Balkan country makes first arrests over slaughter of more than 1,000 Muslims in what was Europe’s worst civilian slaughter since second world war

Serbia is to mount its first trial over one of Europe’s worst atrocities: the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men by Serbian forces in Srebrenica in the summer of 1995.



Following a war crimes investigation, police arrested seven suspects in Serbia on Wednesday in the first such domestic operation in almost 20 years after the massacre, which was declared under international law to have been an act of genocide – the sole such act during the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Vladimir Vukcevic, the chief Serbian war crimes prosecutor, said authorities had sought to arrest eight suspects in pre-dawn raids at different locations in Serbia on Wednesday, but one man evaded police.

“More people have been in our focus, but we have managed to detain seven out of eight suspects so far,” Vukcevic said. “They are former members of a special brigade of the Bosnian Serb police.”

The prospect of a Srebrenica trial in Serbia, where the authorities have struggled to accept blame or responsibility for the crimes and where many remain in denial, marks a potential watershed in the country’s fitful attempts to address what happened in Bosnia in the 90s.

Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, the political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 war, are on trial at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, facing charges of genocide for their oversight of the Srebrenica massacre. The trials mark the climax of more than 20 years of seeking justice for the crimes of the 90s and setting the record straight.

The seven men arrested at various locations in Serbia on Wednesday are suspected of having taken part in the mass murder of around 1,000 men at a warehouse in Kravica outside Srebrenica, a small hilltown in eastern Bosnia where Bosnian Muslims were held in a UN “safe haven” and besieged by Mladic’s forces for three years until the denouement in July 1995 resulted in the worst single atrocity of the war and the biggest massacre in Europe since the Nazis.

Although arrested in Serbia, the seven were members of a Bosnian Serb police unit said to have organised and supervised the bussing of the victims from Srebrenica to Kravica where they were summarily shot in the warehouse before grenades were thrown in.

“This is the first such case involving people directly suspected of taking part in the Srebrenica massacre,” Bruno Vekarić , Serbia’s deputy war crimes prosecutor, told Reuters. “There are other suspects in Serbia and neighbouring countries and we are after them as well.”

Many Serbs persist in believing that the tribunal in The Hague is an international plot aimed at stigmatising the Serbs and blaming them for the horrors of the 90s. Staging a trial on such an emotive subject in Belgrade might serve an educational purpose as well as bringing justice and some closure to the families of the victims.

“It is important to stress that this is the first time that our prosecutor’s office is dealing with the mass killings of civilians and war prisoners in Srebrenica,” Vekarić said.

He said Serbia was approaching a key moment in confronting its past. “We have never dealt with a crime of such proportions. It is very important for Serbia to take a clear position toward Srebrenica through a court process,” he said.

The biggest arrest in the sweep was Nedeljko Milidragović, the commander dubbed “Nedjo the Butcher”, who went on to become a successful businessman in Serbia, according to the Associated Press.