As a soldier, General Ratko Mladic had a habit of meticulously recording each and every meeting he attended during the war in Bosnia from 1992-95. His notes, the so-called “Mladic diaries”, may well turn out to be the single most important source of solid prosecution evidence in the war crimes trials of his many Bosnian Serb and Serb allies currently before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

By Radosa Milutinovic, The Hague

The man who authenticated Mladic's notes before the court was his former chief of staff, General Manojlo Milovanovic, who in his own words spent much of the Bosnian war at Mladic's “right-hand side”. Precisely because of that, retired general Milovanovic has testified in a number of cases as a not-too-unwilling prosecution witness.

Implicit connection

Mladic's notes on what former Serbian secret service chief Jovica Stanisic said in a meeting on May 30, 1995--read out by Milovanovic in the courtroom – implicitly connected the Serbian secret police with a paramilitary unit known as the ‘Scorpions’. Only two months later the Scorpions executed six Muslim boys and men from Srebrenica in a field in Bosnia, recording the killings on film.

The shocking footage of the crime was shown for the first time at the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2005, and parts of it were played again during Milovanovic’s testimony in Jovica Stanisic’s trial. Stanisic was indicted as a chief facilitator of Milosevic's criminal plan to forcibly establish a new Serbian state in Bosnia and Croatia through crimes against non-Serbs. His trial ended last week.

Throughout Milovanovic’s prolonged testimony in the Stanisic trial, prosecutors introduced parts of Mladic's notebooks into evidence. They addressed the key issue of the involvement of Serbia's state security service in the wars in Bosnia and Croatia under Stanisic's leadership.

According to Mladic's notes on meetings between Stanisic and Milosevic, Stanisic had been sending paramilitaries under his control, the so-called “Red Berets”, to fight in Croatia and Bosnia, where prosecutors say they committed numerous crimes. Some of these units were headed by the notorious Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovich and Milorad “Legija” Ulemek, the latter of who was later convicted in Serbia for the assassination of prime minister Zoran Djindjic.

The Mladic diaries were seized during a search of his family’s Belgrade apartment in February 2010. Serbian police confiscated 3,500 pages in 18 notebooks of voluminous, contemporary and comprehensive hand-written notes. In addition to the Stanisic trial, they are being used extensively by prosecutors in their case against former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, accused of war crimes and the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs in Bosnia in an effort to create a greater Serbia.

Together with Karadzic, Mladic is charged with the genocide of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995.

Right to the heart

Mladic's notes speak for themselves, getting right to the heart of this alleged joint criminal enterprise between Bosnian Serb and Serb leaders. Testifying recently in the Karadzic trial about the war aims of the Bosnian Serb army, prosecution military expert Ewan Brown relied on Mladic’s notes to recall a meeting with Karadzic and others at the beginning of May 1992.

Mladic wrote that the “ethnic separation” of Bosnian Muslims and Croats was defined by Karadzic at the meeting as the Serbs’ primary and overall strategic war aim. Other goals included the “division of Sarajevo” and the “removal” of the border with Serbia on the Drina River.

The incriminating effect of Mladic's diary was strongly underscored when Brown quoted Karadzic's words from it that Bosnian Serbs are “within reach of establishing their own state without many internal enemies”.

“The birth of the state and the establishment of its borders could not be achieved without war”, Karadzic said in June 1992, according to Mladic's notes. No doubt Mladic will have to answer to his own words when his genocide trial begins, which could be as early as next March.