Serb villages "under the protection of the Bosnian state"

“The Bosnian government is not a mirror image of Karadzic's regime: the mass murder of civilians is not one of its military objectives. Serb villages in reconquered areas of Herzegovina live peacefully now under the protection of the Bosnian state.”

This claim appears in an article by the historians Mark Almond, Adrian Hastings, Branka Magas, Norman Stone and Noel Malcolm published in the International Herald Tribune on 29 November 1994, two months after the Bosnian Army (ARBiH) captured about 100 square kilometres of territory south of the town of Konjic in September 1994.

The focus of the attack was the Bijela, a village that prior to the war had 635 Serb, 1,186 Muslim and 1,492 Croat inhabitants. The Committee for Collecting Data on Crimes Committed Against Humanity and International Law in Belgrade claimed that when the ARBiH took the village on 12 September they found only three people, “a bed-ridden old man and two mental patients”, killed the old man and transferred the other two to a prison camp in Konjic. The name of the old man (Simo Nenadic, born 1910) appears on a large list of names compiled by the Committee of Serbs allegedly killed in Konjic between 1992 and 1995. While this list should obviously be treated with scepticism, many of the same names appear on the widely-respected Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre’s list of people killed in the war in Konjic, though Simo Nenadic’s does not.

The Committee’s implicit claim that the Serb inhabitants of Bijela left before the ARBiH advance is easier to establish. Speaking during a session of the National Assembly of the Serb People in Bosnia Herzegovina in Pale in November 1994, General Zdravko Tolimir, Assistant Commander for Intelligence and Security of the Bosnian Serb Army Main Staff,  said: “During the attack on Borci [a Serb-held town in Konjic municipality that was also targeted by the ARBiH in September] we have lost the villages of Bijela, Mladeskovici, Ljubina ... The total number of evacuated Serbian inhabitants is 850.”

According to an International Crisis Group  report of 1998, there were 728 Serbs in Konjic municipality in 1998. The report says that 600 Serbs left the municipality at the end of the war, suggesting a population of about 1,300 Serbs at the end of hostilities. Most of these Serbs probably lived in areas that were under Serb control before being transferred to the Muslim-Croat Federation in line with the Dayton Accords that ended the war. Given that there were no major changes in territorial control between the ARBiH advance in 1994 and the Dayton Accords, it seems reasonable to surmise that the Serb population in the entire territory Konjic municipality was roughly 1,300 in late 1994. If this number and Zdravko Tolimir's estimate of 850 evacuated Serbs are remotely correct, there was clearly a sharp fall in and possibly complete disappearance of the Serb population in the captured territory.

That these villages were unlikely to come “under the protection of the Bosnian state” in any meaningful sense is certainly suggested by previous actions of the ARBiH in Konjic municipality. When Muslim and Croat forces captured the village of Bradina in May 1992, inhabitants were taken to the Celebici prison camp and beaten, raped and murdered. Units of the ARBiH were then involved in atrocities against Croat civilians in Konjic during 1993, including the Trusina massacre in April of that year. During 1993, military units including the “Black Swans” and the 4th Muslim Brigade of the ARBiH’s Mostar-based 4^th Corps, or “Muderis”, commanded by the cleric Nezim Halilovic, gained notoriety in Konjic.

The 4^th Muslim Brigade  “played a key role” in the successful 1994 attack on Bijela and other villages, according to the journalist Sefko Hodzic in his book ‘Bosnian Warriors’. Elsewhere in Bosnia, in October 1994, the month before the publication of the Herald Tribune article, some 2,000 Serb civilians fled before the ARBiH 7^th Corps advance towards Kupres, according to the UN.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that in 1995 the much more extensive ARBiH capture of territory was preceded by the flight of the Serb inhabitants, wisely given the treatment of those who were unable to leave. In northern Bosnia, the majority Serb village of Vozuca was taken by the ARBiH in September 1995, to provide a road link between its 2^nd and 3^rd Corps, but also, according to some sources, to house refugees from Srebrenica, which had recently fallen to the Serbs. The attack, assisted by foreign “Mujahideen” fighters, resulted in war crimes and the exodus of Vozuca's Serbs.

The actions of the ARBiH obviously have to be seen in the context of the much worse atrocities committed by the Serbs, but the idea that the Serb villages it captured came “under the protection of the Bosnian state” – and the implication that Serb civilians remained there and were left unharassed – is not credible.

Ethnic cleansing in Bijeljina

Bijeljina is an interesting case study because it was one of a handful of municipalities in Bosnia that, except for a few days of fighting at the beginning of the war, the Serbs took over without opposition.

Examining what happened there during the war sheds light on the long-term political aims, as distinct from short-term military aims, of the Bosnian Serb leadership, because, unlike in other areas, the ethnic cleansing visited on the Muslim population cannot simply be dismissed as a side-effect of the fighting.

And Bijeljina was by the end of the war in 1995 thoroughly ethnically cleansed of Bosnian Muslims – much of this cleansing having been accomplished in 1992 – suggesting that an ethnically pure Republika Srpska (RS) was indeed the political aim of the Bosnian Serb leadership.

The ethnic cleansing was facilitated by killing, some of it during the takeover of the town when Serb paramilitaries did face opposition from the Muslim ‘Patriotic League’, but most of it when the town had already been secured and the Muslim population could not meaningfully be perceived as threatening Serb control of the town. A report by the influential Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, ‘Bijeljina’s Strange Silence over War Crimes’, notes that the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre found that 1,040 people were killed in Bijeljina during the war. The report fails to note that a large majority of this figure was actually Serb, presumably soldiers from the municipality killed on the nearby frontline, but still, some 300 Muslims were killed, which at about 1% of the municipality’s pre-war population is a substantial figure, probably enough to scare the rest of the population into leaving.

The ethnic cleansing of Bijeljina’s Muslims is described in the 2005 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judgement against Momcilo Krajisnik, a senior member of the Bosnian Serb leadership.

According to this judgement, Serb paramilitaries, together with local MUP (Interior Ministry) forces, terrorised Muslims and some Serbs in Bijeljina in the months following the takeover. On 15 June the paramilitary leader Ljubisa Savic, known as Mauzer, stated that the presidency of SAO Semberija-Majevica (the region including Bijeljina and neighbouring municipalities) had decided that all Muslims in managerial positions would be fired if the “genocide” continued against Serbs elsewhere in the country. From July, Muslims in the town were subjected to looting and expulsion by the SDS. In this, Vojislav “Vojkan” Durkovic of the Bijeljina SDS was aided by Mauzer’s men. Muslim houses were then allocated to Serbs in exchange for a fee. “The Bijeljina SDS was determined to rid the municipality of its remaining Muslims”by killing a Muslim family on each side of town. The plan was implemented in September 1992 by a special police unit led by Dusko Malovic at the instigation of Drago Vukovic of the MUP. The Serb plan to rid Bijeljina of its Muslims also involved cutting off electricity, water and telephone lines to the homes of Muslims who refused to be mobilised and firing them, as well as forcing prominent Muslims to perform menial tasks. At least 52 people, mostly Muslims, were killed between April and September, on top of the at least 48 civilians killed during the takeover of the town.

This account of events in Bijeljina during 1992 is almost wholly taken from the witness statement and testimony of Milorad Davidovic, a policeman working for the Yugoslav Federal SUP (Secretariat for Internal Affairs) who was called in by the SDS leadership in July 1992 to help deal with problems caused by paramilitaries in Bijeljina, but soon forced out, probably because he was seen as being to rigorous.

The description of Djurkovic as “of the SDS” comes from Davidovic’s account. According to Davidovic’s witness statement Djurkovic “worked for the SDS as a field operative.” But the Krajisnik judgement does not explain Djurkovic’s role in the SDS in Bijeljina and fails to note that he was actually a member of the Party of Serbian Unity, which was headed by Arkan, the paramilitary leader active during the takeover of Bijeljina in early April 1992, setting in train the reign of terror continued by Djurkovic and Savic. Savic was a member of the SDS, but the relationship of both of these characters with the Bijeljina SDS leadership and the SDS leadership for the whole of RS is not fully explained.

The Krajisnik judgement also draws heavily from Davidovic’s account of a three-part SDS plan to ethnically cleanse Bijeljina of its Muslims. The plan involved: killing Muslim families in different parts of the city to scare the remaining Muslims away; firing Muslims who refused to respond to the call for mobilisation from their jobs and cutting off their utilities; and forcing prominent Muslims to perform menial tasks. The first and second parts of the plan were conducted by Drago Vukovic and his colleague Predrag Jesuric, while the third part “was the SDS policy,” thought up by a member of the SDS municipal main board. The link between the SDS and the first two parts of the plan is not explained, although Davidovic does say that he attended a meeting of the local SDS and crisis staff where the whole plan was discussed. Predrag Jesuric was according to Davidovic, “the main ideologue in the Bijeljina SDS”, but later in his witness statement Davidovic says, “I do not know if he was a member of the SDS.” Drago Vukovic’s connection with the SDS is not explained.

Those inclined to swallow Davidovic's account of events in Bijeljina whole should note that he  has described Mirko Blagojevic, a local Serb Radical Party and paramilitary leader who is named as one of members of the Joint Criminal Enterprise in the Krajisnik judgement as a “very positive character during the war in terms of protecting Muslims”. He also stated that the conflict in Bijeljina was “started by the Muslim forces that tried to provoke a clash.”

Nevertheless, Davidovic’s account is valuable and it is still the case that the SDS was the main political force in Bijeljina and presided over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in 1992. There is little reason to doubt Davidovic’s claim that Milan Novakovic, an SDS deputy from Bijeljina elected in 1990, was close to the paramilitaries operating in Bijeljina, aware of their activities and unwilling to do anything about them. (Davidovic says that another elected SDS deputy from Bijeljina, Dragoljub Micic, was sympathetic to his attempts to halt the ethnic cleansing activities of the paramilitaries in Bijeljina.) His claim that members of the Bosnian SDS leadership such as Radovan Karadzic and Momcilo Krajisnik benefited from and knew about the looting activities of the Serb paramilitaries in Bijeljina is also very credible.

That the SDS leadership was heavily implicated in but not in full control of the ethnic cleansing of Bijeljina is also suggested by an Amnesty International Report from 1994, which describes Vojkan Djurkovic’s“Commission for the Exchange of Population”, established in 1992 to conduct ethnic cleansing operations, as “semi-official”, but later vying for power with other Serb factions in the area.

The Amnesty report also cites the claim by the human rights group the Humanitarian Law Fund that in 1993 the Bijeljina authorities said that they were implementing a policy of to reduce the municipality’s Muslim population to 5%. There is no smoking gun evidence of this kind in the ICTY account of events in Bijeljina in 1992, however.

The appeal judgement in the Krajisnik case adds to the impression that events in Bijeljina in 1992 may not have been the result of a plan to drive out the entire Muslim population. It notes that since each of the Serb crisis staffs included at least one Assembly deputy among its members the Bosnian Serb leadership exercised “a substantial amount of control over” the crisis staffs, but also that the initial judgement against Krajisnik “did not reach any general finding on the link between the Bosnian-Serb leadership and crisis staffs.”

Many far-fetched claims have been made about the wars in the former Yugoslavia, by all sides. Among these are the Serb claim that the exodus of Serbs from the Croatian Krajina region was part of a Croat plan for an ethnically pure Croatia and the Croat claim (outlined in Charles Shrader’s “The Muslim-Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia") that there was a Muslim plan to drive the Croat population out of central Bosnia. The claim that what happened in Bijeljina in 1992 was wholly the result of a plan to create an ethnically pure “Greater Serbia” also belongs in this category.

Karadzic acquitted of major count, media not interested

Radovan Karadzic: Courtesy of the ICTY

I think both sides of the debate can agree that the decision by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to acquit former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic of genocide in 1992 is momentous.

Serbs and Bosniaks alike are vexed by the media's concentration on the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, Serbs because they say it was a reaction to crimes against Serbs in the region in 1992, Bosniaks because it distracts attention from the brutal ethnic cleansing they experienced all over Bosnia in 1992.

The focus on the symbolically-important Srebrenica massacre may explain why the decision has, judging by BBC, Sky and ITN TV news programmes this evening, received scant coverage so far.

But the lack of coverage of this momentous decision is surely not just due to this. It seems to me also due to a reluctance to present the public with news that calls into question widely held assumptions about the war. Today’s decision does not sit well with the Western perception of Radovan Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb leadership in general. Where it has been covered on English-language news websites, the headline has often been about the predictable failure to have some of the charges dropped, rather than the real story, the ruling on Count One, the charge of genocide in various municipalities in Bosnia from March to December 1992.

Surely his his monstrous reputation is what makes the headline “Karadzic acquitted...” all the more newsworthy? The ruling is particularly interesting given that it would seem much easier to connect Karadzic with the events of 1992 than with the Srebrenica massacre. As James Gow writes of the massacre  in the excellent 'The Serbian Project and its Adversaries': “Mladic’s bloody determination in this situation almost certainly means that the Bosnian Serb political leader Karadzic was not involved and knew nothing about it – potentially creating significant problems for the prosecution, if he faced trial for genocide in The Hague, based on events at Srebrenica.”

That today’s news is of interest to audiences outside the Balkans is suggested by the wide attention given to the ruling by RT, the English language TV station funded by the Russian government.

As with all RT’s news on the former Yugoslavia, the coverage is undoubtedly due to the channel’s strong pro-Serb bias. But I think the Western media’s lack of coverage of the decision is also for the wrong reasons.

The Battle of Bijeljina

“The aggressor is always peace-loving; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.” Carl von Clausewitz, On War.

There are few English-language accounts of the “Battle of Bijeljina.”  This is because, according to most observers of the outbreak of war in this northeastern Bosnian town in early April 1992, there was no such battle. It was a massacre, the beginning of a genocidal campaign to create an ethnically pure “Greater Serbia.” Clausewitz’s insight is redundant, because in Bijlejina, as in the rest of Bosnia, violence was not a means for the Serbs to achieve political ends, but an end in itself.

Yet Hase Tiric, who commanded the Patriotic League (PL), a Muslim paramilitary group, in Bijeljina, is quite clear about what took place there: “We lost three men in the battle in Bijeljina,” he says.

And another PL commander, Vahid Karavelic, acknowledges that, while the PL could not prevent a Serb takeover of Bijeljina and the neighbouring village Janja, it was nevertheless engaged in a holding action that helped the defence of other parts of Bosnia, such as Tuzla.

According to the International Criminal Tribunal For the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judgement against Momcilo Krajisnik, the wartime president of the Bosnian Serb Assembly, fighting began in Bijeljina on March 31, when Arkan, (Zeljko Raznjatovic) and his Serbian Volunteer Guard entered the town and took control of town structures in cooperation with a local paramilitary group under the command of Mirko Blagojevic. On 1 or 2 April JNA reservists surrounded the town and despite some resistance Serb forces quickly took control of the town. By 4 April, Serb flags were flying from the town’s mosques. Arkan’s men were installed in the SDS (Serb Democratic Party) building and were involved in arresting members of the local Muslim SDA (Party for Democratic Action) presidency. At least 48 civilians, including 45 non-Serbs, were killed. Bodies were moved by the Serb forces ahead of a visit by a delegation of officials including Biljana Plavsic of the SDS and Fikret Abdic of the SDA. Many Muslims were then detained in barracks by the Serb authorities. In the months following the takeover, Serb paramilitary groups terrorised Muslims and in September, Serb forces, implemented a plan by the SDS, which was determined to rid the municipality of its remaining Muslims, to kill a Muslim family on each side of the town to scare Muslims away.

Witness testimony in ICTY trials such as those of former Serb Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and former Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadzic reveals more about the outbreak of war in Bijeljina. In late March, a Serb threw a grenade into the “Cafe Istanbul”. On 31 March at 8.15 pm, Alija Gusalic, a Muslim, attempted to throw a grenade into the nearby “Cafe Srbija”, where he said Serb paramilitaries had gathered, in retaliation and in the belief that they were about to attack Bijeljina, but was shot and wounded by one of the paramilitaries. Shooting broke out between Muslims in the Cafe Istanbul and Serbs in the Cafe Srbija. Fighting erupted elsewhere in the town between PL and Serb paramilitary groups, both of which had set up barricades.

This account is in line with Vahid Karavelic’s description of the events in Bijeljina. There was a significant PL presence in the town and it took the Serb paramilitaries four days to take it over. The Bijeljina PL was part of the Tuzla regional PL, which had been formed in November 1991. We cannot know how the Serb takeover would have transpired if there had been no resistance, but it seems highly plausible that there would have been less violence and therefore less ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Following the takeover, the Serb paramilitaries then moved south to the Muslim village of Janja in Bijeljina municipality, where there was much less resistance and a much less violent takeover. To an even greater extent than in Bijeljina, a significant Muslim population remained in the village after the Serb takeover and it was, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, used by the Serbs to showcase peaceful coexistence between “loyal” Muslims and Serbs. The exodus of Muslims from Bijeljina was much less extensive than in municipalities where the PL resistance was stronger, such as Zvornik, though there were several waves of ethnic cleansing in Bijeljina in the years following 1992.

In the neighbouring municipality of Ugljevik, which had a Serb majority and a substantial Muslim minority, Muslim villages were, according to a report by Serb authorities from 16 April 1992, blockaded and forced to express loyalty to the “Serbian Autonomous Region of Semberija” in northeast Bosnia, which had been declared by the Serbs in 1991. According to one anonymous prosecution witness in the Milosevic trial, an Interior Ministry employee who witnessed the events in Bijeljina in April, “the inhabitants of all these villages voluntarily moved out in the direction of Teocak (a Bosnian government-held village in Ugljevik municipality)” in July. The HRW report describes how displaced Serbs from the villages of Potpec and Tinja in the Tuzla region moved into villages in Ugljevik, such as Janjari and Atmacici, putting pressure on the Muslim inhabitants to leave. Many of these Serbs were from areas that had been captured by Bosnian government forces in combat. Potpec, for example, was among several villages where, according to a Bosnian Army report “in the first half of July strong Chetnik strongholds were liquidated.”

In Bijeljina and Ugljevik, it is likely that the Serbs, in line with Clausewitz’s dictum, preferred to achieve their objectives unopposed. They engaged in extensive ethnic cleansing, but this was in the context of the fighting that erupted in Bijeljina town as they faced armed opposition, and later fighting elsewhere in the country that led to a large influx of Serbs into Serb-controlled areas.  The claim that they were trying to create an ethnically pure state – and deliberately provoked violence to bring this about – is not borne out by events in the Bijeljina in the early stages of the war.

Combating revisionism, controlling the past: the ICTY and the Srebrenica massacre

In a previous post, The trial of Herceg Bosna, I pointed to the assertion by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that its judgements have “contributed to an indisputable historical record, combating denial and helping communities come to terms with their recent history.”

In a variation of this rather grandiose claim, the ICTY’s head of outreach Nerma Jelacic wrote to the Swedish state broadcaster in November last year saying that the tribunal had “contributed to creating a historical record, combating denial” and – deploying language worthy of a Tito-era communist functionary – “preventing attempts at revisionism.”

Ms Jelacic’s letter was in protest at the broadcaster’s decision to show the documentary A Town Betrayed, which is about events in Srebrenica during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. By my reading, the letter contains only one real factual correction. But, through a series of vaguely worded criticisms related to the “underlying theme” of the documentary, it seeks to discredit the whole film in a manner likely to lead to its suppression.

The letter begins by accusing the documentary of running “counter to rulings made by the ICTY” and of contradicting these rulings. The first specific criticism, which, to be fair, is linked to the letter's only factual correction elaborated on later in the letter, is of the documentary’s depiction of events during the fall of Srebrenica as part of a “conventional military operation." 

But she then enters much shakier ground, criticising the claim by the Bosnian journalist who appears in the documentary, Mirsad Fazlic, that the Bosnian president Alija “Izetbegovic is bearing responsibilities” for the fate of the Muslims who were massacred in Srebrenica. Her letter does not demonstrate how the latter quotation contradicts the ICTY’s ruling that the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) committed genocide in Srebrenica. The point being made is that Izetbegovic sacrificed the town by refusing adequately to defend it, but accusing him of bearing some responsibility for what happened, does not in any way lessen the blame of the Bosnian Serbs, unless you believe that blame can only be apportioned into percentage units. It is quite worrying that the ICTY seeks to shield Alija Izetbegovic’s reputation in this way, even against criticism that is compatible with the tribunal’s judgements.

Next, the letter refers to the claim by the film’s narrator that an attack by the Bosnian Army (ARBiH) on the village of Visnjica on 26 June 1995 was a “marching order” to the Serbs for their attack against Srebrenica on 6 July. The letter goes on to say that “Proceedings before the Tribunal have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Srebrenica was a planned killing operation and not a spontaneous act of revenge”, failing to explain how the use of the term “marching order”, which can be interpreted in many ways, implies this.

It then criticises the documentary for saying that the delivery of arms to the ARBiH in Srebrenica was “connected to its ultimate fate.” This is very dangerous territory. Is it really not legitimate to suggest that the flow of arms into Srebrenica may have had a connection with what happened in the enclave? If this is the case, then Allies and Lies, a previous documentary by A Town Betrayed‘s maker David Hebditch, which was shown on the BBC in 2001 before any genocide convictions had been delivered by the ICTY in relation to Srebrenica, is now beyond the pale. Since it contains the assertion that “Defence analyst Tim Ripley believes that the US plot to train and equip the Bosnian Muslims directly led to the terrible death-toll at Srebrenica later in 1995”, it is quite possible to imagine that material such as Allies and Lies can no longer expect to be aired on mainstream television.

Ms Jelacic’s letter then takes issue with A Town Betrayed‘s implication that the male inhabitants of Srebrenica may have been spared had they agreed to lay down their arms and points out that “Evidence from the exhumations that the Trial Chamber reviewed in the Krstic case shows that most of the victims were not killed in combat but in mass executions.” But again, the evidence she cites does not refute the documentary’s claim. It is at least possible that the failure of the Bosnian Muslims to lay down their arms influenced the VRS’s actions following the capture of the town, including against unarmed male civilians.

Then we come to the only factual correction in the letter relating to claim by one of the film’s interviewees “That only c.2000 individuals were executed in the first 48 hours following the fall of Srebrenica and the implication that the remaining numbers killed afterwards were killed as military targets.” The letter then cites the first instance judgement in the case of Popovic and others that “at least 5,336 individuals were killed in the executions following the fall of Srebrenica.”

Unfortunately, this is a minor part of the letter’s criticism of the documentary. As can be seen from the rest of the letter, the ICTY does not just wish to refute explicit contradictions of its rulings but to suppress any kind of discussion that could be construed as not being wholly in accord with its rulings.

Ms Jelacic concludes the letter on a conciliatory note, reiterating that she is “not questioning any decision as to whether or not to broadcast this documentary” and asking that the ICTY be allowed to respond to any further material contradicting its rulings that the Swedish broadcaster should decide to broadcast. But it is difficult to believe that this is the real intention of the letter. A much more likely consequence is that other broadcasters who may have been considering showing the film will simply decide not to do so and that filmmakers considering exploring the Yugoslav wars will conclude that if they don’t want their production confined to a few independent cinemas and Youtube, they’d better not deviate from ICTY orthodoxies. This is what Ms Jelacic means by “preventing attempts at revisionism.”