SARAJEVO: A Bosnian court yesterday handed down stiff sentences against two former Bosnian Serb policemen for “aiding genocide” when they oversaw killings during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslims.
Dusko Jevic and Mendeljev Djuric were sentenced to 35 and 30 years in jail respectively for ordering their men to take part in the separation of the men from other refugees in Srebrenica and later to carry out an all-night, all-day killing spree of more than 1,000 captured Muslims.
After they captured the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb troops separated the fighting-age men from the rest of the tens of thousands of Muslim refugees who gathered around the UN base in Potocari, hoping for protection.
The women, children and the elderly were bussed out to nearby Muslim-held territory. In the days that followed, the Bosnian Serbs killed nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys and buried them in mass graves.
At the time Jevic was a deputy commander of a special Bosnian Serb police brigade, while Djuric commanded the brigade’s 1st company.
Jevic and Djuric “aided in the partial destruction of an ethnic group and are guilty of aiding genocide,” Sarajevo court judge Mira Smajlovic ruled. “With their participation in the massacre the members of this unit were a link in the chain that was carrying out a genocide,” added the judge.
According to the ruling, the police brigade’s 1st company took part in the separation of “more than 1,000 Muslim men from their families” in Potocari, just outside of Srebrenica, “knowing that these men will be taken for execution.”
The company later also joined in the killing of more than 1,000 men on the site of an agricultural warehouse in nearby Kravica, where Srebrenica captives were taken, the court found.
“They replaced another unit that started with the executions at the site and killed prisoners during the whole night of July 13th and the whole day of July 14th,” the judge said. After first firing on the prisoners packed into the warehouse with semi-automatic weapons the 1st company then threw grenades inside the building.
After several hours they called for survivors, offering medical help but when some men staggered out they were lined up and shot on the spot, the court said.
FROM: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
Ex-cops handed up to 35 years for Srebrenica carnage
