Mladic Witness: Bosniaks ‘Left Srebrenica Voluntarily’

“The people wanted to leave the territory. As far as I know, they left of their own accord,” defence witness Ljubodrag Gajic, a former member of Bosnian Serb police special forces who was in Potocari near Srebrenica at the time, told former Bosnian Serb military chief Mladic’s trial in The Hague on Monday.

Gajic admitted however that members of the Bosnian Serb police’s special forces unit killed Muslim prisoners in the village of Kravica in July 1995, after the fall of Srebrenica.

The indictment charges Mladic, the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, with genocide against about 7,000 Srebrenica Bosniaks in the days that followed the occupation of the town on July 11, 1995.

As evidence that the Bosniak population left Srebrenica voluntarily, Mladic’s lawyer Miodrag Stojanovic showed a recording filmed on July 12, 1995 showing the defendant telling Bosniak civilians they would be transferred to territory “under the control of [Bosnian wartime president] Alija [Izetbegovic’s] forces” and that they should not be afraid.

Gajic testified that on July 12 and 13, 1995 he did not witness the abuse of Bosniaks, but said that Serb civilians “violently” separated the able-bodied men from their families.

According to the witness, who led talks between Serb police officers and UN peacekeepers in Srebrenica, the men were then detained in a nearby “white house”.

“The separation was a surprise to me, because Mladic said everyone would be evacuated,” Gajic said.

Before they entered the “white house”, the witness said, the Bosniak men had to dump their bags and other belongings, and their money was taken away from them.

During cross-examination, the witness said that on the early morning of July 14, 1995, near an agricultural warehouse in the village of Kravica, he saw what he thought was a soldier firing a machine gun at Bosniak prisoners detained in the warehouse. He said however that he later learned that the soldier was actually a special policeman.

According to the indictment, around 1,000 Bosniak prisoners were killed at the warehouse in Kravica on July 13 and 14 – the first mass killing of Srebrenica civilians.

Gajic said that about 400 metres from the warehouse, he and other police officers from his unit were tasked with collecting Bosniaks who surrendered and “putting them on trucks” in order to take them to the warehouse.

When asked what happend to the detainees afterwards, he replied: “I know they were executed, killed… From the morning until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, gunfire could be heard from time to time. At the time, we did not know what was going on, but later there were rumours they were killed there.”

Mladic’s attorney Stojanovic asked whether any member of the Bosnian Serb Army was near the warehouse, and Gajic said no.

Mladic is also charged with the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, which allegedly reached the scale of genocide in six other municipalities, terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

The Hague Tribunal said on Monday that an autopsy had revealed that no foul play was involved in the death of Serbian forensic expert Dusan Dunjic.

Dunjic died last week in a Dutch hotel before he was due to testify in Ratko Mladic’s defence at the Tribunal.

“A pathologist from Serbia was also in attendance and observed the autopsy. As a result of the autopsy it was concluded that Mr. Dunjic died of natural causes,” the Tribunal said in a statement.

The trial continues on Tuesday.