The presiding judge is Carmel Agius together with two newly sworn-in ad litem judges from Demark and Germany.
Oric was in charge of the enclave’s armed forces until the town fell to the Serbs in 1995 and some 7,000 of its male inhabitants were killed, in the largest massacre on European soil since the end of the second world war.
Although the trial, due to start on 6 October, will focus on the events that took place several years before the 1995 massacre, its horrors are bound to resurface in The Hague tribunal’s courtrooms.
Oric, 37, is accused of crimes against Bosnian Serbs that he and the forces he commanded allegedly committed in the months between the outbreak of hostilities in Bosnia in the spring of 1992 and the designation of Srebrenica as a UN safe area in 1993.
The prosecutors allege that between June 1992 and March 1993 the troops under Oric’s command destroyed at least 50 Serbian hamlets and villages in the wider Srebrenica area, expelled thousands of their inhabitants and plundered their property – notably livestock and food supplies.
They are hoping to prove that Oric personally planned and participated in at least some of those attacks.
Oric is also accused of alleged torture, beatings and murders of Serb detainees committed by his subordinates at the Srebrenica police station, where inmates were regularly beaten and kept in insanitary and overcrowded conditions. The prosecution has listed in the indictment a case of an inmate tortured by extracting his teeth with rusty pliers, and several cases of prisoners beaten to death.
The indictment officially charges Oric and his alleged subordinates – whose names it does not mention – with six counts of violations of the laws or customs of war.
Oric has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Oric is one of a handful of Bosnian Muslims indicted by The Hague tribunal, where the vast majority of indictees are – due to the nature of Bosnian conflict – of ethnic Serb origin. He is also the only one indicted for crimes committed in the Srebrenica area, where ethnic tensions were high throughout the war, culminating in a particularly horrific episode of killings that are now the first legally proven case of genocide in Europe after the Holocaust.
Around a dozen of former high-ranking Bosnian Serb political and military officials have been accused of planning and participating in the massacre.
Over the years, Oric has reached near mythical status among Srebrenica survivors. In the years leading up to the massacre, thousands of the town’s Muslim inhabitants were being kept on a starvation diet by the surrounding Serb forces, who controlled the flow of United Nation’s food deliveries to the area. Many survivors say that Oric was essential in keeping unofficial food and medicine supply routes open during the three-year siege.
Many also think that Oric managed to prevent Srebrenica from falling into Serbian hands in the beginning of the war in 1992. And he is seen by many Srebrenica survivors as somebody who, had he been there, may have been able to fight off the Serbs three years later.
Oric left Srebrenica in the weeks leading to its fall, allegedly on an order of the Sarajevo government, and there is widespread speculation surrounding this disappearance.