Bosniaks held protests in several towns across the country to support Atif Dudakovic, former commander of the Bosnian Army’s Fifth Corps, who was arrested last week on suspicion of war crimes.
Several thousand Bosniaks gathered in Atif Dudakovic’s hometown Bihac on Monday, while similar rallies were held in the towns of Tuzla, Zenica and Mostar to protest against the former general’s arrest.
Protesters held up pictures of Dudakovic and described him as a hero.
“We are here to support our commander, without any politics involved, and that is reason why there will not be any politicians speaking here today,” Dzevad Malkoc, minister of veterans’ affairs in the Una-Sana Canton government, told media at the protest in Bihac.
The war veterans’ association organised the protest in Bihac with the support of the Una-Sana Canton government.
Dudakovic, along with 11 other officers and soldiers of the Bosnian Army’s Fifth Corps, was arrested on Friday on suspicion of having committed war crimes against Serbs and Bosniaks in 1994 and 1995.
The alleged war crimes involve several hundred casualties, including civilians and captured Serb soldiers from Bosnia’s Western Krajina municipalities in 1995, as well as crimes against Bosniak civilians from the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia, a self-proclaimed Bosniak-led wartime breakaway statelet, in 1994.
In 2009, media in Bosnia and Serbia broadcast a videotape that apparently showed Dudakovic giving an order of “fire” or “burn it all”, referring to a Serb village during a military operation in 1994.
Dudakovic dismissed the footage as “part of the [Bosnian Serb] propaganda war that is still ongoing, and is nothing new”.
After the broadcast of the video however, a criminal complaint was filed against Dudakovic by the then president of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska, Dragan Cavic, and the entity’s then prime minister, Milorad Dodik.
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