Dr. Mesic suiting up

Dr. Mesic: Most of my family were killed - taken to the concentration camps called Omarska and Trnpolje. There are no indications they are alive. One of my uncles was brought here to Sasina and killed.

01.00.00

A cousin  whose name was Nermin Pasalic was killed in a monstrous way by his neighbour. He was tied by chains to a tractor and dragged through the village square.

Map Bosnia

Dr Mesic walking towards makeshift coffins

Jones: The most constant companions of Dr Semira Mesic are the dead.

01.01.00

She is literally digging up evidence of genocide. In one year, 15 mass graves have been exhumed around Sanski Most.

Dr. Mesic: Here we have one hundred and twenty bodies. Civilians... Women. The oldest woman here was ninety-four years old.

01.01.20

Jones in medical mask

There are children aged thirteen years. We have young women up to twenty... and men. Horrible crimes were done in this area.

Jones: How did these people die?

01.01.44

Dr. Mesic

What we are looking at here... They were shot with firearms and they have injuries made by hard blunt objects.

Dr. Mesic examining exhumed body

Jones: It's Dr. Mesic's job to identify the dead, and to discover how they died.

Dr. Mesic: This is a man. The corpse is skeletised. Parts of the bones remain, and parts of his clothing. Here you can see the cloth - just some of it. You cannot see the type of cloth or the colour which is why identifying the body is difficult. As far as injuries - I can see by the broken bones, such as the long bone here that there are injuries caused by firearms. Also we have here head injuries from firearms. Here you can see his boots. A boot with a sock and part of the foot remaining.

01.02.05

Jones: Dr. Mesic is cataloguing the injuries and identifying the victims. Not only for proper burial, but as evidence for The Hague War Crimes Tribunal

01.02.58

Onlooker to Dr. Mesic's examinations

Dr. Mesic: This is a middle-aged man - Tadic Drago - and he was found together with the others in the mass grave at Skrljevita. That is here - close to Sanski Most.

01.03.08

FX: Trucks

Jones in car

Jones: As we drove into town, the list of the dead from the grave site, finally identified by Dr. Mesic, was being read out on local radio.

01.03.27

Radio

Sanski Most

Jones: In Sanski Most, these lists have been broadcast regularly, since work began to find the missing

01.04.00

The people here consider themselves survivors. Many of them only know each other because they met in the concentration camps of Omarska, Manjaca, Kereterm and Trnpolje - all in nearby towns.

FX: Horse

Jones walking towards building

Jones: We were here to meet the man who'd survived the camps, and come back to prosecute those responsible for the killings.

01.04.25

Draganovic in his office

In May of 1992, Judge Adil Draganovic was arrested in his office, and sent to Manjaca, along with 6.000 other civilian prisoners.

He lived through the ordeal, until the camp was shut down after international pressure.

01.04.44

And when he finally got back to his office in 1995, he found documents the retreating Serbs had left behind.

Draganovic interview

Draganovic: We found all the documents of their crisis committee. Everything they were planning they made a note of. I found the notebook in which everything is nicely laid out - the plans for who to kill, the attack on this area, what to do with the rest of the citizens. But very clearly it says who to arrest and who to kill.

01.04.57

UN personnel wearing medical mask and suit at grave site.

Jones: Using the documents and accounts of eyewitnesses, Judge Draganovic has overseen the exhumation of more than 700 bodies from secret grave sites like this one at Laniste.

Draganovic: I'm sure you've seen what's up at Laniste. They killed about two hundred people and threw them into that hole and covered them with earth. They thought it would never be discovered.

01.06.00

Draganovic in office with photos of dead

Jones: Investigators from The Hague assess the evidence and use it in indictments against men like the recently deceased Simo Drljaca, the Prijedor police chief whom the judge grew up with.

01.06.34

Draganovic

Draganovic: Simo Drljaca was born in Sanski Most and we studied together in Sarajevo. We knew each other very well, however... he showed himself to be a cruel criminal when, as head of the police he was responsible for the liquidation of thousands of people from Prijedor.

01.06.47

Men on street in Sanski Most

Jones: Many of the people in Sanski Most are refugees from Prijedor, only 30 kilometres north, and the town with the highest concentration of indicted war criminals in Bosnia.

01.07.15

Balian interview

Super:

Hrair Balian

International Crisis Group

Balian: Omarska concentration camp is only a few kilometres from Prijedor town, near a little village called Omarska.

01.07.27

The people who were in charge of that camp are still in the area. The same people who directed the atrocities during the war, who were responsible for the atrocities during the war, are still in charge or influencing the political events in the area, in the region.

Shots of Munich

FX: Church bells / music

Jones: Many of the people who can still unveil those stories, the witnesses to Bosnia's war crimes, have scattered across the world as refugees.

01.08.14

FX: music

Jones: They're living temporarily in cities like Munich, too scared to return to their own corner of Europe.

Jones entering block of flats

Germany has taken more than 350,000 Bosnian refugees.

01.08.38

Inside Sbhia Turkanovic's flat with family

Mrs Sbhia Turkanovic is a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp.

She will be a witness at The Hague war crimes trials, of the men from Prijedor who ran the camp.

Her husband was at Omarska too, and in those days the couple were separated from their children, who were imprisoned by the Serbs in another camp.

They are Muslims, from the town of Kozarac, and before the war they considered themselves well off.

Turkanovic: We had two large houses. The big house was on two levels and had a restaurant and kitchen downstairs. We owned three cars but everything he and I earned and saved in our thirty years of marriage we had to leave behind.

01.09.24

Omarska camp

Jones: In July 1992, the Turkanovics were taken to Omarska camp to join thousands of other Muslims imprisoned there.

01.09.50

The old iron mine is infamous for the brutality of its guards, who were under the direction of their chief, Simo Drljaca.

Mrs Turkanovic interview

Turkanovic; So they wouldn't have witnesses they dragged them out of the White House at night - from 7.00 to 7.30 every evening. At night, a small yellow truck drove through the camp past our building to the left. It was carrying dead bodies and when we looked through the windows we saw head, arms and legs hanging limp - all tortured to death - and maybe some were still alive - just thrown onto the dead. Bodies everywhere... If only you dug up Omarska imagine how many Muslim groups you'd find there and in the surrounding areas - because every evening, then trucks would leave and God knows how many bodies were in each truck.

01.10.08

Jones listening to Turkanovic

Jones: The whole time in Omarska they were under the direct authority of Simo Drljaca.

01.11.00

Mrs Turkanovic

Ivo (translating): There is no way known that they can get out until Simo Drljaca signs them out. You needed his signature for them to get out to free country.

Turkanovic: I think that until they go to The Hague and until they are sentenced  for what they did, consciously and unconsciously - until they answer for that we can't return home.

Bosnian countryside

Jones: We went back to Bosnia to the source of the problem

01.11.40

Sarajevo

singing

Jones: In Sarajevo, we sought out the man who's been one of the strongest advocates, behind the scenes, for the arrest of the war criminals.

And on the eve of his departure as the second most powerful UN official in Bosnia, we spoke to Michael Steiner.

Intv. Steiner

Steiner: The international community must make up its mind what they want. If they really want Dayton to be implemented, this is an unavoidable issue.

01.12.14

Jones: We assume there are contingency plans to arrest these people?

Super:

Michael Steiner

Ambassador, United Nations

Steiner: This had been thought about. I don't want to go in the details. I don't think that would be wise. I'm convinced it can be done. It's a question of the political will.

Helicopter landing

FX: Helicopter

Jones: That political will as about to be tested again, after the intense reaction to the shooting of Simo Drljaca.

01.12.44

For the main targets, the real leaders of Republika Serpska, the indicted war criminals Karadjic and Mladic, will now be much more heavily protected.

Plane landing

In the meantime, the people of the Bosnian diaspora are returning to a fractured country, where the promises of Dayton are not being fulfilled.

Official calling names from list

Man: Sulejmani, Manevona!

Jones: Again, the lists of people. This time, of the living. Followed by the intense relief of the displaced, to be back amongst their families.

Refik being reunited with Mustapha

Fifteen year old Refik Saban is reunited with his father, Mustapha.

The family were ‘cleansed' from Prijedor, by Drljaca's police, and imprisoned in the camps he ran at Omarska and Trnpolje and Kereterm. His mother never recovered from the experience. She died a refugee.

Housing on outskirts of Sarajevo

They gave us an address  in the destroyed outskirts of Sarajevo.

Out part the old front line that divided the western sector of the city.

Here we found, playing in the rubble, a group of Muslim children from Srebrinica, survivors of yet another massacre.

And like so many others, unable to return to their city.

Garden of house

We found Mustapha Saban and his son living with several other families in an undamaged house.

01.14.47

It had survived unscathed because it was behind the Serb lines, and owned by a Serb, who'd left with her own people, fearing reprisals if she stayed.

01.15.03

Mustapha interview

Mustapha: You see, five of us left Prijedor. We're only three now. My wife and mother-in-law both died in Macedonia. My wife saw many people being killed and her heart gave out.

Jones: Yet Mustapha told us he'd been reborn when his son came back, because the boy represented anew life for his people.

01.15.33

Refik interview

Refik: This country needs educated people. Because many educated people were killed in the war - managers... professors. That's the general idea. I would like to finish high school and get as high degree as possible.

Mustapha: He's right about what he said just now about many professors, engineers being killed. I'm talking about the situation in Prijedor -where those people... the professionals, suffered most.

Mustapha with Refik

Jones: We asked Mustapha if he'd ever be prepared to go back to Prijedor.

01.16.27

Mustapha: I have nowhere to go. Where would I go? Everything of mine is destroyed.

Steiner intv.

Super:

Michael Steiner

Ambassador, United Nations

Steiner: You have a number of participants in the crimes and you have villages also around Prijedor, where - and that's the most frightening. Many of the population have taken parts. It's not just some representatives. But where, in some way, everybody was involved in these crimes.

Men with horse and cart

Jones: From Sanski Most, the UN runs a special bus service the short distance north to Prijedor.

01.17.15

Women on bus

A few Muslim refugees from the town - overwhelmingly women - take the trip to visit relatives.

01.17.27

Plainly afraid to make themselves conspicuous, none of the women on the bus would talk to us. But the knowledge that Prijedor had been a control centre of a string of concentration camps, and that the people who set them up and planned the ethnic cleansing, still run the city, makes the trip a strange one.

Women getting off bus

I felt sympathy for the women, scurrying into town with their heads down.

01.18.01

Exterior of Hotel Prijedor / Jones and Sonja in hotel room

From the Hotel Prijedor, we began calling the city's bosses to seek interviews.

By now, Simo Drljaca held no official posts, though he reputedly headed a local Mafia.

We decided the best way to find him would be through his friend, Dr. Milan Kovacevic -the hospital director who has now become the first indicted war criminal to be arrested by NATO troops.

01.18.26

We were told he was out of town. And when we informed the police we planned to film in the nearby town of Kozarac, we suddenly drew the attention of Serbian State Security.

01.18.41

Jones getting into car

Jones: Oh, we're in a bit of strife here?

Ivo: What's happened?

Jones: Just got a grilling from the State Security guy. He doesn't want us to film in Kozarac. In fact he says we can't film in Kozarac unless we get permission from Pale, from the Minister of Information, which we can't get.

Ivo: He's probably rung them already.

Jones: He's probably rung them

Jones: Well, that was our welcome to Prijedor, that's for sure.

01.19.16

Jones: We decided to go to Kozarac the next day.

FX: Serbian music from radio

Jones in car going to Kozarac

Jones: The Turkmenovic family in Munich had drawn us a map to their house in Kozarac. But we soon realised there wouldn't be much left to see.

Ivo: This is what remains of a mosque. Must have been a beautiful mosque, too. Look at the tiles on it. There's nothing left of it now.

01.19.53

Jones: Why did they destroy everything, they've razed the place to the ground.

Sonja: If you destroy their houses, they have nowhere to live. Then you're guaranteed, more or less, they won't come back. Because they have nothing to come back to.

01.20.05

Jones: It's quite eerie, actually, isn't it?

Sonja: The classic tale was that they would start shelling, and to cause panic, they rounded them up and took most of the men to camps. They would have various collection centres not far from here, where they would first move people and then decide hat to do with them. Because it's a big organisation task, moving thousands of people, you know. It didn't happen haphazardly.

House with rose garden

Jones: Then in the midst of the destruction, a bizarre sight - an in tact house with a flourishing rose garden.

01.20.35

Sonja, ask this lady how it feels living here in such a nice house  with a nice garden, but everything else is ruined.

Mrs Mrgic

Mrgic: It was my people that created the evil, not others. I can't live with this pain. No way.

Mrs Mrgic in garden

Jones: Her name was Mrs Mrgic, and she told us that her husband was a Croat, so her people - the Serbs - killed him.

01.20.55

And they killed her only son too, because his blood was mixed. So now she tends her roses, apparently drifting in and out of sanity, and dreaming of her lost neighbours.

Mrgic: Difficult. I am dying. It's too hard for me now... they were my brothers and sisters. Kozarac as beautiful. It was clean, neat, tidy. We didn't hate each other. We like each other as neighbours. Roses were blooming. We had coffee in each other's houses. We didn't feel the existence of nationalities.

Muslim women crying at funeral

FX: Crying

Jones: In Sanski Most, it was time to bury the dead.

01.21.55

Jones to camera

Super:

Tony Jones

The people here say they still can't believe that this could have happened in Europe on the eve of the 21st century. Or that the worst murderers could still be living free, a short drive from here. And I find myself wondering, what if I were burying my wife or my children, or my parents or my sisters here today, or if these were my friends or my neighbours, if they had been dragged from their hoes, like many of these people, in the middle of the night and slaughtered and thrown into a lonely pit, and I had survived. And I know deep down, that there can be no peace here without justice. For without justice, the living will surely seek revenge.

01.22.03

Funerals

FX: Crying

Jones: It is sometimes said of Bosnian Muslims that they hide their grief. But today, it was etched into their faces.

But even here there were signs of the divisions that destroyed the old Bosnia.

Black draped coffins

The black draped coffins of the Catholic Croats were kept apart from the green covered Muslim coffins, although they'd been together in death, and were unearthed from the same pit.

01.23.24

And I recalled what the pathologist, Dr Mesic, had said when we asked the religion of one of the dead. "To me, this is just a man..."

ENDS