Mladic Trial: Dispute Over Srebrenica Bodies in Serbia
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At Ratko Mladic’s war crimes trial, a defence demographics expert rejected a prosecution report that said victims of the Srebrenica massacres were washed up by a river across the border in Serbia.
Defence demographics expert Svetlana Radovanovic was cross-examined by prosecutors at the Hague Tribunal on Wednesday, as a courtroom dispute about whether Srebrenica victims’ bodies could have been found in Serbia continued.
The defence cited a report by its own investigator Dusan Janac, who found that several bodies of people declared missing after the fall of Srebrenica were found in Serbia, along the Drina and Sava rivers, near the towns of Sremska Mitrovica, Sabac and Belgrade.
The bodies, according to the prosecutors, came from Zvornik in Bosnia and Herzegovina – where most of more than 7,000 Bosniaks from Srebrenica were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, according to the charges – and then were carried into Serbia by the River Drina.
But Radovanovic said that there was no evidence to connect the remains with Srebrenica except for the date of the victims’ disappearance.
“Besides the date when these men went missing, there is no factual evidence that anyone [of them] was killed in Srebrenica,” said Mladic’s expert witness.
Mladic, the former chief of the Bosnian Serb Army, is charged with genocide in Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
Asked by the prosecutor if she disputed the lists of missing Srebrenica residents made by the Red Cross, which lists Srebrenica and nearby Potocari as the places from which they disappeared, Radovanovic replied: “This information cannot be a factor, and even your own experts admit there are mistakes and that the place of disappearance is missing sometimes.”
Commenting on Radovanovic’s claim that 31 people on the list of the men who went missing from Srebrenica were already dead according to Bosnian Army information, Hague prosecutors said that these mistakes were removed in later lists which were used in Mladic’s trial.
Asked if she used the previous lists from 2009 rather than the updated ones from 2013, Radovanovic said it was not her task to look for new lists.
Prosecutors will finish their cross-examination of Radovanovic on Thursday.
