July 4, 1996

War Tribunal Paints Ugly Picture of 2 Wanted Serbs

By MARLISE SIMONS

HE HAGUE, Netherlands -- The international war crimes tribunal shuddered on Wednesday at the details of mass murders as the court for the first time presented its evidence of the role the Bosnian Serb commander played in the widespread killing of civilians in Srebrenica, once a city of refuge.

Wednesday was the fifth day in a week of special hearings held to increase pressure on NATO powers to capture both the commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, and the Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic. They have been charged with the command responsibility for war crimes they either ordered directly or failed to prevent.

Both have been indicted twice for genocide, crimes against humanity, breaches of the Geneva Conventions and violations of the laws and customs of war. Karadzic is particularly held accountable because he is responsible for both political and military leadership.

In these proceedings the tribunal is publicly presenting testimony and evidence against the two, which is deliberately one-sided, in order to attract further attention to the alleged crimes.

Since the opening of the hearings on Friday, the tribunal has indicated the enormous lengths to which it has gone to firm up the evidence for indictments of the two Bosnian leaders.

During the hearings this week, investigators reported how Karadzic's Serb Democratic Party, through its so-called "crisis staff," was vital to establishing control and channeling information during the war and how it organized military training for volunteers and led operations of ethnic cleansing.

A former mayor of Sarajevo came to the court to tell of life in the city during the siege, with the sniping and shelling of civilians. Investigators this week also described the systematic destruction of Muslim monuments and religious sites.

A Canadian soldier described how he was tied to a lightning rod and was threatened with execution while he and other United Nations soldiers were taken hostage and used as human shields by Mladic's troops.

While the broad outlines of the evidence against the two men were published in the indictments, the hearings have yielded new insights.

Although Srebrenica's fall and the subsequent killings of perhaps 6,000 people are well known, Wednesday's testimony by the investigators and by the commander of the Dutch U.N. battalion protecting the town provided new details about Mladic's role during the takeover and the suffering of the Muslims who had sought refuge there.

Muslim men and boys and even small children were tortured, mutilated and slain on such a scale that in three days last July Srebrenica became an emblem of the evil committed during the Bosnian war, an investigator for the prosecution told the court on Wednesday.

Bosnian Serb soldiers, though they were well armed, often chose to use knives to kill their victims, as if relishing the experience, said the investigator, Jean-Rene Ruez of France. In this frenzy of death, Ruez told the court, a number of the refugees did not wait to be killed but hanged themselves.

The tribunal's investigating team, which this year has made three trips to the area, also showed the court on Wednesday a new series of photographs of human remains, the result of recent exhumations done under the tribunal's auspices.

"These killings amounted to genocide," said Mark Harmon, the prosecutor in charge of crimes related to Srebrenica. "It is the final and perhaps most repulsive manifestation of ethnic cleansing."

Mladic was in charge of the entire operation, Ruez said. After Bosnian Serb troops overran Srebrenica, Mladic was seen by witnesses at seven different sites where prisoners were assembled. Many of the prisoners were subsequently executed, Ruez said, and at one site, at Karakaj, witnesses saw Mladic while the executions were going on.

Placing Mladic at or near the scene of the killings is crucial to his indictment, court officials said.

Western leaders have called for the appearance of the indicted leaders at the tribunal, something mandated in the Dayton peace accord, and have stepped up calls for their ouster, but so far they have been unwilling to risk conflict by ordering NATO troops in Bosnia to arrest the two.

Court officials said the current proceedings are a way of embarrassing the Western powers, which pushed for the creation of the tribunal.

On Friday, at the end of the hearings, the panel of three judges is expected to reconfirm the indictment of the two Bosnian Serb leaders. They may also issue an international warrant for their arrest, the effect of which is to brand them even more emphatically as "an international war criminal" and obliges any country that is a U.N. member to arrest them, should they travel outside their home territory.