Srebrenica Eyewitness Tells Belgrade Court about Executions
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Witness 302 told the court how his unit separated men from women and children at Potocari near Srebrenica, and was then stationed on a road near the village of Konjevic Polje.
The witness described how hundreds of Bosniaks from Srebrenica surrendered to Serb fighters who were stationed on the road after the Bosnian town fell on July 11, 1995.
“They were taken to unknown locations, to the hangars in Kravica, as I later heard,” the protected witness said.
He named one of the defendants, Aleksa Golijanin, as the man who ordered him and several others to come to Kravica and “get a job done”, not knowing what to expect.
The witness said that upon arrival the troops were aligned in a firing squad and ordered to fire at the Bosniak men lined up in front of the hangar.
“We were ordered to shoot but I couldn’t stand to watch,” said 302, who insisted that he did not fire his weapon and looked away for several minutes instead.
The killings in the warehouse in Kravica were among several massacres by Bosnian Serb forces after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995 that left at least some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys dead.
Eight former members of a police special brigade from Bosnia’s Serb-led entity Republika Srpska are indicted for committing a war crime against civilians in Kravica on July 14, 1995.
Nedeljko Milidragovic, Aleksa Golijanin, Milivoje Batinica, Aleksandar Dacevic, Bora Miletic, Jovan Petrovic, Dragomir Parovic and Vidosav Vasic are accused of organising and participating in the shooting of more than 100 civilians in the warehouse.
The Serbian prosecution charged them in 2015 and the trial opened in February 2017, but proceedings have been plagued by delays.
So far more than 1,300 Bosniak civilians who were massacred in the warehouse in Kravica have been identified, after their bodies were found in several mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina.