Hague Archives Show Bosnian Croat Officers’ Links to Executions, Rapes

The detainees were tied together with wire and made to stand in a line, and then their captors started to execute them with shots in the back.

"HVO [Croatian Defence Council] soldiers killed one man at a time, killed the people who were lined up with us. If someone fell to the ground, the wire around our neck would tighten and we would all fall down. We could not remain standing because we could not breathe," a protected witness identified only as BL told the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY in The Hague.

Witness BL was testifying at the ICTY's trial of six wartime Bosnian Croat political and military officials from the self-proclaimed Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia statelet, whose military force was the Croatian Defence Council, the HVO. The officials - Jadranko Prlic, Slobodan Praljak, Bruno Stojic, Milivoj Petkovic, Valentin Coric and Berislav Pusic - were all found guilty in 2017 of crimes against humanity and other wartime crimes against Bosniaks.

The verdict, which was handed down three years ago, on November 29, 2017, determined that Praljak was informed about the fact that members of the HVO were relocating and detaining Bosniak civilians in Prozor-Rama in the period from July to August 1993. Praljak took poison as his verdict was being read and died shortly afterwards.

The ICTY also established that Petkovic led military operations in the Prozor-Rama municipality in April and June 1993, while Coric was responsible for the robbery and destruction in Prozor-Rama in October 1992.

The verdict said that 11 prisoners were killed at the Crni Vrh execution site on July 31, 1993, but it could not determine with certainty whether ten others whose bodies were also found there were killed the same...