June 28, 1996

For First Time, Court Defines Rape as War Crime

By MARLISE SIMONS

HE HAGUE, Netherlands -- A United Nations tribunal announced Thursday the indictment of eight Bosnian Serb military and police officers in connection with rapes of Muslim women in the Bosnian war, marking the first time sexual assault has been treated separately as a crime of war.

The indictments were announced by the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague after almost two years of investigations.

Court officials said that although rape charges had been included in other cases, this indictment gave organized rape and other sexual offenses their due place in international law as crimes against humanity.

"This is a landmark indictment because it focuses exclusively on sexual assaults, without including any other charges," said Christian Chartier, a spokesman for the court. "There is no precedent for this. It is of major legal significance because it illustrates the court's strategy to focus on gender-related crimes and give them their proper place in the prosecution of war crimes."

Experts said that while previous postwar courts have heard evidence of rape, they have treated it as secondary, tolerated as part of soldiers' abusive behavior.

The Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which judged Nazi crimes after World War II, made no reference to rape in its charter. At a Tokyo war crimes court after World War II, some Japanese officials were convicted of failing to prevent rape.

But evidence of the magnitude of rape in Bosnia was so shocking that it persuaded the tribunal's chief prosecutor, Justice Richard Goldstone, and others to confront the issue.

"Rape has never been the concern of the international community," Justice Goldstone said in an interview in an early stage of the investigations. "We have to deal openly with these abuses."

According to investigators of the European Union and Amnesty International, rape was often used in Bosnia as a strategy to terrorize people. They said that all three parties to the conflict, including Muslims and Croats, had committed sexual abuses, but that Bosnian Serbs had been the main perpetrators. The European investigators calculated that in 1992, 20,000 Muslim women and girls were raped by Serbs.

The eight Serbs charged Thursday, all either in the military, the paramilitary or the police, are accused of rapes committed between April 1992 and February 1993 in or near Foca in southeastern Bosnia. None have been arrested.

The indictment described the ordeal of 14 Muslim women in Foca, none of them named, "some of them as young as 12 years of age." Most were detained in a prison camp, where they were subjected to almost constant rape and sexual assaults, torture and other abuses.

"The physical and psychological health of many female detainees seriously deteriorated as a result of the sexual assaults," the indictment said. "The detainees lived in constant fear."

Some became suicidal; others suffered from depression. All suffered psychological and emotional harm; some remain traumatized.

A woman who complained to the local chief of police, Dragan Gogovic, about the abuse was then herself raped by him, the indictment said.

A 15-year-old girl, Witness No. 87, was taken prisoner in July 1992 and raped by four men. Over the next two weeks, the indictment said, she and others were gang-raped every evening by groups of soldiers.

She endured rapes for eight months, the indictment said. Part of the time she and other women were kept in a house where they had to cook, wash and clean for soldiers in the daytime and were raped at night.

Witness No. 87, now 19, said that much of the time she wanted to die. On Feb. 25, 1993, one of the accused, Radomir Kovac, sold the girl for 500 German marks to two soldiers from Montenegro.

Thursday the tribunal also issued a second indictment in which nine men, Bosnian Croats, were charged with war crimes during attacks on Muslim villages in the Lasva valley in central Bosnia in 1992-93. These indictments were ready last November, but the announcement was delayed because the court feared for the safety of victims and witnesses.

Thursday's new charges brings the number of suspects accused of war crimes in Bosnia to 75. One has died of cancer; seven are being held in the Hague. The rest are at large.

The tribunal also began public hearings Thursday against its two most wanted suspects, Dr. Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb leaders. The evidence against the two, who are not in custody, was presented to put more pressure on Western powers to arrest them.

The prosecution contends that the two are responsible for the deaths, rapes and torture of thousands of Bosnian Serbs, Prosecutor Eric Ostberg said in his opening statement.

"They are being charged with individual responsibility for the war crimes committed by their subordinates," the prosecutor, a jurist from Sweden, told the court. He said that he would seek to prove that the two men were guilty of "the ultimate crime of genocide."

This and other crimes for which the two men were twice indicted, include atrocities against civilians in Bosnia, specifically during the siege of Sarajevo and Sbrebrenica and the taking of U.N. peacekeeping soldiers as hostage.

The hearings, the first to involve the most senior Bosnian Serbs, are largely symbolic, but Karadzic, who has declared the tribunal irrelevant and incompetent, on this occasion sent a lawyer to represent him.

But the lawyer was not permitted to be present in court.

"The presence of the defense lawyer would transform the proceedings into a trial in absentia," the prosecutor said, adding that this would be against court rules.