"Each of us has a greater or lesser amount of evil within us, and it depends on circumstances whether that evil will surface."
"There are very few people in the world, now and always, who have the character and moral strength to resist when the spiral of horror and madness begins," is the impression of Ivica Đikić, a Croatian journalist and author of the documentary novel about the Srebrenica genocide, "Bear".
Đikić spent years researching those who directly participated in massacre of more than 8.000 Bosniak young men and boys and were later convicted of war crimes and genocide committed in July 1995.
In addition to Ratko Mladić, the wartime commander of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), and the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić, sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide and crimes in Srebrenica, before international and domestic courts, approximately 50 people were sentenced to more than 700 years in prison.
Among convicts for genocide are generals Radislav Krstić, Deputy Commander of the Drina Corps of the VRS, Zdravko Tolimir, Mladić's assistant and Chief of the VRS General Staff for Security, subordinate to him Ljubisa Beara, Chief of Security of the VRS Main Staff, as well as Vujadin Popovic, Chief of Security of the VRS Drina Corps.
By comparing the careers of the convicted officers, it can be determined with certainty that during the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), during the 1980s and early 1990s, they mostly held positions in the same military areas as Mladić.
Who were the convicted and what were their roles in July 1995?
Ivica Đikić did not choose Beara as the main character of the documentary novel about Srebrenica by chance, although all the convicted are linked by the fact that before the war, the former common state had educated and highly-positioned officers of the Yugoslav People's Army, mostly from intelligence and security circles.
Almost every one of them, during their career in the JNA, which as a rule entailed moving and living in various cities of the former Yugoslavia, served in Knin, Croatia, at the dawn of the wars of the 1990s.
In the summer of 1991, when interethnic conflicts began in Croatia, Ratko Mladić was at the head of the Knin Corps of the JNA, and this is where the paths of these officers crossed.
The leaders of the JNA, which inherited the ideas of anti-fascism and brotherhood and unity of the Yugoslav peoples, at that time became "Serbian officers".
"According to doctrine, people from the intelligence and security department were tasked with carrying out executions, that's in their job description in every army, and in the JNA it was specifically prescribed."
"However, Beara is a bit of a specific case, these others are one-dimensional people, nationally aware already at the beginning of the war, and he joined that train late," says Đikić.
During interviews with Hague investigators in 2000, Radislav Krstić claimed that all responsibility for the crimes in Srebrenica lay with him. Young man and the "Knin clan" elder who have followed him since 1991.
Ljubiša Beara, operative
Đikić describes Beara as a likeable careerist who gradually advanced to the very top of Yugoslav military security.
Although his job was to be an invisible operative and a cold-blooded shadowy figure, which would be particularly confirmed during the 1995 Srebrenica offensive, Beara was a welcome neighbor even as head of security for the Military-Naval District in the Croatian port of Split before the war.
He shared his last name with his cousin, the famous goalkeeper of the Split football club Hajduk Vladimir Bear, and many people enjoyed hanging out with him.
However, when he was given the task of organizing the transport of thousands of Bosniak prisoners, the execution, burial and relocation of their remains after the capture of Srebrenica, he carried it out "like any other job," says Đikić.
"From his communication with other officers, when he is looking for people to kill, buses, fuel, it is clear that he sees it all as a job, and not as some emotional revenge for the 'rebellion against the dahi', as Mladić used to say."
"It couldn't have been done any other way."
In just a few days, the operation was completed, thanks to Beara.
"If we ignore the moral aspect, from a technical point of view it was very complicated - hundreds of buses in operation that needed to be found, people to guard the prisoners, dozens of excavators to dig graves, utility workers, drivers...
"It's like organizing some kind of harvest, only this time it's about people," Đikić describes.
Despite evidence and witnesses, until his death in 2017, Beara's defense before the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague was based on the claim that he was not in Srebrenica during those days, but that on July 14th celebrated his 56th birthday with friends in Belgrade.
Even after the final verdict, Beara did not make any statements, just as he did not make any statements after the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995 and his departure to The Hague in 2004.
"He lives a self-effacing life as a pensioner in Belgrade, moving around in a circle of family friends, having no contact with his war comrades, neither with Tolimir nor with Mladic during that period," says Đikić.
He probably hoped that he would not be accused and that he would be found guilty, only the one who gave the order, not the one who did his job, he says.
"He lived in the belief that his guilt didn't matter, and he had it all figured out."
"Mladić gave the order, but everything after that was planned by Beara - and in which schools people would be detained, where they would be killed, he planned it all on the fly, with the help of Vujadin Popović," Đikić emphasizes.
Radislav Krstić, the first person convicted of genocide
Radislav Krstić, former VRS general, the first time is in November 2024 in a letter He acknowledged to the United Nations the genocide against Bosniaks in Srebrenica, for which he was the first to be convicted before the Hague Tribunal.
After 26 years in prison, he requested release but was denied, even though he had served two-thirds of his sentence.
Krstic has long denied guilt, but over the past three years he has repeatedly said that he is guilty and that he "bears great personal responsibility for the terrible crimes committed during and after the fall of Srebrenica."
Radislav Krstić, born in 1948, after graduating from the Yugoslav People's Army military school, was assigned to the Pristina Corps of the JNA, where, in early 1991, Ratko Mladić was also assigned.
In 1992, he joined the Army of Republika Srpska.
In early July 1995, as a major general, he served as Chief of Staff and Deputy Commander of the Drina Corps, responsible, among other things, for the area around Srebrenica.
He was arrested on December 2, 1998, and transferred to The Hague the very next day.
He was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war in 2001. 46 years in prison.
After an appeal in 2004, the verdict was overturned, and he was sentenced to 35 years in prison for aiding and abetting genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws or customs of war.
It was the first final verdict in which the Tribunal in The Hague found that the Army of Republika Srpska committed genocide in Srebrenica.
He was held in various detention units.
He was injured in a fight in Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire in 2010 when he was attacked by three Muslim prisoners.
From there he was transferred to a prison in Poland in 2014, and is now in a UN detention unit in The Hague.
Zdravko Tolimir, Mladic's 'right-hand man'
The former general and Chief of the VRS General Security Staff was sentenced to life imprisonment for the genocide committed in Srebrenica by the Hague Tribunal.
He was arrested in Serbia in 2007.
At the trial, it was established that he was Mladić's "right-hand man".
"The accused not only had knowledge of the genocidal intentions of others, but he had them himself."
"Therefore, he is responsible for the crime of genocide," the judge said. Kristof Flyge.
After the verdict was pronounced, Tolimir stood up, took off his glasses, and crossed himself three times, but showed no emotion when it was announced that he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
"I want this process to end in accordance with God's will," he said previously.
He is accused of knowingly participating in the forcible expulsion of Bosniaks from the enclaves of Srebrenica and Žepa, knowing that "individual killings would occur as a result of a joint criminal enterprise."
"His men... were at the sites of detention, execution and burial, ensuring that the murderous operation carried out its evil work until the last bullet was fired and the last body buried," it said. prosecution.
He was also tried for the cruel and inhumane treatment of Bosniak civilians who were detained in Bratunac and Zvornik, as well as for the destruction and theft of Bosniak property.
He is accused of helping to incapacitate UN troops during the VRS attack on Srebrenica by lying to UNPROFOR, the United Nations contingent in Bosnia at the time.
Tolimir was born in November 1948 in Glamoč, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
After graduating from high military schools in Yugoslavia, he, like Mladić, served in Macedonia.
Like Beara, he served in Split, where he was caught up in the outbreak of war and the collapse of the former common state.
He met Mladić again in Knin, and together with him he came to Bosnia, where in 1993 he was appointed assistant commander for intelligence and security affairs of the VRS Main Staff.
After the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, he served as Bosnia's military representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
From November 1996 to January 1997, he was an advisor to Biljana Plavšić, former president of Republika Srpska, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison in The Hague for persecutions and crimes against humanity.
In February 2005, the Hague Tribunal indicted him for war crimes.
He passed away in prison in 2016.
Vujadin Popović, Beara's associate
The Chief of Security of the VRS Drina Corps was convicted along with Beara sentenced to life in prison for Srebrenica massacre before the Tribunal in The Hague in 2015.
He was born in 1957 in Šekovići, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in the early XNUMXs he served in the security service of the Knin Corps of the JNA, where Tolimir and Beara were his superiors, and he also knew Mladić.
In The Hague he declared that not guilty as charged for crimes committed since the entry of paramilitaries and VRS forces into the enclaves of Srebrenica and Žepa.
However, prosecutors argued during the trial that the "totality of the evidence" confirmed the statements of key witnesses that Popović was at the crime scenes around Zvornik and that he organized and carried out the executions.
As evidence, among other things, they cited that, according to secretly wiretapped conversations, Popović on July 16, 1995, requested 500 liters of fuel "for the work he was doing in Pilica", threatening that otherwise, that "job" stop.
The indictment alleges that in the period from August 1 to November 1, 1995, members of the army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republika Srpska, including Popović, participated in organized and comprehensive efforts to cover up the executions by exhuming bodies from primary graves and reburial them in secondary graves.
He is serving his sentence in a German prison, and he has gained condition for mitigation of sentence or pardon, after he surrendered to The Hague in 2005.
However, the court rejected the request for early release in June 2025.
Dražen Erdemović, the first to admit crimes in Srebrenica
Significantly lower in the hierarchy was Dražen Erdemović, a soldier of the 10th Sabotage Detachment of the VRS.
However, he was the first to plead guilty to the crimes in Srebrenica in The Hague in 1996.
He admitted that after VRS forces captured Srebrenica in July 1995, participated in the execution of hundreds of unarmed Bosnian Muslims on the Pilice farm near Zvornik.
According to the indictment, He personally killed 70 people.
He later testified in other trials and provided significant and detailed evidence of the crimes committed, for which he was convicted. to five years in prison.
"In the 10th Sabotage Squad, eight of them killed 800-900 people in a few hours. Among them were truly psychopathic killers, who were mentally 'born killers'."
"But Beara and the others were not psychopaths, they consciously agreed to do evil out of their own motive, whether to be rewarded or out of fear of punishment," says Đikić, based on numerous conversations with those who knew them.
If Mladić displayed a psychopathic trait in Srebrenica - hatred and a desire for "revenge on the Turks", as he derogatorily called Bosniaks, this was not the case with Beara, he adds.
Mladić and Karadžić: Opposite characters
Speaking before the Assembly of the Serb People in Bosnia in May 1992, when he was appointed to head the VRS with the rank of general, Mladić also famously warned the deputies that the forcible separation of Serbs from Muslims and Croats, as a proclaimed war goal, would constitute "genocide."
"We cannot cleanse, nor can we have a sieve to sift only so that the Serbs remain or the Serbs perish, and the rest leave... Well, that's... that won't...
"I don't know how Mr. (Radovan) Karadzic and Mr. (Momčilo) Krajišnik will explain it to the world. This, people, is genocide," said Mladić.
However, three years later, units under his command would carry out a massacre of around 8.000 Bosniak men, which international courts determined was genocide.
John Simpson, an experienced BBC journalist who reported from Bosnia during the war, said that Mladić scared him, but that Karadžić was a completely different character.
"A weird, crazy visionary, really. He was always so much easier to talk to. He loved talking to people."
"Mladić wanted to argue, and Karadžić wanted to explain his idea," he said. Simpson for N1.
Before his arrest and extradition to The Hague in 2008, Karadzic was one of the world's most wanted fugitives.
Today, the 80-year-old politician, poet, and psychiatrist, who while in hiding identified himself as Dragan Dabić, has been sentenced to life imprisonment, which he is serving in a British prison.
Of the hundreds involved directly or indirectly in the crimes in Srebrenica, only four or five people objected, mostly to having the killings moved out of their area of responsibility, Đikić notes.
"Most people in such circumstances simply succumb to the evil they carry within themselves," he concludes.
BBC is in Serbian from now on and on YouTube, follow us HERE.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube i Viber. If you have a topic suggestion for us, please contact bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
- How the hiding of the Hague fugitive Ratko Mladić ended
- How Radovan Karadžić was arrested: "Crazy house" and pancakes, 15 years later
- Genocide in Srebrenica through the eyes of children
Bonus video:
