CR 2006/22
International Court Cour internationale
of Justice de Justice
THHEAGUE LAAYE
YEAR 2006
Public sitting
held on Friday 17 March 2006, at 10 a.m., at the Peace Palace,
President Higgins presiding,
in the case concerning the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro)
________________
VERBATIM RECORD
________________
ANNÉE 2006
Audience publique
tenue le vendredi 17 mars 2006, à 10 heures, au Palais de la Paix,
sous la présidence de Mme Higgins, président,
en l’affaire relative à l’Application de la convention pour la prévention et la répression du
crime de génocide (Bosnie-Herzégovine c. Serbie-et-Monténégro)
____________________
COMPTE RENDU
____________________ - 2 -
Present: Presieigtgins
Vice-Prsi-Kntasawneh
Ranjevaudges
Shi
Koroma
Parra-Aranguren
Owada
Simma
Tomka
Abraham
Keith
Sepúlveda
Bennouna
Skotnikov
Judges ad hoc Mahiou
Kre ća
Couevrisrar
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ - 3 -
Présents : Mme Higgins,président
Al-K.vsce-prh,ident
RaMjev.
Shi
Koroma
Parra-Aranguren
Owada
Simma
Tomka
Abraham
Keith
Sepúlveda
Bennouna
Sjoteiskov,
MaMhou.,
Kre ća, juges ad hoc
Cgoefferr,
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ - 4 -
The Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina is represented by:
Mr. Sakib Softić,
as Agent;
Mr. Phon van den Biesen, Attorney at Law, Amsterdam,
as Deputy Agent;
Mr.Alain Pellet, Professor at the University of ParisX-Nanterre, Member and former Chairman of
the International Law Commission of the United Nations,
Mr. Thomas M. Franck, Professor of Law Emeritus, New York University School of Law,
Ms Brigitte Stern, Professor at the University of Paris I,
Mr. Luigi Condorelli, Professor at the Facultyof Law of the University of Florence,
Ms Magda Karagiannakis, B.Ec, LL.B, LL.M.,Barrister at Law, Melbourne, Australia,
Ms Joanna Korner, Q.C.,Barrister at Law, London,
Ms Laura Dauban, LL.B (Hons),
as Counsel and Advocates;
Mr. Morten Torkildsen, BSc, MSc, Tork ildsen Granskin og Rådgivning, Norway,
as Expert Counsel and Advocate;
H.E. Mr. Fuad Šabeta, Ambassadorof Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Kingdom of the Netherlands,
Mr. Wim Muller, LL.M, M.A.,
Mr. Mauro Barelli, LL.M (University of Bristol),
Mr. Ermin Sarajlija, LL.M,
Mr. Amir Bajrić, LL.M,
Ms Amra Mehmedić, LL.M,
Mr. Antoine Ollivier, Temporary Lecturer and Research Assistant, University of Paris X-Nanterre, - 5 -
Le Gouvernement de la Bosnie-Herzégovine est représenté par :
M. Sakib Softić,
coagment;
M. Phon van den Biesen, avocat, Amsterdam,
comme agent adjoint;
M. Alain Pellet, professeur à l’Université de ParisX-Nanterre, membre et ancien président de la
Commission du droit international des Nations Unies,
M. Thomas M. Franck, professeur émérite à lafaculté de droit de l’Université de New York,
Mme Brigitte Stern, professeur à l’Université de Paris I,
M. Luigi Condorelli, professeur à la fact de droit de l’Université de Florence,
Mme Magda Karagiannakis, B.Ec., LL.B., LL.M.,Barrister at Law, Melbourne (Australie),
Mme Joanna Korner, Q.C.,Barrister at Law, Londres,
Mme Laura Dauban, LL.B. (Hons),
comme conseils et avocats;
M. Morten Torkildsen, BSc., MSc., Tork ildsen Granskin og Rådgivning, Norvège,
comme conseil-expert et avocat;
S. Exc. M. Fuad Šabeta, ambassadeur de Bosn ie-Herzégovine auprès duRoyaume des Pays-Bas,
M. Wim Muller, LL.M., M.A.,
M. Mauro Barelli, LL.M. (Université de Bristol),
M. Ermin Sarajlija, LL.M.,
M. Amir Bajrić, LL.M.,
Mme Amra Mehmedić, LL.M.,
M. Antoine Ollivier, attaché temporaire d’ense ignement et de recher che à l’Université de
Paris X-Nanterre, - 6 -
Ms Isabelle Moulier, Research Student in International Law, University of Paris I,
Mr. Paolo Palchetti, Associate Professor at the University of Macerata (Italy),
as Counsel.
The Government of Serbia and Montenegro is represented by:
Mr. Radoslav Stojanović, S.J.D., Head of the Law Council of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of
Serbia and Montenegro, Professor at the Belgrade University School of Law,
as Agent;
Mr. Saša Obradović, First Counsellor of the Embassy of Serbia and Montenegro in the Kingdom of
the Netherlands,
Mr. Vladimir Cvetković, Second Secretary of the Embassy of Serbia and Montenegro in the
Kingdom of the Netherlands,
as Co-Agents;
Mr.Tibor Varady, S.J.D. (Harvard), Professor of Law at the Central European University,
Budapest and Emory University, Atlanta,
Mr. Ian Brownlie, C.B.E., Q.C., F.B.A., Member of the International Law Commission, member of
the English Bar, Distinguished Fellow of the All Souls College, Oxford,
Mr. Xavier de Roux, Master in law, avocat à la cour, Paris,
Ms Nataša Fauveau-Ivanović, avocat à la cour, Paris and member of the Council of the
International Criminal Bar,
Mr. Andreas Zimmermann, LL.M. (Harvard), Professor of Law at the University of Kiel, Director
of the Walther-Schücking Institute,
Mr. Vladimir Djerić, LL.M. (Michigan), Attorney at Law, Mikijelj, Jankovi ć & Bogdanovi ć,
Belgrade, and President of the International Law Association of Serbia and Montenegro,
Mr. Igor Olujić, Attorney at Law, Belgrade,
as Counsel and Advocates;
Ms Sanja Djajić, S.J.D., Associate Professor at the Novi Sad University School of Law,
Ms Ivana Mroz, LL.M. (Indianapolis),
Mr. Svetislav Rabrenović, Expert-associate at the Office of th e Prosecutor for War Crimes of the
Republic of Serbia, - 7 -
Mme Isabelle Moulier, doctorante en droit international à l’Université de Paris I,
M. Paolo Palchetti, professeur associé à l’Université de Macerata (Italie),
cocomnseils.
Le Gouvernement de la Serbie-et-Monténégro est représenté par :
M. Radoslav Stojanović, S.J.D., chef du conseil juridique du ministère des affaires étrangères de la
Serbie-et-Monténégro, professeur à la faculté de droit de l’Université de Belgrade,
coagment;
M. Saša Obradovi ć, premier conseiller à l’ambassade de Serbie-et-Monténégro au Royaume des
Pays-Bas,
M. Vladimir Cvetković, deuxième secrétaire à l’ambassade de Serbie-et-Monténégro au Royaume
des Pays-Bas,
comme coagents;
M. Tibor Varady, S.J.D. (Harvard), professeur de droit à l’Université d’Europe centrale de
Budapest et à l’Université Emory d’Atlanta,
M. Ian Brownlie, C.B.E., Q.C., F.B.A., membre de la Commission du droit international, membre
du barreau d’Angleterre, Distinguished Fellow au All Souls College, Oxford,
M. Xavier de Roux, maîtrise de droit, avocat à la cour, Paris,
Mme Nataša Fauveau-Ivanovi ć, avocat à la cour, Paris, et membre du conseil du barreau pénal
international,
M. Andreas Zimmermann, LL.M. (Harvard), professeur de droit à l’Université de Kiel, directeur de
l’Institut Walther-Schücking,
M. Vladimir Djeri ć, LL.M. (Michigan), avocat, cabinet Mikijelj, Jankovi ć & Bogdanovi ć,
Belgrade, et président de l’association de droit international de la Serbie-et-Monténégro,
M. Igor Olujić, avocat, Belgrade,
comme conseils et avocats;
Mme Sanja Djajić, S.J.D, professeur associé à la faculté de droit de l’Université de Novi Sad,
Mme Ivana Mroz, LL.M. (Indianapolis),
M. Svetislav Rabrenovi ć, expert-associé au bureau du procureur pour les crimes de guerre de la
République de Serbie, - 8 -
Mr. Aleksandar Djurdjić, LL.M., First Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia and
Montenegro,
Mr. Miloš Jastrebić, Second Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia and Montenegro,
Mr. Christian J. Tams, LL.M. PhD. (Cambridge), Walther-Schücking Institute, University of Kiel,
Ms Dina Dobrkovic, LL.B.,
as Assistants. - 9 -
M. Aleksandar Djurdji ć, LL.M., premier secrétaire au ministère des affaires étrangères de la
Serbie-et-Monténégro,
M. Miloš Jastrebi ć, deuxième secrétaire au ministère des affaires étrangères de la
Serbie-et-Monténégro,
M. Christian J. Tams, LL.M., PhD. (Cambridge), Institut Walther-Schücking, Université de Kiel,
Mme Dina Dobrkovic, LL.B.,
comme assistants. - 10 -
The PRESIDENT: Please be seated. The sitting is now open.
Today, the Court will begin the hearing of the witnesses, experts and witness-experts called
by the Parties, and I am going to explain the procedure to be followed. At the invitation of the
President, the witness, expert or witness-expert w ill enter the Great Hall of Justice and take his
place. The President will then ask the witness, e xpert or witness-expert to make the appropriate
declaration in accordance with Article64 of the Rules of Court. Witnesses will make the
declaration set down in Article6, subparagraph4 (a), of the Rules of Court, while experts and
witness-experts will make the declaration set down in subparagraph (b) of the same Article.
Thereafter, the Agent or counsel of the relevant Party will begin the examination of the witness,
expert or witness-expert. The witness, expert or witness-expert may give his evidence in the form
of a statement and/or as replies to questions put to him by the Party having called him, at the option
of that Party. The other Party may cross-examine the witness, expert or witness-expert and for this
purpose will be allowed the same amount of time as was required for examination. The Party
calling the witness, expert or witness-expert will th en be asked by the President if it wishes to
re-examine. The attention of the Parties is drawn to the fact that any such re-examination must be
brief and limited in scope to the issues already d ealt with in cross-examination. Thereafter, the
Court will retire, but the Parties and the witness, expert or witness-expert should remain in the
vicinity of the Great Hall of Justice. If the Cour t wishes to put questions to the witness, expert or
witness-expert, it will return to the courtroom and questions will be posed by the President on
behalf of the Court, or by individual judges. If the Court does not so wish, it will not return to the
courtroom and the Registry will inform the Parties and the public accordingly.
I note that witnesses, experts and witness-experts may not be present in court either before or
after their testimony or statement. The Court h as further decided that, exceptionally, the verbatim
records of the sittings, during which the witnesses, experts and witness-experts are heard, will not
be made available to the public or posted on the website of the Court until the end of the sittings
allocated for the hearing of the witnesses, e xperts and witness-experts, namely, on Tuesday
28March2006 at 6p.m. Finally, both members of the media, in accordance with the code of
conduct they have signed, and the public, are request ed not to publish the content of the evidence - 11 -
given or statements made by the witnesse s, experts and witness-experts until Tuesday,
28March2006, at 6p.m., nor to communicate in any manner with the witnesses, experts and
witness-experts. This is for the good administration of justice.
In accordance with Article71, paragraph5, othe Rules of Court, the relevant part of the
verbatim record, in one of the Court’s official la nguages, of the examination, cross-examination,
and re-examination, and any questions put by judges and the answers thereto, shall be made
available to each witness, expert or witnexpert as soon as possible after his testimony or
statement. The witness, expert or witness-exprt will be asked to insert into the transcript
corrections of any mistakes that may have occurred ⎯ without affecting the sense and content of
the testimony given, the statement or respo⎯ and will be requested to return the transcript,
corrected and duly signed, to the Registrar within 24hours of its receipt in order to facilitate any
supervision that the Court may think it proper to exercise in respect of any corrections made.
The Court will first hear experts to be called by Bosnia and Herzegovina. The first expert to
be called by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dr. András Riedlmayer, may now be brought into court.
[Expert enters and takes his place at the rostrum]
Good morning, Dr. Riedlmayer. I call upon you to make the solemn declaration for experts
as set down in Article 64 subparagraph (b), of the Rules of Court.
Dr. RIEDLMAYER: Thank you, Madam President. I solemnly declare upon my honour
and conscience that I will speak the truthwhole truth and nothing but the truth and that my
statement will be in accordance with my sincere belief.
The PRESIDENT: Thank you. I now give the floor to the Agent of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
SOFr.TI Ć: Thank you.
INTRODUCTION BY THE A GENT OF B OSNIA AND H ERZEGOVINA TO THE CALLING OF THE
EXPERT M R . NDR Á SR IEDLMAYER ON 17 MARCH 2006
1. Madam President, distinguished Members ofthe Court, Bosnia and Herzegovina would
like to ask the permission of the Court to call e xperts according to Rule65 of the Rules of Court - 12 -
and the Statute of the International Court of Ju stice. And the first expert that Bosnia and
Herzegovina would like to call is Mr. András Riedlmayer.
2. Mr.Riedlmayer will be testifying before this Court on the destruction of the cultural,
religious and architectural heritage of Bosnia a nd Herzegovina. Mr.Riedlmayer has testified for
the Prosecutor at the ICTY in the Milosevic and Krajisnik cases and is currently preparing a report
for the Prosecutor in the Seselj case.
3. Mr.Riedlmayer will be examined by my esteemed colleague, Ms Joanna Korner, and I
would like now to respectfully ask the Court to gi ve permission to Ms Korner to take the floor.
Thank you.
The PRESIDENT: Thank you. I now give the floor to Ms Korner to begin her examination.
Ms KORNER: Mr. Riedlmayer, if you can go back to where you were. Mr. Riedlmayer, the
Court has heard your name. I think you wanted to say something before we begin.
Destruction of cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes. At this point Madam President, distinguished Members of the
Court, as this is my first appearance before this Court, I should like to say what a very great honour
it is for me. Thank you.
Ms KORNER: Now Mr. Riedlmayer, before we deal with the matters which you are going
to be helping the Court, can I ask you a little bit about your sources for the information that you are
about to provide. Your expertise, as this Court k nows, is in the religious and cultural heritage. Is
that correct?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes.
Ms KORNER: And is this right, that you in fact specialized in the history of the Balkans
during your undergraduate years at the University of Chicago?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, I did.
Ms KORNER: That you wrote your thesis on Bosnia and Herzegovi na and the conquerors
of Berlin?
Mr. RIEDLEMAYER: Yes. - 13 -
Ms KORNER: And for the last ten years have you written extensively on cultural history of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, in particular on the subject of the destruction of the cultural heritage.
Mr. RIEDLEMAYER: I have.
Ms KORNER: I think it is equally correct that you have presented papers at a number of
international conferences?
Mr. RIEDLEMAYER: Yes, I have.
Ms KORNER: And that in addition to your work at the International Criminal Court for the
former Yugoslavia, have you also given presenta tions before congressional commissions and other
bodies?
Mr. RIEDLEMAYER: I have.
Ms KORNER: In respect of the work that yo u did for the ICTY, as we can call it, can you
tell us what preparation you made before you produced those reports and testified?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
Sources, methodology
Yes. First of all I studied the photogr aphs and reports compiled by the religious
communities in Bosnia, by the Institute for Protectio n of Cultural, Historical and Natural Heritage
of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by the Council of Eu rope rapporteurs who were sent on missions to
Bosnia during and after the war, by Unesco, and other sources, all of which serve to document the
devastation of cultural heritage in the country during the 1992-1995 war.
In addition to the information compiled by these local and international bodies, my
knowledge of these matters also derives from exte nsive fieldwork in Bosnia, including a field
survey of 19municipalities, carried out in July 2002 and commissioned by the ICTY, in which I
travelled more than 4,600 km within a small country and documented 392sites, 60per cent of
those by first-hand site visits, the remainder by reviewing and collecting photographs and other
documentation from multiple independent sources judged to be reliable.
In July 2003, I testified about my findings be fore the ICTY as an expert witness in the case
Prosecutor v. Slobodan Milosevic. Subsequently, I was contracted by the Tribunal to serve as an
expert witness in two additional cases, for which I was asked to compile data for seven additional - 14 -
municipalities, bringing the total of Bosnian m unicipalities surveyed to 26 and the number of
devastated cultural and historical sites fully docum ented to 452. The field surveys that I have
carried out at the request of the ICTY, and the e xpert reports that I have submitted, may represent
the most extensive and systematic record of the damage compiled thus far.
Ms KORNER: Mr. Riedlmayer, during the course of your evidence here you are going to be
asking the Court to look at a number of photographs and, in one case, some footage of part of this
destruction. Can you tell the Court, are these phot ographs and the film evidence publicly available
documents.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, for the most part these derive either in the case of pre-destruction
photographs from public sources; in the case of pos t-destruction photographs the majority were
taken by myself and were submitted in evidence at the ICTY and are part of the record there.
Historical background
Ms KORNER: Can you start please by just te lling the Court very brie fly something of the
historical background to these events?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Thank you.
5. With your permission, Madam President, I would like to begin by briefly introducing the
rich and varied heritage of Bosnia and Her zegovina and the different religious and cultural
traditions that have contributed to it. Located in the heart of Europe, Bosnia and Herzegovina is a
country that has long stood at the crossroads of European civilization.
[slide: Bosnia and Herzegovina (map)] 1
6. Since its emergence as an independent c ountry in the Middle Ages, Bosnia has been a
complex and multifaceted society, where cultural influences from both East and West have met and
interacted, both with each other and with a rich indigenous tradition. It also has a long history of
tolerance and coexistence between different faiths and cultures.
Ms KORNER: All right, what we had up was a map and that was just to demonstrate, was
it?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: The location of Bosnia within Europe.
1
Source: the author. - 15 -
Ms KORNER: Thank you very much.
[slide: Medieval Bosnian tombstones at Radimlja] 2
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: What you see on the display now is a medieval Bosnian tombstone.
Most of the images are captioned and I will not trouble the Court by reading the captions.
7. Alone in medieval Europe, the Kingdom of Bosnia was a place where not one but three
Christian churches ⎯ Roman Catholicism, Byzantine Orthodoxy and a local Bosnian Church ⎯
coexisted side by side. Leaders of all three churches were called upon to witness acts of State, but
the State did not regularly favour one church ove r the others. The Bosnian Kingdom endured for
more than 250 years and has left behind many monuments of its cultural vitality.
3
[slide: Old Bosnian Muslim tombstones at Jakir]
8. Islam arrived in Bosnia nearly six centuri es ago, when the armies of the Ottoman sultans
swept across the Balkans and onward s into Hungary. Many Bosnians from all social and religious
backgrounds ⎯ more than half the population by the year 1700 ⎯ adopted the faith of the Islamic
conquerors. A distinctive Bosnian Muslim culture took form, with its own architecture, art,
literature, social customs and folklore.
[slide: Bridge of Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic at Visegrad] 4
9. The Ottoman sultans and their local Bosnian governors built bridges ⎯ such as the one
you see on the photo ⎯ markets, schools and mosques, around which new neighbourhoods and
entire new towns grew. Among these new Ottoma n Bosnian towns were Sarajevo, BanjaLuka,
Cajnice and Mostar. The history here is reflected in the buildings: in these cities, Bosnian Muslim,
Roman Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and Jewish townspeople lived and worked side by side.
Their places of worship were built in close proximity with each other.
[slide 5: Sarajevo: Gazi Husrev Beg Mosque] 5
10. Thus, in the centre of Saraje vo, the city’s principal mosque ⎯ which you see on the
picture ⎯ built in 1531 by GaziHusrev-beg, Ottoma n Bosnia’s first native Bosnian Muslim
Source: the author.
3
Source: the author.
Source: the author.
Source: the author. - 16 -
governor, Sarajevo’s Old Orthodox Church, built in 1539, the city’s first Jewish synagogue, erected
in 1580 on land provided by an Islamic endowment , and Sarajevo’s Roman Catholic cathedral, all
stand within an area of less than half a square kilometre.
6
[slide 6: Sarajevo: Old Orthodox Church and Catholic Church]
11. The same juxtaposition could be seen in other cities and towns throughout Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Thus in the town of Cajnice in eastern Bosnia, the mosque of Sinan-BegBoljanic,
the town’s sixteenth century fo under, was across the market square from Cajnice’s Orthodox
church, which was famous for its miracle-working icon. You can see the church at top left, the
mosque at bottom right.
7
[slide 7: Cajnice: Mosque and Orthodox church next to each other]
12. In the town of Bosanska Krupa, in nor th-western Bosnia, which has already been
mentioned in the pleadings, the town mosque, the Catholic church, and the Orthodox church were
on three sides of the main square. And in Bo sanski Samac, in the Posavina plain of northern
Bosnia, the Catholic church and the Orthodox chur ch were facing each other across the street, both
of them within sight of the minaret of the Bosan ski Samac Mosque, located less than five minutes’
walk away.
13. Please note, Madam President, that the placement of architecture is an intentional,
thoughtful, and I would say political, act. People who cannot abide the sight of each other will not
build their houses and the most important monume nts of their religious and communal life in the
shadows of those of the others. Of course, the f act that different religious and cultural traditions
managed to coexist and engage in fruitful interactions should not be taken to imply a lack of
periodic frictions and rivalries. Like other regions of Europe in the early modern era, Bosnia had
its share of corrupt officials, oppressive landlords and rebellious peasants, bandits, blood feuds and
other sources of social discord. However, the fact of pluralism itself was considered a given. Over
the longue durée, Bosnians of different religious traditi ons found ways to live, work, and build
together.
6
Source: the author.
7Benac, Alojz (ed.). 1980. Bosna i Hercegovina (Beograd: Jugoslovenska revija; Sarajevo: Svjetlost): plate60
(photo). - 17 -
Ms KORNER: Mr. Riedlmayer, that is the background, what happened to that tradition of
coexistence during the period 1992-1995?
RMIE. LMAYER:
14. It was this long tradition of living together in Bosnia-Herzegovina that was violently and
deliberately shattered in the 1992-1995 war. One of the most striking features of the assault on
coexistence was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the cultural and religious tradition and
heritage associated with the targeted commun ities. Here you see a mosque and the Catholic
church, respectively, both ruined in 1992.
[slide 8: Mosque at Carsija (Kotor Varos); Catholic church at Dubrave (Brcko)] 8
15. In late 1992, in response to reports of su ch widespread attacks on cultural and religious
landmarks, the Committee on Culture and Educati on of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary
Assembly sent the first in a series of missions to Bosnia and Herzegovina to collect information on
the destruction by war of cultural heritage. The first of the ten information reports submitted by the
Committee on this subject already characterized the extent of this destruction as “a cultural
catastrophe in the heart of Europe” 9.
16. On the basis of the documentation available, out of an estimated 1,706 mosques extant
in Bosnia on the eve of the war, at least 985 were damaged or destroyed in attacks by Serb forces
between 1991 and 1995. In the same period, at least 270 Roman Catholic churches and 23 Catholic
monasteries are documented to have been damaged or destroyed by Serb forces. The
overwhelming majority of this destruction of religious sites occurred during the first nine months of
the war, between April and December 1992, alth ough destruction in certain areas continued until
the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in late 1995 and in some cases even after Dayton.
17. In parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina o ccupied by Serb forces during the war that I
surveyed in my field study, more than 75per cent of all Roman Catholic churches and almost
100 per cent of all Muslim houses of worship were f ound to have been either seriously damaged or
totally destroyed.
8
Source: the author.
Council of Europe , Information Report: The Destruction by War of the Cultural Heritage in Croatia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina, presented by the Committee on Culture and Edcation. Parliamentary Assembly doc. 6756,
2 February 1993. - 18 -
Criteria
Ms KORNER: You just used the expression “seriously damaged or totally destroyed”.
Could you explain to the Court your criteria for the assessment of damage?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
18. Yes. According to the criteria and termi nology I employed in damage assessment in my
reports for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal, buildings that have been “seriously damaged”
is used to refer to buildings that had suffered significant structural damage to their principal
elements, typically buildings that had been burnt out, often with the roof entirely or substantially
collapsed, or with extensive blast damage, or with a combination of damage to several parts of the
structure. Those buildings categorized as “destr oyed” had no potentially salvageable elements left
standing above ground.
19. In many cases, the rubble of mosques and churches had been removed and the sites
levelled with heavy machinery, following the dest ruction. In some cases, I found even that the
foundations had been excavated and all material s removed from the sites, which had to be
identified with the use of pre-war photographs.
20. Close to 60percent of the affected bu ildings were historic structures dating from
Bosnia’s Ottoman (1440-1878) or Austro-Hungarian period (1878-1918). According to data in my
expert reports for the International Criminal Tr ibunal for the former Yugoslavia, which cover
313Muslim mosques, 59other Islamic sites, such as dervish monasteries, Qur’an schools, or
shrines, and 76Roman Catholic churches and monast eries, the historic buildings appear to have
been singled out for attack, suffering more severe da mage than the survey av erage. None of the
Muslim mosques and Roman Catholic churches and ot her institutions of religion and culture that I
documented in the survey escaped without some degree of damage.
21. Minarets appear to have been favoured as ta rgets. In effect, one can trace the borders of
territory held by Serb forces during the 1992-1995 wa r in Bosnia by the absence of minarets. The
sole mosque known to have survived the war with its minaret still standing within the borders of
what is now the Bosnian Serb entity, or Republik a Srpska, was in the village of Donje Baljvine,
near the town of Mrkonjic grad, where local Bosnian Serb villagers protected their Bosnian Muslim
neighbours from Serb troops and would not let the troops destroy the mosque. - 19 -
Beginnings
Ms KORNER: Right, can we now look, please, at the beginnings of this destruction?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
22. Yes. Attacks on cultural and religious s ites of the non-Serb communities in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, by the Yugoslav People’s Army ⎯ or JNA ⎯ started even before the beginning of
the war in Bosnia in April 1992. The first such attacks are reported to have taken place in the
autumn of 1991 and allegedly involved JNA troops on their way to or from the fighting in Croatia.
Thus, during the night of 23-24 September 1991, J NA reservists are alleged to have blown up the
eighteenth century Ljubovic mosque in the village of Odzak, south of the town of Nevesinje in
Herzegovina. When I inspected the ruins in th e summer of 2002, I found all but one wall of the
historic mosque levelled by the explosion, with large, carved stones from the mosque scattered at a
considerable distance by the force of the blast. The former secretary of the Islamic Community of
Nevesinje provided me with a copy of a memorandum about the incident that he had sent to the
JNA commander the day after the attack, reportedly without any response. Here you see a picture
of the mosque.
10
[slide: Odzak (Nevesinje) Ljubovic Mosque]
23. Two weeks later, on 3October 1991, JNA troops on their way to join the attack on
Dubrovnik attacked the mainly Bosnian Croat v illage of Ravno in eastern Herzegovina. The
sixteenth century Roman Catholic Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in Ravno was badly
damaged in the JNA attack, its roof smashed in by shelling. Most of the houses in the village were
also destroyed in this attack.
11
[slide: Ravno: Catholic church damaged by JNA shelling]
24. Other reported incidents from this period be fore the “official” start of the war in Bosnia
include an attack on the historic Town Mosque in Tuzla, shot up on 13 October 1991 by a JNA unit
passing through town on its way from Croatia to the border with Serbia; and at least two attacks on
1Source: the author.
1Zivkovic, Ilija (ed.). 1997. Raspeta crkva u Bosni i Hercegovini: uni stavanje katolickih sakralnih objekata u
Bosni i Hercegovini (1991-1996) (Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo: Biskupska konferencija Bosne i Hercegovine; Zagreb:
Hrvatski informativni centar) [photo]. - 20 -
the sixteenth century Osman Pasha Mosque in the southern town of Trebinje, reportedly damaged
by grenades and gunfire by JNA reservists, on 22 October 1991 and 25 January 1992.
25. Attacks on cultural and religious landmar ks in Bosnia-Herzegovina intensified in
April1992, as paramilitaries from Serbia and JNA troops crossed the Drina and took control of
towns and villages in eastern Bosnia. Among examples are attacks such as the sacking of a mosque
in Bijeljina, in eastern Bosnia, by a group of Arka n’s paramilitaries, who are seen in this photo
posing with a trophy inside the mosque in early April 1992.
12
[slide: Bijeljina: April 1992]
26. In the towns of Zvornik and nearby Kozluk, along the border with Serbia, which were
also taken over in early April 1992 by units from across the Drina, all the mosques were destroyed,
their ruins razed and the sites levelled after the local Bosnian Muslim population had been driven
out or killed. Here you see a photo of the oldest mosque in Zvornik. If you look carefully at the
building to the right of the mosque ⎯ you can see it in the after picture as well ⎯ you can see the
mosque was not only torn down, its site was levelled and replaced with a modern apartment
building as if the mosque had never been there.
[slide: Zvornik: Zamlaz Mosque, before and after] 13
27. In between April and June1992, the sout hern city of Mostar was bombarded by JNA
troops positioned on the heights overlooking the to wn, damaging or destroying 12 of Mostar’s
14 historic mosques and all three of its Roman Cat holic churches. They also destroyed the Roman
Catholic Bishop’s palace and its library, with 60,000 books and manuscripts, the archives of the
local monuments preservation authority ⎯ which were burned out ⎯ and much of the historic core
of the Old Town. On the slide you see a photo of the Franciscan Priory Church and Monastery,
Mostar, before and after 1992.
14
[slide: Mostar: Franciscan Priory Church and Monastery before and after 1992]
12Photos by Ron Haviv (1992).
13Pre-war photo: Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1975); post-destruction photo: Council of
Europe, Specific Action Plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina, Preliminary Phase: Final Report (1998).
14Pre-war photo: Raic, Ciril. 1998. Ciril Ciro Raic i Hercegovina: 45 godina fotografije. (Mostar:
Hercegvacko-Neretvanska zupanija): 214 (photo: 1980s); post-destruction photo: Institute for the Protection of
Monuments, Mostar (photo: 1992). - 21 -
28. The damage done to Mostar’s mosques a nd churches and other historic sites by this
shelling is reliably reported to have taken place between the second week of April1992 and
13 May 1992, while the forces attacking the town were formally under the aegis of the JNA. Here
you see a picture of Mostar’s principal mosque before and after the shelling. You can see that the
minaret has been decapitated and fell off to the mosque, smashing it.
15
[slide: Mostar: Karadjoz-beg Mosque (built 1557) before and after 1992]
29. As was noted by Dr.Colin Kaiser, w ho in December1992 inspected the damage to
historical monuments in Mostar as a rapporteur for the Council of Europe:
“The devastation [in Mostar] ⎯ beside which the damage in the Old Town of
Dubrovnik pales in comparison [note: emphasis in the original] ⎯ can be attributed
overwhelmingly to artillery, which used virtually every kind of projectile in the
Yugoslav Army panoply. This artillery destroyed minarets and roofs, levelled smaller
stone structures, punched holes a metre and a half wide in façades, collapsed corner
walls, and provoked fires in upper storeys, which then burned, falling into lower
storeys, eventually bringing en tire internal structures to the ground... It should be
noted that, according to the local evaluation, 12 of 14 dzamija mosques (the mission
visited 12) in Mostar were hit, and all 12 are in the upper damage classifications
(4-6). Five minarets were shot off at one leve l or another, and 4 others were hit. It
may have been inevitable that mosques in a military ‘front’ zone would be hit, but it is
highly doubtful that a minaret can be brought down with a single large calibre shell,
which implies a certain amount of deliberate targeting on these structures.” 16
MsKORNER: Could you pause there for a moment, Mr.Riedlmayer? Could you tell the
Court, please, who Dr. Colin Kaiser is?
Mr.RIEDLMAYER: Dr.Colin Kaiser has fo r the past decade or so served as Unesco’s
representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the time, in 1992, when he visited Mostar, he was on
a mission from Unesco and the Council of Europe to assess war damage.
Ms KORNER: Thank you.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
30. The 1992 JNA attacks also targeted Most ar’s famous Old Bridge, built in 1566, causing
some damage to the bridge proper, which you can see at the bottom right, weakening the structure,
and inflicting very serious damage on the mediaeval towers that anchor the historic bridge on both
1Pre-war photo: Njavro, Mato. 1989. Hercegovina: Povijest, kultura, umjetnost (Zagreb: Privredni vjesnik);
post-destruction photo: Drus tvo arhitekata Mostar. 1992 . Mostar ’92: Urbicid , ed. Ivanka Ribarevic-Nikolic, Zeljko
Juric. (Mostar: Drustvo arhitekata Mostar; HVO Opcine Mostar), plate 16.
1Council of Europe , Information Report: The Destruction by r of the Cultural Heritage in Croatia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina, presented by the Committee on Culture and Educatio n. Parliamentary Assembly doc. 6756, 2 Feb.
1993, paras. 129, 155. - 22 -
sides of the Neretva River. At the top, please compare the before and after pictures and you can
see the level of devastation.
[slide: Mostar 1992: damage to the Old Bridge] 17
31. As is well known, it was the second siege of Mostar, by Croatian forces, in 1993-1994,
that brought about the final collapse of the Old Bridge into the Neretva River. But the major
damage to Mostar’s cultural and religious heritage had already been done by the JNA siege of
April-June 1992. Aside from downing the Old Br idge, the worst the Croatian forces could do to
the buildings of the Old Town, many of them already in ruins, was to “make the rubble bounce”.
32. The pattern was repeated in towns and villages across Bosnia and Herzegovina. The
bombardment of the historic centre of the Bosn ian capital Sarajevo by the JNA commenced on
6 April 1992 and, except for brief ceasefires, would continue for the next three-and-a-half years.
Sarajevo
Ms KORNER: Yes. Can you now please con centrate on what happened in Sarajevo as far
as cultural and religious destruction is concerned?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
33. Almost from the beginning, the Bosnian capital’s religious and cultural landmarks came
under attack. The Roman Catholic Church of St. Joseph in Sarajevo’s Marindvor district was
shelled by JNA forces across the river in the subur b of Grbavica in mid-April and was struck by
more than 30 projectiles.
18
[slide: Sarajevo: Gazi Husrev Beg Mosque ⎯ shell impacts]
34. On 3May 1992, Sarajevo’s largest and mo st famous mosque, th e Gazi Husrev-begova
dzamija, was shelled in the first of many such attacks on this historic landmark. The map you see
on the slide, prepared in 1993 by the Sarajevo Federation of Architects, shows the location of
impacts of projectiles on or near the Gazi Husr ev Beg Mosque. One does not have to be a
1Pre-war photo: Aga Khan Trust for Culture (1981); post-destruction photos: Drustvo arhitekata Mostar. 1992.
Mostar ’92: Urbicid , ed. Ivanka Ribarevic-Nikolic, Zeljko Juric. (Mos tar: Drustvo arhitekata Mostar; HVO Opcine
Mostar).
1Sarajevo Federation of Architects. 1993. Urbicid Sarajevo: dossier (Sarajevo: Drustvo arhitekata, Marseilles:
Arc en reve centre d’architecture). - 23 -
specialist to realize that the mosque ⎯ the structure with the circul ar dome in the centre of the
map ⎯ was indeed the intended target and was not hit by accident.
35. On the night of 17-18May 1992, concentr ated shelling toppled the minaret of one of
Sarajevo’s oldest mosques ⎯ the Sheikh Magribija Mosque, built in 1538 ⎯ bringing the slim
stone spire crashing onto its roof and causing extensive damage.
[slide: Sheikh Magribija Mosque] 19
36. It should be emphasized that a minaret is a slim target and difficult to bring down from a
distance. It can take many attempts and concentrated shooting to take one down successfully.
37. It must also be noted that the attacks on cultural monuments just mentioned, as well as
others such as the shelling of Sarajevo ’s Oriental Institute on 17May 1992 ⎯ about which I will
have more to say later ⎯, were carried out before the JNA’s so-called withdrawal from Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
MsKORNER: All right. You told the Court th at minarets are slim targets and difficult to
bring down from a distance. On what do you base that assertion?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Well, on considerable experi ence, Your Honours. First of all, I have
seen ⎯ in my various survey trips in the Balkan ⎯ several hundreds of incidences of this kind of
destruction. Well, I am not a military expert but I do know something about these buildings.
Minarets are traditionally built of brick and can withstand a great deal of punishment. You can
take out a chunk of masonry or even drive a hole through a minaret without causing its collapse.
So very often a minaret that has been decapitated ⎯ which is the most common thing, you see ⎯
will have many holes in it, which indicated parallel attempts to bring it down. It is also simply
common sense that a minaret, which is at most a few metres wide, would no t make a particularly
easy target to hit from a distance.
1992 Examples
Ms KORNER: Yes, thank you. I think you were about to move on to some other examples
of the damage and destruction.
19
Cantonal Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Sarajevo (photo: May 1992). - 24 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
38. Yes, thank you. The destruction of cultura l and religious landmarks in Bosnia continued
and grew in intensity through the late spring a nd summer of 1992. Attacks on cultural landmarks
within besieged towns such as Sa rajevo, Mostar and Maglaj, however grievous, were far exceeded
in scale by the systematic destruction that occurre d outside of the context of armed conflict, in
areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina that had already been overrun by Serb forces, or which had been
seized by them on the eve of the war, without any fighting, as can be seen in some of the following
examples.
39. In the months after Serb air forces took over the town of Foca on the Drina in April 1992,
all of the town’s 14historic mosques were system atically destroyed by fire and explosives, the
ruins of 13 of these mosques were then levelled w ith heavy equipment, the rubble taken away and
dumped in the river or in rubbish tips.
20
[slide: Foca: Aladza dzamija, before and after]
40. The slide you see on the screen shows the Al adza (dzamija) Mosque, the most famous
and perhaps the most beautiful of Foca’s 14 mosques, built in 1550 and destroyed in August 1992.
At the right is a photograph of its empty site, take n after it was blown up and the ruins razed. You
can still see the lines of the foundation in the gras s and the circular fragments of the ablution
fountain in front of it.
21
[slide: Nevesinje: The Emperor’s Mosque (built 1485) ⎯ before and after]
41. JNA and Serb militias took control of the so uthern town of Nevesinje in Herzegovina at
the beginning of the war, without a shot being fi red. The new Serb aut horities forced the local
Muslim and Croat residents to leave. Then Nev esinje’s two ancient mosques, one of them more
than 500 years old, the other built in the seventeenth century, as well as the town’s Roman Catholic
church, were destroyed with explosives, the ruin s razed and the rubble dumped in a rubbish tip
outside of the town.
2Pre-war photo: Benac, Alojz (ed.). 1980. Bosna i Hercegovina (Beograd: Jugoslovenska revija; Sarajevo:
Svjetlost); post-destruction photo: Lucas Kello (1996), in the collection of the author.
2Pre-war photo: Njavro, Mato. 1989. Hercegovina: Povijest, kultura, umjetnost (Zagreb: Privredni vjesnik):
93; post-destruction photo: the author (2002). - 25 -
[slide: Nevesinje: Catholic church ⎯ before and after] 22
42. Here you see the Roman Catholic church, and on the prior slide you saw the 500 year old
mosque. If you look carefully at the church, in front of it is a low stone wall which you can also
see in the after picture, that and the trees are the only signs that we are looking at the same sight.
However, I also have the cadastral plan for the site and it’s identified without any doubt.
The same was also the case in Banja Luka, a town in northern Bosnia that had been taken
over by Serb nationalists in a coup on the eve of the war and where there was never any fighting
during the war. In a nine-month period, between April and December 1993, all 16 of Banja Luka’s
mosques were systematically destroyed. This destruction occurred while the city was under the full
control of Serb authorities.
Banja Luka
Ms KORNER: Yes, can we now look, please, at the Banja Luka?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
43. According to eyewitnesses I have intervie wed, the city’s two largest mosques, the
Ferhadija Mosque (built 1578) and the Arnaudija Mosque (built 1587), were both blown up by
sappers while the city was under curfew during the night of 7May 1993. You can see the
Ferhadija Mosque on the screen. Please take a caref ul look, just to the left of the mosque and
behind it, is a building that belongs to the Islami c community, it will feature in the next item to be
shown. The day after the blast, the Serb-contro lled municipal authorities had public works crews
using heavy equipment to break up the ruins of th e mosque. The crews used additional rounds of
explosives to demolish the massive stump of the Fe rhadija mosque’s minaret. Despite the pleas of
the city’s remaining Muslim residents, the rubble of the historic mosques was taken away by truck
to the city dump and buried under tonnes of garbag e in order to forestall any possibility of the
stones ever being reused for any future reconstruction.
Ms KORNER: Mr. Riedlmayer, will you pause there for a moment. I must ask you to
explain the term “sapper”.
2Pre-war photo: Ciril Raic. 1998. Ciril Ciro Rajic i Hercegovina: 45 godina fotografije(Mostar:
Hercegovacko-neretvanska zupanija): 299 (photo 1980s); post-destruction photo: the author (2002). - 26 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: “Sapper”. In this case I am not using it merely as a term of art, I am
using it to describe what I know from having in terviewed eyewitnesses. On the eve of the
destruction of the mosque, the surrounding street s were roped off, witnesses saw military trucks
drive up, residents of nearby buildings were repor tedly told to open their windows so they would
not be broken by the blast. The blast occurred well after midnight while the city was under
wartime curfew and was witnessed by the Mufti of Banja Luka, whom I also interviewed, who
lived in that building right behind the mosque.
Ms KORNER: I’m sorry, it was my fault ⎯ “sapper” is a term meaning what?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: “Sapper” is a military expl osives expert and to carry out such a large
demolition and the sighting of the military trucks and the roping off of the streets by the authorities
imply that professionals were involved.
Ms KORNER: Thank you. I’m sorry to have interrupted you.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
23
[slide: Banja Luka: Ferhadija Mosque (built 1578)]
44. We will continue now with our first vide o clip which documents the destruction of the
Ferhadija Mosque and was taken by Mr. Bedrudin Gusic, who from May 1992 until 1994 served as
elected chairman of the Committee of the Islamic Community of Banja Luka. Could I have the
clip, please?
[clip 1: of the destruction of the Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka ⎯ 1 hr. 20 min.] 24
You see here the mosque as it was before, it was built by Banja Luka’s f ounder, Ferhad Pasa
Sokolovic, who also built a clock tower and a number of educational institutions, and the site also
had the mausoleum of the founder, which you can see in this shot. We will continue to a brief
interior view so you can see what a magnificent st ructure it was. And now you see the clip as it
was the day after the explosion. Just a moment; th at is the prayer niche of the mosque; and here
we are with the stump of the minaret, which was al l that was remaining of the historic structure;
2Pre-war photo: Ayverdi, Ekrem Hakk ı. 1981 . Avrupa’da Osmanl ı mimârî eserleri, III. cild 3. kitap:
Yugoslavya. (Istanbul: Istanbul Fetih Cemiyeti): plate 46.
2Source: video footage of the Ferhad ija Mosque and its destruction, take n in 1993 by Bedrudin Gusic, at the
time the elected chairman of the Committee of the Islac Community of Banja Luka. Submitted by Bosnia and
Herzegovina on 16 January 2006 as DVD 15 and 16. - 27 -
and note in the background the large machinery that was immediately ordered out to take down the
ruins; and now the site as it appeared only a few weeks later ⎯ a piece of bare ground and all you
can see is the Islamic community building in the rear of the site. It is as if the mosque had never
been there.
Ms KORNER: Has the mosque yet been rebuilt?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: No, it has not.
45. Similarly, five mosques were blown up in the eastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina on the
night of 13 March 1993 ⎯ almost a year after the town had been under firm control by Serb forces.
In the following days, as the “Republika Srpska” Assembly met in the town, which had been under
Serb control since the start of the war, munici pal work crews cleared away the rubble of the
mosques as lines of buses and trucks waited in line to take away the town’s terrified Muslim
residents.
25
[slide: Bijeljina: Atik Mosque (built 1530) before and after]
46. Journalists who visited Bijeljina a m onth later found grass and trees planted on the
levelled sites of the destroyed mosques. You can see one of them on this photo ⎯ the photo I took
in 2003 ⎯ you can see that at that point the mosque had still not been rebuilt.
47. The removal of ruins of destroyed mos ques to rubbish tips and the levelling of the
cleared sites appears to have been a general prac tice in cities and towns in Bosnia that had been
seized by Serb forces during the war. In some case s, such as that of the ei ghteenth century Savska
Mosque in Brcko, even the foundations were dug up and the rubble of the destroyed mosque was
deposited on top of the bodies of murdered Muslim residents in a mass grave site outside of town.
[slide: ruined Roman Catholic church at Sasina.] 26
48. In other cases, houses of worship were used as sites for the killing and burial of non-Serb
civilians. One example is the Roman Catholic parish church in the village of Sasina, near Sanski
Most in north-western Bosnia, which was dest royed by Serb forces using explosives on
2Pre-war photo: Tomasevic, Nebojsa (ed.). 1980. Treasures of Yugoslavia: An Encyclopedic Touring Guide
(Belgrade: Yugoslavia Republic): 268; post-destruction photo: the author (2002).
2Pre-war photo: Zivkovic, Ilija (ed.). 1997Raspeta crkva u Bosni i Hercegovini: unistavanje katolickih
sakralnih objekata u Bosni i Hercegovini (1991.-1996.) (Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo: Biskupska konferencija Bosne i
Hercegovine; Zagreb: Hrvatski informativni centar); post-war photos: the author. - 28 -
28July1995. Two months later, on 21Septembe r1995, in the closing weeks of the war, some
65non-Serb civilians, both Muslims and Croats, were driven to the site of the Sasina church and
executed by Serb paramilitaries, who buried the victims in a mass grave at the foot of the church.
Ms KORNER: Pausing there again for a mome nt; where does that information that you
have just given to the Court come from?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: A number of sources, Madam. First of all, I interviewed the Bishop of
BanjaLuka, FranjoKomarica, in whose diocese this fell and who provided information on the
destruction of the church. The report on the incident of 21September1995 comes from sworn
testimony and evidence submitted in the Miloševič trial.
Ms KORNER: Thank you. Yes.
27
[slide: before and after views of the Mosque at Hanifici]
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
49. In other cases the destruction of non-Serb houses of worship was even more directly
linked with the killings and abuse of civilians. Among the examples is the village mosque at
Hanifici in the municipality of Kotor Varos, where more than 30members of the congregation
were reportedly burned inside the mosque in August 1992.
The PRESIDENT: Could I interject there to say, I feel we are now straying beyond your
testimony as an expert in the particular field. If you can confine yourself to that, and not to facts,
or alleged facts, that go beyond that. Thank you.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I understand, Madam Preside nt. The point I was trying to make here
is not that merely the destruction of architecture, but first of all, the link between the destruction of
architecture and its connection to the community which it symbolized and the various actions
involving the architecture, whether it is things like taking the rubble of the mosque and dumping it
on top of mass graves or the use of mosques as sites for atrocities is, I believe, a vital part of the
picture I am trying to present. It is not merely a matter of bricks and mortar. So . . .
The PRESIDENT: Please continue.
27
Source: the author. - 29 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Thank you.
50. There is also the example of the Roman Catholic church at Brisevo, in Prijedor
municipality, burned by Serb forces in a July 1992 attack in which not only the church but all the
houses in the village were burned and as many as 70 parishioners, including women and children,
were killed. When I visited the site a decade late r, not a single family had returned to the village,
whose houses, ruined church and farm fields were reverting to forest.
Nature of destruction
Ms KORNER: Madam President, we have got a s light technical hitch. Thank you. Well, in
fact, I think it is in the bundle of photographs . . .
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Well, it is on the screen now . . .
[slide: before and after views of the Catholic Church at Brisevo]28
Ms KORNER: It has come up.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, you see Brisevo before and after: essentially the extinction of a
community and its civilization centred around its focal structure. I am done with that section, I
believe.
Ms KORNER: You described examples of the ty pe of destruction. Can you tell the Court
anything about the nature of the destruction as a wh ole, that you are able to say, having looked at
all these different sites?
RMIr. LMAYER:
51. Yes, the destruction of mosques and Catho lic churches appears to have been deliberate,
widespread and systematic throughout the areas cont rolled by Serb forces. I base this conclusion
on the findings of my field survey, and on the fact that, according to what I found, the majority of
this destruction took place outside of the context of armed conflict.
Ms KORNER: Can you explain what you mean by that, please?
2Pre-war photo: Zivkovic, Ilija (ed.). 1Raspeta crkva u Bosni i Hercegovini: unistavanje katolickih
sakralnih objekata u Bosni i Hercegovini (1991.-1996.) (Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo: Biskupska konferencija Bosne i
Hercegovine; Zagreb: Hrvatski informativni centar); post-war photo: the author. - 30 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: “Outside of the context of armed conflict” means that these were not
buildings caught in cross-fire during military action, but that the destruction happened either in the
absence of any fighting or after the fighting was over.
52. Statements made by those engaged in the “ethnic cleansing” as well as by the people who
were the targets of such actions show a keen aw areness of the actual and intended impact of the
destruction of the houses of worship and other symbols of the targeted community.
53. The eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad w as a scene of particularly brutal atrocities
inflicted on its Bosnian . . .
The PRESIDENT: Mr. Riedlmayer, I am afraid I have to interrupt you again. You have
taken your declaration as an expert and so I am going to ask you to pass to paragraph59 of your
statement for us.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes. Thank you Madam President.
54. . . .
55. . . .
56. . . .
57. . . .
58. . . .
59. After the town of Srebrenica was overrun by General Mladic’s forces in July 1995, and
the town’s Bosnian Muslim residents had been e xpelled (women, children, the elderly) or killed
(some 8,000 men and boys), all traces of Muslim her itage in Srebrenica were also destroyed. The
town’s five mosques, all of which were still standi ng at the time Srebrenica fell, were all destroyed
along with the religious archives recording the history and properties of the town’s Muslim
community.
29
[slide: Srebrenica: Crvena Rijeka Mosque, before, during the war and after]
60. The slide you see shows Srebrenica’s second oldest mosque, a traditional Bosnian village
mosque with a wooden minaret, as it stood before the war. The modern imam’s house behind the
mosque held the offices, library and archives of the Islamic Community of Srebrenica, and was
2Pre-war photo: Institute for the Protection of Culturl, Historical and Natural Heritage of Bosnia and
Herzegovina; 1993 photo: Zene Srebrenice; post-war photo: the author (2002). - 31 -
also used for other religious functions. On 1 January 1993, while Srebrenica was under siege by
Bosnian Serb forces, the mosque was hit by a bom b dropped by a military aircraft that came across
the Drina River from Serbia, according to eyewitn esses. The damage was repaired by people from
the neighbourhood, who can be seen in the second picture attending Friday prayers after the repairs
were completed. Two-and-a-half years later ma ny of the men in the photo were dead and the
mosque was destroyed, its ruins bulldozed into a wooded gully behind it. When I took the third
photo, in 2002, the imam’s house had been repaired and a family was living in it. But there was no
trace left of the mosque, or of the neighbourhood’s Muslim residents.
[slide: Srebrenica: Petric Mahala Mosque, before and after] 30
61. This slide shows another Srebrenica mo sque and serves as an illustration of how
mosques were destroyed outside of the context of military action in Bosnia. The mosque, located
in the Petric Mahala neighbourhood of Srebrenica, was still intact when Serb troops took over the
town in July 1995, as can be seen on a video take n by the Serbian reporter Goran Petrovic at the
time. Six months later, after the end of the wa r when the first IFOR peacekeeping troops came to
Srebrenica, the mosque was the ruin that you see in the left-hand photo. It had been destroyed by
placing explosives inside the stairwell at the centre of the minaret, causing it to collapse against the
building and smash the roof. One can see the char acteristic way the base of the minaret flares
outward from the force of the blast. The right-hand photo shows the site two years later, in 1998,
after the local Serb authorities had bulldozed the ruins, completely obliterating any sign that there
once had been a mosque or Muslims in the Petric Mahala neighbourhood.
31
[slide: Kalata (near Kozarac): Mosque with toppled minaret]
62. The same technique of destruction, showi ng signs of a professional at work, can be seen
in the case of this 100-year-old mosque near Kozarac, destroyed in 1992, when the area was
“ethnically cleansed” by Serb forces. The explosiv es were set in such a way that the tall stone
minaret, when toppled, fell directly across and smashed the entire front half of the mosque. The
mosque at Hanifici, which I showed before, was an example of what I would call a more amateur
approach, where the tall stone minarets fell away from the building.
30
Post-war photos: IFOR (1996); Council of Europe (1998).
3Source: Thomas Keenan (1998). - 32 -
[slide: Presnace: Catholic parish church, before and after; Father Filip Lukenda and
32
Sister Cecilija Grgic ]
63. Here you see a Catholic church, if you look at the bottom left you can see how it has
ballooned out; again this is not a building that was hit in crossfire; clearly explosives had been set
inside. You can see that the steeple has been t oppled and the columns of what remains of the
building are ballooned out. On the right, you see the parson and a nun who were killed in the house
next door, which was also burned down.
33
[slide: Divic (Zvornik) ⎯ mosque before and after]
64. And the next slide, please. This is a slide of a mosque in Divic, just south of Zvornik. In
the last pre-war census held in 1991, Divic was home to 1,388 Bosnian Muslims and four Serb
residents. On 26 April 1992, the JNA came into Di vic and told all the Muslim men to assemble in
front of the mosque and surrender their weapons . After the expulsion of the Muslim population
and the destruction of the village mo sque, Divic was renamed Sveti Stefan ⎯ after the Christian
St. Stephen ⎯ and was resettled with Serbs from elsewhere in Bosnia. A Serb Orthodox church
was erected on top of the site of the razed mos que and the old Muslim cemetery, which was also
destroyed. The newly-built Orthodox church, whic h you can see at the right, is still there, despite
repeated orders from the Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The aim, clearly, was to
eliminate both the community in Divic and its hist orical, cultural and religious identity and even
the very memory of its existence.
Ms KORNER: Now, you have mentioned the Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Is that composed entirely of Bosnians or does it have an international ⎯ ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: It is a mixed internationa l and local judicial body, established under
the Dayton Peace Accords, which was to pass rulings on humans rights cases brought before it.
3Zivkovic, Ilija (ed.). 1997. Raspeta crkva u Bosni i Hercegovini: uni stavanje katolickih sakralnih objekata u
Bosni i Hercegovini (1991-1996.) (Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo: Biskupska konferencija Bosne i Hercegovine; Zagreb:
Hrvatski informativni centar).
3Pre-war photo: Suljkic, Hifzija. 1981. “Dzamija u Divicu,” Glasnik Vrhovnog islamskog starjesinstva u SFRJ
44/br. 5-6: 544; post-war photo: the author (2002). - 33 -
Attacks on the cultural record
Ms KORNER: Could you now look, please, at th e question of attacks on the cultural record
of Bosnia and Herzegovina?
RMIEr. LMAYER:
34
[slide: views of historic parish registers, burnt records]
65. Another key part of the attempt to dest roy a community is the obliteration of the written
record of its existence. Attacks on libraries and religious archives associated with the targeted
groups were reported to have taken place in the ma jority of the municipalities that I surveyed in
Bosnia. Prior to the introduction of civil registration in the twentieth century, it was the archives of
the local Islamic communities and Catholic parish es that embodied the personal, family and group
history of these communities. You can see two exampl es of old parish registers, at the left, dating
back as far as the eighteenth century . On the right, you can see a destroyed archive of a Catholic
religious community in the Grbavica suburb of Sarajevo.
35
[slide: destroyed Islamic vakuf archive and library in Foca]
66. This is a slide showing the Islamic archiv e in the rear of the mosque in Foca which,
again, held records that had both community significance and economic significance for the
survival of the community, since they incl uded deeds and other documents of the pious
endowments and other properties that sustained the continued existence of the community by
establishing it to carry on religious, charitable and educational activities.
[slide: views of burnt documents, gutted Oriental Institute] 36
67. However, the most egregious attacks on th e written record of Bosnia’s past took place
very early in the war. On 17May 1992, the Institute for Oriental Studies in Sarajevo was
bombarded with incendiary munitions from Serb pos itions and burnt, with the loss of all of its
collections. These collections included the former Ottoman provincial archives ⎯ more than
3Pre-war photos: Raic, Ciril. 1998. Ciril Ciro Raic i Herce govina: 45 godina fotografije. (Mostar:
Hercegvacko-Neretvanska zupanija); photo of burned archive of Catholic monastery in Gr bavica: Zivkovic, Ilija (ed.).
1997. Raspeta crkva u Bosni i Hercegovini: unistavanje ka tolickih sakralnih objekata u Bosni i Hercegovini
(1991-1996). (Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo: Biskupska konfer encija Bosne i Hercegovine; Zagreb: Hrvatski
informativni centar).
3Pre-war photo: Ayverdi, Ekrem Hakk ı. 1981 . Avrupa’da Osmanl ı mimârî eserleri, III. cild 3. kitap:
Yugoslavya. (Istanbul: Istanbul Fetih Cemiyeti): pl. 202; post-war photo: Lucas Kello (1996) in the collection of the
author.
3Photos (1992) courtesy Orijentalni institut u Sarajevu. - 34 -
200,000 documents ⎯ and the cadastral registers, which documented the land ownership in Bosnia
and Herzegovina at the end of the Ottoman period. The losses also included the country’s richest
collection of Islamic manuscripts ⎯ more than 5,000 codices in Arabic, Turkish, Persian and
Bosnian ⎯ many of them unique, representing the products of five centuries of Bosnian Muslim
cultural history. All obliterated. Ninety-nine pe r cent of the Institute’s collection was completely
burnt. You can see the burnt manuscripts, at left, and a sample of a judicial document on the right.
68. The Oriental Institute, as my investigation showed, had clearly been singled out.
According to interviews with eyewitnesses, the building had been targeted with a barrage of
incendiary munitions, fired from positions on the hills overlooking the town centre. Surrounding
buildings in the densely built neighbourhood remain in tact to this day. I also spoke to employees,
residents and firemen who answered the call to the fire, so I am quite sure of my assertions about
this.
69. On 25 August 1992, Bosnia’s National Library was bombarded and set ablaze by a
tightly targeted barrage of incendiary shells , fired from multiple Bosnian Serb army (VRS)
positions on the heights overlooking the old town. As firemen fought the blaze, the attackers swept
the surroundings with heavy machinegun and anti-airc raft cannon fire, aimed at street level, in
order to keep away firemen and volunteers trying to save books from the burning building. An
estimated 1.5 million volumes, comprising the bulk of the National Library’s collections and much
of Bosnia’s cultural record, were consumed by th e flames in this, the largest single incident of
deliberate book burning in modern history. Once again, only the library was targeted with
incendiary shells. Buildings along the narrow str eets that surround the burnt out library on two of
its three sides still stand intact to this day. I would like to show a brief second video clip, please.
[video clip 2: Sarajevo ⎯ Burning the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina ⎯
37
25-26 August 1992 ⎯ 1 h. 47 min.]
Here you see the library on the day after the a ttack already ablaze, flames bursting out of the
building, firemen responding. Unfortunately, the wa ter to the city had been cut, the Bosnian Serb
forces holding the control of the water supply. The firemen inside the building trying to put out the
3Raw documentary footage of the burning Library take n 26 August 1992, courtesy FAMA, BH-TV. Submitted
by Bosnia and Herzegovina on 16 January 2006 as DVD 7. - 35 -
fire and rescue collections. Here you will see the shocking sight of the library itself ablaze with the
pages of a million books dancing in the flames. Again, I interviewed more than a dozen firemen
who took part in the rescue of the books and their efforts to put out the flames. I also interviewed
neighbourhood residents who had watched the she lling itself but assured me that various sources
were firing. This is Kurt Schork, a reporter for Reuters who wrote one of the most detailed reports
on the shelling of the library and was ??? So that is the end of the clip.
38
[slide: before and after views of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral in Mostar]
Damage to Serb Orthodox heritage
Ms KORNER: You dealt with all the destruc tion that was caused in Bosnia to Muslim and
to Roman Catholic edifices. Do you have any knowledge of any destruction done in respect of
Serb Orthodox institutions?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes.
70. While it was not my task to survey wartim e damage to Serb Orthodox heritage in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, by virtue of the terms of my mission for the Tribunal, I did make a point of
noting the condition of Orthodox sacred sites du ring my fieldwork and have studied the
documentation that has been published by the Se rbian Orthodox Church and by other sources.
There was indeed damage to Or thodox sacred sites during the war and it was not insignificant.
Among the most serious cultural losses was the destruction of Mostar’s Serbian Orthodox
Cathedral, blown up in early June 1992 apparently by Croat extrem ists, in the aftermath of the
Yugoslav army’s siege of Mostar. In June-July 1992, the historic Serbian Orthodox monastery in
Zitomislic south of Mostar, built under Ottoman ru le in the sixteenth century and the centre of
Orthodox culture in the region, was also blown up by Croat extremists. Elsewhere in Herzegovina
and in northern Bosnia, a number of other Serb ian Orthodox churches were damaged or destroyed,
mainly but not exclusively in the early months of the fighting between Croat militias and Serb
forces.
71. However, it should be noted that no Muslim mosques and very few Catholic churches
remained intact in the towns a nd villages in Bosnia-Herzegovina seized by Serb forces during the
38
Pre-war photo: William Remsen (1980), collection of the author; post-war photo: the author (2001). - 36 -
1992-1995 war. Accompanying the “ethnic cleansing” of the non-Serb population was a
systematic and deliberate transformation of the cu ltural landscape. Minarets and Catholic church
steeples vanished from the land, along with the people who had once looked to those landmarks as
visible signs of their history and presence in the country.
[slide: Cajnice: next to the intact Orthodox church, an empty spot in place of the
39
Sinan Pasha Boljanic Mosque]
72. On this slide you see the town of Cajni ce, now an all-Serb town, “cleansed” of its
Muslims and mosques, with an empty spot marki ng the site of the mosque that once faced the
Orthodox church across the town square.
[slide: Bosanski Samac: empty site of the destroyed Catholic church, across the street from
40
the intact Serbian Orthodox church]
73. Likewise in Bosanski Samac, at the end of the war there was an empty lot ⎯ you can see
it there at the left ⎯ across the street from the Serb Ort hodox church where the town’s Catholic
church had once stood facing it.
41
[slide: intact Serbian Orthodox churches in Sarajevo]
74. Meanwhile, Serbian Orthodox churches surv ived the entire war intact and still stand in
the majority of those towns and cities in Bosnia that remained under the control of Bosnia’s
internationally recognized Government during the war ⎯ such as Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Zenica.
The city of Mostar, as we already mentioned, is a notable and tragic exception.
[slide: view of Bosanska Krupa ⎯ destroyed Roman Catholic church, newly rebuilt
mosque, intact Serb Orthodox church]
75. In the towns in north-western Bosnia that were retaken by the Bosnian Government’s
army in the final weeks of the war (such as Sa nski Most, Kljuc, Bosanska Krupa), the Serb
Orthodox churches still stand intact ⎯ while in the same towns the Muslim mosques and Catholic
churches had been systematically destroyed by Se rb forces during their occupation. This photo is
one that I took in the town of Bosanska Krupa. The town was held by Bosnian Serb forces from
3Post-war photo: Dr. Machiel Kiel (1998), collection of the author.
40
Post-war photo: Office of the Prosecutor ICTY (1996).
4Source: the author (1997). - 37 -
1992 until late 1995, when Bosnian Government forces reconquered it. During the Serb occupation
the Catholic church, whose foundations you can see at the left, and the mosque which is in the rear
of the square, were blown up. I have pictures of the ruins of the mosque which, by the time I
visited, had been newly rebuilt. But what you sh ould not at right is the Serbian Orthodox church
which remains standing to this day on the third side of the square.
Kosovo
Ms KORNER: You have told the Court effectiv ely of what you consider to be a widespread
and systematic pattern of destruction. Have y ou seen that pattern anywhere else in the former
Yugoslavia.
42
[slide: burning Islamic Community archive and damaged Mosque in Kosovo]
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
76. Yes, in late 1999, four months after the end of the war in Kosovo, I went on a mission to
Kosovo to survey damage to cultural heritage and my findings indicate a pattern that may be
instructive for the Court to consider. Duri ng the March-June 1999 war in Kosovo, you had
similarly a pattern of “ethnic cleansing” with more than a third of the province’s ethnic Albanian
residents forced out.
77. In the course of this oper ation, according to my findings ⎯ and I did a very extensive
field survey ⎯ there was destruction or damage to 225Muslim mosques, more than one third of
Kosovo’s pre-war total of 607 mosques. All this in a three-month operation. Islamic religious
archives and libraries in Kosovo were likewise de stroyed, among them the Central Historical
Archive of the Islamic Community in Kosovo, which you can see burning in the photo at left.
Serbian Orthodox sites in Kosovo were also damaged but only after the war in reprisal attacks by
returning Albanians and I found no evidence that even a single one had been damaged during the
war.
42
Photo of burning Archive: Reuters (1999); photo of Mosque: the author (1999). - 38 -
Concluding question
Ms KORNER: All right. Finally, Mr. Ried lmayer, this. You bega n your presentation by
telling the Court that the tradition of living together in Bosnia between the nationalities was
shattered. In all the investigations you did in to this, I suppose catalogue of destruction, did you
learn of any incident which reflected that there was still some kind of coexistence possible?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER:
78. Compiling the catalogue of destruction, ex amples of which I have presented before this
Court today, has been a very depressing exercise, of a sort that does not give cause for much
optimism about the human condition. Yet, amidst th e devastation, there was a rare encounter with
a spark of light in the darkness, a sign of the Bosn ian heritage of coexistence that I have described
and which has been brought so close to being extinguis hed, its very traces destroyed. In the city of
Doboj, in Bosnia, I spoke with the Roman Catho lic parish priest, whose church was burned down
on 4 May 1992, during the night. He told me the fire was caused by incendiary projectiles fired by
Serb forces. In 1993, the ruins of the church were mined twice, the site levelled by bulldozers and
all building materials removed by the Serb author ities. In August 1992, the parish house and the
nearby convent was vandalized and looted by three “Red Berets” in military uniforms, who spoke a
dialect indicating they were from Serbia. They took over the convent for the use of the Red Berets.
The priest and the nuns were given 24 hours to leave the town. The parish archives ⎯ baptismal
registers, records of marriages and burials from the parish ⎯ had been hidden at the priest’s
request by “good people, local Serbs”, who took th em to their houses after the first attack on the
Catholic church in May 1992. When the Red Berets searched the parish house in August of that
year, they looked for the parish records but they could not find them. After the end of the war, the
“good Serbs” who had hidden the archives returned them to the parish priest when he came back to
Doboj 43. Thank you very much.
Ms KORNER: Thank you, Mr. Riedlmayer.
4Rev. Dr. Pero Brkic, parish priest of Sacred HeaCatholic Church in Doboj, interviewed by the author
(July 2002). - 39 -
The PRESIDENT: Thank you, Mr.Riedlmayer. Thank you, Ms Korner. The Court will
now rise for ten minutes.
The Court adjourned from 11.20 to 11.30 a.m.
The PRESIDENT: Please be seated. Could Mr. Riedlmayer be invited to rejoin us? I now
give the floor to Ms Fauveau-Ivanović for cross-examination.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Merci, Madame le président. Monsieur Riedlmayer,
peut-on dire que vous avez fait des recherchr le territoire de dix-neuf municipalités en
Bosnie-Herzégovine concernant la destruction de monuments historiques ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: The 19 municipalities were the municipalities I surveyed for the
Milosevic Bosnia case. There are seven other municipalities that I have documented for two
additional cases. So that is a total of 26 municipalities.
MFmeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Peut-on dire que ces vingt-six municipalités étaient
sélectionnées par le bureau du procureur du Tribunal pour l’ex-Yougoslavie ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Only in part. My assignment from the Tribunal specified a number of
municipalities and then I could choose additional ones. So for the Milosevic Bosnia case I had ten
specified ones and nine additional ones that I chose.
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Selon quels critères avez-vous choisi les municipalités que
vous avez choisies ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: My criteria were: try to achieve a better geographic spread. If you
plot onto a map of Bosnia the 19 municipalities I su rveyed in the course of that field survey you
will see that it covers a broad arc frč and Sanski Most in the north-west through Br čko,
Bijelina, Zvornik all the way down to Višegrad and Fo ča. So basically I was covering a broad arc,
trying to get as much of a sample as possible within the limitations of the time available.
MFAe VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Etes-vous d’accord que vingt-six municipalités en Bosnie,
cela couvre à peu près 25 % du territoire de la Bosnie-Herzégovine ? - 40 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, that is roughly correct. Before the war there were
109municipalities in Bosnia of very unequal sizes, some quite small, some much larger but in
terms of number of municipalities we are talking of roughly 25 per cent.
MFmUeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Comment, sur la base des données que vous avez recueillies
sur le territoire de ces vingt-six municipalitirez-vous la conclusion que la situation était
identique dans toute la Bosnie-Herzégovine ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: In addition to the information I collected through my surveys, I have
made a detailed study of all published documetation on destruction of cultural and religious
heritage in all of Bosnia-Herzegovi na. I alluded to this in my earlier testimony. If you have a
chance to read my reports, you will see the extensive listing of all the materials I studied.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Vous avez également dit ⎯effectivement, j’ai vu vos
rapports ⎯, vous avez dit dans ces rapports que avez utili sé le témoignage des gens qui habitaient
dans ces municipalités et notamment de personn es qui appartenaient à la communauté religieuse
musulmane. Est-ce exact ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Not quite. I relied on local residents, in particular local clergymen to
guide me to sites of destroyed houses of worship in particular. This was essential especially in
cases where the building no longer existed. In the absence of such assistance, it would have taken a
much longer time to document this many places.However, I never included a single site in my
surveys only on the basis of what people told me. Fi rst of all I visited more than 60 per cent of the
sites included in the survey. For every sI had photographs, often cadastral plans and other
independent information verifying first of all that this was the site it purported to be, that there had
in fact been a church or mosque on the site befo re the war and that there was no longer one on the
site now.
MFmUe VEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Vous avez parlé de certains événements qui sortent un peu
du cadre de votre expertise. Mais lorsque vous parlez de ce meurtre, notamment à Hanifici, Sasina,
Carakovo, comment avez-vous vérifié ces informations ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: The information in almost all of these cases again comes from
multiple sources. One of my sources was the publicly available testimony which can be found on
the UN war crime Tribunals website. Certainly in many cases where I collected information such - 41 -
as when was ?? destroyed, I had to simplywhat local people told me. However I would
then double-check information such as where is the fighting in the area by looking at publicly
available military histories such as the volumBalkan Babel , which I believe you are
familiar with. So I did not again go simply by what one person told me.
FAme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Savez-vous que les événemen ts à Hanifici et Carakovo que
vous rapportez étaient jugés par le Tribunal pénal in ternational qui n’a pas du tout adopté le point
de vue que vous avez exposé ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I was not aware of that.
MFAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Vous parliez de la mosqué e à Banja Luka. Combien de
mosquées il y avait à Banja Luka avant la guerre ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: According to the best of my information and the fact that I used it in
16 sites, I believe there were 16 mosques in Banja Luka including the suburbs.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Vous pensez qu’il y en avait seize ou vous en êtes sûr ?
Mr RIEDLMAYER: I know that there were 16.
MFAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Savez-vous combien d’églises catholiques il y avait à
Banja Luka ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: In Banja Luka itself, I assume you are alluding to the cathedral which
still stands. However, in the surroundings in Ba nja Luka in places like (?), which are close enough
to be suburbs, as many as ten or more catholic churches were destroyed.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Savez-vous combien d’églises orthodoxes il y avait à Banja
Luka, à Banja Luka même, dans la ville de Banja Luka ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Orthodox churches were notformally included in the scope of my
study. I am aware of the large new Orthodoxthat has been erected ne xt to the town hall.
However I did not do a count of Orthodox churches.
MFAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Donc vous ne savez pas exactement combien d’églises
orthodoxes il y avait à Banja Luka ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: No, I do not.
MFAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Vous parliez de la mosqe Ferhadija qui était, d’après
votre témoignage qu’on avait entendu tout à l’heure, détruite au mois de mai 1993, est-ce exact ? - 42 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Which month, I am sorry?
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Mois de mai 1993.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, you’re referring to the Ferhadija mosque?
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Oui, je me réfère à la mosquée Ferhadija.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, it was an incident very widely reported at the time. I think it is
indisputable that it was destroyed.
MFAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Avez-vous une explicatione, dans la requête de la
Bosnie-Herzégovine qui a été déposée en1993, cette mosquée était déjà reportée comme
détruite ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I had nothing to do with those findings. I can however say that the
mosque had had a number of attacks befowhich had caused it relatively slight damage but
damage that in fact went back to the previous year.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Mais vous êtes certain qlle n’a été détruite qu’en
mai 1993 ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes.
MFAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Vous avez parlé sur certains incidents de moyens, de
méthodes, comment ces mosquées ont été détruites. Savez-vous quelque chose sur la mosquée de
Ferhadija. Comment elle a été détruite ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Only the visual evidence, some of which you have seen, as well as the
accounts of eyewitnesses who report a very large blast, which is consistent with the visual evidence
of the aftermath. The actual destructioremains of the mosque was carried out by heavy
machinery and then with pneumatic drills and further explosives in the case of the [inaudible].
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: En effet, on peut dire que vous n’avez absolument aucune
connaissance exacte de qui a pu détruire cette mosquée ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: In terms of the individual responsible, I have none. What knowledge I
have of what parties may have been involved, I already presented as much as I know in my
presentation.
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Mais ce que vous avez présenté, ce n’est pas basé sur une
connaissance directe et immédiate que vous avez des événements ? - 43 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Only so much as I ga thered from eyewitnesses, including the mufti
who lived in the house right behind the mat the time it was destroyed and from Mr.Gusic,
the gentleman who took the video, who was able to describe what he saw the morning after.
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Le témoignage que vous avez obtenu des témoins, ce sont
les témoignages que ces témoins ont donnés à vous ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes. I interviewed Mr. Gusic who now lives in the same town I live
and I went to Banja Luka and I spoke to people in this [inaudible] community there.
MFmeUVEAU-IVANOVI : Avez-vous des connaissances et des compétences
particulières pour apprécier la crédibilité des témoignages ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: No, I am not a judge or a lawyer and all I have is the common sense
and knowledge of a human being. I have some sen se to know when somebody is trying to pull the
wool over my eyes. I believe that the people I ta lk to are trustworthy and I am supported in that
belief first of all by the fact that what they sa y seems to correspond to th e evidence as I see it, the
visual evidence, and that it is not contby each other. But I am not empowered to take
sworn statements and I am not a jurist.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Vous avez parlé de la ville de Mostar. Lors de vos voyages
en Bosnie, êtes-vous allé à Mostar ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, I did.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Est-ce qu’à Mostar aujod’hui, il y a une seule église
orthodoxe entière ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: No. There were two Orthodox churches in Mostar before the war. If
you study my curriculum vitae you will findI wrote an article about them and about their
destruction, and I am very familiar with what happened to them. Also, the photograph you saw of
the destroyed Orthodox cathedral in Mostar was one I took. So, yes I’m very familiar with it.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Vous avez parlé des événements qui se sont produits à
Mostar en 1992. A l’époque, vous n’étiez pas en Bosnie ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: No. At the time, I was not in Bosnia. However, the siege of Mostar
in 1992 was early in the war and produced iderably more documentation than some other - 44 -
events much later in the war. In particular, ther e were foreign journalists present in Mostar at the
time who reported on the shelling of the ciecondly, the Mostar Fede ration of Architects in
August and September 1992 did comprehensive documen tation of all the damage in the town. By
the way, including the damage to the destroye d Orthodox church; at that time the second Orthodox
church was still standing. This was publishedan exhibition catalogue profusely illustrated.
Furthermore, Mostar was visited at the end of 1 992, December 1992, by Mr. Kaiser on behalf of
the Council of Europe, who went there with a and photographers and visited every site that
had been damaged.
MFmeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: M. Riedlmayer, concernant Mostar je ne conteste
absolument pas que les monuments aient été détruits, ce que j’essaie de savoir, c’est comment vous
pouvez savoir qui les a détruits ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Again, the only thing I can say is I wasn’t present but I examined all
available documentation, ranging from accounts by i ndependent observers who were there at the
time. Also the fact that as of 1992, tknowledge no one was shelling Mostar other than the
Yugoslav army.
MFAe VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Quand vous dites que c’est selon vos connaissances, d’où
tirez-vous ces connaissances ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Again, I do not need to investigate personally the military situation in
Mostar. It has been written about in publismilitary histories of the Bosnian war, such as
Balkan Battlegrounds, which lay out in great detail the even ts between April and June 1992, which
is when this damage occurred.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: D’accord. Vous admettez en effet que vous n’êtes pas
vraiment qualifié pour vous prononcer sur cette situation militaire ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: No, for that I simply have to rely on others who are. I am, however,
qualified to assess damage either at first hand or from documentation.
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Est-ce que vous pouvez dire combien de mosquées étaient
détruites en Bosnie entière ? Pendant toute la période de guerre.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: In terms of the entire terr itory, the numbers vary to some degree. The
number I cite in my report ⎯ I believe it was over 950 but less than a thousand: I do not want to - 45 -
waste time looking at it right now ⎯ comes from a combination of sources. I went first of all to
the Islamic religious community, which has collected its own documentation about the damage to
its own sites. Secondly, the various independe nt bodies such as the Council of Europe, after it
brought rapporteurs during the war, and a technical aid mission in 1997-1998, which surveyed
historical buildings, including mosques, in all of Bosnia’s municipalities. Furthermore, I consulted
the database of the Bosnian War Crimes Commission and all other published available information.
So, I think as a ball-park figure, the 900-odd mosques that I mentioned as having been destroyed
and the destruction attributed to the Sprobably represent a reliable figure. If you are
asking, were other mosques destroyed? Yes, probably at least 200 more.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Ces autres mosquées étaient détruites par qui ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Those mosques were the victims of the fighting between Croat forces
and Bosnian Government forces in 1993 and 1994.
FAme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Donc vous admettez que dans la guerre entre les Croates et
les Musulmans, les Croates détruisaient les mosquées musulmanes ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes.
MFAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Si vous prenez la totalité des mosquées détruites dans la
guerre en Bosnie, est-ce que vous savez quel pourcentage ces mosquées détruites représente ?
The PRESIDENT: Counsel, could you please repe at the question for the interpreters, they
did not catch it.
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Bien sûr, Madame le président. Pouvez-vous nous dire en
pourcentage combien de mosquées étaient détruit es en Bosnie-Herzégovine, mais en prenant la
totalité, aussi bien celles qui étaient détruites dans la guerre entre les Serbes et les Musulmans et
celles qui étaient détruites dans la guerre entre les Musulmans et les Croates ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Based on the figures I just cited, it is relatively easy to do the maths.
If we are talking slightly less than 1,000 attributed to Serbs, and roughly 200 attributed to Croats.
It is a ratio of roughly ten to 2, or nine to 2.
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Mais ces mosquées détruites représentent quel pourcentage
de la totalité des mosquées qui existaient en Bosnie-Herzégovine ? - 46 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: As I cited in my presentation, the total number of mosques in Bosnia
was slightly over 1,700 so we are talking here well over half of all mosques in Bosnia that
were destroyed, or damaged during the war.Destroyed here, when talking about these figures
includes both complete destruction and partial damage.
MFAUe VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Savez-vous combien d’églises orthodoxes étaient détruites
en Bosnie-Herzégovine ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: This was not the subject of my study but I have seen some
publications by the Serbian Orthodox church in the museum of the Serbian Orthodox church, such
as Durovnik [inaudible] and others. I never dimaths, but have looked at individual sites. I
believe the number is over 100 but less than 200.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Savez-vous combien d’églises orthodoxes il y avait en
Bosnie-Herzégovine ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: That is a figure I have not seen.
MFmUe VEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Donc, vous ne pouvez ni conf irmer ni infirmer que environ
50 % des églises orthodoxes étaient détruites aussi pendant la guerre en Bosnie-Herzégovine ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: In the absence of those figures, obviously I am not in a position to do
so. However, I must say that when I was vi siting Bosnian towns and cities, I noted where
Orthodox churches still stood and where they were maged, and the fact is that in territory
controlled by the Bosnian Government, in all the ma jor cities, except for Mostar, that I visited the
Orthodox church was still standing.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Est-ce que vous avez pu obtenir une liste officielle des
organes de Bosnie-Herzégovine de mosquées qui étaient détruites ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: There is no single official list. In my report to the United Nations
Tribunal, which you say have read, I go into shortcomings of the vari ous reports that were
issued. The problem was that at the end of ther, amidst the crisis of maintaining peace, of
resettling the refugees and rebuilding a shatd country, things like inventorying cultural
monuments seemed to be very low on the roster our priorities. Various bodies that collected
information tended to have purposes in mind or than doing a global survey. The religious
communities were most concerned with obtaining funds for reconstruction and tended to focus on - 47 -
those sites where reconstruction was feasible. Th e Council of Europe rapporteurs, for example,
tended to be interested only in listed monuments, meaning monuments that had been designated for
a special legal protection, and so forth. You al so had the problem that after Dayton, Bosnia was
divided into two separate entities and in those cases that meant that no single body had jurisdiction
over the entire country and the Annex8 Commission, the Commission on National Monuments,
which is supposed to look into the documentation and protection of monuments throughout Bosnia,
was not functioning for the first six or seven years after Dayton. So, in fact there is no such thing
as a single official list; there are many lists of varying degrees of reliability.
MFmUe VEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Avez-vous pu obtenir une liste des mosquées qui existaient
en 1992 ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: No, I don’t have the list of mosques in 1992.
FAmUeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Admettez-vous qu’une telle liste n’existe pas ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I am not in a position to say whether it exists or not. I must say,
however, that under legislation in effect ie former Yugoslavia before its disintegration,
mosques and religious institutions were requirbe registered with the Government. And so
therefore I assume that records of extincsques do exist, somehow. Whether these records
survived the war intact is maybe another question.
MFmUeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : En tout cas, ceci n’est que l’une de vos présomptions. Vous
n’avez aucune certitude que cela existait en 1992 en Bosnie ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: In the case of the mosques that I did document ⎯ we are talking about
the numbers that I mentioned in my repor⎯ I tried whenever possible to obtain definitive
evidence that these mosq ues indeed existed before the war. Including pre-war photographs, I
actually went to cadastral offices and got cadastral records, which include, as you know, site plans,
so even if the building was not there when I visited, in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I had evidence
that there was a monument there before.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Lors de votre témoignagedevant le TPIY, lorsque vous
avez témoigné dans le procèMilosevic, M.Milosevic vous a posé une question concernant la
e
mosquée à Foca, en disant que cette mosquée du XVIiècle était construite sur les fondations
anciennes d’une église orthodoxe. Est-ce que vous vous souvenez de ça ? - 48 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I recall the question, yes.
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: A l’époque, vous avez dit que vous ne connaissiez pas ça.
Est-ce que vous avez fait des vérifications sur cette question ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I am not sure I see the revance of it, but the fact is that I was not
about to research building histories going back to the Middle Ages. There are buildings which I
have studied for my own research, the alleged mosque in Foca is not one of them. Whether or not
in medieval times a church existed on site wh ere the mosque was then erected, I think does not
make much difference in terms of the criminality of destroying the mosque.
MFAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Certainement pas, maimoi je vous pose seulement une
question. Est-ce que vous savez, est-ce quavez fait des recherches si cette mosquée a été
faite sur les fondations d’une ancienne église orthodoxe ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I did not.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Mais, tout de même, vous ad mettez que c’était une pratique
assez courante dans l’Empire ottoman de faire des anciennes églises dans les mosquées ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: It’s actually a rather complex situation. I am a scholar of Ottoman
history and aware of the fact that when the Otto mans conquered towns, they would generally take
the major church in that town and turn ia mosque, leaving the smaller churches to the
Christian communities that still remained. Rememb er that we are talking about medieval times,
when in fact religion and State were not separated and the major monument within the city was as
much a symbol of the ruler as of any religion. An d the practice was fairly similar in Europe, or at
least analogous.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Vous avez parlé de la biblio thèque nationale à Sarajevo qui
a été détruite. Il s’agit d’une bibliothèque nationale de Bosnie-Herzégovine, est-ce exact ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, it was the National and University Library of Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : C’est une bibliothèque nati onale de la Bosnie-Herzégovine,
ce n’est pas une bibliothèque nationale des Musulmans de la Bosnie-Herzégovine ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Most certainly not. It was the repository of the entire country’s
written heritage as such. - 49 -
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Donc, cette bibliothèque contenait les ouvrages concernant
l’histoire croate et serbe aussi ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, it did.
MFmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Lorsque cette bibliothèque a été détruite, cet héritage croate
et serbe a été détruit aussi ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Tragically, yes.
MFmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Encore une fois, concernant cette bibliothèque, vous n’avez
aucune indication précise sur qui a détruit cette bibliothèque ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: That is not correct. First of all, as I told you, I interviewed more than
a dozen residents in the neighbourhood surrounding the library. I interviewed people who saw the
shells land on the roof of the library. Sithey were phosphorous shells, they threw very
characteristic fans of sparks. During the siege of Sarajevo residents of Sarajevo became quite good
at telling various kinds of munitions apart, because they had different effects and they were
dangerous to them in different ways . In Sarajevo, the old town is located in a very steep and deep
valley and the people I interviewed also id people who lived on the hillside immediately
overlooking the library. The library began to be she lled just after sunset and they were able to see
muzzle flashes and hear the munitions coming in and landing on the library. So, it’s not exactly a
mystery where it was coming from.
Secondly, in the video, you saw the reporter Ku rt Schork of Reuters. He was one of two top
correspondents, the other one being John Pomfret, who witnessed the attack on the library. They
filed long reports and in the case of Kurt Schork, I had a correspondence with him before his tragic
death ⎯ he was killed reporting on the war in Sierra Leone a few years ago ⎯ and he shared with
me his rough notes on what he saw. What he sw included not only a library on fire, but the
firemen being fired on from the surrounding hillsides which were held by Serb forces. So, in other
words, yes I do have some reason to believat it was indeed the work of the forces on the
surrounding hills.
MFme VEAU-IVANOVI Ć : C’est exactement ce que je pensais. Vous avez des raisons
de croire, mais vous ne pouvez pas l’affirmer avec certitude. - 50 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Let me go one step further. In addition to having talked to a number
of people who witnessed this and were able to inde pendently report the same kind of details, I was
able to inspect the building and the surrounding bui ldings. The building itself is very completely
burned out, the metal elements in places were melted by the heat of the flames, they were of such
intensity. The building had a skylight ⎯ a metal roof, with windows ⎯ and the shells landed on
the roof according to eyewitnesses and, stored ben eath the roof, was the library’s main book depot
which immediately caught on fire. Then the bu ilding was fired on with small arms when the
firemen first arrived. If you look at the building you can see the marks of the shrapnel and the
bullet impacts. Since the building afterwards was abandoned and was not used for any purpose, I
assume that those marks date from that period.
Furthermore, the site is triangular, one side faces the river, and two of them are rather narrow
streets with apartment buildings and offices. The buildings facing the library on the narrow streets
show some of the bullet impacts, especially on the upper storeys, that not one of them was hit by
any incendiary device. So, I would say that there are considerable signs that this library was indeed
targeted.
MFmAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Vous avez vu beaucoup de rapports, et vous avez lu
apparemment beaucoup sur la guerre en Bo snie-Herzégovine, est-ce que vous avez eu
connaissance, est-ce que vous avez trouvé cette information lors de vos recherches que, très
souvent, les Membres des Nations Unies, les membr es de la mission de paix (les militaires), ont eu
beaucoup de difficultés à déterminer d’où venait un obus.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I have read that there we re various controversies, some of them I
believe were artificially stirred up, others may have been subjects which remain in doubt. In this
case, I do not know of any allegation raised at the time, or indeed since, that a search that the
library was shelled by anyone else.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Admettez-vous qu’en 1995, vous avez écrit une lettre à
Bill Clinton en demandant la levée de l’embargo sur les armes pour la Bosnie-Herzégovine ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, I did write that le tter in the summer of 1995, and I wrote that
letter in part because I believe that under the Charter of the United Nations, Bosnia and
Herzegovina as a Member State of the United Natio ns had the legitimate right to self-defence, and - 51 -
under the Charter of the United Nations, if d Nations is not in a position to protect the
country, then the country has a right to pursue its own defence. This being already the fourth year
of the war, and with Srebrenica happeninglieved that it was an international scandal that
Bosnia and Herzegovina should be denied this right. However, my having taken this position has
absolutely no bearing on my professional qualificati ons or indeed on my honesty in reporting what
I saw.
MFAUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Effectivement, concernant les événements à Srebrenica,
vous avez également pris la position que ces événem ents sont la conséquence d’un accord tacite
entre les Serbes et les Nations Unies ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I do not recollect when said such a thing, but I don’t exclude the
possibility that you found something that may suggest such a thing. I would say that if indeed you
came across something like that, all I may have b een repeating was widesp read speculation in the
press at the time, which said that the enclaves were seen as a burden and that there were people at
high levels who would just as soon see them out of the way. But as I say, I don’t recall what you
specifically may be referring to, perhaps you can refresh my memory.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : C’était un article dans le New York Times.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Can you read the excerpt?
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Je suis désolée, je ne l’ai pas.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: OK, well, then there is really not much to be said.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Savez-vous que l’agence de relations publiques américaine,
Rudder & Finn travaillait pour le Gouvernemenbosniaque concernant la destruction des
monuments culturels ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I am not.
FAmeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Elle ne vous a pas contacté ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: No.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Vous avez dit dans un de vos rapports que la société
musulmane est une «société moderne, industlisée, européenne». Restez-vous avec cette
affirmat? C’est l’affirmation que vous donnez de la société musulmane de la
Bosnie-Herzégovine. - 52 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I believe what you’re quo ting from is an article I wrote about Bosnia
in general and it referred to Bosnian society as larg e, as being industrialized and European. I don’t
see that either of those statements is particularly controversial. During the Yugoslav period, Bosnia
had heavy industry and it was indisputably integrated into the greater regional economy.
MFmAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: S’agissant des mosquées en Serbie-et-Monténégro, en
dehors du Kosovo où la situation a été une situa tion de guerre civile, est-ce que vous pouvez me
dire si vous avez connaissance d’une mosquée détr uite en Serbie-et-Monténégro, en dehors du
Kosovo ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: OK. Let me preface this by saying that I have not travelled to Serbia
and Montenegro, outside of Kosovo, since the war.I was there as a student, back before the war,
but I was not in any pos ition to personally assess any damage Serbia and Montenegro. That
being said, yes I am aware of some mosques that we re attacked, in particular in the Bukarac region
of Sandzak, where according to reports publis hed by independent human rights NGOs, and
illustrated with pictures ⎯ with photos ⎯ a number of Muslim villages were attacked and at least
two mosques were destroyed. This was back at the time of the war in Bosnia. Furthermore, the
mosque in Belgrade was not destroyed; it was subject to a number of attacks during the 1990s. As
I recall, there were at least seven reported att acks on Belgrade’s only mosque, the Bijeljina, during
the 1990s, ranging from people throwing grenades, to ot hers firing shots and other forms of attack.
I do not claim that there was massive destructiobut I think it would be unfair to say that there
was no attack on a mosque in Serbia and Montenegro.
MFmUeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Je crois que ma question était si une mosquée a été détruite,
pas si une mosquée a été attaquée. Mais je cr ois que vous avez répondu à cette question de toute
façon. Est-ce que vous avez eu l’occasion de faire une estimation des dommages faits sur les
monuments culturels dans d’autres conflits armés, en dehors de la Bosnie-Herzégovine, en dehors
de l’ex-Yougoslavie disons ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes. As a matter of fact, I have. Since 2003, I have served as the
Chair of the Committee on Iraqi Libraries at the Middle East Librarians’ Association in which I
worked to document the damage to and destructi on of libraries related to cultural property in Iraq - 53 -
during the Iraq war. We have published information on a website that we maintain and I published
extensively on the subject.
MFmAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Seriez-vous d’accord que dans cette guerre d’Irak la
destruction des monuments culturels était aussi assez importante ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Yes, although I believe that the circumstances were fundamentally
different from that in Bosnia.
MFmUeVEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Il s’agit d’une guerre. Donc la destruction était importante,
d’accord ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Actually I believe that in Iraq the destruction to which I refer, which is
of cultural institutions, had actually no connecti on to military actions. What happened was that
Iraq was invaded, the local security forces wedisarmed and the invading forces for whatever
reason did not impose order and then people fvarious reasons, whether for profit according to
some allegations to destroy records that mightincriminate them, would attack archives and
libraries. I think nothing of that sort has been reported from the Balkans over the 1990s.
MFmAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Avez-vous connaissance d’un conflit armé entre les
différents Etats, entre les différentes relientre les différentes ethnies, entre les différentes
nations ? L’héritage culturel est resté intact ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: No, I am not. Actually, all war results in destruction. However, there
is a fundamental difference in destruction thatis caused incidentally to a [inaudible] and
destruction that is deliberate and aimed at th ese particular monuments. The second instance would
include the Nazi burning of the synagogues or the 2004 attacks on Serb churches in Kosovo. Those
are specific attacks on cultural property as such. The question of say Cologne cathedral incinerated
during the bombing of the city during World War II, I think is a very different matter. It may well
have been war crime. I think it would be up to so mebody who is an expert in international law to
determine on facts whether it was. But I think there is a good possibility that it was not the main
aim of the attack. I think in the case of a monumof culture that is specifically destroyed at a
time when there is no military excuse for doing so is a fundamentally different matter than
monument of culture that merely is in the way of a battle. - 54 -
MFmUe VEAU-IVANOVI Ć : Le seul conflit armé que vous avez examiné à part celui de
la Bosnie-Herzégovine, c’est celui en Irak? Cest ce que vous m’avez dittout à l’heure, c’est
vrai ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: It’s not the only one conflict I’ve heard about. I’m saying this is the
only one in which I’ve been involved to a degree th at I have developed specific expertise on. But I
have read very widely on the subject of cultural her itage in war which has been an interest of mine
for going on 20 years.
MFmUe VEAU-IVANOVI Ć : En tout cas, celui que vous connaissiez le mieux parce que
vous êtes impliqué dedans, celui d’Irak, vous adit aussi tout à l’heure que les dommages qui
étaient faits ne sont pas vraiment liés aux actions militaires ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Only in the most incide ntal of fashions, namely that it happened
immediately after a military takeover, but that in nature it was a breakdown of civil order. It did
not involve soldiers shooting at each other.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Lors de votre examination directe, vous avez dit à un
moment donné que vous vouliez faire un point et que vous vouliez lier l’élément culturel à la
communauté nationale religieuse. Seriez-vous d’accord qu’en fait, votre déposition aujourd’hui ici
est plus la déposition d’un avocat que d’un témoin impartial extérieur ?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I would say not. My role is first of all to speak about facts that I
gathered, secondly to come to certain conclusions. Now the reason that I am concerned about the
destruction of cultural monuments is not merely in the abstract sense of a thing of beauty should
not be destroyed. I see it as fundamentally connect ed to the meaning of those monuments to the
people who used them, who lived with them and in that sense I think it’s very legitimate to look at
not just whether buildings were destroyed or how they were destroyed but also to look at the
context in which they were destroyed and the co nsequences of their destruction. You brought up
the National Library in Sarajevo. I have lonwondered exactly why such a building would be
targeted and it is a bit of mystery because the anations that have come from officials in the
Bosnian Serb leadership at the time were rather contradictory. Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the
Bosnian Serbs, was interviewed about that a femonths after the event and he claimed that the
library had been burnt down [inaudible] by the Muslims because they didn’t like its architecture. I - 55 -
don’t know. To me, that sounds like a rather fland irresponsible remark. Nevertheless I think
the fact is that no one until now has claimed that the building was shelled by anyone else other than
his forces. And the fact is that I believe thdestruction was meant to strike a blow at not just
the Muslim community but at Bosnia as a country. You say, it helps Serb works. Yes, they threw
out Serb works like the works of Aleksa Santic, a very proud Serb from Mostar who could write
poems like [inaudible] where he addressed his Bosnian Muslim country members who had been
emigrating to escape conscription and told them: “Please don’t go. Your place is with us, your
brothers.” I don’t think that kind of Bosnian Serb heritage was something that the nationalists were
particularly interested in preserving.
MFAUe VEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Donc, en effet, ce que vous dites, que c’était un acte qui
était dirigé vers les Serbes de Bosnie-Herzégovine, c’était en fait un acte politique. Ce n’est pas du
tout un acte religieux, ethnique ou national.était provoqué par des raisons politiques. Peu
importe qui l’avait fait.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I think it was . . . First of all the National Library clearly was not the
single property of any one of Bosnia’s national oups. It was the common heritage of all the
Bosnian peoples.
MFAeUVEAU-IVANOVI Ć: Je vous remercie M. Riedlmayer, je n’ai plus d’autres
questions. Merci, Madame le président.
The PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, Madam Fauveau-Ivanovi ć. MsKorner, do you
wish to re-examine?
Ms KORNER: I just have two questions, Mada m President, if I may. The first is this,
Mr.Riedlmayer, you were asked about the number of Orthodox churches which had been
destroyed in your view, and you said over 100 and less than 200. It was then put to you, could you
confirm or deny, that over 50 per cent of Orthodox churches had been destroyed; in other words,
there were only 400. In your expert view, were there only 400 Serb Orthodox churches in Bosnia?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: I believe that’s highly implausible.
Ms KORNER: Any idea at all how many? - 56 -
Mr.RIEDLMAYER: You can go by the fact there that in pre-war censuses the Serb
community, which was overwhelmingly Orthodox in religious tradition, constituted up to a third or
more of Bosnia’s population. Therefore one would expect that it would proportionally have houses
of worship in numbers commensurate with, or in proportion.
Ms KORNER: Secondly this, and this really go es to the heart of the matter. It has been
suggested to you, and there has been criticism that you’re in no pos ition to give expert evidence as
you weren’t there, for example in Mostar. Can you just tell the Court very briefly, how an expert
acquires his knowledge?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Sorry, can you repeat that?
Ms KORNER: How an expert acquires the knowledge that makes them an expert.
Mr.RIEDLMAYER: There are ways of acquiring knowledge, MadamPresident, as you
know other than by being there. In fact being th ere sometimes is not the best way to do so. What
an expert does is collect information and documen tation, tests its reliability, tests its internal
consistency and, in so far as possible, tries to confirm data from multiple independent sources.
That is how you document something; simply by looking at it is probably one of the less reliable
ways of doing it. Unless you also then take all these next steps.
Ms KORNER: And finally this: it has been suggested that in some way you have a bias and
are attempting to mislead the Court in some way about your findings. Is that the case at all?
Mr.RIEDLMAYER: I take strong exception to an y suggestion like that. First of all, I am
quite sincere in my belief that I’m doing my level best to tell you the truth. And secondly, the facts
I’m presenting to you are based on years of meticulous research. I don’t believe that this research
has been seriously challenged so far. Thank you.
Ms KORNER: Thank you very much, Mr. Riedlmayer. Thank you, Madam President.
The PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. The Court will now retire, but the Parties and the
expert should remain in the vicinity of the Gr eat Hall of Justice. If the Court wishes to pose
questions to Mr.Riedlmayer, it will return to the courtroom within the next 15minutes; if the - 57 -
Court does not choose to put any questions to Mr. Riedlmayer, it will not return to the courtroom
and the Registry will inform the Parties and the public accordingly. The Court now rises.
The Court adjourned from 12.35 p.m. to 12.50 p.m.
The PRESIDENT: Please be seated. Will Mr. Riedlmayer please resume his place.
Dr. Riedlmayer, I beg his pardon. Thank you.
Certain judges do wish to put questions to you, Dr. Riedlmayer. I will call upon those judges
in the sequence that I hope conveniently clusters fo r you the types of questions to be asked. I start
with Judge Kreća.
JKdRge ĆA: Thank you, Madam President. Mr. Riedlmayer, would you be so kind as to
explain to us very briefly the principal conclu sions you came to in your papers published in 1994
and 1995 I think, “Killing Memory: Genocide and the War on Culture in Bosnia-Herzegovina”.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Those early publications came while the war was still in progress. I
had yet to do any field investigations at that point, but from the moment that the war broke out I
had noted the two phenomena that seemed to charact erize the war. One is the so-called process of
ethnic cleansing, in which populations were, in one way or another, removed from the areas in
which they were. The second was the massive destru ction of the cultural heritage associated with
those communities.
In order to document this I began collecting published photographs, interviews with refugees
and other information. I produced an article whic h recounted the evidence I was able to collect on
these matters. But in general, the process of acquiring information on what happened in Bosnia has
been something that has taken me more than a d ecade to achieve my present level of expertise on
it. Obviously I know more now than I did ten or 12 years ago. Nevertheless, I think the basic
conclusions I was able to come to then are still, more or less, my conclusions today.
The PRESIDENT: Dr. Riedlmayer, you were specifically asked to say, if you can in a
sentence or two, what were those conclusions. - 58 -
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: The conclusions were in fact that: first of all, the cultural heritage in
Bosnia and Herzegovina was not merely destroyed in the fighting, but that it seemed to be a
specific target of destruction; and, secondly, that the scale of that destruction was very large; and
that thirdly, it seemed to be connected with th e expulsion of the populations that were connected
with that heritage.
The PRESIDENT: Thank you. I call upon Judge Tomka to put his question.
Judge TOMKA: Thank you, Madam President. Dr. Riedlmayer, from your curriculum
vitae, page 6, I gathered that, in March 1994, you took part in the International Conference:
Genocide 1944-1994, held at D uke University in North Caro lina and you presented a paper
“Culture and Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Would you be so kind just to briefly tell us
your views, or your conclusions, reached in that paper.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: The conference was held in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the
publication of Rafael Lemkin’s ground-breaking work on methods of Axis Rule in Europe in which
he introduced the term “genocide”. In Lemkin’s original concept of genocide he included the
destruction of culture as one of the key elements of genocide. This definition, however, was much
narrower in the Genocide Convention that was adopted , I believe, four years later. In so far as
culture plays a role in genocide, as far as my unde rstanding of jurisprudence goes, and I am not a
legal expert . . .
The PRESIDENT: Could I recall that you are being asked to answer what your conclusions
are.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: My conclusions were th at in this Conference, which addressed the
legacy of Lemkin, I tried to show that what happened in Bosnia met Lemkin’s definitions.
The PRESIDENT: Thank you. I next call upon Judge Simma.
Judge SIMMA: Thank you, Madam President. I have two questions to Dr. Riedlmayer.
The first one refers to the issue of destruction of orthodox places of worship during the war. You - 59 -
mentioned that you had not been mandated to look in to that issue, but you said that there was some
destruction which was effected by the Croat for ces fighting the Serb forces. My question is: do
you have information about the respect or lack of respect by Bosnian and Herzegovinian forces,
including the mujahideen, for orthodox places of wors hip in areas of conflict? That is my first
question.
My second question is: you said that there we re 1,700 mosques in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
out of which around 900 were destroyed by ⎯ let us say, in the right sense of the word ⎯ Serbs
and between 100 and 200 by Croat forces. Is it so that the number of 1,700 mosques includes the
mosques in all of Bosnia and Herzegovina; that is , also mosques situated in territories which were
never actually a theatre of the war?
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Thank you. I will answer the second question first because it is easier.
The number of mosques is for all of the territo ry Bosnia and Herzegovina, including places that
were not touched by the war. So in fact, in th e areas where destruction did occur, it was probably
more intense because of this proportionality.
Your first question which related to Bosn ian Government forces has a rather complex
answer. First of all, as far as the mujahidin are concerned, I never did any fieldwork in central
Bosnia which is where the mujahidin were more ac tive. However, my understanding is that in the
recently announced verdict in the Hadzihasanovic case at the ICTY in which the charges included
responsibility for destruction of cultural monuments by mujahidin, the ruling of the Court was that
the Bosnian Government army, at least at the time of the charges, did not have control over the
mujahidin and therefore it was not held responsible for that.
As far as what I know about attacks on Serb monuments by Bosnian Government forces:
basically, as far as I know, the attacks that did occu r were concentrated in the final phase of the
war, when the Bosnian Serb front line was collaps ing, especially in north-western Bosnia, and the
Bosnian army retook large swathes of territory. In that territory, in the large cities, the Serb
Orthodox monuments were generally left alone. However, these include many municipalities
where I did extensive fieldwork so I was able to observe that in a number of village settings the
Serb Orthodox churches were burnt out. When I interrogated local people about that, they said that - 60 -
much of the destruction was the work of civilia ns, sometimes of ordinary soldiers and they
claimed, at least ⎯ I have no way of confirming this ⎯ that officers tried to stop them. I think as a
matter of common sense, it makes a good deal of sense to suppose that if there had been a
Government policy to have Orthodox churches d estroyed, then we would not see the intact
churches in the cities. At the same time, the Bosnian Government officials made rather proud
statements about how the Serb churches were okay in towns where mosques and Catholic churches
were not, so at least their public front was that th is is not something we do and this is what makes
us different from the other side. Now it is, of c ourse, not always the fact that people do what they
say they do. So, these are informal observations, obviously.
The PRESIDENT: Thank you. We now come to the final question to be put this morning.
Vice-President.
The VICE-PRESIDENT: Dr. Riedlmayer. You describe yourself as a student of Ottoman
history and the question was put to you whether certain mosques had stood on a place where a
church was originally built in the Middle Ages, to which in that particular case you did not have an
answer. But you then said that in certain places in Bosnia and Herzegovina and probably in the
Balkans, it was the policy of the Ottomans, or it was reported that the Ottomans turned the major
churches into a mosque and left the lesser or smaller churches to their Christian population. Then I
noticed in one of the exhibits that you spoke of a cathedral, Serb cathedral, that had been built
during the Ottoman time. Can you please tell me what exactly was the policy of the Ottomans.
Was it to destroy Orthodox churches, to tolerate th em, to encourage them? Briefly. I know this is
not easy because the Ottoman rule was a long one in the Balkans.
Mr. RIEDLMAYER: Thank you. I assume you are referring to Cajnice. In the case of
Cajnice where you saw the large Orthodox church with the miracle working icon and at the
opposite corner the mosque which actually look s somewhat smaller. The church was rebuilt
several times during the Ottoman rule; it is a ve ry curious situation because technically, according
to Sharia law which the Ottomans at least nominally observed, pre-existing churches and
synagogues can be rebuilt, but no bigger or fancier th an they had been before. In fact, this was - 61 -
violated left and right. The most famous example of it is the old synagogue in Sarajevo. Before
the Ottoman conquest there were no Jews in Sarajevo so therefore family legal fiction invented a
pre-existing synagogue which was then built on [i naudible] endowment land. Similarly, in
Zitomislic, south of Mostar ⎯ which is the monastery I mentioned in my presentation ⎯ there had
been a small pre-existing Orthodox church which was then successively en larged with Ottoman
Government permission in the sixteenth and sevent eenth centuries and, in fact, there were even
churches and monasteries that were built with contributions from Muslim donors. The most
striking example is in one of the towns I menti oned in my presentation, Meresina (?), where the
town’s Orthodox church was built in the nineteenth century next to the main old mosque in town
on land that was donated by the Islamic community so that the Serb peasants who would come to
market in the town, which was mainly Muslim, woul d have a place to worship. When I visited the
site, of course, the mosque was gone and the church was still there.
The PRESIDENT: Thank you. This brings to an end the hearing of Dr. Riedlmayer. We
thank you very much for appearing before us.
The Court will meet on Monday 20 March at 10 o’ clock in the morning to hear the evidence
or statement of the second expert called by Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Court now rises.
Ms KORNER: Madam President, I am sorry. I do apologize. Before you rise, may I just
mention one procedural matter. The Court has laid down fairly strict rules about the conduct of this
part of the case. I wonder if you and the Court would care to consider an extra one: that, if
documents are to be put to witnesses on things that they have said, the document must be available
in court so that in fairness to the witness he can see what it is that is being said that he said.
The PRESIDENT: Ms Korner, of course we take all requests from counsel very seriously.
You will understand that the questions went to the impartiality of the witness and it was his own
writings. So, I think in the particular circumstance he has not been surpri sed by the references to
his own writings. - 62 -
Ms KORNER: I think, and I do apologize for detaining you a little longer, I think the
problem, however, is as you saw this morning, that the witness says: can I see that, because I can’t
remember exactly what I said. And if it is ta ken out of context we have no way of checking it
unless we have the article.
The PRESIDENT: Yes, the Court will take your point into consideration. Thank you.
The Court rose at 1.10 p.m.
___________
Audience publique tenue le vendredi 17 mars 2006, à 10 heures, au Palais de la Paix, sous la présidence de Mme Higgins, président