Dražen Erdemović

Dražen Erdemović was born in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia to a Croat mother and a Serb father.[1][2][3] In 1990 aged 18 he began his mandatory military service in the Yugoslav National Army which at the time was of multiethnic composition. In 1992 he left the Army to serve with the Croatian Defense Council's police force. He didn't stay for long. He appears to have been an accidental and unwilling soldier, coming from a pacifist, cosmopolitan background and opposed the war now embroiling his country. He sought work as a locksmith, married a young Serbian woman, and together they drifted around Serbia seeking work and a peaceful place for a multiethnic family to settle. In 1994 with his wife pregnant, and savings depleted Dražen turned to one of the few realistic sources of steady employment and enlisted in the Bosnian Serb army of Radovan Karadzic's self-proclaimed "Republika Srpska," the Serb enclave within Bosnia. He requested to serve in the 10th Sabotage Detachment as it was not a combat unit. Erdemović's wife bore a son, money came in, and his military duties were not too onerous.

In July 1995, Erdemović and his unit were sent to Branjevo military farm in the village of Pilica, north of Zvornik. After the VRS forces took over Srebrenica on 11 July, the Serbs began to send male Bosniaks to various locations for execution.

One of those places was the farm in Pilica, 15 kilometers from the border with Serbia, where Erdemović and the 10th Sabotage Detachment were tasked by General Ratko Mladić to execute about 1,200 Bosniak men and boys between the ages of approximately 17 and 60 years, who had surrendered to the members of the Bosnian Serb police or army near Srebrenica. On 16 July, the prisoners were bused to the farm and gunned down in groups of ten. The mission was not disclosed to the soldiers until the buses pulled up. Erdemović was incredulous and allegedly resisted the order, but was then told that he either shot them, or hand his gun to another, and join those to be killed. Faced with such a choice, Erdemović reluctantly agreed to obey the order. He made a further effort to be merciful when he spotted an elderly man he recognised who had helped save the lives or Serbs on a previous occasion, but his commander denied this appeal. Erdemović gave up resisting, and unwillingly took part in the slaughter. He later told journalists that he tried to kill as few people as possible, but the buses kept leaving and returning with more victims, and by the end of the day some 1,200 civilians had been slaughtered. Erdemović estimated that his bullets killed between 70 and 80 people. After the murders were over the victims were buried in mass graves.

After the massacre, Erdemović returned home, but reportedly felt guilt-ridden over the crimes he had committed. Fellow soldiers of the 10th Sabotage put pressure on him not to say anything, including a Serbian soldier, Stanko Savanović. One evening, while meeting in an undisclosed bar, Savanović shot Erdemović, wounding him badly in the torso. In November 1995 the Dayton Accords brought an end to the war and Dražen Erdemović was demobilized, but his personal war was not over. Erdemović told his story to a journalist from the French newspaper Le Figaro, and told her he wanted to go to The Hague and tell his story there. He did not have long to wait, and at The Hague he reiterated his confession. There was some reluctance at The Hague to act on this - the Tribunal had been established to bring justice to high-ranking perpetrators, and a conscience-stricken 25 year old foot soldier did not quite fit the remit. However, in May 1996 Dražen Erdemović was charged with one count of crimes against humanity and one count of war crimes. In November, after delays - due to Erdemović's mental and emotional state - he pled guilty to the first charge, but reiterated his plea that he participated in the massacre only to save his own life.

This Erdemović case was significant in the Tribunal being it was the first application of the defence of duress, claiming that his life had been threatened and that he had no choice. It was found that it did not absolve him of guilt, but could be a mitigating factor in his sentencing. On 29 November 1996, Erdemović was sentenced to ten years in prison, convicted of murder as a crime against humanity. He was the first person to enter a guilty plea at the Tribunal, He was the only member of the 10th Sabotage Detachment to actually be tried for the war crimes, while the rest remained on the Tribunal's most wanted list.

Erdemović appealed and his sentence was later reduced by ICTY to five years in 1998, accepting that he committed the offences under threat of death had he disobeyed the order. Credit was given for time served since 28 March 1996. On 13 August 1999, he was granted early release. Upon serving his sentence in a Norwegian prison, Erdemović entered the Tribunal Court's witness protection program and testified at the trial of Slobodan Milošević.

I wish to say that I feel sorry for all the victims, not only for the ones who were killed then at that farm, I feel sorry for all the victims in the former Bosnia and Herzegovina regardless of their nationality. I have lost many very good friends of all nationalities only because of that war, and I am convinced that all of them, all of my friends, were not in favour of a war. I am convinced of that. But simply they had no other choice. This war came and there was no way out. The same happened to me. Because of my case, because of everything that happened, I of my own will, without being either arrested and interrogated or put under pressure, admitted even before I was arrested in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, I admitted to what I did to this journalist and I told her at that time that I wanted to go to the International Tribunal, that I wanted to help the International Tribunal understand what happened to ordinary people like myself in Yugoslavia... in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia I admitted to what I did before the authorities, judicial authorities, and the authorities of the Ministry of the Interior, like I did here. My lawyer, when he first arrived here, he told me, "Dražen, can you change your mind, your decision? I do not know what can happen. I do not know what will happen." I told him because of those victims, because of my consciousness, because of my life, because of my child and my wife, I cannot change what I said to this journalist and what I said in Novi Sad, because of the peace of my mind, my soul, my honesty, because of the victims and war and because of everything. Although I knew that my family, my parents, my brother, my sister, would have problems because of that, I did not want to change it. Because of everything that happened I feel terribly sorry, but I could not do anything. When I could do something, I did it.[4]

The story of Erdemovic's trial in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia forms the basis of the 2005 play A Patch of Earth, written by Kitty Felde and collected in the anthology The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).

Germinal Civikov - Srebrenica. Der Kronzeuge, Promedia Verlag, Vienna. 2009, ISBN 978-3-85371-292-4

• ICTY case information sheet
• Trial Watch : Drazen Erdemovic