Krsmanovic: Evil Has Come

Testifying at the trial, she said that indictee Krsmanovic was among members of the Serb forces, who took her neighbours from Dusce village.

“I saw Oliver on that day. He was dressed in camouflage uniform. Sometimes he had a headband and sometimes a cap,” witness OK-7 said, listing the eight Bosniak men, who were taken towards the saw mill. It still not known what happened to them.

Krsmanovic, former member of the Second Podrinje Light Infantry Brigade with the Republika Srpska Army, is charged with having participated and assisted in the murders, rape and forcible disappearances of the Bosniak population from Visegrad.

The indictment alleges that he participated in unlawful arrests of men from Dusce and helped in the murder of six people, who were taken from the Varda factory, and killed on Drina River banks on June 7, 1992.

OK-7 said that, a few days prior to the Dusce event, two groups of men, including her husband, were taken away from Varda.

“I watched a VW Passat arriving in front of Varda. They took my husband and two other men out….Twenty minutes later, the same car came back. They took some other people out. They drove them to the River Drina banks. I heard individual gunshots, followed by a burst of fire,” the witness said.

She considered Milan and Sredoje Lukic responsible for the shooting of the second group of men from Varda. Under a first instance verdict pronounced by The Hague Tribunal, Milan Lukic, former member of “Beli orlovi” (white eagles) paramilitary unit, was sentenced to life imprisonment, while his cousin Sredoje Lukic was sentenced to 30 years.

“Milan and Sredoje shot. Who else could have done it? They drove that car all the time,” she said, adding that she was present when the Lukic cousins confiscated the car from a neighbour of hers in Dusce.

OK-7 said that she went to the River Drina bank with her neighbour later on and saw corpses of people, who had been taken away from Varda, adding that her husband’s body was taken out of the Drina later.

As she said, she did not see indictee Krsmanovic when the men were taken away and killed on the Drina river.

The Defence asked the witness why, in her statements given to police in Visoko in 1993 and to The Hague Prosecution in 1998 amd 2008, she failed to mention that Krsmanovic participated in the taking of men from Dusce.

After having been presented with the statement from 1993, the witness said that the statement did not contain her signature, adding that she knew the indictee “very well since a young age”.

“I still cannot sleep because of the things I saw. You were children. You grew up together. I still wonder where the evil in you had come from,” OK-7 said.

The trial is due to continue on Friday, March 16.M.T.