They opted not to call Ibran Mustafic, wartime president of the Srebrenica municipality, despite the fact he had already arrived at The Hague and undergone two days of preparation with the prosecution.
“This witness was not cooperative…and he will not be supportive to the strategy of the prosecution to prove our case,” prosecutor Jan Wubben explained to the judges. “It’s disappointing, because we projected this witness as an important insider.”
Oric, 37, was the commanding officer of the Srebrenica armed forces throughout the war.
He is charged with failing to prevent or punish the soldiers under his command for crimes they allegedly committed in and around the enclave in 1992 and 1993. These include destruction and looting of Serb villages around Srebrenica and the murder and mistreatment of Serb detainees in the town’s prison.
The prosecutors are trying to prove that Oric failed to order investigations into these crimes, and also to report them to civilian and military authorities.
This latest turn in the Oric trial came after a string of previous insider witnesses ended up doing more for the defence case than for the prosecutions.
Many described conditions inside the enclave - a town packed with tens of thousands of famished refugees and cut off from the rest of the world from 1992-1995 - as “total chaos” where rules and procedures were hard to follow. Others said Oric was not in a position to control the troops supposedly under his command.
In March, Presiding Judge Carmel Agius of Malta told prosecutors to send one insider witness home – a senior Srebrenica policeman – because he didn’t believe anything he said.
As it nears the end of its case, the prosecution has called more than forty witnesses. It has dropped twelve potential witnesses so far, including five insiders. Mustafic is the first to come all the way to The Hague before prosecutors realised he wouldn’t be of much help.
Almost apologising, Wubben told the judges that Mustafic had given two statements to the tribunal’s investigators in August last year, which made the prosecutors “confident to move forward with him recently”.
When Judge Agius inquired whether the prosecution had considered presenting Mustafic’s previous statements in court and treating him as a hostile witness if necessary, Wubben said their decision to withdraw Mustafic was “definitive”.
Merdijana Sadovic is IWPR’s reporter in The Hague.
