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A defence witness told Ratko Mladic’s trial that non-Serb prisoners in Rogatica were not persecuted by the former Bosnian Serb military chief’s forces during wartime, as the indictment alleges.
Novica Andric, a former driver with the Bosnian Serb Army’s Rogatica Brigade military police told Mladic’s war crimes trial at the Hague Tribunal on Tuesday that he saw no persecution of prisoners who were held in Rogatica in 1992.
Andric said that after the referendum on Bosnia’s independence that year, nationalism started growing, and he joined Serb territorial defence forces because his village was surrounded by armed Muslims.
He said that the Rasadnik building in Rogatica, an improvised detention facility where Bosniak prisoners were allegedly abused by Serb forces, was actually divided into two parts – a reception centre and a detention centre.
In the reception centre were civilians who wanted to leave the area and go to territory under the control of Bosniak forces, he testified.
“Upon my arrival at Rasadnik, I saw civilians walking around freely and they were not imprisoned, unlike soldiers,” he said.
When asked whether the people he saw could also go home freely, the witness said they were safer in the reception centre.
Mladic is on trial for the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats in 15 municipalities under Serb forces’ control, including Rogatica.
The witness also denied that members of the Hurko family, who were allegedly detained in his father’s garage, were actually imprisoned at all, or assaulted.
“These three people were not imprisoned there. The door on the garage, which served as a summer kitchen, was not closed while they were there. They were even served with coffee. There were no abuses,” he said.
Bosnian Serb soldier Stojan Perkovic admitted abusing the Hurko family in Andric’s father’s garage and was jailed for 12 years in 2009 for various wartime crimes in Rogatica including the assault.
But Andric insisted that no crime took place in the garage.
Mladic is also on trial for terrorising the population of Sarajevo by conducting artillery and sniper attacks against civilians, genocide in Srebrenica and seven other municipalities, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
The trial continues on Thursday.
