The prosecution wants to include a notebook ‘most probably belonging to Ratko Mladic’ in the lists of exhibits it intends to tender at the upcoming trial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic. In December 2008, the Serbian authorities seized the notebook from Bosiljka Mladic while searching their family house in Belgrade


As the trial of former Serbian state security service chiefs Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic is about to resume on 25 May 2009, the prosecution has requested that the list of exhibits it submitted be amended to include a notebook ‘most likely belonging to Ratko Mladic’

According to the prosecution motion, the notebook is one of several notebooks seized on 4 December 2008 from Mladic’s wife Bosiljka together with a number of video tapes in the search of their family house in Belgrade. The search warrant was issued by the Belgrade War Crimes Chamber. The Serbian authorities handed over all the confiscated material to the OTP investigators in late February 2009.

The notebook the prosecution wishes to add to the list of exhibits in the Stanisic and Simatovic case covers the period from 27 January to 5 September 1995 and contains entries about Jovica Stanisic and his part in the meetings on the joint operations of the VJ and the VRS. The meetings were attended by other high ranking political and military figures headed by Slobodan Milosevic. Mladic’s notes, as the prosecution alleges, ‘indicate there was close collaboration between Stanisic and other participants in the joint criminal enterprise’. According to the prosecution, the notes furthermore show that Stanisic played the ‘role of a coordinator’ in that enterprise. Moreover, in the entry for 30 June 1995, immediately before the VRS operation in Srebrenica, Mladic speaks of Stanisic’s connection with the paramilitary formations from Erdut and Djeletovci. The motion specifies that at that time ‘Arkan’s men’ and ‘Scorpions’, paramilitary formations directly involved with the crimes the former chiefs of Serbian state security are charged with, were stationed in Erdut and Djeletovci.

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