Jan Svoboda

* 1977

  • "When the bombing started in Kosovo, the mood of the local population deteriorated and demonstrations started there. We had the task of guarding the bridge. And at that time the demonstrators knew that there were soldiers there guarding the bridge, so they came after us. They just came after us. Somehow we hid in the BVP, and suddenly we heard them shooting at us. It was a terrible rumble in the BVP when the bullets hit the armour. And they started throwing Molotov cocktails at us. Then we called on the radio what to do. Because there were two BVPs, and there were, each BVP could hold a maximum of ten people, so there were maybe seven or eight of us, I don't know, I don't remember exactly how many of us were there that day. And we were two BVPs on each side of the bridge, so two BVPs together. And they told us to leave the area because we had no way to defend ourselves against that crowd. In our eyes they were unarmed people, that the crowd was going and everybody had a machine gun in their hand, that wasn't there."

  • "Probably the worst thing we saw there was, I suppose it was a woman's body, because you could see the hair, it was always there on the bodies, even the clothes, the skirts were visible and stuff. So I would say most of those bodies were women. One woman had her legs spread lightly and she had two small skulls between her legs. Just heads. Just children's heads."

  • "Our job when we were there, because it was mined everywhere, was to somehow clear a small area. There was a special machine that came in and it was demining it. So they were demining some area for us. There was a kind of a mosque that had fallen down, and by the mosque we had made... they put up a field tent for us to sleep in. I think we were there for about five or six weeks. There was supposed to be a mass grave somewhere not far from the mosque where they supposedly had shot the people at that time. So there were several doctors from several states that came there, and they spent the day trying to find bodies. And then, of course, they found the mass grave and started to take out the remains of the people who had been there for several years. Because when a person dies, they have some weight. I'll say, for example, that if a person was 80 kilos, and if I put him in the ground, in two years he'll be nothing. But here, the way the mass grave was, the way the people were crammed into the pile, the people were just like 50 kilos. The one who had had 80 kilos, after the seven years or so that they were in the ground, that body still had quite a bit of that tissue. It was such decomposing tissue, it smelled awful. The tissues were melting and there was this disgusting water running everywhere as the bodies were being taken out, so there was just pools of this stinking water. It was 35 degrees outside and the doctors were taking the bodies out during the day. They put each body separately in a bag. And there were coolers brought in, and the bodies were put in the coolers. And always when there were already a few of those bodies, I don't know, I don't remember exactly, in the container, and the people were already stuffed in there, then we used to go to Sarajevo with armed escorts. There we went in the BVP, normally the trucks that were carrying the container, those were the UN white containers. And we, as SFOR, escorted them with BVP, normally armed, and they were taking the dead bodies to some hospital or whatever it was, I guess, where they were doing autopsies on the bodies and finding out if these people really came from that village and from that concentration camp Omarska."

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    České Budějovice, 29.09.2022

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    duration: 01:39:29
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    České Budějovice, 27.01.2023

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    duration: 34:36
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There were mines everywhere. We were scared at first, but you get used to it

Jan Svoboda, 1999
Jan Svoboda, 1999
photo: Witness´s archive

Jan Svoboda was born on 6 May 1977 in Borovany, České Budějovice, where he grew up. In 1994 he trained as a cook and in 1996 he completed his basic military service in Český Krumlov. After the war, he worked at the Borges factory in his place of residence as a forklift driver. He then decided to go on a NATO-led peacekeeping military mission. After a successful recruitment and thorough training, he left for the military peacekeeping mission SFOR II in Bosnia and Herzegovina in March 1999. There he was assigned as a private soldier of the 3rd Mechanised Battalion of the Czech Contingent and was there for one full rotation until October 1999 at the Bosnian Krupa military base. During the mission, his unit participated in preventing attempts to disrupt the peace process in the country, monitored compliance with the Dayton Peace Agreement by ethnic armies, and performed guard duty. He participated in the security of specialists during the exhumation of a mass grave near the Omarska prison camp. After returning from his mission, he worked as a worker in the Borges factory from 1999 to 2002 and joined the Czech Police in August 2002. In 2017, he married Michaela Bohdalová, and they had two daughters. In 2023 he was living in Borovany.