The Prime Minister of Bosnia's Republika Srpska entity said Thursday evening the allegations against him are completely baseless and that he never offered anyone any money to relocate mass graves from Srebrenica, for his conscience is clear.
“I didn't respond to those accusations because it's all made up, its a lie. I don't was to lie in the mud as those attacking me. I was a member of the RS Army, I don't have a stain on me and my hands are clean and no one can take that away from me,” Radovan Viskovic, the prime minister of Bosnia's Serb-dominated RS entity told the RS Radio Television (RTRS).
A local investigative portal Istraga.ba published a text last week along with an audio recording from 2017 of a protected witness M-16 in the case of Miodrag Josipovic et al. saying that the current Prime Minister of Bosnia's Serb-dominated RS entity organized the transport of Bosniaks from Nova Kasaba village, near the eastern town of Srebrenica, to the location of their execution.
“Radovan Viskovic offered me money to relocate mass graves,” protected witness M-16 told the Court in 2017, Istraga.ba reported adding that the same witness gave exactly the same testimony in 2007.
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Istraga.ba also noted that, to date, the Prosecution of has not prosecuted or marked Radovan Viskovic as a suspect. Back then, during the testimony of witness M-16, the Chief Prosecutor was the incumbent Gordana Tadic and prior to taking over as Chief Prosecutor, Tadic was head of the War Crimes Chamber, the portal wrote.
When asked where was he in 1995, Viskovic said he was at the same place where he spent all four years of 1992-1995 was in Bosnia – at the RS Army HQ serving as a Traffic Officer.
“On August 1, 1996, I came to work at the bauxite factory in Milici and all this story is unfounded. There is more than transparent documentation about that transport and who did it, who was in charge, who had the command and who did everything,” Viskovic said.
“I have many Bosniak friends who know me. You have honest and honourable people in any nation, I don't judge people by their nationality but what kind of person they are. I may have lived in a belief that Bosnia has a future, that these events can be to directed so that our citizens live better, but obviously those who swear by Bosnia are striking the last nail in that coffin so that Bosnia is no more,” said Viskovic.
He announced charges against certain media and individuals.
During the 1992-1995 war for the country's independence from the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia lost over 100,000 people, over 8,000 of which were lost in July 1995 in Srebrenica, when Bosnian Serb forces, which received financial and logistical support both from Serbian authorities and individuals during the war, overrun the then UN-protected zone of Srebrenica.
Their bodies were subsequently buried in primary, secondary and even tertiary mass graves in an attempt to hide the crimes and make identification of victims impossible. Thanks to state of the art DNA labs, all the bodies that were buried at the Memorial Centre were positively identified.
The bodies of victims that were not identified are still held in morgues waiting for their relatives to give their DNA samples. unfortunately, many have died before their loved ones were exhumated making it impossible to identify a small number of skeletal remains.
The International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice later ruled that the massacre was an act of genocide.
International and regional courts have sentenced 45 people for what happened in Srebrenica to a total of more than 700 years behind bars.
Those who the ICTY sentenced to life imprisonment are Ljubisa Beara, Zdravko Tolimir, and Vujadin Popovic. But the most well-known alleged masterminds of what happened in Srebrenica are former Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic and ex Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, and both have been sentenced for it but have appealed.
The first burial of genocide victims began at the nearby Potocari genocide Memorial Center in 2003. Since then, twenty collective funerals have been held and 6,652 victims of genocide have been buried. The buried victims of genocide were found at over 150 different locations, of which 77 were mass graves.
The youngest buried victim in the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Center is the newborn Fatima Muhic, and the oldest victim, Saha Izmirlic, was 94 years old at the time of the murder.
