SERBS FORCED BOSNIAK BOY TO HAVE SEX WITH DEAD MOTHER

A taste of horrors of the Bosnian Genocide,
other than Srebrenica

Witness Provides Gory Testimony on Bosnian Camp

Reading Eagle, p.B8

22 June 1996.

Bosniak survivor of Serb prison camp tells U.N. war crimes trial how drunken Serb soldier killed young man after ordering him to have sex with his dead mother.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (Reuters) — A Muslim survivor of a Bosnian Serb prison camp said Friday a drunken Serb soldier shot and killed a young man after ordering him to have sex with his dead mother, killed by the same soldier moments before.

Sulejman Besic, 46, a former lumberjack, told the U.N. war crimes trial of Bosnian Serb Dusan Tadic how the woman, in her mid-30s, had come to the Trnopolje camp in northwest Bosnia to bring food to her son who was held there.

He described how the soldier shouted at the woman that he would kill her if she did not tell him where her husband was. He then ordered her to strip off her upper clothes.

“She was crying terribly, but she took them off,” Besic said. “Then I heard firing and saw her lying on her back. He shot her in the head.”

“The son was screaming so much you had to close your ears. The soldier told the son to get naked so everyone could see and then said these words to him: ‘Now I will make you rape your dead mother.’”

Besic said prisoners standing nearby tried to retreat inside buildings but were ordered by Serbs to watch or be killed.

“I heard firing and saw the boy fall next to his mother,” he said.

The soldier was then led away in handcuffs by other guards but was back on duty as normal the following day, Besic said.

He also described how the stench from a fellow inmate’s gaping wounds — crosses gouged on his front and back — prevented other prisoners from treating him

“When we looked on his back where they had cut him there were worms, live worms wriggling around and we tried to take them out … but the stench was so horrible you could not get near him,” he said.

Besic was testifying toward the end of the seventh week of Tadic’s trial, the first before an international war crimes tribunal since those in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II.

Tadic, 40, is accused of visiting three prison camps in the Prijedor region of northwest Bosnia in 1992, killing and maiming non-Serbs at will.

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Serbs Brutally Raped Underage Bosniak Girls in Trnopolje

Grisly Testimony Given in War Trial

Lawrence Journal World, p.6A
22 June 1996.


THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A former inmate at a Serb-run detention camp testified Friday that teen-age Muslim [Bosniak] girls were raped in a cinema and the elderly men who tried to help them were knifed to death.

It was the most horrifying testimony yet in the war crimes trial of Dusan Tadic, a Bosnian Serb bar owner charged with a campaign of murder and torture in and around three camps in north-western Bosnia in 1992.

Tadic was not implicated in any of the crimes described by Sulejman Besic, a 46-year-old lumberjack who also testified that a Muslim professor was murdered at the Trnopolje camp by a Serb soldier he’d once given a bad grade.

Prosecutor Grant Niemann asked Besic to provide the testimony in order to establish the murderous nature of the camp regime. Tadic, 40, has pleaded innocent to all charges, including those allegedly committed at Trnopolje.

Besic testified he was taken to the cinema, used as a dormitory for women, children and the elderly at Trnopolje, where he saw two teen-age girls, about 13 and 15 years old, lying in a bathroom.

“They had very few clothes on and they were bloody,” he said.

Inside, he said he found three more girls, including one who appeared to be dead, and four elderly men whose throats were slashed.

Another inmate told him Serb soldier had arrived the previous night and taken their pick of the girls in the cinema, Besic told the court. Any who resisted were beaten and the elderly men who tried to intervene were killed, he said.

Besic also testified that a soldier ordered two camp guards to find a woman’s young son, then forced the woman to strip to the waist.

“Then … I heard firing, and the woman was lying on the road. He had shot her in the head,” Besic said.

The soldier then ordered the woman’s screaming child to rape his mother, Besic testified. “All of a sudden I heard firing and I looked up and saw as the boy fell next to the mother,” he said.


He claims he is the victim of mistaken identity.