Bosniak Srebrenica Commander Naser Oric’s Retrial Begins

The retrial of Naser Oric and his Bosnian Army subordinate Sabahudin Muhic for the killings of three Serb prisoners in the villages of Zalazje, Lolici and Kunjerac in the Bratunac and Srebrenica areas in 1992 opened on Monday at the state court in Sarajevo.

The retrial is being held after the state court’s appeals chamber quashed the acquittal of Oric and Muhic in June this year.

The original trial was highly controversial because Oric is seen as a hero by many Bosniaks for his role in defending Srebrenica in the years before the 1995 massacres, while some Serbs have claimed that the charges against him should have been more severe.

After the presentation of introductory statements, a former Bosnian Serb Army soldier, Radivoje Ostojic, gave testimony, recalling how he was wounded twice during a Bosnian Army attack on the village of Zalazje on July 12, 1992.

“I lost a lot of blood,” Ostojic said, adding he saw one of the three Serb victims, Dragan Rakic, during the attack.

He said he and other Bosnian Serb troops then went into Rakic’s house; a Bosnian Army soldier peeked in, but did not see them.

“At that moment, somebody in the neighbouring house gave an order: ‘All of you shoot at the white house [Rakic’s house] with all available weapons,’” Ostojic recalled, adding that he was shot in the buttock when the Bosnian Army troops opened fire.

But Oric’s defence lawyer Lejla Covic said that in a statement given by Ostojic during the investigation of the case in 2006, the witness claimed to have been shot in the stomach area.

The retrial is due to continue on September 24.

Before the original trial started, the defence asked the UN tribunal in The Hague to order a halt to the proceedings against Oric, arguing that he had already been tried for and acquitted of war crimes in Srebrenica by the Hague court and should not stand trial for the same crimes twice.

The Hague Tribunal rejected the request, with the judge saying that “the murder charges in the Bosnian indictment fundamentally differ from the murder charges in the Hague indictment with respect to the alleged victims and the nature, time and location of the alleged crime”.

Earlier this month, the prosecutor in the Oric case, Miroslav Janjic, said he had received death threats from a witness who testified in the original trial.

Defence lawyer Covic said that she had also received threats from the same witness, as had her client Oric.