Hague witness says refused to execute prisoners
Former commander of a Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) battalion testified in the Srebrenica Seven trial.
Friday, 22.06.2007.
13:22
Hague witness says refused to execute prisoners
He refused to obey an order from his superior command to detach a platoon of soldiers from to execute the captured Srebrenica Muslims after the fall of the town.The defense had tried to postpone Aćimović's testimony at the trial of the Bosnian Serb military and police officers, claiming that his statement contains “new details that have been disclosed late.”
He took the stand because the judges had decided to exclude “new details” from the record and thus dismissed the defense motion for postponement.
In “the days after the fall of Srebrenica,” Aćimović went to his house in Ročević. There he learned that some Muslim prisoners were being kept in the local school.
He saw some soldiers he did not know around the school. Their “demeanor and conduct were unpleasant,” he said. A local official and the priest told him that those men had been “killing the prisoners.”
He reported those events to the Zvornik Brigade command, and in response, the command sent him a telegram ordering him to “detach a platoon of soldiers for the execution operation.”
“We were taken aback and flabbergasted”: this is how Aćimović described the shock in the battalion command that “someone could actually ask us to do something like that.”
Their answer was that they had no men for such a thing, and that they would not take part in it. They gave the same answer to the second telegram with the same order.
After that, the witness claims, there came a telephone call from Drago Nikolić, one of the indicted officers, former security and intelligence chief in the Zvornik Brigade.
He asked Aćimović to carry out the order which had come “from above,” threatening that he, Aćimović, and his associates in the command would personally have to shoot the prisoners if they failed to find the men to do it.
Aćimović was adamant: he did not want to send his soldiers to do such a task and he himself was not going to participate. He repeated the same stand the next morning, when he got another phone call. Aćimović told the court he then tried to get in touch with the commander or the chief of staff, but they were both away and he was unable to contact them.
Aćimović obeyed only the order to meet Nikolić at the Ročević school that morning, but instead of Nikolić, he met Vujadin Popović, another of the officers indicted in the case, then security chief in the Drina Corps.
He also tried to first persuade him and then force him to find people for the execution of prisoners. When Aćimović repeated he would not be participating in any way in the operation, Popović cursed him, telling him he was crazy and asking him if he knew what had happened in Kravica and other Serb villages that had been burned down.
Aćimović’s answer was that he knew what had happened there because he had been there to help the villagers.
That, he went on to say, had nothing to do with the issue at hand, with what was being asked of him. This answer did not help. Popović insisted on it, threatening that he would “be held responsible for refusing to obey an order.”
Aćimović’s testimony will continue.
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