Former Prime Minister of Republika Srpska (RS) Vladimir Lukic died on Friday in Banja Luka, the University in this city announced, where he worked as the first dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy.
Lukic was the second Prime Minister of the RS, leading the government of this Bosnian and Herzegovinian (BiH) entity from January 1993 to August 1994.
In the years after the war, he testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague in the case against Ratko Mladic.
At that time, he suggested that the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs treat all citizens equally, regardless of national affiliation. His government, he claimed, issued orders to the police and the army to use “all legal means” to protect the population. However, he stated that it was not possible to control the situation on the ground, among other reasons, because local authorities were so independent that RS functioned during the war as a “confederation of municipalities.”
Before becoming Prime Minister of the RS, Lukic was a delegate of the Serb leadership for liaison with UNPROFOR, and in that role, he admitted, he received frequent complaints from international representatives about attacks on Sarajevo civilians from Bosnian Serb artillery and sniper positions.
He said, however, that UNPROFOR “was biased because it always started from the assumption that the Serbs were responsible for incidents, and did not respond to Lukic’s complaints about crimes against Serb civilians in the city.”
That crimes against non-Serb civilians were committed by members of the Army of RS (VRS) was something the prosecutor at the time also sought to prove using the witness’s letter in which he warned Mladic’s Main Staff that his soldiers were looting, killing, and raping civilians in Sarajevo’s Grbavica neighborhood and in other places.
At that time, Lukic tried to relativize his position from that period, saying that there were people who had “latched onto” the army and “did whatever they wanted,” and that he had called them members of the VRS because they were in uniform, wrote the Center for Transitional Justice.
Mladic’s wartime diary states that in March 1993, Lukic told him that soldiers were raping “even Serb women,” and Lukic recorded in one report that “even Serbs are no longer safe.”
He then told the court in The Hague that he had not used the word “even” in this context, but that he nevertheless stood by those claims.
He said that he wanted to “emphasize” the problem, because “if Serb women who had the protection of their husbands are being attacked, what is then being done to other women.”, Klix.ba writes.
