Mladic Trial: Defence Disputes Prosecution Forensic Evidence

At the trial of Ratko Mladic, demographics expert Svetlana Radovanovic said the Hague Tribunal’s prosecution had inflated the numbers of Bosniaks who went missing from Srebrenica in July 1995.

Radovanovic told Mladic’s trial at the Hague Tribunal on Monday that the prosecution had used demographics experts to exaggerate the number of Bosniaks from Srebrenica who were killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

She said that the prosecution’s demographics experts did not define what they meant by Srebrenica and included in their statistics the deaths of Bosniaks in a much wider area, including casualties from “almost 15 municipalities… among them some in western Serbia”.

As an example, Radovanovic said that Hague prosecution expert Helga Bumborg wrote in one report that some Srebrenica victims went missing in the Loznica, Valjevo, Priboj and Tara areas of Serbia.

Arguing that these were “statistically minute numbers”, Radovanovic said the only reason for their inclusion was to “increase the number of victims for Srebrenica”.

According to Hague prosecution data, 7,692 people went missing after Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica in July 1995.

Radovanovic also tried to dispute the Hague prosecution’s findings by citing that 29 people on the Srebrenica missing lists do not have a date of birth, and 20 per cent of them do not have a listed place of disappearance.

She called the Hague prosecution demographers’ work “unprofessional and intellectually unfair”.

Former Bosnian Serb army commander Mladic is charged with genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in July 1995, and the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats across the country which reached the scale of genocide in several municipalities in 1992.

Mladic is also charged with terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

The trial continues on Tuesday.