Sweeping Villages Around Visegrad

The witness, Bosko Trifkovic, said that he was mobilised at the start of war, and his unit was searching the villages around Visegrad and confiscating weaponry. Around those villages, he said, he did not see Rackovic.

Trifkovic also said he went by the school in Orahovci, where the next day he learnt that Muslims were being held in the building. Asked by the defence whether Rackovic could have been the one who brought those people to the school, the witness replied that he saw the defendant by the mosque in the village, but that the defendant did not go to the school.

“Vitomir did not go to the school. He was there by the mosque, but I saw him return,” said the witness, adding that his unit’s task was to set up a front line in Orahovci.

Rackovic is charged, as a member of the Army of Republika Srpska, with participating in the attacks on Bosniak villages between May and August 1992, as well as the imprisonment, torture, forced disappearances of persons in the territory of Visegrad, and rape.

Some of the illegally arrested people, said in the indictment, were never found and the bodies of certain civilians were exhumed in 2000 at the Slap site in Zepa.

Trifkovic also said that at the start of the war the Uzice Corps came to Visegrad, but that only after the departure of members of this corps Muslims and Serbs started separating from each other and that “gun fights and setting up road blocks began.”

The second witness for the defence, Bozo Tesevic, former member of the police station in Visegrad, also spoke of security situation after the departure of the Uzice Corps. He said that after the corps left the Visegrad territory, “people from villages that felt threatened started fleeing.”

He confirmed there were attacks on Serb, but also Muslim villages, and added that he knew there were victims in the attacks on Serb villages.

The witness said that before the war the majority population in Visegrad was Bosniak, and that inter-ethnic tensions began after ethnic political parties had been formed.

“There were inter-ethnic tensions inside the police as well. Serbs were in an unfavourable position because they were a minority and the station was soon divided,” he said.

The trial will resume on October 22.