The first witness in the trial of Ratko Mladic , the former commander of the Bosnian Serb army , testified Monday that the army slaughtered Bosnian Muslims from his village in 1992 . Elvedin Pasic said that he was 13 when his family , anticipating the arrival of the army , decided to split up . Though the family members had signed a truce with their Serbian neighbors , they feared that the village 's men and boys would be killed anyway , he said . So , Pasic and his father fled with about 200 other villagers , including the village imam , he said . But a combined force of Bosnian Serb army soldiers and Serbian civilians ambushed them , he said . `` It was around midnight , '' he said . `` Suddenly we stopped . And everyone said , 'Hush-hush . We are very close to the Serbs . Do n't move , do n't make any sounds . ' That 's when the bullets started firing . '' Fleeing the gunfire , the group ran straight into a minefield , where one of the men 's legs was blown off , Pasic said . `` He was crying and saying , 'Do something , kill me . ' My dad grabbed me and said , 'Do n't look . ' `` After the villagers surrendered , a Bosnian Serb soldier separated the youngest children and a handful of women from the men , said Pasic , who was with his father at the time . `` They ordered all the women and children to get up ; I did n't want to get up . I said , ' I do n't want to get up . ' I did n't want to leave him . 'Get up , ' he whispered to me . My uncle said , 'Get up ; you will survive . ' `` He said his father denied to the Serbs that any of his relatives were among the group in order to save him . The women and children from the group were then led through a gantlet of Serbian civilians who beat them with sticks , after which the prisoners were put on a bus and taken to the village Grabovica , Pasic said . During Pasic 's testimony , Mladic wiped his eyes . Mladic is accused of masterminding the army campaign to `` cleanse '' Bosnia of Croats and Bosnian Muslims . Those atrocities included the Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 people were executed and the siege of Sarajevo , which lasted more than three years and killed 10,000 . Pasic is the first of hundreds of witnesses expected to testify against Mladic , who is 70 . Pasic , now 34 , said he was reunited with his mother but he never saw his father again . At the end of his testimony , he said that of the more than 100 men he left behind , `` There is no doubt in my mind , they were all killed . '' Mladic 's trial began in May , but was suspended after a single day over the prosecution 's failure to disclose evidence against Mladic . Mladic is accused of orchestrating a campaign of ethnic cleansing during the bloody civil war that ripped apart Yugoslavia . He has been indicted on 11 counts of genocide , war crimes and crimes against humanity in the 1992-95 war . His trial is taking place in The Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia , a court established to try those responsible for atrocities during the war . In May , prosecutor Dermot Groome laid out details of the case against Mladic , saying that ethnic cleansing was not a byproduct of the war , but a specific aim of the Bosnian Serb leadership . He said he would show that Mladic was directly responsible for atrocities carried out by his forces , which were fighting for control of land in ethnically mixed Bosnia . Mladic eluded authorities for nearly 16 years until his capture in May 2011 , when police burst into the garden of a small house in northern Serbia . Though he was carrying two handguns , he surrendered without a fight and was extradited to the Netherlands . In the three decades leading up to the violent splintering of Yugoslavia , Mladic rose rapidly through the ranks of the Yugoslav army . In 1991 , he served as a front-line commander spearheading Serb forces in a yearlong war with Croatia . By the time he took to Bosnia 's battlefields , he had become a hero to many Serbs , seen as a defender of their dwindling fortunes . In May 1992 , Bosnia 's Serbian political leaders picked him to lead the assault on their Muslim enemies who clamored for independence . Mladic wasted no time galvanizing his heavily armed forces in a siege of Sarajevo , cutting the city off from the outside world . Serb forces pounded the city every day from higher ground positions , trapping Sarajevo 's ill-prepared residents in the valley below . As the war ended in the fall of 1995 , Mladic went on the run . Shortly after Mladic was sent to The Hague last year , authorities nabbed former Croatian Serb rebel leader Goran Hadzic . He was the last Yugoslav war crimes suspect at large . Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested in 2008 . And Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was arrested in 2001 but died before his trial was completed .
Nikola ##j was 13 when his family fled the advancing Bosnian Serb Army . Ambushed , they fell into a minefield , he died . He never saw his family again . Milan Mladic , former commander of the army , covered his eyes during testimony .