Radovan Karadzic in the courtroom

Radovan Karadzic has asked the Trial Chamber to issue a subpoena to Major General Guy de Haynin, of France, to compel him to an interview with Karadzic’s defense team. During the BH war, De Haynin, who was a colonel at the time, commanded a French special forces unit that was part of the UN peace-keeping force in Sarajevo.

Based on Karadzic’s earlier request, the Trial Chamber urged France earlier this year to deliver some documents to the accused, including all the reports made by the French peace-keepers ‘indicating that the Bosnian Muslims in Sarajevo killed their own people’. In September 2010, the French government informed the Tribunal that it had failed to locate any such documents.

Karadzic then sent another letter to the French authorities, quoting from an interview De Haynen gave to the Soldier of Fortune magazine in February 1995. ‘You may not read it in the papers, but we've had reports, confirmed reports, of shots aimed at our troops and at civilians which came from the Bosnian side’, the French colonel allegedly said, adding that this ‘may have been the action of a few radical individuals who wanted to provoke the situation and place the blame on the Serbs’.

This statement, Karadzic notes in his request, corroborates the defense argument that the Bosnian Muslims ‘opened fire on civilians and on UNPROFOR in an effort to blame Serbs for those actions’. The accused referred to General David Fraser’s statement, claiming that on 18 October 2010 Fraser ‘testified that the French were in a possession of a video showing a Muslim sniper shooting at Muslim civilians’. The witness in fact said that he ‘heard stories about that but never saw the actual video’.

According to Karadzic, General Fraser ‘testified’ that the French soldiers saw on one occasion ‘a Muslim TV crew filming a staged attack with children’ intending to use it later on TV to blame the Serbs. Actually, according to the transcripts of that part of Fraser’s evidence, when Karadzic asked him about that, the general replied he ‘heard stories’ from other UN members.

In his motion, Karadzic proposed to interview the French major general in the ICTY in The Hague on 3 December 2010, on the eve of the resumption of Karadzic’s trial. The trial of the former Republika Srpska president for genocide and other crimes in BH has been suspended for a month.

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