Srebrenica Accused are Finally Turning up in The Hague

One by one, the accused killers of Srebrenica are headed to the bar of justice.

For years, despite international criminal charges against them, many of the Bosnian Serbs accused in the greatest mass killing of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina lived with impunity, sheltered by people in the region who saw them as war heroes.  However as the tenth anniversary of the executions at Srebrenica approaches, several of the major players have recently surrendered to the Hague-based international court created to punish those responsible for war crimes in the bloody Balkan conflict.

Milorad Trbic (left) and Vujadin Popovic (right), former officers in the Bosnian Serb Army, during their initial appearances before the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on April 13 and April 18 2005. The photo of Trbic on the left is © Paul Vreeker/AP Photo The photo of Popovic on the right is © Peter Dejong, Pool/AP Photo

In early July 1995, in the waning months of the war, Bosnian Serb forces moved into the town of Srebrenica, a United Nations-sanctioned “safe haven” where tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims had fled to escape the violence. For five days, under the orders of Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladic, Srebrenica was shelled relentlessly.

Afterwards, Mladic’s forces moved into the battered town, rounding up the fleeing masses and separating them by gender: girls and women bussed west to Tuzla and other Bosnian enclaves; boys and men aged 16 to 60 set aside “to screen for possible war criminals,” according to claims recorded in the indictments of several Bosnian Serb officers. 

For the next week, the “screenings” resulted in the systematic transport of the males to sites surrounding the town, where they were gunned down with automatic weapons and buried in mass graves.  Some escaped to nearby forests and were hunted down.  Estimates of the dead have approached 8,000 – the single greatest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust. 

The Accused and The Charges

The UN International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established in 1993 and began its first trial three years later.  Since then, it has passed down scores of indictments against alleged war criminals on all sides of the conflict.  Eighteen of those fingered Bosnian Serbs for crimes surrounding Srebrenica, including Mladic and his political commander Radovan Karadzic. Mladic is accused of 15 criminal counts, including genocide, extermination and taking of hostages; Karadzic faces 11 charges, including genocide and the infliction of terror upon civilians. 

While Mladic, Karadzic and Dravko Tolimir, an assistant commander under Mladic, remain at large, several others of those indicted have either been captured or have surrendered to the ICTY. In February, Milan Gvero, Mladic’s wartime deputy, and Radivoje Miletic, the former deputy chief-of-staff of the Bosnian Serb Army – the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) – turned themselves over to ICTY. Along with Tolimir, they each face five criminal counts, including murder and forcible transfer of civilians. 

In March, General Vinko Pandurevic and Lieutenant Drago Nikolic followed suit. Both are charged with crimes rooted in Srebrenica, including genocide and murder. Ljubomir Borovcanin, head of the VRS police, arrived at The Hague on April 1. He is charged on six counts, including murder and complicity in genocide. 

Next to fall was Milorad Trbic, who gave himself up just days following Borovcanin. The former VRS reserve captain and deputy to Nikolic is charged with one count of murder as a crime against humanity for his role in the deaths of more than 1,000 Muslim men around Srebrenica. The most recent to surrender was Vujadin Popovic, a former VRS army commander accused of six different counts of genocide, murder and crimes against humanity. 

All seven men – Gvero, Miletic, Pandurevic, Nikolic, Borovcanin, Trbic and Popovic – have pleaded not guilty to all counts. Along with Ljubisa Beara, former head of security for the VRS who was transferred to The Hague last October, they will be tried together for the crimes committed at Srebrenica. 

It wasn’t easy for the court to gather the accused. For much of the last decade, Belgrade officials have denied the criminal charges against Bosnian Serb military leaders, maintaining that ICTY was on a witch hunt targeting Serbs while ignoring crimes of Bosnia’s Muslims.  As of May 2005, only six accused in the Srebrenica killings had been tried and found guilty. Their sentences ranged from 5 to 46 years.  

A Shift in Serbian Politics

The recent spate of surrenders appears to be driven by political considerations.  In January 2005, the U.S. announced it was withholding $10 million in aid to Serbia as “a direct result of the Serbian government’s continued lack of full and unconditional cooperation” with ICTY, according to a statement released by Michael Polt, U.S. ambassador to Serbia. 

Serbia’s wish to enter the European Union also is a likely factor. A feasibility study for E.U. membership, withheld from Serbia for months, was finally granted late in April, possibly as a result of stepped-up cooperation from Belgrade with the ICTY. 

According to Charles Ingrao, a Purdue University history professor, the Serbian government found itself caught in a pinch between turning over alleged war criminals for the sake of its international image and protecting former fighters still popular with people back in their towns and villages.   Mladic is among the final holdouts of that policy conflict, with Belgrade officials reluctant to give him up for fear of a political backlash at home – assuming they know where he is, speculates Ingrao. “Serbia is still a democracy and its officials still have to cater to the will of the people,” he said, adding that anyone surrendering Mladic would be committing political suicide.   “But they’re compensating for that by turning over these other guys, who are really the small change.” 

The fighting in the region began in April of 1992, when Serbian troops and paramilitaries crossed the border into Bosnia-Herzegovina. The goal of then-president Slobodan Milosevic was to extend his control over a “greater Serbia.” The method he is accused of applying is known euphemistically as “ethnic cleansing,” for which Srebrenica remains an enduring symbol. 

Dusan Svetolik Janjic, a researcher at the University of Belgrade, said it is important for the various ethnic groups to learn from the past but not be obsessed with it. That, he added, is the only way to address the political differences that continue to loom. 

A Representative Killer?

Of the recent group to surrender to The Hague tribunal, Trbic is the most obscure – and perhaps the most illustrative of the role of middle-ranking officers committing war crimes during the Bosnian conflict.  Born in 1958 in the tiny Bosnian village of Ponijevo – an island of Serbs surrounded by Muslim communities – Trbic served for two years in the Yugoslav National Army in the late 1970s, then joined the VRS when war broke in Bosnia in 1992. A year later, he was appointed deputy commander of the 3rd Battalion of the Zvornik Brigade, rising to reserve captain in 1995. 

Trbic’s indictment is based partly on an episode on July 14, 1995, during which he allegedly oversaw the execution of 20 Muslim men and boys near the gymnasium of the Grbavci School in Orahovac, a village outside Srebrenica but still within the U.N. safe zone. During that execution, the indictment reads, Trbic himself fired a few blasts as the victims were mowed down. Afterwards, prosecutors contend, Trbic was responsible for the exhumation and reburial of victims in a failed attempt to hide the evidence. He pleaded not guilty to one count of murder as a crime of war on May 11.  

With the recent wave of military surrenders, many hope that victims’ families and the wider ethnic communities from which they come will find some measure of justice and thus reconciliation. Whatever the outcome of the trials, all sides agree that healing the wounds will require not only time, but also political courage.

Mike Lillis is a reporter with Medill News Services in Washington D.C.

Related chapters from Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know:

Bosnia

Genocide

Persecutions on Political, Racial or Religious Grounds

Related Links:

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

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