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BOSNIA'S GRAVES
JANUARY 25, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
JANE BENNETT POWELL, ITN: Off the main road, halfway up this track in Northeastern Bosnia lies the sixth site believed to contain the mass graves of Muslims. It's in a deserted Muslim village, and it would provide another piece of the jigsaw of what happened after the fall of Srebrenica. In the first extended filming in Srebrenica
itself, the signs of the people who used to live here lie everywhere. The town, the former Muslim safe area, now houses around 6,000 Serbs, themselves refugees from fighting elsewhere.
This girl told us there was no glass, only plastic, in the windows where she lived.
This man said they were forced to leave their homes just as the people here were forced out.
The new Serb inhabitants have dumped most of the reminders of the past. Up until six months ago, there were 40,000 Muslims living here. Then in the middle of July in the face of Serb attack, they fled down this road behind me, and it's estimated that some 6,000 are still unaccounted for. This week, the local military police escorted us as we filmed at these sites again. Six months on from the forced evacuation, there was no attempt to prevent us photographing the place where eyewitnesses allege they saw Muslim men lined up and shot by Serb soldiers. With the Bosnian Serb soldiers was the Serb mayor of the area who organized food for the Srebrenica people and buses to transport them to Muslim territory. He told us the numbers were overwhelming. He commandeered more trucks but denied there was any violence against the Muslims.
LJUBISAV SIMIC, Mayor, Bratunac: (speaking through interpreter) If there had been some shooting, even sporadic, I would have heard it. If I hadn't seen it because of the mass of people, I would have at least heard it.
JANE BENNETT POWELL: The town of Bratunac is the center of his administration.
With a civilian minder from the police station, we filmed a deserted school which is now a refugee center but where last July, Muslims alleged men were held after the fall of Srebrenica. It's near the football field where Muslims say 4,000 men were held. Testimonies speak of hearing shots there. We filmed the locked changing rooms under the stand. The walls are riddled with bullet holes. The mayor said no one from Srebrenica was brought here. There is fear and mistrust of Srebrenica Muslims in this town. Many Serb soldiers and civilians have died since 1992, killed in attacks launched, they say, from the Muslim enclave a few miles away. Many Muslim fighting men who were captured in the woods and hills around Srebrenica were taken according to Muslims interviewed last autumn to a warehouse at Kravika, 10 miles to the Northwest, and reportedly shot. Their bodies, according to those same testimonies, were buried in a burnt out village nearby called Glogova. Without a military escort, we filmed a field dressing on the frozen ground which was clearly recently excavated and a limb exposed beneath a piece of clothing. Heavy machinery had clearly been used too on a site on the other side of the track. We saw a shoe and what looked like an army jacket.
MAYOR LJUBISAV SIMIC: (speaking through interpreter) What can I say? If there really was something going on there and there really were some soldiers dying, and were buried there, what can I say? If such a thing really existed, then it shall be investigated by the military to find out how these things happened.
JANE
BENNETT POWELL: American satellite pictures pinpoint another alleged site. Three
houses top left stand near a white patch marked by an arrowing suggesting disturbed
earth. On the ground the three houses. Nearby, signs of heavy excavation in
a site otherwise untouched in a deserted hamlet near Nova Casaba. By the river
another tract of ground gouged out by heavy machinery. This site yielded few
artifacts, but American intelligence and war crimes investigators believe Muslim
bodies may be buried here. It's not been tampered with recently, and grass is
beginning to grow again. The Bosnian Serb military court system has been established
to try crimes arising from the war. Army personnel staged a session for us.
Over the last four years they told us they'd tried 2,000 cases, including murder,
and heard 450 appeals. But so far, there were no cases involving the deaths
of Muslims in the aftermath of Srebrenica.
COL. NOVAK TODOROVIC, Bosnian Serb Military Court: About Srebrenica I don't
know anything exactly because we have nothing about Srebrenica in our court
here and in our courts in the first level I know that we have nothing.
JANE BENNETT POWELL: Do you think it will be a possibility?
COL.
NOVAK TODOROVIC: I don't know, really I don't know. I, I hear that international
court in Hague has something about that. If they give us, we shall consider
that case and, and where to go and make sentences and--
JANE
BENNETT POWELL: But the colonel also says that while he is willing to proceed
with such cases, they must be instigated by the Bosnian Serb state prosecutor.
The Bosnian Serbs put faith in their own military justice and prison systems.
They have little time for the Hague which they say is biased against them, but
today a senior member of the Bosnian Serb leadership ventured for the first
time to cooperate with the Hague tribunal.
MOMCILO KRAJISNIK, Bosnian Serb Parliament: (speaking through interpreter) We are fully prepared to start a trial against any person against whom it is firmly established that he's committed a crime or a murder or abused his position.
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