Man weeps as he tells of Mladic’s trail of death and destruction

It’s been 20 years since Elvedin Pasic’s father was captured by Serb fighters in the Bosnian war. But as the 34-year-old Bosnian Muslim yesterday became the first witness at the UN trial of Ratko Mladic, he repeatedly broke down in tears

During the emotional testimony, the former Bosnian Serb military chief sat stone-faced in court looking straight ahead. He faces 11 charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for allegedly masterminding Serb atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war that left 100,000 people dead.

He denies wrongdoing and faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment if convicted.

Speaking in English, Mr Pasic said he still dreamed of a hand waving to him out of the window of a makeshift prison camp in a school where his father was being held, and regrets not having gone to see him one last time. He was 14 at the time.

“I was afraid. I didn’t [go],” he told judges at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, as he wept. “I wish, I wish I would have went.”

Mladic is the last top-ranking suspect to go on trial at the UN court that was set up in 1993 as war raged in Bosnia. There was early scepticism about the tribunal’s chances of gaining custody of top suspects, but the court eventually got all 161 people it indicted, including alleged 
masterminds Mladic and his former political master, Radovan Karadzic. Both went into hiding for more than a decade before being captured.

Mr Pasic said that his family fled from his village in northern Bosnia in 1992 as it was shelled by Serb troops under Mladic’s command. He eventually was captured along with his father and scores of other villagers.

They were held in a near-by school, with more than 150 men in an upstairs room and a smaller group of women and children downstairs. The next morning, shivering from a cold night spent in soaked clothing, the women and children were bused away and the men stayed, never to be seen again.

“Your honours, after being there that night, there is no doubt in my mind they were all killed,” Mr Pasic told the three-judge panel.

He recalled being beaten and abused as he walked towards a bus through a crowd of angry Serbs. One elderly woman dressed all in black grabbed him and threatened him with a knife, he said.

“She said, ‘let me kill one balia because one of my sons died’,” he recalled her saying, using a derogatory term for Bosnian Muslims.

Earlier, Mr Pasic described weeks of wandering with his mother after being forced from their village by Serb shelling.

He and his mother eventually circled back to their home village despite a warning from two Serb soldiers patrolling nearby who told them: “There is nothing for you to go back to. Your home is Turkey, this is Serbia.”

They went home anyway, only to find the Serb soldiers had told the truth about there being little for them to return to.

“The house was burned completely, the fridge, the televisions, the walls – what was left of the walls was stripped,” Mr Pasic said. His voice choked with tears as he told how he had hoped to find his dog alive, but found it shot where it was chained.

Most of the handful of people who had remained in his village, notably one elderly religious man, had been burned alive in their homes, he testified.

Mladic’s trial started on 16 May, but was almost immediately halted an apparent clerical error by prosecutors meant they failed to disclose thousands of pages of evidence.

Mladic showed no emotion as Mr Pasic’s testimony laid bare how an amicably multi-ethnic Bosnia was plunged into a war that turned former neighbours into sworn enemies.