Witness Recalls Serbs’ Surrender to Naser Oric’s Troops

Jeremic said the village was attacked from various directions on July 12, 1992.

He said that he hid inside a house, but when a bomb was thrown into it, he moved to another one.

When he got there, he saw five of his army comrades, who at first put up resistance from inside the house and then climbed upstairs to the attic.

“We heard the voice of commander Naser Oric, telling us, via megaphone, to surrender and that we were surrounded… He introduced himself. We heard men who were in another house begin surrendering,” the witness said.

According to Jeremic, the man who announced himself as Oric said the houses in the village should be set on fire but nobody should harm the captives because they would be tried in Srebrenica.

Responding to the defence’s questions, the witness said he did not see any of his comrades watching what was happening in front of the house from the attic. He also said he did not hear any screams or moans.

Jeremic recalled that when the house in which they were hiding began to burn, they came down from the attic and left the village.
Jeremic was testifying at the trial of Izet Arifovic, Suad Smajlovic and Amir Salihovic, who have been charged with the murders of Serb civilians in the Srebrenica and Bratunac area in June and July 1992.

According to the charges, following the attack on Zalazje, a group of eight Serb civilians were transported to the police station in Srebrenica, where Arifovic killed one more of them, while Salihovic took the others away to an unknown location. They have not been seen alive since.
Oric is also on trial in a separate case for crimes in the Srebrenica and Bratunac area.

Also on Wednesday, while testifying at a trial for genocide in Srebrenica, a prosecution witness told the state court that he had not personally received or heard that the Bosnian Serb Army Zvornik Brigade’s Second Battalion had received a cable requesting its soldiers to participate in the execution of captives in July 1995.

Witness Milisav Cvjetinovic said he was a signalman with “[defendant] Sreco Acimovic’s battalion”, and explained that there was a strict procedure for sending and receiving telegrams.

“If it is sent from the brigade, their signalman dictates it to us, we write it down and one of us takes the telegram to the command,” the witness said.

Srecko Acimovic, the former commander of the Second Battalion, is accusec of having acted on a command from the brigade and the Bosnian Serb Army’s Main Headquarters in July 1995, asking for men from Srebrenica to be taken from a school building in Rocevic in the Zvornik municipality to a location of his choice – a gravel factory on the banks of river Drina in Kozluk – and killed.