1 Thursday, 16 July 1998
2 --- Upon commencing at 10.13 a.m.
3 (Open session)
4 JUDGE JORDA: Please be seated. Have the
5 accused brought in, please?
6 (The accused entered court)
7 JUDGE JORDA: Good morning to the
8 interpreters and to the court reporters. We can now
9 resume our work. According to what we were told
10 yesterday by both parties, we would like to welcome
11 Mr. Kehoe back, and a large number of witnesses we're
12 going to hear today, right?
13 MR. KEHOE: One, I believe, Judge.
14 JUDGE JORDA: Very well. Then we're going to
15 hear the one witness. The floor is yours.
16 MR. KEHOE: Thank you, Mr. President. Good
17 morning, Mr. President, Your Honours, counsel. The
18 witness this morning is Dr. Colin Kaiser from UNESCO
19 and Dr. Kaiser's testimony will focus on the
20 destruction of sacral and cultural monuments and for
21 the most part Islamic sacral and cultural monuments
22 that were destroyed in the Lasva valley area, Busovaca
23 area as well as the Kiseljak area.
24 Dr. Kaiser has been studying this subject for
25 sometime, in the former Yugoslavia since the early
1 '90s. During that period of time, he was assigned by
2 the council of Europe to do a series of studies on the
3 destruction of sacral and cultural monuments throughout
4 the former Yugoslavia and the impact that destruction
5 had on the various ethnic cultures who suffered that
6 damage.
7 He will explain to Your Honours, with some of
8 the photographs that are in evidence, and a sampling of
9 photographs that have not been received into evidence,
10 exactly what the various religious, sacral or cultural
11 structures are used for, why it is that one would
12 destroy this type of structure, and the impact, again,
13 on the ethnic group, in this case, the Muslim ethnic
14 group, of such destruction. He will likewise offer
15 some conclusions on what the entity in this case, the
16 HVO, might be attempting to accomplish by such a
17 destruction of Islamic sacral and cultural
18 institutions.
19 His presentation will focus, in the main, on
20 two counts, and that count is count 1, the persecution
21 count which, of course, encompasses as part of it, the
22 destruction -- persecution of the Bosnian Muslim
23 population in Central Bosnia and as a method of doing
24 that, the destruction of their sacral and cultural
25 monuments, and in the main count 14, which is a list of
1 various cultural and sacral monuments in Kizeljak,
2 Busovaca and Vitez that were destroyed by the HVO
3 during the operative time frame.
4 That will essentially be Dr. Kaiser's
5 testimony, beginning with some background and moving
6 down to the specifics as he goes through the pictures.
7 I think it might be somewhat more efficient,
8 Mr. President, if the photographs that have been
9 provided to Mr. Dubuisson could be marked and be given
10 to Dr. Kaiser so that he might begin his testimony to
11 Your Honour and move these photographs on and off the
12 ELMO as he sees fit. If there's no objection with the
13 court, that might be a more efficient method to
14 employ. And certainly, giving the new photographs to
15 Defence council at this point, is perfectly
16 appropriate.
17 JUDGE JORDA: This doesn't cause any problems
18 for the Judges. Does it cause any problems for
19 Mr. Hayman? Very well. All right. We can work that
20 way. Registrar, have the usher bring Dr. Kaiser into
21 the courtroom, please.
22 (The witness entered court)
23 JUDGE JORDA: Dr. Kaiser, we have to ask you
24 to remain standing for a few moments. Please, put your
25 headset on and we ask you to remain standing for a few
1 moments. First of all, to confirm your title, your
2 family name, your given name and then to read your
3 solemn declaration. First give us your title, then
4 your family name and -- we have to know who you are
5 first.
6 THE WITNESS: My name is Dr. Colin Kaiser.
7 I'm the UNESCO representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
8 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you very much. Now
9 please read the oath.
10 THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will
11 speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
12 truth.
13 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you very much. Please be
14 seated now. You have been called by the Prosecution as
15 part of the trial of Colonel Blaskic, the accused who
16 is in this courtroom. The Prosecutor has given us a
17 quick summary of the general sense of your testimony,
18 and he will now ask you some questions after which, of
19 course, you will be asked some questions by the Defence
20 and by the Judges. Mr. Kehoe, please proceed.
21 WITNESS: Dr. Colin Kaiser
22 Examined by Mr. Kehoe:
23 Q. Thank you, Mr. President. Good morning,
24 Dr. Kaiser. Mr. Kaiser, before we begin your
25 testimony, can you tell the Judges a little bit about
1 yourself, your educational background, your
2 professional background, and I know that you noted that
3 you are UNESCO's representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina
4 at this point. You could tell the Judges what that
5 exactly means.
6 A. Well, I'm a social and institutional
7 historian by training, a specialist in old regime
8 France. Most of my professional life has not been
9 involved directly in history, in any exercise and
10 practice of history. I have worked in the
11 International Council Monuments and Sites where I
12 became director, so my main interest over the past ten
13 years, really, has been cultural heritage. I passed
14 from the International Council Monuments and Sites to
15 UNESCO where I worked for them as a consultant in
16 cultural heritage.
17 In October 1995, when the cease-fire began in
18 Bosnia-Herzegovina, I was asked by UNESCO to take up
19 the post of representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, that
20 is, the head of mission, the chief of office, so I'm
21 now responsible for carrying out, elaborating sometimes
22 UNESCO projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in education, in
23 cultural heritage, in media. I spent a lot of time in
24 Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia during the wars. I'm
25 spending a lot of time in Bosnia now hoping to see the
1 pieces of the society come back together, to see it
2 reconstructed. It's a very important job for me,
3 privately. When you have seen things come apart, it's
4 nice to see them come back together and try to
5 contribute to that.
6 Q. During the course of your work in UNESCO, you
7 have been called to the Tribunal here in The Hague to
8 testify before, have you not, sir?
9 A. Yes, I have.
10 Q. Now, let us just discuss for a moment what
11 you said at the outset, and if you could again explain
12 to the Judges your involvement in the study of sacral
13 and cultural monuments in the former Yugoslavia,
14 through the beginning of your work with the council of
15 Europe, and if you could then explain to the Judges, as
16 we move from the general to the more specific, the
17 prescription of your work, how you do your work now,
18 and if you could move down to the level of destruction
19 of sacral and cultural monuments in Central Bosnia, and
20 specifically areas under HVO control. Could you do
21 that for us, sir?
22 A. Yes. It began, in fact, with UNESCO, because
23 I was one of two UNESCO observers sent to Dubrovnik in
24 November and December of 1991. I was present in
25 Dubrovnik during the Saint Nicholas Day bombardment on the
1 6th of December. It was quite a terrifying
2 experience. It was a very eye opening experience, in
3 the sense that the destruction, the bombardment of
4 cultural and religious objects, the attack on the city
5 which was completely defenceless seemed to me a very
6 novel way to wage war.
7 When the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina began,
8 the fear, the sentiment that I had that this was a war
9 which was not just about taking military objectives in
10 the strict sense of the term, but these were wars about
11 perhaps of identity which means that other things were
12 also being targeted. It was very clear to us that the
13 international community, at the beginning of the
14 Bosnian war, wasn't very interested in these things.
15 There was some sort of information from Sarajevo when
16 the Vijecnica, the national university library, was set
17 on fire, and that was kind of an archetypal crime
18 against cultural heritage. But considering that the
19 war was all over the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
20 there was great concern, at least in small circles,
21 that, in fact, it was the military actions or
22 post-military actions were taking place against the
23 symbols of peoples' identity.
24 My work with the council of Europe began
25 merely in -- it began in the summer of 1992, but the
1 first time we were able to go on mission was in
2 November of 1992. It was extremely hard to go on
3 mission because none of the international community
4 would say that it's a proper mandate. UNPROFOR didn't
5 have a mandate for cultural heritage. The European
6 community monitoring mission didn't have a mandate for
7 it. The UNHCR didn't have a mandate for it. So it
8 took awhile to get into the field.
9 The first mission was in Neretva valley.
10 This, in some ways, was even more frightening and
11 awesome than the mission in the Dubrovnik area because
12 the amount of damage, for example, done to Mostar in
13 the first battle of Mostar, by the Bosnian- Serbian
14 army, in the period of three months, was really quite
15 astounding.
16 JUDGE RIAD: Excuse me a second. It's
17 written here that the first mission was in Neretva
18 valley. You mean Lasva valley? Neretva valley?
19 A. Neretva valley, the first mission for the
20 council of Europe.
21 Also, what was astounding was the reprisal
22 activity. I had never seen a dynamited church. I had
23 never seen a dynamited church from the 16th century,
24 Zitomislic, which is an Orthodox monastery, or the new
25 Orthodox church in Mostar, on the east side. This war
1 was much more savage than the war that I had seen in
2 the Dubrovnik commune. It took awhile to organise
3 other missions. What I did mainly during 1993, was
4 that I was recording information that was coming in,
5 writing reports about what might be happening, with a
6 sense of great frustration. There was some information
7 that was filtering in. The destruction of the mosque
8 in Banja Luka in May 1993. There was information about
9 that. There was some sort of reaction to it. The
10 destruction of the old bridge in Mostar in November
11 1993. That's another example where the international
12 media became very interested, very briefly.
13 In 1994, was the first time that Bosnia sort
14 of came open to our activities. I was writing
15 information reports for the council of Europe. The
16 point of writing information reports was to hopefully
17 build up some sort of reaction on the part of
18 government members' states of the council of Europe,
19 not so much public opinion. If you didn't have good
20 information, you couldn't hope that your reports were
21 going to have much of an impact. 1994, we had a very
22 interesting echo from the European community monitoring
23 commission. The sort of interest in what was going on
24 came from the field, it came from the monitors
25 themselves. They began to see in Bosnia that an awful
1 lot of things were happening, and also in Croatia, and
2 they were much more open to cooperating with the
3 council of Europe than in the preceding years.
4 So in March 1994, I carried out a mission in
5 western Herzegovina and also parts of the United
6 Nations protection areas. And then in May and June
7 1994, with European community monitoring mission, I
8 carried out a mission in Central Bosnia. This was an
9 important mission from the point of view of
10 information. It covered the front zones between the
11 Armija, the Bosnian Serbian army. It also concerned
12 the Central Bosnia area, about which there was not so
13 much information. Of course, we all heard about the
14 Ahmici massacre in 1993. We had all sorts of rumours
15 about other activities that had been carried out in the
16 area, ethnic cleansing which was alleged. We had
17 information that the Franciscan monastery in Guca Gora
18 had been totally destroyed, that the great collections
19 in the Franciscan monastery of Kraljeva Sutisca (phoen)
20 had been totally dispersed, and this last case, if it
21 was actually true, it would have been a very, very
22 serious cultural loss. But the truth of the matter is,
23 again, we knew nothing about it. Convoys were going
24 everywhere. You see them all over the place. There's
25 the other organs of the international community, but we
1 didn't really know what was going on.
2 So ECCM took me in, and concerning the areas
3 which are of interest in the case against Mr. Blaskic,
4 I did visit parts of the Vitez pocket. I was able to
5 photograph a few buildings. I visited Busovaca. I
6 went very quickly through the Kiseljak area, which was
7 considered to be extremely dangerous. You couldn't
8 even get out of the vehicle. You couldn't take
9 pictures. That was the extent of my activity, in fact,
10 in Central Bosnia, in this mission in 1994.
11 I continued working after that. I worked in
12 Mostar for UNESCO. I continued even in the rest of the
13 war to do more small monitoring activities with ECMM
14 which also set up their own monitoring system of
15 cultural and sacral heritage. Also, in the post-war
16 period, we continued to monitor churches and mosques
17 because they continue, in periods of tension, to be
18 targeted. There had been mosques burned in Western
19 Herzegovina. There have been church towers dynamited
20 in Central Bosnia before the last elections last year.
21 There have been churches fired, also in Central Bosnia
22 since. All these things that have happened, we have to
23 be interested in. One of my duties as a UNESCO
24 representative is to make sure that sacral buildings,
25 sacral property are respected. Sadly enough, there are
1 cycles, in which even in the peace time, they are not.
2 Earlier this year, I was requested by ICTY to
3 help them in terms of gathering information, evaluating
4 information, that is, evaluating information that the
5 Tribunal had, but also going out in the terrain to see
6 what the situation was in the municipalities which are
7 covered by this trial, the municipalities of Vitez,
8 Busovaca and Kiseljak. So from April to June, this
9 year, this is what I did. I examined mosques, mesjids
10 and mektebs in these three municipalities, and the rest
11 of my presentation will be more or less, a summary of
12 this information I gathered and also the information
13 which was made available to me here at the Tribunal.
14 Q. Before you go into that description,
15 Dr. Kaiser, why is this important? Why you as a
16 representative of UNESCO, why is this issue concerning
17 the sacral and cultural monuments and the safeguarding
18 of those monuments an important issue?
19 A. It's important for reasons that are sort of
20 second nature to people, but often sometimes harder to
21 spell out. People are attached to their environment,
22 first of all. Secondly, they are attached to specific
23 objects in their own environment. If you take a
24 building like Vijecnica, the national university
25 library in Sarajevo, people are not attached to it
1 because they know the name of the architect or they
2 admire it aesthetically. They are attached to it
3 because they had rendezvoused with their girlfriends in
4 front of. Maybe they spent many good hours reading
5 books in it. It's a landmark. It's something that is
6 part of their lives. Maybe as time goes on, they start
7 to know a little bit more about it and what it
8 represents, what it signifies, in terms of the history
9 of the town or the history of their district. So in an
10 unconscious way, people are very attached to their
11 environment and the buildings in their environment.
12 I'm talking about built cultural heritage, I'm not
13 talking about manuscripts, et cetera, et cetera.
14 Other buildings are closer perhaps to the
15 cultural sole, the cultural psyche. You asked this
16 question because, in the society which we leave, we are
17 an extremely urbanised society and very often we will
18 admire Notre Dame because we know what century Notre
19 Dame was built in, we know something about its history,
20 its aesthetics have been explained to us.
21 We live in secularised societies. We don't
22 always, immediately responsible, to the simple messages
23 that is in a lot of the sacral heritage. But there are
24 societies and there are populations in any society
25 which are extremely attached to certain types of
1 buildings. They are a symbol of their past. A church
2 contains often a cemetery. A cemetery contains the
3 graves of our ancestors. A church also were most
4 important parts of your life have gone through. You
5 may have been married in the church. You may be buried
6 in the church. The church points upwards. Religious
7 buildings, sacral buildings are very, very important
8 for the cycle of life. When you have the society
9 groups in the society for whom those things are really
10 important, then if you touch the church, if you touch
11 the mosque, then you are touching something very, very
12 important to those people. As we are talking here
13 basically about sacral buildings, I think that's
14 basically my answer. This is an intangible thing, but
15 an extremely important thing.
16 Q. If those sacral buildings, let us stay with
17 the sacral buildings, are destroyed or damaged, what
18 effect might that have on the population, the
19 particular ethnic population, when they see and observe
20 such a destruction?
21 A. Well, I think there's a sense of desolation,
22 a sense of being especially wounded. I think the
23 destruction of a mosque is different than the
24 destruction of a Bosnian Muslim's house. The mosque or
25 the church or whatever, it represents an order to the
1 world. What happens to you, everybody knows that
2 you're mortal. Your life is a series of accidents.
3 But the mosque, the church, it represents an order.
4 When you destroy that, you are sort of tempering,
5 threatening the order of existence. I think that one
6 reacts in that sense. It has often been said to me,
7 during the war, and not just about churches, but about
8 other major cultural buildings, that we get used to
9 being killed. We know that human life is no more
10 tangible or tougher than the life of a butterfly, but
11 when we see these other buildings being destroyed, then
12 the world starts to crumble around us. And I think
13 it's more so, in the case of sacral buildings.
14 Q. Let's turn our attention to the actual
15 destruction of the Islamic cultural and sacral
16 buildings. If you can begin your discussion, Doctor,
17 with a brief overview of what you're talking about
18 vis-à-vis these buildings, I think that would be
19 helpful.
20 A. To go back a little bit to the question you
21 asked before, you asked it generally, but there's also
22 a specific application in terms of the area that is
23 being under concern. These municipalities are
24 overwhelming rural.
25 Q. You're talking about Kiseljak and --
1 A. Kiseljak, Busovaca and Vitez. Kiseljak,
2 which is the biggest town but it's a small sort of
3 country town for us. Busovaca, Vitez, or Novi Travnik;
4 these are very small places and they are surrounded by
5 a sort of curia of villages. One thing that has to be
6 kept in mind, in discussing the rural population, and
7 we're talking specifically about the rural Bosniaks, is
8 that this is something that very much impressed me in
9 1994 when I went there.
10 When I went to Mostar in November 1992, there
11 were these fabulous town mosques, stone mosques, but a
12 lot of them were being used as galleries or museums.
13 They were not being used for the cult. One of them,
14 the Carados Begova (phoen) mosque was the frescos
15 the very interesting fresco and it was being
16 restored. So there was a big scaffolding inside, but
17 this a process that was going to take years and years
18 and years to carry out.
19 When you went to the countryside, you found
20 the plethora of mosques all over the place. And I was
21 trying to identify cultural heritage, so I would have
22 pictures from the 1920s or something of a mosque, and I
23 would be sort of junketing around the countryside
24 looking for this mosque, and I couldn't find this
25 mosque. I couldn't find this mosque because it had
1 been totally transformed by the imam, by the community
2 over time. Everybody questioned their tastes, their
3 tastes in colours, their tastes in objects, et cetera,
4 et cetera, but there was no doubt about it that these
5 mosques were alive and that they were important for the
6 rural community.
7 I had many examples of seeing people go to
8 the mosque and a lot of people going to the mosque.
9 There were a lot of new mosques in the countryside as
10 well. A lot of these mosques were built or built
11 partially with funds from the "gastarbeiter", the
12 emigrant workers who went to Germany, who went
13 elsewhere.
14 There was a kind of vitality in the
15 countryside, and this was proof of a kind of devotion,
16 a devoutness, on the country population. This is the
17 general rule all over the world. If we wanted to look
18 at Western Herzegovina, we wouldn't understand it
19 either if we didn't understand the Franciscans and the
20 role of the Catholic church in the lives of the
21 people. It's the same thing in rural Bosnia, in as
22 much as the Bosnian Muslims themselves are concerned.
23 To talk about the types of buildings which
24 are under consideration here, well, it's quite simple.
25 We have mosques. A mosque has a minaret to distinguish
1 it from a mesjid. It's often called Friday mosque. To
2 give you an example of how important a mosque is in the
3 local life, when I was in one village called Rotilj, I
4 spoke to the head man of the village. This little
5 village is sort of at the end of a valley, and the road
6 out of the valley goes through Kiseljak. So there was
7 a Bosnian Muslim population living in this village.
8 They were going to the mekteb, using it as a mosque.
9 He said to me, "I hope that after the war,
10 the mosque in Kiseljak will be available to us so we
11 can go there for Dzuma on Friday." So on Friday, and
12 you see this all over the territory, it's market day.
13 It's also Dzuma. So people will go from a whole series
14 of little villages around the town, they will go to the
15 mosque which has the minaret. They will go do their
16 devotions there; they will meet their friends there;
17 they will exchange a lot of news there. So this is
18 another way of pointing out how important the mosque is
19 for the community's life on, sort of, a wider level. A
20 mosque is one type of building.
21 In this area, there were very few minarets
22 traditionally. There were little minarets that were
23 built in the roof of the mosque. They only went up a
24 few metres high. They rested on the beams in the
25 ceiling. Later on, in the post-war period, a lot of
1 minarets began to appear.
2 Q. When you're talking about post-war, you're
3 talking about World War II?
4 A. Yes, World War II, yes. The other type of
5 cult building, of course, is the mesjid, which is
6 basically a mosque without a minaret. It's a type of
7 small one-roomed orbit, several rooms sometimes because
8 it's combined with other functions. It's a small
9 building that you find in the countryside.
10 The third type of building is the mekteb.
11 The mekteb is a school for primary-school-aged
12 children. This is for the study of the Koran. It's
13 also where the children learn Arabic. Mekteb often
14 serves as a mesjid, in fact, in the country area.
15 A function that you find in modern religious
16 buildings is the gasulhane which is for washing the
17 dead. Now, traditionally, mosques and mesjids, they
18 had that specific function. More and more recently,
19 you find a building which will have all functions put
20 into it, mekteb, mesjid or mosque, gasulhane. And you
21 find a lot of older buildings have adapted to have a
22 mekteb room for the teaching of the children and also
23 for the gasulhane.
24 One remark about the Islamic sacral and
25 educational buildings from a historical point of view
1 in this area, I think, should be made. The buildings
2 here are not as striking as the great urban heritage or
3 even some of the rural heritage. The mosques in the
4 Vitez area have nothing in common, except for one, with
5 the great mosque of Travnik which was just a few
6 kilometres down the road. The mosques in the Kiseljak
7 area haven't anything in common, of course, with the
8 Sarajevo mosques. None the less, there are mosques of
9 important.
10 In Stari Vitez, there's the Ahmed Aga mosque
11 built at the end of the 16th century. We will have a
12 chance, I think, to see a picture of this later on. We
13 have the Vares mosque from the 16th century in
14 Busovaca. In Kazagici, which is north of Kiseljak,
15 there is the old mosque which dates, I think, from the
16 middle of the 16th century. There's an old mosque in
17 Han Ploca. I'm not when it was built. It was rebuilt
18 in 1960. There is a mosque in Bukve, north of Vitez,
19 built at the end of the 19th century, and the mosque in
20 Bukavica, which has an undetermined date. All of these
21 are stone buildings, but they are not representative of
22 all the types of buildings, sacral or educational
23 Islamic buildings you find in the area.
24 After World War II, a lot of brick buildings,
25 and brick buildings often of quality, which were
1 built. You will find mosques in Gromljak and Hercezi.
2 There are a lot of mektebs. The mektebs are not very
3 distinguishable, also it should be said, from private
4 houses, which may have something to do with their
5 survival. There are also here and there, not so many
6 of them in this area, there are turbe. Turbes are
7 tombs, and they are tombs, usually, of important
8 historical figures, and they look like little tiny
9 houses. So there are a few of these in the area as
10 well.
11 From the 1970s on, a lot of sacral buildings
12 went up, and they are very poor quality. They are
13 hollow block, cement minarets. There's a proliferation
14 of minarets that date, actually, from the 1950s where
15 brick minarets were added to a lot of buildings, and
16 then, of course, a lot of mosques now which are built
17 with minarets. I think it's something ironic in the
18 sense that the minaret is a sign of Muslims living
19 there, but before the war, say, in the last 30 years of
20 the war, which is not considered to be a golden age of
21 the Muslim people in Bosnia-Herzegovina, there are more
22 signs of this on the horizon than there were before.
23 Just before the war, there were lots of mosques and
24 mektebs that were being built, and you will see a few
25 of these in the photographs as well.
1 Now, I think I should maybe say something
2 about how one goes about finding buildings in the
3 countryside, because this is important. If you don't
4 have a reasonable sample of something, you can't draw
5 conclusions from it from what you've seen from your
6 sample. The major source for information that was
7 given to ICTY was lists of Islamic sacral buildings in
8 these municipalities. These lists are a little
9 confusing because they don't differentiate between
10 buildings. They just give a long list of functions.
11 For example, in one place they will indicate
12 there's a mesjib, a mekteb and a gasulhane, but you
13 don't know if there is one building or it there is two
14 buildings or even, eventually, three buildings. That
15 makes it a little bit problematic when you are trying
16 to look for them. Sometimes buildings on these lists
17 are indicated as mesjids when, in fact, they are
18 mektebs. This sort of exaggerates the importance of
19 the building, but at the same time, it is an indication
20 of the function of the building changed during the war
21 where a mesjid, in fact, because the people -- or a
22 mekteb, because people didn't have access to a mosque,
23 the mekteb was used as a mosque for prayers.
24 In these lists, there's sometimes a doubt
25 also whether or not a building actually existed, and
1 there are several cases where I'm not at all certain
2 that there was a building there like that before the
3 war. In a couple of cases, buildings were, in fact,
4 forgotten. In this case where they were forgotten,
5 they were not badly damaged buildings. Maybe that's
6 why they were forgotten. Maybe they were forgotten
7 because the dzemat which is sort of like a parish for
8 the Islamic community, its boundaries don't necessarily
9 correspond to the boundaries of the municipality.
10 THE INTERPRETER: Will you please ask the
11 witness to slow down?
12 MR. KEHOE:
13 Q. Did you get that message, Doctor? If you can
14 pause for a little bit. I believe we were going to
15 move to the maps and we were going to give some
16 indication of the areas that you studied and what you
17 found. Those maps are with the usher.
18 MR. KEHOE: Mr. Dubuisson, if we can give out
19 those four sets of maps at first, and we start with
20 those.
21 THE REGISTRAR: This is 451.
22 MR. KEHOE: If we can also give the witness
23 452 as well, the next map. I'm sorry, Mr. Dubuisson,
24 it might be easier to give the other two out as well so
25 the witness can go through them in series. I
1 apologise.
2 Mr. President and Your Honours --
3 THE INTERPRETER: Microphone, please,
4 Mr. Kehoe.
5 MR. KEHOE: Mr. President, Your Honours, for
6 reference purposes, the four maps, 451 through 454, are
7 just cut-up versions of Exhibit 29. It's a little
8 difficult to see for Your Honours and counsel when it's
9 at the easel. So it's just easier, I thought, and more
10 expeditious if Dr. Kaiser just explained it in a
11 smaller format using the ELMO.
12 Q. Doctor, if we can use those four exhibits, I
13 believe we have them set up. The one on the easel at
14 this juncture is Exhibit 451. Can you explain your
15 work, obviously, exactly what you were attempting to
16 accomplish? You might want to explain the colour
17 scheme first.
18 A. Yes, on the map that have you in front of
19 you, you see only two colours, but on all the maps you
20 will see four. Blue represents a building that is
21 destroyed. It's destroyed because the load bearing
22 construction system is so badly damaged that all you
23 can do with this building is just to bulldoze it.
24 The other colour that you will see, which you
25 don't see on this first map, is orange. Orange means
1 the building is very severely damaged in its
2 construction system by explosives, or it means that a
3 building has been totally burned out, no roof. All the
4 internal fixtures, everything is gone. It is severely
5 damaged. It can be repaired, but it often looks as if
6 it's destroyed.
7 Green means moderate damage, some damage to
8 the roof structure, maybe an artillery impact in the
9 wall, some burning, but the basic structural system is
10 not affected.
11 Yellow means light or no damage. The yellow
12 mark indicates that a building could be used after, you
13 know, a certain minimum amount of work. The other
14 three colours imply that the building is not usable.
15 The functions are, in fact, destroyed. Obviously,
16 there are some cases that do not fit conveniently into
17 any one of these four categories, and I'll point them
18 out.
19 I will explain what is on this first map.
20 This first map contains buildings on the lists of the
21 Islamic community in Armija-controlled areas. All
22 together, there are 26 Islamic sacral and educational
23 buildings on these first two maps. This first map is
24 the Vitez and Busovaca municipality. I don't know if
25 you can see everything.
1 MR. KEHOE: If you could provide him with the
2 pointer.
3 A. I have the pointer here, but I think I have
4 to move the map around. Okay, that's very good, yes.
5 Q. Would it be helpful to turn the ELMO towards
6 you, Doctor?
7 A. The first comment that can be made about this
8 map, Vitez and Busovaca municipalities, is -- by the
9 way, why are these buildings here? They were indicated
10 on the lists of the Islamic community as being severely
11 damaged or completely destroyed. In other words, I had
12 to go and look at them in order to find out what had
13 happened in the area. You can see from the first map
14 that nearly all of them are indicated as lightly
15 damaged or no damage. That was their condition.
16 There are two exceptions. One of the
17 exceptions is the building in Vitez. In Stari Vitez,
18 this is the Ahmed Aga mosque. The other one is the
19 mosque in Bukve. In both of these cases, I consider
20 that the damage was probably moderate, but for one of
21 them, Bukva mosque, it could have been lighter. One of
22 the problems is that the buildings have often been
23 repaired since the war. So it is very difficult.
24 Nobody has photographs. People come and tell you what
25 happened to it, and very often they exaggerate.
1 Maybe we will pass to -- there's a picture of
2 this mosque in Stari Vitez, but maybe we will pass to
3 the other map first.
4 Q. Whatever is easiest for you. The one on the
5 ELMO right now is 451, and we can move to the next map
6 which is 451. This has two areas of notation, Doctor,
7 and we're going to ask the usher to move that onto the
8 camera at some juncture because there are two different
9 locales. Again, 452 is an area in around the Kiseljak
10 area, and you have the two contrasting corners marked.
11 A. At the top corner what you have is four
12 buildings, and that represents sort of the front-line
13 area. The Armija was in control of that area. Those
14 buildings are all light or lightly damaged or not at
15 all damaged. Then you have buildings down in the
16 right-hand corner. The two green buildings, the two
17 green indications, are mosques, Bukovica and Sokolic.
18 In both of these cases, there is artillery damage to
19 the mosques, but the direction of the impacts is from
20 the east or south-east. It is highly unlikely that this
21 damage was, in fact, done by HVO.
22 The conclusions here are that the mosques
23 which were, in fact, on the front-line in the Armija
24 positions which could -- not all of these could easily
25 be attained. Visibility on them was not always -- some
1 of them were not so visible. But the conclusion here
2 is that, in fact, there is very little damage. It's
3 not the type of artillery damage which one is used to
4 seeing on the mosques on the frontlines between the
5 Armija and the BSA, a totally different situation.
6 Q. Would you want to move to the next map at
7 this juncture or would you prefer to move to the
8 pictures?
9 A. I was thinking, perhaps, showing the mosque
10 in Stari Vitez.
11 Q. That's fine.
12 MR. KEHOE: Mr. Dubuisson, if we can move to
13 the series of photographs commencing with the first two
14 photographs. Not those photographs, Mr. Usher, the
15 ones that are in the binder. Yes, thank you.
16 THE REGISTRAR: This is 455.
17 MR. KEHOE:
18 Q. We're looking at 455/1.
19 A. This is going to be, I think, the most
20 idyllic picture of all of the selection here. This is
21 a picture I took in June 1994 of the Ahmed Aga mosque
22 in Stari Vitez. This is arguably the finest building
23 in the whole area. The reason is that this stonework
24 here is extremely, extremely fine, a very carefully
25 crafted building. There is almost no other building
1 that you can actually see such stonework in the whole
2 area. The minaret was added later. There is a
3 graveyard around it, and you can see from this, it
4 looks fairly untouched.
5 The damage on this mosque, on this mosque
6 here, is, in fact, what would permit you to classify it
7 as light. You will see there's two piercing impacts in
8 the minaret, but they don't damage the stability of the
9 minaret. On the surface of the mosque, you can see a
10 sort of diagonal line of small arms fire. But if you
11 look at the roof, you see something has been done to
12 the roof. We have another picture which explains why
13 this would be considered to be moderately damaged.
14 This picture, I believe --
15 MR. KEHOE: This photograph, Mr. President
16 and Your Honours, was taken by then Lieutenant Michael
17 Duly of the British battalion during the Cheshire's
18 tour in April of 1993.
19 A. This is interesting because you see the
20 addition, the front addition gasulhana and mekteb on
21 the right-hand side, but you see something in the roof
22 which is extremely interesting. If you look at the
23 rows of tiles on the roof, you see that they are all
24 sort of -- they are out of whack, I would say, but they
25 are not properly aligned. There's an awful lot of
1 tiles on the south-eastern side which have fallen off.
2 Now, what is this? I think this is the
3 result of the truck bomb in Stari Vitez. These
4 home-made, crude weapons often had very considerable
5 destructive power. The truck bomb in Mostar set off,
6 in fact, a small earthquake. In the gymnasium in
7 Mostar, which I went over with an engineer, it was
8 pointed out to me that it looked like the building had
9 gone through an earthquake.
10 What happened with this building in Stari
11 Vitez was that when the bomb went off, the roof rose
12 and then fell back, which explains this movement of the
13 tiles. Not only do you have to replace the tiles, but
14 you also have to look at the roof structure itself,
15 because probably the wooden structure was also
16 damaged. So this explains why this would be considered
17 to be a moderately damaged building.
18 That's all for this one.
19 Q. I believe we're moving back to the map
20 arrangement, and if we could move to the next map,
21 which is 353, Dr. Kaiser, with the assistance of the
22 usher. These next two maps, can you just start off
23 with what that represents before you begin your
24 explanation?
25 A. This map represents the municipalities of
1 Vitez and Busovaca, and here you can see there are
2 three -- this is HVO-controlled territory. You can see
3 here that there are different colours. There's only
4 one green or moderately damaged, Donji Vecerska.
5 However, on this particular map, there are three blues,
6 which means three destroyed buildings, and there are
7 four buildings which are severely damaged.
8 This is the first part of the other map. You
9 can take all the buildings together that were seen or
10 for which photographic evidence was seen in the three
11 municipalities, you find that these two maps, they
12 contain 26 Islamic sacral and educational buildings
13 under HVO control. Three of them are in the
14 municipality of Busovaca. There are five in Vitez
15 municipality, and there are 18 in Kiseljak
16 municipality.
17 Q. If we could just turn to that next map, we
18 have 453 on the ELMO. Just for the record, I know you
19 discussed the next map, which is 454, that represents
20 the Kiseljak area under HVO control and the various
21 destruction that took place in the Kiseljak area; is
22 that right, sir?
23 A. That's correct, that's correct. This map has
24 another colour which is the colour yellow. You will
25 see here that there is only one blue marking, Hercezi.
1 There is, however, a larger number of orange. There
2 are three moderately damaged buildings, and then there
3 are a whole collection of yellows, which are lightly
4 damaged or not all damaged. As you can see from this,
5 most of those are south and south-east of Kiseljak.
6 Q. Continue, Doctor.
7 A. Well, I think that it's worthwhile sort of
8 recapitulating, first of all, what is on the maps.
9 There's 26 buildings here. Of these 26, over half,
10 that is 14, are severely damaged or destroyed. That's
11 54 per cent. If you add the moderately damaged
12 buildings, you get 18, and that makes 69 per cent of
13 the buildings seen or for which there is photographic
14 evidence.
15 In the Vitez and Busovaca municipalities, all
16 damaged sacral buildings are in the moderate to
17 destroyed category. In Kiseljak, 10, or 55 per cent in
18 the moderate to destroyed categories with, again, as I
19 said, the least damage category being south of the
20 Kizeljak area. There are pictures now.
21 Q. Just to recapitulate again, between these
22 three municipalities, among these three municipalities,
23 the ones that are severely damaged and destroyed or
24 moderately damaged or worse is 69 per cent?
25 A. That's right.
1 MR. KEHOE: If we can go to the individual
2 photographs, Mr. Usher, and the photographs we are
3 going to start with will be the photographs that are
4 part of Exhibit 47/1, which is the photographs to
5 Dr. Kaiser's right that have been received in
6 evidence.
7 JUDGE RIAD: Excuse me. Just to
8 recapitulate, the yellow is lightly damaged?
9 A. Yes, it is, or not damaged.
10 JUDGE RIAD: Or not damaged. The green?
11 A. The green is moderately damaged.
12 JUDGE RIAD: Moderately. And the blue?
13 A. The blue is destroyed. Orange is severely
14 damaged.
15 JUDGE RIAD: Thank you.
16 MR. KEHOE: If you can flip those over,
17 Mr. Usher, we are going to start with 47/1, which is
18 the photograph of the Ahmici mosque, the lower mosque.
19 You have to take it out, yes.
20 A. First of all, I should say that there are
21 four buildings destroyed amongst this whole group of
22 26. They are destroyed, all of them, by explosives.
23 One of them, there's a bit of doubt if it's severely
24 damaged or destroyed, but we will get to that one.
25 This is the Ahmici mosque, recently built, as I say,
1 out of this cement block structure. This building is
2 destroyed. The minaret looks as if -- it's possible it
3 was mined in two places, one of them being just below
4 the second sharafe and perhaps at the base of the
5 minaret. This is --
6 Q. Let me stop you there. This sharafe, can you
7 just explain that?
8 A. The sharafe is the gallery. In the modern
9 mosques, the minarets sometimes have two galleries
10 where the muezzin goes up, and traditionally he would
11 call the faithful from the gallery or the sharafe.
12 This is an expert job. The minaret has been brought
13 down on top of the roof. So the artifices don't simply
14 have a lot of explosives. They know exactly where to
15 put them.
16 Q. If we could go to the next photograph, which
17 is 47/30. No, that's not the photograph, sir. The
18 photograph is one of the upper mosque, photograph
19 47/30. That's it. Thank you.
20 A. Well, this is the mesjid in Ahmici. There's
21 a better one than this one, in fact, a better
22 photograph.
23 Q. I believe it's 47/31, which is the one right
24 below it. That's it.
25 MR. KEHOE: Mr. Usher, is the one that you're
1 putting on 47/31?
2 Q. If we can move to 47/31, I believe that's the
3 photograph you were discussing, Doctor?
4 A. Yes, this is simply more graphic. There have
5 been several charges placed in this building. You can
6 look at these corner posts here, the reinforcing
7 structure here. Everything has been blown out. It's
8 well-placed, but it's a bit obvious that this building
9 is really finished. There's nothing you can do except
10 bulldoze this one.
11 Q. Doctor, just by way of clarification, the
12 mosque that you noted in 47/1 in Ahmici, that is a
13 traditional mosque with a minaret?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. This is an example, is it not, of a mesjid, a
16 mosque without a minaret?
17 A. That is correct, yes.
18 Q. Again, this was destroyed through a charge of
19 some fashion?
20 A. Several charges. Maybe they're tank mines.
21 Tank mines are commonly used to knock out houses and
22 other buildings.
23 MR. KEHOE: If we could move to the next
24 photograph, Mr. Usher. It is in the series here, and I
25 believe that will then be photograph 455/3.
1 Q. I believe, Doctor, that is the next
2 photograph in your series. Continue, sir.
3 A. This is the mesjid at Skradno. On the
4 left-hand side, you can see the gasulhana here with a
5 slab to wash the dead. There are two stories here, and
6 then there's -- there were two stories here, and then
7 there was a roof on top of it. The explosives have
8 been used here. They have brought down the upper
9 story. They have knocked out the structure in this
10 part of the building, and they have brought the ceiling
11 down on it. I think the next picture is also very
12 interesting.
13 Q. 455/4, again, another photograph of the
14 Skradno mesjid?
15 A. You can see the ceiling. If you look to the
16 right, you can see the type of damage done to the walls
17 which are leaning in. You can see other types of
18 cracks which are extremely telltale about what the
19 situation of the building is. This building, which is
20 also like the other preceding two, same sort of
21 structures, same type of materials, this building is
22 destroyed.
23 Q. The next mosque, I believe, is the Hercezi
24 mosque, is it not?
25 A. Yes, it is.
1 Q. By way of reference, if we can just look at
2 Exhibit 68/1 and 2, and just have you take a look at
3 those and identify those as the same mosque that you
4 will then discuss in 455/5.
5 Doctor, that is Exhibit 68/1. That is the
6 Hercezi mosque, is it not, sir?
7 A. On the left, there is the Hercezi mosque, and
8 in the middle is the Hercezi mekteb.
9 Q. Can you point with your pointer to those two
10 facilities distinguishing between the mosque and the
11 mekteb?
12 A. This is the mosque here, and this is the
13 mekteb right here.
14 Q. Okay, sir. At this point, if we could now
15 move to the photograph in your series 455/5, which I
16 believe is yet another angle of the Hercezi mosque.
17 MR. KEHOE: If you could put that on the
18 ELMO, Mr. Usher?
19 Q. That is, in fact, another angle of the
20 Hercezi mosque, is it not, sir?
21 A. Yes, it is. The lens in this camera is a
22 little bit distorting. That's the only problem with
23 this picture. What has happened here is that the
24 minaret has been mined, and this has done a lot of
25 damage to the front of the mosque. In the preceding
1 picture on the opposite wall, through the windows,
2 there is other damage which has been done from the
3 explosion.
4 I think that this building is destroyed, that
5 you cannot save it. You can't see them so well. There
6 are other cracks which are indicative here of the
7 damage that has been done. Some people might argue
8 that you could, in fact, save this building, but it's
9 in very, very bad condition. It should be kept in mind
10 that this is also the similar type of building
11 materials, and these hollow block buildings, cement
12 structures, are very easy, in fact, to knock out.
13 I should perhaps say that this dubious --
14 this case which is discussible, it's in the Kiseljak
15 area. The preceding three are in Vitez and Busovaca.
16 Q. This, again, is another one that had some
17 type of charge placed to it?
18 A. Yes, in the minaret.
19 Q. Now, at this juncture, we are moving from the
20 various conditions of mosques to those that were
21 severely damaged, are we not?
22 A. Yes, we are.
23 Q. Could you continue with that explanation,
24 sir, beginning with the first photograph, which is
25 455/6?
1 A. Yes, now we are moving towards buildings that
2 are severely damaged. This means that they can be
3 rebuilt, but it also means that they are totally out of
4 function and there is a certain amount of expense to do
5 so.
6 This first building is the recently built
7 mosque in Grbavica in Vitez. This is a picture I took
8 in June 1994. You can see that this building has no
9 roof here. That's where the roof should be, of
10 course. There was a roof there, but that roof has
11 probably been burned or dismantled. More importantly,
12 right in the middle you see where the minaret was
13 surrounded by rubble, which comes from the charge that
14 was placed in the minaret. You can see the type of
15 damage which has been done by the explosion here, to
16 the post here, here, and even here as well. This is
17 the first example of a severely damaged mosque.
18 Q. The roof of this structure was burned, was it
19 not?
20 A. From this picture, you cannot -- it looks
21 like there's some traces of black here, which means
22 that the fire would be inside. The roof is gone. I
23 mean, I'm not sure if it was burned or not. I didn't
24 climb up onto it to see, but it's gone.
25 Q. The next building that we're talking about is
1 the Vares mosque in 455/7. Before we do that, if we
2 could just look at the outside of that structure that
3 is depicted in photograph 60/1, if we could. The Vares
4 mosque is the mosque that is in downtown Busovaca, is
5 it not, Doctor?
6 A. Yes, it is.
7 Q. Is that the Vares mosque from the exterior,
8 sir?
9 A. Yes, it is. This also gives you a better
10 understanding of why I was very confused when I was
11 going around in 1994 because this is a recent
12 structure, a gasulhana and mekteb which has been added
13 to the front of the historic mosque. This picture
14 shows burning damage in the structure.
15 Q. Let's move to your photograph 455/7.
16 A. This is a photograph I took in June 1994 of
17 the interior of the mosque. You can see where it has
18 been burned. Also, of cultural interest, this mosque
19 didn't have a minaret. It had a minaret on the side.
20 It had a minaret in the roof, and the minaret would
21 have rested on beams which you see that have been
22 burned there. This is, in fact, a stone mosque. This
23 is a 16th century mosque. This is a building of great
24 value, even though it has been changed. You can see
25 the rendering which is peeling off. Almost no where
1 can you see the stones.
2 As bad as this looks, and this mosque is
3 severely damaged, this mosque can be rebuilt using the
4 original structure.
5 Q. If we could now move to the next structure
6 which is the Lancari mesjid, which is depicted in
7 455/8?
8 A. I'm a little sorry about the quality of this
9 picture, because the interior, you can't see it so
10 well. This is a case, also, of a building which -- I
11 think it's in very, very tricky condition. Now, I'll
12 explain the charge - there seems to have been one
13 charge - was placed inside on the ceiling where it made
14 a hole. You can't see it here in this reproduction,
15 but there is -- here, there are a series of structures
16 like this, these cross-beams, concrete beams, and the
17 whole interior wall of block is blown out. This wall
18 is blown out. Then this wall has actually been moved,
19 you see?
20 Q. Over on the left-hand side?
21 A. Yes, on the left-hand side. This has
22 actually been moved. This is in an extremely dangerous
23 condition. This building, if you leave it this way, it
24 means the whole distribution of weight on the building
25 corner has changed. So it is all leaning. If it isn't
1 given attention, it is going to be in trouble.
2 You can also argue that this is moderately
3 damaged. I mean, if you take pictures of this building
4 from the other sides, you don't see this damage, but
5 this is serious damage done by explosives.
6 Q. Let's move to the next photograph which is
7 the Gacica mekteb which is 455/9 in that series. If we
8 could also give Dr. Kaiser the next photograph which is
9 also part of the series, 455/10, for ease of moving the
10 photographs on and off the ELMO.
11 A. Like the preceding building, the Lancari
12 building, it has the mesjid, mekteb and gasulhana. You
13 could see that it was unfinished. This in Gacica is a
14 mekteb and gasulhana. It was, in fact, being used
15 before the war, apparently, but, in fact, it is rather
16 in an unfinished condition. This is also of the
17 interior. I'm afraid that what you're looking at in
18 the corner is the remains of the internal rendering,
19 and you can see at the top -- you can see where it is
20 burned. I mean, yes, this building has been completely
21 burned out. There is no wood left here either, I'm
22 afraid. It's severely damaged, but if you put the roof
23 back on and put the rendering on, you can actually put
24 it back into function.
25 I should say that the number of severely
1 damaged buildings is ten, and we have just seen four of
2 them which are from the Vitez and the Busovaca
3 municipality.
4 Q. Now, sir, we are now moving to the Kiseljak
5 area to discuss the mosque first in Gromljak; is that
6 correct, sir?
7 A. That's correct, yes.
8 Q. If we first just cross-reference the
9 photographs that are in evidence and first look at
10 Exhibit 67 in evidence, 1 and 2. Let's just take a
11 quick glance at these photographs in evidence, Doctor,
12 beginning with Exhibit 67/1. Is that an exterior shot
13 of the Gromljak --
14 A. Yes, it is.
15 Q. I guess it's the Gromljak mekteb --
16 A. Mosque.
17 Q. Mosque, I'm sorry. The next photograph,
18 67/2, is that a photograph of the interior of the
19 Gromljak mosque?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. Now, let's look at the next photograph in
22 your series, 455/11. If we could pan that back just a
23 bit, thank you. Doctor, can you explain the damage to
24 this facility?
25 A. This is the Gromljak mosque. This is a brick
1 mosque, and actually this is a rather nice building,
2 built, I think, after World War II. An explosive
3 charge has been placed in the minaret and has done
4 considerable damage. Besides destroying the minaret,
5 the brick has fallen all over the place and has helped
6 to break up the roof. There is considerable damage
7 which has been done to the entrance part of the
8 mosque. This is bad damage - it is severely damaged -
9 but brick structures are often far more resilient and
10 can be put back together far more easily than they
11 look. This building is probably recoupable.
12 One of the problems, though, is that if
13 people do come back to this area and they look at it,
14 the problem is that they will probably knock it down,
15 not try to reconstruct it, and will build a new one
16 with a concrete minaret and the hollow block walls.
17 Q. Doctor, if we could move to the next mosque,
18 which is the Visnjica mosque, and if we could first
19 reference photographs in evidence 73/1 and 73/2. 73/1,
20 which is on the ELMO, that is, in fact, an angle shot
21 of the Visnjica mosque, is it not, sir?
22 A. That's correct, that's correct.
23 Q. The next photograph, 73/2, that is a shot of
24 the interior, is it not, sir?
25 A. Yes, that's the interior. It is looking
1 directly towards the mihrab or the prayer niche right
2 here. It is an interesting photograph because it also
3 gives us a certain idea of the toughness of the
4 building as well.
5 Q. If we could move to your series of
6 photographs 455/12 and 13, we have two angle shots of
7 the Visnjica mosque. If you could use them in your
8 explanation of the damage to this building.
9 A. The Visnjica mosque.
10 Q. Excuse me.
11 A. This is the similar type of damage that's
12 done to Gromljak. The charge has been placed in the
13 minaret here. It's blown in the wall. It has probably
14 also helped bring down part of the roof. The building
15 is severely damaged, but probably recoupable.
16 Q. 455/13?
17 A. More or less the same view with a slightly
18 different angle.
19 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Kehoe, perhaps this would
20 the time to take the break.
21 MR. KEHOE: Yes, Mr. President. That would
22 be fine, thank you.
23 JUDGE JORDA: All right. The hearing is
24 adjourned.
25 --- Recess taken at 11.30 a.m.
1 --- On resuming at 12.00 p.m.
2 JUDGE JORDA: The hearing is now resumed.
3 Have the accused brought in, please? The accused,
4 please? We seem to have lost the Defence attorney and
5 I hope we haven't lost the accused also.
6 (The accused entered court)
7 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Kehoe, you can proceed.
8 MR. KEHOE: Thank you, Mr. President, Your
9 Honours.
10 Q. Doctor, we were staying in the Kiseljak
11 municipality and discussing severely damaged mosques,
12 mesjids, mektebs and turbe and we were talking about
13 Visnjica, and now we want to move to the Kiseljak
14 mosque, and for that purpose, Mr. President, Your
15 Honours, we will look at Exhibits 63/1, 63/2 and 63/3.
16 Dr. Kaiser?
17 A. This is the mosque in Kiseljak. It shows the
18 mosque from the other side of the road. The minaret
19 has been dynamited. This is a brick mosque, by the
20 way. The dome looks as if it's been stripped of some
21 of the lead covering. This is, I think, rather an
22 expert job. The artifices could have put the mosque,
23 minaret down on top of the building. And it seems like
24 a few bricks right here, but most of it is right beside
25 the mosque.
1 Q. If we can move to the interior shots and just
2 go to 63/2, please? Thank you.
3 A. I think what's interesting about this is it
4 shows some burning damage in the entrance part of the
5 mosque here.
6 Q. Can you point to that, please?
7 A. Well, all of this here. You can see the
8 black.
9 Q. You're pointing to the black areas on the
10 ceiling as well as on the sides?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. The last photograph on the Kiseljak mosque is
13 63/3?
14 A. This also shows some burning damage, I think,
15 here. There's also rubble as well. This is not a very
16 good photograph, but the mihrab here --
17 Q. The mihrab is the place that's pointing
18 towards Mecca; is that right?
19 A. That's right. This looks as if it's been
20 vandalised. It's hard to tell from the photograph.
21 But it is interesting that in some cases, it seems that
22 the fire was lit right in the mihrab or right in front
23 of the mihrab, and in this case, it looks like some
24 damage done to the structure to the mihrab.
25 Q. And some burnt damage, as well, on the walls?
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. If we can move to the next mosque and is the
3 Han Ploca mosque, and if we can, just for reference
4 purposes, put Exhibit 398 on the ELMO before we move to
5 the next exhibit. That is the Han Ploca mosque, is it
6 not?
7 A. Yes, it is.
8 Q. In your series of photographs, let's look at
9 455/14 which is just a different angle of that Han
10 Ploca mosque. That is obviously a different time of
11 year photograph, Doctor, but nonetheless, is that not
12 the Han Ploca mosque?
13 A. Yes, that is the Han Ploca mosque. You can
14 see the old structure, this sort of rubble stone
15 structure behind here.
16 Q. You're pointing to the top of the building
17 now?
18 A. Here, right here. This is the front of the
19 old mosque right here. That's the old mosque structure
20 there and then this is the newer, the brick structure,
21 gasulhane and mekteb, I believe in here. This damage
22 looks like burning damage, except in the front, there
23 may have been an explosion.
24 Q. The next photograph is 455/15, which is the
25 Gomionica mekteb.
1 A. Yes, this photo dates from this year. It was
2 during the tour that I took of the area. Gomionica
3 mekteb has been completely burnt out. You can tell
4 there's still a burnt beam at the top here.
5 Q. You are pointing to the top of the
6 photograph, the top of the building where you can see
7 that burnt beam; is that right?
8 A. That's right.
9 Q. This is the Gomionica mekteb; is that
10 correct, sir?
11 A. This is the mekteb.
12 Q. The next photograph, 455/16 in the series
13 there, thank you. Doctor, can you explain that?
14 A. This is an interesting structure. This is a
15 turbe. This is another -- inside of this, on the top
16 of the floor is a catafalque and underneath, in the
17 ground, should be buried the body of a notable. I have
18 information that this, in fact, is the turbe of Sejh
19 Ismail Harisani who was the commander of the Sultans
20 army in the 15th century. This is not information that
21 comes from -- it doesn't come from a cultural heritage
22 institute, so I take it with a grain of salt, but it
23 should be pointed out that these turbe, in the
24 countryside, usually turn out to be important people
25 from the past. The form of this building, this is not
1 an original, old building. This was made in the'70s
2 or '80s, something like that. It looks from this
3 photograph as if it were burned, but there could be
4 burning damage at the top here, but it's not entirely
5 conclusive.
6 Q. You noted that you had heard from sources
7 that this was the tomb of a commander of the Sultan's
8 army from the 15th century?
9 A. It's a written source which is -- it's from
10 an official source, not a cultural source. I think
11 it's a ministry -- the ministry of the interior. It is
12 interesting that this -- a turbe, a historic turbe
13 figures on lists of cultural heritage from the cultural
14 heritage institutes that they do not identify who is in
15 it. So, this a little problematic.
16 Q. Did the people in the area believe that that
17 was a turbe in which a significant Islamic leader was
18 buried?
19 A. That's different. I don't know what the
20 people in the area believed, but these objects, they
21 attach -- they have that kind of importance, and they
22 regard it that way. Whether or not X is X or X is Y
23 who is buried there, the local people think it's
24 somebody. Yes, I understand your question.
25 Q. Could you recapitulate on these buildings in
1 the Kiseljak municipality that you just discussed,
2 before we move on?
3 A. Okay. There were six buildings that were
4 severely damaged in the Kiseljak area, compared to four
5 in Busovaca and Vitez. These severely damaged
6 buildings in four cases it's been explosives, in four
7 of the cases it's been fire, in two cases, maybe more,
8 it's a combination of firing and also explosives.
9 Q. Now we're going to move into an area, Doctor,
10 of Islamic, sacral buildings that received less damage;
11 is that correct?
12 A. That's correct.
13 Q. If we start with the first photograph,
14 455/17, and if we could place that on the ELMO and if
15 you could identify that, Doctor, and begin to discuss
16 that.
17 A. I recall that there are four buildings in
18 these three municipalities, in this situation. This
19 building is the Donji Vecerska mekteb. It's in the
20 Vitez municipality. This building has been pillaged.
21 The roof has been stripped. All the black of the roof
22 structure, there is a little bit -- well, it's a bit
23 misleading, at least from what I can see on my screen.
24 There was a burning attempt made on the roof, very
25 circumscribed, but basically this is a stripping,
1 pillaging operation.
2 Q. The next photograph, which is 455 -- excuse
3 me -- 455/18, if we could put that on the ELMO.
4 A. This is the unfinished mosque at Duhri.
5 There appears to have been an explosion here.
6 Q. You're pointing to the centre of the
7 photograph?
8 A. The centre of the photograph. There's not
9 much rubble from this explosion. I've seen written
10 sources, official sources, that claim that the minaret
11 was dynamited. It's highly possible the minaret was
12 not finished, but the damage is from explosives, and
13 this is moderate damage.
14 Q. There was, in fact, another building that you
15 mentioned in a prior photograph which had moderate
16 damage, and that was the Hercezi mosque; is that right?
17 A. That's correct, that's correct.
18 Q. Just for reference purposes, if we could just
19 take a quick look at that --
20 A. Excuse me, mekteb.
21 Q. I'm sorry. If we could take a quick look at
22 68/1, I believe that we could go back and reference
23 that particular mosque, that particular mekteb, excuse
24 me. It's this photograph, Mr. Usher. This one.
25 I know this is some degree of repetition,
1 here, Doctor, but, again, the mosque is on the left and
2 the mekteb is the centre building; is that right?
3 A. That's correct.
4 Q. Just point to that for the record, the centre
5 building in white. Can you tell us about that damage?
6 A. I can only Judge from the photograph because
7 I haven't seen the building -- I say moderately damaged
8 because the roof is clearly gone completely. You look
9 in the upper story windows, you don't see any signs of
10 daylight. It looks as if the ceiling is a concrete
11 ceiling. The inside may have burned, may not have
12 burned. The roof may have burned -- the roof
13 construction may have been stripped, but this is a
14 moderately damaged building.
15 Q. If we could move to the next photograph which
16 is 66/1 and 2, it's the Jehovac mesjid, the Svinjarevo
17 mesjid. Continue, Doctor.
18 A. This is the Jehovac mesjid which suffered
19 pillaging, burning, some stripping of the roof as well.
20 Q. Could we go to that next photograph? Is that
21 the inside of that Jehovac mesjid?
22 A. This is the inside. This is probably --
23 well, it's hard to say from this photograph, it's not
24 very good, but photographs I took of it after this
25 showed that there had been a burning attempt made on
1 the mosque, but it didn't do substantial damage, I
2 don't think, to it. You can see that this internal
3 roof structure is still intact.
4 Q. Doctor, were there any other buildings in the
5 Kiseljak municipality that suffered some light damage?
6 A. Well, in fact, there are eight buildings in
7 this category, suffering the light damage. One case of
8 light damage is simply a broken window. On all but one
9 of these buildings were mektebs, and there's one
10 picture of a mekteb that has light damage.
11 Q. Can we go to that photograph? That would be
12 455/19.
13 A. All right. This is the mekteb and gasulhane
14 in Gornji Palez. You can on the roof, damage from
15 small arms. But what is down here looks to me like
16 stripping. One thing that has to be kept in mind is
17 that sometimes buildings -- well, considering the
18 amount of damage done to roof tiles during the war,
19 people would go and they would take tiles off the
20 roof. This is interesting because this seemed only
21 have to remove roof tiles on the part of the roof that
22 is over -- that overhangs the building, is the kind of
23 consideration given to the building. The building also
24 seems to have been pillaged inside. You couldn't
25 approach it because there was a problem with mines in
1 this area, but this is the typical kind of light
2 damage. It doesn't take too much to get that building
3 repaired.
4 Q. Thank you, Mr. Usher, I think we are through
5 with all our photographs at this point. As we move
6 ahead, Doctor, can we move to the subject of certain
7 information you received concerning this destruction,
8 and if you could carry on with that portion of your
9 testimony.
10 A. Okay. To be very honest, I received very
11 little information about the exact dates of destruction
12 of buildings during my touring around about Grbavica
13 mosque 1994. I was told by ECMM that it was burned in
14 April 1993. I had a discussion with a Croatian refugee
15 child, at the site of Grbavica, who told me that the
16 mosque had been mined two weeks before in the month of
17 May, around the 20th of May, 1994.
18 The Vares mosque, the ECMM told me that it
19 was burned possibly in September 1993 and that the
20 minaret was mined in March 1994. In Jelinek mesjid
21 which was in Armija territory, there was an attack on
22 the village, and a Bosniak villager from the village
23 explained to me that this took place on the 17th of
24 April, 1993. Skradno mosque, Bosniak returnees told me
25 that it was mined during an HVO attack in October
1 1993. Gomionica turbe, Bosniak returnee with whom I
2 was speaking in June explained that it was burned in
3 April 1998. I have been shown video evidence that
4 shows that the catafalque was damaged before March or
5 May 1996 when the film was taken. That is all the
6 information I have about dates.
7 Q. Thank you, Doctor. Let's turn to the subject
8 of some general remarks you may want to tell the Trial
9 Chamber about the destruction of Islamic and sacral and
10 educational buildings in the HVO controlled areas.
11 Could you do that, sir?
12 A. Well, I think everything is sort of relative,
13 and when you have had a lot of experience in the area,
14 you tend to compare things that have happened in one
15 area with things that you have seen in other areas.
16 One first remark is that, as you remember from the
17 first two maps, very, very little damage was done from
18 HVO positions against mosques that were in
19 Armija-controlled territory. There was extremely light
20 damage. I don't know why. I don't know if it was a
21 question of ordinance, I don't know if it was a
22 question of will. But certainly compared to what the
23 Bosnian Serbian artillery did to mosques, it's very,
24 very negligible.
25 My second comment is that there is no
1 bulldozing of mosques or mesjids or mektebs in this
2 area. Now, bulldozing is especially an urban
3 phenomena. It seems to reflect more of a logical
4 approach, more of a reasoned out approach to what one
5 is doing. There are a lot of bulldozed mosques in
6 Republic Srpska, not just in towns, but also in
7 villages. There's one bulldozed mosque in Mostar west,
8 the Balinovac mosque. There are no bulldozed mosques
9 in Vitez, Busovaca or Kiseljak municipalities, and it's
10 interesting, the Kiseljak mosque, that could have been
11 a candidate for bulldozing, if somebody wanted to do
12 it. As I pointed out, even the mining of the mosque is
13 a bit odd. They knocked down the minaret.
14 I've been in some places where a building was
15 damaged and later on authorities used the damage to it
16 as an excuse, they said, this building is dangerous,
17 and they would then destroy the building. In the case
18 of the mosque in Kiseljak, I suppose if you stand in
19 the aperture where the bricks are, where the minaret
20 was blown out, that's dangerous. But it doesn't
21 present that degree of danger. You couldn't justify
22 destroying it because it was a dangerous building. It
23 could have been blown in such a way as to make the
24 invocation of the danger the reason to destroy it, but
25 it wasn't.
1 So those are two beginning remarks. If you
2 look at the three different municipalities in the
3 HVO-controlled areas, you see that there is a
4 difference. Of course, there are fewer Islamic and
5 sacral and educational buildings in Vitez and Busovaca,
6 but they are significantly more damaged than the sacral
7 and educational buildings in the Kiseljak
8 municipality. In Kiseljak, especially what seems to
9 have survived are the mektebs. As I pointed out, the
10 mektebs, they are somewhat more anonymous buildings.
11 They very, very often look like houses. It's hard to
12 find them because they don't stand out. Local people
13 would have known where they were. If they were local
14 people destroying, they would know exactly where to go,
15 but in Kiseljak municipality, there was less damage,
16 including even the major structures.
17 Q. So in your analysis, there's more damage in
18 Vitez and Busovaca than in Kiseljak?
19 A. There's more serious damage.
20 Q. Serious damage?
21 A. Yes, more serious damage, yes. However, in
22 both areas, it is to be said that both mosques and
23 mesjids are damaged, badly damaged and should be
24 recalled that there is not one minaret in HVO
25 controlled territory. There's the minaret in Stari
1 Vitez but there are no other minarets.
2 Q. Before you move on to the next point, you
3 said there are no minarets standing in HVO-controlled
4 territory, but the minaret is standing in Stari Vitez?
5 A. It was not HVO-controlled territory.
6 Q. Exactly. Had that particular minaret been
7 fired upon?
8 A. It had been fired upon, but not with great
9 determination.
10 Q. Continue, sir.
11 A. To recapitulate, one could say in the
12 HVO-controlled territory, 54 per cent of the buildings
13 were severely damaged or destroyed and 69 per cent
14 showed moderate damage up to the level of total
15 destruction.
16 Q. Doctor, based on your analysis and your work
17 in the area, what significance do you attach to this
18 destruction and damage to Islamic sacral buildings?
19 A. Well, the first obvious thing is that you are
20 depriving local Muslims of a place of worship. I think
21 that's the fairly obvious thing. Where there are
22 minarets, there are Muslims. Where there are no
23 minarets, it seems to say that there are no Muslims. I
24 mean, this is remodelling the landscape to make it
25 correspond to what the ethnic or national components of
1 the landscape, in fact, are. Remove the minaret is a
2 way of saying, "There are no Muslims here."
3 I think we go back to the question of what
4 the sacral building represents, especially for the
5 rural population. I think this is a particularly
6 strong, enduring injury inflicted upon the Bosniaks by
7 this destruction. Given how important it is for them,
8 this is close to sacrilege. It is a very strong way of
9 saying to the Bosniak Muslims that, "We don't want to
10 live with you anymore."
11 There are a few other remarks that I think
12 are in order as well. If you are going after an old
13 building -- now, the old mosque in Stari Vitez, of
14 course, is standing. There's a tradition about that
15 mosque that the stone comes from a Roman bridge, that
16 it was not cut for the mosque, it was in a Roman
17 bridge. If you destroy this mosque, you are doing
18 several different things. One of them is that you are
19 sort of removing the memory -- it's been there since
20 the end of the 16th century, you are removing the
21 Muslims, not from just the present landscape or the
22 future landscape, you are removing them from the past.
23 In this case, you are even going back further. You are
24 going to damage the perception of the past that
25 everybody has had. If it goes far enough, you are
1 taking the Muslims completely out of a chronology, not
2 just out of space. You're saying that the Muslims were
3 never there.
4 Now, there's another question which is a very
5 important question. I've thought about it a lot. It's
6 common to regard the destruction of somebody else's
7 cultural heritage as an attack on the other person. It
8 is true. It is obvious. But it is more complicated
9 than that. It is not just physically cleaning the
10 society, removing the others, it also means changing
11 the identity of one's own people. I think that we all
12 have to take this much more into consideration now.
13 What you're doing to the Croat from this area, is
14 you're taking the Bosniak Muslim out of him. You are
15 creating a new Croat. You are creating a Croat who has
16 not the memory and the experience of having lived with
17 somebody else.
18 This is one of these -- I hope the last gasp
19 of the 20th century of creating new men all the time.
20 Q. Doctor, when you were going through these
21 areas, did you see a difference between the destruction
22 of sacral monuments, and by sacral monuments, I say of
23 all religious confessions, between areas controlled by
24 the HVO and areas controlled by the Armija?
25 A. In 1994, we were trying to get a complete
1 picture of the damage to cultural and sacral buildings,
2 because we were trying to be fair. We wanted to get
3 the full range of destruction. As my trip in 1994, of
4 the area, was not exhaustive, which means that I didn't
5 see all of the mosques and all the mesjids. At the
6 same time, we tried to see Serbian Orthodox churches
7 and Catholic churches, and I did see some. I would say
8 that the damage that was done in HVO-controlled
9 territory to Bosniak sacral heritage was far
10 greater intensity than the damage I saw carried out on
11 Catholic churches outside the HVO-controlled
12 territory.
13 I could also point out that in Busovaca there
14 was a late 18th century Orthodox church. I visited
15 that church. Some local lady had a key. We went into
16 it. It was perfectly intact in Busovaca, under HVO
17 control. Outside the HVO-controlled territory, what
18 did I see? I saw in Kacuni, I saw a recent church.
19 This church was roughed up. It was pillaged, probably,
20 I can't remember exactly, glass was broken in it. It
21 was not burned. No burning attempt was made. I saw
22 Guca Gora monastery. I was one of the first, I think,
23 internationals allowed close to Guca Gora. I was not
24 allowed into the monastery, that is either the church
25 or the monastery buildings. I was told, either by ECMM
1 or Armija or the Travnik authorities that the Armija
2 had thrown out the mujahedeen after the mujahedeen had
3 occupied it for two weeks. The building from the
4 exterior, everything seemed okay. I have a cultural
5 heritage assistant who, a few weeks ago, because we put
6 Guca Gora on the list of national monuments in
7 Bosnia-Herzegovina, sent my cultural heritage assistant
8 to look at the church. Inside of it, there was
9 graffiti from Armija elements.
10 I visited the churches in Travnik. At the
11 time of my mission, I believe that the Catholic church
12 was actually functioning. It was not damaged by the
13 local population. The Serbian Orthodox church was a
14 little damaged to the exterior, perhaps, in fact, from
15 bombardment from the BSA. It was closed up. There
16 seemed to be no attempt to disturb the church. I
17 visited a church in Dolac, which is just outside the
18 western part of the Vitez pocket, a Catholic church,
19 fine late 19th century building, which had some sort of
20 military damage, I think, to the roof. Inside, it had
21 been roughed up. It had been vandalised. There was
22 some broken windows, but there was no attempt to burn.
23 So what I would say is from the limited
24 sample of buildings that I saw in the area, close to
25 the frontlines, to the HVO positions, could even be
1 seen by the HVO, in fact, there was much less damage
2 done than to the Bosniak -- the Islamic sacral
3 buildings inside of the Kiseljak and Vitez pockets.
4 Q. In the area that you visited in Kiseljak,
5 Vitez, and Busovaca, you noted various buildings that
6 had received dynamite charges, some very professionally
7 done, according to your testimony, especially in Vitez;
8 is that right?
9 A. Yes, there are a few cases here. I mean the
10 Ahmici mosque and the Kiseljak mosques, were very
11 professional mosques, yes.
12 Q. Did you see anything like that with the
13 Orthodox and Catholic churches that you observed?
14 A. Well, outside of the HVO-controlled areas, I
15 had not seen any mined buildings in those areas or even
16 burned buildings. There are two burned Serbian
17 Orthodox churches in the Bosna valley, south of the
18 Lasva valley, those exist. Some of the Zepce pocket, I
19 know of a village which has a Catholic church and that
20 was burned. The ECMM said it was burned by the
21 Armija. But this is far away from this area and is
22 burning. What I say around the area was not very
23 significant damage, compared to what we saw inside of
24 the pockets.
25 Q. Doctor, you mentioned in your testimony,
1 several moments ago, that a destruction of a mosque and
2 a minaret is sending a message to the Muslims that we
3 do not want to live with you anymore; is that right?
4 A. Yes, I think it can be interpreted that way.
5 Q. Would that activity, the destruction of these
6 sacral monuments and sacral buildings be consistent
7 with an attempt to remove the Muslim population from
8 the area?
9 A. It would be consistent.
10 Q. Let's turn our attention to responsibility,
11 Doctor, and talk a little bit, if you will, based on
12 your experience and your work in the area, of the
13 responsibility of protecting these types of -- the
14 cultural heritage and the sacral buildings in the
15 former Yugoslavia, and specifically, Central Bosnia?
16 A. Well, generally, this is kind of an
17 obsessional question with us, from the international
18 community, that's been involved with trying to do
19 something with the cultural heritage during the war and
20 afterwards. We often feel, first of all, we have an
21 international responsibility that we did not exercise
22 as much as we should have done.
23 But let's get to sort of more operational
24 and, perhaps, meaningful responsibilities in all
25 countries. Civil authorities have a responsibility for
1 protecting public property and cultural heritage which
2 is listed by their services. The same thing, of
3 course, is true in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The civil
4 authorities had the responsibility in peace time, and
5 at other times, to protect buildings that were listed.
6 In Central Bosnia, in these HVO-controlled areas, the
7 Vares mosque was listed as a third category monument,
8 that is to say, a regional monument, sort of local
9 importance. This was indicated in the materials
10 provided by the institute to preserve cultural and
11 historical and natural heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
12 I also believe that probably the Ahmedija mosque was
13 also a listed monument, but I haven't found any
14 material to prove it, so far, in lists.
15 At any rate, the civil authorities of
16 Busovaca were obliged, they were -- they had a legal
17 responsibility to protect the Vares mosque, and the
18 Vares mosque was burned and the minaret was dynamited.
19 There's another level of responsibility which
20 is, of course, the responsibility of military
21 authorities. Yugoslavia was a state's party to The
22 Hague convention of 1954, on the protection of cultural
23 heritage. It had a reputation, at least in UNESCO, of
24 being a very good pupil of the convention, which is to
25 say that it did inventories of cultural heritage of
1 buildings which should be spared in case of war on its
2 own territory. The Yugoslav armed forces were,
3 apparently, taught well about cultural heritage, and
4 the responsibilities they had to it.
5 I remember at the beginning of war in
6 Dubrovnik, The Hague convention flag came out all over
7 the place. And I have seen over the years, many, many
8 pictures of The Hague convention flag in Croatia
9 especially, but also at the beginning of the war in
10 Bosnia-Herzegovina. Some countries refused to sign the
11 convention. I believe that France refuses to fly this
12 flag, and maybe for a good reason. Some people say
13 this flag, in fact, attracts attention. In other
14 words, the military had a responsibility to protect
15 certain buildings, and this would include, at least,
16 also the Vares mosque as a listed building.
17 In the end, who exercised their
18 responsibilities to protect these buildings? We've
19 seen the pictures of these buildings. The buildings
20 are badly damaged.
21 Q. Would your consensus be that in the areas
22 that you discussed and viewed in Vitez, Busovaca, and
23 Kiseljak, the HVO failed in that responsibility?
24 A. Yes.
25 MR. KEHOE: Mr. President, if I might have
1 one moment to talk with my colleague, Mr. Harmon.
2 Mr. President, I have no further questions of the
3 Doctor at this point. I appreciate it. Thank you,
4 Doctor.
5 JUDGE JORDA: All of these exhibits are going
6 to be tendered as evidence?
7 MR. KEHOE: Yes, I apologise, Mr. President,
8 that would be 451 through 455 inclusive.
9 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you. Mr. Hayman?
10 MR. HAYMAN: Thank you, Mr. President.
11 Cross-examined by Mr. Hayman:
12 Q. Good afternoon, Dr. Kaiser. My name is
13 Russell Hayman and I represent General Blaskic in these
14 proceedings. You have a history degree, I take it?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. What was the subject of your Ph.D.
17 dissertation?
18 A. The Masters of Request in Age of Descent of
19 Centralisation of 1589 to 1660, I believe. That was
20 the title of it.
21 Q. What geographic area did that deal with?
22 A. That was France, old regime France.
23 JUDGE JORDA: The interpreter did not hear
24 it. I would have liked to know what was the title of
25 the thesis. I got the date but I didn't get the title
1 Could we hear it again, please?
2 A. The Masters of Request for Centralisation
3 from 1589 to 1660.
4 JUDGE JORDA: Did the interpreter get it?
5 Very well, thank you very much.
6 MR. HAYMAN:
7 Q. Outside of your reports to and for the
8 council of Europe, have you authored any publications
9 on the subject matter of your testimony here today?
10 A. I have not published anything.
11 Q. Did you say, on direct, that you have
12 previously testified before this court?
13 A. Yes, I have.
14 Q. What case was that?
15 A. The ruling 61 regarding Radovan Karadzic.
16 Q. Do you recall the month or date?
17 A. I think it is July of two years ago, 1996.
18 Q. Thank you. You described your first mission
19 to the Neretva valley and said that there were
20 reprisals in response to conduct by the VRS or Bosnian
21 Serb army. Who engaged in those reprisals, if you
22 know?
23 A. I was guided by two Croats around all of
24 these sites, and after hesitation on their part, they
25 said, "Our side did it." To go into any greater
1 detail, they didn't, and it would be -- I would say the
2 people were specialists who did it.
3 Q. The persons who were touring you around, were
4 they military or civilian?
5 A. No, they were civilian.
6 Q. When you were being toured around the Lasva
7 and Kiseljak valleys, were there any admissions or
8 confessions of guilt of responsibility by any tour
9 guides or other persons, concerning destruction to
10 Muslim cultural sites in those regions?
11 A. My tour guides were the European community
12 monitoring mission, that is, to say, mainly military
13 people who had been in this area for a certain time and
14 worked in it. The information came from them. There
15 was no information coming from local people or opinions
16 about who destroyed what.
17 Q. You had no such contacts, is that correct, on
18 that trip?
19 A. Not with local people. I had contacts with
20 -- I spoke with an Imam in Kacuni who accused the
21 HVO. There were vague local -- there was the local
22 standby person who said, "Oh, this was done by the
23 HVO," that sort of comment which was made. This was
24 usually about, you know, small arms fires or
25 projectiles or some sort like that.
1 Q. But nothing specific and no details were
2 passed to you by those types of --
3 A. No, nothing really detailed, no.
4 Q. You described the May 1993 destruction of a
5 mosque in Banja Luka. Do you know who may have been
6 involved in that act or acts?
7 A. Well, referring to the destruction of, first
8 of all, the Ferhadija mosque which is one of the finest
9 mosques in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was, and the Arnodija
10 (phoen) mosque in May, which promptly gave rise to a
11 whole series of other incidents. These were all expert
12 jobs. I don't know who destroyed them.
13 Q. Who controlled the territory?
14 A. The Republic Srpska -- the Srpska territory,
15 so it was controlled by the Serbian authorities of
16 Bosnia-Herzegovina.
17 Q. Am I correct that your first visit to the
18 Lasva or Kiseljak valleys was between the 30th of May
19 and the 22nd of June, 1994?
20 A. That's correct.
21 Q. That was some two months after the signing of
22 the Washington Agreement and the general crease fire in
23 that region; correct?
24 A. That's correct.
25 Q. You have obviously undertaken a study and
1 provided the court with the statistical results, as
2 well as, other testimony concerning your study. You
3 said that you have received certain information here at
4 the Tribunal. Can you explain what information, in
5 your study, that is the basis of your testimony, came
6 from your own inspection and what information have you
7 summarised that was given to you here, at the Tribunal
8 for the first time?
9 A. I think I indicated that there are 52
10 buildings in this area, the 26 in the Armija-controlled
11 area, and then there are 26 in the HVO-controlled
12 areas. I visited about 24 of the buildings in the
13 Armija-controlled area, and there are photographs that
14 I took of most of those buildings. I visited and
15 stopped -- let's put it this way, stopped at 16 of the
16 buildings, got out, took photographs in the
17 HVO-controlled areas, but many of the buildings, in
18 fact, are on a main road, and they are evident. For
19 example, Han Ploca mosque is on the main road, and I
20 didn't take photographs. The photographs were taken
21 earlier and submitted to the Tribunal.
22 Q. I take it, with respect to, ten out of the 26
23 sites in HVO territory, you did not visit them on your
24 tour, but you have been provided information and
25 photographs here at the Tribunal which you've used and
1 incorporated into your testimony; is that correct?
2 A. I think there's about half a dozen of them
3 which I did not drive by and relied on photos
4 completely, in my evaluation.
5 Q. Photos provided to you after you arrived here
6 at the Tribunal and prepared your testimony?
7 A. Before, before.
8 Q. Photos -- let me correct that then. These
9 photos that you described were provided to you by the
10 office of the Tribunal Prosecutor in advance of your
11 testimony?
12 A. That's correct.
13 Q. And you incorporated that information in your
14 testimony here today?
15 A. That is correct.
16 Q. Now, where did you get the list of 52
17 buildings which formed the universe for your study?
18 A. The list was given to me by the Tribunal
19 earlier this year.
20 Q. By whom?
21 A. By an individual or --
22 Q. Well, was it by a representative of the
23 office of the Tribunal Prosecutor?
24 A. Yes, yes.
25 Q. Was that represented to you to be a
1 comprehensive list of cultural sites in the area?
2 A. It was a translation, two versions. There is
3 a translated version. There's a Serbo-Croatian
4 version. It was represented to be what the Islamic
5 community believed to be its sacral and educational
6 property in the area.
7 Q. Do you know who, in the Islamic community, or
8 what representative of the Islamic community, gave the
9 list to the office of the Tribunal Prosecutor?
10 A. No.
11 Q. Did they represent to you whether it had come
12 from the interior ministry or the Bosnian intelligence
13 service?
14 A. It may have been. I really don't know. It
15 may have been submitted through the interior ministry.
16 Q. But you did not ask?
17 A. Well, I would say this: I've seen so many
18 lists in my profession, dealing with cultural heritage,
19 I wasn't particularly interested in how it came
20 through. I was more interested what was on it.
21 Q. Is it fair to say you were told to conduct a
22 study or asked to conduct a study based on the universe
23 of 52 buildings that had been selected by some other
24 party who, as of right now, is not identified for the
25 court; is that correct?
1 A. Let's put it this way: It's not 52
2 buildings. The way the list is broken down, it is
3 broken down by function. As I said, one of the
4 problems using the lists earlier, in an area, you would
5 have place --
6 MR. HAYMAN: If you could slow down.
7 JUDGE JORDA: Dr. Kaiser, first I would ask
8 you to slow down. When you answer, please look to the
9 Judges because you are answering for the Judges. You
10 hear the question, you listen to the question, turn to
11 the counsel to hear the question, but answer facing the
12 Judges because they are the ones who make the
13 decisions. I know it's a bit complicated, but if you
14 would make that little extra effort, we would be
15 grateful to you. Thank you very much.
16 A. As I explained, the lists indicated, not
17 buildings, they indicated functions, so there are not
18 52 buildings on these lists. There are a number of
19 functions that go beyond 52. I can't remember how many
20 there are. So you would have under a location, you
21 would have a mesjid is here, a mekteb is here and a
22 gasulhane is here, but you don't know if you're talking
23 about one building, two buildings or even eventually
24 three buildings.
25 Q. Nonetheless, the list had geographic
1 locations on it, I take it?
2 A. Yes, that's correct.
3 Q. And you took those geographic locations as
4 the universe of your study for the purposes of your
5 testimony in this case; correct?
6 A. Yes, I did. There were a couple of different
7 lists, I should say, as I pointed out earlier, I was
8 attentive to try to compare all information in order to
9 see if something had been forgotten. Sometimes things
10 are forgotten.
11 Q. You compared different lists. Are these
12 lists sometimes different, that is, they have different
13 geographic sites on one list and not on another, or
14 different cultural sites on one list that aren't on
15 another?
16 A. There are differences. In fact, there's a
17 list for the Kiseljak municipality also supplied, also
18 emanating from the Islamic community, which fails to
19 mention that there is a mekteb in Bukve. It fails to
20 mention that there's another mekteb in Donji
21 Zezeljevo. There are differences. There are little
22 differences, for the most part.
23 Q. One last question about these lists, Doctor.
24 You said you received them and other materials prior to
25 your testimony. Were they received by you, prior to
1 your testimony, but after your on-site inspection in
2 Central Bosnia, in May and June of 1994?
3 A. They were before, before my on-site
4 inspection. I have a lot to do, and I try to limit
5 it. It takes a fair amount of time to find places in
6 Central Bosnia, and so these materials were given to me
7 before, and that helped me to organise my tours.
8 Q. Before May of 1994?
9 A. I'm sorry, no. I did a tour at the request
10 of the Tribunal in April/May 1998.
11 JUDGE JORDA: Please be specific here. You
12 know that the Tribunal was established in November
13 1993. Try to be very specific in your responses to the
14 Defence's questions.
15 A. I think -- yes, I apologise. When I went to
16 Central Bosnia in 1994, I had no lists given to me by
17 anybody, except for the Riyaset. These were old lists
18 that came out from the war. They were sort of
19 everything in the kitchen sink is sort of put into
20 them. The lists I'm talking about and you're asking
21 questions about are specific lists given to me by the
22 Tribunal last fall, I believe, and materials I saw last
23 fall or January here. I used these in order to
24 organise these trips that I have carried out in Central
25 Bosnia from April to June 1998.
1 Q. How many trips were those?
2 A. It's about five, five day-trips all together.
3 Q. The photographs, which together constitute
4 Exhibit 455, do they include photographs taken during
5 your 1994 visit to the Lasva and Kiseljak valleys or
6 during your 1998 visits, or are they a mixture of
7 photographs from those various visits?
8 A. I think I -- yes, there is a mixture. There
9 are a few photographs from June 1994 and there are a
10 few photographs taken in the April, June visits, and
11 then there are other photographs, which are not my
12 photographs.
13 Q. Are some of the photographs also from your
14 1998 visits to the region?
15 A. Yes, yes.
16 Q. Are most of the photographs in Exhibit 455
17 from your 1998 visits, or are you able to make a
18 generalisation?
19 A. I think there are probably more there, from
20 the materials that the Tribunal supplied. We can go
21 through every one of them and I can point out which
22 ones are mine and which are the Tribunal's.
23 Q. So most of the Exhibit 455 were not taken by
24 you and, therefore, you don't know when they were
25 taken; is that correct?
1 A. I would say about half of them.
2 Q. Half of them were not taken by you; is that
3 correct?
4 A. Yes, that's right, maybe a bit more.
5 Q. Thank you. You described the communities in
6 the Kiseljak, Busovaca and Vitez municipalities as
7 largely rural, small towns and the like. Did you find
8 in your tours and inspections, that generally in these
9 regions, residential districts are segregated by ethnic
10 or religious groups?
11 A. It is a good question because the only answer
12 to it is a nuanced one. Bosnian society was not the
13 mix that the -- there's an idealic version of Bosnian
14 society which has come out from the war, after the war,
15 that it was a mix. In fact, if you look carefully at
16 Bosnia or any particular region, if you look at towns,
17 if you look at the countryside, you find it is not
18 quite so simple. There are a lot of villages in the
19 country which are mono-national or mono-ethnic. There
20 are a few that are mixed. If you go to a town, and you
21 take Stari Vitez. Stari Vitez is a Bosniak area inside
22 of a town which is basically a Croatian town. In fact,
23 there is a lot more segregation in the country than has
24 often been said.
25 Q. Would you agree that in the Lasva and
1 Kiseljak valleys, generally villages are mono-ethnic,
2 and where they are not mono-ethnic, within a village,
3 residential districts are generally segregated by an
4 ethnic or a religious group?
5 A. The villages that are on the hills are
6 basically mono-ethnic. There is a little bit more mix
7 in the valley, the main valley in Kiseljak. But I
8 would basically agree with what you've said.
9 JUDGE JORDA: This might be the moment,
10 unless you have another question about the ethnic
11 composition of the villages, this might be a good time
12 to take our break.
13 MR. HAYMAN: I've completed that area,
14 Mr. President. Thank you.
15 JUDGE JORDA: Very well. We will resume at
16 2.30. The hearing is adjourned.
17 --- Luncheon recess taken at 12.56 p.m.
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25
1 --- On resuming at 2.35 p.m.
2 JUDGE JORDA: We will now resume the
3 hearing. Have the accused brought in.
4 (The accused entered court)
5 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Hayman, we're going to
6 continue now with your cross-examination. The floor is
7 yours.
8 MR. HAYMAN: Thank you, Mr. President.
9 Q. Once again, good afternoon, Dr. Kaiser. You
10 stated that mektebs generally resemble, from the
11 outside, private residences; is that correct?
12 A. That's correct.
13 Q. So to recognise such a structure as a mekteb,
14 you would have to have some local knowledge of the
15 local sites; is that correct?
16 A. One has to ask questions to the local
17 people. Sometimes the mihrab, that is, the
18 prayer niche, is visible on the exterior wall.
19 Q. For the record, you have had some notes
20 opened before you during your earlier testimony that
21 you have referred to from time to time.
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. Please feel free to continue to do so if it
24 is helpful.
25 If Exhibit 451 could be placed on the ELMO?
1 That is one of the maps tendered by the Prosecution in
2 connection with the testimony of this witness. Very
3 well, you have it before you, Dr. Kaiser. You said, I
4 believe, that the locations in yellow were under BiH
5 army control; is that correct?
6 A. That is correct.
7 Q. As of what time?
8 A. I can answer you in terms of what I actually
9 saw in 1994. I'd say that Kruscica, that was under
10 ABiH control, because I was there; Stari Vitez, of
11 course; Strane out in the east; and Merjani (phoen), I
12 didn't go to, but it's visible from the road east in
13 from the Lasva Valley.
14 Q. I didn't intend to make you go through them
15 one at a time. My question, rather, was: Did you mark
16 these in yellow because they were under BiH army control
17 at the time of your visit in May and June of 1994 or
18 did someone else mark these for you and tell you that
19 they were under BiH army control at some point or points
20 in time?
21 A. Okay. The way it works is this: Every
22 single mosque, mekteb, or mesjid that was on the list
23 and was indicated as severely damaged or destroyed I
24 wanted to see. I saw these -- in fact, I didn't know
25 exactly where all of these were located, and I simply
1 made a list of them to go out and look for them, in
2 fact. When I went to these areas, I could tell from
3 the surrounding population that these were -- I
4 presumed to be -- there was a Bosniak population in
5 these areas, a big one. In some places I spoke with
6 local people because I was uncertain as to where they
7 could be.
8 For example, Rovna, which is down here, I
9 came along this road from the east here. I went up and
10 I spoke -- there was nothing that was obvious there,
11 not too many habitations in the area, not too many
12 people, but up at the mosque there were some old men.
13 I went and asked them some questions, and said, "Where
14 was this during the war?" And they said to me, "This
15 was in Armija territory." If you looked to see the
16 damage, yes, that was possible. It's that kind of way,
17 when you asked questions, I got the precise answer and
18 I feel certain about those sites. The other ones I
19 judged simply from the population.
20 In some cases, you know, you are also going
21 over front-line, and you know that you are going over
22 the front-line, and that's the way you know where it
23 is. It was not indicated to me that these were in
24 Armija-controlled territory. I can tell you that. It
25 was just by going around that I began to presume that
1 they were, in fact, in Armija-controlled territory
2 because of the population, because of what people said.
3 Q. You made that judgement. Was that in May/June
4 of '94 or in 1998 when you went back that you made the
5 judgement that the locations in yellow were under BiH
6 army control?
7 A. You will remember that I only saw a few of
8 these locations in 1994, so I made a judgement about
9 certain of those locations. Kruscica was one of them.
10 The other ones I mentioned at the beginning. In all
11 the others, I made that judgement during the April to
12 June trips around the areas.
13 Q. April to June 1998?
14 A. 1998, yes.
15 Q. If you learned that locations such as
16 Jelinak, Putis and, perhaps, others had been in HVO
17 territory during part of the war, what would that tell
18 the court with respect to those locations?
19 A. I should say that I know that Jelinak and
20 Strane were briefly in control. Jelinak I mentioned as
21 an example of an inhabitant that said the village had
22 been overrun in April 1994. I don't know how long it
23 was overrun for. Putis, I didn't know that. I asked
24 the local inhabitants, and I didn't get that answer.
25 Strane looked as if it had been overrun because it had
1 pillaged. Someone had gone in there. It was a Bosniak
2 village, so I assumed it was the HVO.
3 In a few cases I learned that it had
4 happened, but I didn't include those as being in
5 HVO-controlled territory simply because I didn't -- I
6 knew that they weren't in HVO-controlled territory very
7 long, for the most part.
8 THE INTERPRETER: Could you please make a
9 break between the question and answer for the
10 interpreters to catch up?
11 MR. HAYMAN:
12 Q. Dr. Kaiser, do you believe the court can or
13 should infer anything from the fact, for example, that
14 Jelinak and Strane were held by the HVO for a period of
15 time, and yet there was little or no damage to cultural
16 sites there; whereas, other sites that were under Croat
17 control for longer periods of time and, thus,
18 accessible to civilians, vandals, et cetera, they fared
19 less well? Do you think that the court can or should
20 make an inference based on that data?
21 A. I think it depends on how long something is
22 under control. I don't know how long Jelinak was under
23 HVO control, whether it was one day, two days or three
24 days.
25 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Hayman, ask your questions
1 directly, please. Don't try to infer everything that
2 the Judges might infer, because they are grown-up and
3 know how to make the inferences that they need to
4 make. Please don't make too many suggestions about any
5 possible inferences that the Judges could make.
6 Believe me, they will do what they have to do at the
7 proper time.
8 MR. HAYMAN: There must have been a problem
9 in interpretation, Mr. President, because I wasn't
10 suggesting the court's job or role. I apologise if it
11 was interpreted in such a manner that the court
12 understood me to be doing so.
13 Q. Dr. Kaiser, can we reasonably infer that if
14 the HVO held Jelinak for a few days or a week and a
15 cultural site wasn't destroyed, then whatever HVO
16 commander was on the ground there wasn't given any
17 instructions or command, at least not one that he
18 obeyed, to destroy a cultural site at that location?
19 A. The Jelinak case is an interesting case, if I
20 can talk about that, because the head man of the
21 village, he showed us his mekteb, mesjid, gasulhane,
22 and he said that it had been overrun, fire had been set
23 in it, and that it had been mined to go off. I have
24 heard this thing about places being mined to go off,
25 and at the last miraculous moment they didn't go off.
1 Somebody took the mine out, et cetera.
2 There were the slightest traces of fire. It
3 was clear that the building had been rehabilitated. I
4 put down it was lightly damaged. I don't know exactly
5 how much damage was done to it, but to that building,
6 there was an attempt made to damage it. But I don't
7 know whether it was moderate or light, so I put light.
8 Q. What about the cultural site in Strane? Do
9 you have any more for the court about that site?
10 A. I think the village was overrun. There was a
11 lot of pillaging. Explosives seems to have been put in
12 houses. This little mesjid, this is a case of one that
13 is visible from the outside, the mihrab, it was
14 pillaged. It was pillaged. That was all. I don't
15 know how long they were there.
16 Q. If Exhibit 452 could be provided to the
17 witness? That's the next in this series of maps. If
18 it could be moved up so that the lower right-hand
19 corner of the exhibit is visible on the ELMO, please,
20 lower right-hand corner. Thank you.
21 I think the exhibit is upside down, if it
22 could be turned right-side up, please. Thank you very
23 much.
24 Dr. Kaiser, you said that the two locations
25 in green had been hit by artillery from the east or
1 south-east; is that correct?
2 A. That's correct.
3 Q. Who held that territory during the war, if
4 you know?
5 A. One thing I should have mentioned to you, I
6 also had mine maps, and that indicated often where
7 forces were. Those mine maps I acquired from the Mine
8 Action Centre in Sarajevo. In this case, if you take
9 the mine map, you will find a whole line of mines north
10 of the two towns here. I assume that this was, in
11 fact, in Armija territory, these two locations.
12 Q. Do you know who held the territory from which
13 the direction of fire came causing the injury or damage
14 to the sites?
15 A. My inference, since it came from the
16 north-east and south-east, generally from the easterly
17 direction, my inference is that the damage would have
18 been done by the Bosnian Serbian forces.
19 Q. You discussed the causes of various damage
20 visible to you. Am I correct that you were not in a
21 position to differentiate between the effects of
22 different types of explosives when exploded on or in a
23 cultural site, or is that something that is within your
24 field of expertise?
25 A. I would say that I can differentiate between
1 artillery damage and explosives, high explosives. But,
2 honestly, I could not tell you much, if anything, of
3 technical nature about explosives used in a building.
4 Q. So whether military explosives, a mine, or
5 civilian industrial explosives are used, you're not
6 able to render an opinion on that; is that correct?
7 THE REGISTRAR: I would like to allow myself
8 to interrupt you for a moment. We are having a problem
9 with the French transcript. We have to take a short
10 break for a moment to correct the technical problem.
11 JUDGE JORDA: Well, we are going to suspend
12 the hearing for ten minutes.
13 --- Recess taken at 2.50 p.m.
14 --- On resuming at 3.05 p.m.
15 JUDGE JORDA: Please be seated. Have the
16 accused brought in.
17 (The accused entered court)
18 JUDGE JORDA: All right, Registrar, maybe you
19 can tell us what is working and what isn't working.
20 THE REGISTRAR: We had a small transcript
21 problem with the French, but everything is operating
22 perfectly, or it seems to be operating perfectly.
23 JUDGE JORDA: I really admire your prudence.
24 We can continue now, Mr. Hayman.
25 MR. HAYMAN: Thank you, Mr. President.
1 Q. Dr. Kaiser, let me repeat my question which
2 you were not given a chance to answer. Is it correct
3 that you are not able to render an opinion in specific
4 cases of -- the destruction of cultural sites whether
5 military explosives, such as a mine, or whether other
6 civilian explosive materials may have been used to
7 cause a particular explosion or detonation?
8 A. Regarding explosives put into buildings, I am
9 not an expert and I cannot distinguish between a tank
10 mine, a big charge of civilian explosives or other
11 types of explosives.
12 Q. I didn't understand with respect to the
13 mosque in Kiseljak whether the minaret fell on the roof
14 or did not fall on the roof. Do you need to see a
15 photograph to refresh your recollection or can you
16 answer the question without a photo?
17 A. I believe that some of the bricks fell on the
18 roof, but you see a mass of bricks around the base of
19 the minaret, outside. I don't think that the minaret
20 was exploded in such a way as to fall on the roof.
21 Q. You also said that that detonation was a
22 "expert job." Do you mean it was expert in keeping
23 the minaret from falling on the roof or was it done in
24 an expert manner in some other way?
25 A. Yes, precisely. I mean, it's an expert who
1 made certain that it didn't fall on the roof. He put
2 it somewhere else.
3 JUDGE RIAD: I'm sorry. Would you clarify
4 that?
5 A. An expert could make it fall wherever he
6 wanted it to fall. I think, I'm inferring that the
7 artificer who put the explosives, in the minaret, in
8 the Kiseljak mosque, he wanted the minaret to go in a
9 certain direction and not another direction.
10 JUDGE RIAD: Why would you do that?
11 A. I don't know. He could make more damage or
12 less damage.
13 JUDGE RIAD: Was it in order to save the
14 minaret, for instance?
15 A. He wanted to destroy the minaret, there's no
16 question about that, the question is about how much
17 more damage he wanted to do.
18 JUDGE RIAD: So it was an experiment on
19 damage?
20 A. Yes.
21 JUDGE RIAD: The opposite of what you do.
22 A. I couldn't do that, in other words, I would
23 probably bring it down, maybe on top of the roof.
24 MR. HAYMAN:
25 Q. You described the, I believe the phrase is,
1 turbe, a tomb memorial of a sort. Where was that?
2 Could you tell us the geographic location? I didn't
3 catch that in your testimony.
4 A. The turbe which I mentioned is located in
5 Gomionica Mahala.
6 Q. You said there was some information that it
7 was the tomb of a commander of the Sultan's army.
8 A. That is correct.
9 Q. Can you explain which sultan you're referring
10 or the sultan of what empire?
11 A. Ottoman sultan, I mean, we're talking about
12 Mohamed Fetih the second, I think, in the middle of the
13 15th century.
14 Q. In Donji Vecerska, you described a site that
15 had the roof stripped, the roof tiles taken off. Can
16 you tell the court, have you found in your studies of
17 damage to cultural sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina, that
18 there are different types of vandalism?
19 A. Yes, there are different types of vandalism.
20 Q. Can you explain what those different types
21 are?
22 A. Well, we have the trashing of the interior of
23 a building, for example. That is upsetting
24 everything. It's a spectrum, a spectrum of vandalism.
25 It can be indiscriminate. It can be, for example, in
1 the case of a church -- take an example of the churches
2 from the Dubrovnik commune. There's a very famous
3 example of vandalism which is carried out by the
4 Serbian forces in Cilipi which involved cutting the
5 heads off of statues of Mary and of Joseph and of
6 another saint. That's a very specific kind of
7 vandalism. There are other types of vandalism in
8 churches, where the statue is knocked over, but nobody
9 has gone to cut the head off.
10 To go back to the spectrum of damage, there
11 can be burning inside of a building, an attempt to burn
12 it, to go to the exterior, we can shoot out or through
13 stones through windows. We can take off a roof
14 because, perhaps, one needs the tiles. Usually that's
15 a good reason, otherwise it's a long job. This is sort
16 of minor types of vandalism, not completely destructive
17 of the structure. Then vandalism keeps going. I
18 consider vandalism also to be burning and also putting
19 explosive charges in a building.
20 Q. Is it also possible to categorise vandalism
21 as, in the first category, the threat or removing of
22 usable building materials apparently for the purpose of
23 reuse as compared to vandalism that can be linked to
24 the political or ethnic symbolic value of the thing
25 being desecrated or vandalised. Is that a distinction
1 that you, yourself, have made in the past, Doctor?
2 A. Yes, I have made that distinction in the
3 past. People have vandalised buildings in their own
4 territory, of their own national group, or what they
5 consider to be their own national group, because they
6 are looking for tiles, because they are looking for
7 wood to burn. Yes, I do make such a distinction.
8 Q. You described the unfinished mosque in Duhri
9 and whether or not the minaret had, in fact, been
10 constructed at all, despite reports that you received
11 that there was a minaret at that location and that it
12 had been destroyed. Would you agree that the general
13 quality of hearsay reports in Bosnia-Herzegovina
14 concerning destruction and vandalism and acts of
15 violence, are quite poor, that is the quality of those
16 hearsay reports are quite poor and, in fact, they are
17 rather unreliable?
18 A. I believe that is to be the case. I pointed
19 out also in these lists given by the Islamic community
20 that the damage was systematically overestimated. This
21 is true. You always have to go -- if you haven't got
22 photographs, and then you have some good ones, you have
23 to go and see something by yourself, because you cannot
24 go upon the hearsay evidence.
25 When I was working for the Council of Europe
1 in 1993, and we were collecting all this material, on
2 the basis on my own experience in 1992, the end of 1992
3 in Dubrovnik, these materials, I didn't know what to
4 believe. It is a very, very difficult exercise. The
5 same mistake can be repeated ten times. Yes, the
6 hearsay evidence is not very good.
7 I also mentioned that we thought that the
8 good -- I read in a newspaper the Guca Gora monastery
9 had been destroyed, and that's hearsay evidence and it
10 wasn't.
11 Q. When you got to Guca Gora, were you not
12 allowed inside because it was a BiH army installation,
13 it was being used by the BiH army?
14 A. Precisely. I was not allowed inside because
15 the Armija was in the establishment.
16 Q. And was using it for their military purposes;
17 correct?
18 A. Military purposes. I mean, it was presented
19 to me -- in fact, it was also a form of protection. I
20 did see what I thought to be mujahedeen in the area. I
21 saw that the village, that Croats houses in that
22 village had been burned. That seemed to me to be very,
23 very convincing argument to put troops in the monastery
24 to protect it from somebody else.
25 Q. Please be assured that I'm not suggesting it
1 was a good or a bad idea to have BiH army troops
2 stationed in and around the monastery. Would you agree
3 that you were not invited inside, not because they were
4 guarding the monastery but because they were engaged in
5 military activities inside the monastery?
6 A. I think that what they knew and sensed is
7 that I was nosing around to see what had happened, and
8 the church had, in fact, been defiled in one way
9 another. I mentioned that the graffiti was used. I
10 think that's what they were afraid of me seeing. They
11 were, perhaps, also afraid of me seeing that the
12 soldiers were living in the monks quarters and had
13 probably, my assistant didn't go into those quarters,
14 but perhaps it was full of graffiti, insulting
15 graffiti, because wherever soldiers go, there is often
16 insulting graffiti and they didn't want me to see that.
17 Q. Did you learn, despite the limits put on your
18 access, at the Guca Gora monastery, that some one-half
19 of the vast library at that monastery had been
20 destroyed by the mujahedeen when they took over the
21 monastery in 1993?
22 A. That is news to me. I heard about the great
23 fire at the end of World War II, supposedly carried out
24 by the Germans. I was told by the Bosniak officials,
25 in the municipality of Travnik, that much of the
1 collection had been saved. Our cultural heritage
2 assistant did not mention seeing traces of a fire,
3 excuse me, the fire of a library. I'm not sure exactly
4 what happened to the library and to the other treasures
5 of Guca Gora. I never saw them.
6 JUDGE JORDA: Doctor, would you please face
7 us when you answer. Thank you.
8 MR. HAYMAN:
9 Q. Could you then tell the court, Doctor, if you
10 recall, where you got the information in your report to
11 the Council of Europe dated 16 March 1995 which reads:
12 "Franciscan monastery at Guca Gora (Travnik): About
13 50 per cent of the library had been destroyed or lost
14 during the period the monastery was occupied by
15 mujahedeens in 1993, but ABiH managed to save part of
16 it."
17 A. Which report are you referring to?
18 Q. 15 May 1995, Council of Europe, seventh
19 informational report on war damage to the cultural
20 heritage in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Your
21 update begins on page 37 and I was reading from the
22 third paragraph under "Bosnia and Herzegovina" on page
23 39. Is that information you recall or you don't recall
24 receiving it?
25 A. I'm sorry. I recall -- well, I have in front
1 of me the report from '94. I can't recall this
2 particular information.
3 Q. Could the usher show the paragraph, first to
4 the Prosecutor and then to the witness. This is the
5 only copy I have. Perhaps it will refresh his memory,
6 Mr. President.
7 A. Okay. I think I understand better. The
8 question here --
9 JUDGE JORDA: Excuse me. Perhaps we have
10 made an error here. The sentence that you quoted,
11 Mr. Hayman, the extract from the report of the Council
12 of Europe is important. In the interpreter's mouth, I
13 heard that they had been occupied by the HVO and then
14 by the Bosnian army. The transcript mentions the
15 Bosnian army. Could we repeat that sentence, please?
16 I hope that doesn't bother you.
17 MR. HAYMAN: I will repeat it. It was not
18 the HVO but the mujahedeens, who initially occupied the
19 premises and then were replaced by the BiH army
20 according to the report which managed then to save
21 roughly one-half of the library holdings, the balance
22 having been apparently destroyed by the mujahedeen.
23 Q. Let me ask you, Dr. Kaiser, first of all, is
24 your memory refreshed with respect to that bit of
25 information?
1 A. Yes, indeed. I wrote it. I'm just trying to
2 remember where I got it. I was in contact with ECMM,
3 and this was information, I think, I probably got later
4 on, in fact.
5 Q. After your the visit at which you were denied
6 access to the monastery?
7 A. Yes, after the visit, yes.
8 Q. But this is -- I did accurately read a
9 portion of your report; is that correct?
10 A. Yes, you did.
11 Q. Thank you. If Exhibits 66/2 and 66/3 could
12 be provided to the witness, they pertain, I believe, to
13 the Svinjarevo mesjid.
14 A. Mesjid, yes.
15 Q. I was a little confused, Doctor, I thought
16 you said, but correct me if I'm wrong, that these
17 photos depicted damage to this mosque, but that in a
18 later photo you saw potential damage from burning, or
19 evidence of burning, but not in these photos; is that
20 correct?
21 A. I have photos that I took in which the
22 burning -- the smoke is quite clear, is quite clearly
23 on certain objects. It's clear at the base of the
24 mihrab here.
25 Q. What is clear?
1 A. Right here. I'm not sure that I can say that
2 that's smoke damage there actually. Then there is
3 another storey, there is another floor, and there is a
4 staircase. Underneath the staircase, there are the
5 traces of fire, of smoke.
6 Q. That you saw in 1998?
7 A. 1998. Also, there are other pictures that I
8 have, in which certain elements of the roof, in fact,
9 are damaged by fire.
10 Q. Also photos from 1998?
11 A. That's right.
12 Q. And that damage is not apparent in these
13 photos; is that correct?
14 A. No, it's not apparent in those photos.
15 Q. So if these photos -- excuse me. Let's pause
16 for a moment. If these photos were taken in 1996 and
17 you found burning damage in 1998, that would tell us,
18 of course, that that subsequent damage occurred during
19 that interval; correct?
20 A. Yes.
21 MR. HAYMAN: I'm completed with those photos,
22 Mr. Usher. Thank you.
23 Q. You told the court of several items of
24 information you received concerning when specific
25 cultural sites were damaged. Am I correct that you
1 have no other information concerning the time or
2 circumstances of the damage to the various sites you
3 have reviewed, other than what you have already told
4 the court?
5 A. Basically, that's correct. There may be a
6 few other notations in reports that I have made, but
7 basically, this is all the information. There's not
8 very much.
9 Q. Do you have any basis to give the court an
10 opinion whether the majority of the damage to the sites
11 you have discussed occurred after the Washington
12 Agreement in roughly March 1994 or occurred before the
13 Washington Agreement in 1994, March of that year?
14 A. Well, clearly if the only information I have
15 is here, I cannot put specific dates on the damage
16 which has been done to these buildings.
17 Q. Returning your attention to Exhibit 451,
18 which is the map with a large number of yellow
19 locations indicated, if that could go back on the ELMO,
20 please. Is it your believe, Doctor, that these
21 locations in yellow were certainly, that is, cultural
22 sites indicated by the locations in yellow on
23 Exhibit 451, were certainly within the range of HVO
24 artillery during the war?
25 A. Can I be a little boring here and go one by
1 one?
2 Q. Only the court can grant you leave in that
3 area, Doctor.
4 A. Okay. For example, well, obviously, the
5 Stari Vitez, the mosque there was quite visible. Bukve
6 is very visible from the main road. Sadovaci, this is
7 different. This, by the way, was undamaged. I don't
8 think this building was visible to HVO positions.
9 Preocica, I think the mosque is visible. Dolovici,
10 it's visible to the front-line positions of the HVO.
11 Sivrino Selo, yes. Vrhovine, I doubt very much if the
12 mesjid is visible. There is, by the way, another
13 mosque here in Poculica, which I don't know why I
14 didn't put it on which is visible as undamaged. The
15 mosque in Vrhovine, I'm not sure if that is visible.
16 Kruscica, the mosque, I think, was visible. The mesjid
17 was not visible and is not damaged. Vreniske, I really
18 don't think it's visible. It was in a valley. Rovna,
19 visible --
20 JUDGE RIAD: Was this last one damaged or
21 not?
22 A. Vreniske, not damaged.
23 JUDGE RIAD: So it was not visible to the
24 HVO.
25 A. No. Rovna was visible, it had slight
1 damage. Besici, this is visible and was damaged.
2 Jelinak was definitely visible.
3 JUDGE RIAD: Was it damaged?
4 A. Yes, it was damaged, yes. Putis, I think,
5 was visible from the hill here. I believe there was
6 fighting in this hill. Strane, it's in the trees.
7 It's a very small building. I'm not sure if it was
8 visible. Merdjani may have been visible at one moment
9 or another.
10 MR. HAYMAN:
11 Q. Thank you. Can we conclude that the sites
12 you identified as visible, to HVO artillery,
13 nonetheless, showed no other indications of having been
14 targeted and damaged by HVO artillery; is that
15 correct?
16 A. Well, I think Bukve was targeted. Stari
17 Vitez was targeted. Kruscica was targeted once. It
18 had one impact in it. Wait a minute, Preocica, was
19 targeted once, one mortar shell, I think.
20 Q. Tell us, Doctor --
21 MR. KEHOE: Excuse me, if the witness can
22 finish.
23 MR. HAYMAN: I thought he had finished.
24 A. Yes, Rovna was targeted, not by artillery or
25 mortars, though. It was hit by small arms. Besici was
1 hit by small arms and maybe by projectiles, but not big
2 projectiles. Jelinak was not hit by projectiles.
3 Putis was shot by -- small arms damage, that's all.
4 MR. HAYMAN:
5 Q. Tell us, Doctor, if any of these visible
6 sites, if targeted by an artillery attack directed at
7 the site, by capable artillery operators, the site
8 could be totally destroyed; correct?
9 A. There's no doubt about it. I mean, a capable
10 artillery man, if he decides to go after something, he
11 can get it, he can hit it badly.
12 Q. And you saw that result in hundreds of cases
13 with respect to the Bosnian Serb army; correct?
14 A. Well, maybe I didn't see the case for
15 hundreds of front-line -- mosques near the front-line,
16 but I saw many cases.
17 Q. What you see here is different; correct?
18 A. Yes, it is.
19 Q. Now, you compared damage to Muslim and
20 Catholic sites. Let me ask you just a few examples.
21 Was the Catholic church in Vitez damaged by fire? When
22 I say "fire," I mean projectile fire?
23 A. Yes, it was, in fact. Not seriously, but it
24 was damaged, yes.
25 Q. Was the damage comparable to the pock marks
1 on the Stari Vitez mosque?
2 A. I think it's a little less. I think it's one
3 or two impacts on the church.
4 Q. Mortar impacts?
5 A. Okay, I don't have pictures in front of me, I
6 don't remember, but not heavy artillery. It wasn't a
7 big artillery piece.
8 Q. Since you have made general comparisons
9 between Muslim and Catholic sites, let me ask you, on
10 the list that the Prosecutor's office passed on to you
11 for your 1998 review, were there any Catholic sites or
12 were those exclusively Muslim or Islamic religious
13 sites?
14 A. No, they were exclusively Islamic sacral and
15 educational buildings.
16 Q. Do you recall any damage to Catholic sites in
17 the village of Dusina?
18 A. I have not been in that village.
19 Q. Vlajkovica?
20 A. This village is close to a group of schools
21 that UNESCO is working on, and I have gone through that
22 area. But about a year ago, I wasn't involved in
23 sacral buildings at the time. I think the village was
24 damaged. I can't remember exactly what the state of
25 the church was, though.
1 Q. Restovsko in the Kiseljak municipality?
2 A. I don't think there's very much -- I don't
3 recall seeing any damage to the church.
4 Q. The church in Silos near Kacuni?
5 A. I'm wondering, is that the same church we
6 were talking about? There is one church in Kacuni. I
7 mean, there's only one church I can recall on the main
8 road.
9 Q. One moment. The description I have is of the
10 villages on the road from Fojnica to Kiseljak, east of
11 Fojnica is Natbare, afterwards is mainly Croat Silo,
12 largely burnt out, along with it recent Catholic
13 church?
14 A. That's from my report from June 1994. That's
15 the road from Fojnica to Kiseljak. It's not Kacuni to
16 Kiseljak. Yes, I remember going through that area and
17 seeing a Catholic church that was damaged, yes.
18 Q. It was burned out?
19 A. Burned out, I think.
20 Q. In terms of the psychological impact on a
21 population, civilian population, as well as individual
22 soldiers, would you agree that the psychological impact
23 of destruction to religious sites is a common one among
24 various religious or ethnic groups?
25 A. Can you rephrase that? I'm not sure I
1 understand.
2 Q. Would you agree that the impact on a
3 population, be it a Muslim population, a Catholic
4 population, or some other religious group, it is the
5 same when one's own group's religious sites are
6 destroyed, targeted, and are the victims of violence?
7 A. Yes, thank you for rephrasing your question.
8 Yes, it is the same, I think.
9 Q. Do you also believe that that psychological
10 impact crosses municipal lines, that, for example, acts
11 of violence in a neighbouring municipality may heighten
12 fear, paranoia, anxiety in the next door municipality?
13 A. Of course.
14 Q. Did you visit Bugojno on any of your tours or
15 visits to the Central Bosnia region?
16 A. My tour in 1994, I went through it, but
17 unfortunately, since then I've been back, and not just
18 to go through it.
19 Q. What did you find?
20 A. Well, Bugojno is a very nasty place, to put
21 it bluntly, even speaking as a UNESCO representative.
22 There was a case of a big church out there, an
23 explosive being set at the foot of it. This is after
24 Dayton. The church in Humac and this was the most
25 extraordinary kind of violence to have seen since the
1 war, was the victim of an explosive charge, which
2 destroyed the church tower. This was about a year ago,
3 before the elections. Bugojna is not a very nice
4 place. It is a very, very badly vandalised Catholic
5 cemetery which I have written about to the Reis Ul
6 Uleima, in fact.
7 Q. In the former Croat population of Bugojno?
8 A. They have had a very, very tough time there.
9 There's no doubt about that.
10 Q. Did you have occasion to visit Fojnica and,
11 if so, what did you find?
12 A. Yes, I visited Fojnica only once. I visited
13 during the June 1994 mission. It seemed to be in
14 rather bad condition. I didn't -- this was a town in
15 which the monitors didn't want me to get out of the
16 vehicle, even though it was in Armija territory. They
17 pointed out to me that there had been a certain amount
18 of ethnic cleansing of the Croatian population. We
19 were visiting the monastery in Fojnica, because the
20 monastery in Fojnica has a very, very important, very
21 rich collection, and, of course, I knew about the
22 incident in the monastery, I guess which was in October
23 '93, in which two priests had been assassinated.
24 Q. By the BiH army; correct?
25 A. I don't know who they were assassinated by,
1 but I don't assume they were assassinated by other
2 Croats.
3 Q. And the former Croat population of Fojnica?
4 A. When, during the war or after the war?
5 Q. How did you find the situation when you
6 visited?
7 A. It looked like a very unhappy place.
8 Q. I have a few more questions, Doctor, but not
9 many. In the area of responsibility, you said that the
10 JNA taught the dictates of The Hague convention, well.
11 Do you know what they taught? Have you seen teaching
12 materials? Were you in the JNA, Doctor, or are your
13 sources of information something else?
14 MR. KEHOE: Excuse me, I think there is four
15 questions there as opposed to one. I have to ask
16 council to break his questions down, it might be easier
17 for the transcript.
18 MR. HAYMAN: Very well.
19 Q. Can you tell us your source of information
20 for your knowledge of what the former JNA, at a
21 particular point in time, did or did not teach
22 concerning The Hague conventions?
23 A. Well, this is, of course, a general
24 statement. This is an evaluation from within UNESCO.
25 UNESCO is involved in the implementation of The Hague
1 convention. It is responsible for keeping the
2 archives. They are supposed to know something about
3 the implementation with the armed forces. You would
4 call this hearsay evidence but it's from inside UNESCO.
5 Q. Do you know the ultimate source, other than
6 the general believe on UNESCO's part?
7 A. I don't work in that area. I haven't seen
8 the materials of the reports that were compiled. The
9 thing is that, Yugoslavia compiled reports and sent
10 them, regularly, to UNESCO. They do exist.
11 Q. Before the break-up of the former Yugoslavia;
12 is that right?
13 A. That's right.
14 Q. Were there any reports after the break-up and
15 after the war broke out in the former Yugoslavia?
16 A. I don't know. I doubt it.
17 Q. You would doubt it because the situation
18 became somewhat chaotic; correct?
19 A. That's correct, yes.
20 Q. Does The Hague treaty require the flying of a
21 particular flag, over sites that are registered as
22 being of cultural significance?
23 A. I believe that it recommends it. If you
24 don't fly it, then you're taking a risk.
25 Q. I take it, if you fly it and the building is
1 destroyed, then you haven't violated the treaty; is
2 that right? You haven't violated your duty to protect
3 the building; is that true?
4 A. You have respected the recommendation. You
5 have respected the spirit of the convention. You have
6 allowed the enemy to make his choice. Remember, it
7 depends on the enemy and whether he wants to shoot or
8 not.
9 Q. Do you think, in Central Bosnia, during the
10 war that was fought there, it was a good idea for any
11 party to put up flags identifying particular sites or
12 do you think that the failure to fly such flags was a
13 reasonable exercise of discretion by whatever local
14 civil authorities made that decision?
15 A. Well, first of all, I doubt very much that
16 there any flags in Central Bosnia. The flags were
17 usually put up, for example, in Croatia. They were put
18 up by the institutes to preserve cultural heritage.
19 Croatia had an excellent network of those. Bosnia had
20 a poor network. Would it have been a good idea to put
21 them up in the war? It seems one of the lessons that
22 this war has taught us is that these flags didn't
23 protect very much.
24 Q. I take it, you think it's unlikely they had
25 any flags to begin with; is that right?
1 A. I think it's unlikely, probably, in this
2 area.
3 Q. You spoke of the duty of military personnel
4 with respect to listed sites. Is it your opinion that
5 military personnel had a duty to act as civil police
6 and physically guard registered sites during wartime?
7 Is that your understanding of The Hague convention?
8 A. One of the understandings is they don't give
9 orders to shoot at buildings. That's one thing.
10 Secondly, if they regard that there is a danger to a
11 building from military personnel or armed personnel, I
12 believe that they cannot -- they don't necessarily have
13 to put soldiers in front of it. Well, they can put
14 military police in front of it.
15 Q. They have an obligation to attempt to
16 maintain discipline within their own troops; correct?
17 A. Exactly.
18 Q. Is that the obligation?
19 A. Yes, that's one of the obligations, yes. If
20 necessary, to protect the building. I've asked SFOR to
21 protect buildings, in fact, in the post-Dayton
22 situation, if necessary, with troops, by patrols. I
23 think it's also a solution.
24 Q. Very well. You've spoken, though, of a legal
25 duty. Can you articulate what that legal duty is for
1 military personnel under The Hague conventions or is
2 that outside your field of expertise?
3 A. Well, you will imagine, sir, that I would
4 like The Hague convention to be respected.
5 Unfortunately, I have seen it hasn't been so respected,
6 and not very much respected during the war. I don't
7 want to say I'm cynical about The Hague convention, but
8 I certainly approve of everything that's being done to
9 reform it. In a certain sense, I'm not so interested
10 in what it has to say, but I am interested in the
11 spirit of it. The question is what should the soldiers
12 do? The commanders should give orders to their
13 soldiers to respect certain buildings. They should
14 list the buildings. We're talking about, in combat
15 situations. Outside combat situations, they should
16 make -- they should try to ensure that those orders
17 are, in fact, respected and that soldiers don't do
18 something, if they feel that there is a situation they
19 can't control so well, then they should, if necessary,
20 guard the building.
21 Q. You're talking now about buildings within the
22 area of control of a particular military force, as
23 opposed to buildings outside of that area?
24 A. Yes, I am, yes.
25 Q. If a military commander gives orders,
1 repeated orders, to his forces to respect and protect
2 civilian structures, is that consistent with the
3 duties, as you understand them, arising on the part of
4 military commanders under The Hague convention?
5 A. It's a good start. At least the soldiers
6 know what they are up against if they disrespect the
7 orders.
8 Q. If a soldier at a lower level disrespects
9 that order, is the commander responsible for a criminal
10 offence under The Hague conventions? Is that your
11 understanding?
12 A. If a soldier disrespects the order, and his
13 commander does nothing to be certain to see that he is
14 punished, then his commander has a responsibility, but
15 the commander is not necessarily responsible for what
16 the subordinate soldier does. He is responsible to
17 make certain that he is punished for it, if he has done
18 it.
19 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Hayman, let me remind you
20 that the witness has come to testify about a certain
21 number of things. I'm not sure that his opinions on
22 military command responsibility are moving a little bit
23 away from the purpose of the testimony.
24 MR. HAYMAN: I have two more questions on
25 this area, Mr. President. He did give an opinion on
1 the responsibility of commanders and if I may, I would
2 like to finish the area.
3 Q. I take it then, Doctor, your understanding is
4 the obligation on the part of military commanders
5 created under The Hague convention, is not one of
6 strict liability?
7 A. Is not one of strict liability?
8 Q. Yes. It is not a strict liability obligation
9 on the part of a military commander?
10 A. I may be a bit thick. Can you explain what
11 you mean by that?
12 MR. KEHOE: Excuse me. Excuse me. This is
13 precisely the point, I believe, that Your Honour has
14 just addressed on the issue of strict liability and
15 what it means within the term of international law and
16 international humanitarian law.
17 MR. HAYMAN: He gave a legal opinion,
18 Mr. President, he gave a legal opinion on the duties of
19 civil authorities and military authorities. I don't
20 know what I'm supposed to do --
21 JUDGE JORDA: I have to say that you are
22 taking the words out of my mouth, but I'm also going to
23 turn to the Prosecution. When you ask too much of a
24 witness, you then expose yourself to have questions
25 that go beyond the limits. I have said, the witness
1 comes to express what he knows about a specific area.
2 Dr. Kaiser, perhaps not theoretically, perhaps not an
3 expert in military responsibility. All right, let's
4 leave it at that. You have asked your questions,
5 Mr. Hayman. Have you got any others that you want to
6 ask?
7 MR. HAYMAN: One more and then one last area.
8 Q. Before asking to opine, were you shown any
9 orders of my client?
10 A. No.
11 Q. Thank you. You said during your May/June
12 1994 visit, you could not get out of your car in
13 Kiseljak or take pictures because it was too
14 dangerous. Why was it too dangerous. This was after
15 the cease-fire; correct?
16 A. Yes, this was the opinion of the ECMM. I was
17 under their control. I would not question it. I think
18 they believed that what we could call -- there was an
19 expression that was used a lot during the war, it's
20 uncontrollable elements, and ECMM's opinion was that
21 there were significant uncontrollable elements in
22 Kiseljak.
23 Q. Did they tell you that uncontrollable
24 elements in Kiseljak were omnipresent?
25 A. Something like that, yes.
1 Q. Did they tell you who these uncontrollable
2 elements were and whether they had been there during
3 the war as well?
4 A. I'm afraid I can't remember -- the
5 uncontrollable elements were Croat elements. They
6 didn't enter into a long history about what they had
7 done or not done during the war.
8 Q. Let me ask you if you agree with the
9 following, referring to acts of vandalism and violence
10 perpetrated on cultural sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina:
11 "These acts of vandalism are perpetrated --
12 MR. KEHOE: Excuse me, counsel, what page?
13 MR. HAYMAN: Report of 19 January, 1994, page
14 17, paragraph 64.
15 Q. "These acts of vandalism are perpetrated by
16 --
17 THE INTERPRETER: Would you read more slowly,
18 please?
19 MR. HAYMAN:
20 Q. "These acts of vandalism are perpetrated by
21 representatives of authority, soldiers and military and
22 probably civilian police. It can be posited that they
23 are sometimes deliberately ordered by local authorities
24 but that many of them are spontaneous." Do you agree
25 with that, sir?
1 A. Yes, I do agree with it.
2 Q. Let me ask, then, if you agree with the
3 following, paragraph 65: "The sense of this term,"
4 referring, I believe, to spontaneous, "Should be
5 elucidated. HVO and BiH units are armies of civilians,
6 sometimes led by ex-JNA officers, but often led by
7 other civilians. The lack of discipline, combined with
8 the suffering that many of these soldiers have known,
9 either to themselves, directly in prison camps or
10 occupied areas or to their families and their property,
11 has caused an extremely dangerous force for prisoners,
12 civilians, and property. Moreover, they are encouraged
13 to commit outrages by political and military leaders
14 who envisage Bosnia-Herzegovina as a series of small,
15 pure ethnic states." Do you agree with that statement,
16 sir?
17 A. Yes, I do.
18 Q. Are you in a position to tell us, to tell
19 this court, whether it's your belief that all political
20 and military leaders on the BiH army and HVO side
21 encouraged persons or soldiers to commit outrages, or
22 was it a subpopulation of that group, namely, only some
23 leaders of any stripe that engaged in such activity?
24 A. I think it was only some leaders. I don't
25 think it was all leaders.
1 MR. HAYMAN: Thank you, Doctor. I have no
2 further questions, Mr. President.
3 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you. Mr. Kehoe, do you
4 want to redirect?
5 MR. KEHOE: Yes, Mr. President. Thank you
6 very much.
7 Re-examined by Mr. Kehoe:
8 Q. You were just asked a series of questions by
9 counsel concerning the destruction of cultural and
10 sacral monuments being sanctioned by HVO politicians
11 and leaders; is that right?
12 A. Yes, I was asked that series of questions.
13 Q. And you said that it was done by some leaders
14 and not by others; is that right?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. Are you saying, by that, that there within
17 the HVO structure, there were moderate leaders --
18 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Kehoe, please slow down.
19 Think about the interpreters.
20 MR. KEHOE: I'm sorry.
21 Q. Doctor, are you saying that within the Croat
22 population, there were moderate leaders?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. As well as moderate military leaders?
25 A. Yes.
1 Q. Are you likewise saying that within the HVO
2 military, there were more extreme leaders, both
3 political and military, within the HVO?
4 A. I think that was probably the case.
5 Q. Now, you noted that there were almost 69 per
6 cent of the sacral buildings within Vitez, Busovaca and
7 Kiseljak which were destroyed; is that right?
8 A. Well, from moderate damage to complete
9 destruction.
10 Q. Moderate damage to complete destruction?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. Some of which were completely dynamited.
13 Now, that's well over half, and then the balance were
14 damaged in a slight way; is that right?
15 A. That's correct.
16 Q. During these areas, there was a significant
17 amount of ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Muslim
18 population, was there not?
19 A. Yes, there was.
20 Q. Who do you think was winning the day, the
21 military commanders who were attempting to eradicate
22 the Muslim population or the military commanders that
23 wanted some type of coexistence?
24 A. The former not the latter.
25 Q. It's pretty clear when you look at the
1 evidence in that area, is it not?
2 A. Yes, I think it's clear, yes.
3 Q. Now, you were asked some questions, both on
4 direct, but some additional questions by counsel --
5 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Kehoe, please speak slowly,
6 otherwise, once again I'm going to ask that we take a
7 break for the interpreters because we can't go on that
8 way. It's going too fast. Please slow down.
9 MR. KEHOE: I do apologise, Mr. President. I
10 will attempt to slow down.
11 Q. You were asked some questions by counsel
12 concerning the obligations of military commanders, as
13 well as the record keeping that was done by the JNA,
14 prior to the fall of the former Yugoslavia; is that
15 correct?
16 A. That's correct.
17 Q. On JNA maps, do they not have religious
18 facilities marked on those maps or do you know?
19 A. I've not had, in my hands, a JNA map, but on
20 the maps that we are using for going around, the
21 religious facilities are clearly marked. I find it
22 very hard to imagine that it is not clearly marked on
23 the JNA map.
24 Q. Would you conclude that JNA-trained officers
25 knew that religious sacral and cultural monuments were
1 not to be destroyed?
2 A. I think they knew that.
3 Q. Let us talk about a few issues raised by
4 Mr. Hayman, and let us start, if you will, with the
5 Guca Gora situation. You commented in your -- pardon
6 me for a moment, 31 August 1994 report concerning the
7 issues in Guca Gora and the reported damage in Guca
8 Gora. I read to you, did you not say this that: "The
9 least bad solution under the present circumstances is
10 that the ABiH remain in the ensemble until the return
11 of the Franciscans can be assured, along with the
12 stationing of an adequate police guard."
13 A. Those are my words.
14 Q. Did you not also say, when talking about the
15 Fojnica monastery, again, counsel, this is on page 14
16 of the 31 August 1994 report, and you recount the
17 killing of the two Franciscan priests in November of
18 1993, did you not also say that the monastery presently
19 has a BH guard, police guard?
20 A. Yes, I wrote that.
21 Q. Did you get the feeling, during your research
22 and years in the former Yugoslavia, that the Bosnian
23 Muslim authorities had sensitivity to the destruction
24 -- or Bosnian Muslim people as a whole, had a
25 sensitivity to the destruction of sacral monuments and
1 sacral buildings?
2 A. Yes, in fact, I have come to believe that,
3 both from the war experience and also afterward. I
4 remember, this is after the war, there's a little
5 village near Novi Travnik called Pecine which is up in
6 the hills. It's very far away from everywhere. It's a
7 Croat village. I had information that in December,
8 December 1996, I think, that this church had been
9 torched, and I went up there, you know, you had to go
10 up with a 4-wheel drive vehicle, winding, winding,
11 winding road, nobody there, nobody there. I went into
12 the village, and I did, indeed, find that the church
13 had been torched. To my astonishment, I also found two
14 Bosniak policeman who had been stationed up there to
15 make certain that it wasn't completely torched. This
16 is a post-war example.
17 If you go back to the war, you will see in
18 the various towns on the -- the front-line towns, that
19 the authorities had done much, it seems, to make
20 certain that the Orthodox churches and the Catholic
21 churches were not abused. They didn't always succeed.
22 Some places are very bad, and I'm not too surprised in
23 towns that are shelled every day, you know, 20 or 30
24 rounds, that somebody goes and torches the Orthodox
25 church. There was a case, I think, in Maglaj. It was
1 quite striking that there seemed to be an effort on the
2 part of the authorities, on many of the Bosniak
3 authorities, to take care of these buildings.
4 Q. How about the actual soldiers on the ground?
5 Did you have any instances you might relate to the
6 Chamber concerning the feeling of the rank and file
7 among the Armija concerning the destruction of Catholic
8 institutions? I point you to what you relayed to me
9 concerning Dolac.
10 A. In a certain sense, you know, very
11 uncontrollable situation, leaders can say something in
12 the capital, and then a local leader may have a totally
13 different opinion, and the local leader cannot have
14 complete control and something happens somewhere else.
15 What I'm saying is a lot of things will rest on the
16 individual soldier. It's true in Dolac, when I went to
17 look at the church in Dolac, it was in June 1994, it
18 was somewhat vandalised, not dramatically damaged, and
19 I remember always a soldier, a Bosniak soldier from the
20 Krajine, and he was a refugee, carrying a load of
21 wood. He walked past us and he began sort of shouting
22 at me. He said, "Why aren't you going down to the
23 Lasva valley and looking at the dynamited mosques? Why
24 are you looking always at the churches here?" And then
25 he pointed at the church, and he said, "This is the
1 house of God. We will not destroy it." This was what
2 was interpreted to me. And I was rather struck by that
3 remark. I have always been struck by it and I've had
4 to think about it since and what did it mean? Did it
5 mean that the rural Bosniak was more respectful of
6 cultural heritage than the rural Croat or the rural
7 Serb? What did it mean? Because when he pointed out
8 the church to me in that condition, I mean, that's what
9 it looked like, that there was a respect for the
10 religious object of the other faith.
11 It's a very difficult thing to objectively
12 analyse, weigh and compare the Croatian soldier, the
13 Serbian soldier and the Bosniak soldier, et cetera, et
14 cetera,. But I think when the inventories are finally
15 completed on what happened to sacral heritage, one will
16 find out that there was one side that did behave better
17 than the other sides. Why was that? I'm always
18 turning that one around and maybe I'm starting to find
19 some answers to it. Excuse me, I'm not being very
20 clear.
21 In this war, people are always looking for
22 simple answers. There were people outside in the
23 international community who said that, they are all a
24 bunch of savages so we don't go and intervene. Then
25 there were other ones who said, oh, no, no, it was a
1 fantastic place, they loved each other throughout their
2 history they lived together, et cetera, et cetera, and
3 the truth is somewhere between.
4 If you look at Islam, Islam has a special
5 relationship to the Christian religion, a relationship
6 that the Christians do not have with the Islam
7 religion. Islam is a younger religion than
8 Christianity, and Christians, Jews, are so-called
9 people of the book. Our prophets are also the prophets
10 under Islam. So there is a special kind of
11 relationship, special attitude of Islam towards
12 Christians.
13 In Bosnia-Herzegovina, there's something
14 else, is that the Turks, the Ottoman Empire controlled
15 the area for four centuries. It was an empire of
16 relative degree of tolerance, not sort of -- there's
17 been a lot of said about how tolerant it was. It was
18 fairly tolerant compared to many Christian monarchies
19 of the period. In other words, I think that there's a
20 kind of activism on the part of the Bosniaks. They
21 tolerate, they have a history of tolerating the other
22 religions. They were powerful. It's a memory of a
23 power, of their society, of the civilisation, the
24 Ottoman civilisation there in Bosnia. It's a long,
25 long memory of it. It's a sense, although it doesn't
1 manifest itself that way, a kind of a sense of
2 superiority, this respect and tolerance.
3 And I think to a degree, that Christians
4 whether they be Catholic or Orthodox, too have not
5 forgotten something. They have not forgotten that they
6 were tolerated. They have a different relationship.
7 As I say, I'm sort of thinking out loud, I'm looking
8 for reasons why it happened this way, because I don't
9 believe necessarily that Sarajevo could give an order
10 and it would be respected everywhere. Something deeper
11 in individual people, and whatever the reasons, it is
12 something of value, and wherever it occurred, whatever
13 Serb or Croat or Bosniak, it's of value.
14 With respect to cultural heritage, when the
15 final inventory is drawn up, I think it will be shown
16 that the Bosniaks behaved better than the other sides.
17 I wrote that in 1994, and today I still believe it.
18 Q. A couple of follow-up questions, Doctor,
19 concerning some questions asked to you on
20 cross-examination. The first has to do with the lists
21 that were provided --
22 JUDGE JORDA: I would ask you to answer the
23 questions, not to go beyond the scope of the questions,
24 because in respect of the Defence, it could be thrown
25 off balance. Generally, you must answer the questions
1 directly. Try to answer as specifically as you can.
2 Thank you very much.
3 MR. KEHOE:
4 Q. Doctor, you were asked some questions about
5 this list of Islamic sites that was given to you by a
6 representative from the Office of the Prosecutor, from
7 the Islamic institute in Sarajevo; is that right?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. Was that list correct?
10 A. I pointed out that there were a few little
11 problems with the list, but I believe it is basically
12 95 per cent correct.
13 Q. Did you conduct your own survey of those
14 sites, in that you viewed the sites and made your own
15 determinations concerning completely destroyed,
16 seriously damaged, lightly damaged, or was that a
17 decision that was made to you by some other
18 institution?
19 A. No, I checked what was on the list presented
20 by the Islamic community. Nobody else told me to go
21 there or not to go there or whatever, if that's what
22 you mean.
23 Q. You made your own decisions?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. Now, if I can ask you to take a look at
1 Exhibit 390A. This is a map that has been received in
2 evidence which is a view of Gomionica, if you could put
3 that on the ELMO, please? You testified previously
4 that there was a mekteb in Gomionica; is that right?
5 A. That's correct, yes.
6 Q. Is that designated as point 3?
7 A. Yes, it is.
8 Q. You were asked a couple of questions by
9 Defence counsel concerning the identification of
10 mektebs, and I believe you said, both in cross and in
11 direct, that often from the outside a mekteb is
12 difficult to identify; is that right?
13 A. That's correct.
14 Q. Now, you then said in cross-examination that
15 sometimes you can see the outline of the mihrab on the
16 mekteb?
17 A. That's correct.
18 Q. Well, certainly could you not identify a
19 Islamic sacral site if you went inside?
20 A. Of course.
21 Q. The other side, if you take a look at
22 Exhibit 390, you were asked some questions about a
23 turbe in Gomionica. Is that designated in point 2?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. On Exhibit 390? Thank you, Mr. Usher. I'm
1 done with that exhibit. If we can turn our attention
2 to the maps --
3 JUDGE JORDA: Mr. Kehoe, do you have many
4 questions? This is in order for us to organise our
5 work.
6 MR. KEHOE: Mr. President, two or three.
7 JUDGE JORDA: Very well, go ahead.
8 MR. KEHOE:
9 Q. If we can just start on this first map, 451?
10 Doctor, you identified these areas on Exhibit 451, as
11 basically, front-line positions; is that correct?
12 A. Yes, in front-line zones, yes.
13 Q. Front-line zones.
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Generally, soldiers in front-line zones are
16 pretty busy, aren't they?
17 A. Well, it depends if -- yes, they can be very
18 busy. Sometimes they are just waiting.
19 JUDGE JORDA: Ask your questions directly,
20 Mr. Kehoe. We could assume that soldiers are occupied
21 with things. Ask your question, please.
22 MR. KEHOE:
23 Q. If there is fighting going on in these areas,
24 and trenches are being laid in these areas, one would
25 assume that the soldiers in the trenches are busy;
1 correct?
2 A. Of course.
3 Q. Defending themselves or engaging in an
4 offensive?
5 A. Of course, yes, yes.
6 Q. And the two maps that you gave us, Exhibits
7 353 and 354, the maps where the various locales are
8 designated as being destroyed in HVO territory in
9 varying capacities, they are within HVO lines, aren't
10 they?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. And the most significant damage that you
13 observed was done in areas that was within the control
14 of the HVO?
15 A. Yes.
16 MR. KEHOE: Mr. President, Your Honours, I
17 have no further questions.
18 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you. I would like to
19 consult with my colleagues for a moment.
20 The interpreters are going to be the judges
21 now. They are the ones who take the decision. I've
22 consulted with my colleagues. We have about 20 or 25
23 minutes of questions that the Judges want to ask,
24 depending, of course, on how the answers are given.
25 Then I think that there are no other witnesses, is that
1 correct, Mr. Kehoe?
2 MR. KEHOE: No, that's correct, Mr.
3 President. This is the last witness for the day.
4 JUDGE JORDA: Very well, the interpreters are
5 tired. In light of their fatigue, would they like to
6 take a break immediately and then come back for the 25
7 minutes or would they prefer that we finish now? For
8 once, we're going to bow to the interpreters' will. I
9 think we're going to take a break. There has to be
10 unanimity here. There is no unanimous consensus, then
11 we take a break.
12 --- Recess taken at 4.17 p.m.
13 --- On resuming at 4.43 p.m.
14 JUDGE JORDA: Please be seated. Have the
15 accused brought in. We will now resume the hearing for
16 the questions the Judges would like to ask.
17 (The accused entered court)
18 JUDGE JORDA: Let me first turn to Judge
19 Riad.
20 Judge Riad?
21 JUDGE RIAD: Good afternoon, Dr. Kaiser. I
22 would like to have some more information from you.
23 That was very informative testimony, but I would like
24 to have the benefit of your knowledge. Perhaps if you
25 are in a position to answer me, because sometimes it
1 might be beyond your scope, although you are really
2 here in two capacities. You are an expert on cultural
3 heritage, and you have the ground experience of what
4 happened. So in light of these two main backgrounds,
5 I'll ask you my questions.
6 You first went to Bosnia in June 1994 and
7 then April 1998. You went twice?
8 A. Your Honour, I went in May/June 1994 on a
9 mission with the ECMM for the Council of Europe. I
10 have since been back. I worked a lot in Mostar from
11 the fall of 1994 to the summer of 1995. In October
12 1995, I became a representative of UNESCO in
13 Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I'm there all the time since
14 October 1995.
15 JUDGE RIAD: All the time?
16 A. Yes.
17 JUDGE RIAD: Then you are really an
18 eyewitness. I'm speaking of the list that was given to
19 you from ICTY in April 1998. You verified the damage
20 done to certain sites. Now, this damage was done in
21 1994 or 1993. It was done before. Would this lapse of
22 time increase the damage or would it make it worse or
23 would it make it better if it were repaired?
24 A. Of course it makes it worse. When the roof
25 is damaged, the rain is coming in and the ceiling is
1 rotting. If the building has been damaged by
2 explosives and it has not been attended to, the damage
3 gets worse, yes.
4 JUDGE RIAD: In your opinion, much of it was
5 repaired or much of it had deteriorated more?
6 A. Well, let's say that the mosque, mesjids and
7 mektebs, which are in the territory controlled by
8 Armija, many of them have been repaired if they were
9 damaged. In the other territory, if they had been
10 damaged, they have not been repaired.
11 JUDGE RIAD: In the places occupied by the
12 HVO, nothing has been repaired?
13 A. Nothing has been repaired.
14 JUDGE RIAD: Nothing has been repaired.
15 A. With one exception, one exception. In
16 Rotilj, the mekteb, in fact, wasn't damaged. It wasn't
17 damaged by HVO soldiers. It was damaged by refugees,
18 in fact, who lived in it, so there's a totally
19 different kind of damage, and that has been repaired,
20 but that was the only case.
21 JUDGE RIAD: Speaking of the damage, you
22 mentioned there were several degrees of damage. Would
23 you consider that -- you said that, among other things,
24 there was no minaret standing in HVO territory. Did I
25 understand you rightly?
1 A. Yes.
2 JUDGE RIAD: Would you consider that there
3 was something systematic in trying to make all these
4 minarets disappear?
5 A. Yes.
6 JUDGE RIAD: Systematic?
7 A. If they all went, there was something --
8 JUDGE RIAD: Not individual endeavours, by
9 angry, angry, indigenous people of the police.
10 A. Angry, indigenous people --
11 JUDGE RIAD: Of the villages, just each one
12 trying to destroy something.
13 A. To destroy a minaret, you need explosives.
14 JUDGE RIAD: Yes, and they were destroyed in
15 some kind of a homogenous manner. You mentioned some
16 of it was lying in a certain way.
17 A. I believe that usually the explosives were
18 set by people who are professionals, they knew what
19 they were doing. In a few cases, not, but usually
20 yes.
21 JUDGE RIAD: By experts. And by heavy
22 weapons, heavy mines, heavy explosives?
23 A. Well, enough explosive to do the job. It's
24 sort of a graduated scale, I think. It was well-dosed
25 to do what was necessary. It depends on whether the
1 building materials are brick, whether they're concrete,
2 whether they're stone. It depends on the building
3 materials you have.
4 JUDGE RIAD: It was by professional
5 expertise.
6 A. Most of the time, I think so, yes.
7 JUDGE RIAD: Would you rule out the fact that
8 all of these minarets would have been destroyed in the
9 fighting?
10 A. When you're fighting, you're doing something
11 else. You are not shooting -- there is no point to
12 shoot at a mosque, unless it's being used militarily.
13 There's no reason to do so. I don't think that in
14 fighting that the mosques were damaged. As I pointed
15 out, there was very, very little damage from military
16 means on the frontlines.
17 JUDGE RIAD: So they were aimed at
18 specifically? It was a specific damage, not casual
19 damage done in fighting?
20 A. The mining of the minarets was specific
21 destruction, yes, outside of the fighting. It was by
22 firing -- if you burnt the mosque that had a minaret in
23 the roof like Han Ploca, that minaret fell through. If
24 you have a brick or a cement, reinforcing-steel
25 structured minaret, you use mines or some other
1 explosives.
2 JUDGE RIAD: Speaking of damage, you said
3 that the sacral Muslim heritage was severely or totally
4 damaged in Vitez, severely or totally damaged in
5 Vitez.
6 A. Okay, Vitez municipality under HVO control,
7 yes.
8 JUDGE RIAD: That was, let's say, the
9 stronghold of the headquarters?
10 A. Yes.
11 JUDGE RIAD: There was no protection from the
12 authorities, because you mentioned an example of Pecine
13 village where you went and the monastery was protected
14 by two soldiers, by two BiH soldiers?
15 A. Two BiH policemen after the war.
16 JUDGE RIAD: After the war?
17 A. Yes.
18 JUDGE RIAD: But to prevent damage?
19 A. Yes, yes.
20 JUDGE RIAD: Was there anything like that in
21 Vitez, the protection of the sites of the sacral Muslim
22 heritage?
23 A. During the war, you're asking?
24 JUDGE RIAD: Whenever you went.
25 A. I did not see any protection of the sites.
1 They were all damaged. There were no policemen. There
2 were no soldiers around them.
3 JUDGE RIAD: And they were all damaged?
4 A. Yes, the ones I saw, yes.
5 JUDGE RIAD: You said "totally or severely
6 damaged," to quote you right?
7 A. Yes.
8 JUDGE RIAD: Now, you mentioned that you have
9 to fly a flag in order to indicate that it is a
10 religious site or a cultural site; is that right?
11 A. I think it is recommended that you have to do
12 so. Normally, the lists are supposed to be
13 communicated between two warring sides. So even if you
14 don't fly the flag, they are supposed to know where it
15 is.
16 JUDGE RIAD: Do you think that you should
17 also fly a flag on a minaret or does it speak for
18 itself?
19 A. To fly a flag to protect it?
20 JUDGE RIAD: To protect a minaret, is it
21 compulsory? If there's no flag on the minaret --
22 A. Whether or not there's a flag on the minaret
23 doesn't matter. You are not supposed to shoot at it.
24 JUDGE RIAD: You are not supposed to shoot at
25 it. I think I have one more question for you. You
1 went through many details.
2 I think I'm well-informed. Thank you very
3 much.
4 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you, Judge Riad. Of
5 course, if you have any additional questions, you can
6 ask them whenever you like, once your colleague or
7 myself have asked our questions.
8 Judge Shahabuddeen?
9 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Dr. Kaiser, would I be
10 write in compartmentalising your testimony this way:
11 There is a general part in which you spoke to us very
12 engagingly, if I may say so, of the need which all
13 communities feel to identify themselves by one method
14 or another, and there is a specific part in which you
15 told us of your observations in Bosnia, and you sought
16 to relate that to the general part. Would that be a
17 correct appreciation of your testimony?
18 A. That's a very generous appreciation.
19 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Thank you. Let us take
20 the general part. Would I be right in understanding
21 you this way: That all communities have a common need
22 to identify themselves. They may do so by one method
23 or another, and some communities may place greater
24 reliance on one method than another?
25 A. Yes.
1 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Now, these methods would
2 include, history, culture, religion, religious
3 buildings, and religious objects, among others; am I
4 right?
5 A. Yes.
6 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Now, let us take
7 history. You did your doctoral thesis in France?
8 A. I did it in London but it was French
9 history.
10 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: I'm glad for the
11 correction, but it doesn't blank the point I am about
12 to put to you and it is this: With no disrespect to
13 one country or another, would I be right in saying that
14 the body of historical writing in, say, France about
15 France is of greater density and larger proportion than
16 the corresponding body of history in Bosnia?
17 A. I think that would be the case, yes.
18 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Where the levels of
19 historical writing differ, would I be correct to say
20 that a community which disposes of a lower level of
21 historical writing would tend to place greater reliance
22 on religious buildings, religious objects, cultural
23 artefacts for the purpose of meeting this common need,
24 which all communities feel, to identify themselves?
25 A. I think that would be a reasonable
1 hypothesis, yes.
2 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Thank you. Would I be
3 right in saying that in Bosnia, the infliction of
4 damage on a religious building would tend to perpetrate
5 a greater sense of injury on the perception by people
6 of its own identity than in the case of a country which
7 could place greater reliance on its sense of history?
8 A. That could be the case. But, for example,
9 after World War I in France, which already in 1918 had
10 a very, very, very long and extensive rich written
11 memory, the necessity to rebuild churches destroyed in
12 bombardments was felt very strongly, and enormous
13 resources were put into rebuilding hundreds of
14 churches. So what you're saying could be so, but it
15 would have to be nuanced as well.
16 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Yes, indeed, yes,
17 indeed, that would be so, but I'm concerned not with
18 the absolute need felt by people to repair buildings,
19 but the relativity’s involved.
20 Let us go to the question of mono-ethnic
21 villages. I understood you to be saying that, yes,
22 there were many villages in Bosnia which were
23 mono-ethnic. Would I be right in understanding you to
24 mean this: That a village which was mono-ethnic in the
25 sense of being composed of Croats could, nevertheless,
1 co-exist in the same region with another village which
2 was mono-ethnic in the sense of being composed of, say,
3 Serbs or Bosniaks?
4 A. Yes.
5 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Would you draw a
6 distinction between a situation where, within one
7 region, you have a case of coexistence of different
8 mono-ethnic villages on one side, and on the other side
9 a region which consists entirely of mono-ethnic
10 villages?
11 A. I would draw a distinction.
12 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: You would. If the
13 evolution moved from the former to the latter
14 situation, then I understand your testimony to mean
15 that a change would be perpetrated on the identity of
16 both peoples; is that correct?
17 A. Yes, absolutely.
18 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Now, let us move to the
19 question of reprisals. It's a word you used. I,
20 myself, will not repeat it to you in any more technical
21 sense than that in which you may have employed it.
22 Would I be correct in understanding you to mean this:
23 Yes, on the side of the Bosniaks, there were instances
24 in which damage was done to Catholic places of
25 religious worship and so on, but that that was done by
1 way of reprisals in the sense of ad hoc, retaliatory
2 action; is that a way of understanding your evidence,
3 or should I understand that to mean that this signified
4 the adoption by the Bosniaks also of a policy of ethnic
5 separation?
6 A. I think there's a problem of calendars and
7 chronologies that always has to be sorted out --
8 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Tell me that.
9 A. -- in these cases, otherwise, you don't know
10 whether something is a reprisal or not. That's the
11 answer to the first part of your question. The second
12 part of your question: Is there an evolution towards a
13 solution on all parties of mono-ethnicity in the war?
14 I believe that is what you're saying. I'm looking now
15 across a perspective of the piece, and I would say
16 across a perspective of the piece, I think that is
17 happening. It was probably happening in the war, too,
18 in certain areas, also in Armija-controlled territory.
19 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: So that was the de facto
20 position. Was that also the policy of the ABiH?
21 A. I don't think it was. I don't think so.
22 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Now, you told us, if I
23 may translate your terms, of a religious predisposition
24 on the part of the Bosniaks to regard with a certain
25 degree of respect Catholic places of worship; is that
1 correct?
2 A. That's correct.
3 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: You told us of seeing
4 ABiH soldiers or policemen guarding Catholic places of
5 worship which had been damaged?
6 A. In a few cases, yes.
7 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Did you ever see on the
8 other side any HVO soldiers or policemen guarding
9 damaged Bosniak buildings of worship?
10 A. After the war, yes, but not during the war.
11 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Not during the war?
12 A. Not during the war.
13 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Let us stick to the
14 period of the war. Was this a matter of public
15 knowledge that ABiH soldiers and policemen were
16 guarding and protecting Catholic places of worship
17 which had been damaged?
18 A. I can't really answer that. I don't know
19 that.
20 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: You can't answer that.
21 A. No.
22 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Let us talk a little
23 about Bugojno. You saw, I think, some damage to a
24 Catholic place of worship, did you?
25 A. Yes.
1 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: And you had occasion to
2 write to the Uleima?
3 A. Yes.
4 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: For the purposes of the
5 record, am I right in saying that the Uleima is a
6 learned, religious gentleman --
7 A. Yes.
8 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: -- in a leadership
9 position?
10 A. Yes, he is the leader of the Islamic
11 community.
12 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: What was his reaction;
13 do you know?
14 A. He did not write back to me, but I heard he
15 was furious.
16 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: Furious about your
17 writing to him or furious about the damage?
18 A. He thought I should be taking much more
19 interest in Muslim cemeteries and not raising this
20 problem of the Catholic cemeteries.
21 JUDGE SHAHABUDDEEN: I see. Then I thank
22 you. That is the last question I wanted to ask you.
23 JUDGE JORDA: That was your last question.
24 I'm going to ask you only a few questions, and then my
25 colleague, Judge Riad, may have one or two questions to
1 ask, and then you will be finished.
2 I might ask you somewhat of an indiscreet
3 question. Were any other studies done on the question
4 of cultural destruction? Do you direct thesis? Do you
5 know students who might be working in that area or,
6 perhaps, any other researchers elsewhere in the world
7 that would be interested in that aspect of the war in
8 the former Yugoslavia?
9 A. During the war, Dr. Marion Wenzel, who is a
10 noted specialist of the country, especially of the
11 Stezi (phoen), you will find her reports also with the
12 Council of Europe. She was also involved with this.
13 I'm afraid I'm not aware of many initiatives during the
14 war outside of the Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
15 There was a tendency to put into circulation
16 lists of damaged heritage which were totally
17 uncontrollable and not very, very useful. After the
18 war, yes, there's a big interest after the war in the
19 damage of cultural heritage.
20 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you. If I've understood
21 you correctly, the mektebs are not very easily
22 distinguishable from the churches or the mosques. In
23 your opinion, in order to destroy them in any
24 systematic fashion, in a well-targeted fashion, in your
25 opinion, would you say that you would have to be a
1 soldier who comes from that area in order to spot them
2 quickly?
3 A. Yes, it's true in the case of the mektebs and
4 in the case of some mesjids. You wouldn't necessarily
5 know what it is, and you would have to come from the
6 area in order to do so. For the mosques, that's an
7 obvious thing.
8 JUDGE JORDA: Do you think that the
9 destruction might have been caused by civilians,
10 civilians that were not under the control of the
11 military personnel, for example, who had been inflamed
12 by propaganda? Do you think that would be possible?
13 A. Absolutely. The one photograph that I showed
14 of the roof being stripped, the bottom part of the
15 roof, I think that was probably done by civilians who
16 needed those tiles. There are other types of damage,
17 for example, in a mekteb in Dolci. There is a very
18 poor burning attempt on the floor which doesn't show
19 very much determination. I think maybe that could even
20 be children who attempted to fire it. Adults might be
21 more determined. Soldiers would be better equipped.
22 JUDGE JORDA: I understand. From the point
23 of view of proportions, without being particularly
24 specific but in a general fashion, in the type of
25 vandalism that you noticed, were there more ritualistic
1 types of vandalism than others? My second question, I
2 have two, if "yes," were your observations something
3 that would lead you to think that what was involved
4 with was a ritualistic vandalism?
5 I know my question was long. Let me say it
6 again: First of all, are there ritualistic types of
7 vandalism? For example, in a Catholic church, one
8 might shell the walls of the church. That's a
9 ritualistic vandalism. But if you were to go into the
10 tabernacle and pull out the hostises and throw them on
11 the ground, that would be a ritualistic act of
12 vandalism which would be even stronger.
13 In the destruction that you noted, were you
14 able to see that, in general, people went to the very
15 heart of the ritual and to the very heart of the
16 religious symbolism?
17 A. Dealing with the destruction of a Catholic
18 church by Serbs, there is so much similarity in
19 religions that you know where to go and what to
20 destroy. When it comes to dealing with an Islamic
21 building, I'm not so certain that the Christians know
22 as well. I've seen a few cases where, perhaps, a
23 ritual is made up by those who did the destruction,
24 that is, a setting of fire in the mihrab, which we
25 would all know points towards Mecca.
1 In the case, possibly, of the Kiseljak
2 mosque, if you look at the structure around the mihrab,
3 the picture is not good, but it looks like somebody has
4 been shooting at it and knocking the bricks off. But
5 unless one considers the destruction of the minaret
6 itself, but that's an invented ritual of those who
7 destroy, it doesn't go to the heart of a desecration, I
8 think.
9 JUDGE JORDA: I have two further questions.
10 Would you agree with me when I say that there are wars
11 that are more territorial and economic wars, and there
12 are others that are more ethnic. In the first
13 category, one might consider, since you seem to be a
14 specialist of French history, that the revolutionary
15 wars or the war of 1914 were fought in order to gain
16 the territories of Alsace-Lorraine.
17 If you were to make a comment in this area
18 that you're familiar with, would the principal
19 characteristic of this war be the ritualistic war,
20 religious, which would consist of going to destroy
21 one's enemy to the very bottom of its own symbolism?
22 Would that be a powerful characteristic of that type of
23 war, in your opinion?
24 A. I think it became that. That's a harder
25 question to answer than it might seem. Those who
1 unleashed the war, unleashed it particularly for their
2 own reasons. They had their own motives. They may
3 have nothing to do or not much to do with those
4 questions, but they certainly knew how to mobilise
5 those kinds of energies on the part of their peoples.
6 In the end, yes, as it went on, I think it became more
7 and more that sort of struggle.
8 JUDGE JORDA: My final question: You were
9 able to draw some kind of a map where there would be an
10 almost perfect equalisation between a territory
11 occupied by the HVO, which would have a destroyed
12 mosque, and a Christian steeple, which had been
13 maintained in good condition?
14 A. Mm-hmm.
15 JUDGE JORDA: Yes?
16 A. Yes, I believe so.
17 JUDGE JORDA: Very well. Thank you very
18 much. I know that my colleague Judge Riad had one or
19 two additional questions to ask. The floor is yours
20 again, Judge Riad.
21 JUDGE RIAD: Dr. Kaiser, your answer to my
22 eminent colleague, Judge Shahabuddeen, brought to my
23 mind some other statements by you, as he said, in your
24 general part, as a witness in history, apparently. I
25 noted even what you said. You said that there was a
1 message in destroying the minarets, because where there
2 are minarets, there are Muslims. The message was to
3 the Muslims, "We don't want to live with you anymore,"
4 and that the message was that they wanted to remove the
5 Muslims from the memory of history, from the memory of
6 the people, getting the Muslims out of chronology. You
7 said the words "and out of the history of the
8 country." These are very strong statements.
9 Whereas, the Bosniaks accepted the
10 coexistence. This parallels, perhaps, what Judge Jorda
11 pointed out in your comparison. Then you also were
12 speaking about the trend towards mono-ethnicity. You
13 think the idea was to annihilate their existence
14 through the destruction of cultural heritage, to
15 annihilate the presence of the Muslim Bosniaks?
16 A. Yes, I think that's what was going on here,
17 yes.
18 JUDGE RIAD: Whether it's vice versa or not,
19 but not vice versa, in your opinion.
20 A. It's a horribly contaminating thing that
21 happened in Bosnia.
22 JUDGE RIAD: But you're statement really
23 means that the idea was to erase them out of history,
24 to erase the Bosniaks out of history, and that was the
25 purpose of the destruction of the minarets, of the
1 cultural heritage?
2 A. To get rid, physically, of the people, to get
3 rid of them of the memory of the region, and, as I also
4 said, to remove them from the Croat.
5 JUDGE RIAD: So an ethnological annihilation?
6 A. Yes, to change fundamentally the Croatian
7 identity in these areas. You have mono-ethnic villages
8 where people may live to together. They may live
9 separately most of the day, but there is an
10 interaction. They are giving something to each other
11 during the period that they are there. One of the
12 reasons for all of this destruction, whichever side, is
13 to get rid of that other person who is in your people,
14 inside of, in the memory, in the way of doing things.
15 JUDGE RIAD: Thank you very much.
16 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you, Judge Riad. Thank
17 you, Doctor, it was long, but interesting. We're going
18 to now send you back to your work, your very
19 interesting work, and we want to thank you.
20 We will first ask the registrar to have the
21 usher escort Dr. Kaiser out of the courtroom.
22 (The witness withdrew)
23 JUDGE JORDA: Thank you very much.
24 Registrar, I would like to move into a closed session,
25 please.
1 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at
2 5.25 p.m., to be reconvened on
3 Wednesday, the 22nd day of July, 1998 at
4 2.30 p.m.
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