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The protected witness codenamed RM-253 said that he was among 12,000 or 15,000 Muslims, “one third of whom were armed”, who were trying to break through to the town of Tuzla when he surrendered to the Bosnian Serb Army on July 13, 1995.
He confirmed that he was serving with the Bosnian Army at the time and that he had been mobilised on the eve of the attack on Srebrenica.
After having surrendered, more than 2,000 male captives were transferred to a football ground in Nova Kasaba, where they were visited by Mladic.
“There was a dead silence at the stadium… Mladic mentioned that buses would take women and children and that we would join them,” the witness said.
Mladic, then commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, is charged with the genocide against about 7,000 Srebrenica Muslims in the days that followed the fall of the UN-protected enclave on July 11, 1995.
According to witness RM-253, as they were leaving the stadium, another captive wanted to take his bag with him, but a Bosnian Serb soldier told him: “As if you would need that bag again.”
“At that moment I realised that we would be taken somewhere and executed and that our chances for survival were small,” the witness said.
He said they were then taken to a school building in Petkovci and some captives were killed even before they arrived.
According to the charges, about 1,000 Muslims from Srebrenica were shot at a dam in Petkovci on July 14, 1995.
In the early evening, Serb soldiers began taking groups of captives out of the classrooms, where many of them were held, and then shooting could be heard, the witness said.
“When I came out into the corridor, they ordered us to put our personal documents aside. They had previously confiscated our money. They tied my hands behind my back, so I could not even move my fingers,” RM-253 said.
Following a short drive in the dark, the truck which was carrying him and other captives arrived at a plateau near the dam, where he saw piles of bodies.
As soon as they got off the truck, the captives were shot at from close range. The witness said he was hit on his hand and lost consciousness. He then fell down among the other bodies, so Serb soldiers thought that he was dead.
He told the Tribunal that, once the soldiers had left, he managed to hide in a nearby canal, along with another survivor.
He said they saw a “truck collecting bodies and loading them onto a tractor, which then transported them up there, towards the dam”. He said this clean-up operation lasted the whole day.
The trial of Mladic, who is also charged with persecuting Muslims and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorising civilians in Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage, continues on Wednesday.
