Jury Is Out on Bosnian War Crimes

By Susan Helen Moran (Reprinted from Insight on the News, Washington Times.)

Summary

Bosnian War Crimes: As evidence of atrocities in the former Yugoslovia piles up, the international community is preparing for a tribunal to try war leaders. But questions linger: Will hostile factions turn over the accused for extradition? Will trials impede the peace process?

At a Serbian-run internment camp in northwestern Bosnia, says Esad, a 30-year-old Muslim, policemen poked rifle butts into his back, pushing him and others toward a bus. The prisoners were Croatian and Muslim civilians being evacuated on April 21, 1992, without explanation by the Serbs. On the bus, Esad says, the police began beating the men.

Esad’s account of what happened next may figure as evidence in the first international war crimes tribunal since 1949, which is expected to be in place by January. “Men dressed in blue uniforms [who] belonged to special units of the police passed out plastic bags and told us to deposit all our belongings and possessions,” Esad, a native of the village of Trnopolje in northwestern Bosnia, told Helsinki Watch, a New York-based human rights organization. When the bus stopped, he said, the soldiers forced off all the males over 16 years old and ordered them to keep their heads down.

“We had to keep looking at the ground,” B.J., another man on the same nightmarish journey, told Helsinki Watch. “They told us to line up along the wall of a cliff. They made us perform military movements, then told us to go to the other side of the road, to the edge of a ravine – where they told us to kneel and bow our heads,” said B. J., a Muslim resident of the village of Kevljani in the municipality of Prijedor.

“I heard shots and saw people falling off the side of the cliff, so I jumped in the ravine. I fell about 20 meters, and as I rolled down, I saw the periphery of a forest, so I ran.” Some of the men didn’t jump but waited for a Serbian bullet to kill them.

“I waited in my [hiding] spot until nightfall. Then I climbed up to see the dead. In addition to those who had been executed that same day, there were old corpses as well. They were swollen; many were black. The bodies were rotting, and the smell was bad.”

At least seven men are known to have survived the massacre, according to Helsinki Watch representatives. Five of the survivors, including Esad and B. J., were later recaptured by Serbian forces.

These two witnesses identified Dragan Mrdja as “commander” of the police officers who executed more than 150 people at the ravine. Reports by the Associated Press and other media corroborate their account, as does Stojan Zuplajanin, the Serbian chief of security forces in Banja Luka, according to Helsinki Watch.

Firsthand accounts such as these – of executions, mutilations, rapes – crowd the data banks of computers at DePaul University in Chicago, where the preliminary evidence for the war crimes trial is being compiled.

Supporters say the tribunal can bring to justice individuals guilty of mass murder, torture, rape and genocide and deter other genocidal regimes. Critics, however, point to intimidating hurdles the tribunal must clear before it can hope to succeed.

Each day the number of civilians maimed and killed in Bosnia grows, while diplomats from the warring factions give lip service to cease-fires and peace talks. Serbian and Croatian forces, which have surrounded Sarajevo – cutting off running water, electricity and food to the civilian population of between 385,000 and 425,000 – may finally have reached the limit of U.S. and NATO tolerance by firing last month on French U.N. peacekeepers, part of a contingent of 900 U.N. peacekeepers deployed in the former Yugoslavia. A NATO air strike against Bosnian Serb targets remains a possibility.

Serbia’s unrelenting aggression since the fighting began in the former Yugoslavia – in Croatia in the summer of 1991 and in Bosnia in April 1992 – has dashed any hope on the part of Bosnians that the prospect of being tried for war crimes could prevent further atrocities. …

 Bosnian War Crimes

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