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Mladic’s Defence attorney Dragan Ivetic suggested that many persons, whose remains were found in mass graves, were killed in combat when a line of several thousands of men and members of the 28th Division of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina tried to break through a VRS ring around Srebrenica by walking through the woods towards Tuzla.
When Defence attorney Ivetic quoted his testimony from previous trials, in which he said that “between 1,000 and 2,000 soldiers” were killed in various ways during the breakthrough, Janc said that, according to his findings, “about 1,000” of people from the line got killed.
Janc, who began testifying on Monday, August 19, stuck to his statement that 756 victims had been found on the ground alongside the line breakthrough path until April this year and that “some of them were shot, some were killed in battles while others committed suicide”.
Mladic, former Commander of VRS, is charged with genocide against about 7,000 Bosniaks from Srebrenica in the days that followed the occupation of the United Nations protected enclave on July 11, 1995. He is also on trial for persecuting Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, taking UNPROFOR members hostage and terrorising Sarajevo citizens.
Mladic’s Defence attorney insisted that a large number of Bosniaks, who were killed in battles, were buried in secondary mass graves during a legal “cleaning” of terrain, including collection and burial of corpses from battlefields. According to Defence’s allegations, the Prosecution counted those corpses towards the total number of executed victims.
While confirming that the cleaning was foreseen under the laws of the former Yugoslavia, Janc, however, said that no witnesses mentioned the terrain cleaning during the investigation and that many people must have participated in the collection and burial of bodies of killed soldiers.
While not denying that some Bosniaks were killed in battles or in minefields, and that some committed suicide while trying to break through from Srebrenica, Janc said that the names of those soldiers were not included in the lists of Srebrenica victims, whose remains were found in mass graves near Zvornik.
Janc said that 6,849 people, who were killed after Srebrenica had been occupied by VRS in July 1995, had been identified through a DNA analysis until April this year. He said that about 800 more persons, who went missing after the fall of Srebrenica, had still not been found or identified.
The trial of Mladic is due to continue on Wednesday, August 20.
