Witness Recalls Sanski Most Bridge Killings

Rachel Irwin

Senior Reporter

Friday, 7 September, 2012

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The sole survivor of a 1992 massacre in Bosnia gave a harrowing account this week of how he and 15 other men were beaten, forced to jump off a bridge, and then shot at as they tried to swim away.

Rajif Begic appeared as a witness for the prosecution in the Hague trial of wartime Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic.

He said that on May 31, 1992, his village in the northwestern municipality of Sanski Most was attacked by the Bosnian Serb army, which set homes on fire and separated the men from the women. Then the soldiers forced him and 19 other men to march to the nearby Vrhpolje Bridge.

Four of the men were shot dead on the way there, including a father and son who were unable to keep up, the witness said.

As the group approached the bridge, soldiers ordered them to remove their shoes and most of their clothing, although the witness said he kept his t-shirt on.

Then, he said, the soldiers began to beat him and the others, all the while “cursing and insulting” them.

One soldier said the army had to kill 70 Muslims that day “because seven Serb soldiers had been killed in that area”, the witness recalled.

“What were you thinking at that point in time?” prosecuting lawyer Camille Bibles asked.

“We were frightened. We had been beaten up, it was cold…we were just waiting to see what fate of group would be. We had been abandoned to our fate,” Begic said.

The witness said that after the soldiers had spent some time beating the prisoners, one of them asked which of the group “was good at jumping in the water”.

One man was singled out; he happened to be the other son of the father who had been killed earlier with his son, Begic said.

“He climbed over the railings and jumped into the water. As he was swimming, I saw four soldiers preparing automatic weapons, and when [the man] appeared under them, they opened bursts of fire and several moments later, you could see his body a little further down,” he said. “You could see his body wasn’t moving, and you could see that the water was red with his blood.”

The same pattern was repeated as the soldiers went down the line of men, he said, and then it was the turn of a 15-year-old boy.

The boy, standing near his father and two brothers, was ordered to jump into the water, Begic said. However, as he was about to jump, a soldier called Jadranko Palija approached him and shot him in the head, Begic said.

“He pushed [the boy] over the railing and when the body was passing under bridge, four men fired at him again,” the witness added.

Palija was tried before the State Court of Bosnia and Hercegovina in 2007 and was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, rape and pillage, for his role in the Vrhpolje Bridge massacre among other crimes.

Begic said that after the boy was shot, the soldiers began beating the remaining prisoners, and one of them ordered the witness to open his mouth.

“Jadranko put the automatic weapon in my mouth and someone said, ‘Don’t kill him on the bridge, don’t dirty the bridge – he should jump,’” Begic recounted, tears appearing in his eyes.

Begic said that before he jumped, he looked at his younger brother, who was also on the bridge.

“That was the last time we saw each other,” he said.

Begic said he dived head first into the water, hitting his head on a rock at the bottom of the Sanica river.

“I turned around, and managed to climb out under the mid-column of the bridge. I was standing there and I heard soldiers looking for me. They knew I had to pass by,” he said.

To avoid making an “easy target”, he said, he took off his white t-shirt and sent it floating downstream. He swam underwater, slightly to the left of the soldiers, who spotted the t-shirt in the water and opened fire.

“As luck would have it, I avoided all those bullets,” the witness said.

After swimming down the river, he was able to grab onto a bush and hide there for a while. He could still see the bridge from his hiding place, and he told the court that he “could see people jumping off the bridge and bodies falling into the water, but it was not possible to identity the person who had jumped into the water”.

“You could hear people groaning and moaning,” he added.

After spending the next few days wandering around the area, Begic said he decided to seek help from his Serb godmother, who lived nearby. He made the journey to her house during the night and hid in her barn until she came out the next morning.

She took him in and cleaned his head-wound with plum brandy, but her Serb neighbours found out and someone turned him into the authorities, he said. Begic was interrogated and eventually sent to the Manjaca detention camp, where he remained until December 1992, when it was shut down.

His younger brother’s body was identified after exhumations were carried out in the area around the bridge.

During cross-examination, Mladic’s lawyer Branko Lukic questioned the witness on the details of his account, including the assertion that he could see bodies floating downstream when he was standing on the bridge.

The witness clarified that he could only see the bodies once they had floated about 30 or 40 metres downstream, and that he could not see what was happening directly under the bridge.

“I don’t know where the bodies ended up. I could see them floating, but not all the time, because [we were] being beaten, so our attention was diverted and we could not watch bodies to see where they ended up,” Begic said.

Lukic then asked him about a statement he made in 1996, where he said he swam underwater for 100 or 150 metres before grabbing onto a bush. In his testimony this week, he said it was about 50 metres.

“To this day, I cannot say exactly how far away it was from bridge to that bush. Now, when I think of it, it seems to be 150 meters. Sometimes I say 50, but at any rate, the distance was at least 50 and up to 150 meters. That’s the most accurate way of putting it,” Begic said.

Prosecutors allege that Mladic, the highest authority in the Bosnian Serb army from 1992 to 1996, is responsible for crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer which "contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory".

He is also accused of planning and overseeing the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left nearly 12,000 people dead, as well as the massacre of more than 7,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. Mladic was arrested in Serbia in May 2011 after 16 years on the run.

This week, he mostly sat quietly in the courtroom, but was reprimanded more than once for making gestures, including wagging a finger at a witness with whom he disagreed.

On September 3, he refused to enter the courtroom because he wanted a doctor or nurse to take his blood pressure, not a security guard. When presiding Judge Alphons Orie said the chamber was ready to continue the trial without him, he came back in.

Rachel Irwin is IWPR’s Senior Reporter in The Hague.