Ljubiša Beara, 'captain' of the Srebrenica genocide, dies in Berlin prison at 78

Former Chief of Security of the Main Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska Ljubiša Beara died yesterday in a Berlin prison, reports Mondo, as carried by Patria.

Ljubiša Beara was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Hague Tribunal. He was found guilty of genocide against nearly 7,000 Srebrenica Bosniaks, after the VRS captured the UN „safe“ enclave of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995.

Excerpt from Đikić's novel

Journalist Ivica Đikić is the author of the novel „Who is Ljubiša Beara, the 'captain' of the Srebrenica genocide“, published last year.  

- Until the evening of 13 July, until the first meeting with Miroslav Deronjić, Colonel Beara was most concerned with selecting a sufficient number of reliable killers, those who would not ask too many questions or talk, and how to secretly bring them in to kill several thousand people in a day or two or three.

This occupied him more than the specific execution sites, because he thought there would be no problems with the killing in Bratunac, and the specific locations would be taken care of, or had already been taken care of, by Momir Nikolić, Chief of the Security Organ of the Bratunac Brigade of the Army of Republika Srpska.

In the evening hours of 13 July, the killing operation was, among other things, at a standstill because the unit that Colonel Beara had assigned one of the central roles in „finishing the job“, i.e., in the „distribution of packages“, which was the code for the execution of Bosniak prisoners from Srebrenica, had not arrived in Bratunac: it was the Intervention Platoon of the Višegrad Brigade of the Army of Republika Srpska, a platoon under the command of Major Milan Lukić and his right-hand man, Boban Inđić. Lukić's and Inđić's platoon did not arrive due to a bus breakdown, and a new bus could not be found. Major Radomir Furtula, commander of the Višegrad Brigade, does not appear to have been particularly determined to involve the unit formally under his command in Beara's killing operation.

More than the specific sites of mass execution of Srebrenica prisoners, Colonel Beara was preoccupied that evening, of course, with the removal of the bodies of the killed: both those who had been killed that day in Kravica, in the Cerska valley and elsewhere, and those whose execution was being intensively prepared. How to dispose of the corpses? Who would do it?