Ewan Brown, witness at the Radovan Karadzic trial

In the final part of the cross-examination, Radovan Karadzic tried to contest the conclusions of the prosecution military expert Ewan Brown about the ‘pattern of conduct of the 1^st Krajina Corps’. Brown concluded that in the municipalities of the Bosnian Krajina in May and June 1992, Muslims and Croats were first disarmed and, after the Serbs seized power, they were forced to move out en masse from the Republika Srpska territory.

Karadzic tried to prove that the witness drew his conclusions using only a few municipalities as examples, out of more than 20 municipalities in the area of responsibility of the 1^st Krajina Corps, such as Kljuc, Sanski Most and Prijedor. The accused insisted that those municipalities were in the Sana River valley which was a ‘strategic goal’ of the BH Army 5^th Corps and ‘incidents’ occurred there to which the Serb army had to respond.

‘I can’t confirm this based on the documents I have seen. In May and June 1992, the army in the Bosnian Krajina municipalities carried out operations that resulted in a mass exodus of the population’, the witness was quite resolute.

Karadzic put it to the witness that in his analysis of the documents he failed to make a distinction between those ‘who fled, those who were expelled and those desperate enough to leave on their own’. Karadzic insisted that this ‘is not the same from the points of view of criminal law’. ‘For me, it is all the same’, the witness responded, noting that in his analysis of the documents he concluded that the Serb side wanted to demarcate a territory in which there would be no enemies: this effort resulted in the evacuation of a large number of people.

Karadzic criticized the witness for failing to take into consideration Karadzic’s cables in which Karadzic ‘prohibited the evacuation of civilians’ when he wrote his expert report. This prompted the witness to ask Karadzic to show him those documents. Karadzic produced a memo he sent to the Serb authorities in Donji Vakuf, a town which had been renamed Srbobran, prohibiting the evacuation of the people. The witness said that the document probably prohibited the evacuation of Serbs because the town had a Serb majority.

The witness again disagreed with Karadzic when the accused said a substantial number of Muslims remained in all towns and villages in Republika Srpska, except in Drvar which before the war was inhabited solely by Serbs. ‘You said it yourself at a meeting of the SDS Deputies Club that you wanted to have a 90 percent Serb population in your republic’, the witness replied.

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