“They loaded us onto two buses, after tying our hands first. I saw that we arrived at some houses and that farm in Branjevo. There was the army, the killers, and you could hear gunshots. They took us out – you could see death with your own eyes… No more life.”
This is the testimony of a protected witness codenamed Z2 before a Bosnian court in 2011, recalling being taken from Srebrenica by forces led by Ratko Mladic after the Bosnian Serb Army captured the town in July 1995.
At least 1,000 Bosniaks would end up being killed at Branjevo farm by members of the notorious 10th Sabotage Detachment of the Bosnian Serb Army, according to Bosnian court that sentenced five of the unit’s members to a total of 122 years in prison.
The detachment’s commander Milorad Pelemis, however, was not among them – he was in Serbia, out of the reach of Bosnian prosecution.
“The Bosnian prosecutor’s office issued a warrant for [Pelemis], he is on an Interpol red notice, but he keeps appearing in Serbian media very often,”’ Ivana Zanic, the legal team coordinator at the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre NGO, told BIRN.
Indeed, Pelemis has made many public appearances over the years, denying the accusations against him as well as insisting that other Srebrenica mass murders didn’t happen.
In 2015, Pelemis told the trial of Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that neither of them ordered the shootings at Branjevo.
“I did not participate in selecting the [fighters] and issuing them with the task,” Pelemis told the court.
Like Pelemis, at least eight more Bosnian Serbs wanted or linked to the 1995 Srebrenica genocide have fled Bosnia and Herzegovina for Serbia, where the Belgrade-based war crimes prosecutor’s office has charged only one of them, while the Serbian authorities ignore calls for action from Bosnia.
The Humanitarian Law Centre has filed criminal complaints to the Serbian war crimes prosecutor’s office against Pelemis and 11 others which it accuses of involvement in the Srebrenica genocide.
The HLC has published a file on the 10th Sabotage Detachment alleging that its members killed 1,200 Srebrenica Bosniaks in Branjevo farm on the orders of Pelemis and Dragomir Pecanac, Ratko Mladic’s personal adjutant.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
