The prosecution has filed a motion seeking leave to tender into evidence parts of Mladic’s diaries in which he claims that the SRS volunteers took part in the destruction of Mostar and the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Bosnia


As indicated earlier, the prosecution has now filed a motion seeking to tender into evidence parts from Ratko Mladic’s diaries at the trial of the Serbian Radical Party leader, Vojislav Seselj. The prosecution alleges that the 13 excerpts contain evidence on the cooperation between the Serb political and military structures, including the Serbian Radical Party members and volunteers. The motion notes that parts of Mladic’s diaries are relevant for the existence of a joint criminal enterprise to permanently remove non-Serbs from parts of Croatia, Vojvodina and BH from 1991 to 1995.

The prosecutor submitted the summaries of relevant portions of Mladic’s notes taken at the meetings he had attended from February 1992 to October 1994 with various Serb political and military leaders, including Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Blagoje Adzic and others.

At a meeting of the Serbian and Montenegrin leadership on 28 May 1993, Mladic wrote down that the goal of the Vance-Owen plan was to ‘prevent the creation of a Greater Serbia and the unification of the Serbian people’. In the prosecution’s view, this indicates that the highest ranking Serb representatives wanted to implement the goal Seselj has called a ‘Greater Serbia’. The prosecution also contends that Mladic’s notes taken at a meeting on 6 May 1992 show that the Bosnian Serb leadership planned "the separation along the ethnic lines in BH, a single state for all Serbs, formation of a single Serbian army in BH". Three days later, at a meeting with the representatives of the JNA 2nd Military District, Mladic wrote that General Momcilo Perisic ‘destroyed’ Mostar with the assistance of ‘Seselj’s men’, including warlord Oliver Baret.

In early June 1992, Mladic described the consultations of Bosnian Serb leadership in Karadzic’s presence, where it was said that some places – like Bratunac, Srebrenica and Sarajevo municipalities of Vogosca and Ilidza – had been ‘cleansed’. As alleged in the indictment, the SRS volunteers took part in the crimes perpetrated in Vogosca and Ilidza. Mladic’s notes from a meeting with the representatives of the Zvornik municipality in late June 1992 show what the implementation of the joint criminal enterprise in Eastern Bosnia looked like, the prosecution contends. The entry from that meeting shows that the ethnic cleansing of the area was implemented in cooperation with the local Serb authorities, the Territorial Defense, the Serbian MUP and Arkan’s and Seselj’s volunteers, the prosecution contends. Mladic wrote down that the SRS sent the Yellow Wasps unit under command of Vojin Vukovic Zuco to Zvornik from Belgrade. During his trial Seselj didn’t deny the crimes committed by the Yellow Wasps unit.

In an attempt to confirm the authenticity of Mladic’s diaries in its motion the prosecution sought leave to call two additional witnesses and to tender the statements they gave to the OTP investigators into evidence. One witness is former chief of the VRS Main Staff Manojlo Milovanovic. In his statement from April 2010, Milovanovic confirmed that Mladic took notes at meetings and that diaries were indeed in Mladic’s handwriting. The other witness is OTP investigator Erin Gallagher, who described in his statement the ‘chain of custody’ of Mladic’s diaries. The diaries were confiscated in Mladic’s family house in Belgrade in February 2010.

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