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The Grbavica neighbourhood of Sarajevo just after the war in March 1996. Photo: Stacey Wyzkowski/US Defence Department.
The Supreme Court in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Federation entity on Monday quashed the verdict convicting Veljko Papic, the former commander of the Third Company with the First Battalion of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, of crimes against the civilian population in Sarajevo’s Grbavica and Kovacici neighbourhoods in 1993 and 1994.
Papic had been sentenced to two years in prison by the Cantonal Court in Sarajevo in January 2021 for giving orders that forced non-Serb civilians to do hard labour and put them in life-threatening situations in the besieged Bosnian capital.
But the Supreme Court overturned the conviction and sent the case back for a retrial.
The original verdict said that Papic made civilians who were part of a forced labour squad do hard and humiliating physical labour, usually on the front lines, while also psychologically abusing them.
The civilians could not refuse to carry out the tasks because they were afraid for their own lives and for the lives of their family members, who had been threatened with death, the verdict said.
The verdict also said that Papic ordered four of the civilians who were part of the forced labour squad to remove the bodies of two young Sarajevans, Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic, who were killed on May 18, 1993 as they tried to cross the Vrbanja bridge in the city centre.
Ismic, a Bosniak, and her boyfriend Brkic, a Serb, became known after their deaths as the ‘Sarajevo Romeo and Juliet’.
The verdict said that Papic ordered the four civilians to remove the couple’s bodies from the demarcation line between the Bosnian Serb Army and the Bosniak-led Bosnian Army near the Vrbanja bridge, “threatening them that he would kill their families should they try to flee”.
Papic was also found guilty of making three members of the forced labour squad plant explosives in a building on the demarcation line used by the Bosnian Army in the spring of 1994, again threatening that he would kill their families if they ran away.
The verdict said that in order to demonstrate the seriousness of his threats, Papic beat up one of the members of the forced labour squad.
However he was acquitted of other crimes against members of the forced labour squad. The Supreme Court upheld this part of the verdict.
