Dusan Zurovac, defence witness of Radovan Karadzic

Dusan Zurovac, former commander of one of the companies in the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps contends that his unit didn’t open fire on civilians in Sarajevo; they only defended their positions against BH Army attacks. The prosecution claims that snipers from the positions held by the witness’s company on Hrasno Brdo wounded Nafa Taric and her daughter Elma in September 1993 in Ivana Krndelja Street. According to the prosecution, in July 1994, a sniper operating from these positions injured 13-year old Seid Selak. He was hit in the stomach while he was window shopping with his mother and sister in Miljenka Cvitkovica Street.

In his replies to Radovan Karadzic, Zurovac specifically claimed that those locations were not visible from the positions held by his unit. The accused showed photos purportedly confirming the claim. Zurovac then argued that no honorable fighter ‘would allow himself to fire at women and children because soldiers have families too’. Zurovac also contended that his soldiers couldn’t have seen from the distance whether the woman and the child were Muslim and would consequently have not fired on them. Finally, the witness said that opening sniper fire from that part of the city was dangerous: fighters from his unit would have had to climb on the house roofs and that would have been ‘very dangerous’ and would have resulted in ‘certain death’.

The witness tried to turn the picture of the siege of Sarajevo upside down, denying all the currently adjudicated facts on the crimes perpetrated in its course. First, the witness claimed that the BH Army – not the VRS – used excessive force and killed civilians. According to the witness, the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps only ‘responded to provocations’ carried out by a force that had more personnel and weapons. The witness said that the ‘enemy’ shelled the positions held by his company indiscriminately and ‘razed houses to the ground’. According to Zurovac, the BH Army had ‘an incredible quantity of snipers’, including people who competed in shooting events before the war. During the war, 100 members of his platoon, 20 civilians from Hrasno Brdo and even a cow were killed by snipers, the witness said. In a bid to prove that the Bosnian Serb army didn’t open fire at civilian areas, Zurovac said that Sarajevo looked the same before and after the fighting began, apart from some houses along the confrontation lines that had been destroyed.

In the cross-examination, the witness went a step further, claiming that the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps didn’t hold the city under siege. As he said, there was an ‘internal siege’ put up by the BH Army; the goal was to rob the population. Prosecutor Kimberly West showed several VRS documents stating that the enemy ‘is trying to break through the siege’. Unperturbed, Zurovac confirmed at least five times that the enemy indeed was trying to break through the siege, never realizing that he was contradicting his own claim that there was no siege. A VRS document from April 1994 was admitted into evidence; the document states that wire and concrete fences should be placed around Sarajevo to ‘amplify the effect of the siege, as if they were in a prison camp’.

Zurovac claimed there were no snipers in his company. However, the documents presented by the prosecutor showed that a number of Zurovac’s fellow fighters had taken their sniper rifles with them when they deserted. The witness didn’t know how they had gotten hold of them. Zurovac claimed that Serb soldiers were simply doing everything they could to defend their ‘houses, icons and votive candles’. At the same time, the witness didn’t deny the contents of the document that show that soldiers were going AWOL on a daily basis. Karadzic’s trial continues tomorrow.

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