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The Crown Witness at The Hague
>From the desk of John Laughland on Sat, 2009-05-02 08:27
In 1993, a year after the war in Bosnia broke out, the Republic of
Bosnia-Herzegovina lodged an appeal with the International Court of Justice
against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, alleging that the country was
committing genocide against it. The wheels of international justice turn
slowly, especially at the ICJ (an arbitration court with no coercive power and
little competence in international criminal law) and the ruling was not handed
down until February 2007. It found against Bosnia and in favour of Serbia on
almost every single count, especially on the central charge that Yugoslavia had
somehow controlled the Bosnian Serbs.
The ICJ ruling also systematically dismissed the Bosnian Muslims’ claims that
Bosnian Serb forces were trying to wipe them out as a nation. The Bosnians
adduced a massive amount of material from the grisly to the ridiculous. Some of
this material has since been found to be untrue, such as a the famous claim
that a Bosnian Serb camp guard forced one Muslim inmate to bite off another
inmate’s testicles; other claims were always absurd, such as that genocide was
demonstrated when Bosnian Serb soldiers caused “mental harm” to Muslims by
forcing them to make the sign of the cross.
But even where the Court found that abuses had occurred, it did not classify
them as genocide – with one famous exception. Along the hundreds of pages of
claims about genocide allegedly perpetrated over many years by the Bosnian
Muslims in 1993 (they submitted new claims in 1996) only the massacre at
Srebrenica in July 1995 is left standing. It and it alone has been classified
as genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,
and consequently by the ICJ too (which simply follows the ICTY’s rulings).
But what is the evidence for the finding that genocide was committed at
Srebrenica? I am not asking this question in the useful sense in which it has
been asked (and answered) by investigators such as Jonathan Rooper. I am asking
what evidence was submitted in court at the ICTY in support of this uniquely
successful claim.
Germinal Civikov is a native of Bulgaria who lives in The Hague and Cologne.
His book, “Srebrenica: Der Kronzeuge” (Wien: Promedia, 2009) is written in a
limpid and often humorous style. Its findings are devastating. Civikov explains
that the ICTY ruling that genocide was committed at Srebrenica on the orders of
the Bosnian Serb leadership is based on the testimony of a single witness, a
self-confessed perpetrator of one of the massacres called Drazen Erdemovic.
Civikov’s discussion of the “crown witness” and his evidence reads like a
detective thriller: in fact, it should be made into a film.
Erdemovic originally surfaced in 1996 after he had been arrested in Yugoslavia
for war crimes. He contacted the Prosecutor in The Hague because he believed
that he would be given immunity from prosecution in return for evidence.
Transferred to The Hague, he was himself charged with crimes against humanity,
to which he pleaded guilty having admitted taking part in a massacre of 1,200
Muslim civilians of which personally killed about 100. For this act of mass
murder, Erdemovic was given a 10 year prison sentence by the ICTY, reduced to 5
years on appeal because he had cooperated so well with the Prosecutor. But
there was never any trial because he pleaded guilty and so he was never
cross-examined. He was released from prison shortly after his conviction, since
he was considered to have served most of his sentence already, and he now lives
with a protected identity in a North West European country. This mass murderer
could well be your neighbour.
Civikov’s interest in the case was aroused when he started to reflect on the
veracity of Erdemovic’s testimony. The prisoners, he claimed, were shot in
groups of 10. They were bussed in, taken off the busses, marched to the
execution spot in a field several hundred metres away, frisked for their
possessions, and shot. Arguments broke out between the executioners and the
victims; the executioners drank and quarrelled; there were some moving scenes
such as when Erdemovic tried to save an old man but eventually had to kill him
like the others. Quite simply, Civikov reasoned, it is not possible to kill
1,200 people this way in 5 hours unless one assumes that each group of 10 men
was killed in 2.5 minutes. Even if it had taken only 10 minutes to kill each
group, itself an achievement, it would instead have taken some 20 hours to kill
so many people. If you do the maths you will see that he is right.
Throughout the thirteen years since Erdemovic has been telling his story in
four different trials, not one of the ICTY judges ever did this simple
calculation or questioned the veracity of his account. Instead, Erdemovic was
summoned back again and again from his new life to tell his story. On several
occasions, he named his seven co-perpetrators. At one of the earlier hearings,
ajudge asked the Prosecutor whether these other men were going to be
apprehended and he was told that they would be. But not only has the Office of
the Prosecutor never tried to arrest or even question these men, one of them
(the unit commander) lives in Belgrade and had given interviews to the Serbian
press while another was arrested on a different matter in the United States
without any extradition request ever being made against him by The Hague. It is
as if the Prosecution is determined to prevent anyone else from giving his
account of events.
Apart from the admission about the massacre, the key point about Erdemovic’s
testimony is that he alleges that his unit acted on orders from the Bosnian
Serb leadership. Yet as Civikov shows with excruciating attention to detail,
Erdemovic’s own statements about the command structure in his little platoon
are self-contradictory and untrue. He claims that he was forced to commit this
massacre and that the orders came from one of his co-perpetrators, Brano
Gojkovic. But as Civikov shows, and as even the Prosecution at one point had to
admit, this Gojkovic was an ordinary soldier who could not give orders to
anyone. Instead, as Civikov also demonstrates, it turns out that Erdemovic
himself was a sergeant (he lied to the contrary in Court, claiming that he had
been stripped of his rank) while another of the perpetrators was a lieutenant.
It is obviously impossible for a private to give orders to two officers and
other soldiers to commit war crimes. But
if this evidence is faulty, then how valuable is Erdemovic’s claim that
Gojkovic’s orders came from the Bosnian Serb HQ in Pale?
Erdemovic has presented himself, including in the media, as a pathetic victim
of the Bosnian war. He did what he did because he had to. A sort of novel has
even been written about him, as have newspaper articles, in which he is
elevated to the status of a holy fool. Civikov wades through years of evidence,
spanning a decade, to show that in fact Erdemovic is a pathological liar, as
well as a callous murderer. He was not a conscripted soldier who was forced to
fight, but instead a mercenary who fought on all three sides in the Bosnian
civil war. He was not forced, on pain of death, to commit the massacre, as he
claimed in court. On the contrary, Civikov shows that his unit was on leave
when the massacre was committed. He was not the victim of a later murder
attempt to prevent him from testifying, as he also said in court, but instead a
criminal and a thug who quarrelled over money with his fellow murderers and
who, by his own admission, is prone to blind
fits of violence and anger. During his time in the other Bosnian armies (Croat
and Muslim) he had evidently been an unscrupulous war profiteer who extracted
money from people in return for their safe passage.
Civikov has convinced me that the following is what really happened. Erdemovic
belonged to a mercenary unit which was on leave after the fall of Srebrenica.
On 15 July 1995, someone evidently offered him and some other mercenaries on
leave a lot of money (gold, in fact) to commit a war crime, in this case a
massacre of prisoners. In other words, the Bosnian Serb authorities had nothing
to do with it – and hence the ludicrous story about the private giving orders.
(Perhaps he was the one with the cash.) The mercenaries then hijacked busses of
prisoners which were on their way to be exchanged by the Bosnian Serb
authorities – to the horror of the unsuspecting bus drivers, and of course of
the prisoners themselves – and murdered them. A few days later, there was a
fight in a bar over the money and the former comrades starting shooting at each
other: Erdemovic was hit in the stomach and later sentimentalised the scar in
Court by lifting up his shirt to
claim that they had tried to kill him to prevent him from testifying. Escaping
from this situation by fleeing into Yugoslavia, he was unexpectedly arrested by
the Yugoslav authorities from whom he managed to escape by securing his
transfer to The Hague, where his self-interest in receiving a light sentence,
coupled with his ability to spin yarns, made him a perfect Prosecution witness.
The Prosecution won out on the deal because it gained “proof” of both genocide
and command responsibility – which enabled it to go after the “big fish” like
Karadzic and Mladic in headline prosecutions – while Erdemovic won out too
because he has not only been let off for mass murder, but has also been given a
new life, a house and presumably some sort of income. This, I repeat, is the
witness on whose evidence alone the finding of genocide at the ICTY is based.
Outstanding questions remain. Who offered the mercenaries money and why?
Civikov’s book is scrupulously rooted in documentary evidence and there is no
documentary evidence to support a clear answer to this question. However, there
are speculations and Civikov discusses them. As Milosevic said during his own
gripping cross-examination of Erdemovic – gripping because, whenever he started
to get close to the truth, Judge Richard May intervened to prevent him from
pursuing his line of questioning – there were reports in Serbia of a rogue
French secret service unit operating on the territory of the former Yugoslavia
and later involved in a plot to overthrow him, known as “Operation Spider”.
There had also been reports that these people had been present at Srebrenica.
The West, it is implied, “needed” a big atrocity at Srebrenica, and it was
indeed immediately following the fall of that town - and thanks largely to
pressure exerted by the French
president, Jacques Chirac, who took the lead on the matter – that NATO
intervened and bought an end to the Bosnian war. As it bombed Bosnian Serb
targets, the Americans helped Croatia to launch “Operation Storm” in which over
a quarter of a million Serbs were driven out of the Krajina. Defeated and
marginalised as war criminals, the Bosnian Serb leaders were barred from
attending the peace conference at Dayton, where a deal was imposed by the
Americans.
Funnily enough, evidence seems to have just emerged that the Croatian
authorities manufactured a pretext for Operation Storm. Is it true? Did the
same thing happen with Srebrenica? One thing is sure: manufacturing pretexts
for military action is the oldest trick in the book. Please read Civikov’s book
if you can read German: it is brilliant.
John Laughland is Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and
Cooperation in Paris.
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
