KARADZIC TRIAL READY, 'KILL THEM ALL'

"All those who are down there, they should be killed. Kill all those you manage to kill." - Radovan Karadzic

The case against former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is ready to begin in September. A months ago, U.N. Judges ordered Prosecutors to cut more charges against Radovan Karadzic for the purpose of speeding up the trial. The Office of the Prosecutor already reduced charges of Bosnian Genocide from 27 municipalities to only 11. Furthermore, "the prosecution announced it would not call eight crime base witnesses for Sarajevo, noting it was actively trying to cut down the number of witnesses for Srebrenica" according to the SENSE Tribunal. "The prosecution [also] asked that the transcripts of evidence given at other trials by deceased witnesses Milan Babic and Miroslav Deronjic be tendered into evidence."

WHY IS EVIDENCE GIVEN BY MIROSLAV DERONJIC IMPORTANT?

During his trial at the International Crimes Tribunal, Miroslav Deronjic had admitted ordering an attack on Glogova (a village just outside of Srebrenica) on 9 May 1992 in which 64 Bosniak villagers were massacred.

In his testimony Deronjic described former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic as being happy about the massacre and rewarding him with a round of an applause.

He implicated Serbian Army in the massacre and also testified that Karadzic ordered all Srebrenica refugees to be killed, quote:

A: [W]hat he [Radovan Karadzic] meant was that when our army entered Srebrenica and when the Muslim army in Srebrenica was defeated, that they would start pulling out. And I concluded that he thought that we should kill everybody we could get our hands on.

Q: So on this meeting of the 8th or 9th, did President Karadzic actually say, "Miroslav, they should be killed," referring to any potential Muslim prisoners?

A: Yes. And this is something I have told the Prosecution about. I mentioned this sentence to the Prosecution. I'm not sure about every word, but "kill," I remember this word being used. He said, "All those who are down there, they should be killed. Kill all those you manage to kill." That's what I can remember. [Court Transcript]

Yugoslav army and Bosnian Serb forces razed the village of Glogova to the ground, setting alight its mosque, homes, warehouses, fields and haystacks. After the Glogova Massacre, Deronjic went to Pale (war-time Bosnian Serb capital) to meet Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. When Deronjic walked in a large conference hall, Karadzic was sitting at a table with a map in front of him. With him were Bosnian Serb army commander-in-chief General Ratko Mladic and one of Karadzic's officials, Velibor Ostojic. Deronjic said that when he reported that the village of Glogova had been burnt down and its Bosniak population deported, the three men broke into applause. "Now we can colour Bratunac in blue," said Ostojic. Blue is a traditional Serb national colour.

During the war, Deronjic was chief of the Bratunac crisis staff, an ad hoc Bosnian Serb local government, during the time when forces under his control attacked the Bosniak village of Glogova in May 1992. Deronjic was the only person to be convicted for Bratunac related crimes in which over 600 Bosniaks died.

In a signed statement, which he gave to the International Crimes Tribunal, attached to his plea agreement was evidence implicating the Yugoslav army and Serbian police and paramilitaries in the massacre. In his statement, he said that, as a confidant of Karadzic and a central board member of the Serbian Democratic Party, he was aware that in the months leading up to the war both the Yugoslav army and Serbia's interior ministry were arming Bosnian Serbs.

In mid-April 1992, volunteers from Serbia poured into the town of Bratunac, on the river Drina. They came under an agreement between the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs and Serbia itself, said Deronjic. The volunteers immediately killed some of the most prominent Bosniaks.

The war crimes tribunal in The Hague sentenced Deronjic in 2004 and rejected his appeal the following year after which he was moved to Sweden to serve his sentence where he died in 2007.

SREBRENICA 1992-1995: From 1992-1995 Serbs from heavily militarized villages around Srebrenica had forced approximately 40,000 Bosnian Muslim refugees to live in the Srebrenica ghetto with little or no means of survival. Furthermore, Serbs around Srebrenica had terrorized Srebrenica population by constantly attacking neighbouring Bosnian Muslim villages. In July 1995 the Bosnian Serb army staged a brutal takeover of Srebrenica and its surrounding area, where they proceeded to perpetrate genocide. Bosnian Serb soldiers separated Bosniak families, forcibly expelled 25,000-30,000 Bosniaks, and summarily executed at least 8,372 Bosnian Muslims - boys, men, and elderly.