Details emerge from wartime diaries of Bosnian Serb Gen. Mladic on deals with Bosnian Croats

Details emerge from Mladic’s secret wartime diary

AMSTERDAM — Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic recorded details of secret deals with Bosnian Croats to divide the country and expel the Muslim population in the early 1990s, according to excerpts of his diaries released Friday.

Prosecutors at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague cited Mladic’s diaries, seized in a raid on his wife’s Belgrade home in February, in a motion to reopen the trial of former Bosnian Croat political leader Jadranko Prlic and five other political and military Croat officials that ended two months ago.

They say seized notebooks and audio cassettes support their contention of a Serb-Croat conspiracy following the disintegration of Yugoslavia to drive out Muslims from parts of Bosnia and carve up the state into larger Croatian and Serbian nations.

“We need to agree on 2-3 things today. Muslims are the common enemy,” Mladic’s notebooks quoted Prlic as saying in June 1994.

“There are 2-3 ways to keep them down (first - militarily, by breaking their backbone),” read the note from the meeting that also included Radovan Karadzic, the top Bosnian Serb leader who is standing trial separately.

The excerpts were the first snippets released from the 18 diaries, written in Cyrillic script in Mladic’s hand over 3,500 pages, that chronicled his activities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. An estimated 100,000 people died in the conflict.

Mladic was indicted for genocide by the U.N. tribunal even before the war ended, and has been a fugitive for 15 years.

Only a few notes directly related to the case of the Bosnian Croats were released to support the argument that Mladic’s diaries offer “fresh evidence” warranting a reopening of the four-year-long trial.

The six are accused of the cruel imprisonment of thousands of Muslims in military detention camps, where inmates were brutalized, beaten, underfed and kept in inhuman conditions. Detainees were forced to beat others, including their own families. Some were shot.

The motion said the diaries showed the Croatian defendants conspiring with Bosnian Serb leaders “who were responsible for widespread crimes,” and provided evidence that they also “intended crimes to be committed” to establish a Croatian-dominated state.

“If you kill 50,000 Muslims more, you will not achieve anything. Their population will quickly recover,” the dairies quoted another defendant, Slobodan Praljak, as saying. “The population should be exchanged.”

Beyond incidents involving the Bosnian Croats, the notebooks hold out the promise of a treasure trove of information about behind-the-scenes contacts by the Bosnian Serb leadership, where Mladic had a central role in the planning and military execution of the war.

Prosecutors have applied to introduce them as evidence in the Karadzic genocide trial. They said the wartime records cover discussions about strategic military objectives, possible sanctions and the treatment of civilians in the Srebrenica safe haven on the eve of the massacre there of 8,000 Muslim men by Mladic’s forces and Serb paramilitaries.

They also include conversations with Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader accused of engineering Yugoslavia’s breakup who died of a heart attack in 2006 before his own war crimes trial was concluded. The diaries also have Mladic’s notes from meetings with international mediators, former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and former British Foreign Secretary David Owen.