From: barrada@infonode.ingr.com (Ahmed Barrada)
Subject: Atrocities in Bosnia -The Guardian-
Organization: Intergraph Corporation, Huntsville, AL.
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 17:00:18 GMT



                    ******************************************************
                    *                                                    *
                    *       SLAUGHTER IN THE NAME OF SERBIA              *
                    *                                                    *
                    *              By John F Burns                       *
                    *                                                    * 
                    *       THE GUARDIAN, Thursday, 03-12-1992           *
                    *                                                    *
                    ******************************************************

                       `It was an order.I simply did what I was told.'
                        Now Borislav Herak, murderer and rapist, awaits
                        the firing squad.

  What Borislav Herak remembers most vividly about the sunny morning in late 
June when he and two companions gunned down 10 members of a Muslim family
is the small girl, about 10, who tried to hide behind her grandmother as the
three Serbian nationalist soldiers opened fire from a distance of about 10
paces.

  "We told them not to be afraid, we wouldn't do anything to them, they should
just stand in front of the wall," say Herak, 21. "But it was taken for granted
among us that they should be killed. So when somebody said, `Shoot' I swung 
around and pulled the trigger, three times, on automatic fire. I remember the
little girl with the red dress hiding behind her granny."

  As he tells his rambling story at the Viktor Buban military prison in 
Sarayevo, Herak stands up, shuffles into the open part of the room in his 
green field jacket and laceless black army boots, and demonstrates how he
fired from the hip with his Kalashnikov rifle. With his companions, he emptied
a 30-bullet magazine at the family he had found cowering minutes before in the
basement of a home at Ahatovici, a Muslim village five miles from the prison.

  The details given by the young Serb to investigators, and repeated during 
seven hours of interviews, amounted to a six-month chronicle of the savage
violence that has characterised the Bosnian war.

  Two weeks ago, Herak and a Serbian married couple, now also under arrest
for war crimes, took the wrong road while driving their Wolkswagen Golf from 
the time of Vogosca to Ilidza, in the Serbian-held outskirts of Sarajevo. At
a raodblock, th trio were stopped by a unit of the Bosnian army defending 
Sarajevo.

  Almost immediately, Herak began telling investigators of his gruesome
experiences as a Serbian fighter, including one incident in which he used a
six-inch hunting knife to cut the throats of three captured Muslim men who
were Bosnian soldiers.

  Until he fled Sarajevo in May and joined the "Serbian volunters" who have 
been drafted as auxiliaries to the regular military forces besieging Sarajevo,
Herak had a menial job at a Sarajevo textile company.

  Now, under Article 41 of the old Yugoslav criminal code, he faces the firing
squad for offences including genocide, rape and looting. His trial this month
could make him the first person executed legally for crimes committed in 
Europe's most brutal conflict since 1945.

  The indictment lists 29 individual murders between June and October, 
including eight rape-murders of Muslim women held prisoner in an abandoned
motel and cafe outside Vogosca, seven miles north of Sarajevo, where Herak 
says he and other Serbian fighters were enocuraged to rape women and then kill
them. The indictment also covers the killings of at least 220 othe Muslim
civilians, many of them women and children, in which Herak has confessed to
being a witness or taking part.

  His account offers new insights into the ways tens of thousands of civilian
victims of the war have died, most in towns and villages where there have been
no independent witnesses.

  In addition to the Ahatovici incident - in which four children under 12, two
elderly women and four men were killed - Herak described two mass murders of
Muslims by Serbian forces in the Sarajevo area.

  In the first, in June, Herak said he watched a Serbian unit called the
"special investigation group" machine-gunning 120 men, women and children in a
field outside Vogosca. Dump trucks were used to transport their bodies to
scrubland at Rajlovac, near Sarajevo, where the bodies were piled in an open
pit, doused with petrol and set alight.

  In another incident, in July, Herak saw 30 men from Donja Bioca, a Muslim
village near Vogosca, shot and incinerated in a furnace at a steal plant at
nearby Ilijas. He says some of the men were still alive when they were thrown
into the furnace.

  He also desrcibes seeing the bodies of 60 Muslim men who he says were used 
as a "human shield" when Bosnian forces were trying to drive Serbian forces
off Zuc Mountain, outside Vogosca, in August.

  Herak also recounts being taken to a farm outside Vogosca in ealy June. A
65-year old Serbian volunteer showed him and three other young Serbs how to
wrestle pigs to the ground, hold their heads back by their ears and cut their
throats. Days later, Herak used "this skill" to cut the throats of three
Muslim captives.

  Herak's story is the first account given by a perpetrator to outsiders of
how the Serbian nationalist forces have carried out "ethnic cleansing". Herak,
his head shaven by his captors, frequently used the Serbo-Croatian word 
ciscenje, meaning cleansing, to describe his activities as a Serbian fighter,
for which he was paid the equivalent of #4 a month.

  Referring to the killing of the Muslim family at Ahatovici, for instance, he
says Serbian commanders called the Serbian operation in the village ciscenje
prostora, or the cleansing of the region, and had ordered the Serbian fighters
to leave nobody alive.

  "We were told that Ahatovici must be a cleansed Serbian territory, that it 
was a strategic place between Ilidza and Rajlovac, and that all the Muslims
there must be killed. We were told that no one must escape, and that all the
houses must be burned, so that if anybody did survive, they would have nowhere
left to return to. It was an order, and I simply did what I was told."


                  ******************************************************
                    *                                                    *
                    *   SLAUGHTER IN THE NAME OF SERBIA    (part two...) *
                    *                                                    *
                    *    [from the GUARDIAN, Thursday, 03-12-1992]       *
                    *                                                    *
                    ******************************************************

  Throughout much of his account Herak appeared almost nonchalant. He 
described details of the killings without any apparent emotion, and showed 
remorse only when asked to express his feelings. He appeared confused, saying
at one point that "if there was a God, I would not have been caught", and at
others that he was haunted by the recurring images of the people he had killed.
"All these things have fried my conscience."

  But even the threat of execution did not seem to hold his attention for long.
"I am sure that I am guilty, and even if I am sorry, I will be executed. they 
will stand me in front of a wall and shoot me."

  Looking pallid, with sunken eyes and with deeply bitten fingernails, Harak
is haunted at night by the recollection of some of his victims, in particular
the three Muslim men whose throats he cut.

  "I have pictures in my mind of many things I did, and they return every
night. I sleep, I wake up in a sweat, I sleep again, I wake up and smoke, and
Osman is always there. I have dreamed at least 10 times of Osman saying:
`Please don't kill me. I have a wife and two small children.'"

  But mostly he recounts events in a matter-of-fact manner with a keen atten-
tion to detail. As he shifts between one killing and another, and between 
rapes, he names many of his victims, describes where they were killed, what
they were wearing, and what they said just before they died.
  
 In hours of talking he never changed a detail, and only fell silent when
pressed for his feelings. Asked repeatedly if he had been put under pressure
to talk, or promised a lighter sentence or relief from harsh treatment for 
confessing, he said he had not. However, he appeared deeply frightened and 
asked after one session if a visitor would seek the prison governor's assu-
rance that the guards, mostly Muslims, would not beat him once he had finished
telling his story. The governor, Besim Muderizovic, gave assurances he would
not be harmed.

  According to investigators, much of what Herak has told them has been echoed
by the Serbian couple with him when he was arrested.

  Sreten Damjovanic, 31, is said to have been with Harak at many of the
killings. After investigators confronted him with statements by Herak and
Damjovanic's wife, Nada, 46, implicating him in the Ahatovici killings, he
allegedly replied: "Is that what he said? If you put me in a cell with him,
I'll kill him."

  Among those who believe Herak, is his father Stretko Herak, a welding 
technician, one of 50,000 Serbs who stayed in Sarajevo. Referring to a tape-
recorded confession by his son played on Sarajevo television last week, he
said: "I could see that he was frightened, but I believe he was telling the 
truth. Now I am ashamed to look people in the face because my son has thrown
dirt on his family."

  His son had a history of poor grades in school, erratic behaviour as a
conscript in the Yugoslav navy, and heavy drinking accompanied by threats of
physical harm to his father who says: "I would be happier if he had simply
killed me and gone to prison for it. Now, I am alive and tortured by what my
boy had done to innocent people."

  The Pofalici neighbourhood of Sarajevo where Borislav Herak grew up is a
mixed community of Serbs, Croats and Muslims. Residents say there have never
been nationalist frictions. During two interviews at the prison, the younger
herak spoke warmly of Muslims, in particular of Jonkovic, his brothe-in-law,
whom he described as exceptionally kind and a good husband to his sister.

  Speaking of the couple's daughter, Indijana, who like tens of thousands of
people in Sarajevo, has a mixture of Serb, Muslim and Croat forebears, he 
says: "I love her more than anything else in my life."

  Herak had had nothing but good relations with Muslim neighbours in Pofalici,
who have invited the Herak family into their homes for Bajram, the principal
Muslim festival, and had been invited each year into the Herak home to 
celebrate the Serbian Orthodox Christmas. "They helped me, Muslims. They were
very good to as people. Everywhere I went, Muslims helped me. They are a very
correct people."

  But Herak says that after he went to the bridge across the Miljacka River in
late May, carrying a loaf of bread as a pre-arranged signal to Serbian fighters
waiting for him on the othere side, he began to get a different view of Muslims
 .

  From Serbian radio and television and in gatherings with other Serbian 
fighters, particularly the older generation steeped in Serbian Folklore going
back to Serbian defeats by the Ottoman Turks in the Middle Ages, he said he 
learned that Muslims posed a threat to Serbs.

  Serbian political leaders and commanders told fighters that Muslims, who 
accounted for 44 per cent of Bosnia's pre-war population of 4.4 million, were
planning to declare "an Islamic republic" in Bosnia, which became independent
of Yugoslavia under a Muslim-led government in April, just as the Sarajevo
siege began.

  According to these accounts, Herak says, Muslims would also require Serbian
children to wear Muslim clothing. "We were told that we would have to cleanse
our whole population of Muslims. That's what we have been told. That's why it
has been necessary to do all this."

  The young fighter was also motivated by the urge to have things he never had
before the war, including women, and goods like television sets and videos 
Serbian fighters were encouraged to loot from Muslims' homes.

  Herak says the Muslims did not plead for their lives. The only exception was
Osman, one of the three men whose throats he cut with his hunting knife. The
other Muslim soldiers, Ahmed and Ziad, said nothing as they were tackled to the
ground and had their feet held byt other fighters while Herak cut their throats
 .

  "It was just a short cut, and they were dead immediately, just like the pigs,
"
Herak says, demonstrating his technique in the prison office by kneeling on one
knee, pulling his right hand back in a replay of the movement needed to expose
his victims' necks, and making a quick, imaginary cut with his left hand.

  "But Osman was different. He pleaded for his life at the very last moment. Bu
t
it made no difference. He was dead in two seconds."

  Often Herak's account goes back to the Sonja cafe, a motel and restaurant 
complex outside Vogosca on the main road north from Sarajevo to Zagreb, the
Croatian capital. A prison for Muslim women was established in its rooms
"ruled" by a Serbian fighter named Miro Vukovic who established "a system"
for the Serbian fighters raping and killing the women.

  "It was always the same," Herak says, describing how he and his companions
were encouraged to go to the motel by Serbian commanders who told them that
raping Muslim women was "good for raising the fighter's morale."

  Herak identifies the women he had attacked - Emina, Sabina, Amela and Fatima
among others, the youngest of them teenagers, the eldest about 35 - and says
Vukovic, the "prison commander", had told them: "You can do with the women
what you like. You can take them away from here - we don't have enough food for
them anyway - and don't bring them back."

  According to Herak, this was understood to mean that the women should be 
killed. He describes how he and a companion attacked fatima, whom he described
as "a nice woman, about 30 years old", in a room at the motel, and then took
her at gunpoint in their car to Zuc Mountain.

  "We stopped by a small bridge, and I told her to get out. She walked about 
three metres away from the car, with her back to me, and I just shot her, I 
think in the upper back or the back of the head. I went to her, just to be 
sure that she was dead."

  He says he went to the motel once every three of four days, and that 
although Serbian fighters routinely took the women they raped away and killed
them, there were always more women arriving. "It was never a problem. You just 
picked up a key and went to a room."

  Herak's account of the rapes was among the tape-recorded sequences shown on
Sarjevo television. His father, showing visitors through his son's room at the
family home on Drinska Street in Sarajevo, seemed to shift from grief to some-
thing closer to disgust as he opened cupboards and showd piles of pornographic
magazines and empty liquor bottles.

  "I told Boro many times, `Never pick up a gun', but he didn't listen. He 
just said, "That's okay, old man, you just stay here and wait for the Serbian
shells to kill you.'"

Sincerly ,

Ahmed Barrada

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ahmed Barrada
ALB24A , 105B / LR24A
Infrastructure Group / AEC
Intergraph Corp
Huntsville , AL 35894-0001 , USA

Internet: barrada@karam.b24a.ingr.com

205 / 730-8150 w , 205 / 730-8743 f
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