Witness Describes Horrible Conditions at Potoci Detention Facility

Enes Curic, Ibrahim Demirovic, Samir Kreso, Habib Copelj and Mehmed Kaminic have been charged with participating in the unlawful arrest and detention of Croat civilians in the municipality of Mostar from June to December 1993.

The Bosnian state prosecution alleges that at the time Curic was a member of the 49th Mountain Brigade of the Bosnian Army and the manager of a detention facility in a school and other buildings in Potoci, Demirovic was the commander of the 47th Mountain Brigade of the Bosnian Army, Kreso was the head of the medical service with the military unit of the Mountain Brigade (active in the Bijelo Polje area), while Copelj and Kaminic were members of the Bosnian Army.

Demirovic, who was also a member of the 449th Eastern Herzegovina Mountain Brigade of the Bosnian Army, has also been charged with the rape of a woman in Potoci in 1993.

State prosecution witness and former Potoci prisoner Andja Jasin testified at today’s hearing. Jasin said Bosnian Army soldiers took her and other women to the Ploca neighbourhood in the municipality of Mostar on June 30, 1993. She said they were accommodated in an abandoned house.

Jasin said the soldiers then took her and the other women to Mostar. Twenty days later they were taken to a school building in Potoci, which was being used as a detention facility.

“They put us in a hall. The windows were broken…They lined us up. There were women, children, pregnant women. The conditions were catastrophic. We had enough water, but very little or no food at all,” Jasin recalled.

She said she believed Enes Curic was in charge of the facility. She said he used to call out detainees in order to perform forced labour.

“I hadn’t known him from before. He introduced himself as the boss in that school building,” Jasin said.

Jasin said some prisoners who were called out to work never came back.

“Eno [Enes Curic] would come and call out the names of the people who would work. Some of them didn’t even come back. They told us they were killed…Three of them were killed while carrying a cannon on Cucurak Hill. That’s what I heard. I didn’t see it,” she said.

In response to questions by Curic’s defense attorney, Jasin said she didn’t know whether Curic received orders from someone else. She also said she didn’t know if he brought the detainees food from the military logistical stock.

The trial will continue on September 2.