Eurasia Press & News
Testifying at Radovan Karadzic’s trial, an expert witness says that Bosnian Serb authorities organised the removal of the non-Serb population from areas under their control.
Dorothea Hanson, an expert witness who drafted a report on the establishment and functioning of Serb crisis committees and wartime presidencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said that municipal authorities confiscated property from the non-Serb population, creating conditions in which “the stay of non-Serbs was unimaginable”.
“As far as the moving of people is concerned, the point was not just to relocate people during the course of the war. They worked on substantially changing the composition of a municipality’s population.
“Wartime presidencies in municipalities said that property was only temporarily confiscated, but I think this is not a fair way of putting it, because their intention was to make those people leave for good,” Hanson said.
Karadzic, former President of Republika Srpska, is indicted before the Hague Tribunal for having participated in a joint criminal enterprise with the aim of permanently moving the non-Serb population from the parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina claimed by Bosnian Serbs, by committing genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and deportation.
