Tuesday 25 October 2016

Police and atrocity crimes in Bosnian Krajina


INTRODUCTION

The Blogajevo pages came into existence when I spent 9 months in Sarajevo in 2014. I was there to research police violence during the 1992-1995 war. Criminologists sometimes assume that police are ‘natural’ partners in ethnic violence. I wasn’t so sure, and spent my time away from Edinburgh going through court records to see what the story was. What I found was that processes of democratisation, politicisation, deprofessionalisation and militarisation fundamentally changed the shape of the police and help to explain their involvement in atrocity crimes. A full paper, with sources and citations, is available here

My nine months were spent analysing over 50,000 pages of court transcripts and 3,000 pieces of evidence from two cases heard in The Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (Prosecutor v Brđanin, Prosecutor v Stanišić and Župljanin). 

Police participation in genocides and atrocity crimes is well recognised. Police are trained to use violence and to obey senior authority, but to me that’s a fairly thin understanding of police. At best, it suggests a potential role in violent state action against civilians, at worst it risks taking police violence for granted. The underlying assumptions can be questioned. They ignore the possibility of untrained personnel; fail to consider in what ways and in what contexts police are trained to use violence; side-line ideological conviction or other explanations; and don’t treat violence as a process unfolding over time. Detailed description and analysis of a specific case can shed more light on these processes. 

DESCRIBING POLICE VIOLENCE

The police contributed to ethnic cleansing in the Krajina region in the north west of Bosnia through the creation of an inhospitable environment for non-Serbs, forced transfers of population and murder.

Krajina municipalities in pink and blue


Disarmament

Serb authorities, including the police, targeted disarmament programmes at Bosniaks (known at the time as Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnian Croats. In contrast they accommodated and cooperated with irregular armed formations of Bosnian Serbs and Serb neighbourhoods and villages retained or received weapons. Radio broadcasts explicitly targeted non-Serbs with calls to surrender arms. In this way, Serb authorities secured a monopoly over the material means of physical violence.

Joint military and police weapon collection programmes targeted towns, villages and individuals. Weapons taken in by the civilian police included those retained after military service, illegally procured arms and legally owned and registered pistols and rifles. These operations involved intrusive and violent police searches, arrests and large scale detention of civilians. Both before and after the expiry of deadlines, military attacks were threatened and occurred.

Detention camps, arrests, interrogation

Evidence from detainees and members of the Serb Interior Ministry describe various detention camps, often in schools, public facilities and industrial sites.

Camp detainees were held in inhumane conditions. Camps were crowded, had inadequate provision for nutrition and personal hygiene, and inmates slept on hard floors. They were humiliated and denigrated, beaten and killed.

Beatings took place during police interrogations and as part of the daily activities of the police acting as guards. In Kotor Varoš, at the school building and sawmill, acts against inmates extended to sexual violence and rape against men and women.

Individual killings include the suffocation and beating to death of men being transferred to Manjaca, and the July massacre of detainees from Brdo in the Omarska camp. Further details on individual killings and massacres in Omarska and Keraterm are found in other cases at both the ICTY and the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The ICTY evidence only includes the clearest and strongest examples, where eye-witnesses survived to testify. An association of camp detainees has wider evidence of around 700 killings at Omarska
Lines of control are often ambiguous in camps, but police involvement is evident. Examples include the sports hall in Sanski Most; the Manjaca detention camp; and in leadership and day to day running of camps at Omarska and Keraterm.

Interrogations took place in police stations and in camps. Teams of interrogators were made up of the regular police (Public Security Service), the intelligence-oriented State Security Service, and Military Security. In Keraterm, Manjaca and Omarska camps, interrogations categorised detainees into three groups, including men singled out to be killed. These included those in leading functions, wealthy citizens, intellectuals and professionals, suggesting a strategy to undermine non-Serb communities by removing those playing a role in organisation and representation.

In some cases, police acted to protect non-Serbs during transfers or in detention. These are limited, but indicate points where police break from the script of persistent, repeated and serious abuse and violence.

Violence outside camps and police facilities

The camps provided a contained environment in which violence was routinized. Violence, including police violence, was also prevalent outside. The police cooperated with military forces in violent attacks on villages and were involved in individual and large scale killing outside the detention camps.

The massacre at Korićanske Stijene is one of the better documented mass killings. On 21 August 1992, a police intervention squad from Prijedor shot around 200 Bosniak men at the edge of a canyon. Clothing lying in the canyon and a bad smell suggested this was not the first mass killing at the site.

A hostile environment

As part of the strategic goals of the Serb authorities to separate the peoples of BiH and to secure territory, a combination of killings, detention and harassment sought to rid the area of non-Serbs by elimination and by creating a hostile environment to promote mass population movements out of the region.

The court documents allow detailed description of this process, and can serve as a foundation for an explanation of how a multi-ethnic police force is transformed to carry out such acts.

EXPLAINING POLICE VIOLENCE

Three developments changed the structure and function of the police. First, the democratisation process and the victory of ethnically-oriented parties; second politicisation and polarisation in police agencies leading to fragmentation and deprofessionalisation; finally, the militarisation of the police.

Democratisation

In BiH’s first multi-party elections in 1990 three ethnically-based parties, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ), Party for Democratic Action (SDA) and Serb Democratic Party (SDS) secured 202 of 240 seats in the Republican Assembly.

A minimal consensus existed between parties around a principle of dividing up control of republican, municipal and socially-owned institutions and offices. This shows continuity with party penetration of state institutions common under communism, but in a new multi-party context.

An arrangement known as the 'ethnic key', ensuring representation of BiH's different constitutent peoples in key state functions, was also adapted to the new context.

The relative strength of ethnically-based parties became a proxy for working out the relevant ethnic composition at all levels, and parties put forward their preferred candidates. Agreement that roles and functions should be distributed across the parties did not mean agreement on the specific allocations, and many appointments were contentious.

Attachment to a party (rather than the party) remained important in securing key roles after the elections, but now with three parties rather than one. In many cases, experience was disregarded and people with no police background were appointed to leading positions or relatively junior staff were promoted rapidly.

Politicisation and deprofessionalisation

Police professionals, appointees with no previous policing experience, and party members all describe how parties put forward their own people for key police posts. In Prijedor the SDA even made a pre-election promise to appoint a Muslim Chief of Police.

Party appointees often fell short of the requirements of the job. In many cases, appointees had no background in policing. It was claimed that the Chief of Police appointed by the SDA in Prijedor had no experience policing outside being stopped for drunk driving. After an armed takeover of the town the role went to Simo Drljača, from the education service, then to a mathematics teacher. In Kotor Varoš an engineer with no experience of policing was appointed as Chief of Police, and in Ključ, the same role went to a man with experience in construction.

Regardless of the professional background of police-leaders, party-based nomination meant that candidates owed their jobs to political parties and were likely to be loyal or sympathetic to their aims. Further, candidates that did not meet pre-existing criteria diluted the professionalism of the police and new leaders were not schooled in the police values of SFRY.

Irregularities were noted throughout the service, not just at the top. Police officials sacked over disciplinary or criminal matters were reappointed after elections, while normal appointment procedures were ignored for regular police officers and circumvented to stack the police reserve with party supporters.

As BiH disintegrated ethno-political appointments and dismissals were more explicit. In June 1992, an official decision by the Krajina authorities limited all positions involving the protection of public property to Serbs and excluded those “who have not confirmed by plebiscite or who in their minds are not clear that the Serbian Democratic Party is the sole representative of the Serbian people”.
Changes in the composition of the police force question police training as a factor in their role in atrocity crimes. One witness saw men as young as 16 or 17 in police uniform.

Instead a restructured and mono-ethnic police provided an organisational framework and badge of convenience with access to the material means of violence. These means of violence were then expanded through the militarisation of the police.

Militarisation

The militarisation of the police impacted upon the structure of the organisation, the skill set of its members, the tools available, and the opportunities for engagement in activities against civilian populations.

Military tools were sometimes redeployed to police. Former military vehicles were repainted in police colours and militia in blue uniforms manned the front lines. Once mobilised, police reserves had access to weapons including automatic and semi-automatic weapons.

In the Krajina, Serb police requested military hardware from the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) in April 1992. It was subsequently paraded in Banja Luka and elsewhere in the region. The request included helicopters, armoured vehicles, machine guns, sniper rifles, hand grenades and other explosives.

The creation of an expanded and militarised police reserve is something that began before the division of the Ministry of the Interior in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rooted in a Yugoslav concept of All People’s Defence, it was also a logical move in light of restrictions on military force in the UN-backed Vance plan, and the limited defensive capacity held by republics in Yugoslavia.

Special units or detachments were set up, like the special detachment of the regional Public Security Centre (CSB) in Banja Luka. The unit was formed from a mixture of police, members of the paramilitary Serb Defence Forces, and the military. Criteria for inclusion in the unit included front line experience.

Regular use of police in combat was a further threat to the distinction between police and military. The expert witness, Christian Nielsen, identified the extent of police deployment in military roles. In 1992, it was suggested that police served 300,000 man days per month in combat functions.

The different dimensions of the apparent militarisation of the police support two separate conclusions.

First, the ‘policeness’ of those who appear to be a part of the police is called into question. The wholesale transfer of personnel and weaponry from military and paramilitary units into police organisations shows a fundamental change to the nature of the police in the Krajina region, marginalising officers whose training and service started before the war.

Secondly, regular utilisation of police in military roles can create an embattled and brutalised force who view their role in terms of securing their people from an enemy as opposed to securing a more general sense of order.

A NEW POLICE: POLITICISED, DEPROFESSIONALISED, MILITARISED

The police in the Krajina region of Bosnia and Herzegovina were transformed into a tool of the SDS programme of ethnically targeted violence. This was not inevitable, but used the existing structures of policing and defence from Yugoslavia, and was shaped by the ethnicisation of politics in Bosnia’s democratic transition.

It created a police force distanced from a professional ethos, in which senior positions were held by ideologically committed party men often with no previous police experience. Uncontrolled recruitment and an absence of police training left no scope for sharing professional values that might have countered the SDS strategy.

Coupled with the military potential of a police force viewed, equipped and utilised as an integral part of the emerging state’s military capacity, this helps explain the role of the police in atrocity crimes in the Krajina, especially in the period of spring to winter 1992.


The ICTY files are a rich resource, but not without problems of coverage and interpretation. This work makes a start at mining the files to make sense of what happened in the war.