Bosnian Serb Ex-Official Blames Army Officer for Massacre
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“He [Beara] was the trigger… [for] this process of killing prisoners of war to start. The person who should have prevented that ordered it,” Kovac said.
According to the indictment, Bosnian Serb forces killed 1,313 Bosniaks from Srebrenica in a hangar at a farm in Kravica on July 13 and 14.
The killings in Kravica were among several massacres after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995 that left more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys dead.
Serb ex-policemen Nedeljko Milidragovic, Aleksa Golijanin, Milivoje Batinica, Aleksandar Dacevic, Bora Miletic, Jovan Petrovic, Dragomir Parovic and Vidosav Vasic are on trial in Belgrade for organising and participating in the shootings.
Kovac said that the Bosniak prisoners attacked one of their guards, a member of Bosnian Serb police special forces, took his gun and shot him dead because they had already come under attack themselves from a member of the Serb forces, Milan Lukic, who was under Beara’s command.
“That is why those Muslims attacked them, because they were shot at by the other side, that has been established,” Kovac told the court.
“He [Lukic] shot at them and then one of them came to that special policeman and killed him,” he added.
The killing of the special policeman sparked the massacre, Kovac testified.
“When the prisoners killed that soldier, they [other Serb troops] responded so brutally that many of them were tried for that, some in The Hague, others in Sarajevo,” he said.
Kovac described the massacre as “an incident” because “it happened without premeditation”, and repeated during his testimony that the Bosniaks were prisoners of war, rather than civilian detainees.
He also insisted that the defendants in the trial, who he described as “deserters”, were not at the hangar in Kravica at the time of the killings.
Kovac himself was indicted for genocide in Bosnia in January 2018.
Beara was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 by the Hague Tribunal for the genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica. He died while serving his sentence in Germany in February 2017.
Aleksandar and Vladimir Seselj, two sons of convicted war criminal and Serbian MP Vojislav Seselj, attended Tuesday’s hearing as spectators. Aleksandar Seselj is also an MP.
