“I was sitting there and I saw a [soldier] arrive,” the witness told the court. “He went into the house and he killed [the owner]. His wife started screaming, and then he killed [her] too.
“The next day, when I got up ... I saw next to the road there were corpses and there was blood. All night this crime had been going on, these murders which no one was able to prevent... or rather, [which] nobody paid attention [to].”
The witness, who testified anonymously and with his voice distorted, told the court that he had been threatened several times after agreeing to testify in the Halilovic case.
In his testimony, he confirmed that the killing spree was carried out by men under Halilovic’s command and spoke of an organised effort by army members to cover up what had happened.
The witness told the court that the whole episode began after an off-the-cuff remark by one of Halilovic’s junior commanders – to the effect that locals who objected to billeting soldiers in their homes should be executed and tossed in the nearby river.
Halilovic, he said, was present when the comment was made and expressed his disapproval – but that was all.
The general is charged with failing to prevent or punish the massacre in Grabovica and a further thirty murders in Uzdol just a few days later.
The witness told judges that when he first heard commander Vehbija Karic’s comment about how the troops should solve their accommodation problem, he did not pay it much heed.
“I thought it was a joke, I didn’t take it seriously,” he said. “These were just ordinary citizens – they were not soldiers, this was not combat.”
Halilovic, he said, “just made a gesture with his head and said, ‘Are you in your right mind?’ That’s all he did.”
This exchange occurred, the witness told judges, following a speech by senior commanders to between 100 and 150 soldiers of the Bosnian army involved in an effort to liberate the town of Mostar in Hercegovina, during which Halilovic made it clear it was he who was in command of the operation.
Defence lawyers argue that those who carried out the killings in Grabovica were not in fact the accused’s subordinates.
The witness said it wasn’t long before the first killings – of an elderly couple, Pero and Dragica Maric – occurred that evening, and the shooting carried on until the middle of the following afternoon.
At that point, he said, another Bosnian army commander Zulfikar Alispago, also known as Zuka, arrived and set up checkpoints at both ends of the village.
“He said no one was to leave Grabovica … without his approval,” the witness told the court. “He collected all those corpses that were by the roadside, put them on a truck and drove them off somewhere.”
Following his return to Sarajevo that October, the witness said he was arrested and put in prison for some four months, during which time he was questioned once about what happened in the village that day and was warned that if he said anything more about the matter he could face a life sentence or the death penalty.
Years later, he said, after agreeing to testify before the Hague tribunal, he was contacted by a lawyer who offered him a substantial sum of money – apparently to withdraw or change his testimony.
He said he also received a series of intimidating anonymous phone calls and on one occasion was accosted by a group of men who held a knife to his throat and a gun to his head.
“Even today I fear my return to [Sarajevo],” he said. “God knows what might happen.”
During cross-examination, defence counsel Peter Morrissey accused the witness of altering his account over the years since the incident occurred, and implied that he might have colluded with others.
Morrissey demanded to know, for instance, why the witness hadn’t told anyone before coming to The Hague about the large numbers of corpses he saw in Grabovica or about the fact he was personally present at the killing of Pero Maric.
“I didn’t have occasion to and I would not feel safe enough,” the witness replied. “Who would provide me any guarantees if I were to say something like that in Sarajevo?”
Morrissey also accused the witness of personal involvement in the killings, suggesting that his testimony in court was an attempt to shift the blame to others and conceal his own guilt.
“Had I been guilty of committing a crime... in relation to Grabovica, I would admit that now,” the witness insisted. “A person committing such an act must be sick in his mind.”
The trial continues.
Michael Farquhar is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.
