Witness O: a seventeen-year-old who survived an execution among the bodies of murdered men

The fall of Srebrenica and the column through the forest

The Vojska Republike Srpske (VRS) captured Srebrenica on 11 July 1995. Witness O, who was then only seventeen years old, set out with his father in a column of thousands of men who were trying to make their way through the forests to territory controlled by the Armija Republike Bosne i Hercegovine (ARBiH).

The promise of protection and the surrender

On 13 July, recorded calls to surrender were heard from loudspeakers in the forest, together with a promise that prisoners would be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. In the afternoon, Witness O came out of the forest together with a group of several thousand men.

In the evening the prisoners were made to run north along the road towards Bratunac with their hands above their heads, to take turns carrying the wounded, and to greet with three fingers the buses in which women and children were being deported.

Trucks and the school

On the night of 13 to 14 July the prisoners were held in a clearing and then loaded onto overcrowded trucks. Some lost consciousness from the heat; they were given no water.

In the afternoon of 14 July they were taken to several school classrooms. Soldiers shouted nationalist slogans, and shooting was heard in front of the school from dusk until almost midnight.

During the night of 14 to 15 July, men were taken outside two at a time. Witness O's uncle refused to go out with him, and no one has seen him since. The witness's hands were tied with wire and he was driven by truck for about ten minutes.

The execution

In the early morning of 15 July, at a place where the bodies of executed men already lay in rows, shooting began. A fellow prisoner wanted to untie him, but he refused, fearing that the man would kill him. Witness O was hit in the right side of the chest and in the right arm. He lay among the bodies waiting for death, listening to the soldiers laughing after the shooting.

The escape

When the shooting stopped, he called quietly into the darkness. A man answered him: "I'm alive." Both crawled over the bodies and moved away from the execution site. After several days of wandering through the forests, they reached ARBiH-controlled territory.

Testimony in The Hague

On 13 April 2000, Witness O testified as a protected witness before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the trial of General Radislav Krstić, Chief of Staff and, from 13 July 1995, Commander of the VRS Drinski korpus. He described the killings as systematic and organized. He said that the organizers do not deserve freedom, while he would forgive the direct perpetrators because, in his words, they were misled ("because they were misled").

On 2 August 2001, the ICTY Trial Chamber found Radislav Krstić guilty, among other things, of genocide and sentenced him to 46 years in prison. On 19 April 2004, the Appeals Chamber altered the judgment to aiding and abetting genocide and reduced the sentence to 35 years in prison. Krstić was convicted with final effect of aiding and abetting genocide, murder, extermination and persecutions in Srebrenica in 1995.