WAR CRIMES WITNESS MAY REFUSE TO TESTIFY
By MIKE O’CONNOR
c.1996 N.Y. Times News Service
TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina A key witness in the war-crimes case against the Bosnian Serb military commander said Wednesday that because he had been given no protection by the international war crimes tribunal or the Bosnian government, he might refuse to testify out of fear that he or a member of his family would be killed by Serbian assassins.
The witness, Mevludin Oric, 24, has told the war crimes tribunal he survived the capture of the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in an offensive led by the Bosnian Serb commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic. Based on the testimony of people like Oric, the general has been indicted by the tribunal on charges of genocide in connection with ordering the executions of thousands of men and boys taken prisoner there last July.
Oric was prepared to corroborate the prosecution’s claims. Now he says he has lost faith in the tribunal’s interest in protecting him, his wife or their three small children who live in a refugee compound and rely on Bosnian government handouts for food.
“I can’t believe they can’t find a place for me and my family that is safe,” he said.
His fears underscore what critics say is a serious shortcoming in the international effort to bring indicted war criminals from the Bosnian fighting to justice.
Representatives of international agencies expressed shock but no solutions when they learned of Oric’s predicament.
“This is unspeakable,” said James Lyons, deputy director of the U.N. police monitors for northeast Bosnia. “I can’t understand how the tribunal would leave them so exposed,” he said. “Not only to people from the outside, but they are surrounded by desperate refugees who might do anything to get a little extra food for their families.”
Lyons said the U.N. mandate did not allow his officers to protect witnesses. “There is nothing I can offer them,” he said.
NATO commanders have also defined their responsibilities in Bosnia in a way that excludes witness protection, saying that they are not required to protect individuals or groups, but rather to help create an atmosphere of safety.
The tribunal, which is convening in The Hague, said it also could not help. “Once the witnesses are in here, we can guarantee them full protection,” the tribunal’s spokesman, Christian Chartier, said in The Hague. But until then, he said, “We must rely on local authorities.”
Chartier said the tribunal had six employees who coordinated protection with local police for all its cases in the former Yugoslavia, but that in Bosnia only one person was being protected.
Bosnian police officials were not available for comment.
When the Bosnian Serbs moved into Srebrenica last summer, the Muslim women, children and many of the elderly people living in the area were expelled, and most of the men escaped over the mountains, fearing they would be captured and killed. According to the tribunal’s indictment of Mladic, thousands of the men were taken and executed at several sites.
Oric and two other men say they survived the mass executions at what is thought to be the main execution site, a field near Karakaj. The prisoners were being held in a school gymnasium before being taken out to be shot, they said. They saw the Bosnian Serb military commander, Mladic, confer with the soldiers.
“Fifteen minutes after he left, they started taking us to the field nearby to be shot,” Oric said.
Experts familiar with the tribunal’s case say Oric’s testimony is the most detailed and convincing among the three witnesses.
Another survivor, Smail Hodzic, 65, a peasant farmer with little education from the backwoods of Bosnia, said Wednesday that no one had told him that his testimony against Mladic could put him in danger, and he has not been offered protection.
“The investigators from the tribunal just said that I should go there and tell people what I saw,” he said, seemingly puzzled that it might be hazardous to testify against a man accused of war crimes and genocide and who still commands the Bosnian Serb army.
Hodzic lives with relatives five miles from the part of Bosnia still controlled by Serbian forces.
The third man, whose testimony is consistent with Oric’s, according to officials, was not available to be interviewed.
The men said they were able to evade their executioners’ bullets by dropping down and lying still as the bodies of the dead and dying fell in piles on top of them. They encountered one another when they escaped after nightfall.
(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS)
Tribunal investigators, who asked to remain anonymous, said Oric’s accounts had been essential in finding a mass grave where they did preliminary digging in April. After uncovering human bones and the blindfolds that Oric said were put on the prisoners about to be shot, investigators determined they would do extensive exhumations in the summer.
When they examined the field, investigators concluded that it had been extensively tampered with and that evidence might have been removed. But a tribunal spokesman said that the missing physical evidence was not critical since its main importance was to substantiate the statements of witnesses like Oric.
Evidence against both Mladic and Dr. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, both of whom remain at large, will be made public by the tribunal in proceedings on June 27.
The presentation of the evidence linking the two men to the genocide is likely to result in international warrants, which will increase political pressure for their arrest.
This article sheds extraordinary light on The Hague Tribunal’s processes for evidence gathering.
Mevludin Oric (a cousin of Nasir Oric, the commander of the 4,800-strong Bosnian Muslim garrison in Srebrenica) was one of four men who claimed to have survived a massacre close to Srebrenica town by playing dead – a familiar and extremely weak claim.
The fact that his cousin was known to have been responsible for the murder of more than 1,500 Serbian peasant farmers living in isolated villages within the safe area also makes his testimony highly suspect.
So here we have Oric reported to be threatening not to give evidence at The Hague because he feared Serbian reprisals and was being denied protection by the ICTY and NATO. But a few weeks later, he did give evidence at The Hague.
What was going on? Well, Oric may have been making this threat as a basis for demanding more money from the ICTY. If so, he was probably successful because the ICTY was extremely well-funded and, since they had gathered no real evidence to support their indictments, would have been keen not to lose one of the very few claimed eyewitnesses of a massacre.
Another possibility is that by this stage the ICTY was getting increasingly concerned that, after a year since the alleged events in Srebrenica, it still had no substantive case.
In fact, it had no case at all. No professional investigation of Srebrenica had been carried out. The first mass-grave excavations, carried out by Physicians for Human Rights, lasted for some four months and came up with almost nothing. Responsibility was then passed, on the whim of Bill Clinton, to an organisation called the International Commission for Missing Persons, which was in reality just a slight re-boot of the Muslim Commission for Missing Persons.
The ICMP was more than 90% staffed by Bosnian Muslims and, although its work was fully funded by the ICTY, only revealed information to the outside world at carefully-staged press events to announce the discovery of new mass graves. These events were essentially picture opportunities where ICMP forensic staff could be seen working on a small area which was supposed to be part of an enormous mass grave.
Identification of alleged Srebrenica victims did not start until the early 2000s. As bodies had by then had been buried in the ground for the best part of seven years most were fully decomposed, so the only means of identification was the comparatively new science of DNA.
Here again, the ICMP kept its work under very close wraps. No hard evidence was ever made available to the ICTY or anyone else. Inexcusably the ICTY decided to admit as evidence a written account of the ICMP’s conclusions delivered in court by a member of ICMP management.
This evidence was evidently preposterous. Not only did the ICMP pretend to have developed a ‘breakthrough’ DNA technique that was very cheap to use, it also claimed much higher rates of positive identification than ever achieved elsewhere in the world.
Experts who studied a short video of DNA analysis in ICMP labs released by the ICMP believed that what they saw was an early, primitive DNA technique which had long since been abandoned.
In short it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, even as early as 1996, The Hague Tribunal had given up all hope of presenting a coherent and compelling case. Powerful quotes about the wickedness of the Serbs such as those above were now the best hope. The game had become news management to create an impression that the ICTY’s claims were well-founded even if they had no evidence to support them.