Mladic Ordered Bosnian Massacres

Dragan Obrenovic, the second Bosnian Serb officer to plead guilty for his role in the massacre of Srebrenica, has said that he took part after learning that army chief General Ratko Mladic had personally ordered the killings.

Obrenovic, 40, who was chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb army’s Zvornik brigade at the time the killings were carried out in July 1995, began giving testimony as a Hague prosecution witness on October 2.

He pleaded guilty in May this year to persecution, a crime against humanity, and agreed to testify against fellow officers Vidoje Blagojevic and Dragan Jokic, as part of a plea agreement. It came two weeks after another such deal was reached with the fourth man charged in the same case, former Bosnian Serb army captain Momir Nikolic, who is now also giving testimony in the trial.

Blagojevic, who was commander of the Bratunac brigade, and Jokic, chief of engineering in the Zvornik brigade, are accused of helping to organise the killing of at least 7,000 Muslim men and boys after the fall of the United Nations-designated safe area in July 1995, and the subsequent burial and cover-up.

Obrenovic, who was chief of staff and acting commander of the Zvornik brigade, said he first became aware of the plan to kill all Muslim prisoners on the evening of July 13, 1995.

In a telephone conversation with his security officer, Lieutenant Drago Nikolic, he found out that thousands of Muslim prisoners captured in the previous two days while trying to break out of the enclave would be transported to Zvornik the following morning.

When Obrenovic opposed that decision and suggested that they should be taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Bijeljina, Drago Nikolic told him that orders to kill the prisoners had come from Mladic, commander of the Bosnian Serb army.

Drago Nikolic also told him that Ljubomir Beara, chief of the Bosnian Serb army's security service, and Drina corps security officer Colonel Vujadin Popovic would be in charge of the killing operation.

"He said that he needed to prepare facilities for prisoners to be held, and asked to be relieved of his [other] duties," said Obrenovic in his testimony.

"That is when you decided to support the operation?" asked prosecutor Peter McCloskey.

"Yes," replied Obrenovic.

Obrenovic then ordered a military police commander, Lieutenant Miomir Jasikovac, to report to Lieutenant Nikolic, with a platoon of military police.

"After he [Nikolic] mentioned the entire chain of command I got scared. I thought there was no point in standing up to it," he told the court.

Between July 14 and 16, Obrenovic said, he was in combat, fighting an armed Muslim column which was fighting its way out of the Serb encirclement towards Bosnian government-held territory in Tuzla.

Units under his command were forced to withdraw, and a temporary ceasefire was agreed and, on the afternoon of July 16, a corridor was opened for 24 hours for the rest of the column to pass through.

However, dozens of small groups did not make it in time, and were left behind Serb lines. Troops from the Zvornik brigade and police units hunted them down for weeks and months to come.

"After one of our soldiers was killed, the brigade commander issued an order to our units not to take prisoners. Some did, some did not," Obrenovic told the court.

Emir Suljagic is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.