Prominent Bosnian attorney Vasvija Vidovic told N1 on Friday that she had heard the name of the Prime Minister of Bosnia's Serb entity, Radovan Viskovic, several times in the Hague Tribunal, in connection with war crimes, adding that many witnesses there mentioned that name.
“I've heard of that name, This is not the only witness to mention it. Several people who testified in The Hague mentioned that name,” Vidovic told N1.
A local investigative portal Istraga.ba published a text last week along with an audio recording from 2017 of a protected witness M-16 in the case of Miodrag Josipovic et al. saying that the current Prime Minister of Bosnia's Serb-dominated RS entity organized the transport of Bosniaks from Nova Kasaba village, near the eastern town of Srebrenica, to the location of their execution.
“Radovan Viskovic offered me money to relocate mass graves,” protected witness M-16 told the Court in 2017, Istraga.ba reported adding that the same witness gave exactly the same testimony in 2007.
Upon the publication of the text, local media outlets based in the RS found out and published the identity of the protected witness to the condemnation of all major international institutions in the country.
“The reaction of the state prosecutor's office was mild. The consequences of revealing the name of the protected witness are terrible. This is the strongest blow to the course of justice in Bosnia since the end of the war,” Vidovic said. “I believe that both Serge Brammertz (the Chief Prosecutor of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals which inherited the work of the Tribunal) and the UN Security Council, which established the Hague Tribunal, will react to this because a very large number of witnesses testifying under protection in Bosnia have testified in The Hague. This is a criminal offence, but also a contempt of court,” Vidovic said.
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Radovan Viskovic spoke on Thursday evening about the allegations, saying everything was false and that he had nothing to do with the genocide in Srebrenica.
During the 1992-1995 war for the country's independence from the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia lost over 100,000 people, over 8,000 of which were lost in July 1995 in Srebrenica, when Bosnian Serb forces, which received financial and logistical support both from Serbian authorities and individuals during the war, overrun the then UN-protected zone of Srebrenica.
Their bodies were subsequently buried in primary, secondary and even tertiary mass graves in an attempt to hide the crimes and make identification of victims impossible. Thanks to state of the art DNA labs, all the bodies that were buried at the Memorial Centre were positively identified.
The International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice later ruled that the massacre was an act of genocide.
International and regional courts have sentenced 45 people for what happened in Srebrenica to a total of more than 700 years behind bars.
