Oric

Sunday, 20 November, 2005

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Helen Warrell

Soldier and former policeman Hazim Malagic this week told the Hague tribunal of his experience fighting alongside Naser Oric, who he denied was in command of Muslim forces in municipalities including Srebrenica and Bratunac.

“He wasn’t commanding anybody,” said Malagic, who also told this week of the “fierce fighting” inflicted by Bosnian Serb forces on Muslims in eastern Bosnia.

“We all had our own group, there wasn’t any coordination. [War] is a time when personal courage is demonstrated, no one listened to anyone else when the violence started and the attack was underway,” he added.

Oric is accused of directing the destruction of more than 50 Serb hamlets and villages surrounding Srebrenica from June 1992 to March 1993.

However, Malagic repeatedly denied any suggestions that the Muslim forces had a recognised military structure or were controlled by a higher command. He insisted that the groups of fighters were headed only by local leaders, and did not share information or communicate in any way.

When Oric’s defence counsel Vasvija Vidovic showed the witness a prosecution document, a military order allegedly signed by Oric appointing a man named Avdo Beli to lead a group of fighters, Malagic laughed.

“This is a joke at Oric’s expense,” he said, adding that Beli was well known to be “mentally unstable” and never carried weapons.

During the conflict, Malagic was a member of what he alleges was an informal militia based in Likari, a mountain village about 10 kilometres from Srebrenica.

The prosecution argues that Oric had “both de jure and de facto command and control” over such groups of Muslim fighters.

However, the witness explained that during this period, he and other Muslims in the wider Srebrenica area had been forced out of their villages by Bosnian Serb soldiers, and were struggling to find food and defend their places of refuge.

Malagic was keen to stress the overwhelming power of the Bosnian Serbs’ military arsenal. When Vidovic asked what weapons the Serbs had used during attacks in the Srebrenica area in 1992, he replied, “I’ll put it like this, the only thing they didn’t use was the atom bomb.”

The witness went on to describe how the Serb forces had access to “all the weapons of the former [Yugoslav army] JNA” including mortars, light rocket launchers, howitzers, tanks and anti-aircraft machine guns.

The defence sought to demonstrate these claims with a series of Bosnian Serb Army, VRS, documents, one of which listed the “material losses” of the Drina Corps, one of six VRS units, following their December 1992 attack on the village of Bjelovac near Likari.

The offensive cost the VRS 23,000 automatic rifle bullets, 2,000 machine gun bullets, 700 mines or mortars and 100 aerial bombs.

Another defence exhibit, a VRS directive to the Drina Corps dated November 19, 1992, ordered that the Drina Corps should inflict “the heaviest possible losses” on the enemy and force them to leave the area.

The defence has consistently argued that the attacks on Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces between 1992 and 1995 were part of a wider plan to gain control of Bosnian territory which would then become an annex of Serbia.

Malagic insisted that the attacks he had experienced in eastern Bosnia were a result of this intended expansion.

“The idea of a Greater Serbia meant that [the Serb forces] had to drive the Muslims away as far from the Drina river as possible,” he said.

The defence counsel’s examination focused on the fact that, in contrast to the well-equipped Bosnian Serbs forces, Muslim fighters had only limited numbers of weapons. The group at Likari, which was led by the witness’s cousin, Osman Malagic, had only about 25 old hunting rifles and no means of obtaining more.

“For us at the time, weapons meant survival,” said the witness. “When you heard a colleague had been killed you would ask, well is his rifle still there?”

There was humour in the courtroom when the witness, having been asked how he knew Oric, said that the commander used to come to parties in Malagic’s home village of Voljovice and eventually married a girl from there. Oric chuckled to himself as the witness said, “We were a bit jealous, I must admit. It wasn’t for just anyone to pick a girl from Voljovice.”

During a more sober cross-examination, prosecution counsel Patricia Sellers continued to emphasise earlier claims that Oric, as a commander for the Srebrenica territorial defence, TO, gave orders to lower-ranking soldiers, and was in overall control of Muslim forces in the Srebrenica area.

She showed the witness a sales contract from April 1992 in which Oric, on behalf of the TO, apparently agreed to purchase 800 rifles, 50 hand-held rocket launchers and a 30 TT pistols as well camouflage uniforms, boots and food for Muslim troops.

“I am a bit shaken by this. It does not correspond to the situation at all,” said Malagic. “I see orders for huge quantities of flour [but] people died searching for flour.”

Sellers then suggested that the witness and his group had been “positioned” at Likari by senior commanders because it was high up and allowed good view of Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, so was therefore of strategic importance.

In reply, Malagic snapped, “We were not ‘positioned’ by anyone, we were spending time there, what could we do, retreat into Srebrenica and wait to be killed?”

Returning to Oric himself, the prosecution produced an extract from a book by local historian Besim Ibisevic that alleged that the accused had been involved in the illegal trafficking of weapons in Bosnia, along with a local man named Ibrahim Mustovic. Malagic flatly denied that this could have happened, insisting, “Mustovic never liked Naser, any person from the area can tell you that.”

In the defence’s re-examination, the witness’s scepticism appeared to be vindicated when Vidovic pointed to a section of Ibisevic’s book in which the author admitted that some of his accounts were based on “whisperings and rumours”, and that he had not had time to verify certain incidents.

After the four-day testimony, Presiding Judge Carmel Agius described Malagic’s evidence as “extremely important”.

The trial continues with English doctor Simon Mardel, who worked as a field officer in Sarajevo in 1993 and early 1994.

Helen Warrell is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.