Milosevic Tells Massacre Survivor: 'There Was No Execution'

Milosevic refused to accept any part of the testimony given on June 26 and 27 by a Bosnian Muslim man who was one of three survivors of a massacre perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces in May 1992. Suad Dzafic was from a tiny village of 12 houses and perhaps one hundred people near Vitkovici in the Bratunac municipality of Bosnia Herzegovina, an area populated by approximately 64% Muslim and 34% Serb inhabitants in the 1991 census. The indictment against Milosevic alleges that a Bosnian Serb Crisis Staff controlled the region after April 12, 1992, when local police were joined by Serbian paramilitaries – including the “White Eagles” and “Arkan’s Tigers” - in a campaign of ethnic cleansing marked by mass executions, detention and deportation.

Dzafic’s description of the preparatory steps taken by these forces uncannily mirrored the testimony of protected witness B-1701, who was brought to the court in April to give evidence about a different massacre in the same region (see April 12, 2003 CIJ report “Witness Describes Massacre at Bratunac”). Both men described a pattern in which Serbian police or military demanded that weapons held by Bosnian Muslims be handed over temporarily in exchange for receipts and a promise of protection. In both cases, compliance with the order led to deportation or death.

For Dzafic’s family, the order to turn in weapons came on May 17, 1992 from the Bratunac police chief, who presented a list of people in the village alleged to have arms distributed previously for the use of members of the local territorial defense (TO) unit. The witness’s father, a brother, and two cousins voluntarily turned in their pistols and hunting rifles and received receipts and assurances of protection from the police. The next day, armed Serbs surrounded the village and loaded the inhabitants into buses, driving them first to Bratunac and then to neighboring Vlasenica. The women and children were separated from the men and sent on foot to Muslim controlled territory, as Mr. Dzafic learned later from his wife. The men were not so lucky.

Dzafic was one of 35 men – mostly members of his family - held in a three by five meter cell in a police building in Vlasenica and beaten by locals and paramilitaries for three days. On May 21, the men were taken back to Bratunac by bus in a convoy that the witness said included vehicles painted with skulls. He also testified that members of the White Eagles and Arkan’s Tigers were part of the group. He knew one of the Serb men in the convoy by name: his neighbor Pero Mitrovic. They ultimately stopped by a field on the main road near the entrance to the old city of Bratunac, and the men were ordered to disembark the bus in batches of four or five. As soon as the first group stepped off the bus, they were shot in their backs. When it came time for him to get off, he heard an order to run into the field.

His group made it 30 or 40 meters into the field before the men at the convoy opened fire. Dzafic was wounded by four bullets, hitting his stomach, hip, and legs. As he lay in the field, he realized that the executioners were moving through the field taking pistols to men showing signs of life. When they came within 10 to 20 meters from him, he heard a quarrel between his neighbor Pero Mitrovic and another man about whether they should have done this next to the main road. At that moment, another voice ordered them away. When the vehicles left, Dzafic rose and walked for two hours to a nearby village, where two other survivors of the massacre were eventually brought. Dzafic’s father and two brothers didn’t survive.

Milosevic’s cross-examination of this survivor followed familiar lines. He asked – or rather, asserted – information about armed Muslim extremist groups in the area and political maneuverings in local leadership. At one point, he read out a lengthy list of Serb civilians – mostly housewives – who allegedly had been killed by Muslims. Dzafic was unable to provide any information about those cases, and at one point asked Milosevic “please can you ask questions related to my case.” This question was evidence of a perceptible change in the way this witness and the court handled Milosevic’s questioning, as compared to many who have come before.

Both the prosecution and the judges carefully monitored the cross-examination of Dzafic, who, like all witnesses who give evidence pursuant to Rule 92bis, submitted a written statement to the court and underwent minimal direct examination. In the past, Milosevic has used this process to his advantage. Trial observers do not have the witnesses’ written statements or the narratives that would be established through direct examination. They hear only the information elicited through Milosevic’s own questioning, and his questions have habitually jumped without explanation between different times, places, and events described in the written statement, simultaneously confusing witnesses and giving the appearance of contradictory testimony. Dzafic, by contrast, repeatedly asked the Accused to clarify the time period and event about which he was asking. The prosecution provided a witness statement with numbered paragraphs and requested that Milosevic refer to those numbers in his questioning, and both Judge Kwon and Judge May intervened to clarify certain questions and answers.

Milosevic still doesn’t understand – or care to value – the fact that the existence of extremists and the perpetration of atrocities by “the other side” can in no way justify the crimes against civilians testified to by the witness, including murder, forced deportation, and destruction of property. As has been often repeated, not only is evidence of other unrelated crimes not a legal defense, but Milosevic’s assertions of such crimes cannot even be considered evidence by the Court, since he is not testifying under oath. With Dzafic, Milosevic also pursued his self-destructive tactic of denying even the most basic facts of the testimony, rather than structuring a more sophisticated defense about his own responsibility for events he did not witness. He ended his cross-examination of this witness by simply asserting – with no factual support - that the executed Bosnian Muslim men had been fighting in a military unit: “they weren’t executed, there was no execution.”

This statement forms part of a pattern by which Milosevic insinuates that the witness is lying without actually questioning him about the disputed fact. At one point, he suggested that Dzafic had not in fact been shot, although he never put the question directly to the witness, since it would likely do Milosevic no good if the witness actually showed his visible scars to the court. Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice told the judges that the wounds were, of course, “possible to verify,” but Judge May agreed that it was unnecessary to do so.

At other times, the witness’s own responses powerfully refuted the insinuations. Milosevic asked incredulously about the possibility of walking two hours after having been shot: “You could walk with those wounds?” “I had to walk,” replied Dzafic, “I tried to lie down but it was too painful.” Similarly, Milosevic asked how it was possible for 35 men to fit into a three by five meter cell. “Everything is possible,” said the witness. In their only moment of agreement over the course of the testimony, Milosevic concurred with Dzafic that everything is in fact possible. The Accused would be well advised to keep this in mind during his questioning of survivor witnesses, both to pay respect to their loss and to preserve the credibility of his defense.