesday, 1 October 2014

 2                           [Open session]

 3                           [Defence Closing Statement]

 4                           [The accused entered court]

 5                           --- Upon commencing at 9.00 a.m.

 6             JUDGE KWON:  Good morning, everyone.

 7             Yes, Mr. Karadzic you have the floor.

 8             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Good morning, Your Excellencies.

 9     Good morning to all.  Thank you, thank you for giving me this

10     opportunity.

11             I come from a system where it was clear for 50 years that if

12     somebody is sentenced to ten years in prison, he must be guilty of

13     something because for nothing people got eight years in prison.  That was

14     our justice; however, the west hasn't faired much better.  When it was

15     established that Dreyfus, totally innocent, life imprisonment was reduced

16     to ten years in prison.  So we've got two systems that have similar

17     results.  They are particularly drastic and dangerous when they meet one

18     another:  Western justice and our Balkan fate.  Something like that

19     happened in the beginning of the 20th century when Austro-Hungary tried

20     many Serbs.  The best known were the Banja Luka and Zagreb trials that

21     really shamed that country.  And then Masaryk and other renowned persons

22     with a great deal of moral integrity were turned against the state

23     because the state acted in such a way.  The Dreyfus affair and the

24     Austro-Hungarian trials happened then.  And, in the meantime, nothing

25     that big or this wrong happened like this war that was imposed upon us

Page 47820

 1     and these trials that followed that war.

 2             From those days until today, until this case, there hasn't been a

 3     situation when so many decent, innocent people, mostly Serbs, were

 4     sentenced to high prison sentences that they are serving in different

 5     European countries outside their homeland; and, on the other side, so

 6     many perpetrators of crimes against Serbs, murderers, were set free.  We

 7     can pretend that that did not happen, but it did happen, and it will be

 8     remembered for longer than the Dreyfus affair.  And that will be studied;

 9     everything that was done and how justice was meted out.

10             We know exactly why that was done in 1914, for the sake of the

11     Austrian breakthrough into the east, why that is being done towards the

12     end of the 20th century.  With small nations, that we don't know.  Let us

13     hope to God that this is just for the sake of NATO credibility or

14     different elections.  But I'm afraid that that is on account of something

15     that is far bigger than that and that the entire world is going to pay

16     for a lot more.

17             To be honest towards the Trial Chambers, although the Judgements

18     and the elaborations provided by different Trial Chambers, are really

19     something that should be read and that one had to wonder at, how people

20     reach certain conclusions.  I have to say that the Trial Chambers are

21     less guilty there because that is really the handiwork of the

22     Prosecutor's office.  For example, in this case, the Prosecutor is

23     challenging the authenticity of the Serb fear of a new genocide, and they

24     say that that was imposed upon the people by Karadzic and the Serb

25     Democratic Party.  There is not a single family that does not have living

Page 47821

 1     witnesses or the offspring of those who were killed in the genocide that

 2     took place in the Second World War.  It would only be fair for the

 3     Prosecution to come out and say that had there not been a genocide

 4     against Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia 50 years ago, now it's

 5     been longer than that but in relation to 1990 it would have been 50

 6     years, then Karadzic and others would not have to defend themselves and

 7     they would not have to explain why they were not actually trying to

 8     convince the people of something that is wrong and that is not

 9     well-founded.

10             The Prosecution did not err on the side of caution.  They did

11     even more than they were allowed to do.  In our system, the Prosecution

12     would not be allowed to do what was done in this Tribunal, in this case

13     more particularly.  I'm more familiar with my own case.  They would have

14     been cautioned.  Perhaps the case would have been thrown out all together

15     because of the way in which it is being presented to the Chamber.

16             Now, what is all this about?  I know the truth.  The Prosecution

17     knows the truth.  Who are we supposed to delude?  The Trial Chamber.  If

18     I were a member of the Trial Chamber, I would be offended.  This degree

19     of falsifying facts, such bastardised sentences where only portions of

20     sentences given in response are being taken into account and then this

21     semantic bastard is being presented as a fact.  I highly appreciated the

22     well-intentioned cautions issued by the Trial Chamber that I was not

23     defending the Serb people but that I was here to defend myself because

24     the Serb people were not on trial; however, you will see that it is the

25     Serb people who stand accused, the entire Serb people stands accused, and

Page 47822

 1     that has been demonstrated over the past two days most tellingly.

 2             This is how it is being done:  The Prosecution cannot indicate

 3     what my motives are for those actions that they are attributing to me, to

 4     my friends, my collaborators, and the entire Serb community in Bosnia and

 5     Herzegovina, this community consisting of 1.500.000 people.  I did not

 6     have any reasons to go into politics actively.  I had a successful

 7     professional career, a very nice one.  Also as a physician, as a doctor,

 8     I had a loving family, I had a good social network, including many

 9     Muslims and Croats.  Many of them remained my friends.  As I'm a trained

10     psychiatrist and I received my training in England, the US, in

11     Yugoslavia, and Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, and also knowing the Russian

12     and English languages, I could have worked anywhere in the world.  I was

13     not a candidate for any particular office.

14             Now, why did I do all of this?  If I'm crazy, then the

15     Trial Chamber has to see whether I am responsible for my actions.  If it

16     is a question of patriotism being equated with craziness, then the

17     Trial Chamber has to see what the Prosecution is doing.  If I'm crazy,

18     are a million and a half Serbs crazy, who let their only sons go into

19     freezing trenches to defend their homes and families for three and a half

20     years?  To vote at all referenda in favour of what the Serb Democratic

21     Party advocated and what I personally advocated?  Did they have a motive?

22     Did the Prosecution show to the Trial Chamber in any way what it was that

23     happened?  How come so many people agreed on this?  Out of 12 million

24     Serbs throughout the world, at least 8 million stood by that policy -- or

25     rather, was opposed to the policy that was pushing us into war and into

Page 47823

 1     defending our basic fundamental rights.

 2             The Prosecution has really exaggerated here, the distinguished

 3     Mr. Tieger.  He said that I said that the SDS was full of idiots.  The

 4     SDS had within itself and behind it the elite of the Serb people,

 5     university professors, academicians, writers, doctors, and there would be

 6     some obstinate people too, and colloquially we could say that such a

 7     person was an idiot but not really.  This kind of membership made the SDS

 8     the best party, the most self-sacrificing party among the Serb people and

 9     throughout Europe, if you will.  The dissidents who had the moral

10     strength to oppose Tito and communism now made an effort in favour of

11     their own people, and they opposed the new world order that did not take

12     into account the basic interests of the Serbs.

13             The luckier ones lost their property but the less-fortunate ones

14     lost their nearest and dearest.  The Prosecution offends these people

15     deeply by the things they are saying, by fabricating this joint criminal

16     enterprise that involves these people too, because these people asked to

17     be represented honestly and to have their political objectives and their

18     struggle for freedom be represented and defended.  Nobody could have

19     imposed that upon the Serbs.  The Serbs are the most difficult people to

20     lead because they are not sheep.  They are not obedient.  So nothing can

21     be imposed on them just like that.

22             These weak allusions proffered by the Prosecution are trying to

23     lead the Trial Chamber astray.  Various words that were uttered by MPs

24     over the phone and chitchat, et cetera, and then they're drawing

25     conclusions on the basis of that.  And then the entire case and the

Page 47824

 1     entire Judgement, therefore, is supposed to be based on conclusions,

 2     based on hearsay evidence.  That would really be another invention,

 3     another precedent which would, indeed, be remembered.  Allusions,

 4     inferences, instead of evidence, that judgements would be made on that

 5     basis.

 6             For example, as a matter of fact, certain sentences uttered by

 7     members of parliament are being misquoted here, although we heard two

 8     prime ministers here, Lukic and Djeric.  There were some extreme opinions

 9     presented in debates, sometimes motived by political reasons, but these

10     extremist views never prevailed.  The parliament does not meet for the

11     sake of sentences.  The parliament meets to produce documents that would

12     be the foundation of a system.  They did not show us a single document of

13     the Assembly of Republika Srpska that would have tolerated crime, let

14     alone led to crime as such.

15             The distinguished Mr. Tieger, a distinguished lawyer from the

16     Prosecution, since he has no evidence he decided to tarnish my

17     personality and he called me a liar and a mobster.  That happened on the

18     very first day, and this was front page news in our media, as the

19     strongest argument provided by the Prosecution.  That frees me from any

20     obligation to remain polite, but I'm not going to resort to that because

21     I have arguments.  I believe that it was with a heavy heart that

22     Mr. Tieger decided to go for this kind of labelling and tarnishing a

23     person's reputation.  He probably wouldn't have done that had he had a

24     single shred of hard evidence against Radovan Karadzic.  In this way,

25     without any kind of evidence, the OTP is expecting the Trial Chamber to

Page 47825

 1     make certain decisions, to draw certain conclusions, and to base the

 2     Judgement on that which the Prosecution is proffering as evidence, and

 3     this basically consists of allusions, random chitchat, testimony by their

 4     own employees as experts, who managed to put the indictment itself into

 5     evidence.  We've written all of this.  I don't need to repeat everything

 6     that we've said in the final brief, how the employees of the OTP

 7     testified, admitting that they made an effort to please the Prosecution,

 8     to prove something that the OTP already knows, and so on.  We have about

 9     a dozen of those experts who, at any rate, should have been totally

10     impartial and they certainly were not.

11             Now, what is behind the Prosecution case, the so-called joint

12     criminal enterprise?  This was probably taken from legal provisions that

13     deal with the prosecution of Mafia.  There wouldn't have been an

14     indictment had it not been for this kind of unfair argumentation.  There

15     would have been no indictments except for immediate perpetrators.  If you

16     don't believe this, instruct the Prosecution to write up a -- or to patch

17     up an indictment against me that would exclude JCE.  Let's see what

18     Karadzic would stand accused of then, apart from the joint criminal

19     enterprise.  The only thing that would remain would be my good deeds,

20     towards my own people and towards the other two peoples.  These good

21     deeds are reflected in major efforts to avoid a war, and also in

22     lessening the suffering of all three peoples once the war had broken out.

23     Honest persons, especially those who converse with God, know that that is

24     so, honest persons from all three ethnic communities.

25             The Prosecution adheres to the JCE, thus accusing each and every

Page 47826

 1     Serb.  It is not true that the entire Serb people is not being accused

 2     because this trial - and not only this one, these trials in general - are

 3     supposed to shift responsibility from other peoples to the Serb people,

 4     and then after the Jewish people some other people are supposed to be

 5     declared victims to simply change this overall perception of crimes in

 6     the world, as it stands today.

 7             The Prosecution did not come up even with approximate allusions

 8     as to who and how founded this joint criminal enterprise, who determined

 9     what would happen and what would be done by whom.  The OTP draws

10     conclusions after a civil war happened, after crimes were committed in

11     that civil war, so they say that must be because the Serbs had founded

12     the Serb Democratic Party in 1990.  Then, however, they abandoned this

13     idea that it was the beginning of the JCE, and they move it to 1991 and

14     the moment when the authorities were established after these elections.

15     And then they blacken our entire struggle for freedom, constitutionality,

16     and the rule of law, as if on all other sides the rule of law and honesty

17     and integrity towards partners were flourishing, as if there had been no

18     secret army founded on the other side, targeting exclusively

19     Bosnian Serbs, an army that was first intended to fight the JNA and

20     Yugoslavia and then Bosnian Serbs.

21             We've heard here many accusations against completely legal

22     actions in parliamentary life and lawful parliamentary decisions.  I am

23     painted by the Prosecution as an autocrat who holds everything in his own

24     hands, although there is hard evidence that it's not me calling people

25     from the Ministry of the Interior; they were calling me to ask me about

Page 47827

 1     the agreement I had made with the SDA and the HDZ, and they were afraid

 2     of it because that agreement threatened the foundations of our state and

 3     the provisions of that agreement were incompatible with the survival of

 4     the Serbian people.  And I hope the record will be corrected after we

 5     hear the tapes.

 6             So the Prosecution implies that the Serb Democratic Party should

 7     not have cared about implementing the programme that was supported by 50

 8     per cent of the vote, although the Serbian Democratic Party put in

 9     positions of power the least amount of party cadres, and that's why I was

10     criticised by many Prosecution witnesses, including Neskovic and others,

11     who claimed that I had put power back into the hands of old cadres,

12     although I had tried to nominate professional and able people.  Thus,

13     everything that happened in 1990 turns out to be suspect, whereas the

14     Islamic Declaration is mentioned nowhere.

15             I had asked Mr. Izetbegovic explicitly, and he said that he would

16     not renounce it for the sake of our political life in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

17     They pretend there had been no decision to establish the Patriotic League

18     on the 30th of March, 1991, and as if on the 30th of April, 1991, that

19     league had not really been established, and that's the date from which

20     their years of service are counted, as if the council for the defence of

21     Muslims had not been established, comprising officials who, instead of

22     defending Bosnia and all the ethnic communities, created a separate body

23     as a political wing of the Patriotic League.  They pretend that until

24     September -- by September 1991, as if we -- as we saw from the documents

25     of Sefer Halilovic, the Patriotic League was not established in 103 joint

Page 47828

 1     municipalities.  They only didn't dare to establish them in Croat

 2     communities.  And in those communities, in many of them, Serbs were the

 3     majority; 8 per cent were the Muslim majority.  And if all that had not

 4     been happening, the Serbs were trying to do something that was

 5     prohibited.  And the Prosecution completely overlooks the willingness of

 6     the Serbs to compromise, and they ignore our demands to form associations

 7     of municipalities by their own free will.  Instead, we see that there are

 8     orders to form joint municipalities in Kosovo.  It was always the right

 9     of people to organise themselves and form associations, to combine their

10     resources to meet their needs.  Regionalisation is a red rag to the

11     Prosecution, as if it had been done in secret.  The regionalisation was

12     carried out pursuant to the constitution and the laws, and especially in

13     view of the threats that Bosnia would secede violently and unilaterally

14     from Yugoslavia without dealing with the issues of the rights of Serbs,

15     and later Croats as it turned out.

16             The Prosecution overlooks that we accepted to give up on the

17     regionalisation at the proposal of Mr. Zulfikarpasic.  The international

18     and our Western allies who regularly betray the Serbs - and they have

19     done so this time - had the opportunity to opt for European-oriented

20     Muslims in Bosnia.  There are many of them, and there were two big

21     parties led by Fikret Abdic and Zulfikarpasic.  No, they opted for the

22     other variant that led to war.  The Prosecution says in their

23     paragraph -- they say that Bosnia-Herzegovina inevitably moved towards

24     independence while Karadzic was -- it's paragraph 28, Karadzic was

25     intensifying ... and so on and so forth.

Page 47829

 1             Bosnia was not moving towards independence inevitably.  It was

 2     not inevitable.  But in chair's opinion number 4 says that.  It was not

 3     inevitable and it was not clear.  And we see that from the decision to

 4     establish a conference on Bosnia-Herzegovina lead by Lord Carrington and

 5     Ambassador Cutileiro.  If it had been inevitable, why then all these

 6     additional measures to enable it?  And although the Serbs had accepted to

 7     remain in an independent Bosnia, on the condition that they continue to

 8     enjoy at least a part of what had been provided by the former joint state

 9     of Yugoslavia, that proposal was supported by the European community.

10     That was a condition sine qua non.  Without that, Bosnia could not have

11     moved towards independence.  That was accepted, and within a week an

12     attempt was made to trick us.

13             We saw what Irfan Ajanovic was saying on the 18th of March.

14             "We will yet see who is a fool, who is fooling the European

15     community, who is not in favour in peace."

16             Since that did not happen within a week, it was the SDA that

17     rejected the agreement, Irfan Ajanovic later said that they only needed

18     to gain time, and why did they need that time?  To trick the Serbs.  The

19     Prosecution says that the Serbs had grabbed 65 or 70 per cent of the

20     territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbs demanded that much for

21     themselves, and they rely on different scribes serving at various

22     conferences and their understanding.  But it is not confirmed by

23     Cutileiro or Akashi or anybody else who testified, it's nowhere in the

24     papers.  On the contrary, Lord Owen says that it would have been the

25     first instance in history that an army that has not been defeated would

Page 47830

 1     give back so much of the territory that it was at that moment controlling

 2     and holding.

 3             Let's look into these territorial issues.  The Prosecution claims

 4     that we were taking over power in different places and that we had

 5     conquered 65 or 70 per cent of the territory.  The evidence is replete

 6     with proof that we had had that territory even before the war, and we had

 7     an even larger territory before the war.  And I said many times in the

 8     Assembly of Bosnia-Herzegovina:  Don't try to violently impose some sort

 9     of new state.  That state will not be able to impose its power on 65

10     per cent on Bosnian territory.  Nobody ever disputed that Serbs were the

11     majority in 65 per cent of Bosnian territory and that the Serb ownership

12     in Bosnia-Herzegovina was about 64 per cent.

13             We heard here that the late President Milosevic was smirking at

14     the idea, saying it was social property.  If the Prosecution had looked

15     into our legislation, they would have seen that it was not state

16     property.  It was social property, and farmland belonged to peasants.

17     Other people could not use it as grazing land unless they had an

18     agreement with the peasants.  It's not nobody's; it's somebody's

19     property.  However, in 1990, at the elections, the Serbs won absolute

20     power in 37 per cent of municipalities, rural but rather well-developed

21     municipalities, and a good amount of the vote in 47 per cent of the

22     municipalities.

23             The Prosecution says that the joint criminal enterprise implied

24     take-over of power in municipalities in which we already had power; and

25     in the municipalities in which we had power and in municipalities where

Page 47831

 1     we were a minority party, there were conditions to form two or three

 2     different municipalities.  Even when we created the provisional borders

 3     of Republika Srpska, we invited Croats and Muslims to establish their own

 4     police stations wherever possible, not to go into Serb villages, and the

 5     Serbs would not go into their villages to defuse tensions.  There is no

 6     way to throw out somebody from a municipality in which they have their

 7     own police station, their own municipal authority.  That was not the

 8     purpose.  The purpose was for the Serbs to protect what they already had,

 9     and the Prosecution says here that Karadzic had said he would not allow

10     Alija's state to operate.  Of course that kind of state would not work

11     because the Serbs would not accept it.  But a state in which one-third of

12     the population occupying two-thirds of the territory as a majority

13     populace can function and will function, and I must mention that it was

14     late Mr. Izetbegovic who first suggested to divide Bosnia and who

15     proposed to apply his Islamic ideas only on the Muslim part of the

16     territory.  He was then pushed into war.  Somebody pushed him into war.

17     The conspiracy core inside the SDA pushed him.  Zulfikarpasic discovered

18     it, as did some European countries.  We will find out about that.

19     Zulfikarpasic left the SDA at that moment.

20             It was anyway Mr. Izetbegovic who suggested to divide Bosnia, and

21     I informed President Milosevic about that in an intercept reported on

22     29 May 1991.  It's D -- we have it on the screen now.

23             We were astounded and we were not prepared because we had not

24     been thinking about this at all.  However, when it became clear that they

25     will not abandon the idea of Bosnia's independence and they mean to have

Page 47832

 1     a unitary Bosnia ruled by a regime that was unacceptable to us, then we

 2     accepted it on the condition that we also have independence.  The

 3     Prosecution says that Karadzic was spreading the perception of threats

 4     against Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but the Prosecution does not want to

 5     show to the Trial Chamber that in the Muslim part and the Croat-held part

 6     of Bosnia-Herzegovina, it was Hitler's Allies who came into power.  If

 7     not President Tudjman, then his collaborators who came back from

 8     emigration and took power.  And Mr. Izetbegovic, beginning with 1939,

 9     were members of the young Muslim movement and received al-Husseini, the

10     mufti who arrived to prepare the Handschar Division as Hitler's ally and

11     personal friend.  Those were the things that all the intelligentsia among

12     the Serbs, all the educated people knew and wanted to defend the Serb

13     people from that, rather than conquer other peoples villages or territory

14     or impose their will on somebody.

15             JUDGE KWON:  Mr. Karadzic, now because of -- thanks to that video

16     aid, we know that it's part of Exhibit D1282, but for the future

17     reference, you're better to put it on the record, in the future.  Do you

18     follow?

19             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Yes, I apologise.  For the

20     transcript, it's D1282 of the 29th of May, 1991.

21             So the OTP, without the obligation, to actually determine who

22     concocted this joint criminal enterprise wants the Trial Chamber to

23     believe it.  They say Karadzic wanted an ethnically pure Republika Srpska

24     on 60 to 70 per cent of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, although the

25     record is replete with evidence that what that was about was the creation

Page 47833

 1     of homogenous territory by not taking the inhabited places of others and

 2     the regions belonging to others as part of the Republika Srpska.  All

 3     that time, Karadzic in the parliament of the Bosnian Serbs, in the

 4     parliament of Republika Srpska, was fighting against coveting

 5     territories, exaggerated territorial claims, and I quoted

 6     Mr. Izetbegovic, who said "by God" -- this is P12.  I believe that it is

 7     page 38, where Mr. Izetbegovic said:

 8             "For God's sake.  When drawing the maps, please try to have the

 9     least possible number of us in your parts and the least possible number

10     of your people in our parts."

11             This is a way to homogenise territories at the time when nobody

12     was even considering the possibility of war breaking out because there

13     was agreement that the problem should be addressed by not being overly

14     predatory and greedy in respect of territories belonging to others.  So

15     what happened was that before the war, Dobratici, a group of Croatian

16     villages from the Skender Vakuf municipality, later Knezevo, in the

17     presence of European monitors was actually separated from Knezevo with

18     its Serbian majority on a voluntarily basis, and it was annexed to Jajce

19     with a Croatian majority.

20             However, the Prosecution is accusing Mr. Koljevic, an exceptional

21     person, dubbing him a Serb nationalist, extremist, and in paragraph 75

22     accuses him that he had said that the Serbs had accepted changes of

23     internal borders in order to accommodate ethnic reality.  Changes of

24     internal borders meant what Mr. Izetbegovic was talking about, what I was

25     talking about, and on which such agreement had been reached even before

Page 47834

 1     the war, and such a transaction had already been conducted between two

 2     municipalities.  So one group could not be retained by force of Croatian

 3     villages in a majority Serbian municipalities if they felt better and

 4     could meet their interests better in another municipality, and that was

 5     done.

 6             The Prosecution goes on to abuse and to falsify data that it has.

 7     How does it do that when in the Assembly of Republika Srpska I advocated

 8     the acceptance of a plan, and when I spoke that or said that we should

 9     not fight for too much territory, strive for too much territory, what

10     happened was that I am -- it is -- I'm depicted as having said I did not

11     want Muslims and Croats in the state.  That never referred to Muslims and

12     Croats who would remain with us.  That always meant -- that was always

13     directed against any requests for every Croatian village to be made part

14     of Republika Srpska because that would have meant misunderstandings, it

15     would have meant that people who would have become part of such a state

16     would have become enemies of that state, would not feel comfortable in

17     it, and we would not have their agreement generally speaking.

18             Where Yugoslavia is concerned, that's our common house, our

19     bitter agreement to Croatia's seceding from Yugoslavia by saying that we

20     should not fight at any cost for our enemies to remain in our house who

21     have attacked us in that century twice.  The OTP portrays this as if we

22     were talking about domestic Muslims in Bijeljina, Srbac, Janja, or any

23     other place where they could, if they so wanted to, live normal lives.

24             This is what I talk about in Exhibit P87.  I'll read it in

25     English.

Page 47835

 1             [In English] "When we sacrifice the state for the sake of one

 2     village that wants to join it, if we start blowing like the balloon, we

 3     can easily burst and we don't have the right to do that."

 4             [Interpretation] I was saying exactly the same things in respect

 5     of the mistake committed in 1980 by late King Aleksandar, when he

 6     accepted that future big Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats,

 7     and Slovenes, when he agreed to accept Croats and Slovenes into that

 8     state and create at an inopportune moment a multinational state when you

 9     could not create a state out of a tribe.  That was not a job to be done

10     in the 19th century.  That didn't happen in the 20th century.

11             I apologise.  Actually, it was page 87 and the exhibit is D92

12     when I talked about the sacrifices made for a village.

13             So this position against coveting the territories of others,

14     against such greed for territory and exaggerated greed, is -- so my

15     position against it is mischaracterised.  That, actually, I was saying

16     that what -- we should expel the Croats and Muslims from what we were

17     holding.  The record is full of evidence that the Serbian side had

18     accepted and, in fact, had itself proposed and accepted to protect the

19     minorities in the cantons and in the republics, which the European

20     community had brokered upon a reciprocal basis and in a decent and humane

21     way.  There is not a single shred of evidence that the Serbs wanted

22     anything but that.

23             The Trial Chamber in the Krajisnik case actually highlighted a

24     paragraph, I believe it was paragraph 109, where in respect of my words

25     which I uttered on the 14th of February, 1992, after the 13th of February

Page 47836

 1     when we had established that there would be three Bosnias with Cutileiro,

 2     so my words that they should be aware that there should be no escaping

 3     from our parts, that Trial Chamber determined that, at that time,

 4     Karadzic was still taking care of other -- of the interests of the

 5     others, of the Muslims and the Croats.  If we looked at the decision of

 6     that Trial Chamber of this Tribunal, prior to that there was no joint

 7     criminal enterprise.  We actually have to set a new birthday for the

 8     joint criminal enterprise, but they cannot show it to exist.

 9             They can say there were murders that must have been according to

10     plan, and they take this KDZ240, (redacted) who, was not

11     supposed to testify about things that he knew nothing about, they take

12     him as a witness who says:  I first thought that Karadzic had a great

13     analytical ability and then I actually realised that he was telling me

14     that what he was planning would actually happen.  And I say that that is

15     not so.  And I refer to my address to the Assembly -- speech to the

16     Assembly of Bosnia-Herzegovina on the 15th of October, 1991, which the

17     OTP yesterday again represented this as a threat, although it is an

18     imminently anti-war address.  I actually anticipated what would happen if

19     we opt for forcible secession, the forcible secession of unitary

20     Bosnia-Herzegovina from Yugoslavia.  I reiterated that on -- also on the

21     25th of January, 1992, when I had this brief exchange with

22     Muhamed Cengic.  We actually agreed to postpone the referendum until such

23     time as the government will have carried out the regionalisation.  I told

24     him:  We all know what will happen if an inter-ethnic -- a civil war

25     breaks out here, there will be massive loss of life.  The Serbs will flee

Page 47837

 1     to their parts, the Croats to their parts, and the Muslims to their

 2     parts.  And what will we get?  What will we gain?  The same thing that we

 3     have now, but it will be much more homogenised, and we will have to sit

 4     down and sign an agreement.  In the meantime, there will be several

 5     hundred thousand dead, several hundred cities demolished, and we shall be

 6     where we stand today.  We shall have to sit down and ensure three

 7     signatures.  Without three signatures, there is no Bosnia.

 8             That was not clairvoyance.  That was just simple watching what

 9     was happening in -- following what was happening in Croatia, what was

10     happening, what had happened in all our lands in every war.  Witnesses of

11     the Prosecution -- for the Prosecution here have confirmed that every war

12     in the lands of the former Yugoslavia had a civil component, a civil war

13     component, where our people, brethren of the same blood, same kinship,

14     but of different religions, exterminated each other.

15   (redacted)

16   (redacted)

17             So such my actions involving exchanges with foreigners are

18     portrayed as this or that, as if Karadzic had confessed.  I cannot

19     confess, I cannot deny it, because I don't know until an investigation

20     has been carried out, or at least an inquiry to the military whether it

21     had, indeed, been so.  So because of -- in the absence of real guilt and

22     real evidence, the OTP is actually portraying this as my confession.

23             Colm Doyle testified that I said that -- that they should not

24     open fire on Television Sarajevo, and I told him they will not shoot.

25     Somebody shooting, I don't know whether these are Serb forces, and he

Page 47838

 1     said Karadzic accepted and apologised.  But Karadzic, at that moment, was

 2     not in command of anything.  He didn't have any army to -- under him.

 3     There were Territorial Defence forces of each municipalities.  There were

 4     individuals.  There was the JNA - and I was not in command of the

 5     JNA - and the OTP says Karadzic ensured that they shoot on Television

 6     Sarajevo, that fire be opened on Television Sarajevo in April 1992.

 7             So these are manoeuvres, and there is not a single allegation of

 8     the OTP which does not need to be verified for veracity, for truthfulness

 9     of the allegation.

10             Yesterday reference was made how I was accusing Beara and Mladic

11     because I was not guilty of something, but this is unheard of.  This is

12     something I never did.  I never defended myself by accusing others, and I

13     never accused anybody else of Srebrenica because I don't know what

14     happened.  Now the picture is being put together, but that is not my

15     defence.  In my opening remarks, I said I will not defend myself but by

16     pointing the finger of blame at other people.  What I want is, I want to

17     know what happened, and I know what happened.  Civil war happened that we

18     could have anticipated, that we saw before that in Croatia.

19             So it is a sea, an ocean, it is an abundance of things.  There is

20     not a single sentence that should not be exposed to criticism because

21     this is not the way this is done -- actually, misleading the

22     Trial Chamber.  This is not in the service of justice, distorting words

23     and sentences, is not that.

24             Yesterday they said that it is not true that there was no

25     communication between Pale and Sarajevo and Banja Luka and that I didn't

Page 47839

 1     have influence, and they showed this telephone conversation between me

 2     and Brdjanin from November 1991.  Nobody is saying that at that time

 3     there were no communications.  KDZ101 - Dragan Kezunovic, not a protected

 4     witness - he said that instead of several thousand telegrams a day, there

 5     were about ten telegrams a day at the beginning of the war.  That, that

 6     is called the communications were down [as interpreted].

 7             So the Trial Chamber and the Defence tried, albeit it is in an

 8     unfavourable position, the Trial Chamber should actually check everything

 9     that the Prosecution is saying and proffering.  They said yesterday

10     Karadzic said that the incident in Kravica was triggered by an ostensible

11     mutiny and then a thousand men were executed, shot to death in Kravica,

12     as if Karadzic had said and then had them executed.  First of all, it is

13     not a thousand; and, secondly, it was established here that there had

14     been an incident.

15             So these are things - I'm looking at the clock - but these are

16     things that are completely on a collision course with any notion of

17     justice, not to say international justice.  In our country, in the former

18     system, this would not have been permitted to them.  Just a sweeping

19     statement, there was this JCE between me and President Milosevic.  What

20     we had was respect, at least on my part, but there was no agreement in

21     any other thing, on any other -- in any other respect.  He was against

22     the creation of Republika Srpska; we were in favour of the creation of

23     Republika Srpska.  He was against the establishment of the Assembly of

24     the Serbian people; I was in favour of that assembly.  And we have

25     evidence here to that effect, because we didn't any longer have a chamber

Page 47840

 1     of nations.  He was in favour of accepting all or any peace plans.  I

 2     have never seen many of the alleged members of the JCE in my life, but

 3     the Prosecution believes that they have no obligation to identify and

 4     state how and in what manner was this plan which is being attributed to

 5     us actually drawn up and developed.

 6             So I am looking at the clock, Your Honours.

 7             JUDGE KWON:  Yes, we'll have a break.

 8             Before that, yes, Judge Morrison.

 9             JUDGE MORRISON:  Dr. Karadzic, you've been competing with what

10     sounds like a powerful electric drill.  We will see if we can get it

11     silenced, but I can't guarantee that.

12             JUDGE KWON:  The Registry will take a look into that.  We will

13     have a break for 20 minutes and resume at 22 past.

14                           --- Recess taken at 10.02 a.m.

15                           --- On resuming at 10.23 a.m.

16             JUDGE KWON:  Yes, Mr. Karadzic, please continue.

17             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you.

18             As for the transcript and for the Trial Chamber too, could my

19     indication of the mistakes made by the Prosecution in terms of proving

20     joint criminal enterprise, could that be translated and could that be in

21     the transcript, primarily when was the joint criminal enterprise

22     established or formed and then how and so on and so forth?  They're going

23     to trip over the fact - "they," the Prosecution - are going to trip over

24     the fact that the Serbs kept giving concessions all the time in order to

25     prevent a war.  We have superb evidence here.  The late Vance - not

Page 47841

 1     Harland who takes notes.  In 1992 he informed Genscher that Dr. Karadzic

 2     wishes to avoid war at all costs.  How would it be possible to realise

 3     any kind of joint criminal enterprise without a war?  A JCE as

 4     represented by the OTP.  However, the Prosecution says, and keeps saying,

 5     that the Serbs were not supposed to have any claims of their own as far

 6     as Bosnia is concerned, that they were overdoing it, and so on and so

 7     forth.  The Prosecution is referring to some purported interview given by

 8     the late Raskovic, a friend of mine, a colleague of mine.  They say that

 9     he gave an interview to Yutel, this TV station that was not exactly

10     objective or fair towards the Serbs.  They say that he was different from

11     me, that he thought that Bosnia would not be Serb aside, that the Serbs

12     would not suffer genocide in Bosnia.  That is in paragraph 118 and it is

13     P6617 on page 2.  The late Raskovic allegedly said:

14             [In English] "It would not be genocide.  Maybe it would not be

15     Serbophile," talking about Bosnia, "and it would be Serbophobe, but it

16     wouldn't be Serbocide either."

17             [Interpretation] Why would the Serbs accept that their country,

18     Bosnia-Herzegovina, should be Serbophobe?  And who can guarantee that a

19     Serbophobe Bosnia would not become Serbocide at a given point in time?

20             Now let us see what -- not what Vox says, because Vox said in

21     1990 what would happen to Serbs in Islamic Bosnia, and a year later when

22     they were criticised, they again published this text and said:  Well, we

23     were just joking a year ago.  Such jokes are never told in Bosnia, also

24     the way people do not talk about a rope in the home of a hanged person.

25     We understood that and we were right.  Take a look at this, take a look

Page 47842

 1     at what Ganic is saying to President Tudjman, D1143.  That's the number.

 2     Ganic says:  You know that the world is going to let us marginalise the

 3     Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  In the same exhibit at another section

 4     he says:  We are going to marginalise the Serb entity in

 5     Bosnia-Herzegovina.  That is that Serbophobe component, I guess.  So it's

 6     not Vox, it's the number two man of the Muslim authorities in

 7     Bosnia-Herzegovina who is saying that.  He is saying he is going to

 8     marginalise the Serbs and that he's going to marginalise the Serb entity;

 9     whereas he and his people are planning to import 4 million Turks, the

10     alleged descendents of Bosniaks, and regularly they are bringing in

11     illegally Muslims from Sandzak just to vote there and their only

12     objective is to artificially change the ethnic picture of

13     Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Prosecution says that it was Karadzic who

14     wanted to change the ethnic picture of Bosnia-Herzegovina.  And of course

15     they are fabricating evidence, inventing it, because there is no proof of

16     any such thing.

17             The Prosecution regularly misquotes words that I uttered

18     somewhere at some point in time.  These are mainly political speeches, so

19     this is a clash of opinions, of different views, also struggling in

20     parliament against undemocratic views, and the experts Donia and Treanor

21     themselves admit that I was facing major difficulties in parliament;

22     however, every decision in parliament was unanimously adopted.  It was

23     adopted because it was changed during the debate.  The Trial Chamber has

24     our position in evidence.  Democrats find solutions; whereas communists

25     make decisions.  That means that the proposal has to be changed until

Page 47843

 1     everyone finds it acceptable.  That's the essence of democracy; whereas

 2     Donia and Treanor, the Prosecution experts, say that they did not see a

 3     single proposal of the Bosnian Serbs not get through parliament.  Well,

 4     it's because it did not remain unchanged, because it was not imposed on

 5     the MPs, not that anything could have been imposed on them.

 6             The Prosecution says that I -- I -- well, that's paragraph 43 of

 7     their final trial brief.  They say that this is a well-known thing:

 8             [In English] "-- stressed to his followers that Muslims could not

 9     live with others and that population transfer was the solution.  The

10     conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina..."

11             This is quotation:

12             "... conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina is basically a conflict among

13     peoples, just as it was in the case between India and Pakistan and that's

14     nothing new.  It resulted in a huge resettlement of the people."

15             [Interpretation] That's the paragraph.  That's what it sounds

16     like.  P938.  This is what it says.  It is page 36, like P12, page 18

17     through 20:

18             [In English] "Imagine the stupidity ..."

19             [Interpretation] I said how idiotic, imagine how idiotic this is,

20     that's what I said in the original, how idiotic it would be to create war

21     in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

22             [In English] "The conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina is basically a

23     conflict among peoples, just as it was the case between India and

24     Pakistan and that's nothing new."

25             [Interpretation] And then this is what it says:

Page 47844

 1             [In English] "Settlement."

 2             [Interpretation] I didn't say it resulted.

 3             [In English] "And with a huge resettlement or exchange of

 4     people."

 5             [Interpretation] So that's my position towards the instigation of

 6     inter-ethnic wars and population resettlements.  However, this was

 7     butchered by the Prosecution and they are misrepresenting it, saying that

 8     on the 14th of February, 1992 -- actually, this was earlier -- or, no,

 9     later.  But the 14th of February as well, 1992, that is P12, that I said

10     that Muslims could not live with others.  However, they omit to say that

11     where fundamentalism arrives people cannot live together and that was the

12     key point, the key sentence.  The Prosecution says that earlier on I said

13     that we live together, and so on and so forth.  Yes, we lived together.

14     However, I encouraged people to live together and now this thing that I

15     said about fundamentalism.  In the meantime, fundamentalism happened.

16     They took power.  The SDA gave up on Yugoslavia.  They opted for

17     unilateral secession of Bosnia-Herzegovina, even at the expense of peace.

18     They sacrificed peace.  The SDA formed a secret army consisting of over

19     100.000 people in 93 mixed municipalities.  We saw all of that.  The SDA

20     secretly sent its members to Croatia for training, just as the Ustashas

21     did before the Second World War, to Janka Puszta and Hungary where they

22     trained people to slaughter Serbs.  Then after one year of a terrible

23     experience, deceit, abuse, abuse of institutions, abuse of police powers,

24     then the Serbs realised that when this form of political Islam arrives,

25     that form of government co-existence becomes impossible, living together

Page 47845

 1     becomes impossible.  We can only live one next to the other.  We were in

 2     favour of living one next to the other but not within the same political

 3     system.  If the Chamber were to follow what was happening -- what is

 4     happening right now in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is only Serbs that are

 5     being tried and there are video-clips of the crimes committed by Muslim

 6     generals and they're not even being indicted.  They're putting that off.

 7     It's the same political system and there is that intention of abuse, of

 8     subjugating others.  That is not recommendable and that is not conducive

 9     to a life together.  However, the Prosecution portrays the Serbs as

10     vagabonds, who are sticking a thorn into a healthy leg in peacetime.

11     What I quoted is a verse by Njegos, and Njegos was indeed abused here,

12     and that is a fact that the Prosecution did not make an effort to get

13     semantic interpretations of our sayings, allusions, irony.  When somebody

14     says that we were the most active in having the Muslims move out and if

15     you do not see that they are actually criticising the government, that

16     they're not doing anything else, this is what they say about Zvornik,

17     Bijeljina, this is irony, this is sarcasm, and the OTP are presenting

18     this as bragging, as boasting.

19             When I quote Njegos's verses, if you were to put them all in one

20     pot, a broth could not be blended together.  This is poetry

21     from "The Mountain Wreath" that has been admitted into evidence.  I

22     cannot find the page reference right now, but this is a verse by Njegos,

23     just like what I referred to earlier on was.  But in somebody else's

24     language, a person cannot understand that but they should have made an

25     effort to get this interpreted properly rather than dragging Njegos

Page 47846

 1     through court.

 2             In paragraph 44, the Prosecution says when referring to talks

 3     within the Presidency of Yugoslavia in January 1993 and after the

 4     testimony of Minister Jovanovic here, the Prosecution still abides by

 5     their own total misinterpretations of what they -- of what was said

 6     there:

 7             [In English] "To remove non-Serbs from Serb-claimed areas and

 8     maintain a revised ethnic structure persisted after much of the forced

 9     displacement and that had taken place."

10             [Interpretation] First of all, the structure was not changed

11     because the obligation to return was always proposed by the Serb side and

12     guaranteed as well.  The Prosecution takes as a basis for JCE, for which

13     they cannot say who established it and when.  They say actually that the

14     essence of this is the Serb intention of removing Croats and Muslims from

15     territories that the Serbs aspire after, because during the war removing

16     civilians from areas of combat is an obligation, then the Prosecution

17     thought of saying permanent removal and then they added forcible removal

18     in order to ensure that this indeed constitutes a crime.

19             The removal of Muslims and Croats from territories that the Serbs

20     aspire after - which is not a crime - was never the plan of the Serbs;

21     rather, it was the struggle of Karadzic, Krajisnik, and all others not to

22     grab too much, that we should not take five Muslim villages for the sake

23     of one Serb village and that we should not create disgruntled people,

24     that is paragraph 46 where the Prosecution says in their brief that I

25     said that the Drina is pure.  This is a discussion where we are preparing

Page 47847

 1     for a conference and we are wondering what the conference is going to

 2     give us, what they're going to agree to.  It doesn't mean clean as in

 3     ethnically cleansed, it means clear, that it will not be in dispute.

 4     It's not that the Muslims didn't want the Drina.  The Muslims wanted the

 5     fall of Srebrenica, they wanted to exchange it for Vogosca and Ilijas

 6     beforehand.  Mr. Izetbegovic offered that to the people from Srebrenica;

 7     however, they refused.  So when we say purely Serb territories, it

 8     doesn't mean cleansed Serb territories, it means indubitably Serb

 9     territories.  Cleansed is not the same as clean or pure.  There is a

10     significant difference there.  So you can see from the context that I am

11     speaking about what awaits us at the conference in Dayton, what will be

12     accepted, and for what we will have to struggle.

13             In defence of the Owen-Stoltenberg plan in 1993, I was defending

14     that plan before the MPs because they were saying some Serb towns and

15     municipalities, 90 or 100 per cent Serbs, are not anymore in the Serb

16     territory in the valley of the Neretva River, et cetera, and I told them:

17     Look, let's be honest, we also got some places where we were not a

18     majority.  And the Prosecution portrays this as my bragging about the

19     success in grabbing other people's territories; whereas I was persuading

20     the parliament to accept the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan.  It was partly unfair

21     to us too, but it can't be fair only to us.  In the same municipalities

22     along the Drina River before the war and when the war began, we were

23     offering to the Muslims to establish their own municipalities.  Bratunac

24     and Vlasenica had signed an agreement and made a map -- in fact, maps.

25     And then somebody from Sarajevo ordered that they be rejected.

Page 47848

 1             So no word about driving people out or taking over power.  We

 2     already had power.  In Zvornik a plan had been made for two

 3     municipalities to exist, and to this day two municipalities exist as they

 4     did during the war.  A large part of the Zvornik municipality was always

 5     controlled by the Muslims and we never tried to take that.  However, the

 6     OTP claims that the Serbs took over Zvornik municipalities and that's not

 7     true.  When the war began, then the Serbs took over the town itself along

 8     with the Serb parts, which in peacetime could have had two administrative

 9     municipalities in its urban core.

10             In reference to Bratunac, it is said that somebody claimed there

11     was no longer a single Muslim left in Bratunac.  At that point the Serbs

12     were controlling only the town and 20 per cent of the municipalities.  80

13     were in Muslim hands all the way up to October 1993.  In that way, you

14     can condemn anybody if you do not have the obligation to prove facts.  We

15     had to travel to Bratunac through Serbia because there was no direct

16     communication.  Everything was occupied.  And Podrinje was in the Muslim

17     hands for one whole year, occupied by at least 30.000 soldiers.  These

18     are their facts.  They are in the case file, in evidence.  And it was

19     constantly a combat zone.  The Serbs were suffering attacks in Podrinje

20     for a whole year and for a whole year we appealed to them not to go on

21     with it and that this area would eventually end up in the Muslim entity.

22     In all plans, I always allowed the possibility and it was always drawn

23     into every plan, the Vance Plan and the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan, it was

24     always envisaged that Muslims would have 80 per cent of the territory in

25     the Drina Valley.  That was envisaged and it would have been so had they

Page 47849

 1     not opted for war.  We will discuss Srebrenica tomorrow.

 2             Your Excellencies, I have to point out the chronology of events.

 3     The Muslims set fire to the valley of the Drina River at the very

 4     beginning of the month of April.  The crisis was created there on the

 5     31st of March.  We saw a document here of the Croatian intelligence

 6     service and the Croatian Defence Council, showing that Captain Taric was

 7     sent to Bijeljina on the 31st of March to take over power.  And then he

 8     really captured Bijeljina, took control of it.  His snipers controlled

 9     the entire town from the water-tower and from the high-rises.  The first

10     victims fell, including a woman on her balcony, and then the Crisis Staff

11     of that municipality, not the SDS Crisis Staff, got together to discuss

12     what to do next.  And then the OTP claims that the SDS invited Arkan to

13     come to Bijeljina.  I believe even the -- in the indictment and the

14     pre-trial brief they say the crisis started when Arkan crossed the

15     border.  Arkan crossed the border 15 hours after combat started, and on

16     that very day Arkan himself told the reporter:

17             "We came at the invitation of the Territorial Defence of

18     Semberija and the people."

19             A year later in another interview, he said:  We were invited by

20     the SDS, because the SDS at that time was equated with the Serbian

21     people.  I have to find that sentence.  But on that day Arkan said what

22     he said, that he had been invited by the Territorial Defence, the

23     Territorial Defence of Semberija.  And of course, they not only failed to

24     mention this, they falsified.  And Prosecution chooses what he said two

25     years later to present as the truth, not what he said on that very day.

Page 47850

 1     At the same time - and this is happening on the 31st of March - Karadzic

 2     has no power at all.  There is still a joint Presidency in place.

 3     Biljana Plavsic and Fikret Abdic go at that time to Bijeljina to take

 4     care of the situation on behalf of the Presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina,

 5     not on behalf of the SDS.  And all this was going on a few days after the

 6     massacre against Serbs in Sijekovac, in Bosanski Brod.  And what does it

 7     have to do with Radovan Karadzic or the SDS?  And it is overlooked that

 8     the party Crisis Staff is something quite different to the Crisis Staff

 9     of the municipality.  And five years into this trial they keep insisting

10     that the Crisis Staff of the party grew later into the Crisis Staff of

11     the municipality as a state agency.  Yes, the same people were gathered

12     in it, but it's not the same thing.  And in Bijeljina there is absolutely

13     no doubt who started it, who started the fighting and the crisis and with

14     what intentions.  Also overlooked is the fact that among the 42 or so

15     casualties, less than 10 Serbs were included, but that's only because the

16     Serbs had escaped and the Muslims had check-points around the town.  They

17     were exposed to bullets, to fire, the fire that was opened in response to

18     their fire.

19             I ask for your indulgence until I find the number of the

20     document.

21             And they keep insisting that the SDS took over power in Bijeljina

22     on some day in April, the 2nd or the 3rd of April, after this conflict

23     began.  Although witnesses from Bijeljina confirmed here that there was

24     no change in government, nobody took over power.  The same authorities

25     were in place on the 31st of January, 1991, as on the 31st of January,

Page 47851

 1     1995.  There was no take-over.

 2             It is also said here that Karadzic awarded Arkan, gave him a

 3     medal.  Arkan never decorated -- Arkan was never decorated by Karadzic.

 4     He was decorated according to a proposal to decorate a unit consisting of

 5     two detachments, and that was a unit that was not in Bosnia-Herzegovina

 6     in 1995 or in 1992, and in 1995 when they offered their services they

 7     were accepted and they were placed under the command of the army and the

 8     police and there was no love lost between that unit, Arkan's unit, and

 9     the army.

10             The Prosecution claims that Karadzic had the judiciary, the

11     investigating authorities, police, et cetera, he could have made arrests

12     and punished people.  The president did not have such powers.  Kovac was

13     asked here:  If you had the authorities, the agencies, why didn't you

14     tell the president so that he can do that?  And he said:  No, that's not

15     the president's job.  He didn't have such powers.  He organises work in

16     state authorities.  He cannot interfere with the work of the ministries

17     if the ministries are not going their job -- if they are doing their job;

18     if they are not, then he can try to reorganise them.  However, the

19     Prosecution did not even care to look into the constitution and the

20     legislation that governs the conduct of the president of the republic,

21     but they do accept at the remark of one prime minister, saying that the

22     ministers of the army, police, and justice did address the president.

23     When there is a war on of course it is the obligation of these ministers

24     to address the president to see how these organs are going to be

25     resubordinated to the army because that needs presidential approval.

Page 47852

 1             The Prosecution claims there is evidence that Arkan had committed

 2     crimes but they didn't show that evidence.  They wanted the president to

 3     make arrests and judge people based on their reputation.  We had a lady

 4     witness here from Grbavica who had seen Vojvoda Aleksic accompanying

 5     Dr. Seselj and she jumped up and said:  Here is Vojvoda Aleksic.  I asked

 6     her:  Do you know of any crime committed by Aleksic?  She said:  No.

 7     Aleksic has a reputation because he is called Vojvoda and he has a long

 8     beard, but he is an honest man, modest and humble man.  Or concerning

 9     this Vlaske from Ilijas who was unpleasant to UNPROFOR and the monitors.

10     He didn't care for them, didn't like them.  He thought they were partial.

11     But there is no crime.  However, the president is supposed to judge

12     people based on their reputation.  Concerning Seselj who was so attentive

13     to the Muslims, he had in his Main Board of the Radical Party so many

14     Muslim members.  His deputies always defended Muslims.  His reputation

15     nevertheless is that he is against Muslims and some people always

16     exaggerate their reputation, just as they speak of Karadzic, although the

17     higher representative recently said that the Muslims never had a better

18     friend than Karadzic, the higher representative.  Somehow this got swept

19     under the carpet, although I was really a true friend to the Muslims,

20     even to Mr. Izetbegovic.  But my obligations toward my own people cannot

21     be set aside for the sake of friendship.

22             In 1995 Arkan's unit or Arkan did not commit any crimes against

23     anyone except Serb deserters, and the very next day their powers to bring

24     deserters into custody were revoked.

25             I began my speech with the Drina.  Until the end of March while

Page 47853

 1     the joint state was still in place, the Patriotic League and the

 2     Green Berets were setting municipalities along the Drina on fire, with a

 3     clear aim to bring UN forces to the Drina and cut off Bosnia from

 4     Yugoslavia.  Although recognition, international recognition was already

 5     promised, it was expected on the 6th of April, it was already on the

 6     horizon, they proclaim general mobilisation.  Which kind of world could

 7     recognise a country in which a general mobilisation is going on?

 8     However, the international community did this in our case.  It says that

 9     Izetbegovic was against such a Bosnia-Herzegovina that was moving towards

10     independence, and the greatest experts of this world said that

11     recognition was a mistake, Lord Carrington, Badinter, Owen, Vance.

12     Bosnia should not have been recognised before all the three peoples had

13     agreed on it.  So they had recognition promised to them already and they

14     still set fire on Foca, Zvornik, Bijeljina.  And of course they failed.

15     They set fire to Bratunac only later, towards the end of April, and in

16     early May Judge Zekic was killed, and that's when what happened happened

17     in Podrinje.  Podrinje was divided and several municipalities fall into

18     Muslim hands as well as 80 per cent of other municipalities and large

19     armed forces are on the attack every day.

20             In May, after the withdrawal of the Yugoslav People's Army,

21     municipalities were set to fire in the valley of the River Sana.  And now

22     we have to defend ourselves from accusations in terms of what we did and

23     what it is that we wanted in the municipalities in the Bosnian Krajina,

24     which are municipalities Kljuc, Sanski Most, Prijedor, and Bosanski Novi

25     on the River Sana.  The Prosecution does not have an explanation why the

Page 47854

 1     war in those municipalities started only some six to eight, or rather,

 2     seven weeks after the outbreak of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.  They

 3     didn't even try to explain why did not those Serbs immediately start to

 4     implement their plan on expelling the Muslims from Republika Srpska.

 5     During that time the Serbs were offering to Muslims in Sanski Most and in

 6     Prijedor to form their own municipalities and their own police stations,

 7     whereas the Prosecution says that the Muslim police were fired.  Those

 8     who refused to sign a declaration naturally opted for their own

 9     municipalities, for their own police stations, but they could have

10     remained in the Serbian one.

11             So until the 22nd of May, until the incident in Hambarine, in

12     Prijedor, there was no war.  On the 29th of April an order came to the

13     police station of the MUP of Bosnia and Herzegovina which was based on

14     the decisions of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, saying that an

15     attack should be mounted against the army and control of the Prijedor

16     municipality taken.  That is when the Serbs actually consolidated their

17     own municipality and took control of that part, but they still offered to

18     the Muslims to form their own municipality.  And they tried and went to

19     Ljubija to form their own municipality and their own police station.

20     Then the order came that that is not to be done but that combat should be

21     embarked on, and the combat started only on the 22nd of May because the

22     JNA had withdrawn on the 19th of May.  The Hambarine incident was caused

23     by the Muslims, not by the Serbs.

24             Kozarac was next.  Muslim population of Kozarac passed through

25     Serbian and Muslim lines and took shelter in the city of Prijedor, which

Page 47855

 1     was Serb controlled, and the Serbs actually called civilians to take

 2     shelter and to find shelter with their relatives or their friends, Serbs

 3     in Prijedor.

 4             Why did war break out in the valley of the River Sana?  D3904

 5     will explain that squarely, because it was ordered and because at the

 6     headquarters in Sarajevo they were angry.  Why were negotiations being

 7     conducted there with the aggressors and the aggressors of course were

 8     hailed from Bosnia, born and bred in Bosnia, Serbs.  And this is what

 9     Sefer Halilovic had to say on the 9th of December, 1992 -- sorry --

10             THE INTERPRETER:  Interpreter's correction:  On the

11     10th of September, 1992.

12             THE ACCUSED:  [In English] "The BH army in the Bihac region with

13     full attention and in organising its embryo, the Patriotic League, I was

14     in the region personally on six occasions.  Therefore, the situation in

15     the wider region from the pre-war days until today is completely familiar

16     to me.  I was even in a position to alert the government organs in that

17     region that armed combat was being obstructed since they waited rather

18     long and while war was raging in all the republic of BH.  In this region

19     they were still negotiating with the aggressor."

20             [Interpretation] Of course, at the end of May this bore fruit so

21     that after Hambarine and Kozarac on the 27th of May simultaneously in a

22     number of places, including in Kljuc, conflicts broke out, Sanski Most as

23     well.  And on the 30th of May, they attacked Prijedor from five

24     directions and reached the centre of the city, causing casualties and

25     causing problems.

Page 47856

 1             And what happened then?  Radio Prijedor announced that civilians

 2     should withdraw.  And after they had lost, the army took prisoner about

 3     2.000, as it is written.  The 1st Krajina Corps took prisoner about 2.000

 4     Green Berets and handed them over to the investigation organs.  All these

 5     men had to be accommodated somewhere.  Of course the government -- the

 6     authorities in Pale didn't know anything about that.  They had no

 7     contacts whatsoever.  This was also confirmed by Srdjo Srdjic that --

 8     about what was done then, nobody else, Karadzic or Krajisnik.  And what

 9     did they do?  They requested a detention unit to be made available

10     because the one which they had was too small so they got one in the

11     Omarska factory, where also before that and after that other people were

12     accommodated, on one occasion refugees and on other occasions the army,

13     the troops of Republika Srpska.  So they got what they asked for.

14             The Prosecution says they were detained there, civilians were

15     detained there.  This investigating centre, Omarska and Keraterm, was not

16     without investigations for a single day.  Every day professional staff

17     was conducting investigations to see who of the people there were

18     prisoners of war and who were criminals, war criminals, and who was to be

19     released, and 60 per cent of the people were released from Omarska.  Many

20     were arrested, many more were arrested, and many more were found there

21     that had participated in combat.  Forty per cent of those people were

22     transferred to Manjaca.  Ed Vulliamy, who was in Prijedor only once, he

23     wrote a good report - I'll give you the reference in a minute - he says

24     in his report:

25             "I passed through a Muslim village outside of Prijedor.  It was

Page 47857

 1     intact.  There was just a white cloth hanging on the windows.  The people

 2     were going about their daily work ... et cetera, and I also saw Kozarac

 3     which was demolished."

 4             Then there is his interview with two Muslims.  One Muslim says to

 5     him:

 6             "I didn't take part in the fighting.  It found me -- they found

 7     me in the street, they took me prisoner and took me to Omarska.  When

 8     they found out I had not participated in the fighting, they set me free.

 9     I wanted to get to Trnopolje as soon as possible because it is safe

10     there."

11             That is what he said.

12             The second Muslim said:

13             "I fought and when I saw that we were losing, I fled home, I took

14     off my uniform, and I saw to it that I got to Trnopolje as soon as

15     possible because it was safe there."

16             So two Muslims came to Trnopolje in two different ways, both of

17     their own volition.  Not gladly, of course.  The OTP distorted things.

18     Nobody says that people left -- were glad to leave their homes and their

19     places of residence and to the reception centre, but they did leave of

20     their own free will, in two ways, two Muslims.  In the report by

21     Ed Vulliamy, that can certainly not be said to have been inclined towards

22     the Serbs.  He describes how people reached Omarska and how people were

23     set -- released from Omarska.  And there were professionals there working

24     every day and nobody interfered with their work.  The police and the

25     judiciary conducted the screening in terms of who was to be released and

Page 47858

 1     who was to be prosecuted and who would be a POW.  So these are three

 2     variants.

 3             The first day here the Prosecutor said that some people were

 4     investigated -- maybe it was not the first day, but at any rate.  And

 5     then it goes on to say if it was established that they were not criminals

 6     they would be released.  No, they would not be released.  There are two

 7     kinds of prisoners of war:  Those who are captured and will be exchanged

 8     because they are not guilty of any criminal offence; and those who are

 9     taken prisoner but have committed a crime and they will be prosecuted.

10     Why would they be released?  Because they would fight again.  It is

11     legitimate to actually take the enemy prisoner until the conflict ceases

12     and until an exchange is conducted and until the NATO bombardment ceases.

13     I never said that it was a precondition for it to cease, but no exchanges

14     are to be made before it ceased.

15             So that this is also mis-characterised.  Prijedor is not on the

16     confrontation line.  The fighters who attacked Prijedor are not an army.

17     According to the law of war, they have no rights at all because they are

18     not a unit.  This is designated and marked.  They are mostly in civilian

19     clothes and they are active in the depth of our territory.  Anywhere in

20     the world that is called terrorists, but anyway they were treated as

21     POWs.  But in Prijedor in 1994, there was sufficient Muslims to massacre

22     six Serb policemen and a sufficient number of Muslims to ask me to let 80

23     trucks a day leave Prijedor a day.  I refused that of course and let

24     about five trucks per day leave.  That's also in the record.  So until

25     the end of the war, terrorist groups in dug-outs in the woods, in their

Page 47859

 1     hideouts and in deserted houses existed and were active, operated.  And

 2     they killed according to this pattern, let's kill Bozo Indjic and set his

 3     house on fire.  We have proof of that here.  And then they would say:  We

 4     have killed Bozo and we set his house on fire.  We also wanted to

 5     Grozora [phoen] but she fled through the window.  But we did burn her

 6     house.  So what army are we talking about?  These are terrorist groups

 7     deep in the depth of our territory, killing as they saw fit and whom they

 8     liked.

 9             We have proof about the dug-outs, about the combats, about the

10     Serbian civilian victims.  So in Prijedor, to which I said Penny Marshal

11     and the other journalists, it was not the way it is portrayed by the

12     Prosecution here.  There were crimes.

13             [In English] "There was many."

14             [Interpretation] But in a shift, a guard who abuses his position

15     stops to be that when his superior arrives; namely, the first -- the

16     immediate superior is to prevent such acts and it is prevented by the

17     state.  That is my man who is preventing his subordinate from taking such

18     action.  That is my man doing the prevention.  We have hundreds of

19     examples.  Here we have testimony.  Say we were closed, shut off in the

20     municipality, not in the detention centre, then the criminals came and

21     they injected some yellow gas and the moment they turned their backs the

22     police took us out.  And you will find, Your Excellencies, examples of

23     this kind, that the next level, the next superior level actually saw to

24     the rights of the civilians and of the prisoners and fought against

25     crimes and misdeeds of their subordinates, of which there was a number,

Page 47860

 1     unfortunately, as is the case in every civil war.  Please warn me of the

 2     time.  I'm not quite sure.  Can I go on now?

 3             JUDGE KWON:  If it is convenient, we will take a break now and

 4     resume at 11.40.

 5                           --- Recess taken at 11.21 a.m.

 6                           --- On resuming at 11.41 a.m.

 7             JUDGE KWON:  Please continue, Mr. Karadzic.

 8             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you.

 9             In paragraph 79, the Prosecution claims that the leadership of

10     the Bosnian Serbs and when making up these abbreviations and acronyms

11     they were more creative than the Soviets, Soviet writers of acronyms and

12     abbreviations.  BSL or say CBS for the Serbian language.  It says that

13     they wanted to keep as many territories as possible and to ensure their

14     borders so that they would not be permeable as far as the Muslims were

15     concerned.  Karadzic is saying something completely different:

16             [In English] "I guarantee that everything that extends the war in

17     an attempt by the West to enable Muslims to bring territories back in

18     order not to be -- to beg the Serbs, but now the entire international

19     community has to beg Serbs to give some territories back, so we have to

20     prepare our Serbs to lose as less as possible in a firm, responsible, and

21     statesman's manner, but that we get the main part, that is, that a state

22     outside any federation and confederation.  And what is most important, in

23     our opinion, we must not accept at any cost any membrane not even to the

24     weakness association that outside Bosnian borders would be preserved

25     because it is a great danger today and tomorrow."

Page 47861

 1             [Interpretation] So I'm advocating peace and I'm against the

 2     splitting up of Bosnia and against the annexation of different

 3     territories and I'm advocating modesty in terms of territorial

 4     aspirations.  A territory can be consolidated, ethnically consolidated,

 5     in several ways.  The way that was proposed before the war and practiced

 6     before the war was what Mr. Izetbegovic proposed was the change of

 7     municipal borders in order to leave out villages that did not wish to

 8     belong to a particular unit, that preferred belonging to another unit.

 9     So that was a way that was stricter.  It prevailed before the war because

10     before every peace plan and before every peace conference that was the

11     main issue that he would raise.  The OTP say here that I did not accept

12     the Cutileiro Plan.  We did not accept the maps and I had to tell the MPs that

13     we were not accepting the maps because otherwise we would have had a very

14     difficult situation in parliament.  And according to that setup, the

15     Serbs had the right to their own police and later on we would agree on

16     the rest.  The Prosecutor says that even before the Cutileiro Plan the

17     Serbs were preparing and asking for their own MUP.  Well, that's why it

18     was part of the plan because we had asked for that and the European

19     community thought that that was justified.  However, we did not establish

20     the MUP before agreement was reached on the constitutional principles.

21     We asked, we were setting this forth as a condition, we were threatening,

22     we were saying things had to be done in a legal framework; however, we

23     did that only once that had been adopted.

24             In the same speech, I say:

25             [In English] "If we will redefine then we have to agree to

Page 47862

 1     redefine, but, trust me, it can be described and calculated how much we

 2     saved with the fact that we have not fought Croats for a year and a half.

 3     We don't know.  When I see young men in those areas I think:  Would he be

 4     alive if we fought Croats?  That is God's will, that is the truth with

 5     Croats that appeared naturally.  Many people stayed alive.  Huge material

 6     means have been saved.  This is the best moment for us to finish the war,

 7     that a referee plays, the end on which occasion we have an excellent

 8     score and it is better that we give something back, although I know that

 9     it is hard for us and they will curse and spit on us and they will do a

10     lot to us.  It is better that we give back than to ask back."

11             [Interpretation] So the Prosecution is completely disregarding

12     the context in which I am saying that the territories of others should

13     not be taken, that people should not lose their lives on account of

14     certain territories that we would return anyway, and so on and so forth.

15     So a false picture was created.  And this paragraph 79, like the entire

16     case against me, is false.

17             Another way for having a pure territory is for the army of the

18     other side to take that area, round up the population from their homes,

19     and deport them somewhere.  That did not happen in the case of the Serbs.

20     To a large extent, that did not happen as far as others were concerned

21     too, and this is how and why.  There weren't any undefended places that

22     had declared themselves undefended.  So the army could not enter a

23     particular town or village without fighting through defence lines.  Once

24     the defence lines would be down, the population would leave even before

25     the army.  The army would not wait for the enemy army to enter their

Page 47863

 1     village or town.  In the areas that the Serbs took, such as Jajce, such

 2     as Odzak, such as Podrinje later, the Serbs, the Serb army, never had any

 3     contact with civilians.  The civilians had left earlier on from all of

 4     these places.  That's what the Serbs did.  When Grahovo fell, Glamoc,

 5     Petrovac, Sanski Most, Mrkonjic Grad, Sipovo, the people fled the very

 6     instant they realised that the lines could not be held.  So that was not

 7     the way in which ethnic cleansing was carried out.

 8             The third possible way was that the army that had their own

 9     government in that territory would not have to fight its way in.  They

10     would -- they could get the people rounded up and deported, but that

11     never happened.  Witness 310 spoke about seeing, I don't know, 300, 400

12     people at Grbavica at 6.00 in the morning as they were crossing the

13     Vrbanja bridge.  Is somebody trying to say that these people were rounded

14     up forcibly at their homes?  How many soldiers would be needed for that

15     kind of thing?  And what kind of chaos would that have meant?  Obviously

16     that had been agreed upon, there were lists, lists were made.  People

17     reported in advance and they waited for the time when they could cross

18     over.  (redacted)

19   (redacted)

20   (redacted)

21   (redacted)

22   (redacted)

23   (redacted)

24   (redacted).  That is

25     how things could have been done.  It's not that people were rounded up in

Page 47864

 1     their homes; that did not happen.  Music talked the situation in Hadzici.

 2     Seven times his family went for this agreed exchange of civilians and

 3     every time it is the Muslim side that did not allow this to happen.  They

 4     would return to the sports centre and they would wait for the next

 5     exchange, and it was only the seventh time that the exchange took place.

 6     So that's what the witnesses told us here.  They said to us that we would

 7     have an hour or two to get ready, but, yes, that means two hours if they

 8     wanted to get to that bus.  They had placed their names on the list a lot

 9     before that.  They even paid all their dues to the state before that.

10     They settled all their accounts.  And then they would be informed as to

11     when the bus would arrive.  We saw that; however, Kotor Varos is not in

12     the indictment -- actually, I don't know whether we accepted that.  You

13     know, at the Presidency it said -- they say:  Well, the Croats from such

14     and such a place paid money and they were not exchanged so then their

15     money should be given back to them.  So that is how they were leaving our

16     territory without any kind of fighting before that.

17             Please let us take a look at this, what one of the members of

18     parliament said, the late Branko Simic in P1369 on page 33 and 34.  The

19     most liberal Banja Luka is asking for three documents to allow someone to

20     move out.  Many municipalities are asking for all of 14 documents in

21     order to allow a person to leave.

22             Grgo Stojic, another Prosecution witness told us here about his

23     village, this Croat village in Sanski Most, how they surrendered their

24     weapons and they lived a normal life.  They got a lady teacher who was a

25     Serb who came every day.  The municipality paid for these classes.  The

Page 47865

 1     Muslims went to the centre in Sanski Most on market day to buy and sell

 2     and they would return once they were done.  And one day on a Monday, he

 3     says:  I noticed two criminals waiting for me.  And these two criminals

 4     took him to some other place where there were other Croats, they killed

 5     them, but he managed to survive.  From that instant when he established

 6     contact with normal Serbs and the state organs, the police, hospital, the

 7     Red Cross, and so on, that very moment he was saved.  Danilusko Kajtez is

 8     not Republika Srpska.  Republika Srpska are the policemen who took him

 9     in, who took a statement from him, who put him into hospital.

10     Republika Srpska are the doctors who treated him and informed the

11     Catholic organisation Caritas and took care of him so that he could

12     continue his medical treatment.  And he appeared as a witness only after

13     the war, and that is why Danilusko Kajtez could not have been tried

14     because there weren't any witnesses.  All of that is contained in our

15     final brief.  And I also sent to the Trial Chamber and the OTP everything

16     that I have been saying.  That's our response to their final trial brief.

17             Please take a look at this, what Grgo Stojic says.  He needed

18     quite a few documents to leave.  You have to pay for this and that and

19     then you have to pay taxes.  You have to pay for transportation.  You

20     have to pay for PTT, and so on and so forth.

21             [In English] "Those who wanted to leave had to apply to leave,

22     then were given a list of various certificates and documents that they

23     needed to provide.  After that, if there was any outstanding tax, it had

24     to be paid.  Then they would be put on the convoy list.  After being put

25     on the convoy list, they would be notified about the next convoy.  The

Page 47866

 1     notification about the convoy came over the radio."

 2             [Interpretation] So they drove people out by radio, and that's

 3     called ethnic cleansing.  There is no example of a case when official

 4     authorities rounded people up and drove them out.  There were

 5     individuals, renegades, or refugees who had been driven out of their own

 6     homes that had been set on fire, committed acts of retaliation.  But this

 7     is an official agency formed by ARK, that Arkan and private agencies

 8     followed.  They did leave their homes with a heavy heart, but they left

 9     of their own free will.  What happened with those who had not paid taxes,

10     who did not have the money?  They were not able to leave.  And what about

11     those who did not even ask to leave?  They stayed in those towns until

12     the end of the war.  There was not a single place that was devoid of

13     Muslims.

14             The Prosecution mentions Milivoj Milincic in a negative context.

15     Milos Milincic was the president of Srbac municipality and a member of

16     the Main Board of the Serb Democratic Party.  Bosanski Kobas is a Bosnian

17     large place in Srbac, and before the war - we had that intercept -

18     Mr. Milincic informs me they don't accept for an outpost of the school

19     called Sveti Sava to bear the name Sveti Sava.  In that intercept, I tell

20     him this is their ancestor too, just like Jacob, Isak, Abraham, and

21     Joseph.  It is a Muslim ancestor, just as Serb.  Still they didn't

22     accept, and they suggested another name, the name of Mesa Selimovic, an

23     important writer of Islamic faith.  That's what I suggested.  I did not

24     impose this on Milincic.  He was asking for my advice and my support.

25     And before the war, we were trying to find a solution that the Muslims in

Page 47867

 1     Kobas would find satisfactory.  They did not move out.  They formed a

 2     unit of the Army of Republika Srpska called Mesa Selimovic.  Throughout

 3     the war, they fought for Republika Srpska.  They did not fight for

 4     the Serbs.  They fought for the values that are common to Serbs and

 5     Muslims:  Democracy and a secular state.

 6             Then the commander of that unit, later president of Bosanski Brod

 7     municipality -- those are the Muslims then who didn't have to go

 8     anywhere.  They didn't have to leave.  They signed up and joined the army

 9     of their own will.  But Milincic made that concession before the war and

10     met their request that the school be called not St. Sava but

11     Mesa Selimovic, and the Prosecution portrays this lovely man, an honest

12     man, in the way they do.

13             We saw from the document sent by the Muslim government to the

14     Prosecution in the beginning of July 1996 an overview of all the places

15     with the numbers of Muslim population before the war.  For every

16     municipality, they say Serbs took over power in Laktasi municipality but

17     not by war, by settlement.  The Serbs were there in government from the

18     beginning because the SDS had won the elections, but in all these

19     municipalities there was a significant number of Muslims.  And the table

20     made by Ewa Tabeau shows that more Muslims left municipalities after the

21     Dayton Accords than before.  When the war was over, when the borders were

22     clear, people started moving; until then, they stayed although they had

23     the option to sign up for convoys and didn't use that option.

24             In paragraphs 58 to 78, it is said that there was an alleged plan

25     of ethnic cleansing and that Karadzic was informed of it at a meeting

Page 47868

 1     with the local authorities of Zvornik.  It is perfectly clear what

 2     Karadzic said.  We can find it in P2937.  We see it on the screen now.

 3             "I was told that the Muslim inhabitants of Kozluk village in

 4     Zvornik asked the authorities for permission to go to Hungary or Germany,

 5     otherwise they would be considered hostages."

 6             The Serb authorities asked for a signed document, including

 7     requests made by the Muslims.  The Serb authorities of Zvornik

 8     municipality have written proof that inhabitants left of their own free

 9     will.  This evidence contains a list of names as well as a statement that

10     they were under no pressure.  Each side has one copy.  It is quite clear

11     that they were free to return whenever they wanted to and all of them or

12     almost all of them did return.  Some remained in third countries.  Before

13     departing, this organised departure, they were leaving in a chaotic way

14     and then the Orthodox priest and the Muslim priest came and told them,

15     together with the authorities, they should not leave.  However, when the

16     conflict escalated the authorities were not able to guarantee safety even

17     to its own officials.  Militaries slapped them around.  They stripped

18     them naked, detained them, beat them, et cetera.  That is the truth.

19             In paragraphs 44, 45, and later 77, 81, and 82 the claim is made

20     that during a secret meeting between Karadzic, Jovanovic, and Milosevic,

21     these three advocated the establishment of homogenised national

22     territories.  They were against the freedom of movement that would

23     nullify the demographic structure of municipalities and the so-called new

24     reality.  You can look it up yourselves.

25             At the beginning of his speech, Jovanovic very clearly stated

Page 47869

 1     that ethnic cleansing is out of the question.  Therefore, the territorial

 2     link with Serbia and Montenegro, that is to say Yugoslavia, has to be

 3     ensured in an indisputable way which is not transitory.  But what is more

 4     important is to make the territory that we get.  And how do we get it?

 5     We get it at conferences.  This meeting took place before going to

 6     New York for a conference discussing the Vance-Owen Plan, and whatever we

 7     were getting we were not getting by firing weapons.  We were getting it

 8     at conferences.  Continuing quote:

 9             "Nationally homogenous, as much as possible, but not by means of

10     ethnic cleansing."

11             This is very different from the paragraph of the Prosecution

12     final brief, where it is claimed that I advocated ethnic cleansing.

13     Continuing quote:

14             "Ethnic cleansing is a trap.  We should use a peace time process

15     of population exchange, in other words, migrations."

16             Migrations are a matter of people's own free will and they take

17     years to happen.  If people want to go for that, it takes years.  And my

18     support to Jovanovic was by saying:  Yes, let things happen naturally.

19     Why would we even think of ethnic cleansing when people are deciding to

20     do this themselves?  And we now see that the Muslims have returned to

21     Zvornik.  If the Prosecution had looked at the map, they would have seen

22     that in Sapna and in other places of Zvornik were a Muslim municipality

23     of Zvornik and now that's Muslim territory.

24             Paragraph 59 states that the Bratunac leadership bragged that

25     there were no Muslims left in Bratunac, that ethnic cleansing had been

Page 47870

 1     carried out by local authorities.  At that moment the Serbs controlled

 2     less than 20 per cent of Bratunac.  In 80 per cent of the territory,

 3     there was not a single Serb.  In 20 per cent of the territory, there were

 4     almost no Muslims.  And in P548, I said we must not put pressure on

 5     people to resettle.  This is not for the benefit of the media.  It was

 6     said at a closed meeting with the leadership.  We must not put pressure

 7     on people to resettle.

 8             In paragraph 60 concerning Ilidza, the Prosecution alleges that

 9     the local authorities were driving the population out instigated by

10     Karadzic.  Prosecution witnesses themselves denied -- it's P5065.

11     Prosecution Witness Prstojevic testified that there had been 55.000 Serbs

12     and 100.000 others in Ilidza.  Prstojevic and Kezunovic denied having

13     heard such instructions, and Karadzic even said that not a single Muslim

14     or Croat must have a hair on their heads missing.  Glavas confirmed it

15     too.  He was also a Prosecution witness and he had no contact with me

16     whatsoever.

17             In paragraph 67, the Chamber [as interpreted] says that Karadzic

18     supported the destruction of mosques in Banja Luka.  In our final brief

19     in paragraph 1143, relying on D106, we refuted this completely.

20   (redacted)

21   (redacted)

22   (redacted)

23   (redacted)

24   (redacted)

25   (redacted)

Page 47871

 1   (redacted)

 2             In paragraph 57, the Prosecution says there was a ban on the

 3     return of refugees -- correction, paragraph 68.  There was a ban on

 4     refugees and settlement of Serbs.

 5             I refer you to paragraphs of our final brief --

 6             THE INTERPRETER:  Could Mr. Karadzic slow down and repeat the

 7     numbers of the paragraphs.

 8             JUDGE KWON:  Just a second.  The interpreters didn't follow the

 9     numbers.  I take it they cannot see this video aid, visual aid?

10             Please continue.  If you could repeat the final numbers for your

11     final brief's paras, paragraphs.

12             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Just before that, it was a

13     reference to paragraph 68 of the Prosecution's final brief and our

14     responses in paragraphs from 989 to 999.  I will not repeat what is in

15     our final brief and in the Prosecution final brief, paragraphs 69, 175,

16     and 406 to 428.  The Prosecution deals with directives, especially

17     Directives 4 and 7, and the denial of humanitarian aid to Muslim

18     civilians.  We have already dealt with it in our final brief in

19     paragraphs 12 -- in paragraphs 1294 to 1329 and 3309 to 3317.

20             I could also mention that Marrack Goulding, in February 1992 --

21     in December 1992, was saying that the international mass media are

22     misrepresenting the shipments of humanitarian aid which is quite

23     sufficient and the media are not properly reporting it.

24             Concerning Directives 1, reference to paragraph 407 to 409 of the

25     Prosecution final brief, it is claimed on the 5th of June, Karadzic told

Page 47872

 1     Mladic to cleanse the area of Butmir, Hrasnica, Dobrinja,

 2     Sokolovic Kolonija, and soon after that followed a directive dated

 3     6 June, that's D232.  The Prosecution intends to suggest that some

 4     illegal activities were involved; however, the fact is that in April and

 5     May 1992, the Muslim army and Muslim paramilitaries were constantly

 6     attacking Serb-populated areas precisely from Butmir, Hrasnica, and

 7     Sokolovic Kolonija.

 8             The contention is further that -- actually, the Prosecution

 9     overlooks the fact that military operations in those parts never targeted

10     non-Serb civilians and the directive itself shows that it contains an

11     order to the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps to protect non-Serb civilians, the

12     population there, the civilian population, during the operation.  But the

13     Prosecution doesn't see fit to make reference to that.  In its final

14     brief, in its paras 408 to 409, we saw Exhibit -- order of General Galic

15     which says the police and the army are bringing the civilians from the

16     combat zone to the barracks.  I am unable to take care of them.  Please

17     find some other accomodation for them.  This is an obligation under our

18     defence law, it is an obligation for civilians to be moved out, not to be

19     resettled as is translated by the Prosecution in their documents.  Moving

20     out, resettlement is a process of permanent transfer, but moving out is

21     regulated under the law and it has to be conducted.  Here it is stated

22     that Krajisnik accepted -- admitted that an order of now General Andric

23     of 28th of May, 1992, on the ways of moving out civilians from Podrinje

24     constituted ethnic cleansing.  This order of the 28th of May was also --

25     was created, in fact, a week after the parties to the conflict had signed

Page 47873

 1     an agreement with the Red Cross.  I believe that it is P1603 of the

 2     22nd of May and all the other consequential agreements actually invoke

 3     that original agreement from July and from the 27th of August and the

 4     27th of -- 30th of October actually invoke that original agreement.  The

 5     only thing that Andric failed to do is to refer to that agreement, but

 6     that was the gist of the agreement.  The people and the civilians have to

 7     be removed or moved out from the combat zone.

 8             In the pre-trial brief, paragraph 70, the OTP states that on the

 9     31st of May, 1992, Karadzic said, according to Mladic's diary, cleanse

10     Posavina of Croats.  Mladic's diary is not a diary.  They are just

11     en passant.  These notes are not verbatim annotations, but they are

12     condensed form of what is happening, but the OTP could have checked up to

13     what extent this annotation was actually in keeping with documents and

14     other evidence.  Did they find proof anywhere that a document had been

15     issued which would instruct or permit actions against the civilians?

16     Despite the large number -- the large body of evidence shown by the

17     Defence to the effect that vast efforts were invested to protect the

18     civilian population, the OTP is looking for a totally contrary

19     conclusion.  The only conclusion to be drawn is that this sentence refers

20     to cleaning military -- cleansing military formations, military units of

21     Croats from Posavina.  The Chamber already knows that Posavina is a

22     corridor, that the life line goes through Posavina, and it does not at

23     all refer to Croats as such.  At that time we had Croats in our units.

24     We had a colonel who was a Croat in the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps.  We had

25     a lieutenant-colonel at Pale, the commander of the logistics base there.

Page 47874

 1     We had a multitude of Croats in our army, so it does not refer to

 2     civilians because they would not have stayed on in our army for a day if

 3     civilians had really been in question -- I mean, these people in the

 4     army.  I have to underline again the Croats and Muslims who were in the

 5     Army of Republika Srpska did not fight for the Serbian people; they

 6     fought for common values, democracy, secularism, and freedom.

 7             The directive which prohibits the maltreatment of civilians and

 8     instructs observance of the Geneva Convention, this is D232, this is the

 9     exhibit.  The Prosecution says on the 8th of June Karadzic issued an

10     appeal to the public and to organs to help the Red Cross, but he issued

11     no order.  He actually issued an appeal, not an order.  And as for the

12     13th of June order which Karadzic issued, they call it instructions.  It

13     is quite the contrary.  On the 13th of June, it was an order and the

14     instruction was a supporting document in terms of the procedure to be

15     applied.  The appeal issued to the public was to -- intended to create a

16     favourable atmosphere and position vis-à-vis the Red Cross and

17     international organisations, including humanitarian ones.

18             I issued 64 orders instructing observance of the humanitarian law

19     and protection of civilians.  The OTP is totally disregarding all these.

20     They never even tried to actually refute documents of a strictly

21     confidential nature which are express orders to organs of the army and of

22     the civilian authorities to respect the Geneva Conventions and to respect

23     the civilian population and life as such.  The OTP suggests that it was a

24     dual, a two-faced policy.  On the one hand, orders were issued; whereas

25     on the other, countermanding orders were issued.  But the Prosecution has

Page 47875

 1     failed to show one single count -- order or countermanding order on the

 2     Serbian side; whereas it has totally disregarded such orders on the

 3     Muslim side.

 4             So can we see D43, please.  D43, that is my order of the

 5     16th of April for a secession of actions directed at Srebrenica.  In

 6     order to belittle the importance of this order, the OTP says Karadzic did

 7     this under pressure.  First of all, under pressure, without any pressure,

 8     it doesn't change -- it doesn't alter the fact that I stopped these

 9     activities.  Second, there were pressures throughout the war and

10     sometimes I buckled under pressure, I yielded to pressure to help us

11     survive, but I did not yield to pressure which meant heavy casualties or

12     heavy damage to us.  But it is documented.  You will see that I am

13     ordering that civilians should be protected.  This is not what NATO asked

14     me, that investigation not be conducted because they could be abused,

15     that convoys be let through.  Nothing of this content of this order has

16     been shown.  Nothing was under pressure.  But the Prosecutor does not

17     want the picture to be portrayed in terms of what my position was towards

18     humanitarian issues properly.

19             On that same day, Sefer Halilovic issued an order which is

20     document D343.  The first one I mentioned was D43, it is just a mere

21     coincidence, from April 1993.  And this one that I'm now talking about is

22     D343.  It is also of the 16th of April.  Can we see it, please.  Can you

23     upload it, please.

24             Sefer Halilovic says in that document:  The truce that we

25     ordered, forgot about it.  This is only for propaganda purposes.  You go

Page 47876

 1     on with whatever you're doing.  This is the moment when I stopped the

 2     activities surrounding Srebrenica.  And Sefer Halilovic actually ordered

 3     a continuation of combat actions and disregard of the previous order.

 4     What would the Prosecution give if they could only have found just a

 5     single example of my own order or any order from the Serbian side which

 6     is of such a dual nature, one issued for the public and the other

 7     ordering totally contrary conduct.  They haven't found it and there does

 8     exists a Muslim one of that kind, but the Prosecution chose to disregard

 9     it.

10             In paragraph 74 and 541 of the brief of the Prosecution they

11     referred to the testimony of Ambassador Okun to the effect that Karadzic

12     exploited the results of ethnic cleansing, et cetera.  Please take a look

13     at page 1818 of the transcript which is the testimony of Ambassador Okun.

14     What he says, I'm surprised to hear, that you are saying that I think

15     that your appeals were insincere.  I said the opposite.  I said that they

16     were praise-worthy.  I said that they were commendable.  I said that they

17     had merit, et cetera, et cetera.  Ambassador Okun, in other words,

18     believes that it was so, as he put it.  Here the OTP has put it to the

19     Chamber that President Dodik came after his testimony to greet me and to

20     kiss me three times.  The Prosecutor thinks that that is important, but

21     they omitted to say that the Ambassador Okun also -- after the Chamber

22     had left the courtroom also came to greet me and to kiss me.  Neither is

23     important except for private relations, but the Prosecutor chose to

24     report the first and to disregard the second, not to report it.

25             In paragraph 106 of the prosecutorial brief, the Prosecutor

Page 47877

 1     contends that allegedly Karadzic had stated that Bosnian Serbs had the

 2     support of the Serbian secret -- security service, that is, when Arkan

 3     arrived.  Their reference P1448 on page 133 does not make any reference

 4     to Arkan or the state -- Serbian State Security Service.  It just says

 5     that the SDA -- SDS asked -- but only in the case of the JNA requested

 6     from Serbs before the war not to organise their own army which was

 7     supported by the State Security Service.

 8             Regarding relations with Arkan, one should read our

 9     paragraph 1076 to 1088; that is the Defence brief.  When the OTP referred

10     to document P5888 to support the claim that Karadzic had orchestrated the

11     arming of Serbs outside JNA structures, this document actually says

12     something else.  Here this is between me and Vukic.  I don't have to read

13     it.  You can see it on the screen.  But for the sake of the public, I

14     should read it in English:

15             [In English] "Vukic:  You know, fuck it.  I -- they want us to

16     form the para units' army weapons.  What do I --"

17             Karadzic says:

18             "No, no, no way.  No, no, no way.

19             "Vukic:  Do you know, what should we do?  Tell me."

20             Karadzic said:

21             "I said no way.  No Serbian army.  It all has to ... those are

22     all under the reasoned things ..."

23             [Interpretation] So there is ample evidence that Karadzic never

24     encouraged the creation of Serbian imperial armies and all arming, any

25     arming, had to be done within the Territorial Defence which is under the

Page 47878

 1     command of the JNA or within the reserve companies and battalions of the

 2     JNA which were the reserve which could be drawn upon at any point in

 3     time.

 4             In paragraphs 234 to 242 the Prosecutor says the government

 5     belonged to Karadzic who controlled it completely.  Our response to that

 6     is in paragraphs from 2904 to 2933.  The president has a number of

 7     powers.  They are reflected on the election of the prime minister

 8     designate and they have to do with that and the harmonisation of

 9     relations between state organs.  The president shall also see to the

10     implementation of democratically adopted decisions in his party before

11     the war and after the freezing of the work of the party when the war

12     began.  And if the prime minister designate with whom he proposed is not

13     doing his job well, he cannot remove him, dismiss him by himself.  He has

14     to go before the Assembly.  Neither the prime minister -- he cannot

15     remove them, prime minister or any minister.  The Assembly was the

16     supreme organ of power.  Of course the president had to see to it that

17     the state organs were doing their job well, not how they were doing, but

18     to harmonise their work.  If a ministry is not functioning well, the

19     president could not replace the minister.  He had to ask the government

20     to forward the proposal to that effect to the Assembly, which is the

21     case, as far as I know, in all democratic countries.

22             Paragraph 237 of the Prosecution's brief contends that Karadzic

23     reiterated in March 1995 this point when he told those who were attending

24     a Supreme Defence Council meeting, yes, that is the Supreme Command:

25             [In English] "... every honour to it if it succeeds; I am

Page 47879

 1     responsible.  The army is mine as much as the minister's.  As much as the

 2     prime minister is mine, so the army is mine ..."

 3             [Interpretation] The Prosecution is abusing my clashes and

 4     misunderstandings with structures, especially military structures, where

 5     I'm trying to convince them that they have to carry out orders faster.

 6     If they were doing all of that without any objections, then this sentence

 7     would not have been there, and, by the way, my clashes with the officers

 8     had nothing to do with any crimes of theirs.  All witnesses testified

 9     here that my conflicts with the officers of the VRS were of an

10     ideological nature because they had come from a different ideological

11     communist background.  And when I asked the witness whether we could --

12     whether Mladic had committed crimes, he said:  Ah, had he committed

13     crimes?  We could have replaced him more easily.

14             Do I understand this correctly that this is time for a break?

15             JUDGE KWON:  Yes.  We'll have a break for an hour and resume at

16     1.40.

17                           --- Luncheon recess taken at 12.42 p.m.

18                           --- On resuming at 1.40 p.m.

19             JUDGE KWON:  Yes, Mr. Tieger.

20             MR. TIEGER:  Thank you, Mr. President.  I advised the Defence

21     that I wish to very briefly raise one matter before we move deeper into

22     the submissions, and that is as follows:  Although the Prosecution and

23     Defence agree that it is both appropriate and has been the practice of

24     the institution to submit slides used in opening or closing presentations

25     to the Trial Chamber, we are concerned based on a discussion with the

Page 47880

 1     Defence that it may intend to go beyond what we would consider the proper

 2     limits.  So while it's clearly permissible and highly practical to submit

 3     to the Chamber slides containing quotations from documents in evidence

 4     that have been read out during the course of the oral presentation or

 5     visual aids that are shown to the Chamber and discussed during the

 6     presentation, it is not appropriate to submit to the Chamber submissions

 7     on slides that have not been said to the Trial Chamber during the course

 8     of the presentation, as that would obviously circumvent via a backdoor

 9     written submission the ten-hour limitation.  And the same is true we

10     would consider for lengthy footnotes.  Either they're read out in court

11     or they clearly represent an effort to not use the time that would

12     otherwise be taken by providing a written submission.

13             So I wanted to raise that with the Court before Mr. Karadzic

14     moved too deeply into his presentation so he could incorporate those that

15     he considered important enough.

16             JUDGE KWON:  Does the Defence want to add anything to this?

17             MR. ROBINSON:  Yes, Mr. President.  It may turn out that we don't

18     use all of the slides that we presented for a variety of reasons,

19     including time and priorities, and we trust that as professional Judges

20     you will ignore those slides that have been submitted to you that have

21     not been discussed in Court.

22             MR. TIEGER:  I'm sorry.  Two issues, Your Honour, I apologise.  I

23     don't want to get too deeply in this, but I think they should just be

24     withdrawn, first of all, by the Defence; and, second, there are slides

25     that have been alluded to where a portion of the slide is discussed and

Page 47881

 1     then there are significant portions of text and commentary that have not

 2     been orally stated and they present written submissions that are not

 3     appropriate here.

 4                           [Trial Chamber confers]

 5             JUDGE KWON:  I confirm that the Chamber was in receipt of those

 6     slides but also that we will not use it at all.

 7             Shall we continue?  Yes, Mr. Karadzic, please continue.

 8             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you.

 9             The distinguished Mr. Tieger on the 29th, on the first day, and

10     it also says so in the final brief, he said that Karadzic had control

11     over the local leaderships and he is referring by way of an example to

12     the SDS of Prijedor.  We dealt with that in our final brief and we proved

13     that the SDS in Prijedor acted independently from the start to the end

14     and they had such aspirations and they carried out only the decisions

15     that they wanted to implement.  This was even stated publicly.  1163

16     refers to that and D4057 as well.

17             Now, the Prosecution claims that Stakic admitted that people who

18     came to Trnopolje did not come voluntarily; however, Stakic said

19     something different.  Of course it is being suggested that they were

20     brought in forcibly.  That's not what Stakic said.  However, on pages,

21     transcript pages 45238 to 45239 said the following.  I'll read it in

22     English:

23             [In English] "There were operations going on there.  Is the army

24     when that day at the front line opened a pass gateway, if that is right

25     the war.  And then they let these people get to town because they had set

Page 47882

 1     out towards town of Kozarac, and then the people I walked with at the

 2     Assembly told me that they had arrived during the night and that they

 3     were staying in two buildings in town.  And most of them were called upon

 4     to stay with their relatives' friends.  There were people with mixed

 5     marriages ... and so on and so forth.  I don't know who took these people

 6     in.  At one point in time when the police realised that these buildings

 7     were overcrowded, they took buses.  Once again, they asked these people

 8     whether anybody had some private apartment or house to stay at with

 9     someone, and then they got these other people who had fled from Kozarac

10     from the fighting and then they channelled them towards Trnopolje.  I

11     never said and I don't want to say it now too and I don't want this to be

12     put to me that they were -- went voluntarily.  What happened to them is

13     really sad and I regret it, but I am not saying that we did not make any

14     decision about this Trnopolje.  We did not plan -- we did not plan this

15     Trnopolje."

16             [Interpretation] So creating an impression that Dr. Stakic said

17     something that he had not said does not assist in having the truth

18     established, and it is certainly not a contribution to international

19     justice.  It is clear that the Prosecution needed not only a linguist,

20     but also an expert in semantics.  What it means when somebody says "I was

21     forced to leave a certain place," it could have been something or it

22     could have been someone forcing him.  But the Prosecution seems to be

23     satisfied that it is someone.  To be forced by certain events is not the

24     same as being forced by a particular person.

25             Then also there is a question of voluntariness, doing something

Page 47883

 1     voluntarily or happily.  If somebody goes somewhere even if they're

 2     leaving with tears in their eyes and with regrets, it's still their

 3     decision.  And amongst the alternatives at that person's disposal, he or

 4     she chose the best one available.  Drljaca, says the Prosecution,

 5     informed the leadership about 5.000 Muslim corpses in the mine of

 6     Tomasica.  It is only Mladic's diary that is proof and the only witness

 7     who testified about this was General Subotic, who explained here what

 8     people knew or heard about that.  It's on page 4138 to 4139.  However,

 9     these notes where there is an exaggeration or -- General Subotic

10     testified on T40138 to 40149.

11             The Prosecution presented an enormous number of alleged victims

12     from Prijedor, whereas I have a list of 250 soldiers that the

13     Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina had registered as casualties in the fighting

14     in or around Prijedor.  So everything that the Prosecution says -- the

15     Defence actually expects the Trial Chamber to double-check all of this

16     because obviously the OTP doesn't want to get to the truth but to emerge

17     victorious and I am not sure that that would be right.

18             The OTP also says that Karadzic wanted a state without many

19     internal enemies, again quoting Mladic's diary, P1477, page 258.

20     However, on that page, this is what I said.  Again, this is a shortened

21     version.  It is not verbatim.  It's not recorded verbatim.  I'll read it

22     out in English:

23             [In English] "We are on the threshold of achieving our

24     centuries'-old dream of creating our own state without many internal

25     enemies.  We were very mistaken about the Yugoslav orientation of the

Page 47884

 1     Muslims.  Izetbegovic is a religious fanatic.  He is for a division of

 2     BH.  The Muslims have formed green, red, and black berets.  Izetbegovic

 3     is hoping for further intervention.  He is supported by MUP and

 4     Genscher."

 5             [Interpretation] So it is not an expulsion.  It is not including

 6     people and ethnicity who do not wish to be in a particular state.  That

 7     is why testimony about the creation of Yugoslavia was necessary and the

 8     documents referring to that.  Yugoslavia came into existence through the

 9     victory of Serbia and the Allies in the First World War.  The Croats were

10     defeated.  They were panic-stricken.  They frantically wished to join the

11     state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes because they were afraid that the

12     promises of the London Conference would establish the border of Serbia on

13     Virovitica, Karlovac, Ogulin.  The king -- the king who reigned then,

14     King Aleksandar, agreed and that was a very, very dear -- and a very dear

15     price was paid for that terrible mistake, a million and a half victims in

16     the Second World War.  Do not include the territories of others.  Do not

17     help the enemy in that way, especially when there is fundamentalism.  We

18     even have housewives nowadays who are leaving Bosnia-Herzegovina, going

19     to Syria to fight for Islam.

20             On page 37 of Monday's transcript, the Prosecution answered their

21     own accusations when they said that the Defence in their final brief gave

22     an abundance of evidence to the effect that Karadzic did everything to

23     avoid the war.  I'm going to read it in English now:

24             [In English] "While painting Izetbegovic as a man who actively

25     sought war, falsely, Karadzic paints himself as a man who sought only

Page 47885

 1     peace, filling pages of his brief with various pronouncements ... that he

 2     at every opportunity tirelessly advocated for peace."

 3             [Interpretation] Of course the Defence called a great deal of

 4     evidence.  We do not need to make these bastardised constructs and to

 5     butcher sentences as the Prosecution did, and in this way they are trying

 6     to mislead the Trial Chamber.  Why didn't the Prosecution give any proof

 7     that Karadzic was in favour of the war?  And why does the Prosecution

 8     forget that it was the Muslims who declared war on the Serbs, it wasn't

 9     the Serbs who declared war on the Muslims?  And why are they forgetting

10     that Karadzic throughout 1992 publicly asked Izetbegovic to withdraw this

11     declaration of war?  And he did not introduce a state of war in

12     Republika Srpska so that the life of ordinary citizens would not become

13     militarised.  That's the way it was, and we have proof.  We have evidence

14     from Mr. Vance.  A week before the Lisbon Agreement, he states that

15     Karadzic wanted to avoid war at all costs.  The entire behaviour of

16     Karadzic and the Serbs from the beginning of September 1991 is in favour

17     of an easing of tensions.  When the historic Serb-Muslim agreement went

18     down the drain because it was rejected by the SDA, then the

19     Autonomous Region of the Krajina was established.  However, the Serbs

20     remained in favour of sacrificing everything for peace.  So then in

21     September 1991 we adopted conclusions to the effect that all proposals

22     were legal, legitimate, that they were all on the table, and that nothing

23     is going to be imposed on anyone, that all decisions should be reached by

24     consensus.  And already on the 14th and 15th of October, we encountered

25     this deception because independence was declared illegally.  Even then,

Page 47886

 1     on the 15th of October, up until the 25th of March, the Serbs were

 2     prepared to give concessions just in order to avoid the war.  On the 18th

 3     we -- on the 18th of March, we agreed to the Lisbon Agreement and then

 4     the SDA refused to agree to that, and then there was this slaughter in

 5     Sijekovac and Brod and then the National Security Council and the

 6     government and the constitution, everybody had to deal with that, in

 7     Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia.  And the Prosecution held that against

 8     me.  Now it was impossible to communicate with a minority and minority

 9     rights could not be exercised if there is no such council.

10             The Prosecution also says that the local leadership in Celinac

11     passed certain racist measures for the Muslims of Celinac, they say the

12     non-Serb population, and they are leaving out important parts of document

13     P628.  P2638 is the number of the document.

14             And he says due to the combat activities going on in the

15     territory of Celinac municipality and further afield, reasons occurred

16     for non-Serbs in Celinac to be given a separate status with clearly

17     defined rights and obligations and duties.  And it goes on to list 34

18     persons out of several thousand.  Only those persons who were known for

19     their anti-army activities that could result in case the army arrives or

20     passes in some sort of aggression against those 34 non-Serbs.  The

21     president of Celinac municipality, Mr. Kovacevic, confirmed that this

22     applies only to these 34 persons who are named and it was for their

23     protection because the municipality could not provide 34 policemen to

24     constantly guard these people.

25             The Prosecution, however, does not specify it applied only to 34

Page 47887

 1     people.  They say it applied to non-Serbs.  The Prosecution does not

 2     provide any evidence that Arkan had committed any crimes before he

 3     arrived in Republika Srpska, and they refer to documents P2888 and

 4     another 8, page 4.  All that is written there is that some members of

 5     Arkan's unit made trouble but there is no mention that Arkan committed

 6     any crimes in Brcko.  There is also no mention of non-Serbs.  We heard

 7     here that Arkan had been arrested in Croatia before the war began in our

 8     lands, and apart from his bad reputation, they didn't find anything else

 9     and they released him.  One cannot be judged on the basis of their

10     reputation and especially not by the president of the state.

11             [In English] "During the first month of the war in Brcko, members

12     of the volunteer formation of Zeljko Raznatovic, also known as Arkan,

13     were also present.  They made a significant contribution to combat

14     activities but have, on the other side, caused problems similar to those

15     caused by the majority of volunteer formations."

16             [Interpretation] Maybe it's time for me to extend my response to

17     include an answer to the Chamber's question number 2.  This document

18     suggests that the volunteers were a problem.  The volunteers were

19     governed by a decision of the Presidency of Yugoslavia which was a

20     legitimate body.  From the moment they sign up to the Territorial Defence

21     or a military unit, they become equal in their rights and duties to any

22     other serviceman.  However, there is not a single group or individual who

23     came to Republika Srpska saying:  I want to be a paramilitary man.  They

24     all signed up to be volunteers.  The evidence of that is used against me

25     and the Prosecution says they were on the payroll of the

Page 47888

 1     Territorial Defence of Zvornik or Brcko or wherever.  They have to be on

 2     some payroll.  That man did not come there as a paramilitary man.  He was

 3     a member of the army so he had to be on the payroll.  Nobody was happy

 4     with volunteers until such a time as they all submitted to a single

 5     command or were expelled.  That's how it happened in Zvornik, Brcko,

 6     Bijeljina, and Bratunac.  We've heard here that paramilitary units

 7     multiplied mainly in rich municipalities, municipalities that had wealthy

 8     businesses or factories or enterprises.  They would come a couple of

 9     times to do a stint on the front line and then they become renegades and

10     there was no such power that could remove them from the payroll because

11     they were a power unto themselves.

12             In all the documents of the police and the army, there is

13     evidence and proof of efforts made to either resubordinate them and make

14     them again subordinated to the Territorial Defence, to the police, or the

15     army, or to expel them.  In Bratunac, before the killing of Judge Zekic,

16     the War Presidency even issued an order specifying a dead-line by which

17     paramilitary groups must be expelled from Bratunac, and those

18     paramilitary groups had originally signed up as volunteers.  And the girl

19     who was raped in Croatia by these volunteers, who were then Croatian

20     soldiers, was brought here to testify.  In P1448, page 252 -- the

21     document is P1478.  Again, it is obvious that individuals from the unit

22     ran out of control and out of command, not that the Arkan's unit had

23     committed crimes:

24             [In English] "Volunteer formations enjoyed exceptional success.

25     They were led by Arkan and Seselj."

Page 47889

 1             [No interpretation]

 2             [In English] "Volunteer formations enjoyed exceptional success.

 3     They were led by Arkan and Seselj.  Arkan's withdrew orderly, but some

 4     that stayed broke free of his control."

 5             [Interpretation] Of course Arkan was not in Zvornik during that

 6     fighting and especially not Seselj and Seselj never commanded any unit

 7     because his volunteers were disciplined and they were under the command

 8     of the JNA.

 9             Document P3056, particularly the document that says that Karadzic

10     was informed of Arkan's crimes and it is a document dated

11     24 September 1995, saying that Karadzic was informed of rumours, not

12     facts, and it states:  Considering that the presence of Arkan's

13     paramilitary formation has caused armed clashes and incidents involving

14     individuals and parts of VRS units, as well as unrest among citizens due

15     to rumours that he had arrested all Muslims in Sanski Most and liquidated

16     a number of loyal Muslim citizens.

17             So from this document, we see a number of things.  One, that

18     there is no love lost between Arkan and the army; two, that there were

19     rumours that in -- that on 24 September 1995 there were sufficient

20     Muslims in Sanski Most and among them many loyal Muslims but no proof

21     that this crime had happened, just rumours.  And we will remember

22     document -- a document by Minister Kovac from January 1994 that was

23     presented here where he writes to his subordinates:  Do not send me

24     material wherein the investigation has not been completed.  I cannot

25     bother the president with rumours and incomplete investigations, send

Page 47890

 1     just the reports about finalised investigations that resulted in criminal

 2     complaints so I can inform him properly.

 3             The Prosecution claims and it showed something on Monday that the

 4     Yellow Wasps were part of the state system persecuting non-Serbs, despite

 5     evidence that the police under President Karadzic expelled Yellow Wasps

 6     and returned them to Serbia, of which they were nationals and where they

 7     were tried for war crimes before a court of Slobodan Milosevic.  Two

 8     alleged members of the so-called JCE, Karadzic and Milosevic, one of them

 9     is arresting these people and the other one is trying them.  It just

10     doesn't work.  We refer to it in paragraphs 1089 to 1114 of our final

11     brief.  That is the real truth.  It has been suggested here that we

12     proceeded with the arrests of Yellow Wasps because they had been rough on

13     Minister Ostojic.  But the Prosecution doesn't ask why they had been

14     rough with Minister Ostojic and all the civilian authorities in Zvornik

15     and why Zuca came to look for General Subotic at Pale because they knew

16     by that time that the authorities were going to drive them out.  They

17     would not have subjected a minister of the Government of Republika Srpska

18     to such humiliation if the government had been supporting them.  That is

19     a clear truth and it needs to be said clearly.  Never in Bratunac or

20     Zvornik or Bijeljina or Brcko would have paramilitaries turned against

21     the authorities if the authorities had not turned against the

22     paramilitaries first.  That is a very simple fact and the truth.

23             The Prosecution also refers to directives as foundations as the

24     basis for crimes and it keeps pointing to directive number 1, but they

25     skip over important language ordering protection for civilians and POWs.

Page 47891

 1     That's D232.  Other directives are dealt with in paragraphs 1294 through

 2     1329 of our final brief and in the section dealing with Srebrenica.  Here

 3     I have to note also that on page 75 of Monday's transcript the

 4     Prosecution says, concerning directive 4, that Mladic allegedly said in a

 5     telephone conversation, that's document P4795, that everybody in the

 6     enclave should be killed and civilians expelled.  But they omit two

 7     important things.  First, it was a summary of a telephone conversation

 8     done by the Muslim intelligence service or the Croatian army; and,

 9     second, Mladic said the following -- Mladic said the following when he

10     was wounded:  Upon entering Srebrenica, everybody carrying weapons is to

11     be killed.  The wounded and civilians are to be led out of the town.

12     This directive and Mladic's orders, referring to Srebrenica 93, are

13     covered in our final brief and ultimately nobody entered Srebrenica in

14     1993.

15             The Prosecution put a sign of equality between those who carry

16     weapons, who were combatants, and civilians, deceiving and misleading the

17     Trial Chamber.  They also say that Karadzic had bragged to Bob Djurdjevic

18     that directive 7 was his own order, but if Karadzic had been responsible

19     for this order to commit crimes then Djurdjevic would certainly not have

20     testified as he did on page 25957.  This is the evidence he gave:

21             [In English] "I have known about Dr. Karadzic, and my opinions I

22     formed on him and specifically what I have seen and witnessed on July the

23     13th and 14th, 1995, in my visits, there in Bosnia I cannot conceive a

24     circumstance where Dr. Karadzic would be party to any such crimes."

25             [Interpretation] Thus, little notes, entries, incomplete

Page 47892

 1     sentences, free-ranging discussions among MPs that had no consequence and

 2     were never entered into any documents.  This is the evidence that the

 3     Prosecution has just Radovan Karadzic and this is the fate of this

 4     indictment.  If this is a real court, then this indictment will be

 5     rejected in its entirety.

 6             Again, on page 15 -- 16 on Monday it was said - at least that's

 7     the interpretation I got - that somebody said Muslims are not people.  In

 8     English it's probably not a problem.  But in Bosnia it would mean people

 9     as a nation.  Muslims are not a nation.  Serbs believe Muslims to be

10     Serbs who had converted to Islam and not a separate nation and all real

11     Muslims remained Serbs to this day.  I will come back to that first day

12     of closing arguments.  I have a few more points to make.

13             In paragraphs 484 to 503, the Prosecution in the final brief

14     suggests that Karadzic had available different systems of communication.

15     Our response to that is that all communication systems referred to by the

16     Prosecution has been well explained in our final brief in paragraphs 500

17     to 540, including documents to which -- which the Prosecution selectively

18     invokes, including reports of the MUP itself which is lamenting over the

19     absence of -- and lack of communication in this resorting to courier

20     communications at the end of the 20th century.

21             I should also like to draw your attention to the fact that the

22     Prosecution from the beginning to end is acting selectively on every

23     occasion.  The Prosecution omits to at least comment some substantive

24     parts of the evidence.  For instance, the witness Ranko Vukovic testified

25     in detail about problems associated with the communications system, and

Page 47893

 1     it is in our paragraphs 511 to 513.  The Prosecutor touches upon parts of

 2     his testimony in their final brief - 484 to 487 are the paragraphs - but

 3     the Prosecution does not mention an entire chapter in his statement which

 4     actually addresses the question of the republican communications centre.

 5     Along the same lines the Prosecution -- or rather, in the same way the

 6     Prosecution treats documents of the MUP which refer to communications in

 7     paragraphs 488 to 489 of their final brief and even refers to two MUP

 8     reports from April and December 1992 in paragraph 489 of the final brief.

 9     These are documents P2760 and P2761.

10             The Prosecution fails to accept that these reports clearly

11     demonstrate that the communications systems were practically

12     non-existent.  The Prosecution goes on along the same vein, and in

13     paragraph 493 which also deals with communications in the state security

14     system, again on the principle of selectivity and with selective approach

15     to the testimony of Mr. Kijac, who was cited in extenso, in toto in

16     paragraph 522 of our final brief.  In paragraph 525 of the Prosecution it

17     is claimed that Karadzic failed to react to information of the MUP of

18     17 July 1992 regarding detention conditions, conditions in detention

19     units and prisons.  And we replied in paragraphs 666 to paragraph 679.

20     Just for your information, the president does not do that job.  The

21     moment the president becomes aware and sees that the MUP has come by

22     information, it is -- that is sufficient for the president.  The

23     president can expect the MUP to deal with the matter.  The president is

24     not a Johnny factotum.  He doesn't even have the powers to do that.  So

25     it is sufficient for the MUP to be aware of the situation and they will

Page 47894

 1     deal with the situation.

 2             Excellencies, all knowledge about crimes that the Prosecutor has

 3     actually obtained is from Serbian organ sources and mostly from the MUP.

 4     These are documents which actually demonstrate that the MUP is combatting

 5     crime, and the Prosecutor says:  Aha, this policeman reported this crime

 6     in such and such a street.  Clearly that is his work, that is his job.

 7     How can you then have this posited against me or Republika Srpska or any

 8     Serbian official?  How can you have the fact that the MUP reported crimes

 9     and detected crimes, how can you hold that against us instead of being

10     grateful to the MUP for having documented all that, every single crime?

11     And when it is possible for the people, the perpetrators, to be put on

12     trial, that would be done.  Even today some trials are taking place

13     according to the documents of the Serbian MUP.  We have a document from

14     Sanski Most.  The judiciary actually inherited 30 cases from the Serbian

15     MUP and the Serbian organs and these are cases against Serbs who have

16     perpetrated offences against Muslims and Croats.

17             In paragraph 527, it is stated that Karadzic reluctantly agreed

18     to approve -- to permit the International Red Cross to visit Manjaca in

19     July 1992.  We explained that in paragraphs 644 and 645 and 583, namely,

20     that Karadzic actually called the Red Cross before June 1992 and ordered

21     that they be allowed free access to all prisons and to all camps for

22     prisoners of war.  And these are documents D426 and D477.

23             It is well-known what our attitude to the Red Cross was.  In

24     secondary school, I was actually -- I'm actually a veteran of the

25     Red Cross.  I actually had a whole school join the ranks of the

Page 47895

 1     Red Cross.  And in 1962, I was a congressman at the second congress of

 2     the Red Cross of the International Red Cross in Belgrade.  Not all people

 3     where everybody in the Red Cross actually comported themselves in keeping

 4     with standards, but the Red Cross actually had all doors open.  We opened

 5     all doors to them.  And we publicly supported the Red Cross.  We wanted

 6     the people to know that we were in favour of their work and we made it

 7     possible by our documentation.

 8             Kupresanin also talked about this and about Manjaca, and he was

 9     Karadzic's personal envoy whenever assistance needed to be extended to

10     Muslims, Croats, who were in the war-gripped areas.

11             [No interpretation]

12             JUDGE KWON:  Just a second, Mr. Karadzic.  We didn't receive the

13     English translation for some time.  If you could -- could you repeat.

14             THE ACCUSED:  So I repeat it in English.

15             Paragraph 513, Prosecution final brief.  In early April, Karadzic

16     was personally informed by two international observers about the events

17     in Zvornik.  Journalist Martin Bell, on 8th and 10th of April, saw

18     Arkan's Tigers providing the fire-power for the eviction of Muslims from

19     Zvornik and countering a column of around 20.000 fleeing Muslims who

20     pleaded for help.  Upon returning to Sarajevo, he urged Colm Doyle to

21     inform Karadzic about the number of refugees fleeing Zvornik, which he

22     did.  And other international observers also saw signs of crime.  Holding

23     a press conference to make as much noise as possible when he returned to

24     Sarajevo, after protesting by several means, he met with Karadzic,

25     Plavsic, and Koljevic on 11th of April.  Upon receiving this information,

Page 47896

 1     Karadzic agreed that terrible things were happening, but claimed that

 2     Serbs were suffering the same type of violence and denied having any

 3     control over paramilitaries in Zvornik.

 4            [Interpretation] (redacted)

 5   (redacted)

 6   (redacted)

 7   (redacted)

 8   (redacted).  We

 9     saw that the authorities in the end managed to actually gain control of

10     the paramilitaries and to actually try them for war crimes.

11             This is April.  We're talking about April.  What can Karadzic do?

12     The JNA is still there.  The central commands of the Territorial Defence

13     do not exist.  The communications are down.  And let me remind you that

14     on the 16th of April we have that document on the list.  Our secretary,

15     woman secretary, Radmila, from the MUP, she called Belgrade to ask

16     Arkan's office who is controlling Zvornik.  If the police, given all

17     their potentials, doesn't know who is controlling Zvornik, how can

18     Karadzic who is dealing with hundreds of other matters and only responds

19     when he is asked to deal with something specific, how could he know or

20     should he know what was happening in Zvornik?  The Prosecution doesn't

21     see fit to divide these two things.  No.  They keep referring to the

22     joint criminal enterprise.  Let the Prosecution find something outside

23     the JCE and something specific.  There is nothing, gentlemen.  The -- are

24     joint criminal enterprise something that applies to the Mafia whether in

25     Rome or in Naples.  But here we have a people attacking a people, a

Page 47897

 1     neighbour attacking a neighbour.  And we knew that that was the way it

 2     was going to be.  When I say to foreigners:  Everyone is guilty and it

 3     was chaos.  They say:  Karadzic justified this and accepted this.  No, I

 4     am not countenancing this.  There is no justification for crime.  I'm

 5     just saying what happened, but it was not done by the state, it was not

 6     done by the authorities.  The source of all information of the

 7     Prosecution is actually the criticism of the authorities of illegitimate

 8     practices.  That is actually the source of the information.

 9     Paragraph 323 of the Prosecution's brief in footnote 1185 in English, in

10     the --

11             [In English] "Karadzic liked to meddle in cadre problems and

12     always wanted to have a finger in the pie."

13             [Interpretation] This quotation is correct, but the witness

14     himself said, the witness for the Prosecution, that he actually was

15     mistaken and that this was taken out of context.  President Karadzic was

16     involved in agreements as the president of the SDS -- actually, in

17     appointments, in appointments, to the effect that personnel policy in the

18     police was honoured in accordance with the agreement between the SDS, the

19     SDA, and the HDZ.  I did not impose any personnel on the MUP, but if

20     someone from the Serbian MUP called me and told me they have tricked us,

21     our hands are tied, agreements are not being observed, we cannot

22     discharge our duties, that is when I intervened.  There is not a single

23     example that I imposed on anyone any particular arrangement or solution

24     or appointment in fact.

25             The Prosecution has clear evidence that until the 1st of March I

Page 47898

 1     continued to work as a physician.  In the party, I worked in the

 2     afternoons on a voluntary basis and I served the party cadres in the

 3     government in order to enable them to do their job.  A party wins

 4     elections upon a specific programme.  The president of the party does not

 5     interfere and does not impose decisions and solutions, but he must see to

 6     the implementation of democratically adopted decisions or agreements with

 7     the other two sides, and in multi-national societies, the representative

 8     of the people must respect his people, that people, and carry out what he

 9     was elected for and got the votes for.  Because the very meaning of the

10     so-called ethnic parity, the proportional representation is actually in

11     everybody representing the interests of the constituency that elected

12     him.  The Serbian communists regrettably did not do that successfully for

13     over 50 years and were easily manipulated, and I would -- I would want to

14     say to our neighbours:  You are wrong.  Democracy has not only come to

15     your door.  To your great surprise, the Serbs have also seen democracy.

16     So they also have a right to democratic practices.  Let's see

17     paragraph 59 of the Prosecution.  It refers to Bratunac, to problems with

18     the local leadership at a meeting.  This is P1478, page 258.  They

19     informed Karadzic that the para armies -- paramilitaries were responsible

20     for the wholesale chaos that was reigning and that is totally opposite to

21     the contention of the Prosecution in paragraph 59.

22             JUDGE KWON:  Could you repeat the paragraph number.  59?

23             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] The final brief of the Prosecution

24     paragraph 59, where it is contended -- also contrary to the Prosecution

25     document P1478 page 258 from which you can see that Karadzic was informed

 

Page 47899

 1     that the paramilitary units were responsible for the misdeeds.  It was

 2     stated at that time:  There are no Muslims in Bratunac.  It actually says

 3     in the municipality of Bratunac, this is a --

 4             [In English] "It is a fully liberated town."

 5             [Interpretation] That is correct, but that is only 20 per cent of

 6     the municipality.  Ljubisav Simic, president of the municipality,

 7     stated -- in paragraph 61 of the Prosecution brief, they claim that

 8     Karadzic supported the destruction of mosques in Bosanska Krupa.  And our

 9     answer to that is that during the Municipal Assembly session then

10     Karadzic rejected the speech of the member of parliament who was saying

11     that the refugees would not be able to return or that mosques were

12     destroyed.  P1379, that's the number, page 25.

13             After that meeting Karadzic signed a declaration stating that all

14     citizens who left the territory can return to their homes when they wish,

15     D4807.  So a member of parliament can say whatever he wants to say, but

16     if it does not become part of a document, it doesn't matter.  The law

17     protects the MPs and they can say whatever they want to say, but they

18     cannot stand trial for anything they said.

19             I'm relying on your own decision regarding the break.

20             JUDGE KWON:  Before we take a break, shall we go into private

21     session briefly.

22                           [Private session]

23   (redacted)

24   (redacted)

25   (redacted)

Page 47900

 1

 2

 3

 4

 5

 6

 7

 8

 9

10

11 Pages 47900-47903 redacted. Private session.

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

 

Page 47904

 1   (redacted)

 2   (redacted)

 3   (redacted)

 4   (redacted)

 5   (redacted)

 6   (redacted)

 7   (redacted)

 8   (redacted)

 9   (redacted)

10   (redacted)

11   (redacted)

12   (redacted)

13   (redacted)

14                           [Open session]

15             THE REGISTRAR:  We're now in open session, Your Honour.

16             JUDGE KWON:  Yes.

17             We'll take a break for 20 minutes and resume at ten past 3.00.

18                           --- Recess taken at 2.51 p.m.

19                           --- On resuming at 3.14 p.m.

20             JUDGE KWON:  Yes, Mr. Karadzic, please continue.

21             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you.

22             In paragraph 66 of their final brief, the Prosecution said that

23     Karadzic stated that the SDA planned to make Foca become the Islamic

24     centre, the European Islamic centre.  And it was announced very

25     aggressively and it was worked on as such.  We dealt with that in our

 

Page 47905

 1     paragraph 44.  Even during the communist times, before the elections,

 2     August 1989, Halis Cengic, the father of Hasan Cengic established this

 3     paramilitary formation in Foca and had it armed.  Foca was a

 4     predominantly Serb town.  The municipality may have had a Muslim

 5     majority, but it doesn't really matter.  Things cannot be done that way,

 6     including both Serbs and Muslims.

 7             In paragraph 357 in this footnote 1339, it is claimed that

 8     Stanisic -- Minister Stanisic admitted that he was carrying out

 9     Karadzic's orders:

10             [In English] "Stanisic indeed admitted -- implementing Karadzic's

11     orders; however, the Prosecution conveniently omitted an example of such

12     order cited on the same page in terms of the authority that everyone had.

13     We should all do our best to allow access to the International Red Cross

14     and you sent this to the Ministry of Justice and to the MUP and to the

15     army."

16             [Interpretation] That is Stanisic's testimony on pages 46369 to

17     46370 and also on page 46403.  The document is D0103.

18             So this was permanent.  It's as if you cut off a plant's flower,

19     it would look like a thorn.  If you leave out an essential part of a

20     document or a statement, it's precisely that:  Removing the flower,

21     removing the most beautiful part of the plant, and then you are turning

22     that plant into a mere shrub.  In our system this would really bring the

23     Chamber into trouble.  They would have to double-check all the assertions

24     made by the OTP because none of that is correct.  Everything was

25     mutilated, butchered, and I'll try to prove all of that tomorrow.  These

Page 47906

 1     are bastardised forms, sentences that are bastard sentences, half of a

 2     sentence is the Prosecution view and the other half is a witness's

 3     statement.  So it is hard to swallow something that is that kind of a

 4     mix.

 5             In paragraph 504, in footnote 1834, they say:

 6             [In English] "Many Defence witnesses affirmed that there were

 7     communications during the relevant period."

 8             [Interpretation] Now, the Prosecution wants to believe Defence

 9     witnesses.  And otherwise, except for five or six foreigners who

10     testified, they suggested that 234 witnesses here, excluding those five

11     foreigner witnesses, so they're saying that 234 witnesses of the Defence

12     came here to lie.  Now, if the Trial Chamber is going to accept that or

13     if that is the position of the Prosecution and it is the position of

14     their final brief, that 235 people came here to lie for Radovan Karadzic

15     and be exposed to their cross-examination 20 years later, 20 years after

16     the events that they came here to testify about, then it is clear that

17     international justice was buried before it was even born.

18             I am really sorry now that we did not bring all the 600 witnesses

19     that I wanted to call here because it would have been twice as difficult

20     for them to say that 600 people came here to lie.  I can imagine how

21     accused persons who called 30 Defence witnesses fared.  They were just

22     swept away.  Nothing was taken into account.  As for paragraph 504, the

23     evidence presented by the Prosecution confirms that the communication did

24     exist, or rather, communications existed but they were severely limited.

25     And that just corroborates the Defence case and that can also be seen in

Page 47907

 1     the testimony of Cvoro, T30928 through 30; then D2678, paragraph 8; then

 2     D4463, paragraph 268; and Djukanovic's testimony on page 36, 190 to 192.

 3             I'm astonished that the Prosecution does not have the courage and

 4     flexibility to give up on some senseless claim.  Then everything else

 5     they were saying would sound more convincing, whereas this way all of

 6     this makes no sense whatsoever.  We all know what communications were

 7     like.  We know that all of these communication routes remained in the

 8     Muslim and the Croat Federation, but they keep on insisting as if we

 9     haven't had these four years of trial here and as if we haven't heard

10     almost 500 witnesses.

11             In paragraph 86, there is this allegation, I'll read it out in

12     English:

13             [In English] "In a part that deals with the JCE members, it is

14     cited that Mladic at the Assembly stated only my concern is to have them

15     vanish completely, suggesting some sort of alleged plans to forcibly

16     remove non-Serb population."

17             [Interpretation] Our position is that Mladic talked about the

18     enemy only, the enemy army in uniform and with weapons.  That is P1385,

19     page 49.  This is what that looks like:

20             [In English] "The enemy that we are facing is getting stronger

21     every day, and that fact that the enemy in Zepa, Mostar, Gorazde,

22     Srebrenica, Orasje, Bihac, Kladusa, Tesanj, Zenica, or Sarajevo does not

23     even think of surrendering means that they are determined to fight until

24     the last one of us lives.  They declared war on us.  They made a common

25     declaration and stated it in public.  They started the war at first.

Page 47908

 1     They are heading this war, but that is not my concern.  My concern is not

 2     that they will create the state.  My concern is to have them vanish

 3     completely."

 4             [Interpretation] We heard General Dzambasovic here and he clearly

 5     stated that the war time objective of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina was

 6     to free every little part of Bosnia-Herzegovina; freeing

 7     Bosnia-Herzegovina means of Serbs, what else?  It's not mosquitos.  And

 8     the Serbs would be expelled, as President Tudjman said to

 9     Holbrooke - unfortunately this hasn't been admitted - and as Ganic says,

10     We're going to have them marginalised.  Mladic is not talking about

11     political aspects or civilian aspects or economic aspects.

12             The Army of Republika Srpska suffered unjustified criticism from

13     me.  We heard a member of the Main Staff here who said the president,

14     inter alia, criticised us for being so militant.  What else could the

15     army be but militant?  Why do you want to win?  Well, it's in the nature

16     of the military that they want to win.  I am a commander who commanded

17     stop rather than move most often.  We had plenty of territory anyway.  We

18     had enough to give away, but the Prosecution did not notice that.  So

19     it's clear that Mladic is speaking about the enemy.

20             In paragraph 96 -- I'm sorry.  I really have to make an effort

21     because my glasses are not adequate.  I'll get back to this.

22             Now I'd like to deal with paragraph 199.  It is the 1st Corps

23     of -- General Talic expelled the Serbs from the Krajina, that is dated,

24     and we dealt with that in paragraphs 1668 through 1025 and in paragraph

25     1206 to 1209.  We saw how much paper has to be collected here, how many

Page 47909

 1     documents have to be collected in order to reach a list to be part of the

 2     a caravan and this is a total distortion of the truth.

 3             As for these paragraphs, the ones that we're dealing with, the

 4     ones where we deal with these allegations, that is, these are genuine

 5     orders, genuine orders that were strictly confidential and issued as such

 6     to units.  They are supposed to take care of civilians, they are supposed

 7     to be humane and human, and General Talic, that could be seen from the

 8     transcript of the meetings of the War Presidency of Kotor Varos, he is

 9     giving suggestions and instructions as to how Siprage could be kept happy

10     and at peace, that should be given a teacher, proper communications,

11     public transportation, and so on, so that they would be kept happy, so

12     that there would be nothing to make them unhappy.

13             JUDGE KWON:  Mr. Karadzic, could you repeat the Defence para

14     numbers.

15             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] We have them up there.  The Defence

16     paragraphs that deal with 199 of the Prosecution brief.  So it is 1668 up

17     to 1205 and then paragraphs --

18             JUDGE KWON:  Just a second.  Is it 1168?

19             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Yes, 1668.  I beg your pardon,

20     1168.  Thank you, Excellency, you have really -- yes, 1168 to 1205.

21             JUDGE KWON:  Please continue.

22             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] In the footnotes of these

23     paragraphs, we find documents that are not propaganda because they are

24     strictly confidential documents, orders to protect.  I don't know anyone

25     in that leadership who wanted to harm Muslims or Croats as a community

Page 47910

 1     or, even less, the civilians who lived in our area.  They could have

 2     stayed to live there until the end of the war, all those who didn't want

 3     to fight at least.  In paragraphs 228 and 229, the Prosecution contends

 4     that the SDS was distributing weapons together with the JNA, which

 5     indicates that the JNA and the SDS were pursuing a joint criminal plan

 6     because - and we see a subheading that refers to certain paragraphs of

 7     the OTP final brief which claims that Karadzic supported the recruitment

 8     of JNA.  We responded to this allegation in our document P979,

 9     specifically a footnote in it which is a report from one military

10     district.  I will read in English:

11             [In English] "Population in the JNA.  The district command

12     received the most telegrams, letters, and telephone calls from Muslims,

13     thanking for -- thanking us for having prevented bloodshed.  We have

14     information that the SDA and some other party leadership -- leaderships

15     are considering a plan to gain -- to again turn the Muslim people against

16     the JNA.  So far, they have not been successful in that."

17             [Interpretation] Let me not read everything.  You can all see it

18     for yourselves.  The point is this:  The Serbian Democratic Party was

19     supporting the call-up for recruitment, namely, that conscripts should

20     respond to the military call-up, which is a legal obligation.  Anybody

21     who does differently is committing a crime, and Mr. Izetbegovic himself

22     says:  Yes, yes.  It is the law but now everything has become rather

23     fluid and there are laws and laws.  And now we read in this report of the

24     2nd Military District from March 1992.

25             Looking at the whole picture, the SDS leadership and the Serbian

Page 47911

 1     people have embraced the JNA, they have been protecting it wherever

 2     objectively possible, responding to call-ups to join the army and

 3     volunteer units, co-operating with commands as much as possible, acting

 4     fairly and responsibly with the strategic war supplies, et cetera, which

 5     is logical because the Serbian people are threatened too.  It goes on to

 6     say the appearances of MUP leaders on TV these days indicate that the

 7     ethnic groups of this republic are well armed along party lines, Muslims

 8     around 60.000 men, Croats 35.000, Serbs 2-.000, et cetera.  The Serbs who

 9     responded to the JNA call-up were issued with weapons against receipt.

10     They were in the reserve force; they were not paramilitaries.  And still

11     there were 20.000 people who got hold of weapons by passing this

12     procedure, otherwise the JNA would not have indicated this number.

13             We've also heard here that reservists in Yugoslavia had always

14     had the right to take weapons and uniforms and equipment home and they

15     always had to be on stand-by.  Under the Law on National Defence and

16     Social Self-Protection, every military conscript is duty-bound to act

17     when the country is under attack without waiting for a call-up.  That law

18     erases the distinction between civilian and soldier.  We are on trial

19     here on the charge that our professional armies that live in barracks

20     because they are highly trained and well equipped, but we are talking

21     here about armed people, and Tito wrote it into law as the doctrine of

22     armed people, whereas General Razek, not only him, but he was the most

23     impressive, stated that this was the nature of our war:  Neighbourhood

24     against neighbourhood, civilian against civilian, soldier against

25     soldier.  There was no distinction as long as people were of military

Page 47912

 1     age.  And the Prosecution should study our laws and see if the things

 2     they hold against us were perhaps perfectly legal or even ordered.

 3             In one intercept, intercept number 96, one of the conversants is

 4     Minister Mandic who allegedly -- and this is P1149 and P1143.  Mandic

 5     says that Turks should be kept in encirclement and starved, arrested,

 6     expelled, et cetera.  Concerning P1149, Mandic explicitly informs his

 7     collocutor that their conversation is being eavesdropped.  The collocutor

 8     is informing Mandic about the events at Visoko, saying that he doesn't

 9     want to attack anybody but the Muslims are attacking them, and that's why

10     by that time 14 people had been killed.  Mandic says several times that

11     Muslims had lied many times they would not attack anybody, especially not

12     their neighbours, but then they attack them from the back and kill

13     people.  Mandic cites the example of Koroman, where in Renovica Koroman's

14     people were ambushed and killed.  He says such people should be expelled

15     without any weapons and never allowed to return.  And in the continuation

16     of that conversation, they discuss Serbs who had been slaughtered and the

17     intensification of Muslim military preparations and the establishment of

18     the Sandzak division.

19             So this is a conversation between Mandic and a private person,

20     and this document is used to support the thesis about a criminal plan.

21     In our country, it's quite common for people to say:  I'll kill you or

22     I'll do something to your mother, but it never happens.

23             In document P1143, there is only a reference to a special

24     assignment for 30 to 40 people.  There is no mention of human shields or

25     work on the front line, as the Prosecution says.  In P1152 civilians are

Page 47913

 1     not mentioned in the intercept at all.  Instead, the reference is made to

 2     Muslim women who could have been captured during the fighting or in a

 3     combat zone.  I analysed the lists of those killed in the

 4     Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina.  It's D1115.  All in all there are only

 5     6 per cent of women among the killed.  So a Muslim woman could get killed

 6     only accidentally.  The amount of women killed is actually the same

 7     number that they had in the Muslim army.  They had more Serbs than women

 8     in their army.

 9             The previous document was an intercept between colleagues from

10     MUP, Kvesic and Dojic, and they are obviously bantering.  Mandic

11     testified and said on page T4609 and T4610:

12             [In English] "Alibabic was having this conversation recorded.  It

13     was being intercepted, so we mocked him in a specific Bosnian or, shall I

14     say, Serbian way.  We were trying to, yeah, joke about the advancing of

15     the 182, 2nd and 3rd Armies.  This was more like a joke or a conversation

16     of former associates, some of whom had gone to be with their people, the

17     Croats, and others with their people, with the Serbs.  And I did

18     everything on purpose.  I exaggerated everything on this purpose.  I was

19     ridiculing Munir Alibabic and his staff who were listening in on our

20     conversation and making those reports because of a couple of days before

21     that they had aired some of our conversations on television and had

22     spoken in very bad terms about some of my associates.  So I believe that

23     this was a flippant conversation on our part.  I wasn't something -- it

24     wasn't something reflecting the actual situation in the battle-field or

25     something which was consistent with our actual mood at that time.  This

Page 47914

 1     is what I was about."

 2             [Interpretation] All this is happening because the Prosecution

 3     has no real evidence and that's why they rely on intercepts that do not

 4     institute any kind of document.  They don't even give an indication that

 5     something is in the offing.  From this conversation, we can see that the

 6     conversants are constantly laughing, they are one Serb, one Croat, who

 7     parted ways, took different sides, but they remained professionals.  And

 8     in our final brief, paragraph 130, we describe how Munir Alibabic and the

 9     SDA acted while eavesdropping on Serb leaders.  They listened in to all

10     of us, even before the war.  As soon as we formed joint authorities, Serb

11     officials were unlawfully wire-tapped.  In paragraph 290, the Prosecution

12     cites Mico Davidovic's evidence that the SDS was pursuing a policy of

13     expelling Muslims.  Davidovic was not a member of the SDS and could not

14     have been familiar with SDS policy.  In addition, we have seen his

15     transmogrification here in the courtroom and the tears in his eyes when

16     shown a huge number of Karadzic's document about the protection of

17     non-Serbs.  We dealt with that in paragraphs 751 and paragraphs 1115 to

18     1122.  Davidovic testified about this even without knowing about it, and

19     he said, If I had known it then I would have retired and I would have

20     joined you in your efforts to establish law and order.  That sheds much

21     more light on his actual testimony.  In paragraph 291, the Prosecution

22     cites that Serb authorities restricted the amount of money that non-Serbs

23     were allowed to take when leaving and quotes the Hanson report.  The

24     answer to this issue is that it was all governed by the federal law on

25     foreign currency, and that's D1307.  Ms. Hanson admitted that she did not

Page 47915

 1     take this document into account when writing her report.

 2             In that document, it is clearly stated anyone who owns money

 3     legally taken out of a bank is free to take that money up to a certain

 4     amount, and that is quite normal.  Even in the United States you cannot

 5     bring in more than 10.000 dollars in cash without proving its provenance,

 6     but one needs to read that document in order to understand that it was

 7     completely within the law.  In paragraph 94 it is said that the policy of

 8     dismissing non-Serbs was dictated from Pale.  What we say is that Radic's

 9     allegations in the Tribunal are refuted by contemporaneous documents from

10     1992 and we dealt with that in our paragraphs 1001 through 1016.  Radic

11     provided evidence under 92 quater and he struggled to explain that

12     Karadzic and Krajisnik criticised him for not cleansing Banja Luka.  But

13     he said she brought it up.  I never spoke about this myself.  This is a

14     man who was politically not on very good terms with us but he was very

15     fair to Muslims and Croats.  This evidence was literally forced out of

16     him.  You will see that paragraph where Radic is subjected to literal

17     mistreatment.  He's being milked by the person who took his statement in

18     Banja Luka and by the Prosecutor here in the courtroom so that he finally

19     says what they want.  Radic says:  I opposed the replacement of

20     executives and managers who were not Serbs and I invoked the authority of

21     Karadzic.  He used my name to protect non-Serb directors and businessmen

22     and I was also criticised myself for keeping different managers in

23     state-owned enterprises because state-owned companies have the right to

24     appoint their own directors.  Nobody touched companies, nobody interfered

25     with them.

 

Page 47916

 1   (redacted)

 2   (redacted)

 3   (redacted)

 4   (redacted)

 5   (redacted)

 6             [In English] Can we go for a while in private session, please.

 7             JUDGE KWON:  Yes.

 8             THE ACCUSED:  And if --

 9                           [Private session]

10   (redacted)

11   (redacted)

12   (redacted)

13   (redacted)

14   (redacted)

15   (redacted)

16   (redacted)

17   (redacted)

18   (redacted)

19   (redacted)

20   (redacted)

21   (redacted)

22   (redacted)

23   (redacted)

24   (redacted)

25   (redacted)

 

Page 47917

 1   (redacted)

 2   (redacted)

 3   (redacted)

 4   (redacted)

 5                           [Open session]

 6             JUDGE KWON:  Yes, we are now in open session.

 7             Please continue, Mr. Karadzic.

 8             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you.

 9             In paragraphs 444 to 450, that's six paragraphs in the final

10     brief of the Prosecution, the claims are made that the JNA was waging war

11     alongside with the SDS and was a Serbian army.  We have treated this in

12     our paras 378 to 383.  And in paragraph of the Prosecution 448 reference

13     is made to document --

14             THE INTERPRETER:  The interpreter didn't catch the number.

15             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] -- which refers to a meeting of

16     Mr. Izetbegovic with Blagoje Adzic and Kostic in Skoplje in April 1992.

17     The Prosecution is attempting to support its contention about the

18     pro-Serbia JNA while omitting substantial parts of that document.  So

19     Adzic says the situation is calming down, everybody is practically

20     fighting the Muslim army.  In some places it is the Green Berets or the

21     Patriotic League, et cetera, but according to our information they have

22     over 50.000 men.  In some areas, they are even calling it Alija's army.

23     And then he also adds there are Croatian paramilitary forces which are

24     35.000 men strong and they're formerly under your staff.  He goes on to

25     talk about the Croatian occupying army from the Republic of Croatia which

Page 47918

 1     was present in Bosnia practically all the time, and I'm not going to read

 2     all of this, but this is what was admitted by the Prosecution.  And Adzic

 3     openly tells them there -- that is their mistake because they're not

 4     co-operating with -- actually say in BH territory that less than

 5     15 per cent of members outside of the BH Territory and Adzic tells him:

 6     That is your own mistake, Mr. Izetbegovic, because you did not co-operate

 7     with the JNA.  And he goes on to say:  Mr. President, you have to unblock

 8     all the barracks and the military facilities if you really want to arrive

 9     at peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Unless that is done, that will lead

10     to war and this is the end of April, the 29th of April.  After this

11     meeting and after the agreement for the JNA to withdraw, there were

12     orders issued.  Here's what Adzic says:  Today this order came from

13     Efendic who wants -- anyone who wants peace should not be issuing such

14     orders.  This is what Adzic said and he was showed this order of the 29th

15     of April and the similar one was issued on the 12th of April and this is

16     an order which actually caused the taking over of part of Prijedor,

17     taking control over part of Prijedor.  This is a document which was

18     Telefaxed to every police station and the Serbs who worked in those

19     stations saw what lay in store for them on the basis of that order.

20     Adzic is referring to Efendic's order which is registered as D222.  A

21     couple of days after Adzic's agreements with Izetbegovic, the

22     Green Berets and the Patriotic League massacred the JNA on the 2nd of

23     3rd of May in Sarajevo and on the 15th of May in Tuzla.  The army was

24     withdrawing but they could not actually get out alive or at least not

25     without wounds.  So these were unnecessary casualties, unnecessary

Page 47919

 1     victims, and the Prosecution should be aware of that.

 2             In paragraphs 451 to 460, reference is made to purported

 3     Karadzic's control over territorial units.  We deal with this in our

 4     paragraph 5934 to 960.  Even before the war broke out, Karadzic -- as

 5     well as during the war, Karadzic was a political person.  As the

 6     president of the republic, I was the supreme commander.  The Prosecution

 7     is investing vast efforts to determine that I was a president, I was an

 8     able president, and I was the supreme commander.  This is not the point.

 9     The point is what I -- orders I issued.  At the first request for the

10     indictment against me to be accepted, the Prosecutor was Mr. Harmon or

11     perhaps Mr. Tieger, I'm not sure, he was actually waving with my order

12     about observing the Geneva Conventions from June.  Here it is proved that

13     Karadzic was issuing orders.  It wasn't important what was in the order.

14     According to the Law on the Army which was already cited by the

15     Prosecution and according to my decision on the establishment of the army

16     and the organisation of the army of the 15th of June, I actually handed

17     over tactical command to the professionals, the strategic level of

18     command means and is exhausted in preserve the life-line.  Preserve the

19     corridor.  It has to be opened.  Preserve the Serbian settlements and

20     neighbourhoods in Sarajevo.  You have to preserve people.  You have to

21     preserve territory.  These are strategic decisions and the rest is

22     professional.  And this is something that Karadzic did not -- was not

23     involved in.

24             Excellencies, can we have a couple of minutes longer because I

25     want to wrap up this topic properly?

Page 47920

 1             JUDGE KWON:  Actually, I wanted to raise the issue as well, the

 2     time issue, because I would like to conclude the Defence closing argument

 3     tomorrow as much as possible.  And I was informed that you have spent

 4     four hours, 45 minutes, short of your time allocated to you.  So how

 5     about going 15 minutes more, if -- it should be okay.

 6                           [Trial Chamber and Registrar confer]

 7             JUDGE KWON:  I thank all the staff for their indulgence.  We can

 8     continue until quarter past 4.00.

 9             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you very much.

10             In paragraphs 461 to 482, the Prosecution addresses the issue of

11     volunteers and paramilitaries and I can actually compliment my response

12     to question number 2 by the Chamber to explain.  We addressed the

13     question of paramilitaries in paragraphs 384 to 399 and paragraphs 1052

14     to 1131.  At this point, I can just adduce a few basic facts, give you a

15     few remarks to help explain our position.  The trial -- I recommend to

16     the Trial Chamber the entire transcript P6211, which is cited in para 465

17     of the OTP's final brief.  We see Arkan's role in Bijeljina, at whose

18     invitation he came there, namely, the people of Semberija and the local

19     TO, contemporaneous with his stay there and from which you can see that

20     the Muslims led by the SDA, and in particular the mercenaries from

21     Kosovo, Sandzak and Kotor Varos where are sniping, killing, and

22     slaughtering the local Serbs.  Arkan noted that the refugees both

23     Muslims -- the Serbs could not return to their homes.  The transcript

24     shows that the delegation in Bijeljina on -- was there on behalf of the

25     BH, Biljana Plavsic and the minister of defence and Fikret Abdic, and

Page 47921

 1     they -- they were surprised.  Biljana Plavsic was actually surprised by

 2     the situation that had nothing to do with the Sarajevan propaganda.

 3     Everything was quite the opposite, and the number of casualties, Muslims

 4     and Serbs together, was nowhere near what was said.  Similarly, in para

 5     474 of its final brief, OTP alleges in document P3056 how Mladic in

 6     September 1995 had informed Karadzic that Arkan was killing.  We have

 7     already said this.  In the document itself, in Mladic's document itself,

 8     it is defied as rumours.  In paragraph 477 it is stated that allegedly

 9     Momir Bulatovic supported paramilitary units and the document P6165 is

10     selectively cited.  We had a witness here, Mr. Bulatovic took the stand,

11     and we were able to clarify this matter with him.  And the meeting that

12     is referred to that is something which happened at the supreme -- the

13     National Supreme Defence Council of Yugoslavia.  That is what it was

14     about.  Namely, President Milosevic reacted furiously to allegations that

15     allegedly the prime minister of Republika Srpska, Lukic, that Pale and

16     the leadership were involved in crimes.  President Milosevic asked that

17     all paramilitary units which were involved in maltreatment of non-Serb

18     population in Serbia should be immediately arrested.  And I shall read in

19     English:

20             [In English] "We must catch all of them.  Our police arrested

21     Lukic and he is behind bars.  He must not talk about -- we must not talk

22     about that because we want to arrest some others too.  He's a murderer

23     and a criminal.  It is new to me that the people with whom we seriously

24     discussed that are the disguised promoters of the idea that Muslims

25     should be killed and expelled from this Serbian and Montenegrin -- from

Page 47922

 1     this area.  We have nothing to talk about with such people.  First of

 2     all, the state -- this state is not composed of Serbian and Montenegrin

 3     people only.  We also have Muslims, Croats, Hungarians, and 38 other

 4     nationalities.  If we keep talking about Serbian and Montenegrin people,

 5     we keep developing the fascistic ideology according to which all those

 6     who are not Serbs or Montenegrins are second-class citizens.  That is

 7     contrary to our institution.  Serbia is a democratic state of all of its

 8     citizens.  We are a state of all citizens."

 9             [Interpretation] The reference here P6161, pages 3 to 5.  This is

10     also the reference cited by the Prosecution but they do not actually

11     adduce the nature of this document.  Further, they adduce some hearsay

12     and some allegations to the effect that Vladimir Lukic, the prime

13     minister of Republika Srpska, had said something that is inappropriate in

14     respect of non-Serbs, citizens of a different ethnicity.  But it is a

15     fact that Lukic never in -- had the intention of non-Serbs being killed

16     or expelled, as confirmed by his contemporaneous documents.

17             In this document which is D3060, it is stated:

18             [In English] "If our enemies insist on continuing the war, we

19     must insist on the obligations this Assembly took upon itself when it

20     adopted a declaration on peace.  Already today we must begin creating

21     conditions so that citizens who have left their homes because of war --

22     because they didn't feel safe and felt their property -- save them and

23     their property that was threatened once permanent peace has been

24     established can return to the territory of Republika Srpska.  We must

25     guarantee to all citizens of all ethnicities all rights under the

Page 47923

 1     constitution and laws.  We have taken these obligations upon us and we

 2     have to fulfil them."

 3             [Interpretation] Prime Minister Lukic and the government

 4     programme and the words he addressed to the Assembly two months before

 5     all this hearsay, this slander of Mr. Lukic before the Presidency of

 6     Yugoslavia, and this is what it says.  It is particularly important:

 7             [In English] "And even distribution of aid to the Muslims and

 8     Croats, something the commission will pay particular attention to."

 9             [Interpretation] That is in document D3061, page 8.

10             So the rumours that are being presented to this Trial Chamber

11     have to do with what Brdjanin purportedly said, that only 3 per cent of

12     Croats should stay on or something like that.  That's what

13     President Tudjman said about the Serbs, but nobody said that.  We heard

14     Sveto Selinovic, who denied that he even knew that man, this Muslim

15     witness from Rogatica who claimed here that he had heard that from him.

16     And we saw this witness from Prijedor who said that the programme of the

17     Serb Democratic Party and of Serbs was that there is no co-existence

18     between Orthodox Serbs and non-Serbs.  That is one of the key points of

19     the Islamic Declaration that is being ascribed to us, just like Tudjman's

20     maxim is being ascribed to us; namely, that only 5 per cent of those who

21     do not belong can stay on.  None of the Serbs said anything like that.

22     That is the situation in which it is possible to present hearsay,

23     rumours, slander, and to promote them as evidence since there is no

24     substantive evidence in documents or in actions.  Also, jokes, allusions,

25     irony, sarcasm, all of that is represented in its literal form and is

Page 47924

 1     being offered to the Trial Chamber as evidence against the Serbs.  At

 2     that time, we had war declared against us and there are twice as many

 3     Muslims and Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina compared to the Serbs.  And then

 4     their armies were involved and then take into account NATO, especially

 5     their intelligence services, then also take into account the

 6     reconnaissance assistance and the rapid deployment force and then the air

 7     strikes that were there by way of assistance.

 8             Excellencies, the Serbs were cornered and they behaved far better

 9     than anyone else would have behaved if cornered in that way.  It was

10     total destruction that threatened them, and the Prosecution is saying

11     the -- some Serb blurted something out in an unofficial conversation, in

12     a private conversation.  That is how the entire Serb people have been

13     attacked and our Western allies betrayed us yet again and they opted for

14     non-European variance in Bosnia, although they did have Muslims of a

15     preeminently European orientation.  I see the time and I thank you for

16     the extension.  If there are three minutes left, perhaps I could present

17     paragraph 480 as well of the Prosecution brief, where they are trying to

18     say that the VRS -- well, actually, the Prosecution is trying to distort

19     an authentic order, to arrest and try members of paramilitary forces for

20     crimes that they had committed.  But the Prosecution is trying to say --

21     trying to say that the army wanted to include the paramilitaries in their

22     own units.  These are groups of organised people, these paramilitaries.

23     Just by being members of the paramilitary, they do not have to be people

24     who are criminals.  We disowned them and we are going to prosecute them

25     and we did that.  We arrested them, and so on.  And it is the legal

Page 47925

 1     obligation of the army --

 2             THE INTERPRETER:  Interpreter's note:  It has become too fast for

 3     interpretation.

 4             JUDGE KWON:  Mr. Karadzic, please slow down.  You are far too

 5     fast for the interpreters.

 6             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Thank you.  I'll do my best.

 7             JUDGE KWON:  If you could repeat from, "... it is the legal

 8     obligation of the army ..."

 9             THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] The fact that self-organised groups

10     are being included, yes, they are paramilitary groups but that doesn't

11     mean that they committed crimes.  However, it is a legal obligation to

12     include paramilitary groups into the army, and it is on that basis that I

13     issued the order on the 13th of June; that is to say, to have

14     paramilitary units become part of the VRS, otherwise they will be

15     arrested.  We disowned the paramilitaries, all of those who are not part

16     of the VRS.  Those we prosecuted, arrested, et cetera, throughout

17     Republika Srpska.  And there is documentation to that effect.  481 is the

18     last paragraph that I'd like to deal with.  The Prosecution says that

19     Veljko Milanovic terrorised Muslims in Prnjavor before the war.  However,

20     the document states that individuals from that unit were involved in

21     clashes with the police too and that Karadzic not only had nothing to do

22     with such individuals but was strongly against them.  There is evidence

23     supporting this, D4077, paragraphs 31 to 32; as well as telephone

24     conversations, D4080 and D4078, where I say to my interlocutors and they

25     say:  Not everybody is a criminal, only a few of them.  And I say:  All

Page 47926

 1     right.  Have those few arrested.  We want nothing to do with criminals.

 2     If the entire unit is not criminal, then those who are criminals have to

 3     be arrested.  And later on, there were interventions to the effect that

 4     they should be released, and my response was - and we also have this in

 5     documents - only based on the law, only if it's based on the law.  If

 6     there's reasons for detaining them, they should remain in detention.  And

 7     if there are any further decisions to be made on keeping them in custody,

 8     that is for the judiciary to decide.  So this was even before the war.

 9     There are no examples to the contrary.  The Prosecution is saying that

10     Karadzic promoted a policy of impunity.  If that were the case, I would

11     have to intervene with the judiciary and the police asking them not to

12     punish anyone, and that did not happen.  However, the Prosecution think

13     that I have some kind of services for which I'm going to arrest and

14     threaten, and so on.  Presidents do not do that in any country.  It is

15     state organs that do that.  And a president only harmonises and

16     supervises what is happening.  And then if somebody does something wrong,

17     then the president can see how the different branches of government can

18     be harmonies.  Thank you for this extension, and I think that this will

19     do for the day.

20             JUDGE KWON:  Thank you.  We'll adjourn for today and continue

21     tomorrow morning at 9.00.

22                           --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 4.19 p.m.,

23                           to be reconvened on Thursday, the 2nd day of

24                           October, 2014, at 9.00 a.m.

25