An organisation led by convicted war criminal Momcilo Krajisnik has received over 40,000 euros in public funding from the government in Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska.
When Momcilo Krajisnik was released from prison in 2013 after serving his sentence for committing crimes against humanity during the Bosnian war, he said that he simply planned to go back to work at a petrol station run by his children in the Bosnian town of Pale.
But since then the convicted war criminal, now 74, has taken a more prominent role in public life, becoming the first president of the Asocijacija Stvaraoci Republike Srpske (Creators of Republika Srpska Association), which is funded by the government in Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity.
In 2017, the association received 14,500 euros from the entity budget; in 2018 it was granted 14,000 euros, and this year it got 15,000 euros.
The association’s website says it is a non-political organisation whose main aim is “encouraging the realisation of the principles on which Republika Srpska is based”.
It represents those who actively participated in the establishment of Republika Srpska in 1992 – like Krajisnik, who alongside Radovan Karadzic was a key figure in the formation of the Serb-led entity several months before the Bosnian war broke out.
The Creators of Republika Srpska Association lists its areas of interest as freedom and human rights, the economic recovery of Republika Srpska and public health and social protection of citizens, amongst other things.
It says it also intends to offer solutions to the political and economic crisis in Bosnia and encourage the protection of individuals and groups suffering the effects of war.
Among its activities, it promises to work on the promotion and protection of the Serbian language and Cyrillic script, and to mark important dates for Republika Srpska.
The latest information available about its activities on the association’s website dates back to 2017, when Krajisnik had a meeting with the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Irinej and Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, who was also convicted of wartime crimes by the Hague Tribunal in 2018.
The most recent press release on the association’s website, also dated 2017, said it supports Republika Srpska’s then-president Milorad Dodik in his decision to hold a referendum to gain support for defying a ruling by the state-level Constitutional Court that banned the entity’s controversial ‘statehood day’ holiday.
Critics have expressed discontent about the fact that Krajisnik’s organisation has been receiving tens of thousands of euros of public funding.
“We should not be surprised by these figures, that we as taxpayers are basically paying a wartime criminal, if we bear in mind all the public support he [Krajisnik] gets from major politicians,” Sarajevo-based political analyst Zlatiborka Popov Momcinovic told BIRN.
BIRN contacted the association several times in an attempt to find out more about its activities and about Krajisnik’s role, but only received a brief written answer.
“We can inform you that nobody ever – you are the first – has seen as problematic the fact that Mr. Krajisnik is the president of the association,” it said.
Convicts honoured
Radovan Karadzic, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Hague Tribunal last month, was a close political colleague of Krajisnik. The two men were co-founders of the Serb Democratic Party, which was the strongest political force among Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s.
Krajisnik served as Republika Srpska’s parliamentary speaker from 1990 to 1992 and was briefly a member of its presidency; he also led the Bosnian Serbs’ negotiating team at the Dayton peace talks which ended the war in 1995.
In the first post-war elections in 1996, Krajisnik was elected as the Serb member of the tripartite Bosnian presidency. He was then arrested in 2000 and sent to The Hague to stand trial.
The UN court found him guilty of crimes against humanity in 2009, convicting him of responsibility for the persecution and deportations of Bosniaks and Croats in ten Bosnian municipalities between April and December 1992.
He insisted he was innocent, however, and told BIRN in an interview in 2015 that the trial was a “theatre show in the courtroom”.
“I was found guilty because the Hague Tribunal concluded that Republika Srpska was created through ethnic cleansing,” Krajisnik said. “According to them, the core leadership of the Bosnian Serbs was guilty of this – Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, myself and others. In essence, if one of us was guilty of something, we all were, so I was convicted of crimes I knew nothing of.”
In 2016, he published a book entitled ‘How Republika Srpska was Born’, in which he described his time in prison as a “longer business trip”.
Several thousand Bosnian Serbs gathered in Pale to greet him when he returned to the country following his release in 2013, and he has retained support from officials in Republika Srpska since then.
The Republika Srpska National Assembly caused controversy in October 2016 when it decided to honour him, alongside Karadzic and Biljana Plavsic, an ex-president of the entity and another convicted war criminal.
The awards, called Charters of the Republika Srpska National Assembly, were given to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Bosnian Serb entity’s parliament.
Popov Momcinovic argued that the continuing respect shown to convicted war criminals is a barrier to reconciliation.
“All that is happening only reinforces the long-running ethnic division in Bosnia without any compassion for victims and those who survived all that happened during the years from 1992 to 1995,” she said.
Political interventions
While the Creators of Republika Srpska Association’s website has not been updated for a long time, Krajisnik has not been silent in the public arena, offering his political opinions in the wake of Bosnia’s general elections in October 2018 and the lengthy process of forming administrations at all levels of government that followed.
When opposition parties in Republika Srpska were pondering a proposal from Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik for them all to cooperate at the state level, Krajisnik came out in support – even though his former party, the now-opposition Serb Democratic Party, and its leader, Vukota Govedarica, were strongly against the idea.
Right after the elections in 2018, Krajsnik also proposed the idea that the Serb Democratic Party and Dodik’s ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats should set aside their disagreements and put Republika Srpska “beyond party interests” – a move seen as likely to strengthen Dodik’s political control over the entity.
Banja Luka-based analyst Tanja Topic said that Krajisnik and Dodik “are often on the same page when it comes to the ‘interests of Republika Srpska’ and the ‘united approach of Serb officials’”.
“He (Krajisnik) is regular guest at almost every reception hosted by Dodik and I cannot recall any case in which Krajisnik opposed any idea of Dodik’s,” Topic told BIRN.
BIRN approached Krajisnik for a comment on the work of the Creators of Republika Srpska Association and his relations with Dodik, but was told that “all inquiries should be addressed to the secretary of the association”.
