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Expert witness Dusan Pavlovic told Mladic’s war crimes trial at the Hague Tribunal on Thursday that the bodies of hundreds of Bosniaks alleged to be victims of massacres by Bosnian Serb troops were actually those of men killed in an ambush and skirmishes as they attempted to flee Srebrenica.
“Bodies were gathered and buried in graves right after the fighting,” alleged Pavlovic.
He claimed that the Bosnian Army also has reports about hundreds of bodies left behind after ambushes by Bosnian Serb troops.
“So the question, is where are those bodies? There are thousands of body parts… Some of them were placed in mass graves,” he said.
Pavlovic testified on Wednesday that hundreds or possibly thousands of Bosniak civilians and soldiers were killed in the ambush on road between Konjevic Polje and Nova Kasaba as a column of men from Srebrenica tried to break through Serb lines and reach safety in the town of Tuzla.
Mladic’s lawyer Branko Lukic presented a statement from a former Bosnian Army solder Nuriz Selimovic, who was one of the survivors from the column.
“I think we had at least 4,000 to 5,000 losses,” Lukic quoted Selimovic as saying in his statement.
Pavlovic said Selimovic also quoted Swedish diplomat Carl Bildt, who was a EU representative during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Bildt wrote that “probably more than 4,000 people lost their lives in brutal ambushes… while the column was trying to reach safety”.
Presiding judge Alphons Orie asked Pavlovic if he also believed Bildt’s statement that “in a series of massacres, Mladic prepared the killings of over 3,000 men who were left behind”.
Pavlovic replied that his expert report for the court did not deal with the destiny of those men, only the people in the column fleeing towards Tuzla.
Former Bosnian Serb military chief Mladic is on trial for genocide against about 7,000 Bosniaks from Srebrenica.
According to the charges against him, about 15,000 Bosniak men, a third of whom were armed, began a breakout from Srebrenica on July 12, 1995, after it fell to Bosnian Serb forces. The Serbs set up ambushes for the Bosniaks who were fleeing.
He is also on trial for terrorising Sarajevo during the city’s siege, persecuting non-Serbs across the country, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
After a seasonal break, the trial will resume on February 1.
