Damjanovic: Witness fails to identify the defendant

Prosecution witness speaks of accused’s role in brutality at Vogosca detention camps, but is unable to identify him by sight.

Ismet Isenaj, a Prosecution witness in the trial of Dragan Damjanovic, who is charged with crimes against civilians in Vogosca during the war, has named the accused as having been involved in the abuse of prisoners there.

But he was unable to identify Damjanovic in court.

According to his testimony, Ismet Isenaj spent from June 1992 to March 1993 in various detention centres in Vogosca, a suburb of Sarajevo. For much of this period, starting in mid-August, he was held in the Planjina kuca camp in Semizovac, part of Vogosca municipality.

He had been brought to Vogosca from Ilijas, where he lived up until the start of the war.

Isenaj named Dragan Damjanovic as the person who would escort him and other inmates from the Planjina kuca camp each day on their way to carry out forced labour. While selecting prisoners to carry out labour, Isenaj said the accused “beat and tortured them”.

Damjanovic would also escort them back to the camp afterwards, he said. “When we’d come back, Damjanovic would tell the soldiers who were drunk to beat us,” he told the Court, “and he himself joined them.”

Isenaj was wounded in early January 1993,whilst being used as a human shield at Zuc hill. “I was walking in front of two Serb soldiers towards the lines of Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina when ‘our guys’ wounded me,” he recalled in Court. “They took me to the emergency room, bandaged me and returned me to the camp.”

On March 9, 1993 Isenaj was released in a prisoner exchange. He testified that during his time in detention, his weight had dropped from 86 to 36 kilograms.

When asked by the Prosecution whether he could recognise Dragan Damjanovic in court, the witness said that a lot of time had passed and that from this distance he could not identify the defendant with certainty.