Mladic Witness Describes Foca on Eve of War
Former military nurse tells judges she saw no inhumane treatment.
Mladic Witness Describes Foca on Eve of War
Former military nurse tells judges she saw no inhumane treatment.
A defence witness in the trial of former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic said this week that Muslim residents left Foca willingly after Bosnian Serb forces seized control of the area in April 1992.
Foca is one of the municipalities in which Mladic is charged with acts of persecution committed in pursuit of the “objective to permanently remove Bosnian Muslims and/or Bosnian Croats” from these areas.
Prosecutors allege that Mladic was responsible for crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible population transfer. He is accused of the massacre of more than 7,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, and of planning and overseeing the siege of Sarajevo that left nearly 12,000 people dead.
Defence lawyer Miodrag Stojanovic began by reading out a summary of the protected witness’s statement outlining her role as a nurse in the Foca hospital in eastern Bosnia.
“When the war started in Foca, she was a member of the medical personnel at the department of internal medicine at the Foca medical centre,” he said. “On the eve of the breakout of conflict in Foca, the situation in the hospital was more or less normal, but the witness realised already that in March 1992, some of her colleagues had started sending their children away, both Serb and Muslim.
“At the beginning of April 1992, when the fighting started in Foca, she was invited to come to work, so she managed to get to the hospital under fire. She stayed in the hospital for the next fortnight and she noticed that only Muslim patients came to the hospital, as well as women and children who were not sick, but they were looking for a safe haven because of all the fighting that was already going on in town.
“Once the blockade was lifted off this facility, and when the Serb forces took over control of the hospital, the Muslim population that was there and wanted to leave the town was allowed to leave Foca with their families in their cars or in any other means of transportation available to them.”
The witness, identified only as GRN277, also worked in an infirmary organised by a local Serb “territorial defence” force and provided medical assistance to a unit led by Dragan Nikolic, a Serb commander who was later convicted of war crimes by the Hague tribunal and is currently serving a 20-year sentence.
“In the course of your work that you described, did you ever receive any orders or instruction from superior officers in any form that exercised discrimination against the sick or wounded based on their ethnicity?” Stojanovic asked.
The witness replied that she had not.
“While you were doing your job, and I mean both within the hospital and with the unit, did you notice any unlawful or inhumane treatment [by] the members of the unit that you provided medical care for?” he followed.
“No,” witness GRN277 said.
During cross-examination, prosecuting lawyer Camille Bibles asked more about the witness’s connections to the Dragan Nikolic unit.
“Were you personally mobilised either before or during the war to provide medical assistance?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes, during the war, but not before the war. This unit did not even exist at the time as far as I know,” the witness replied. “During the first month, it was not a military unit, it was not the army; these were self-organised groups to the best of my knowledge. I went there only when and if needed.”
Asked whether she had had a good relationship with the members of the unit, the witness replied, “One could say so, while I was working in the field and being with them.”
The defence went through a list of names, asking whether each had been a member of the unit. Some of those named have been previously convicted by the tribunal for crimes in Foca, including Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic.
The witness said they had been mmebers, although the unit was a loose grouping.
Questioned on whether its fighters wore the “olive drab” uniforms of the Serbs’ National Security Council or SNB, the witness said they did not.
At this point, the prosecution drew the witness’s attention to a previous case in which she gave evidence.
Without specifying whose trial this had been, Bibles said when asked about Kovac the witness had said, “During the first days, he wore the SNB uniform, a green one. Everybody wore that, and only after a longer period of time – I cannot tell you exactly how long this was, but this was in the beginning – after that they got some kind of camouflage uniform they wore out in the field.”
In reply, the witness said that some fighters wore camouflage, some SNB uniforms and others simply wore civilian clothing. Explaining the discrepancy with her previous testimony, she said, “Maybe I was nervous and didn’t understand the question properly.”
She herself wore civilian clothes for the first part of the war, she noted.
“I received my first uniform as late as September because no one gave me before that,” she said, adding that she did not know where the outfit had come from.
The witness also said that Serbs had been imprisoned in the Foca Correctional and Penal Facility (KP Dom) before the Bosnian Serbs seized control of the area from the Bosniaks.
KP Dom, one of the prison facilities mentioned in the indictment against Mladic, was used by the Bosnian Serb Army to detain hundreds of Muslim men following the capture of the surrounding area.
Judge Alphonse Orie went on to ask the witness how she knew that Serbs had been taken to KP Dom before the Bosnian Serb army took control of the area.
She said that the “entire area belonged to Muslims” and they were the only patients at the hospital.
“No Serb arrived in hospital to be treated there,” she said. “They were organised in an infirmary outside the city; they could not even reach the medical centre.”
Judge Orie continued to press the witness on how she knew that Serbs had been detained in KP Dom.
“We did not know what was going on when we were in the hospital… the only information we had about the goings-on in the territory of Foca municipality was from Radio Sarajevo,” she said. “No other information reached us. There was a blockade around the hospital. Once the blockade was lifted, we learned.”
Daniella Peled is an IWPR editor in London.
