WITNESS: BOSNIAN SERB GEN. MLADIC ORDERED KILLING IN SREBRENICA

THE HAGUE/ZAGREB, Oct 2 (Hina) - A prosecutorial witness in the trial of Bosnian Serb officers before the Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal said on Thursday that thousands of Bosnian Muslims were killed in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica in summer 1995 according to the order of the then chief commander of the Army of Republic of Srpska, General Ratko Mladic. #L# The witness Dragan Obrenovic, who earlier pleaded guilty for crimes he was charged with by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), on Thursday took the witness stand in the trial of the two Bosnian Serb officers indicted for genocide which Serb forces committed when they overran the UN-designated safe haven of Srebrenica in July 1995. The witness Obrenovic, who was the commander of the Zvornik Brigade within Bosnian Serb forces, pleaded guilty for his participation in the execution of over 7,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica when the Serb forces entered that Muslim-populated town on 11 July 1995. Under the plea agreement he reached with the ICTY Prosecution, Obrenovic is testifying in the trial of two Bosnia-Serb high ranking officers: Vidoje Blagojevic, charged with complicity in the Srebrenica genocide, and Dragan Jokic, charged with crimes against humanity. Obrenovic stated that everybody knew at the time that the chief commander Ratko Mladic had personally ordered the killing of Muslim prisoners of war. The success of prosecutors in the Blagojevic/Jokic trial in proving that genocide against Srebrenica citizens was ordered by the army leadership within the criminal plan to ethnically cleanse parts of Bosnia for the purpose of creating a Greater Serbia, will contribute to the ICTY Prosecution's efforts to prove that Slobodan Milosevic was responsible for genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. (hina) ms sb