Palija: Witness Identifies Indictee

A Prosecution witness has recognised Jadranko Palija in the courtroom, and has claimed that “four of five Muslim and Croat families who stayed” in Sanski Most were afraid of him and that he always “carried weapons attached to his belt and a knife in his boot”.

Palija, in his capacity as member of the 6th Krajiska Brigade of Republika Srpska Army (VRS), is charged with “having participated in the detention and mistreatment of Muslims and Croats and in using them as human shields” in the period from May 1992 until the end of the war in 1995.

“Palija, dressed in a military uniform and armed, used to come to our front yard and ask where our husbands were. On one occasion he went behind my house and saw two women sitting with their children in front of their house. He told them something and then took one of them behind that house,” witness Dika Alisic has said, reiterating that she “does not know what he said to the women and what happened behind the house.

The indictment alleges that, in the summer of 1992 in Muhici street, Palija came to a house where two women and their children were sitting and told them that their lives were worthless. He said that he wanted to search the locked part of the house, then took one after the other behind the house and raped them.

Alisic has not been able to say what happened when he took one, and then also the other woman behind the house but she has pointed out that “they were unkempt when they came back”.

“When the first woman returned, she sat down, buried her head between her knees and covered her ears with both hands. She did not say a word,” Alisic said, adding that she then “heard the children crying and screaming as the indictee took their mother away”.

After this event, Alisic and other members of her family, women and children, ran away to the village of Caplje. Before leaving Sanski Most, soldiers captured her son and imprisoned him in the sports hall, killed her husband and set their house to fire.

According to the official timetable of the Court of BiH, the trial is due to continue on 19 September.