BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro-The relatives of six Bosnian Muslims gunned
down in a 1995 videotaped execution faced the alleged Serb killers during
emotional court testimonies Wednesday.
The
victims' mothers, sisters or brothers traveled from Bosnia to testify in
the war crimes trial of five Serb militiaman who were shown in the dramatic
video broadcast on Serbian and Bosnian TVs last June.
The video showed the members of the dreaded Scorpions unit kicking the
prisoners, forcing them to lie face down, killing four from behind and
making the remaining two carry their bodies into a nearby barn where they
too were executed.
The landmark trial of the five is the first in Serbia in connection
with the July 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Srebrenica Muslims, Europe's worst
carnage since World War II. The defendants face up to 40 years in prison
if convicted.
Safeta Muhic had in the video recognized her brother, Safet Fejzic,
among the prisoners executed by the Serbs.
The judge asked her whether there was anything she wanted to add to
her testimony.
Muhic said that she wanted to take a good look at the accused.
"All I want here is to look these killers in the eyes, I want to see
if they are really human," Muhic said. "I always dreamed to ask them this:
why did you kill, those were only children."
Hana Fejzic, the mother of the 17-year old Safet Fejzic, said her son
fled into the woods after the Bosnian Serb troops captured the eastern
Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica.
When the judges showed her a photo of the six executed Bosnians, Hana
Fejzic sobbed: "Dear God, here he is."
Mura Alispahic, 61, cried when she saw the photo of her son Amir, who
was 17 when he was shot.
"I knew I would never see him alive again," Alispahic said. "When he
went into the woods, I gave him some bread and salt. The next time I saw
him was in that awful video."
Pero Petrasevic, one of the defendants, said after the relatives' testimonies
that he took part in the executions, but added that he was sorry and that
he was only acting under orders from his superiors.
"If we made the mistake, don't accuse the whole Serbian nation for it,"
Petrasevic told the Bosnian Muslim relatives.
During the trial which started in December, only Petrasevic admitted
shooting the victims. The rest said they did not fire their guns although
they were either present or knew about the execution.
The trials in Serbia of those responsible for war crimes have become
possible since the ouster of former autocratic President Slobodan Milosevic
in 2000. Milosevic himself is being tried by the U.N. war crimes court
in The Hague, Netherlands.
The trial in Belgrade was seen as a key test of the ability of Serbia's
judiciary to deal with cases of war crimes committed by Serbs during the
bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
January 25, 2006 10:29 AM
