Bosniaks Entered Detention Centres ‘Voluntarily’

Witness Rade Jovric, the former commander of the territorial defence force in Prijedor, told the UN-backed court on Tuesday that he heard about abuses at the detention centres where Bosniaks were held, including killings and rapes, and that conditions inside them were inhumane, but insisted they went there of their own free will.

When presiding judge Alphons Orie asked Jovric whether he thought that such abuses were crimes, he responded that they were contrary to all military rules.

Orie then asked why Bosniaks “voluntarily” stayed in the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje detention camps in the Prijedor.

Javoric replied that “those who did not take up arms and did not participate in the fighting” arrived there by themselves and were allowed leave, but those who were captured with arms or during fighting were not.

Javoric said that army was not responsible for the crimes committed at the camps and was only guarding them from the outside for Bosniaks and Croats who were there.

According to the indictment against former Bosnian Serb Army chief Mladic, persecution of Bosniaks and Croats reached the scale of genocide in the Prijedor municipality, and serious crimes were committed in the prison camps. Mladic is also charged with genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 and several other municipalities in 1992, terrorising the population of Sarajevo, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

Javoric blamed Bosniak paramilitaries who killed two soldiers in the village Hambarine in May 1992 for the outbreak of the conflict in the Prijedor municipality.

But when the prosecutor asked him if Serb forces attacked the Prijedor settlement of Kozarac and the village of Hambarine with artillery and “killed many Muslims”, the witness responded: “Unfortunately, that happened.”

The trial continues.