INVESTIGATION: JUSTICE YET TO BE DONE

The massacre of 46 people in a Bosnian village 12 years ago is
a prime example of the kind of cases the local war crimes process
is likely to take up.

By Nerma Jelacic and Hugh Griffiths in Sokolac, Sarajevo and The Hague

"The men who killed my husband walk around Sokolac freely," said Nura
Ocuz. "They are rich and powerful. They have negotiated openly with
international organisations, while no foreigner has interviewed us before.

"These facts alone make me sceptical about justice here in Bosnia."

Ocuz is a survivor of the day in September 1992 when local Serb troops
entered the village of Novoseoce, located in the Sokolac municipality
of the Romanija region, and ordered everyone out of their homes.
Forty-five unarmed men and boys from the village and one woman
were shot dead.

This massacre stands out among many as it is not simply well documented,
it is particularly fresh in local people's minds as the bodies of victims
were only unearthed four years ago.

A number of names of local officials from the civilian local government
and military forces who had control over the area at the time keep
recurring. Yet as Ocuz notes bitterly, not one person has been indicted
for the crime.

The Hague tribunal will not be taking any more new cases as it winds down
its work over the next few years.

Instead, local courts are being set up in Balkan states. A new War Crimes
Chamber, WCC, has been created within the State Court of Bosnia and
Herzegovina. The chamber will have the jurisdiction to take over the
unresolved cases from The Hague as well as draw its own indictments.

Now that the WCC is in business - it was launched on March 9 -
Nura Ocuz's prayers to see the men responsible for the murder of
her husband and son face questioning and trial could yet be answered.
With significant casualty numbers, witnesses to the crime, and possible
indictees still on the loose, Novoseoce typifies the kind of cases
that will provide the WCC with much of its work.

There is always the possibility the Novoseoce case will not be
brought to trial, at least not immediately. The new court will have
many demands placed on it: it must first to handle the caseload
devolved from The Hague; and its selection of new cases has to
appear fair in terms of ethnic and geographical distribution.

Finally, there is the sheer volume of substantial new cases that
the WCC must prioritise and pick from.

WCC prosecutors have told IWPR that when it comes to raising
new indictments, they will prioritise cases from regions not
previously dealt with by the Hague tribunal. That could raise
the chances that Novoseoce will be given priority.

"I can't imagine that the courts in Bosnia or elsewhere in the
former Yugoslavia will be able to try all - or the majority - of those
who committed war crimes," Judith Armatta, an analyst who has followed
war crimes trials on behalf of the International Coalition for Justice,
told IWPR. "The sheer numbers and inadequate resources of the recovering
country mean that many will walk free and [remain] unaccountable,"
she said.

The name Novoseoce has figured in Hague proceedings, even if it
did not constitute a discrete case. The amended indictment against
Momcilo Krajisnik, a senior figure in the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS,
lists a number of incidents involving killings in parts of Bosnia
where he held influence. "In the village of Novoseoce, approximately
44 non-Serb men were killed," says one of the terse entries.

Survivors are keenly aware of Krajisnik's involvement in events in the
area as the war got under way, yet they also want to see local leaders
who they claim implemented ethnic cleansing in the Sokolac municipality
generally, and permitted the massacre at Novoseoce in particular,
brought to account.

"Hague investigators never interviewed us - the witnesses - about
what happened," former Novoseoce resident Munira Selmanovic, whose
husband and son died in the massacre, told IWPR.

IWPR has traced events leading up to and including the massacre of
September 22, 1992 by collecting evidence and eyewitness accounts.
The body of information strongly suggests that a role in allowing
the killings to take place was played by the Sokolac municipality
"crisis staff", a civilian/military local government structure of
the kind replicated across the Bosnian Serb region. The crisis staff
controlled local military forces and was the sole executive authority
in the area it ran.

The Novoseoce massacre can be viewed in the context of the systematic
removal of Muslim civilians elsewhere around Sokolac - the village was
in fact the last in the Romanija region to undergo "ethnic cleansing".
Since the women, elderly and children of the village were forcibly
displaced, they fall into this category. Again, the crisis staff played
a central part.

Of the three key actors in the Sokolac crisis staff, one, Radislav Krstic,
is serving a jail term for another war crimes conviction, and a second,
Milan Tupajic, could not be contacted despite IWPR's best efforts
to track him down. The third former official, Milovan Bjelica,
vehemently denies his own complicity and that of Tupajic in the
killings at Novoseoce.

But evidence obtained by IWPR about the institutional role of the crisis
staff in Sokolac, and its activities before and during the events of 1992,
indicate that it was monitoring and managing the Bosnian Serb leadership's
policies on the ground, and that it was thus in a position to know what
was going on and prevent abuses from happening. Many questions are raised
but none has yet been answered in a court of law.

EXECUTING KARADZIC'S POLICIES

In 1991, Novoseoce came under the control of a crisis staff set up
in Sokolac, the main town of the municipality. The executive would
rule Sokolac during the early stages of the war.

Crisis staffs were an institution originally created by Yugoslav leader
Josip Broz Tito during the Cold War to act as local coordinating
bodies for "territorial defence" - a strategy for waging all-out war
on foreign invaders using locally-raised guerrillas as well as
regular troops.

As the conflict in Bosnia got under way, leaders in the Serb-held areas -
headed by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, now an indicted war crimes
suspect - resurrected the crisis staff structure to bring local civil
government and military affairs under one roof. They were transformed
into mono-ethnic bodies dominated by members of Karadzic's SDS, and took
orders from the emerging "Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina" with
its headquarters in Pale.

The senior officials were commonly structured as a triumvirate, mirroring
the body's triple civil affairs-military-political role with one local
government leader such as the municipality head, a military man, and
an SDS representative who was the key link with Pale and the conduit
for policy directives.

Crisis staff members were responsible for everything from employment
and food distribution through to curfews and handing out arms to
local civilians to form a military reserve. They also controlled
military operations by local police and paramilitaries, and liaised
closely with the command structures of the Bosnian Serb army.

The Sokolac crisis staff was no different from the rest.

Here the triumvirate in charge of the crisis staff was Milan Tupajic,
president of the municipality; Milovan "Cicko" Bjelica, chairman
of the local SDS branch, and Colonel Radislav Krstic, commander of
the Second Romanija Brigade of the Bosnian Serb army.

Krstic, later promoted to major-general, is already in jail for his
part in the June 1995 killing of more than 7,000 men and boys from
Srebrenica. Arrested by NATO peacekeeping forces in December 1998,
he was sentenced to 46 years in prison by the Hague tribunal. The
indictment against him did not touch on events at Novoseoce three
years before.

As early as September 1991, Karadzic issued an order to the leadership
of the regional Serb autonomous areas ordering the ethnic cleansing
of, among others, the Romanija region within which Sokolac falls. "In
Krajina, Romanija and northeast Bosnia, [use] your units [to] eliminate
Ustase-like and other Muslim elements which are disrupting the setting-up
of the sole rightful Serb government in all Serb countries," read the
order signed by Karadzic on September 22, 1991.

"In a case of resistance to this lawful and humane wish of the
Serb nation, you have to be merciless (an eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth)."

An intelligence document obtained by IWPR shows that Karadzic was
in regular touch with his SDS chief for Sokolac, Bjelica, with whom
he frequently exchanged references to the situation on the ground and
"future moves". In one such conversation dated December 27, 1992 - a
transcript of which has been obtained by IWPR - Bjelica tells Karadzic
that "Tupajic is doing a good job" and that "municipal authorities
are functioning well under Tupajic's command". This was three months
after Novoseoce.

Bjelica told IWPR in an interview that he was in fact closer to
the Bosnian Serb president and his right-hand man than the average
SDS regional head. "I was the person closest to Karadzic," said Bjelica,
sitting in a Sokolac hotel. "I enjoyed his full confidence and that of
his deputy Krajisnik."

IWPR has found numerous witnesses and supporting documents which
demonstrate that members of the Sokolac crisis staff played an integral
role in events leading up to the massacre at Novoseoce, including an
orchestrated campaign to arm, train and mobilise Serb as reserve units,
and to ethnically cleanse strategically important areas.

If the role played by the crisis staff's members on the day of the
Novoseoce killings is unclear, the institution played a part in preparing
the village for ethnic cleansing such as that which happened in other
settlements in the area. And those actions made the killings possible

Sources within the new Bosnian state security services told IWPR that in
autumn 1991, Tupajic was identified as one of the key SDS politicians
responsible for the recruitment and clandestine distribution of weapons
to the local Serb population in Sokolac in preparation for war.

According to these sources, he worked closely with Bosnian Serb officers
of the Yugoslav army at that time. Former Yugoslav army general Asim
Dzambasovic testified at the Hague tribunal that Tupajic had regular
meetings with now indicted Colonel Dragomir Milosevic, who was in charge
of reserve units recruited with Tupajic's support.

According to survivors' accounts gathered by IWPR it was these
reserve troops - which included some of their neighbours - together with
regular Bosnian Serb army units that surrounded Novoseoce on September 22.
In most cases reserve units of this kind were controlled by crisis staffs,
as previous war crimes cases have made clear.

INSTITUTIONAL COMPLICITY

In previous cases, the Hague tribunal has highlighted the key role
played by crisis staffs in coordinating and implementing ethnic cleansing
in 1992.

The Hague has so far convicted a number of senior crisis staff members
from other parts of Bosnia, drawing on the Tribunal Statute's Article 7
relating to superior orders and command responsibility.

For instance, in the case of Miroslav Deronjic - a senior SDS figure
who pleaded guilty to charges of persecution in 2003 - the indictment
against him said it was "in his capacity as president of the crisis staff
of the municipality of Bratunac" that he issued an order to attack the
village of Glogovo and forcibly displace Muslim civilians there. His post
gave him "de facto and de jure control over the TO [Territorial Defence;
the reserves] and de jure control over the police of the municipality",
the indictment said.

In recent testimony in front of the Hague tribunal, expert witness
Dorothy Hanson, a specialist in crisis staffs, explained that they
were created from 1991 by SDS-run municipal authorities, and "police
and military authorities were then subordinated to them". Hanson noted
that although the relationship between the civil authorities and the
military varied from one municipality to another, the crisis staff
as a rule dealt with all military matters.

DISARMED AND DISCRIMINATED AGAINST

Eyewitness reports indicate that the crisis staff was implicated in
ethnic cleansing in the broader Sokolac area, and that for several
months, the civil-military authority was involved in discriminating
against, then disarming and containing the population of Novoseoce.

"First, all the Bosniaks [Muslims] from Novoseoce working in Sokolac
were fired in April 1991 by a municipal order signed by the crisis
staff," said resident Munira Karic, who would become a municipal
councillor after the war. "Our children could no longer attend
the municipality's school and the local bus would no longer stop
at our village."

"Then the crisis staff forbade Bosniaks to go on their own
to food shops in Sokolac, and the village shop was closed."

Karic's father, brother-in-law and uncles were killed on September 22.

Other Novoseoce survivors told IWPR how municipal services for which
Tupajic and Bjelica bore responsibility were then denied to the
village. The electricity was cut off in June, followed by the water
the following month.

Tupajic and Bjelica came to Novoseoce on July 27 together with
Bosnian Serb army commissioner Milorad Savic, some soldiers and a
TV camera crew, to collect the villager's registered hunting rifles,
eyewitnesses say.

Anxious villagers asked Tupajic and Savic for a bus so that they
could leave the village and travel to Bosnian government-controlled
territory.

"Tupajic said that wouldn't be necessary, and not to worry," Selmanovic
told IWPR.

"Savic said, 'no one will do anything to you, not a hair on your heads
will be touched'," added Ocuz.

"I remember watching that visit on the Karadzic-run television channel
when I was in Sarajevo," recalled Karic. "Bjelica and Savic were there
with Tupajic. They filmed it to show how they treated loyal Bosniaks."

Munira's sister Muniba Karic remembers how Savic told the villagers
to stay where they were. "He said that the surrounding forests were
full of Serb soldiers and that we should not try to leave the village
but stay where we were," she said.

>From July to September 21, the villagers carried on as best they could,
gathering in their crops. But it was an uneasy time.

"Neighbouring Serbs now in uniform and carrying guns would come to the
village most nights to check on us," said Muniba Karic. "The most frequent
visitor was our closest neighbour, Rade Dubovina. We kept asking Rade
if we should leave but he always said things would be fine. Later he was
to be one of the soldiers who rounded up our menfolk on September 22."

The villagers thought they should be secure as they had signed a document
pledging allegiance to the Bosnian Serb government and to its
representatives in Sokolac. In return, they received pledges that they
would be left alone. Meanwhile, the other Muslim villages in the Romanija
region were subjected to ethnic cleansing from April until August 1992.

Despite the assurances given by Tupajic and the municipal authorities,
the villagers were scared.

"In the summer we heard shooting coming from other Bosniak villages,"
said Selmanovic. "We always had a rucksack ready in case we needed
to run away quickly. Sometimes we would leave our homes at night and
go up into the woods to sleep, thinking they were about to attack us.
At night, we would have two of the men keep watch on the main road
so they could warn us if someone was coming."

THE ATTACK

In spite of the lookouts, the villagers were caught by surprise
on the morning of September 22 as Serb army reservists entered the
village from several sides. "We never even thought they would come
out of the forest behind our backs," said Selmanovic.

Around 300 troops surrounded the village in three concentric rings.
"Trucks then drove into the village carrying weapons and explosives,"
she said.

Ocuz described what she saw,"The Serb soldiers surrounded the village.
We were told to assemble on top of the hill so we all walked up there.
The sun was shining on us, it was hot. After a while the children
started crying. We had no water and we couldn't leave the hill
without an escort."

The commander of the troops was identified by numerous witnesses as
Momcilo Pajic, a local man serving as a reserve major in the military
police. "Pajic came up to us and said, 'if you have weapons, hand them
over now'," recalled Ocuz. "Then the soldiers started ransacking
our homes and carrying off our harvested crops from our cellars,"
she said.

Pajic communicated by radio, conversing with a crisis staff member,
say eyewitnesses. "He went away for about an hour and a half," continued
Muniba Karic. "When he returned, he looked tired and ill at ease.
He said he had got his orders and we could see it was hard for him.

"He took off his helmet and said that he had received an order
that women, children and old men should go to Sarajevo while the men
would be held for a prisoner exchange.

"After a couple of hours, the women were separated from the men. I
bade farewell to my husband and walked down the hill towards the bus.
When I came to the graveyard, I said goodbye to my son across the fence.
I gave him the keys to our house, and his own and his father's jacket
in case they got cold. I never saw them again."

Ocuz broke away from the bus to say goodbye to her husband, "I will
never forget that sight. As I was walking up the hill to say goodbye
to my husband, the sun was burning down really hard on the men. The
old ones took off their berets and their white hair was shining
in the sun. It was at this point that I saw reinforcements coming
out of the forests," she told IWPR.

Ocuz was to lose her 14-year-old son and husband Asim that day.

MASS KILLINGS AND BURIAL

Survivors witnessed one summary killing, that of a woman, Devla Karic,
shot next to the village mosque. The remaining women were then bussed
out of the villages to the front lines around Sarajevo.

Later in the afternoon, the male residents were herded in front of
the village mosque. Forty-five men and boys aged between 14 and 68
were executed on the spot. Forensic examination would later reveal
that they were riddled with bullets from automatic weapons.

Bullet holes in the recovered skulls indicate that the victims
were shot in the back of the head in addition to other wounds.

The mosque was later dynamited and - with the bodies among the rubble -
trucked out of the village.

The mangled bodies buried beneath the mosque remains were discovered three
miles away, on September 8, 2000, ending the anguished eight-year search
by the victims' families, and dashing hopes that some of the missing could
have survived. Forty-four bodies were exhumed from the municipality's
Ivan Polje rubbish dump on September 5-8, 2000.

The exhumation video, shown to IWPR by the Bosnian commission for missing
persons, illustrates how the human remains together with the mosque rubble
were covered by a layer of between one and two metres of rubbish.

A former Hague investigator who asked to remain anonymous believes,
"The fact that the bodies were disposed of on municipal property is
another indicator that the civilian authorities in Sokolac played
a leading role in the massacre at Novoseoce."

A WIDER PATTERN OF ABUSE

Eyewitnesses allege that Tupajic and Bjelica were complicit or
active in ethnic cleansing elsewhere in Sokolac municipality.

Numerous eyewitness survivors from the villages of Knezina, Zulj
and Vrbarje state that Milan Tupajic and Milovan Bjelica personally
oversaw the decision-making process which brought about the expulsion
of these Muslim populations.

Mustafa Imamovic, the community leader in Knezina at the time,
was called to a meeting by Tupajic and Bjelica in July 1992 where
it was first proposed that Knezina's Muslims be removed.

Shortly before Bosnian Serb troops entered Knezina, Tupajic
arrived in the village and announced that all Muslims should leave.
"The order for our deportation was given by Milan Tupajic, president
of Sokolac municipality," said villager Ibrahim Secic in testimony
given to the Hague tribunal.

"Muslims made up 30 per cent of Sokolac municipality's pre-war
population," said a former Hague tribunal staffer, who declined to be
named. "By 1995, virtually all Muslims had been expelled or killed."

THE CIVILIAN ADMINISTRATOR

"Tupajic was one of the most senior SDS leaders in eastern Bosnia
operating outside of Pale in the run-up TO and during the war,"
said a former Hague investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity.

IWPR has been unable to contact Tupajic whose whereabouts are
currently unknown, though his last known address was in Sokolac.

But his colleague Bjelica has denied that Tupajic bore responsibility
for what happened at Novoseoce.

Tupajic went on to become deputy leader of the larger Serb Autonomous
Region of Romanija which comprised much of eastern Bosnia in 1992.

After the Novoseoce massacre, both Tupajic and Krstic were promoted,
the latter becoming the deputy commander of the Drina Corps, the unit
that played a major role in the collapse of the United Nations'
"safe haven" at Srebrenica and the elimination of its male residents.
Tupajic would also reappear there, the most senior SDS official to be
present during the massacre.

After the war Tupajic became the head of the SDS parliamentary caucus
in the Bosnian Serb Assembly before being blacklisted by the Office
of the High Representative for what was described as his continuing
support of Karadzic.

The Hague tribunal has never indicted him, and senior staff from
the Office of the Prosecutor refused to discuss contacts between
The Hague and Tupajic.

IWPR has, however, learned that the tribunal has issued a "Class A"
ruling for proceedings against Tupajic on a separate war crimes charge
other than Novoseoce. What this categorisation means is that the
evidence is considered sufficient to justify arrest and indictment,
although some such cases such as Tupajic's have not yet been brought
to court.

"You cannot blame us for not indicting people like Milan Tupajic,"
a senior Hague prosecution source told IWPR. "The [United Nations]
Security Council has stopped us from investigating and prosecuting
everyone except those at the very top who were responsible for killings,"
the source said, referring to the UN decision last year forbidding the
tribunal from issuing further indictments against lower-level figures.

"The continuing freedom of people responsible for grave crimes is
not the fault of [the tribunal] but of those who seek to stop the work
before the job is done," the source concluded.

THE POLITICAL COMMISSAR

In November 2004, Bjelica met IWPR in a Sokolac motel to discuss
his work as SDS regional supremo back in 1991, and talked openly
about his close contact with Karadzic and Krajisnik.

He denied any role in the massacre.

"Novoseoce is a dark stain on Sokolac and on the Serb people in general,"
he told IWPR. "We in the civil authorities were just concerned that the
civil institutions should keep on working.

"Neither Tupajic nor I played any military role. We did not know or
participate in military operations."

Bjelica would go on to run the large municipality known as Serb Sarajevo,
and later worked as chief accountant for Centreks, a business alleged
to have acted as a financial conduit for the secret support network
that helped Karadzic evade capture after the war ended in 1995.

Like Tupajic, he was blacklisted by the European Union and
the United States because of his alleged support for Karadzic. The
blacklisting resulted in his removal from political and state business
positions, as well as a ban on travelling to the EU or doing business
with US citizens.

STILL SEEKING REDRESS

The sense that justice is yet to be done is felt nowhere more keenly
than in Novoseoce itself.

An unnerving silence envelops the traveller on the muddy road
that leads to the village of Novoseoce, in shadow of eastern Bosnia's
spectacular Romanija mountains. The ruins of old stone houses that
were once home to 160 inhabitants stand as mute witness to the crime
committed there 12 years ago.

Forty-four shiny white gravestones at the foot of the road are
a testimony to the fate of the men and boys that for generations
worked the land in which they now lie buried. There is space for one more.

"I have found my son's body, but not my husband Muharem," former resident
Munira Selmanovic told IWPR, opening her otherwise empty purse to show us
her most prized possessions - photographs of her son and husband.

"I am still looking for him. The commission for missing persons thinks
there are more bodies at the Ivan Polje municipal rubbish dump. They
say they will start digging again - perhaps my husband is there."

The relatives of victims are now firmly focused on the new war crimes
chamber as a way of finding justice.

"I hope this new court will be interested in Novoseoce," said Muniba Karic.

The survivors' concerns about seeing justice done are shared on a
Bosnia-wide scale by observers who say that it will be many years
before many war crime suspects are tried in court.

"If there is to be peace in Bosnia, the survivors of Novoseoce
and numerous other villages throughout the country have to
see the perpetrators face justice," said Amor Masovic, chief of
Bosnia's commission for missing persons.

James Lyon, director of the conflict-prevention think tank
International Crisis Group in Serbia and Montenegro, agrees. "If
the guilty go unpunished, we cannot talk about real reconciliation
and peace," he warned.

"Bosnia's future as a peaceful country is dependent on a large
number of fair trials which bear witness to what happened here and
show citizens of all ethnic groups that justice has been done."

Nerma Jelacic is IWPR project manager in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hugh
Griffiths is an IWPR investigations coordinator. This investigation
forms part of the war crimes reporting and training activities IWPR
and its regional partner the Balkans Investigative Reporting Network
are running in Bosnia to coincide with the opening of the War Crimes
Chamber in Sarajevo.

This project is supported by the Swiss foreign ministry and UNESCO's
media fund, and implemented in partnership with USAID Media. This
investigation was produced with a donation from the US embassy in
Sarajevo.

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BALKAN CRISIS REPORT No. 546

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