Dražen Erdemović (born 25 November 1971) was a soldier who fought during the Bosnian War for the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) and was later sentenced for his participation in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

After the VRS forces took over Srebrenica on 11 July,[4] the Serbs began to send male Bosniaks to various locations for execution.

One of those places was the farm in Pilica, 15 kilometers from the border with Serbia, where Erdemović and the 10th Sabotage Detachment were tasked with executing about 1,200 Bosniak men and boys between the ages of approximately 17 and 60 years, who had surrendered to the members of the Bosnian Serb police or army near Srebrenica.

[citation needed] In early 1996, Erdemović sought out an ABC field reporter and testified on camera about what happened at Srebrenica.

[citation needed] The Erdemović case was significant in the Tribunal being it was the first application of the defence of duress, claiming that his life had been threatened and that he had no choice.

Erdemović appealed and his sentence was later reduced by ICTY to five years in 1998, accepting that he committed the offences under threat of death had he disobeyed the order.

"The story of Erdemovic's trial in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia forms the basis of the 2005 play A Patch of Earth, written by Kitty Felde and collected in the anthology The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).