Mladic Case Testimony to Begin With Mass Execution Survivor
Trial to resume next week following nearly two months of delay.
Mladic Case Testimony to Begin With Mass Execution Survivor
Trial to resume next week following nearly two months of delay.
After a nearly two-month adjournment, the proceedings against wartime Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic will resume on July 9 with the testimony of the first prosecution witness.
Elvedin Pasic, who will address the court in person, will give testimony on how he survived the killing of about 150 people in the village of Grabovica in Bosnia and Herzegovina in November 1992, the court said in a statement.
Pasic will describe “attacks on villages, the persecution of non-Serbs, beatings, killings and the brutal and inhumane living conditions at the Grabovica school detention facility” in the Kotor Varos municipality of Bosnia, the court said.
This witness has previously given testimony in the trials of former Bosnian Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik, and Radoslav Brdjanin, the former head of the Banja Luka crisis staff of the Autonomous Region of Krajina.
The second witness will be David Harland, who was a civil affairs officer and political adviser to the commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia from 1993 to 1995. He has testified previously in three cases, including that of Mladic’s wartime superior, former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic.
The Mladic trial began on May 16 with the prosecution’s opening statements, but was adjourned the following day because the prosecution had mistakenly failed to disclose thousands of documents to the defence.
Then, after judges ruled that the trial would resume on June 25, prosecutors admitted in a court filing that the defence still did not have access to some 4,498 documents to which it is entitled as part of the disclosure process. (See Mladic Defence Still Missing Documents, Prosecution Admits.)
The documents were discovered in a recent audit, the prosecution said. It said it would not object to the defence’s request for the bench to reconsider its decision to start the trial on June 25.
In a brief written decision to restart the trial on July 9, judges said that they had heard submissions from both the defence and prosecution, and that the latter should begin by calling those witnesses “least impacted by any disclosure failures.”
Prosecutors allege that Mladic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army from 1992 to 1996, planned and oversaw the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left nearly 12,000 people dead. Mladic is accused of commanding a force that deliberate sniped at and shelled civilians in the city.
He also faces charges of genocide for his alleged role in the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed.
The indictment – which contains 11 counts in total – alleges that Mladic was responsible for crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer which “contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory.”
After 16 years as a fugitive, Mladic was arrested in Serbia on May 26, 2011.
Rachel Irwin is IWPR Senior Reporter in the Hague.
