Film of Serb Killer on RFE/RL Website
(Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro / Prague, Czech Republic–June 3, 2005) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has obtained a videoclip showing a Serb paramilitary police commander giving instructions to kill Bosnian captives in western Bosnia in 1995. The one-minute video was made by the Serb unit as a record of its atrocities, and is the property of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center, which has given RFE/RL’s South Slavic & Albanian Language Service (SSALS) exclusive rights to place the film on the RFE/RL website and use it in programming. The video clip can be viewed, and an article and audio transcript can be read, on the SSALS website.
In a June 2 broadcast, SSALS aired audio of the videoclip, showing members of the infamous Serb “Scorpion” special unit discussing over a radio phone what to do with five captured Bosnian soldiers. The unit’s commander, Milorad “Legija” Ulemek, is currently standing trial on charges of masterminding the 2003 assassination of prime minister Zoran Djindic. In the videoclip, a man appearing to be Ulemek is giving orders to keep alive one captive and kill the other four, saying: “We need only one. Do it in a way to look as if they were trying to escape.”
The RFE/RL program was a second shock to Serb audiences, coming a day after a film on Serb television showed a Scorpion unit at Srebrenica in July 1995 loading six tortured Bosnian captives onto a truck and driving them to a place of execution. The film showed the captives being shot, as well as the faces of their killers. It was part of the evidence at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague and was brought to Belgrade by Hague tribunal Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte. RFE/RL broadcast audio of the tape, as well as the news that Serb authorities had arrested ten of the alleged killers depicted in the film within 24 hours of its viewing there and a report on the passionate public debate that has now broken out in Serbia about responsibility for the war crimes of the 1990s.
RFE/RL Coordinator of Balkan Analysis Patrick Moore said “the film constitutes a smoking gun, showing irrefutably that Serbian paramilitary police, taking orders from the Serbian Interior Ministry, were engaged in the massacre on Bosnian territory.” He said it removes all deniability from Serb authorities who had claimed that Bosnian warlords were responsible for the Srebrenica massacre and other atrocities, in which thousands of Bosnians were killed.
RFE/RL’s South Slavic and Albanian Languages Service (SSALS) broadcasts nearly 13 hours of programming a day to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Kosovo and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, produced in Prague and in the service’s bureaus in Belgrade, Banja Luka, Podgorica, Pristina, Sarajevo and Skopje and transmitted to listeners via satellite and shortwave signals and AM and FM frequencies provided by local affiliate stations. SSALS programming is also available via the Internet, at www.rferl.org and at the service’s websites www.slobodnaevropa.org, www.europaelire.org and www.makdenes.org.