A chilling encounter: My morning with a suspected Serb war criminal

Milan Kovacevic looked self-confident on that August morning of 1992, his bushy yellow moustache and staring eyes so prominent that we scribbled his features into our notebooks as we sat in the mayor’s office in the northwest Bosnian town of Prijedor.

The Serb who was last week seized by British troops at gunpoint as a suspected war criminal had been introduced to us as “president of the council”; slivovitz brandy had been served at 10am and even the international delegation in the room – a group of CSCE (Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe) officials led by Sir John Thomson, Baroness Thatcher’s former UN ambassador – were sipping alcohol in fraternal fashion. But none of us would be able to forget the thousands of smashed and ruined Muslim homes we had passed in the suburb of Kozarac on the way to this meeting.

Sir John’s job was to talk to Prijedor’s self-appointed Serb mayor Milomar Stakic – who was dressed in a T-shirt oddly labelled “Portobello Road W11” – in a vain attempt to persuade him to cooperate with Alija Izetbegovic’s government in Sarajevo. But the Muslims of Prijedor, whose leaders had been elected at the last free poll, were already murdered, “cleansed” or trucked to the evil camps of Omarska and Manjaca outside Prijedor.

On the morning of 31 August 1992, Messrs Kovacevic and Stakic wanted only to talk about their own plight. The “Muslim” government of Sarajevo was starving the Serbs of electricity, Kovacevic complained. There was no local industry. They needed food and fuel.

“The people who come here from Europe ask questions about one people: the Muslims,” Kovacevic said. “We in our Serb community have the problem of feeding and heating for all our population of all communities. If we don’t have electricity, if we don’t have fuel, not only will we continue fighting but we shall all become cannibals.”

It was a weird, frightening thing to hear in the former Muslim mayor’s office at Prijedor, a wild exaggeration from a man who was supposed to be a responsible official. “We are all losers,” he interjected at another point. All the men in the room – including Kovacevic – knew what had happened to the Muslims of the town; in front of all of us, Stakic had talked about the Manjaca and Omarska camps and later invited us to visit a third, at Trnopolje.

Then Kovacevic addressed Sir John. “In your coming talk with Izetbegovic, please also raise the problem of exchange of prisoners,” he asked. “There are prisoners on both sides but the Muslims have never accepted the principle of the exchange of a single prisoner.”

The “exchange of prisoners” which Kovacevic sought – the deportation of innocent Muslims who had been burned out of their homes and imprisoned in concentration camps, in return for Serbs living in Muslim areas – was the principle of “ethnic cleansing” which the Serbs had embraced from the start.

Indeed, Kovacevic went on to say that his authorities had released some Muslims from the Kozarac area. “Kozarac is not yet a safe place,” he said with equal suddenness. “The Muslim extremists come back and shoot at us. Yesterday we had two of our men killed and their bodies set on fire. These groups of extremists have withdrawn to the Kozara mountains.”

The Muslims could hide in the mountains for another six months or a year, Kovacevic said. “Hitler had 100,000 troops surrounding Kozara in 1942 and in four years he couldn’t get rid of all the Serbs fighting him from there. This is why we get so upset when people come and say we Serbs have concentration camps – because we Serbs know what concentration camps were like.” It was to become a familiar story. The Serbs had driven the Muslims from their lands, imprisoned them in camps, abused them as “extremists” if they resisted – and then drew on their own history of Second World War partisan struggles to obliterate the modern-day sufferings of Muslims.

After we left the mayor’s chamber, I found Sir John sitting in the garden outside, in appalled contemplation of what he had just heard. An hour later, at Trnopolje, we saw the Muslims whom Kovacevic wanted to “exchange”. Most of them were skin and bone.