Court Hears of Suicides During Massacre

A Muslim witness told a U.N. war crimes tribunal Friday how two brothers hugged--then shot--each other, rather than be killed by Serbian executioners in the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

The man, identified as “Witness P,” lived through the massacre by pretending to be dead in a field of corpses. His testimony came in the genocide trial of Bosnian Serb Gen. Radislav Krstic, which began last month.

The witness was expected to be the last in a series of survivors who have described mass executions at the U.N.-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina toward the end of the 1992-1995 war.

Witness P was part of a column of up to 15,000 people trying to escape Srebrenica as it was overrun by the Bosnian Serb army.

He described harrowing scenes of Muslim men committing suicide rather than surrendering to the attacking Serbs.

Five more people lay wounded in the brush screaming after setting off explosives in a failed attempt to take their own lives, he added.

Like most witnesses, he agreed to testify only if his identity was protected because he still lives in the area. He spoke from behind a screen that kept him from view.

Serbian forces broke through U.N. defenses July 11 and in the following week slaughtered at least 7,500 Muslim men and boys, prosecutors say. Krstic is accused of leading the army’s Drina Corps, which allegedly carried out the bloodshed.

After surrendering to the Serbs, the witness spent several days packed on buses and trucks with hundreds of other Muslim refugees who were later taken to various execution sites.

Males 14 to 70 were starved, dehydrated, tortured and beaten before being gunned down by the thousands, witnesses have testified. Some drank their own urine to survive.

The anonymous witness said he was driven to a killing field near a dam in the village of Potkovci, just north of Srebrenica, where row after row of men were lined up and killed with submachine guns.

“I saw a very big field of men lying there dead. I fell over the bodies of those who had been executed before me,” he told the three judges on the bench.

The witness testified that he played dead for almost a day in the soccer field filled with corpses and escaped with a 17-year-old boy who was seriously injured.

“Barefooted, covered in blood and stripped to the waist, we were treading over the dead bodies,” he said.

The witness said he bandaged the boy’s gunshot wounds with his undershirt as Serbian soldiers sang in the distance.

Krstic has been charged with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. He will face life in prison if found guilty of any of the charges. He has pleaded innocent.