In the spring of 1992, the police arrested, detained and tortured local Muslims in Pale. Some of them never returned after their arrest, the prosecution witness said at the trial of Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin


In the spring of 1992, the Muslims who lived in Pale were under ‘psychological pressure’, prosecution witness Stojan Crncalo said at the trial of Bosnian Serb police chiefs Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin.

Crncalo testified for the first time before the Tribunal in the Momcilo Krajisnik case and has recently given evidence at the trial of Radovan Karadzic. The prosecution today tendered into evidence the transcript of Crncalo’s evidence in the Krajisnik case. According to the summary of Crncalo’s evidence, three reserve police officers arrested the witness in March 1992. The witness was taken to a public security station; he was beaten up during the interrogation. The witness was released by the police chief Malko Koroman. If there were any Serb casualties in the Carsija neighborhood, populated mostly by the Muslims, it would be ‘razed to the ground’, Koroman told the witness.

In the spring of 1992, Crncalo attended several meetings with the Serb authorities organized at the request of the local Bosniaks who ‘looked for a solution for a peaceful coexistence’, as the witness put it. At one of the meetings Nikola Koljevic said: ‘What good is it to the Muslims that they want to live in Pale, when Serbs do not want them to’. Koroman picked up on it, saying that the police ‘cannot control the Red Berets’, the witness recounted. The police chief described the round-the-clock shooting by the members of paramilitary groups on Pale as ‘running wild and having fun’.

In 1992, the police arrested several of the witness’s neighbors and detained them in the cinema hall. Many of them ‘never left that place’, Crncalo said. The witness saw the body of one of them, Fehim Hrva, when the police ordered a group of Bosniaks to take Hrva out of the cinema and bury him in the local cemetery. The police declared officially that the cause of Hrva’s death was suicide by hanging. The witness who attended the burial contends that there were no strangulation marks on the victim’s neck. The police had their guns trained at the Bosniaks as they buried the body and there was no time to see if there were any other injuries on Hrva’s body.

Crncalo was forced to leave Pale in one of convoys the police escorted out of the town in early July 1992.

At the beginning of his cross-examination, the lawyer representing Mico Stanisic, the first Republika Srpska interior minister, suggested that the witness was arrested while ‘keeping guard and carrying arms illegally’. Crncalo explained that he was captured in his own yard. He had a permit for the hunting rifle he owned; when he was arrested, the rifle was propped against the wall of the house.

Stanisic’s counsel Slobodan Zecevic will complete his cross-examination tomorrow. The defense lawyers of the second accused Stojan Zupljanin have indicated that they would not examine the witness. Pale is not listed among municipalities in the indictment against their client.

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