Ewa Tabeau, witness at the Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic trial

After weeks of proceedings in closed session to hear a number or protected witnesses, the trial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic continued with the evidence of the prosecution expert demographer Ewa Tabeau. She put together two reports on the municipalities in BH listed in the indictment against the two former chiefs of the Serbian state security service: Bijeljina, Doboj, Bosanski Samac, Zvornik and Sanski Most. Stanisic and Simatovic are charged not only with the crimes in BH, but persecution, killings, deportations and forcible transfer of non-Serbs in Croatia.

In the first report, Ethnic Composition of Displaced Persons and Refugees from 1991 to 1998, Ewa Tabeau states that the ethnic picture of the five municipalities changed drastically during the war: 56,000 persons fled the areas, 45,000 of them Muslims and 2,500 Serbs. The witness noted that the five municipalities were cut in two by the border between Republika Srpska and the BH Federation, adding that 96 percent of the Muslims moved out of the parts under Serb control, while at the same time, 99 percent of the Serbs moved out the parts that belonged to the BH Federation.

According to the prosecution expert, as a result of the war, the share of Muslims in the Serb parts of the municipalities listed in the indictment against Stanisic and Simatovic dropped from about 33 percent to the negligible 1.6 percent. At the same time, the share of Serbs went up from 50 to 90 percent.

The second report deals with the wartime murder victims in the five municipalities. Both her reports, as she explained, were based on the collation of the data from the 1991 census with the post-war electoral rolls, and on a number of field reports and lists of refugees, casualties and missing. She claims she was ‘conservative’ in that she accepted only the data that had been verified from multiple relevant sources, which means that the reports list ‘a minimal number’ of persons who were killed or were forced to flee.

In her report on murder victims, Tabeau states that at least 3,092 civilians were killed in the five municipalities; 75 percent of the victims were Muslims, 19 percent Serbs and about 4 percent Croats. Among the 5,359 Muslims who were killed, 43 percent were civilians and the rest were soldiers; not all of them were killed in action. As she worked on the report, Tabeau obtained information about 14 new victims. The prosecution intends to add their names to those listed in the indictment. The two defense teams opposed the motion, and the presiding judge asked the parties to submit their arguments in writing.

In the cross-examination, Franko Simatovic’s defense lawyer put it to the witness that large-scale migrations were a usual occurrence in crisis situations; according to him, it was only logical that Muslims left for the areas controlled by their parties while Serbs went to the Serb-held territories. According to the witness, combat did affect the migrations, but there were many violent incidents targeting civilians in which ‘Muslims suffered the most’. The fact that there were many murders and other incidents run counter to the conclusion that migrations were voluntary, she insisted.

As the hearing drew to a close, Stanisic’s defense started cross-examining the witness.

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