| Mladic trial reopens with first witness recalling good days |
THE HAGUE Bosnian Serb ex-army chief Ratko Mladic’s genocide and war crimes trial resumed on Monday with the first prosecution witness telling how Bosnia’s ethnic groups lived in peace before its brutal war erupted.
“Before the war we had a great time,” said Elvedin Pasic, who as a 14-year-old boy lived in the village of Hvracani in northern Bosnia. “We were playing basketball and football, we used to do everything together. Muslim, Croats and Serbs, we were all having a great time, respecting each other,” he said.
But things began to change in the spring of 1992, when Pasic first noticed a convoy of military vehicles with soldiers in the uniform of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), giving Muslims the three-fingered Serbian salute.
Now 34, Pasic is expected to “describe the destruction and damage to residential property, attacks on villages and the persecution of non-Serbs,” prosecutors said in a witness list before the court. Having previously testified in other trials, Pasic will recall how he was separated from other men in his family and consequently “survived the execution of around 150 persons in November 1992 in the village of Grabovica,” in northern Bosnia.
Mladic, 70, has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the Balkan country’s war.
Prosecutors also hold him responsible for taking some 200 UN peacekeepers hostage and for allegedly ordering his troops to “cleanse” Bosnian towns, driving out Croats, Muslims and other non-Serb residents. He was arrested in northeastern Serbia last year after some 16 years on the run and subsequently moved to The Hague for trial by the ICTY. Pasic will be followed in the witness stand by UN adviser David Harland, who will describe the siege of Sarajevo, where 1,000 shells landed on average each day between 1993 and 1995, with the exception of lulls during a 1994 ceasefire.
Also among the first witnesses to testify will be Eelco Koster, one of the some 450 Dutch UN peacekeepers guarding the “protected” enclave at Srebrenica when it was overrun by Mladic’s forces.
Agencies
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