Patrick Treanor, witness at the Radovan Karadzic trial

In one of his reports on the Bosnian Serb leadership, prosecution expert Patrick Treanor writes that as of September 1991, the leaders of the Serbian Democratic Party headed by Radovan Karadzic pursued a double policy. On the one hand, they publicly called for BH’s continued existence as part of Yugoslavia, while secretly they undermined the republic and prepared for the conflict. This claim is made in the prosecution pre-trial brief.

Continuing the cross-examination of the prosecution political expert, Karadzic put forth a similar argument but changed the names of participants and geographical terms. According to Karadzic, from 1990 to the outbreak of the war, Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic took part in the negotiations about whether the republics would remain part Yugoslavia. At the same time, Tudjman and Izetbegovic laid the foundations for ‘a forcible ethnic separation’ and the creation of Croatian and Muslim states, akin to what was happening that year in Slovenia.

The prosecution expert initially said that Karadzic’s claim was ‘generally correct’. When the judges asked him to clarify, Treanor said he agreed that Tudjman and Izetbegovic created their armies and set the foundations for the secession from Yugoslavia in parallel. Using the same method, Karadzic started switching names and geographical terms from the prosecution pre-trial brief, claiming that Croats and Muslims defined the territories they considered as their own. Croats and Muslims also established separate institutions, offered resistance to the Yugoslav authorities and took control over large parts of Yugoslavia by force, ‘killing thousands of Serbs and evicting hundreds of thousands people from their homes’, Karadzic said.

Karadzic spent most of his cross-examination today on efforts to corroborate his case by insisting on the historical aspect of the constitutional changes, from the creation of Yugoslavia to its break-up in the early 1990s.

Treanor has written three reports to be used at the trial of Radovan Karadzic; they concern the Bosnian Serb leadership in the period from the first multiparty elections to the end of the war in BH in late 1995. One of Treanor’s reports focuses in particular on Karadzic’s role first as the SDS leader and then as the Republika Srpska president and the VRS supreme commander.

The cross-examination continues tomorrow morning.

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