Porous Border of Responsibility – What Does Serbia Have to Do With It?

At around half past nine in the morning on July 24, 1995, the commander of the Main Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), Ratko Mladić, met in Belgrade with the President of the Republic of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, and the Chief of the Main Staff of the Yugoslav Army, Momčilo Perišić. Two weeks after the fall of the protected enclave of Srebrenica and the killing of several thousand captured Bosniak men and boys, Mladić recorded Milošević's words from the meeting: "Srebrenica and Žepa have caused us very great damage."

Although it was not yet possible to grasp the full scale of the crime at the time, it was already known that around seven thousand people had gone missing after the fall of Srebrenica, and that a large number of them were probably dead.

This was not the first meeting that July between the military and political leaderships of Republika Srpska and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or Serbia. That day, however, something was different. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had issued an indictment against the President of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić, and Ratko Mladić, for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed against the civilian population across the entire territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The authorities in Belgrade had also received, along with the indictment, an arrest warrant for the accused.

Slobodan Milošević, president of a state that officially did not take part in the war, promised that same July, in an interview with the American weekly Time, that the conflict in neighboring Bosnia would be over within six months. In return, he requested that the international community lift sanctions against Yugoslavia. Parts of the interview were carried in the Serbian press on July 11, the day Serb forces entered Srebrenica. The full interview was published six days later, by which time the mass executions of Srebrenica's men and boys had largely already ended.

A Widely Known Fact

Despite Milošević's pretense of neutrality and his attempt to distance himself from the political and military leadership of Republika Srpska, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had, from the very beginning of the war, provided significant political, military, logistical, material, and financial assistance to Republika Srpska and the VRS. Although formally classified as a state secret, this assistance was widely known. In May 1994, at a session of the National Assembly of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić asserted that without Serbia "there would be nothing," because "we don't have the resources, and we wouldn't be able to fight this war." A month before the fall of Srebrenica, VRS received 350,280 rounds of ammunition through the 30th Personnel Center of the Yugoslav Army, followed shortly after by another 567,000 rounds and 46 rockets.

Serbian authorities were informed, at the latest by July 10, of the attack by the Army of Republika Srpska on the protected enclave of Srebrenica. Because of the proximity of the border, the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army closely monitored the situation around Srebrenica and Žepa. During the war, units of the Yugoslav Army crossed the border on several occasions and directly participated in military operations by Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Still, none of the Yugoslav Army units took part in the Army of Republika Srpska's operation codenamed Krivaja 95 – the takeover of Srebrenica –- nor in the crimes that followed.

However, when it comes to Serbia's public and state security bodies, the situation is somewhat more complicated.

Handed Over to Die

It was around four o'clock in the afternoon on July 15, 1995, when a resident of Gornja Koviljača reported to Yugoslav Army border guards that a wounded Muslim soldier was staying with him. Rešid Sinanović, the pre-war chief of police in Bratunac, had been wounded earlier that same day on the opposite bank of the Drina, near Kozluk. With four gunshot wounds, he managed to swim across the river into Serbia.

The wounded Sinanović was taken to the hospital in Loznica. There he was recognized by a doctor from Bratunac, who reported it to the Public Security Station in Bratunac. Police officers from Loznica soon arrived at the hospital, took him out, and handed him over on the bridge between Serbia and Zvornik to officers of the Zvornik police station. Sinanović was killed immediately after the handover. An entry remained in the Zvornik Brigade's logbook: "Turkish lawyer fled to Loznica hospital, wounded and processed (Siniša)."

The return of Sinanović is the first recorded case of the deportation of Srebrenica survivors who, after the fall of the enclave, tried to find safety on Serbian territory. Despite the fact that Serbian authorities were aware of reports of crimes being committed at that very moment on the other side of the river, between mid-July and August 1, 1995, Serbian police handed over at least 30 people from Srebrenica to the authorities of Republika Srpska. Only six survived their return.

The International Court of Justice ruled in 2007 that genocide had been committed in Srebrenica in July 1995. It also found that Serbia – at the time the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro – was responsible for violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It was found responsible because it failed to prevent the genocide and failed to punish the perpetrators, or hand them over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Serbia was cleared of the other forms of responsibility set out in the Genocide Convention – commission, planning, incitement, attempt, and complicity in genocide. Evidence of the deportation of Srebrenica residents arrested in Serbia was not presented in the proceedings before the International Court of Justice.

What the Camera Recorded

On July 15, Belgrade's Studio B aired a report by freelance journalist Zoran Petrović Piroćanac, filmed in Srebrenica and its surroundings in the preceding days. In the footage, the letters of an advertisement for bus travel passed over the faces of women and children crammed onto a bus: "Fast, comfortable, affordable… Bus service to Thessaloniki and Polychrono. STB travel." Following Army of Republika Srpska officers through the captured enclave, Petrović also filmed a field in front of a wall riddled with bullet holes. "There are many dead Muslim soldiers," a voice says on the recording. Then a pile of bodies of Srebrenica residents killed in front of the Kravica farming cooperative's warehouse comes into view.

Around a thousand captured men and boys from Srebrenica were transferred on July 13 to the warehouse of the agricultural cooperative in Kravica. Members of the Jahorina Training Center of the Republika Srpska Special Police Brigade were sent to the Kravica area. That unit included more than 150 Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, whom the Serbian police had forcibly mobilized and handed over to Republika Srpska forces. In the afternoon hours of July 13, a massacre began that continued into the following morning. Six forcibly mobilized refugees, members of the first and second platoons of the Jahorina Training Center, are currently on trial before the Higher Court in Belgrade for the killing of civilians in Kravica.

At the end of June, a forcibly mobilized bus driver from Šabac also arrived at Jahorina. Although not a refugee, he had been detained in Belgrade because he was driving a bus with Vukovar license plates. After his arrest, he was handed over to the Serbian Volunteer Guard's camp in Erdut, from where he was sent to Jahorina on June 26. For nearly a month he drove members of the Guard and the Army of Republika Srpska around the war zone.

On July 15, on the orders of Guard member Dragan Petrović Kajman, he drove VRS soldiers from Jahorina to Bratunac, and then returned. The very next day he was again ordered to go to Bratunac and Zvornik, from where he was sent to the school in Bjelovac and held there until further notice. On July 17, he drove five times between Bjelovac and Konjević Polje, transporting men and boys captured in Srebrenica and the surrounding area. The next day he made the same trip three times, and on July 19 three more times. He was then returned to Jahorina.

Serbia has never apologized for the forced mobilization of refugees and Serbian citizens.

Trnovo

Still, at the time of the Srebrenica operation, forcibly mobilized individuals from Serbia were not the only ones present on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the end of June 1995, the Unit for Anti-Terrorist Operations (JATD) of Serbia's State Security Sector was included in Operation Trnovo/Treskavica, in the area of responsibility of the VRS Sarajevo-Romanija Corps. That unit led forces made up of members of the Scorpions unit, the Serbian Volunteer Guard, and police from Vukovar. United under the command of JATD officer Vasilije Mijović, they were sent as reinforcements to the Army of Republika Srpska on the Trnovo battlefield. Scorpions member Goran Stoparić would later testify that the real purpose of the operation was to divert the forces of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina away from Srebrenica.

Members of the Scorpions unit shot six Bosniaks from Srebrenica at Godinjske Bare near Trnovo in the second half of July. According to Stoparić's testimony, a bus that arrived under police escort was full of civilians. The police handed six of them over to the Scorpions, saying this was "their share" in the distribution of civilians from Srebrenica who were to be killed at various locations. The Scorpions filmed the crime with their own camera, and the public in Serbia would not see the recorded execution until ten years later. Six members of the Scorpions were convicted before courts in Serbia and Croatia for the killing of Srebrenica civilians at Godinjske Bare. The verdict handed down in Serbia does not state that the victims were brought from Srebrenica, and the Scorpions unit was treated as a paramilitary formation. Nevertheless, in 2023, the heads of the State Security Sector, Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović, were also convicted, as members of a joint criminal enterprise, for the shooting of the six Bosniaks in Trnovo.

About ten kilometers from Godinjske Bare, in June 2021, the remains of ten more victims from Srebrenica were exhumed. Dobro Polje was located in the zone secured by the units involved in Operation Trnovo/Treskavica, and had been designated as an evacuation site for wounded JATD members. No one has ever been held accountable for that killing.

Units linked to the State Security Sector of Serbia's Ministry of Interior withdrew from Trnovo by July 24, 1995.

Denial

The General Staff of the Yugoslav Army continued to provide logistical assistance to the VRS for months after the mass executions of Srebrenica residents, of which it was aware. Ratko Mladić and other high-ranking VRS officers, responsible for planning, ordering, inciting, aiding, and abetting the crimes in Srebrenica, were Yugoslav Army officers assigned to the VRS through the 30th Personnel Center. They retained that status even after the crimes and the indictments that followed.

Serbia did not extradite Radovan Karadžić to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia until 2008, and Ratko Mladić until 2011. Serbian authorities today deny the legal classification of the crime committed in Srebrenica, and with it, their own responsibility for violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Ratko Mladić, "like all of us," has his good sides and his bad sides, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić will say, leaving it to history "to judge all of that." The oversight, however, is essential: the verdicts for genocide are already a historical fact.