Bosnian Serb Defied Srebrenica Order
Witness recounts how he refused to get involved in efforts to cover up massacre.
Bosnian Serb Defied Srebrenica Order
Witness recounts how he refused to get involved in efforts to cover up massacre.
The defence team for the Bosnian Serb officer Dragan Jokic managed to produce this week someone the prosecution has spent years trying to come up with - a Bosnian Serb who defied orders to participate in an operation to cover up traces of the Srebrenica massacre.
Rajko Djokic, 67, a retired schoolteacher from the village of Poljine, near Zvornik, appears to be the first witness brought to the Hague courtroom who was not in some way linked to the grim findings of a report presented last year in this trial by the US military intelligence analyst Richard Butler.
In the years that took him to gather the information on the logistics of the Srebrenica massacre, Butler hasn’t come across a single registered case of a Bosnian Serb military or civilian disobeying orders to participate either in the massacres or in the subsequent burials. If there were such cases, the report suggested, they were not recorded.
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, killing some 7000 Muslim men and boys the following week. Jokic was at the time chief engineer of the Zvornik brigade, and is accused of involvement in the burial of the executed Muslims.
At the time Djokic, who was too old to serve in the army, was a member of the so called “civilian defence” in Zvornik, a body that in former Yugoslavia was supposed to comprise volunteers and experts whose job was to deal with natural disasters and to give a helping hand to the army in case of war.
According to Djokic's testimony on July 14, three days after the enclave was overrun by the Serb forces he and his driver Ostoja Stanojevic were sent to Bratunac, from where they were supposed to organise the “cleaning up of Srebrenica”.
“We were told there was a lot of debris there, as a result of combat actions, and our assignment was to remove rubble, roof tiles, even trees from the streets,” said Djokic, who claims he had no idea of what had happened there.
The following day, Djokic's driver was sent to the village of Kravice for an unspecified task, while Djokic remained in Bratunac. When the former returned, the latter immediately saw that something had gone terribly wrong.
“Ostoja was very pale and extremely upset. When I asked him what had happened, he said that whole day he had been taking bodies of dead Muslims from Kravice to Glogova, where they were then buried. His voice trembled; it was filled with mixture of anger and fear,” said Djokic.
Two days earlier, on July 13, 1995, Bosnian Serb soldiers summarily executed over 1000 Muslim men detained in a large warehouse in Kravice.
According to the indictment, between July 14 and 16, heavy equipment arrived and removed the victims’ bodies to two large mass graves located in the nearby villages of Glogova and Ravnice.
“I was terrified. It was the first time I ever heard about something like that since the war broke out,” Djokic said in court.
The day after, it was Djokic's turn to help with the burial of murdered Muslims. But instead he went straight to the local command of the civilian defence and protested.
“Ostojic and I are leaving, because we don't want to carry out such a horrible task,” Djokic claims to have said to his commanders.
“And what did your superiors tell you then?” asked defence counsellor Miodrag Stojanovic.
“Well, they didn't react at all,” said Djokic and paused. “So, we returned to Zvornik.”
Djokic was brought by the Jokic’s defence both as a character and as a circumstantial witness. He testified that it was not the accused that had ordered him to “clean up” in Srebrenica.
He was also one of a number of witnesses last week who testified about the defendant’s relative low ranking within the command structure.
The Jokic trial is set to continue for at least two weeks.
Merdijana Sadovic is an IWPR reporter in The Hague
