Two months after the massacres of more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica, the Bosnian Serb Army was hoping to erase some of the traces of this monumental crime by digging up some of the bodies of the Bosniaks who were killed, which were buried in the village of Glogova, and moving them to another location in the Srebrenica municipality.

The vehicles that were available to the Bosnian Serb Army Drina Corps’ special engineering unit were not sufficient for the task, so Nikolic received an assignment to secure “additional heavy machinery and trucks needed for the operation”.

Nikolic had a conversation with representatives of the Serb-run Bratunac municipality and the local police, and it was agreed to contact state-owned companies and ask them to provide the heavy machinery required.

During his testimony at the trial of Vidoje Blagojevic, the commander of the Bratunac Brigade, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Nikolic said that heavy machinery and trucks were used that belonged to the Bratunac brick factory, which was state-owned, and the Bratunac Public Utility Company, which was in municipal ownership.

“Trucks that belonged to the Sase Mine, which is in state ownership, were [also] used. Trucks were requisitioned from Autoprevoz Srebrenica. A dredger was requisitioned from the Radnik Construction Company, which is in state ownership and located in Srebrenica,” Nikolic continued.

“After that, bodies were excavated from a grave in the village of Glogova and relocated to a new grave in the municipality of Srebrenica… I coordinated the entire operation,” he said.

“Construction trenchers were used for digging, while trucks belonging to various companies were used for transporting the bodies to secondary grave sites,” researcher Meldijana Arnaut-Haseljic explained in an academic paper entitled ‘Forcible Disappearances of Bosniaks in Srebrenica, the United Nations Safe Zone’.

Blagojevic was sentenced to 15 years in prison and Jokic to nine years for crimes committed after the fall of Srebrenica to Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995. In separate proceedings, Nikolic was sentenced to 20 years.

But although military officers have been brought to justice for the Srebrenica massacres and subsequent cover-up, no attempt has ever been made to bring cases to domestic or international courts against companies or their managers who provided logistical support for the Srebrenica genocide.

Ahead of the 26th anniversary of the genocide on July 11, survivors are calling for action to hold such firms accountable, although this could prove difficult to achieve in practice.

Internationally, there are ongoing attempts to prosecute companies for alleged involvement in or support for war crimes committed during the conflicts in places like Syria and Sudan, but legal practices and standards for holding firms accountable for such offences are still at the embryonic stage.

‘More than 20,000 individuals were involved’

In the months that followed the Srebrenica genocide, it was not just trucks and other vehicles belonging to companies from Srebrenica and nearby Bratunac that were used in the attempt to cover up the crime by digging up and relocating the corpses.

According to testimonies from survivors, as well as official documents, heavy machinery, trucks and buses from the Milici and Zvornik areas of Bosnia, but also from neighbouring Serbia, were used as well.

The Hague Tribunal has established that the Srebrenica cover-up operation continued from August to November 1995, during which time “an organised and all-encompassing attempt to conceal the executions was carried out by excavating the bodies from primary graves and burying them again in secondary graves”, said the verdict in one Hague trial.

The exhumations caused some of the bodies of Srebrenica victims to be torn apart by the heavy machinery and subsequently scattered in different graves.

“When they relocated the primary graves with mechanical diggers, the bodies were decomposing. One part of a body was loaded onto one truck and another part onto some other truck. Those trucks did not go to the same location and the same grave afterwards,” explained Sadik Selimovic, an investigator with the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“In 60 or 70 per cent of cases, [parts of] the bodies from those graves were later found at two or more locations,” Selimovic added.

The use of heavy machinery that was owned by companies that were in public ownership before the war was covered in a report produced by a body called the Commission for Investigation of the Events in and around Srebrenica between July 10 and 19, 1995.

The commission was set up by the authorities in Bosnia’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity 18 years ago to probe what happened and deliver a report. Its findings illustrated that the cover-up operation was conducted on a huge scale.

According to one of the members of this body, Smail Cekic, the commission established that more than 20,000 individuals, including people directly responsible for specific events in and around Srebrenica, including those who issued orders as well as direct perpetrators, took part in the Srebrenica crime in various ways and capacities.

As well as the direct perpetrators who killed people and those who ordered them to do it, the report mentioned people who provided logistical support, including excavator drivers, truck drivers and bus drivers. It also pointed to the heads of public utility companies, construction firms and trucking companies, as well as those who dispensed fuel and refuelled vehicles and provided food and water for those involved in the cover-up operation.

The report was published in 2004, but the National Assembly of Republika Srpska then voted to annul it in 2018. Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik insisted that the document contained “false data” and was created under pressure from the international community “with the intention of satanising Serbs”.

‘I was following orders’ is no defence

As well as the Bosnian Serb troops and police who executed the Bosniaks form Srebrenica, numerous other individuals, such as bus drivers who transported Srebrenica residents to killing sites, or digger operators who dug holes for the bodies of the dead and the managers of the companies where they worked, are criminally responsible for the crimes, many experts believe.

Emir Suljagic, the director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, said that the entire genocide operation would actually have been impossible without the involvement of several companies.

“The fact that the means of transport were ‘mobilised’ through the so-called Ministry of Defence of Republika Srpska does not change anything, because it was an illegal operation, with illegal orders,” Suljagic said.

“An order from a superior has not been considered a valid legal defence since the Nuremberg trial [of Nazis for World War II crimes],” he added.

But Bosnian lawyer Nina Kisic cautioned that when trying to establish whether a company and its officials were responsible or not, “it is important to distinguish whether the equipment or services offered by those companies were provided on the grounds of a requisition or on the grounds of a service that was ordered and paid for”.

“If the items or services were requisitioned, it is very hard to establish responsibility,” Kisic argued. If not, “it is realistic that criminal responsibility could be established”, she added.

Under Bosnian law, sanctions that could be imposed include fines, confiscations of property and shutdowns of companies, she said.

Companies sued over Syria, Sudan crimes

Over the past few years, attempts have been made in several places around the world to hold companies legally accountable for their role in war crimes. The best-known example is Lundin Petroleum, a Swedish company.

Two of Lundin’s managers, Ian H. Lundin and Alex Schneiter, are currently under investigation for their alleged role in aiding crimes in what is now South Sudan during the civil war there between 1997 and 2003.

The investigation concerns the financing of the Sudanese Army and several militias, as well as the expulsion of the local population from the regions in which the company planned to conduct oilfield explorations.

The officials and the company, which is also facing accusations of corporate criminal responsibility, deny the allegations.

In France, cement production company Lafarge is awaiting the final decision from the country’s Constitutional Court on allegations that it was complicit in war crimes in Syria.

In 2017, two Syrian NGOs and 11 employees of the company filed suits against Lafarge, accusing it of contributing to crimes against humanity committed by members of the so-called Islamic State. They claimed that Lafarge had done this by paying Islamist militant groups to allow it to keep its factory in north-east Syria operating.

In 2019, the Court of Appeals in Paris and then the Supreme Court of France rejected these accusations, and the final decision from the Constitutional Court is expected later this month.

Going back to the aftermath of World War II, the head of the Association of Genocide Victims and Witnesses, Murat Tahirovic, recalled how a number of German companies agreed to pay reparations to Holocaust victims for their involvement in Adolf Hitler’s regime.

“Whether this will happen in this region in the coming period is a big question,” Tahirovic said.

He said he believes that individuals who held top positions in companies who aided the commission and concealment of the crimes are responsible “because they were involved in the genocide”, but is sceptical about whether they will ever be held accountable.

Suljagic blamed prosecutors for not acting.

“The prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina bears the primary responsibility because the people leading those companies at the time and individual workers who drove buses, trucks and diggers have still not answered for that,” he said.

‘No one is responsible any more’

In other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, company resources were used for committing crimes and for covering them up, as in the north-western city of Prijedor in 1992.

“When Bosniaks and Croats were killed, they were transported through the city of Prijedor towards the Tomasica mass grave. Blood was pouring from those trucks [as they moved along the roads],” said Tahirovic.

“Some companies, like the Omarska Mine [company] and other companies that operated in the Prijedor area at the time, participated in that. Such information exists for many other towns throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he added.

Suljagic, a survivor of the Srebrenica genocide, said he personally saw buses from Serbia, belonging to companies from towns like Uzice and Sabac, beinge used to deport the residents of Srebrenica.

He recommended that war survivors and victims’ families should “sue companies from Serbia in civil proceedings”.

“All survivors have the legitimacy to sue them. They should not expect the Serbian judiciary to do anything,” he said.

But the problem is that after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the demise of the socialist state, the companies that provided heavy machinery, trucks and buses and aided the commission of the Srebrenica genocide simply went bankrupt.

All of the state-owned and municipally-run firms mentioned in Momir Nikolic’s testimony to the Hague Tribunal have long ceased to exist.

BIRN contacted the companies’ insolvency administrators, but they either had no information about the people who were in charge during the war years, or just said: “No one is responsible anymore.”