Prosecution witness claims he replaced Drago Nikolic at the forward command post of the Zvornik Brigade on 13 July 1995. Drago Nikolic’s defense denies this, contesting the Statement of Facts provided by Dragan Obrenovic where he says that he was informed by Drago Nikolic late in the evening of 13 July 1995 that he had to go back to Zvornik urgently to organize the reception of “an enormous number of captured Muslims”


A new prosecution witness took the stand today at the trial of seven Bosnian Serb military and police officers charged with crimes committed in Srebrenica and Zepa. He claims that he took over as the duty officer from the accused Drago Nikolic, the then Zvornik Brigade security chief, at the forward command post (IKM) in Kitovnice, near Zvornik, in the evening of 13 July 1995.

At that time Mihajlo Galic was the assistant for personnel and recruitment in the Zvornik Brigade Staff. Dragan Obrenovic, the Chief of Staff, was his immediate superior. Obrenovic was also indicted for the crimes in Srebrenica, but he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. His duty at the IKM was supposed to begin on 14 July 1995 in the morning, Galic said, but a courier woke him up in the evening of 13 July 1995 with an order to go to Kitovnice and take over as the duty officer. A driver took him to the IKM in an official vehicle. He arrived there at around 11 pm.

Galic claims that he didn’t see Nikolic there. It was only the following morning that he wrote a note in the duty officer log book that he “took over as the duty officer” from Nikolic. The prosecution presented parts of the log book to the witness who recognized his handwriting confirming that he personally wrote down the entries quoted to him.

Nikolic’s defense argues that not only was Galic not the duty officer at the Kitovnice IKM in the evening of 13 July 1995, but that in fact he never was the duty officer there. The argument is based on the differences between the statements given to the investigators in 2001 and in 2002 and on the statements given by the defense witnesses. The defense counsel indicated that he would confront the witness with those statements tomorrow.

The witness dismissed the allegations of Nikolic’s defense counsel arguing that he would not have remember many of the things if “both the defense counsel and the investigators” had not showed him some documents to jog his memory. The defense however insisted on its argument claiming that the documents were forgeries.

By cross-examining Mihajlo Galic in this manner, the defense is actually trying to contest the Statement of Facts signed by Dragan Obrenovic, where he says that Drago Nikolic telephoned him in the evening of 13 July from the forward command post asking him to send a replacement as he had to go to Zvornik urgently to make preparations for the reception of “an enormous number of Muslim captives”. Obrenovic’s statement specified that Nikolic was given this task by the accused Vujadin Popovic, the Drina Corps security chief.

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