Goran Sainovic, defence witness of Stojan Zupljanin

Goran Sainovic, former employee of the Security Services Center in Banja Luka, began his evidence at the trial of Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin. The former Bosnian Serb police officials are charged with crimes against Croats and Muslims in BH in 1992.

Sainovic was a member of the Milos intelligence group of the Banja Luka Security Services Center whose task was to report to the State Security Service in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the authorities in Pale about the security situation in the area. The leader of the group was Predrag Radulovic Pile. In May 2010, Radulovic testified for the prosecution in this trial. Stojan Zupljanin’s defense is trying to contest Radulovic’s testimony with the evidence of Goran Sainovic.

In response to the questions asked by Zupljanin’s defense counsel Aleksandar Aleksic, the witness said that in the late spring of 1992 he visited the Omarska and Keraterm prison camps with Radulovic. Sainovic met his colleagues from the Prijedor and Banja Luka State Security Service there. They worked as investigators in both ‘reception centers’, as the witness called Keraterm and Omarska. The witness contends that the army provided security in the prison camps and he saw ‘two or three persons in police uniforms’ at the entrance to Omarska.

On their way back to Banja Luka the witness and his colleagues met Chief Stojan Zupljanin at the Security Services Center. Radulovic told Zupljanin that the conditions in the prison camp were ‘bad’ and there were instances of ‘abuse’. The witness claims that Zupljanin was surprised and said he would ‘check the allegations and do everything in my power’. Last year in his evidence Radulovic said that Zupljanin was ‘surprised and acted as if he didn’t believe it’. ‘Radule, there’s a war going on, such things happen’, Zupljanin told Radulovic.

Defense counsel Aleksic then showed the witness several reports of the Milos group. Based on the witness’s replies it could be concluded that the reports referred to the intelligence gathered by the Serb side about the Muslims procuring arms in Banja Luka and their intention to set up a separate municipality and police in the town. According to the witness, the Milos group had the intelligence that the Muslims from Prijedor and its environs had organized military formations and were getting arms.

In his cross-examination, the defense counsel representing Mico Stanisic, the first interior minister in the Bosnian Serb government, also focused on the Muslim preparations for the war. The defense counsel put it to the witness that the SDA had illegally sent Bosniaks to Croatia to undergo police training. According to the witness, this could be interpreted as preparing for the war. The witness said that the BH MUP was militarized when the staff trained in Croatia joined the ranks of the regular police.

At the end of the hearing, the prosecutor began cross-examining Goran Sainovic.

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