Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic had a habit of meticulously recording every meeting he attended during the former Yugoslavia’s war from 1992-95. His notes may well turn out to be the single most important source of prosecution evidence in the war crimes trials of his Bosnian Serb and Serb allies before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

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 spent much of the Bosnian war at Mladic’s “right-hand side”. “In Crna Rijeka where the main staff was based, Mladic and I shared an office. We practically shared one desk, we had two chairs, we saw each other every day”, Milovanovic said in Jovica Stanisic’s trial on December 8.

Milovanovic has not been indicted himself, most probably because the Tribunal’s prosecutors have focused on Srebrenica when indicting Mladic’s staff officers and aides – including general Zdravko Tolimir, whose genocide trial is expected to end in 2012; or generals Radivoj Miletich and Milan Gvero, sentenced in 2010 to 19 and five years’ imprisonment for aiding and abetting crimes in Srebrenica.

Absence of Srebrenica notes
In summer of 1995, Milovanovic was fighting at the western side of Bosnia, far away from Srebrenica. Asked by prosecutors about the conspicuous absence of notes on Srebrenica in Mladic’s diary, Milovanovic said: “I don’t know why... It was some sort of secret around the main staff. He didn’t discuss it, and whether he had kept notes there, I don’t know.” Since 2007, retired general Milovanovic has testified in four cases at the ICTY as a not-too-unwilling prosecution witness. He is also due to face his former supreme commander, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in court at the beginning of next year.

It happened almost by chance in April last year that Milovanovic was in The Hague – testifying in the Stanisic trial  - when the Serbian government delivered Mladic’s voluminous hand-written notes to the court. Asked by prosecutors, he confirmed Mladic’s hand wrote them.

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 recording almost all meetings Mladic attended during war. In neat bullet-points, he wrote down the gist of what his numerous interlocutors said, usually in top-secret settings behind closed doors. The incriminating nature of this evidence became clear in April 2010, when prosecutors used it against Stanisic, who – as Serbia’s State Security chief – had been Slobodan Milosevic’s most powerful ally.

Although pieces of Mladic’s diaries have been moved into evidence in different trials (Stanisic, Momcilo Perisic, Vojislav Seselj, Jadranko Prlic), their pages were put in proper context in the case against Karadzic. 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, prosecution military expert Ewan Brown relied on notes on a secret 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 meetings 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. Those words soon proved not to be empty threats, after the Bosnian Serb assembly adopted “strategic” war aims in mid-May 1992, military expert Brown interpreted.

In his defence, Karadzic repeatedly claimed that the Bosnian Serbs’ strategic goals were not only purely political, without relation to what happened militarily on the ground - but also adopted at the time by international peace mediators. Karadzic – who acts as his own lawyer – accepted Mladic’s diaries as authentic.

But he opposed their admittance into evidence “in their entirety”. “I would be very worried if they were to be admitted in their entirety without additional corroborating documents. It’s an aide-memoir, a reminder.
Not a diary in the true sense of the word”, Karadzic said during Brown’s testimony at the end of November. He also said large portions of Mladic’s notes are in fact of an exculpatory nature. The trial chamber has decided to admit all Mladic’s notebooks into evidence.