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Witness Milos Ivanovic said that he went to a frontline on Mount Zaglavak at the beginning of June 1992. As he said, indictee Rackovic was among the soldiers, who were present at that location.
“I stayed there for about 40 days, until St. Peter’s Day on July 12…Nobody left that place except me. I left the place every third day in order to fetch water,” the witness said, adding that he used to see Rackovic during his entire stay at that location.
Second witness Nenad Markovic said that he spent about 40 days on Mount Zaglavak in mid 1992, adding that the indictee was there the whole time.
“I was deployed to that place on June 1. We stayed there until July 12. We held the lines on Mount Zaglavak. There was shooting and killed people…All of us stayed there the whole time,” he said.
Rackovic, former member of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, is on trial for having participated in attacks on Bosniak villages, detention, torture, forced disappearances of people from the Visegrad area, as well as rape, from May 1992 to the end of August 1992.
The indictment alleges that some of the unlawfully arrested persons have never been found, while bodies of some civilians were exhumed at “Slap” in Zepa in 2000.
Speaking about the situation in Visegrad in the spring of 1992, witnesses Ivanovic and Markovic said that the relations between local residents had deteriorated following the establishment of nationalist parties and that extremists, who caused trouble, appeared among Muslims.
Witness Jelisavka Petrovic, former Vice President of Visegrad municipality and member of the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, said that Muslims were the majority in Visegrad and that Serbs were intimidated.
She confirmed that a group of extremists existed among Muslims and that this group caused trouble.
“When the Uzice Corps entered the town, order was established… Following its departure, the SDS formed the authorities and mobilised Serbs,” Petrovic said.
The trial is due to continue on October 29.
