Witnesses Speak of Brcko Abuses

Monday, 26 October, 2009

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Velma Šarić

IWPR-trained journalist

The trial of two former Bosnian Serb police chiefs at the Hague tribunal this week was told of civilians being killed by a policeman and a mass grave in the Brcko area of northern Bosnia.



Stojan Zupljanin and Mico Stanisic, who are alleged to have participated in a joint criminal enterprise aimed at the permanent removal of non-Serbs from the territory of an intended Serbian state, are accused of crimes committed between April 1 and December 31, 1992, in municipalities throughout Bosnia and Hercegovina, including Brcko.



Zupljanin, who became an adviser to the then Bosnian Serb president and Hague indictee Radovan Karadzic in 1994, is accused of the extermination, murder, persecution, and deportation of non-Serbs in north-western Bosnia between April and December 1992.



Stanisic is charged with murder, torture and cruel treatment of non-Serb civilians, as well as for his failure to prevent or punish crimes committed by his subordinates.



Isak Gasi, a Bosnian Muslim electrician, gave testimony on events between 1992 and 1993 in and around Brcko.

Gasi, who has previously testified during three Hague tribunals including that of the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, confirmed testimony he had given in an earlier trial about a shooting incident in May 1992 near the Brcko market.



"I saw the policeman fire to the head of three civilians. His (the policeman’s) hand was bound, just as in the photograph,” Gasi said, referring to a photo by Bojan Stojanovic, a Belgrade-based photographer who took the pictures in May 1992 in Brcko.



Gasi continued, “From May 10 to May 27, while working for the power supply company, I often saw a truck leave to the Bimeks meat preparation plant. I remember having seen a man I knew from before the war twice aboard that truck - he worked for the police and his name was Mika Marinkovic. It was a small freezer truck, normally used for meat, painted in white, I guess it was used to transport corpses."



From May 27 to June 7, 1992, Gasi was imprisoned in the Luka prison camp. “I had been arrested by two policemen, Dragan Pantelic and Stevo Knezevic and taken to the police station. An hour later, I was taken to Luka prison. There a certain policeman, Branko Pusic, started asking me about some barricades. He hit me with a gun behind the neck. Pusic was wearing a regular police uniform,” Gasi said.



According to the indictment against Stanisic and Zupljanin, at Luka camp between May and June 1992, “detainees were severely beaten on a regular basis. In numerous cases the beatings were so severe as to result in serious injury and death”.



When Gasi entered the hangar which was part of the improvised prison, he said he “saw many people lying on the concrete. That same day, I was beaten with a metal fireman's wrench”.



The witness added that the following day he was questioned by three policemen - Petar Kaurinovic, Zoran Kontic and Pero Zaric. Policemen in Luka prison wore a variety of uniforms, he testified, ranging from military camouflage to standard blue outfits.



A second witness in the trial described seeing the corpses of civilians in mass graves around Brcko.



Cvjetko Ignic, a Serb who was giving testimony at the tribunal for the first time, said he had been ordered by the police authorities in Brcko in May 1992 to go to the cemetery and identify victims.



Ignic said that fighting had broken out in the afternoon of May 1 “in the eastern part of town which was predominantly inhabited by Muslims.



"On the evening of May 1, I heard a declaration on the Serb radio in Brcko. It announced that all of us should report to the police. When I came there, I was told that the police station had been liberated the night before and had now become a Serb militia station. The army was there, too, there were camouflage uniforms and old JNA (Yugoslav army) ones... I believe they were Serbs, and they were armed."



The atmosphere at the police station was "murky and chaotic", said the witness, confirming that all the policemen at the station were of Serb nationality.



"Once I came back to work, my colleagues told me what was going on in town. They told me that many had been killed. Dragisa Tesic, an inspector who had been working with me, said that there were some 40 dead people in town, they were mostly Muslims that had stayed behind.



"The police told me that I had to do identification work at graveyards. While on my way, on the road to Bijeljina, I noticed there was a pit on the right, three metres deep and five to six metres wide, with a length of some 10 and 15 metres. I saw a certain number of corpses in the pit. Nearby was a farm which belonged to Bimeks, a meat processing plant."



Ignic continued, “In the process of identification, I was assisted by workers from the public utility service. They were bringing bodies in a vehicle belonging to the public utility service, a small freezer truck. They would usually pick up bodies in the morning and bring them to the burial site at the farm.”



The witness confirmed that it was the policeman on duty who told him when to go to the burial site, and that his visits to the site were "regular in May and June 1992, having become more seldom later. I guess that they stopped using the grave in early July as people were later buried in graveyards”.



He added that the bodies thrown into the pit in early June 1992 were wearing civilian clothing, included women, and were all Muslim, apart from one Croat.



“Once the bodies were delivered, two workers would load them off, as I had no mask or gloves myself, I asked them to search the bodies and pockets for documents, which would help us determine the identity, although there were many people I knew personally and could identify even without documents,” Ignic said.“Many people were bloody from being wounded in the chest and the head.”



He added that the bodies were covered by earth and were "rotting and beginning to stink". Repeating his testimony that the pit had been closed sometime in July, he said he had no idea what had happened to the corpses.



When asked by the prosecutor what had happened with the documents, Ignic answered that "they were kept a while at the police and had then started stinking. I asked the commander what we were supposed to do with them, and he told me to have them burned".



He clarified that there existed "a single list of the people from the grave, and I was ordered to give it to one of the superior officials, I think it was the commander”. The commander during that period, he said, had been Dragan Veselic.



Ignic said that the grave contained 216 bodies. The prosecutor asked who had organised the burials before and after July 10. “I guess it was the authorities, but I don't know who it was exactly,” Ignic answered.



Velma Saric is an IWPR-trained journalist in Sarajevo.