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The mass executions

For more information, see Mass executions in the Srebrenica massacre.

Following the detention of prisoners, the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) conducted a number of mass executions between 13 and 22 July. The scale of the executions and the methodical way in which thousands of men were killed and buried required a vast amount of planning and high-level coordination.

Although some groups of prisoners were killed at the initial assembly points, the pattern of executions generally involved transporting the detainees to the Bratunac area where they were detained for one or two nights before being moved to temporary holding centres (including schools and warehouses) from which they were taken to nearby fields for execution and mass burial.

As of 2007, the remains of more than 6500 individuals have been exhumed from the Srebrenica region and identified or DNA-profiled. The number of people missing or killed as compiled by the Federal Commission of Missing Persons includes 8,373 names so far.

Preparations

The largest number of prisoners were taken by the VRS on 13 July, along the Bratunac-Konjevic Polje road. It remains impossible to cite a precise figure, but witness statements describe the assembly points such as the field at Sandići, the agricultural warehouses in Kravica, the school in Konjevic Polje, the football field in Nova Kasaba, the village of Lolici and the village school of Luke. Several thousand people were herded together in the field near Sandići and on the Nova Kasaba football pitch, where they were searched and put into smaller groups. In a video tape made by journalist Zoran Petrović, a VRS soldier states that at least 3,000 to 4,000 men had given themselves up on the road. According to intercepted radio communications, by the late afternoon of 13 July, the total had risen to some 6,000. The following day, Major Franken of Dutchbat was given the same figure by Colonel Radislav Jankovic of the VRS. Many of the prisoners had been seen in the locations described by passing convoys taking the women and children to Kladanj by bus, while various aerial photographs have since provided evidence to confirm this version of events.

One hour after the evacuation of the women from Potočari was completed, the Drina Corps staff diverted available buses to the areas in which the men were being held. Colonel Krsmanovic, who on 12 July had arranged the buses for the evacuation, ordered the 700 men in Sandići to be collected, and the soldiers guarding them made them throw their possessions on a large heap and hand over anything of value. During the afternoon, the group in Sandići was visited by Mladić who told them that they would come to no harm, that they would be treated as prisoners of war, that they would be exchanged for other prisoners, and that their families had been safely escorted to Tuzla. Some of these men were placed on buses to Bratunac and other locations, while some were marched on foot to the warehouses in Kravica. The men gathered on the football ground at Nova Kasaba were forced to hand over their personal belongings. They too received a personal visit from Mladić during the afternoon of 13 July. On this occasion, he announced that the Bosnian authorities in Tuzla did not want the men and that they were therefore to be taken to other locations. The men in Nova Kasaba were loaded onto buses and trucks and were taken to Bratunac or the other locations.

Numbering approximately 1,000, the men who had been separated from the women, children and elderly in Potočari , were transported to Bratunac and subsequently joined by men captured from the column. Almost to a man, the thousands of Bosniak prisoners captured, following the take-over of Srebrenica, were executed. Some were killed individually or in small groups by the soldiers who captured them and some were killed in the places where they were temporarily detained. Most, however, were slaughtered in carefully orchestrated mass executions, commencing on 13 July 1995, in the region just north of Srebrenica.

Pattern of executions

The mass executions followed a well-established pattern. The men were first taken to empty schools or warehouses. After being detained there anywhere from a few hours to two days, they were loaded onto buses or trucks and taken to another site for execution. Usually, the execution fields were in isolated locations. The prisoners were unarmed and, in many cases, steps had been taken to minimize resistance, such as blindfolding them, binding their wrists behind their backs with ligatures, or removing their shoes. Once at the killing fields, the men were taken off the trucks in small groups, lined up, and shot. Those who survived the initial round of gunfire were individually shot with an extra round, though sometimes only after they had been left to suffer for a time. Sometimes along with men who were still alive, the corpses were collected with excavators and buried in mass graves.

Chronology of events

The executions began on July 13th, when seventeen men were transported by bus to the banks of the Jadar river and shot. By the afternoon of the 13th, large scale executions had begun near the River Cerska (150 men), Tisca (22 men), and near the Agricultural Cooperative in Kravica (1000-1500 men.)

This pattern of executions, now on a wide scale, continued on July 14th-17th. Executions were noted to occur in Grbavci and Orahovac (1000-2500 men), Petkovići (1500-2000 men), Branjevo (1000-2000 men), and Kozluk (around 340 men.)

Though the executions had begun to trail down by the 18th, a number of events occured between July 18th - 22nd. Most notably, a series of executions occured along the Brutanac-Konjevic Polje road (75-100 men), the Nezuk-Baljkovica frontline (several hundred men), and the Meces area (around 350 men.)

The reburials

From approximately August 1st 1995 to November 1st 1995, there was an organized effort to remove the bodies from primary mass gravesites and transport them to secondary and tertiary gravesites. In the ICTY court case "Prosecutor v. Blagojevic and Jokic", the trial chamber found that this reburial effort was an attempt to conceal evidence of the mass murders.The trial chamber found that the cover up operation was ordered by the VRS Main Staff and subsequently carried out by members of the Bratunac and Zvornik Brigades. The cover up operation has had a direct impact on the recovery and identification of the remains. The removal and reburial of the bodies have caused them to become dismembered and co-mingled, making it difficult for forensic investigators to positively identify the remains. For example, in one specific case, the remains of one person were found in two different locations, 30 km apart. In addition to the ligatures and blindfolds found at the mass graves, the effort to hide the bodies has been seen as further evidence of the organized nature of the massacres and the non-combatant status of the victims. If the victims had died in normal combat operations there would have been no need to hide their remains.

Forensic evidence

Progress in finding bodies of victims in the Srebrenica region, often in mass graves, exhuming them and finally identifying them was relatively slow. 5000 bodies were exhumed by 2002 but only 200 were identified. However pioneering use of DNA has allowed the identification of large numbers of victims whose body parts were widely dispersed. As of 9 March 2007 the International Committee for Missing Persons (ICMP) had collected and processed blood samples from 21,032 family members representing 7789 different missing individuals and the DNA-led identification process had helped in the final legal identification of 2913 persons from Srebrenica. Comparison of the DNA profiles from 8369 bone samples from exhumed remains with profiles with the ICMP database of blood-sample DNA profiles has provided direct genetic information for 4100 missing individuals. Although the ICMP doubts that the exact final number of victims will ever be determined, from the rate of blood collection and DNA matches to date they estimate the number of persons missing from the fall of Srebrenica to be around 8000. [Comment by Adam Boys, senior manager for the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) in Bosnia, responding to readers' comments on an article about the ICMP's efforts to identify the exhumed remains of victims of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica (C. Jennings, "Finding the bodies to fill the Bosnia graves," The Scotsman, 14 March 2007): http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=398822007]