Mladic: The Time for Separation from Bosniaks

Protected witness RM-013 said that, after having been arrested in April 1992, he was detained in the Penal and Correctional Facility in Foca for two years, adding that hundreds of Muslims were unlawfully held in difficult conditions in the Facility, while being abused and beaten up, some even to death.

As he said, prior to his arrest, he heard a manifest by the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS on a local radio, saying that “Serbs could no longer live with Muslims” and that “the time has come to get rid of Muslims for good”.

The witness said that all of them were civilians, including the sick and the elderly.

RM-013 said that Serb guards took four groups of prisoners from the Foca Facility in order to be “exchanged”, but nobody saw them alive again. Bodies of most of those Muslims were exhumed from mass graves after the war.

The witness said that he was hidden, along with 25 other “respectable Muslims”, when a delegation of the International Red Cross visited the Foca Facility.

According to the charges against Mladic, former Commander of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, Foca is one of the seven municipalities, where the persecution of Muslim and Croat civilians reached the scale of genocide.

During the cross-examination Mladic’s Defence attorney Branko Lukic asked the witness why only five out of 25 persons, who were arrested together with him, were held in detention. RM-013 responded by saying that he still did not know why.

Attorney Lukic pointed to differences between the names of the missing prisoners mentioned in various statements and testimonies by witnesses.

When asked by presiding Judge Alphons Orie whether the Defence’s theses was that the prisoners, who had been taken away, were not killed, Mladic’s Defence attorney said: “What else can be our thesis, but the fact that they were not killed and that this gentleman does not know anything about it?”.

When asked whether he personally saw the taking away of prisoners from the Facility, witness RM-013 said that he “could not have seen that”.

However, he said that he saw that prisoners were “taken to the administrative building” and that “the beating and screams in the courtyard followed”, adding that he was then “forced to cover the eyes and ears”. As he said, some of the prisoners were beaten up to death in the administrative building.

He said that he recognised the guards who killed the prisoners, and that he saw blood stains on the floor of one of the rooms from which Muslims were taken away.

The Prosecutors are due to examine the next witness against general Mladic, who is also charged with genocide in Srebrenica, terror against civilians in Sarajevo and taking UNPROFOR members hostage, on February 20.