Pelemis and Peric: No Death Certificates

Defence witness Svetlana Radovanovic, an expert in demographics, made her findings and opinion on the basis of the findings prepared by Rifat Kesetovic, expert witness in court medicine, who testified for the Prosecution.

Radovanovic said that the information about the identification of 179 persons was not supported with adequate evidence, i.e. death certificates.

“Expert witness Kesetovic said that 1,057 persons from Srebrenica and other municipalities had been identified. After having read his findings and other documents provided to me, I noticed that death certificates for 878 persons are available, while no such certificates exist for 179 individuals.

“We know that death certificates are the final data about mortality in a country,” expert witness Radovanovic said, adding that, in the case of most of the identified Srebrenica residents, no personal identification numbers were available.

The State Prosecution charges Momir Pelemis and Slavko Peric, former members of the First Battalion Command of Zvornik Brigade with the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, with participation in genocide committed in Srebrenica in July 1995.

The indictment alleges that Pelemis and Peric participated in carrying out a joint plan to permanently and forcibly remove the Bosniak population from the protected enclave of Srebrenica, and in the murder of more than 1,000 men on Branjevo military farm and in the Cultural Centre in Pilica village, Zvornik municipality.

The expert witness said that although the Podrinje Identification Project staff had compiled the data about the identification, her opinion, as an expert, was that identification reports were just one source of data. She said that a person could not be pronounced dead until a death certificate had been issued.

“The expert witness in court medicine said he would provide the Court with the mentioned evidence, but he has not done so,” the expert witness said.

State Prosecutor Eric Larson said that those documents would be submitted to the Court.

“Expert witness Kesetovic’s findings mention July 16, 1995, as the date of death of six persons. At the same time, June 12 is mentioned as the date of death of all of the other individuals. Some people who were said to have been executed in Srebrenica according to Kesetovic’s findings, can be found in the Bosnian Army’s lists of people who were killed before 1994,” Radovanovic said.

The trial is due to continue on March 16 this year.

A.S.