Krsmanovic: Spring when People Disappeared

Zehra Dzafo said that her brother Musan Dzafo was working in the furniture factory Varda in Visegrad in 1992 but that he went to work only occasionally.

“I heard he was led out and taken to the Drina river. That’s where they killed them,” said Dzafo, adding that she identified the body of her brother in 2010.

The second witness, Azra Osmanovic described how in the spring of 1992 the security situation started getting complicated. “Barricades were being set up, people were stopped and searched. People started disappearing, but I thought they were guilty of something. I never suspected that something could happen to me and my family,” said Osmanovic.

Her husband Hamed, she said, who also worked in Varda, disappeared that spring and his body was found eight years later. “I heard some people were taken from Varda, but I don’t know whether my husband was with them,” she said.

Osmanovic heard and she believed that Milan Lukic and “his people” were responsible for these murders.

“Milan was everyone’s terror in Visegrad, people became scared merely at the sight of his dark red car cruising by. I don’t know where all that hate come from [in Milan and his group]” said Osmanovic, adding that people talked about defendant Krsmanovic being in Lukic’s group.

The first instance verdict of The Hague tribunal sentenced Milan Lukic, as the leader of the White Eagle paramilitary unit, to a life sentence.

Krsmanovic is charged, as a member of the Second Podrinja Light Infantry Brigade of the Army of Republika Srpska, with taking part in murders, rape and forced disappearances of Bosniak population in Visegrad. The indictment specifies that on June 7, 1992, he assisted in the murder of six people, who were taken from the Varda factory and executed on the Drina river bank.

The trial will resume on Friday, March 23.