The witness Elvedin Pasic, who was 14 at the time the armed Serb units and Serbs from neighbouring settlements attacked his village Hrvacani near the northern town of Prnjavor, today testified in the English language about the persecution of local Muslims and about the deterioration of relations among ethnic communities as soon local Serbs had begun supplying themselves with arms in 1992.
He said that the shelling of his village had started on the second day of the Bayram religious festivity and that he and his family had hidden in the cellar of their house. They had left the village the following day and tried to find rescue in nearby villages but they had been unwelcome everywhere. After that they came back to Hrvacani where they found burnt houses and corpses of elderly villagers who had not wanted to leave their homes during the attacks.
I can remember the stench of the burnt village, the witness told the UN tribunal in The Hague.
Mladic is charged with genocide for his role in the siege of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo and for orchestrating the killing of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 as well as with other war crimes.
The trial of this 70-year-old Serbian general commenced on 16 May with the opening remarks of the prosecution, and the testimony of the first witness was postponed for today after the defence team complained about not receiving the evidence material from the prosecution on time.
Mladic was arrested in Serbia in May 2011 after being on the run for years.