Ljubisa Beara, Architect of the Srebrenica Massacre

Report from Dani (Sarajevo) by a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre
on the role played in it by Ljubisa Beara, recently arrested in Belgrade
and transferred to The Hague

By: Emir Suljagic

A few days after Naser Oric and a number of his officers from the
28th division [of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina, ABiH] had left the town
on a 'secret' helicopter flight from Zepa, the UN in Srebrenica received
an unexpected request. A certain Ljubisa Beara wished to meet the
commander of the enclave's defence! No one thought this was accidental.
The division's security officer, standing in for the divisional commander,
found it difficult to explain even to the UN why Oric was no longer
available. But greater than the ABiH officers' embarrassment was
their fear, once they discovered who Beara really was: head of the
security service of the main staff of the VRS [Army of Republika Srpska].
No one had any idea what such a high-ranking officer was doing in the
Srebrenica area at this particular time. The answer came in July of
that year.

Nine Years Later

In March this year, an investigator from The Hague was standing in front
of the house in Belgrade where the wanted high-ranking officer of the VRS
lived. When he rang the police to ask for help in arresting him, however,
the suspect disappeared from the house within minutes - and, as it
turned out, changed his address for good. On 4 October this year, chief
prosecutor Carla Del Ponte told Serbian prime minister Vojislav Kostunica
that official Belgrade would be given a fresh test, similar to the one
involving Goran Hadzic, head of the autonomous entity of the Croatian
Serbs. Kostunica replied that his government would respect its obligations
towards the Tribunal. On Friday 8, after the court's investigators
had made sure that Beara was still in the village near Uzice that was
his normal hiding-place, Kostunica was given the information. On the
following day, 9 October, Serbian police surrounded the house and
Beara surrendered without resistance.

He was no longer the same fat, ruddy-faced officer he had been
in Potocari in July 1995. Thinner and with dense tufts of grey hair
framing a bald pate, Beara looked more like some retired conductor or
impoverished academician who could scarcely have any connection with
the greatest massacre on European soil since the end of World War II.
Beara, however, is an academician of death, a conductor of the
Srebrenica massacre, a man who translated Ratko Mladic's killer instinct
into concrete orders. Beara concerned himself with every aspect of the
killings: that the buses should be in the right place at the right time;
that the execution squads should be ready to receive the prisoners
as they climbed out of the buses; that the fuel needed for excavating
the mass graves and for their later re-location should be available ....
Srebrenica in the autumn of 1995 was his life's work.

July 1995

The security service of the VRS was central to the crime, and Beara
was the man at the centre of the web pulling all the strings. At
one end of this web was Captain Momir Nikolic, security officer of
the Bratunac brigade; at the other was sub-lieutenant Drago Nikolic,
security man of the Zvornik brigade; immediately next to Beara was
Colonel Vujadin Popovic, the formal superior of those two and head
of security of the Drina corps. This web had its own death squad:
the 10th diversionary battalion attached to the main staff. When the
soldiers of the 10th battalion proved unable to do all the killings, Beara
recruited soldiers of the Drina corps. In a taped telephone conversation
from the middle of July, Beara asked Radislav Krstic, the commander
of the Drina corps who was then in Zepa, to supply soldiers 'to
distribute another 800 packets'. This was one of the last groups
of survivors needing to be murdered.

Beara did not always use official channels. At one point his deputy
Drago Nikolic managed to find fresh volunteers for the execution squad
by promising them new uniforms. More accurately, Beara used official
channels only when he had to. In those days he had the power to command
everyone and everything. His orders were followed unquestioningly.
It was only once, it seems, that an order of his was changed, due to
the intervention of Radovan Karadzic. This happened on the night of
13 July 1995, when Beara arrived in the office of Miroslav Deronjic,
head of the Bratunac SDS. Interrupting the latter's meeting with a
town official called Ljubisav Simic, Beara said that all prisoners
would be executed that night in Bratunac. Deronjic and Karadzic
evidently had nothing against the killing of the prisoners, but
Deronjic did not want this to happen in Bratunac. In his telephone
conversation with Karadzic that night, he received the order
that the prisoners be taken 'down there', to 'the storage rooms'.
The fate of the prisoners becomes clearer when one remembers that
the day after Srebrenica's capture Karadzic had issued the order:
'Kill the lot!'. Beara was the man for the job.

Supervisor of the Massacre

Since Karadzic's administrative apparatus was not as efficient as the
Nazi bureaucracy, Beara had to supervise everything himself: from the
questioning of the prisoners to their execution, burial and reburial.
Dragan Mirkovic, head of Bratunac municipal services at this time, has
stated that on the night of 13 July Beara ordered him to organise his men
to collect and bury the bodies. He told him: 'There will be many corpses
and burials'. Dragan Obrenovic, chief of staff of the Zvornik brigade,
has told how he learned on the evening of 13 July that all prisoners
would be brought to Zvornik and killed there; he was told this by
Drago Nikolic, who was following Beara¹s orders. Serb witnesses
at the Hague tribunal testify that finally, in the autumn of 1995,
Beara reappeared in Zvornik, dressed this time in civilian clothes.
During the days that followed, parts of the Zvornik municipality
were barricaded off and inaccessible, while he and Popovic, armed
with maps, had the graves dug up again and relocated.

Beara was the invisible hand that guided all events firmly in the
direction of death. He disappeared once the operation was over,
only to reappear nine years later, this time in order to protect
Serbian national and state interests.

Beara was never a run-of-the-mill staff officer. He was a man who always
and everywhere - from the moment he first joined Ratko Mladic in Knin -
did what others had neither the stomach nor the time to do. An energetic
killer, Beara played a crucial role in the events that took place in
Srebrenica between the spring and the autumn of 1995. Possessing a rare
organisational talent, he almost succeeded: thanks to his systematic
approach, for a year or two the Srebrenica massacre was a genocide
without the bodies. During those five fatal days at least, he was
present everywhere and at all times, a supervisor of works mercilessly
driving his incompetent operators. His subordinates were the people
without whom the genocide would not have been possible. Ratko Mladic the
person without whom it would have been inconceivable. Beara the person
without whom it could not have been carried out.

/This comment has been translated from Dani (Sarajevo), 15 October 2004./