Dorothea Hanson, witness at the Tribunal

Continuing the cross-examination of Dorothea Hanson, Radovan Karadzic said that the witness in her report analyzed ‘only a third’ or ‘less than half’ of the 62 municipalities that existed in Republika Srpska during the war. Karadzic gave the example of the municipality of Srbac, where there were no interethnic conflicts in the war.

‘If there was indeed a government policy to persecute non-Serbs, which was implemented in line with the instructions issued by ‘a single strong leader’, the policy would be implemented in the entire republic, and not only in some of the municipalities’, Karadzic argued. ‘The fact that there were no crimes in one place doesn’t change the fact that there were crimes in another place’, Hanson retorted.

Karadzic tried to show that the witness didn’t make a distinction in her report between SDS crisis staffs and municipal crisis staffs. According to Karadzic, the ‘distinction is important’, because ‘party officials are not there to govern, but to serve the citizens’. Karadzic said that the power was in the hands of the deputies and councilors and the ‘party only serviced them’.

‘No, I didn’t make the distinction because you didn’t do it either in your speeches in 1994 and 1995’, Hanson replied. As she read the documents in the prosecution’s possession, Hanson established that the crisis staffs mostly comprised people from the SDS.

Since Karadzic claimed that the Bosnian Serbs did not establish their crisis staffs before April 1992, ‘much later’ than the Muslims and Croats, prosecutor Ann Sutherland addressed the issue in the re-examination. She showed an intercepted conversation from June 1991 in which Karadzic says, ‘we have crisis staffs’, adding, ‘but we cannot discuss it over the phone’. According to the witness, this indicated that Karadzic considered the crisis staffs’ existence ‘a secret’ at the time.

The prosecutor also brought up a decision of the Crisis Staff of the Autonomous Region Krajina establishing the Agency for Resettlement and Exchange of Property, and a number of other documents showing that the decision was implemented at municipal level. The prosecutor used an ethnic map of Bosnia and Herzegovina to show that non-Serbs moved out from Bosanski Petrovac, Bosanska Krupa, Kotor Varos and other towns and municipalities.

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