The hearing before the International Court of Justice in the case of BH against Serbia and Montenegro continued with the hearing of witnesses. The testimony is public, but the contents may not be made public until 28 March, when this stage of the hearings ends. The first witness called by BH is Andras Riedlmayer, an expert for the Ottoman cultural heritage in the Balkans from the Harvard University

The witness testimony before the International Court of Justice in the BH vs. SaM case began today. The two sides will have eight days to call their witnesses. The first witness called by BH is Andras Riedlmayer, expert for the Ottoman cultural heritage in the Balkans. This is all the media may publish about this for the time being, because the contents of Riedelmayer’s testimony and that of all other witnesses can be published only after 28 March, after all the witnesses have been heard.

In July 2003, Riedlmayer testified in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic about the results of his research into the destruction of the religious and cultural heritage in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to Riedlmayer, between 1992 and 1995, 277 mosques, 57 Catholic churches and about a hundred other places of worship and cultural monuments were destroyed in the nineteen municipalities relevant for the indictment charging Milosevic with genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In the expert report submitted to the ICTY, Riedlmayer notes that the actions designed to achieve “systematic and widespread” destruction of the mosques and Islamic religious monuments were in many cases carried out on the eve of the mass exodus of the Muslim population. To illustrate his claim, Riedlmayer quoted a statement made by former police chief in Prijedor, Simo Drljaca, in the New York Times in 1992. “You can’t just destroy the minarets on their mosques. You have to shake the foundations, because that way they can’t be rebuilt. You do that, and they will want to leave. They will simply leave,” Drljaca said then.

In addition to Riedlmayer, Bosnia and Herzegovina legal team will call a few other experts who have also testified in trials at the ICTY. Among them is American professor Robert Donia, who testified in four trials before the ICTY about the historical background for the conflict in BH: Milosevic, Brdjanin, Galic and Stakic. Another witness is British general Richard Dannatt, who testified at the trial of General Krstic, who was tried for and convicted of genocide in Srebrenica.

The Bosnian experts will testify for three days and then SaM will have five days to examine its witnesses. Among the witnesses will be, as indicated, former FRY president Zoran Lilic, former leader of the Democratic Party Dragoljub Micunovic, Milosevic’s coalition partner in the wartime period Dusan Mihajlovic, and Sir Michael Rose, former UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Witnesses are not often called at the International Court of Justice. The last time they took the stand in the Peace Palace in The Hague was in 1984, in the case of Nicaragua vs. USA. The embargo on the publication of the witness testimony is imposed in order to prevent the testimony of previous witnesses to influence that of the witnesses to follow, it has been explained.

The second round of arguments has been scheduled for 18 April. The hearings are set to end on 9 May.