The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Securing Verdicts: The Misuse of Witness Testimony at The Hague
with the consent of the prosecutor, withdrew his guilty plea to crimes
against humanity and, instead, pleaded guilty to violation of the laws or
customs of war. In the subsequent pre-sentence hearing, the prosecutor
appeared extraordinarily anxious to show leniency toward Erdemovic.
As witness, the prosecutor called Jean-Rene Ruez, a French judicial police
superintendent who had worked as an investigator for the OTP
since April 1995, to attest “to the significant co-operation that has been
provided to the Office of the Prosecutor by Mr. Erdemovic.” 65 The trial
court, with the approval of the prosecutor, reduced Erdemovic’s sentence
to five years.
The ICTY hasn’t seen fit to reveal how much time he actually served,
but it clearly fell somewhat short of five years. By the time Erdemovic
came to testify in the Krstic trial on May 22, 2000, he admitted that his
prison term was already at an end. 66
Inexplicable Circumstances
It is clear that the ICTY conducted no serious investigation to discover
whether or not Erdemovic was telling the truth. The OTP has little
evidence other than Erdemovic’s own accounts to show that the
massacres he recounted ever took place. No one has come forward to
corroborate his accounts of the killings at Branjevo farm or at the Pilica
public building. No other participant in the killings has confessed or
been arrested or charged or even been interviewed. 67 To this day, the
lieutenant colonel who allegedly issued the horrific orders remains
unidentified. This is strange. There couldn’t have been that many lieutenant
colonels in the army of the Republika Srpska, and the ICTY
must surely have photographs of all of them. A lieutenant colonel
shouldn’t be that hard to track down. 68
From the start, there were too many inexplicable circumstances surrounding
Erdemovic’s case:
First, it’s not at all clear why a Bosnian Croat would join the army of
the Republika Srpska for the reasons offered by Erdemovic. Nor is it
even remotely likely that the Bosnian Serbs would entrust the carrying
out of executions, particularly if they wanted to keep them secret, to
Croats. Erdemovic declared that most of the members of the unit were
Croats. He said that he had no interest in politics and detested all nationalisms.
Erdemovic “has professed pacifist beliefs and claims to have
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