Richard Butler, witness at the Radovan Karadzic trial

Former Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadzic continued his cross-examination of the prosecution military and intelligence expert, Richard Butler. Karadzic put it to the witness that he, Karadzic, was busy doing other things at the time when the VRS was carrying out Operation Krivaja 95. One of Karadzic’s tasks was to deal with the shells that were purportedly hitting Pale where his office was, and with his daughter Sonja’s wedding.

The accused put his version of the events to the witness: when the BH Army launched its offensive in the Sarajevo theatre in June 1995, the 28^th Division carried out several raids from the Srebrenica enclave deep into the Serb-held territory, prompting the Serb forces to retaliate. At the beginning, the VRS didn’t plan to capture the town. Karadzic himself made that decision in the evening of 9 July 1995, when General Krstic told him over the phone that he stood a good chance of ‘liberating Srebrenica’.

Butler said he didn’t know about the situation in other theatres of war in BH, but he agreed with Karadzic that according to the documents he had examined the decision for the Serb troops to enter the town had been made in the evening of 9 July 1995. The military expert disagreed that Karadzic wasn’t well informed about the course of the operation.

Karadzic’s interpretation of the intercepted conversation with General Milenko Zivanovic on 8 July 1995 differed from Butler’s. In the conversation, Karadzic asks whether three strategically important sites in the Zeleni Jadar area had been captured. In court, Karadzic claimed that the conversation didn’t show that he had had detailed information about the course of the operation. In fact, the conversation proves that the reports reaching Karadzic did not contain enough information, Karadzic argued. When he told Zivanovic to ‘go ahead at full speed’, it was meant as a sign of his support to the army, not a directive, as Butler interpreted it.

Karadzic used an aerial photo of a football field in Nova Kasaba to contest the number of Srebrenica victims. According to the prosecution, more than 1,000 prisoners were held there on 13 July 2012. Karadzic contends that the number is exaggerated by ‘a factor of five to ten’. Karadzic insisted he condemned each and every murder, but contested the ‘game of numbers that is a terrible danger for peace in the Balkans and in BH’. According to Karadzic’s calculation, there were less than 200 persons in the football field.

Butler refused to get drawn into counting how many persons there were on a blurry aerial photo. Butler’s rough estimate was that there were several hundred persons in the football field. As prosecutor Nicholls said, in this particular case the prosecution based its estimate of the number of people on an intercepted conversation between two Serb soldiers on 13 July 1995. One of the soldiers said there were about 1,000 prisoners in the football field in Nova Kasaba. Karadzic claimed the soldier was simply bragging, trying to show ‘who is the bigger hero and who had captured more people’.

Karadzic will complete his cross-examination of Richard Butler on Monday, 23 April 2012.

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