Stevo Pasalic, defence witness of Mico Stanisic

Stevo Pasalic, demographic expert called by the defense of Mico Stanisic, the first Bosnian Serb interior minister, completed his evidence on the migrations of the population during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Pasalic labeled the results of the demography report written by Ewa Tabeau for the prosecution ‘inaccurate and completely useless’. According to Pasalic, the sample of municipalities that Tabeau used was ‘irrelevant’. It didn’t show the true picture and only a study that would include all BH municipalities would be relevant. In her report for the trial of Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin, the prosecution expert covered 20 BH municipalities listed in the indictment. Stanisic and Zupljanin are charged with crimes of the Serb police against Croats and Muslims in 1992.

The witness rejected the prosecutor’s suggestion that he criticized Ewa Tabeau for the ‘partiality’ of her report. As Pasalic explained, he criticized Tabeau for being ‘one-sided’ in the selection of the data she used and her failure to do fieldwork. This rendered the prosecution’s findings ‘unreliable’, Pasalic claimed.

The prosecutor showed several newspaper articles which contain Pasalic’s statements. In a Srna agency report from 1996, the witness says that ‘it is impossible to live’ with Bosniaks ‘as brothers; we can only live with them as neighbors’. The witness claimed this may have been the result of the journalist’s ‘interpretation’ of his words. As Pasalic said, he had always lived with Muslims, but the war brought about ‘new relationships’.

In an article published in May 2006, the witness criticized the findings of the Research and Documentation Center from Sarajevo about the ethnicity of the victims of the war in BH. According to Pasalic, there were between 5,000 and 10,000 Serb victims in Sarajevo. The report produced by the Research and Documentation Center, the witness noted, lists only 800 Serb victims. The prosecutor went on to quote from an interview published in the Oslobodjenje newspapers, in which Pasalic accused the Bosniaks of working on ‘the abolition of the Serb and Croat ethnicities’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The prosecutor contends that because of public claims of this sort the witness is not capable of producing an ‘impartial and moderate’ demographic report which would be of use for the trial. Contesting Pasalic’s qualifications and the relevance of the report he drafted for Mico Stanisic’s defense, the prosecutor objected to the admission of Pasalic’s report into evidence. The Trial Chamber will deal with the objection later.

The trial of Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin continues of Tuesday. Andrija Bjelosevic, the wartime chief of the Security Services Center in Doboj, will return to court for the cross-examination.

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