Oric Praised by Prosecution Witnesses
Testimony backs indictment’s claim that Serb prisoners were abused in Srebrenica prison – but fails to implicate defendant.
Oric Praised by Prosecution Witnesses
Testimony backs indictment’s claim that Serb prisoners were abused in Srebrenica prison – but fails to implicate defendant.
Prosecutors in the trial of former Bosnian commander Naser Oric were forced to sit through some uncomfortable hearings this week after two of their key witnesses painted the accused in a rather flattering light and the testimony of a third was cast into doubt.
The witnesses were all called to support prosecution allegations that Oric’s forces mistreated civilian prisoners captured from Serb villages around Srebrenica in late 1992 and early 1993.
But one of them - while acknowledging that he was severely abused while being held prisoner by Muslim forces in 1992 - told judges that Oric himself had “never done anything wrong” and should not be on trial at all.
And another said that after his capture in January 1993, when he was still a boy, Oric had personally ordered that he be kept safe from harm.
A third witness told the trial chamber that she had been injured and captured as Muslim forces systematically looted and burned Serb houses in her village during an attack in December 1992.
But she later admitted that her testimony in court clashed with accounts she had given to the Serb authorities immediately after her release.
The first witness to appear in court on January 17 was Nedeljko Radic, who is named in the indictment against Oric as one of a number of specific Bosnian Serbs who were subject to “physical abuse” and “serious suffering” at the hands of his men.
Radic had begun his testimony last week by detailing the horrific torture he suffered during a three-week stint in Oric’s Srebrenica prison in autumn 1992, including having his teeth pulled out by a man called Kemo who then urinated in his mouth “to disinfect his wounds”.
But when defence lawyer John Jones suggested on January 17 that Radic might be inventing parts of his story “in order to see Naser Oric sentenced”, the reply was more than he could have hoped for.
“I would never want to sentence Oric,” the prosecution witness protested. “I would free him immediately and would put Kemo in his place instead. Oric never did anything wrong and I always disagreed with him being put on trial.”
Parts of the testimony of the next prosecution witness Branimir Mitrovic, a young man from Banja Luka, also supported efforts by the defence to paint Oric as a very human commander.
Mitrovic said he was captured by Oric’s men on January 16, 1993, when he was only seven years old, whilst staying with his grandparents in the village of Zarkovica.
He told the court that he and his grandparents were hiding in the cellar of their house as Muslim forces attacked the village, he said, when a man - who he thought was Oric - entered.
The witness and his grandmother were led away, while his grandfather managed to remain hidden in a dark corner of the basement. Mitrovic said the soldier in question was nice to them, and they joined a group of other Serb villagers who were then taken to Srebrenica.
There, he said, his grandmother was put in a detention facility with other women, while he was sent to stay with a local Muslim woman in her apartment in the town. During his three-week stay there, the boy was allowed to visit his grandmother every day.
Mitrovic said that while she and the other detained women were treated well, he did on several occasions see Serb men being beaten in the prison corridors with fists, bars and wooden clubs. The beatings, he said, lasted between 15 and 20 minutes and left the prisoners bloodied and bruised.
But his description of a second encounter with Oric himself again painted the accused in a rather positive light.
Mitrovic said Oric came into the restaurant where his host worked as a cook, pointed at him and asked one of the staff whether that was the boy who had been captured. When this was confirmed, Oric said, “Nobody must harm this boy.”
During cross-examination, defence counsel Jones put it to the witness that he wasn’t actually in detention during his time in Srebrenica, but simply had nowhere to go because his parents were living in Serbia and his grandmother was in jail. Mitrovic acknowledged that this was possible.
But worse was to come for the prosecution.
The third witness to speak this week was Mira Filipovic, 36, whose husband Slavoljub Filipovic testified for the prosecution at the end of last year.
Filipovic began her testimony with a strong account of how she was wounded during an attack on the Serb village of Bjelovac on December 14, 1992, when Muslim fighters launched a grenade at the roof of the house in which she was hiding with her children, her mother-in-law and a small boy from the neighbourhood, Brano.
She said the grenade, which injured her and Brano, was fired because the soldiers knew people were hiding in the house but were unable to find them.
The group of Serbs were captured after the explosion and were taken to Srebrenica, Filipovic said, where they stayed for around two months before being released.
But when the prosecution examination of the witness was complete, defence counsel Jones then confronted her with two earlier accounts she had given to the Serb authorities – in 1993 and 1994 - shortly after her departure from Srebrenica, which told a rather different story.
“I detonated the hand grenade clumsily and threw it out of the window,” she said in one of the statements. “But it got caught in the balcony’s fence and exploded, injuring me and Brano.”
Filipovic told the court that she had been mistaken at the time and that her memory is “now much better than it was in 1993”.
The prosecution case continues.
Merdijana Sadovic is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.
