The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Securing Verdicts: The Misuse of Witness Testimony at The Hague
he never had been, and lying about having appeared in photographs in
which he didn’t. Yet in its January 2005 Judgment in the Blagojevic-Jokic
trial, the ICTY still relied on major components of his plea agreement
and testimony. (Just as it continued to rely on Nikolic for a subsequent
Srebrenica-related case: The June 2009 Judgment in the trial of Vujadin
Popovic and his six co-defendants. 91 )
In his plea agreement, Nikolic claims knowledge of BSA executions
of Muslim prisoners. Far more central to Nikolic’s role within the Office
of the Prosecutor’s overall strategy, however, Nikolic also claims to
have directly participated in BSA exhumation and reburial operations—
the second-half of the ICTY’s strategy to account for the 8,000 Bosnian
Muslim males alleged to have been massacred following the fall of
Srebrenica. Hence, in his plea agreement, Nikolic states that:
From July 14 through October 1995, Bratunac Brigade
forces, working with the MUP and other [BSA] forces continued
to capture and execute Muslim prisoners attempting to escape
from the Srebrenica and Zepa areas. From September
through October 1995 the Bratunac Brigade, working with the
civilian authorities, exhumed the mass grave at Glogova and
other mass graves of Muslim victims of the murder operation,
and reburied them in individual mass graves throughout the
greater Srebrenica area. 92
Peter McCloskey, the prosecutor who negotiated Nikolic’s plea agreement,
also negotiated Erdemovic’s plea agreement seven years earlier.
The significance of this fact should not be minimized: Just as the ICTY
has used the Erdemovic plea and the perjury-apparatus surrounding
him to officially recognize evidence related to one or more alleged mass
executions of Bosnian Muslim prisoners of war in which Erdemovic
claims to have participated, so the ICTY has used the Nikolic plea and
the perjury-apparatus surrounding him to officially recognize evidence
related to the alleged exhumation-and-reburial operations in which
Nikolic claims to have participated.
During Nikolic’s plea hearing, Presiding Judge Liu Daqun wondered
what could stop a defendant from embellishing his story in the hope of
making the prosecution happy and thus receiving a lighter sentence.
The “practice of the Tribunal…is to sentence the accused before he gives
any evidence,” Judge Liu stated. “This avoids any suggestion that he’s
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