US PREPARATIONS FOR BOSNIA AIRDROP GAINING INTENSITY

Kentucky New Era, p.5A
25 February 1993.
By Laurinda Keys

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — First, 600,000 leaflets will flutter down on eastern Bosnia, telling residents about a coming American airdrop. Then, tons of food and medicine will fall from the sky.

Our hope is to watch for presents from heaven,” said Fadil Heljic, a ham radio operator in the besieged town of Zepa.

The Defense Department is not disclosing a starting date for its airdrop into eastern Bosnia, but it was expected to start this weekend. It is intended to help about 300,000 cold, hungry Muslims [Bosniaks] in six enclaves besieged by Serb fighters.

About 5,000 people in those areas, including 2,000 children, have died of hunger and cold this winter, according to unconfirmed reports by the Bosnian government.

Some people have been living in caves, and the few truck convoys that have managed to get through have been swamped by emaciated residents.

The populations of these areas, held by Bosnian forces, have been swelled by tens of thousands of refugees who have fled fighting and Serb “ethnic cleansing” campaigns along the Drina River, which separates Serbia and Bosnia.

On Friday, about 1,500 Muslim refugees were sent on buses by Serbs from the town of Sipovo in central Bosnia south toward Travnik, possibly as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing, said Canadian Cmdr. Barry Frewer, a spokesman for the U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia.

Aid workers have not reached some areas in months because of fighting, Serb roadblocks, winter weather and shell-damaged roads.

“Conditions there are very difficult, the populations are thin and malnourished,” said Lyndall Sachs, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. There has been no electricity for weeks, and people are reduced to melting snow for water.”

Medical conditions are medieval. No drugs or anesthetics are available, according to a report by the U.N. agency.

The situation does not appear to be quite so desperate in at least one town, Gorazde, a target of the air-drop. U.N. refugee official Larry Hollingworth, who led a convoy into the town on Thursday, said people there appeared to have some access to food, plenty of wood for heat and “looked healthier than the population of Sarajevo.”

On Friday, U.S. troops in Germany packed food and medical supplies for the airdrop.

Up to 80 tons of food and medical supplies will be in the opening flight by C-130 Hercules cargo planes, U.S. Defense Department officials say. There has been no word yet on how much aid will be dropped before the mission is completed.

The American plan has drawn praise from allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO], but few concrete offers of help from allied powers. They view it as risky, and as a complement to relief and peacekeeping missions they already have on the ground in Bosnia.

U.S. planes have flown tons of food and medical supplies to Sarajevo and other parts of former Yugoslavia, but the airdrops are new.

More than 100,000 people have been killed or are missing since Bosnia’s Bosniaks and Croats voted last February to leave Yugoslavia last year. Bosnia’s ethnic Serbs, backed by Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, revolted and have overrun about 70 percent of Bosnian territory.

Bosnian officials hope greater U.S. involvement will force the warring factions to make peace. More peace talks are to be held in New York next week.

Of the areas targeted for the air mission, only the estimated 110,000 people in Tuzla, a northeastern city about 30 miles west of Bosnia’s border with Serbia, have been receiving regular weekly deliveries of aid.

Most worrisome to aid officials is Cerska, whose 10,000 people have received no aid at all since war erupted last spring. The U.N. refugee agency plans to make another attempt to reach it Sunday.

Four other pockets — at Zepa, Gorazde, Srebrenica and Gradacac — harbor up to 200,000 people.

Crying women, children and old people lined the road for up to nine miles when a Swedish convoy reached the estimated 60,000 residents of Gorazde on Thursday, Bosnian radio said.

The American planes will probably have little difficulty parachuting supplies to Gorazde and Srebrenica, which cover relatively large areas of land.

Airdrops to Zepa and Cerska will be more problematic because of their small size and the proximity of the Serbian lines. Pallets could easily be blown of course.

Elsewhere in Bosnia, fighting resumed in Sarajevo on Friday, ending four days of relative calm. Serb artillery pounded the strategic western suburb of Stup, and an Egyptian U.N. peacekeeper was reported killed Thursday by a sniper.

His death brought to 30 the number of peacekeepers killed in Bosnia and neighboring Croatia.

Elsewhere, Serb forces shelled Potocari in eastern Bosnia and the eastern town of Srebrenica Friday, Sarajevo radio reported. It said two people were killed in Potocari and four wounded in Srebrenica.

In Brussels, Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher briefed American’s NATO allies on the air-drop, intended primarily for isolated Bosniak enclaves besieged by Serbs. The plan drew praise, but few concrete offers of assistance.

UPDATE: Srebrenica Thanks the United States Air Force for Rescue Missions

BOSTON — A pathetic byproduct of the genocide in Bosnia has been the attempt by some Americans of Serbian ancestry to deny the reality of the Serbian aggression there.

“What’s happening in Bosnia,” Bob Djurdjevic of Phoenix wrote to The New York Times the other day, “is not genocide’… it is a tragedy largely inflicted on the Muslims by their own government.”

‘Ethnic cleansing’ Sure — in the sense that the government of Bosnia, an internationally recognized country, refused to cooperate in its dismemberment. It had the temerity to resist Serbian “ethnic cleansing” of its Muslim citizens.

The phrase “ethnic cleansing” was actually invented by the Serbs for their operations in Bosnia. And everyone knows what it has meant: the murder of thousands Muslims and the expulsion of more than one million from their towns and villages.

There is no secret about any of this, except to the willfully blind. The United States, the European Community and numerous human rights groups have documented the horrors. Serbian soldiers themselves have described the systematic rape of Bosniak women.

See no evil: It is not surprising that Americans with attachments to a country of origin should resist seeing that it has been taken over by a tyranny. But sooner or later a decent person’s sight clears.

Happily, there are Serbian Americans who see and speak out. George Mitrovich, writing in The Los Angeles Times, deplored “the abject failure of Serbian-Americans to grasp the brutal savagery of that evil conflict and to protest Serbia’s guilt.”

The poet Charles Simic wrote in The New Republic: “The destruction of Vukovar and Sarajevo will not be forgiven the Serbs. Whatever moral credit they had as a result of their history they squandered by these two acts.”

Shelling continues: And the destruction goes on. On Oct. 9 Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, said, “The siege of Sarajevo is over.” When the Serbs poured shells on the city a week later, that was explained as a reply to an attack by Bosnian government forces. But in fact, Serbian shelling and sniping have gone on before and since – as has the Serbian blockade of Sarajevo.

Fred Cuny, a disaster relief specialist, has been in Sarajevo for the International Rescue Committee for the last 10 months. Back in the United States on a brief leave, he told me that the siege is worse now than at any time since the spring.

“The Serbs are blocking oil, supplies of winter clothing, plastic for weatherproofing houses,” Cuny said — “all kinds of humanitarian supplies.”

Water: “The critical things now are water and natural gas. George Soros [the American philanthropist] funded an emergency water system, taking water from two river sites. But the Serbs are shelling the sites now.

“If the water system is stopped, during the winter people will have to stand in line to get water and carry it home in buckets in the freezing cold through sniper fire. And the sewage system will break down.”

Winter fuel: Natural gas comes through a pipeline from Hungary. At the Bosnian border most of the gas goes to Belgrade; just 10 percent is supposed to go to Sarajevo. The U.N. sanctions committee allowed the gas to go to Belgrade on condition that the Serbs not interrupt the supply to Sarajevo, but they have stopped it. And gas is the only constant source of fuel for the winter.

The gas situation, at least, has a simple solution. The U.N. sanctions committee should immediately cut off the supply to Belgrade, and keep it off, unless and until the Serbs let the gas flow to Sarajevo.

Croatian forces in Bosnia have now added their names to the genocide list, by butchering Muslim men, women and children in the village of Stupni Do (see photos).

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, p.A4
13 February 1993.

By Dusan Stojanovic

ROZAJE, Yugoslavia — Just about anything bad that has happened to Muslims in Bosnia has happened to Sead Sehovic.

He is blind [photo], his face deformed by an explosion. He has been thrown out of his home and his country. As a Bosniak once forced by Serbs to fight his own people, he worries most about his honor.

“Maybe it’s better I cannot see myself in the mirror. I could not stand the reflection of shame and humiliation that I feel inside,” Sehovic said.

After the fighting erupted last year, rebel Serbs took Sehovic from his village near Trebinje in souther Bosnia and forced him to fight against Croats and his fellow Bosniaks.

In July, a grenade explosion ripped open his skull and destroyed his eyes.

Last month, he was caught up in a Serb terror campaign that drove some 4,000 Bosniaks from their homes in southern Bosnia.

He languishes in a tiny hotel room jammed with 20 other refugees in this Muslim enclave [of Sanjak] across the border in the province of Montenegro. His forehead appears dented, his eye sockets are open wounds. He has had no medical care since emergency surgery in July.

The Serbs have been blamed for most of the atrocities. Their latest campaign appears to have been inspired by a proposed international peace plan to divide Bosnia into 10 autonomous provinces, partly along ethnic lines.

Trebinje, a once-prosperous merchant town of 30,000 near the Adriatic port of Dubrovnik, would become a part of a Serb-dominated province.

Refugees say the Serbs who settled into their homes were brought in from Mostar and Capljina, which would fall under Croat control if the plan is adopted.

This was all a well-planned operation, the most blunt method of ethnic cleansing through intimidation,” said Sefket Arslanagic, director of Trebinje’s high school for 25 years.

On Jan. 27, Serbs torched Trebinje’s 300-year-old Osman Pasha mosque and prevented Bosniaks from trying to put out the fire, which burned for two days.

On Jan. 29, local Serb strongman Bozidar Vucurovic lifted a year-old ban on Muslims leaving the area and “signed notices allowing us to go, quickly providing buses and all the necessary papers, saying he could no longer guarantee our safety,” Arslanagic said.

“We were allowed to carry only a handbag each. All of our other belongings had to remain behind,” he said. “As I was moving out of my house, literally on the doorstep, a Serb family was moving in.”

Refugees say uniformed Serb gunmen went door to door in Trebinje and neighboring villages, threatening Muslims, bombing homes, raping women and stealing cars and other property.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) – Bosnian Serb leaders are guilty of “state ordained terrorism” in a campaign purging northern Bosnia of thousands of non-Serbs, a U.N. aid official charged today.

Peter Kessler of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the main U.N. aid agency, said 3,000 Bosniaks had been driven from their homes in Serb-held areas in August alone.

“These kinds of movements cannot happen without the full support of the Bosnian Serb authorities,” Kessler told reporters in Sarajevo. “This is a kind of push to create a Serb-only state, and these kinds of movements are indicative of a state-ordained terrorism.”

Leaders of the self-declared ethnic Serb state within Bosnia often have blamed “ethnic cleansing campaigns on zealous local officials whom they say they cannot control.

But Kessler said recent campaigns of forced expulsions, especially around the north-eastern town of Bijeljina, were too large to be considered isolated incidents.

“These movements have been accompanied by ethnic terrorism,” he said. “There have been several cases of rape. People have been robbed of jewelry and belongings.”

Serbs have been accused most of using terror to drive non-Serbs from territory they have seized.

Their efforts appear to have intensified in recent weeks, following the Bosnian Serb leadership’s rejection of an international peace plan that would divide Bosnia.

The plan would require Bosnian Serbs to give up about a third of the 70 percent of the country they control.

Bosnian Serb leaders have denounced the plan. They say about 96 percent of Bosnian Serbs who voted in a referendum last weekend endorsed the leadership’s rejection of the proposed division.

By Barbara Demick
Knight-Rider Newspapers

BIJELJINA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Two months ago, the police paid an unexpected visit to the home of a Bosniak pediatrician and his wife, a dentist. They had bad news. The city wanted to take over their spacious three-story home for municipal offices.

But the pediatrician also had a surprise for the authorities. He pulled out papers showing that he had legally changed his traditional Bosniak name to a Serbian name.

“There was nothing we could do,” said Capt. Milorad Javic, one of the officers at the scene. “As long as he was a Serb, it was illegal for us to take that house.”

No wonder hundreds of Muslims here are shedding their names. It is the ultimate pledge of fidelity in this woebegone slice of eastern Bosnia that has been under Serb military occupation since April 1992. Bosniaks who want to preserve their homes and businesses — not to mention their lives — have found that changing their names goes a long way in assuring authorities of their loyalty.

As in all of the former Yugoslavia, a name here is not just a name. It is the primary means of distinguishing Serb from Bosniak, Bosniak from Croat. With most of the Bosnian Muslims descended from the same Slavic stock as the Serbs, their appearance provides no clue as to their religion.

Often, just one or two letters need be changed to convert a telltale Muslim name into a comfortable anonymity. Sabira becomes Sara. Mirzana becomes Mirjana.

“It is a simple process,” Javic said. “You just go to City Hall and fill out a few forms.”

“We try not to let too many people do it,” he said. There are some newer officers here in town and they may not know who really is a Muslim. We don’t want people to be able to infiltrate our organizations because they’ve changed their name. But then again, if we are sure someone is a ‘loyal’ Muslim, we have no objections.”

Javic’s own wife is a Muslim, who uses the [Serb] name Vesna instead of Mirza. The couple had their two daughters baptized in the Serbian Orthodox Church, and Vesna is considering getting herself baptized as well, the final step in conversion to Serbian orthodoxy.

“Her father was a good Muslim. He is buried on the other side, among Muslims,” Javic said of his wife. “But she goes to the Orthodox church every week to light a candle for him.”

Before the war, nearly half of Bijeljina’s 100,000 residents were Muslims. Many of those who have been permitted to stay are people whom the Bijeljina Serbs find essential to the commercial life of the town.

Some Muslim doctors still practice here, although under new names. And there’s the owner of one of Bijeljina’s two gravestone suppliers, thriving business in wartime Bosnia. And one of Bijljeina’s wealthiest citizens, Filip Terzic (former Ferhat Terzic), whose restaurant downtown is known throughout eastern Bosnia for its excellent burek, a flaky pastry filled with meat or cheese.

Town authorities estimate that 300 people in Bijeljina have changed their names since the war began. Twenty-eight others have taken the next step and had themselves baptized, according to Nedeljko Pajic, the head of the Serbian Orthodox church in Bijeljina.

“All they do is sign a form saying they are converting of their own free will, and then we baptize them,” Pajic said. “It takes about three days.”

“Never Again” Applies to Bosnia, too

The Jewish Post & News, p.4
12 August 1992.

Never again! That’s the expression Jewish Holocaust survivors and the rest of world Jewry use when referring to the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany.

Never again should anyone stand by, shrug off reports about atrocities committed against other human beings, and claim that it’s not worth intervening.

That’s what happened during the Second World War. Informed of the Nazi killing machine at Auschwitz and other death camps, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dismissed the suggestion that U.S. planes bomb the camps. FDR claimed he couldn’t spare any planes for such a task.

Now, a similar situation has arisen in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbian nationalists are committing brutal attacks on innocent men, women and children throughout that former Yugoslav state, with the assistance of the Serbian government in Belgrade.

Moslems [Bosniaks] make up 44 per cent of the Bosnia-Herzegovina population, and form the largest ethno-religious group. But Serbs are a close second in size, and there are also substantial numbers of Croats t here.

The Bosnian government claims the Serbian nationalists have set up 94 concentration camps around the country since the Croats and Bosniaks of Bosnia-Herzegovina voted to break away from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia last February. The government maintains the Serbs have arrested about 240,000 people, and as of last week, killed more than 9,000 civilian captives.

U.S. President George Bush early last week dismissed reports about the atrocities as unconfirmed.

And last week, it surfaced that UN personnel had known for a month about detailed reports of horrors in that part of “civilized” Europe and kept quiet about them.

The evidence since April of wholesale Serbian drives to force Croats and Bosniaks out of large areas of the republic in a policy of “ethnic cleansing” – reports of people being packed into sealed cattle cars, and TV news clips of starving prisoners with bones protruding – are chilling parallels to the Nazis’ attempt to make Europe “Judenrein.”

The world’s indifference, the caution, the warnings by Time Magazine, American, Canadian and European officials against large scale military action despite the evidence of horrors against civilians, all smack so sickeningly of what happened during the Holocaust.

There is no point in using timid efforts like sanctions and limited military actions against bullies – whether they’are Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic or the nationalist Serbian warlords in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bullies respect only one language – the threat of reality of brute force that surpasses their own.

It is heartening, and altogether fitting, that some Jewish organizations and individuals have spoken out loudly against the outrages now going on in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Israeli government has also expressed vocal concern about the atrocities there.

And on July 9, The Jerusalem Post published an especially heartwarming story. It tells how a Jewish family now living in Jerusalem has taken in a Moslem family from besieged Sarajevo.

The Jewish family was returning a favor – the Moslem family had sheltered it from the Nazis when it lived in Sarajevo, decades ago. The same Moslems helped other Jewish families during the Holocaust.

If only the warring parties in former Yugoslavia could get along as well as those two families. No group there is entirely innocent – Croatian as well as Serbian nationalists have been involved in land grabs in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Until these factions learn the art of compromise, the world should do whatever it takes to impose a solution before thousands of more are murdered, and even more driven into exile, beyond the hundreds of thousands that have already suffered that fate.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel p.10A
4 August 1995.

By George Will

Two years ago, when there were reports that a Bosnian Muslim in a Serbian concentration camp had been forced to bite off his father’s testicles, it was comforting to recall the European tradition of fabricated stories — German soldiers amputating the hands of Belgian nurses in 1914, and so on.

Today, with abundant evidence of rape used as a weapon of war, of Muslims’ eyes gouged out and ears and noses sliced off by Serbian “soldiers” (it is disgusting to give that honorable title to snipers killing Sarajevo children), with testimony about heads on stakes and a woman forced to drink blood from her son’s slit throat, it is reasonable to suspend disbelief concerning all reports about the cowardly mob called the Bosnian Serb “army,” which is a proxy for war criminals in Belgrade.

The Serbs’ flaunting of their terror tactics reveals their largest advantage in this war to extinguish the Bosnian nation — this war in which, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihand (D-N.Y.) says, “a new kind of war correspondent emerged, reporting massacres rather than battles.”

The largest advantage is not the mountainous terrain and the fogs that often shroud it, making Bosnia so forbidding to military leaders contemplating intervention. Rather, the Serbs’ largest advantage is their realistic contempt for the West.

The West — what exactly does that noun now denote, given the non-response to genocidal aggression? — almost preens about having become too exquisitely sensitive to use force against barbarism. Shall we blame that peculiar notion of moral progress for the fact that there still are bridges standing, across which come supplies from Serbia to the Bosnian Serbs?

Why are Serbian computers still serving the Bosnian Serbs’ anti-aircraft missiles of the sort that shot down Capt. Scott O’Grady?

Shoot down an American plane and the president’s response will be to publicize the fact that he smoked a celebratory cigar when the pilot was rescued.

The disarray of the NATO allies and especially of the Clinton administration arises in part from military leaders equally nimble in devising arguments for procuring weapons and against using them. The U.S. military, which purports to be competent to cope with two regional conflicts simultaneously, has an annual budget more than 20 times larger than Serbia’s gross national product.

Before U.S. military leaders tell civilian officials what so many of those officials want to hear — that U.S. force cannot be effectively used to change Serbia’s behavior — they should ponder some words of House Speaker Newt Gingrich: “You do not need today’s defense budget to defend the United States. You need today’s defense budget to lead the world. If you are prepared to give up leading the world, we can have a much smaller defense system.”

The White House warns that NATO military action might “reignite the war” — how does one reignite a conflagration? — and jeopardize the cruelly misnamed “safe areas.” This fatuity calls to mind the 1944 letter in which the U.S. assistant secretary of war, John J. McCloy, said that one reason for not bombing Auschwitz and railroad lines leading to it was that doing so “might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.” Wouldn’t have wanted to anger the operators of the crematoriums.

Especially scathing criticism of the president is coming from The New Republic, which would like to like him. In the current issue Zbigniew Brzezinski, the last national security adviser to a Democratic president, offers a presidential speech that could be given “if the post of Leader of the Free World were not currently vacant.” And The New Republic’s editors write:

“The United States seems to be taking a sabbatical from historical seriousness, blinding itself to genocide and its consequences, fleeing the moral and practical imperatives of its own power …. You Americanize the war or you Americanize the genocide. Since the United States is the only power in the world that can stop the ethnic cleansing, the United States is responsible if the ethnic cleansing continues. Well, not exactly the United States. The American president is an accomplice to genocide. Not so the American people. The president of the United States does not have the right to make the people of the United States seem as indecent as he is. He has the power, but he does not have the right.”

Strong words, but strong feelings are appropriate. Speaking of the Serbs who sacked the Srebrenica “safe area,” a survivor said, “They hunted us like rabbits.” Reread the first paragraph of this piece. No one treats rabbits that way.

George Will is a columnist for The Washington Post

Photo: Pilica mass grave in eastern Bosnia holding remains of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians killed by Serbs in the Bosnian Genocide. Credit: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

By Nancy Nusser
The Tuscaloosa News p.2F / Cox News Service
18 April 1993.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — The pale woman sitting in the health clinic said she hates the son she just delivered and could not bring herself to look at him before nurses took him away.

She is Bosnian, and the baby’s father is the Serb soldier who raped her.

“The child is a Chetnik,” she said, using the derisive word for Serbs. “I hate the child. My brother was in a concentration camp for 10 months and I was raped by Chetniks,” she said.

Pope John Paul II urged the raped women of Bosnia to bear the children. Some, like this 30-year-old Muslim woman, do give birth, but say that keeping the child is beyond the limit for them.

What some call hate of the baby, other victims describe as fear, said Amra Mesic of Tuzla, who has counseled some of the rape victims. “We are afraid that deep inside they might also be Chetniks,” she explained.

In Bosnia, Muslim woman generally are Westernized in clothing and education. Many look as though they would be comfortable in an American mall. Though not intensely religious, many still hold tight to traditional values — opposing sex outside of marriage and convinced that rape is almost like death.

More to the point for those who were raped, the aggressors were Serb soldiers who in many cases also killed or imprisoned the women’s families, and burned their homes.

“If I had gotten pregnant and couldn’t have an abortion, I would probably have killed myself,” said an 18-year-old rape victim, also interviewed in Tuzla.

She and the 30-year-old withheld their names.

“It’s like mental death for them,” said Dr. Mladen Loncar, a psychiatrist for the Croatian Ministry of Health who has conducted studies of the rapes.

Estimates of the number of women raped ranges from a conservative 2,400 to about 20,000. Estimates of the percentage of victims who became pregnant are equally far apart. Dr. Loncar said researchers have no idea how many quietly arranged illegal abortions. Estimates of how many delivered a rapist’s child range from 10 to 1,000. All of the figures could be skewed because many women try to hide the rapes, and those who are helping them through the post-rape trauma often cooperate, Dr. Loncar said.

“I didn’t tell anyone” the 30-year-old new mother said. “Anytime someone mentioned being pregnant, I was ashamed.”

Recently, her husband has been in Pakistan, and so she successfully hid the pregnancy from him. Her two children do not know, but her mother has figured it out, she said. She was raped last June, when Serb soldiers occupied rural villages in north-eastern Bosnia.

Zineta Durakovic, 29, who also was among those captured at that time, was willing to allow use of her name. She said that after the soldiers rounded up the Muslim women and children and older men, they loaded them into buses and drove them from village to village, collecting other non-combatants. Along the way she saw bodies floating in a river, Durakovic said.

In a furniture store, Serbs separated out about 40 women and girls, and the soldiers began choosing from the group, she said.

Durakovic was taken to a burned house and raped once by a man covered in blood, she said. When she pleaded with him to let her go, he told her he merely wanted to make love to her, she said.

When it was over, he asked her, hypothetically, whether she would marry him. Afraid, she told him she might have under different circumstances.

The 18-year-old said she was being raped in another house at roughly the same time. When the women and girls were being chosen, an officer told her to go to one corner of the room, the 18-year-old said. Later, he took her to a house and told her to clean it, which she did.

After that, he raped her “eight or nine times” in the hours of the night, she said. She was 17 at the time. She said she didn’t even think about losing her virginity, only about the physical pain.

She said her 15-year-old sister was taken off by a 17-year-old soldier who couldn’t bring himself to rape her because he had a sister that age. So they just talked all night. But she said the next day her little sister went to a local well to get water, and was raped by another Serbian.

Many of those raped believe it was a deliberate policy, rather than a breakdown of discipline in Serbian ranks.

“They planned to do it because they know how difficult it is for Muslim women,” the new mother said. Most Serbians are of Christian heritage. She said the man who raped her said,”You shouldn’t just deliver Muslim babies. You should also have Chetnik babies.”

She said she didn’t have an abortion because by the time she realized she was pregnant it was too late.

“In the Islamic religion, affairs before or during marriage are not done,” said Dr. Munevera Fazlic, who directs a Tuzla organization that delivers medical supplies to hospitals and aid groups.

“The trauma is worse for Muslim women because they’re closed. It’s their shame,” Dr. Fazlic said. “They will not talk about it.”

But Dr. Loncar attributed the intensity of their trauma more to traditional rural values than to their Islamic beliefs. He described the rapes as a kind of Serb-enforced ethnic cleansing — a brutal way to making them reluctant to return to villages where everyone would know what had happened to them.

“It is harder for women to find a husband because they carry the stigma of rape,” Dr. Loncar said. Those who are already married “expect marriages to break up, and it does split up families,” he said.

The three redacted to their rapes in different ways.

Durakovic, an articulate court stenographer, said she understands that the rape was not her fault and should not be a source of shame. But she no longer feels marriageable.

The new mother was tightly wound up, months after her rape. She spoke only in a low, flat voice, and wrapped her arms about herself. Dr. Loncar said the pain is particularly deep for women who give birth because of the conflict between their urge to mother their child and their decision not to raise it themselves.

The 18-year-old seems to have coped, or at least succumbed to teenage optimism, in the year since she was raped.

“At first I thought I would never marry and have a family, but now I’ve begun to realize it’s not my shame,” she said. “Maybe my husband will think about it, but if he loves me he will not care.”

In an interview that lasted more than two hours, she even smiled or laughed at times. Her words stumbled only when she was describing how hard she tried to stop screaming when the Serb officer told her that he would tell other soldiers to join in if she did not stop making so much noise.

Serbs have moved beaten and starved prisoners out of the notorious camps before media visits.

The Milwaukee Journal, p.A6
19 August 1992.

From Journal wire services

Washington, D.C. — The campaign mounted by Serbian militias to drive Muslims [Bosniaks] from large areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina has been so brutal that it probably has caused more deaths than the bombing and shelling of Bosnian cities, according to a Senate staff report.

“Ethnic cleansing has been carried out with widespread atrocities,” said the report prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and released Tuesday.

“Random and selective killings are a routine part of the process…. In some villages and towns, there were organized massacres of the Muslim population.”

The term “ethnic cleansing” is one that Serbian leaders have used to explain their reshuffling of the region’s ethnic groups.

The Senate report was prepared by two committee staffers who visited the strife-torn former Yugoslav federation to investigate allegations of Serbian-run death camps in Bosnia.

The dissolution of Yugoslavia has triggered civil war among its former constituent republics, with Serbia allegedly aiding Serbian minorities in neighboring regions to break away and join a successor federation under Belgrade’s leadership.

One 44-year-old mother from the town of Kozarac [near Prijedor] told the investigators of taking food to her parents in a nearby village, only to find a young Serbian neighbor outside their house.

Dressed in a camouflage uniform, he ordered them out, and the couple emerged hand in hand.

“Please don’t. We are not guilty,” the father pleaded, according to her account. The neighbor, the 21-year-old son of a local Serbian militant, slit both parents’ throats.

The woman escaped, but never learned the fate of her brother and son, both of whom lived with the elderly couple.

Others told of being arrested, often by Serbian neighbors, and sent to detention centers where women and children were separated from men. Younger men with military-style haircuts often were executed on the spot. At some places young men were randomly selected at night and taken away, never to be seen again.

The report added that the campaign by “the self-styled Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina has substantially achieved its goals” of forcibly expelling the Muslims who had been the “overwhelming numerical majority” in those parts of Bosnia closest to Serbia. Now, the report said, an exclusively Serbian-inhabited region occupying 70% of Bosnia’s territory has been created in territory contiguous to Serbia.

That was the finding of the two staff members, Peter Galbraith and Michelle Maynard, who visited the region Aug. 7-14. They interviewed residents, refugees and local government officials, as well as United Nations and Red Cross personnel.

Galbraight, a senior aide to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is an expert who investigated defections by officials in the Iraqi army during the Persian Gulf War.

The report charged that despite promises of openness, Bosnian Serbians have tried to keep the news media and international organizations from these camps. It said the Serbians have denied that some camps exist, sought to convince journalists that other camps were unsafe to visit, and have moved beaten and starved prisoners out of the camps before media visits.

The Vindicator
19 July 1995.
By Anthony Lewis

Two days after the fall of Srebrenica, Gen. Philippe Morillon, French General Staff member, said: “We have to declare war on Gen. Mladic or get out.”

Ratko Mladic is the commander of Bosnian Serb forces, the architect of the assault on Srebrenica and ethnic cleansing that followed [note: this report war published 8 days after the fall of Srebrenica, while the evidence of the large scale massacre surfaced later]

Morillon’s words pitfily summed up one lesson on Bosnia for the Western alliance: To intervene in a conflict and pretend there is no difference between the aggressors and the victims is not only dishonorable but ineffectual.

Pretending: For three years now Britain, France and the United States acting through the United Nations have been doing just that: pretending. The U.N. Protection Force proclaimed its neutrality between the Serbs and their Bosnian victims even while it said it was protecting “safe areas” from Serbian attack.

To carry on the pretense, various UNPROFOR officers and U.N. officials closed their eyes to horrifying brutalities carried out by Mladic’s forces. The justification was that Mladic and the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, would then be nice and let relief convoys through. They often did promise to do so, but they seldom kept the promises.

The Western officers and envoys who dealt with the Bosnian Serb leaders believed, or at any rate acted on the premise, that they were ultimately rational men open to bargaining. But in fact, they are fanatics, committed to killing and raping and torturing other human beings because they are of a different religion.

Threat of force: Only one thing moves Karadzic and Mladic: the credible threat of force. When they thought UNPROFOR might call in meaningful air strikes, they stopped sniping at children in Sarajevo. Now, with UNPROFOR’s credibility gone, they have tightened the noose on the capital.

You can’t do business with Hitler. So the world learned when Neville Chamberlain boasted that cringing to Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938 had brought “peace in our time.” To Hitler, diplomacy was just an interlude on the way to military victory.

Similarly in Bosnia, the United States and the West Europeans came up with a proposal to settle the conflict by giving the Serbs 49 percent of the country. An international Contact Group pressed the idea. But the Serbs had 70 percent, and they thought they could keep at least that by force of arms – that and perhaps Sarajevo, too.

Last week, Mladic and Karadzic made their policy, and their character, clearer than ever. When decent behavior at Srebrenica might actually have helped them politically, they turned their men lose to rape and kill. But even then British officials said UNPROFOR should stick with its position on neutrality.

Failure’s origin: The Western failure in Bosnia traces back to the original decision made by President Bush in 1991, not to resist Serbian aggression in the former Yugoslavia. With Margaret Thatcher gone from Downing Street, the British and others were happy to agree. So that they would not look altogether indifferent to the horror, the allies came up with the idea of neutral humanitarian relief.

More than a year ago, Alain Juppe, then France’s foreign minister, said at a Washington dinner that the humanitarian policy had not worked, that it would have better for the West to have acted resolutely against Serbian aggression from the start. The choice, as Morillon said, is for the West to fight the aggressors in Bosnia or pull UNPROFOR out. The West has the means to act effectively, if it stops pretending.

The Milwaukee Journal
17 July 1995.

Missing from the heart-rending photographs of terrified refugees were the dusty railroad cattle cars and the sullen storm troopers watching with expressionless faces. Nevertheless, some of the roads and villages of [predominantly Bosnian Muslim-inhabited] eastern Bosnia last week looked too much like eastern Europe when it was the Nazis conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

For the last three years, the ethnic cleansing of eastern Bosnia and the bestial acts that accompany it have been perpetrated chiefly by Bosnian Serb militias commanded by two of the world’s most bloodthirsty guttersnipes: Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander.

Last week, their victims included the former residents of Srebrenica, one of the supposedly “safe areas” the United Nations proclaimed in 1993. Forced from their homes in Srebrenica, where many had fled after being left homeless by previous campaigns of ethnic cleansing, as many as 30,000 Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims] fled westward.

Women, the very young, and the very old told how they had been separated from families. They told of rape, of murder, of infants being dragged from the arms of their mothers. They told how men had been rounded up for “investigation.”

It was impossible to verify these harrowing accounts, since reporters were barred from Serbian-held areas. But many of the refugees told similar tales, lending credibility to the accounts. Moreover, reports of rape and other atrocities have been confirmed by independent investigators.

Bosnia has become the graveyard of thousands of innocent people: mostly Bosniaks, but also Croats and Serbs. But it has buried more than bodies.

By late last week, the U.N. Security Council had condemned the Bosnian Serbs 78 times, but failed to take effective action that would halt, much less reverse, the Bosnian Serb conquest.

Bosnia is also becoming the graveyard of the moral reputation of the U.N. and the rest of the civilized world, a world that sees — but does not challenge — the dismemberment of a country and the conquest of its people.

‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Brings Tales of Terror

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, p.8A
14 July 1995.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — In one of the largest cases of “ethnic cleansing” in the 39-month Bosnian war, more than 14,000 Bosniak [Bosnian Muslim] refugees reached government-held territory Thursday with tales of horror, while thousands more — mostly men — were missing.

The frightening yet familiar stories of rape and murder began to emerge from the refugees a day after they were rounded up and deported by their Bosnian Serb conquerors who swept through Srebrenica, a U.N.-protected “safe area” now lost to war and the world’s inertia.

The refugees claim Serb soldiers, making cruel jokes, dragged off young women, tore men and boys from their families, shot civilians and burned houses. As the convoy passed through Serb-held villages on the way to Tuzla, they said, civilians stoned the sweltering buses.

It was impossible to confirm the refugees’ harrowing accounts immediately: All the journalists were banned from the deportation staging area, and the Serbs refused to allow U.N. peacekeepers to supervise the bus loading or to accompany the refugee caravan.

The nightmare began earlier in the week, as thousands of frightened Muslim [Bosniaks] fled Srebrenica to the nearby village of Potocari. On Wednesday morning, the Serbs captured Potocari. Women, children and the elderly were herded at gunpoint onto buses and trucks, while able-bodied men and boys — some as young as 10 or 12 — were separated for interrogation. Hundreds were taken to a soccer stadium in the Bosnian Serb-held town of Bratunac, relief workers said, but many more remained unaccounted for.

As they arrived in the government-held town of Tuzla — itself already teeming with refugees — the displaced of Srebrenica recounted moments from their harrowing ordeal.

One woman told U.N. relief workers she watched in horror as Bosnian Serb soldiers grabbed and carted away her two nieces. Several refugees told reporters in Tuzla that a number of young women were removed from buses and taken off to be raped. Some of the women returned; others did not.

One refugee said a Serb soldier gave her a bar of chocolate, her first food in two days, but she claimed she also saw rebels shoot a woman and a 10-year-old boy.

Two other refugees — women aged 17 and 23 with young children in tow — said they saw Serbs shoot a 50-year-old man and a boy of 5.

The accounts of shootings could not be confirmed independently. A U.N. spokesman, Alexander Ivanko, said a woman and a child died en route from Srebrenica but gave no details.

Refugee Ibrima Adenovic said she saw Serb soldiers take an 8-month-old baby from its 23-year-old mother then drag the woman away screaming from the last Serb barricade before the trek into government land.

Sedalija Selimovic is one of the few men to make it through the Serb cordon. Looking 20 years older than his stated 44 years, he claims the Serbs took boys as young as 12 off for questioning and, once darkness fell in Potocari, “all night, I was hearing women screaming.”

Selimovic, whose wife was killed when Serbs shelled Srebrenica in 1993, arrived in Tuzla with his 18-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son.

“We will die one day, probably by natural death,” he said. “But we all died in Srebrenica. Of fear.”

Bosnian Muslims suffering like Jews under Nazis, says Jewish leader

by Jewish Telegraphic Agency
28 July 1995.

“The expulsion terror practices in Bosnia today is quite comparable to what happened from the beginning of the Third Reich to the outbreak of the war,” Ignatz Bubis, chairman of the central council of Jews in Germany, told German radio last week.

Bubis said he could not understand why the United Nations and NATO have not learned the lessons that came from appeasing the Nazis before the outbreak of World War II.

In the interview, Bubis said he supported Western military intervention on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims, who, after a three-year-old war, are under increasing attack by the rebel Bosnian Serb forces.

However, Bubis limited his comparison of the Bosnian plight to that of the Jews before the “systematic annihilation of the Jewish people.”

Similar outcries have echoed throughout the Jewish world over the past week, as Bosnian Serb forces have heightened their assault against the U.N. “safe havens” in Bosnia.

Bosnian Serbs captured Srebrenica, one of the U.N. “safe havens” last week. They have also stepped up attacks on others, including Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

The takeover of Srebrenica has also set off a new round of emergency aid shipments by Jewish organizations.

Last week, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee set into motion an emergency shipment of food, medicine and clothing for tens of thousands of refugees from Srebrenica.

The shipment from Split, Croatia, set out Monday and is expected to reach Tuzla — where many of the refugees from Srebrenica are located — with minor difficulties because it will have not have to encounter Bosnian Serb checkpoints, said Yechiel Bar-Chaim, the Joint’s country director for the former Yugoslavia.

A total of 60 tons of supplies destined for the besieged capital of Sarajevo are being held up by Bosnian Serbs 10 miles outside the city, Bar-Chaim said in a telephone interview from Split.

The Joint is working in conjunction with La Benevolencija, the humanitarian aid society of the Sarajevo Jewish community, and World Jewish Relief, the British humanitarian organization.

As a group, the Jews in Bosnia have not taken sides in the war. This allows them to carry out their humanitarian missions.

In Britain, a newly created coalition of Jewish organizations launched what has been described as an unprecedented emergency appeal for Bosnian war victims.

Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, said, “There is a moral imperative for Jews everywhere to intervene in the face of racism and xenophobia.”

At the same time, however, the Jewish Board of Deputies, British Jewry’s umbrella organization, was considering toning down a statement on the situation for fear of creating a backlash against Jews in Serbia.

“There is a feeling that anything said by Jews outside is liable to misinterpretation by anti-Semitic factions,” said Neville Nagler, chief executive of the board.

In the Middle East, Israel and Jordan joined forces to coordinate a humanitarian aid effort for Muslim refugees in Bosnia. Under a joint operation called “Peace in the Middle East — Peace in the World,” two planes, one Israeli and one Jordanian, flew to Bosnia on Tuesday to bring medical supplies, clothing, blankets and other aid to the war victims.

The Jordanian and Israeli planes took off separately from Amman and Tel Aviv for Split, Croatia. There, their cargoes were unloaded and redirected to Tuzla, where thousands of Bosnian Muslims have fled from Bosnian Serb attacks.

Rabin last week called Jordan Television during a telethon to raise money for the Bosnian Muslims. He made a personal pledge of $3,000.

Rabin told the television audience that he condemned the attacks by the rebel Serbs on the Muslims in Bosnia, adding that Israel opposes all assaults on people based on their religion, be they “Jewish, Muslim or Christian.”

Back in the United States, leaders of the organized Jewish community, though silent for many months, are again raising their voices against the escalating war in Bosnia.

The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council said it was outraged at the deterioration of the situation in Bosnia.

“We deplore the United States’ failure to provide effective international leadership while millions of people have been forced to flee their homes and hundreds of thousands have been killed because of their ethnicity or religion.” said Lynn Lyss, the umbrella group’s chair, in a statement earlier this month.

Both the NJCRAC and the American Jewish Congress called on President Clinton and Congress to end the arms embargo on Bosnia.

In a letter to Clinton, David Kahn, the AJCongress president, and Phil Baum, its executive director, wrote: “It is time for our leaders to recognize the clear failure of the present policies, and at long last allow the Bosnian government to defend its citizens from further aggression and put a stop to the genocide.”

The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center has also written to the president, urging him to commit to prosecuting the Serbian leaders who are responsible for the current policy of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

A Bosniak family was bomb-attacked by Serb men in Banja Luka… A Croat woman was grabbed from the streets in broad daylight and raped by a gang of Serb men… an elderly Croat woman was attacked in the city center by an assailant who cut off her ears and poked out her eyes… Adina, a 19-year-old Bosniak woman was raped on March 8 by four Serb men in military uniforms…

Gainesville Sun, p.8A
26 March 1994.
By John Pomfret

GASNICI, Croatia — Ismet Hrustanovic had an inkling something was going on in his back yard. The engineer’s puppy started yelping. Twigs and leaves crunched under the heavy feet of men in boots.

Next, a fusillate exploded into his two-story house. One bullet passed through his nose, into his eye socket and out near his ear. Another bored into his wife’s ankle. Several more punched holes in the wall near his 10-year-old son. A final blast killed the puppy.

This is how Hrustanovic, a Muslim [Bosniak], spent Monday, Jan. 31 — hunkered down with a bleeding face while his wife writhed in pain in their modest house in the Serb-held Banja Luka region of Bosnia. On Wednesday, they were evacuated from the region by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

By the time they abandoned their home in the village of Mrkonjic, a Serb family already had occupied the first floor.

Despite progress toward peace in Bosnia, “ethnic cleansing” continues throughout the 70 percent of the country controlled by Serbs. In recent weeks it has risen again in the northwestern Bosnian region of Banja Luka, the site of some of the fiercest cleansing by Serb forces when Bosnia’s war began in 1992. According to U.N. estimates, there are about 1 million people in the Banja Luka region, including 50,000 Bosniaks and about 27,000 Croats. When the war began, as many as 250,000 Muslims lived in the region.

Interviews in this refugee camp in eastern Croatia with U.N. officials and with Bosniak and Croat victims of Serb oppression indicate that regardless of international condemnation, the Serbs’ efforts to drive our minority groups continue unabated.

Serbian guarantees that if peace comes to Bosnia, the more than 1 million refugees forced from their homes will be assured a safe return appear increasingly hollow, officials from the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.

In recent weeks, U.N. officials in the Banja Luka region, the site of the biggest Serb-held city and the only airport in the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb republic, have reported a marked increase in rapes of Bosniak and Croatian women, unsolved and uninvestigated murders and beatings of minorities, drive-by shootings, dynamiting of houses, looting and mutilations, said Joran Bjallerstedt, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ chief protection officer for Yugoslavia and its former republics.

Last week, in Seher, a Banja Luka suburb, a Croat woman was grabbed from the streets in broad daylight and raped by a gang of Serb men, Bjallerstedt said. Several days earlier, he said, an elderly Croat woman was attacked in the city center by an assailant who cut off her ears and poked out her eyes.

“We are seeing a pattern of atrocities, and it is getting worse,” he said. “Our only solution in this case is to move people out of the area. Hundreds of people’s lives are at stake.”

Adina, a 19-year-old [Bosnian Muslim] woman with an aquiline nose and large brown eyes, said she was raped on March 8 by four Serb men in military uniforms in Vrbanja, a Muslim suburb of Banja Luka.

“I was walking back from the market. … They drove up to me in Volkswagen Golf. Two men got out, and they forced me into the car.”

“They took me to a farm, and three men held me down and one did it. The other men laughed. Then they left. I walked 10 kilometers back home. How can they treat us like this, like nothing, like worse than nothing?”

Serb authorities argue that “uncontrolled elements” are to blame for the upswing in violence, an explanation Bjallerstedt rejects.

“Knowing the high efficiency of the Serb police, they could do something if they wanted to,” he said. But they are part of the problem.”

Bjallerstedth said the United Nations’ only recourse has been to evacuate hundreds of Bosniaks and Croats from Banja Luka. Thus, the United Nations finds itself in the ambiguous position of doing the Serbs’ work for them, clearing Bosniaks and Croats from Serb-controlled turf.

The U.N. humanitarian agency, along with the Geneva-based International Committee for the Red Cross, has sent 60 people a week away by bus from Serb-held regions.

“As for the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, ‘he will lie, keep lying as he has done all the time, and he will kill more of us in the coming days” – Nedjara Beganovic.

Serb blockade claims lives of more children
The Victoria Advocate, p.4C
13 January 1993.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Fifty-one children died of starvation and cold overnight in an eastern Bosnian town [Zepa] blockaded by Serbs and isolated for nine months, according to ham radio reports Wednesday. In addition, 34 adults perished Tuesday night in Zepa, 35 miles east of Sarajevo.

In Srebrenica, a town near the Serbia border, 17 people – including nine children – died during the night, according to the reports.

Amateur radio operators have been the only link to the outside for the 28,000 people of Zepa since April. Serb gunmen and mines prevent U.N. convoys from crossing snowy roads to the town, where some people are living in caves.

There was little fighting Wednesday in the Bosnian capital, but residents were gloomy about Geneva peace talks that on Tuesday resulted in a preliminary agreement to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina into 10 provinces.

Early Thursday, the 12-nation European Community gave Bosnian Serbs six days to approve the plan unconditionally or face total international isolation.

“Because time is running out, we will not tolerate any delaying tactics. We have seen that on too many occasions,” said Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen of Denmark, whose nation holds the EC’s rotating presidency.

Bosnian critics accused the United Nations of allowing itself to be hoodwinked by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who was pushing the agreement.

Sarajevans believe the agreement will allow the Serbs, now holding 70 percent of Bosnia’s territory, to keep their gains.

At least 17,000 people have been killed in fighting in Bosnia since the Serbs rebelled after Feb.29 vote for independence from Yugoslavia by Bosniaks and Croats, who together form a majority.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic told state TV that the Serb agreement in Geneva was “just a game.”

Peace negotiators in Geneva “let Milosevic say he is a man of peace, they smile and shake hands with him, and he is personally responsible for so many deaths on both sides,” said Gordana Knezevic [Serb], a journalist at the daily Oslobodjenje.

As for the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, “he will lie, keep lying as he has done all the time, and he will kill more of us in the coming days,” said Nedjara Beganovic [Bosniak], a bank employee.

Three young Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) victims of war gather around a hospital bed in Kosevo (besieged Sarajevo) on Thursday as the world community prepares to evacuate the most seriously ill for medical treatment. The children, from left, are Admir Spahic, 7, who broke his elbow when he came under sniper fire and fell off his bike; Amar Nevesinjac, 10, who lost his left eye when a grenade exploded in front of his house; and Admir Bazdarevic, 8, who was wounded in the arm by shrapnel while playing basketball. Photo taken from The News (newspapers), published on 13 August 1993, p.3A.

PHOTO: The maternity hospital at Sveti Duh is packed due to the influx of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) refugees in Zagreb, Croatia. As a result, these babies (born to rape victims) are grouped on patients beds before being turned over to CARITAS, a Catholic humanitarian organization. Photographer: Sophie Elbaz.

PHOTO: A girl bursts into tears while listening to other Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) women recount their accounts of rape. In Bosnia, a European Community Investigative Mission concluded that 20,000 women and children were victims of systematic rape by the Serbs during the war. Photographer: Sophie Elbaz

PHOTO: Two Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) sisters – A., 22, and M., 21 – were violently raped over a period of two months while they were imprisoned in the camp of Modrica, northern Bosnia. They are alone now and are suffering from serious infections due to their rapes. Photographer: Sophie Elbaz

PHOTO (above, below): Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) woman, Malima, 20, was a captive in the KLJUC camp for three months and gave birth in Zagreb hospital. “I don’t want to see that ‘thing’. I hate it and those who did it,” she declared to the doctors, who immediately took care of the baby. Ključ is a town and municipality by the same name in western Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photographer: Sophie Elbaz

The Rapes in Bosnia: A Muslim Schoolgirl’s Account

The Washington Post
27 December 1992.

By: Peter Maass

ZENICA, BOSNIA — Before the local Serb warlord took Jasna away from her apartment to rape her on June 9, he told her not to cry. , Jasna a Muslim schoolgirl, would be safe with him.

Then, Jasna, 17, said in a lengthy interview here, the Serb ordered her, her 15-year-old sister and an 18-year-old friend into a car and drove them to a motel in their home town of Visegrad. The notorious Bosnian Serb White Eagle militia had just seized Visegrad, and Jasna sensed in a terrifying instant that the victors were going to treat women as spoils of war.

Nazira (not her real name) is a 30-year-old Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) woman from Goradze where mass rapes took place. She was repeatedly raped by Chetniks (Serbian forces) from April to August 1992 and became pregnant. She is about to give birth and will give the infant away. She wants to forget the past and says she will never tell her husband who is fighting in Bosnia. She is presently hiding out with her 12-year-old son at her sister's and doctors are uncertain she will ever recover her mental health.Photographer: Sophie Elbaz

The girls were taken to the Vilina Vlas motel, which has been described by the Slavic Muslim-led Bosnian government as one of the Serbs’ alleged “rape motels.” Jasna was locked in one room and her friend was locked in another. Jasna’s younger sister, Emina, was put in a room across the hall. A few hours later, Jasna heard her sister moaning and sobbing. She never saw her again.

The warlord, Milan Lukic, who has been well-known locally for years, came into Jasna’s room, put a table in front of the door and told her to undress.

“He said that if I didn’t do what he wanted, I would never go home,” Jasna recalled, speaking in a nervous but steady voice. “Then he ordered me to take off my clothes. I didn’t want to do that. He said I must, that it would be better to take my clothes off myself, or else he would do it and he would be violent.”

Jasna paused in her narration. She tightened her hold on the hand of her older sister, who is a student in Zenica and sat next to her throughout the interview, which was conducted in this government-held city in an empty pizzeria decorated with a few paltry Christmas ornaments. Jasna stared hard at a spot on the tablecloth and resumed speaking.

“I started to cry. He said I was lucky to be with him. He said I could have been thrown into the river with rocks tied around my ankles. But I didn’t want to do it. He got angry and cursed and said, ‘I’m going to bring in 10 soldiers.’ “

And so Jasna, who said she had never had a boyfriend, tried to stop crying as she was raped.

According to the Bosnian government, more than 30,000 women have been raped in this former Yugoslav republic’s nine-month-old war, with some of the victims as young as 12.

The government, partly supported by testimony from Muslim victims and captured Bosnian Serb soldiers, has accused the Serbs of employing rape as a tactic to “boost morale” among the victorious fighters and humiliate Bosnian women and their families. A captured Serb soldier in Sarajevo, the capital, has told journalists that men in his unit were ordered to rape. The soldier, Borislav Herak, admitted violating two Muslim women at a “rape motel” outside Sarajevo and then killing them.

The practice of mass rape has been condemned by the United Nations and the European Community. Each organization is sending investigative teams to the former Yugoslavia to interview rape victims and determine the extent of sexual crimes here. EC leaders described these practices earlier this month as “acts of unspeakable brutality,” but the number of such incidents has not been confirmed.

Most Muslim rape victims who have survived their ordeals are unwilling to talk to anyone — spouses, siblings and especially journalists — about what they have been through. Their code of silence may make it difficult for investigators to collect firsthand testimony.

One hindrance to disclosure is the resentment that many Muslims feel toward Western reporters trying to investigate reports about this latest atrocity in the Bosnian war. The Bosnian government is publicizing the rape issue in an effort to galvanize support for its fight against the Serbs. But many lower-level officials and ordinary people view the Western interest in mass rape as an example of how the West loves to be entertained with lurid tales of Bosnia’s misery — and then do nothing about it.

Jasna, who escaped Visegrad a month after being raped, agreed to talk on the condition that her last name not be divulged because her younger sister is, if not dead, still in Serb captivity. Jasna said there was one reason why she decided to talk: “I want people to know the truth.” After a moment, she added, “I was lucky. I survived.”

As in virtually all other rape cases, there was no way to independently corroborate Jasna’s story, since there were no witnesses and the warlord who she said raped her could not be reached.

The trouble in Visegrad reached a climax in early June when the White Eagle militia, which has been linked to some of the worst war crimes in Bosnia, took control of the Muslim city, once a lovely tourist draw on the Drina River near the Serbian border. The White Eagles began rounding up and killing fighting-age Muslim men, so most of them fled to the surrounding forests to wage a guerrilla war. The women and children were left behind.

Lukic, who is described as a tall, handsome and athletic Serb and is said by the Bosnian government to have led the “ethnic cleansing” operation in Visegrad, came to Mersiha’s building on June 9 to inspect its vacant apartments. About 11:30 p.m., he entered the apartment where Jasna, her younger sister and mother were staying with friends. According to Jasna, Lukic asked how old they were and, seeing the girls tremble, told them not to worry.

Lukic ordered the three girls to come with him so that they could help identify some Muslim youths being held at the city police station. When Jasna’s mother pleaded with Lukic not to take the girls, he became enraged and started overturning furniture. “I am the law,” he screamed.

The three girls went downstairs and got into Lukic’s car. They did not go to the police station. They were taken to the Vilina Vlas motel, which has 20 to 30 rooms. They did not see any other women there except for middle-aged Serb receptionists, who were joking with soldiers milling around the lobby.

The girls initially were locked in one room together. But after about 10 minutes, Lukic came to the room with a soldier and told Jasna’s 18-year-old friend to go with him for “questioning.” Mersiha overheard Lukic tell the soldier in the corridor to “question her, but not too much.” Other soldiers in the hallway began laughing.

The same scenario unfolded with Jasna’s sister, Emina. Lukic entered with a soldier and told 15-year-old Emina to leave with the soldier. He gave the same order — question her, but “not too much.” There was more laughter in the corridor.

Lukic left Jasna alone in the room for about 10 minutes. Then he came back, put the table in front of the door and gave the order to undress, followed by the threat of rape by 10 soldiers if she did not comply.

After the rape was over, Jasna began crying again. She said in the interview that she was crying for her younger sister, not for herself. It did not matter. Lukic taunted her, she said. “What do you want to do to me?” he sneered. “Stuff me into a big artillery gun and shoot me to Turkey?”

Jasna said Lukic fell asleep. Some soldiers knocked on the door and one of them shouted to Lukic, “We know what you’ve got in there and we want it too.” Lukic told them to go away.

Then Jasna heard the voice.

“At about 3 o’clock, I heard a loud cry when the door across the hall was opened. The girl inside that room started to cry. I recognized the voice. It was my sister.”

Jasna has not seen or heard from her sister since that moment.

At about 5 a.m., Lukic ordered Jasna to get dressed, and then, much to her surprise, he drove her home. Jasna’s terrified mother was waiting for her in the apartment building’s entryway.

“I decided to not tell her that I was raped,” Jasna explained. “She was crying and asked me, ‘Where is your sister and your friend?’ I told her they were okay, they were just staying overnight. I didn’t want to hurt my mother.”

Jasna and her mother stayed in Visegrad for a month more, hoping that Emina would be freed and sent home. Even though the town’s Muslim population was under virtual house arrest, Jasna’s mother went to the police station almost every day. One time, a Serb policeman simply aimed his loaded gun at her and said, “Leave.” Another time, she saw Lukic there.

“Lukic said to her, ‘What do you want? At least I returned one of your daughters,’ ” according to Jasna.

With few Muslims left in Visegrad, Jasna and her mother had little choice but to leave in a bus convoy in the middle of July. Their best hope is that Emina is still in Serb captivity. Their worst fear is that she is dead.

Jasna now lives in a student hostel in Zenica with her older sister, Meliha, who was in this central Bosnian town when the rapes allegedly occurred. Instead of remaining silent and withdrawing, she said she has repeatedly talked about her ordeal.

Even so, Jasna said she has nightmares every night and must sleep in the same room with her sister. She gets frightened whenever Meliha goes out. Jasna told her story reluctantly. She avoided talking about the rape for the first 45 minutes of the interview, but then it came tumbling out, almost nonstop.

“I want to tell the Westerners the real truth,” she said. “I want them to stop these crimes. There are plenty of girls in a worse position than me.”

Mass Rape in Bosnia - Breaking the Wall of Silence

By Seada Vranic

Instead of a blindfold, the Serb soldiers bound Enisa’s eyes with their socks. The stench made her throw up, so they hit her until she learned that ‘Serb socks don’t smell’. Seven ‘heroes of the nation’ raped her and beat her for days. At first she resisted, so they brought her to her senses by knocking her teeth out with a rifle-butt and breaking her jaw. When she lost consciousness they would ‘give her a bath’, i.e. douse her in cold water. Terrified that she would be driven mad, she suddenly liked the idea and saw madness as a way out. She began singing Serb songs louder and louder, then dancing with the chetnik who had presumably butchered her husband. The soldiers were dumbfounded. They threatened her, held a knife to her throat, but she only sang louder. Believing she had gone off her head entirely, the soldiers paid less attention to her and she managed to escape, by hiding in a potato sack. When the journalist Seada Vranic spoke with Enisa a few months later, in July 1992, she saw before her a hunched, grey-haired old woman with a contorted face. That was just one month before Enisa’s twenty-eighth birthday.

This is just one example of the devastating testimony presented by Seada in Pred zidom sutnje (recently produced by the Zagreb publishing house ‘Antibarbarus’ and forthcoming in an English version, Breaking the Wall of Silence), a work recording and analysing the experiences of rape victims from Bosnia- Herzegovina. The terrible statements of the half-demented victims so shook the author, that she had the greatest difficulty in maintaining her own psychological stability.

Seada has collected the statements of young children who watched from hiding as chetniks raped their mothers and sisters, or forced men to rape their own family members. Children saw chetniks impale men on stakes after raping them, leaving them alive with the stake in their entrails. Women, impregnated after hundreds of rapes and unable to abort, showed Seada their breasts disfigured by cigarette burns. She recorded all their statements verbatim. She just left out the names, and sometimes shortened the statements when the victims recounted their ghastly experiences in too great detail.

When she began collecting this direct testimony, she believed that rape and the victims of rape were simply part of the madness of war – a chaos without rules or system. After a certain time, however, for all her her caution she came to the unambiguous conclusion that rapes were part of the Greater- Serbian expansionist policy, planned at the top levels of the state. After the first wave of information about this almost unbelievable phenomenon, world public opinion was shocked. But other tragedies in the world soon pushed this terrible dimension of the war into the background, leaving it to sociologists, psychologists and other such experts. Yet the truth was far more terrible than even the greatest pessimists expected. The atrocities were even more numerous and brutal than was initially apparent, given the difficulty of collecting the testimony of rape victims – women, men and also children – many of whom were killed after being raped.

Seada Vranic finds some relief today in devoting herself to her family, who live not far from Geneva on the French side of the border. Her husband, a Croat physicist, works in an institute for research into sub-atomic particles, her two daughters attend primary school. She was born in 1949 to Bosniak parents in Travnik, where she completed her primary and secondary education. She then studied political science at Zagreb University, after which she worked for many years as Zagreb correspondent of the Belgrade daily newspaper Borba. When she first met war victims of rape, she decided to investigate the phenomenon in depth. We spoke over several days. Although today Seada is quite composed, when she speaks of the worst atrocities she has to struggle to maintain a calm appearance.

SV I began to write on this subject almost by chance. My colleagues from Monitor (the independent Montegrin weekly), with whom I had been working for a year already, asked me to write on some Bosnian theme. I told them that my only connection with Bosnia was the refugees. That was at the beginning of the war in Bosnia, in March 1992.

Were your articles censored?

No

Could you write about Vukovar, for example?

Yes, and very emotionally, since there was no other way to write about Vukovar at the time. The Monitor staff journalists too were writing about the shameful war Montenegrins were then waging round Dubrovnik. I am proud of my collaboration with that paper. I don’t know what it’s like today, since I can’t get hold of it. While writing in Monitor about Bosnian refugees, I wrote up the case of a woman with two children who had fled from Bijeljina. I realized that she had been raped.

How did you realize that?

I asked her what was going on in Bosnia. She replied: ‘They’re cutting throats, killing, burning…’ and then, when she continued ‘… and raping’, the word stuck in her throat. Tears ran down her cheeks. At the time I barely knew what rape meant, what kind of a crime it was, what kind of social phenomenon. I paid no special attention to her testimony. I was speaking with these first refugees at the Islamic centre in the Folnegovic settlement near Zagreb. It was only when I began to write my article that I realized how many women had been raped. I wasn’t able to send the article in, since all international links with Montenegro were cut off. While waiting, I started wondering if I couldn’t fill out the article with new details. I went on talking to refugees and constantly encountered rape victims. After those first stories, however, my view on the nature of the crimes was different from what it later became.

In what sense different?

At the time I couldn’t accept the idea that rapes were part of the Serbian expansionist war strategy. I thought: rape is a bio-psychological act that cannot be carried out to order. Strategy implies subordination, submission to a superior. I had no doubt that Karadzic was a sufficiently monstrous being to be able to devise and initiate such atrocities; nor did I doubt that the hordes who’d arrived from Serbia to slaughter and kill were capable also of rape. It wasn’t that I thought any morality would restrain them from it, but I felt sure erection couldn’t be achieved to order. However, after four months the ‘mosaic’ took shape for me. I noticed the congruences in events in wholly different localities and I began to enter them on the map. I had victims from everywhere except eastern Herzegovina.

So then you changed your opinion about the nature of the violence?

Talking with the victims had already begun to open my eyes. I became aware that rape in such circumstances is not the same as violent sex. It is aggression carried out by sexual means. I became convinced that in this war rape is closer to Thanatos than to Eros. I realized how I too was misled by certain notions about the ‘violent nature of the male’, and by the fact that I too live in an environment where males dominate. Even serious people sometimes say: ‘he couldn’t restrain himself, so he raped’. It’s a matter of his instincts, in other words. But this time everything came from the head. Rape cannot be committed in self-defence. No one can say: the woman attacked me, so I raped her. In parallel with my investigations I was reading a wide range of literature on the whole phenomenon.

You were looking for a historical dimension to the events?

I wanted to know everything relevant, to analyse various aspects: for example, how the victims react and how the perpetrators react after rape.

Your book says that victims have the feeling they have been permanently altered; that ‘someone else has moved into their skins’.

According to Professor Kulenovic, the effects remain in the victim at a far deeper level and for far longer than the victim herself is able to express. Those around her are often unaware how deep these effects are. The victims are alive, their wounds are mostly unseen, to look at they’re not invalids – yet they are. Therapies help, but most rape victims in this war haven’t been subjected to any therapy. Most of them will never admit to anyone that they have been raped.

You mention certain ratios between the total number of rape victims and those who speak out about the crime.

Other people have collected these data. One sociologist, writing about rapes in the province of Zenica in the nineteen seventies, was astounded when she realized that in the surrounding villages only every twenty-fourth rape was reported. In the city the ratio was somewhat less, but still horrifying. Some other studies speak of less drastic ratios, but still conclude that, out of every ten rapes, only one is reported to the competent institutions. It is difficult to take in this knowledge about the wall of silence, against which I myself ran up: a mother and daughter, for example, may know about a rape, the father not.

The claims in the book about the overall number of rape victims are truly terrifying.

Nobody has exact statistics for this and the final figure will be only an estimate. There are many ‘blanks’ in the research. In the USA one rape is reported every six minutes. No one knows how many actually occur. In Bosnia during this war there were tens of thousands of rape victims, that’s beyond any doubt, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand. Three estimates are often quoted: the Bosnian government speaks of 50,000, the Investigating Commission of the European Union of 20,000, and the victimologist Dr Zvonimir Separovic of 30,000 rape victims, with the comment that these are not the final figures, which will doubtless be larger. Personally I don’t like haggling with these figures. The crime will not be any greater if a few more thousand victims are attached to it. But in my opinion even the number spoken of by the Bosnian government will eventually be surpassed.

Is a systematic effort still being made to establish the definitive number of victims?

In Sarajevo there exists a commission and an institute for collecting data about war crimes.

Do you believe that they approach their work in a serious and objective manner?

The fact that they haven’t made any bombastic pronouncements is very significant. From the commission I obtained five statements by rape victims, all of which my experience tells me were authentic. At the end of each of these statements the victim confirms that she is ready to repeat her testimony in front of any court or expert commission. Out of all the rape victims whose experiences those Sarajevo bodies have collected, 1,300 have signed similar declarations. Altogether, a lot of work has gone into this.

Did the victims usually insist on full anonymity?

Yes, normally. When writing my book, I had to take care no real names crept in. I was writing under a heavy load. Just before the book was printed, after reading it through I don’t know how many times, I was horrified to discover that I’d written one real forename and surname. I tried to maintain an emotional distance from the book, thinking I’d stand the strain more easily in that way. All that testimony really crushed me, I was on the brink of physical and psychological collapse.

When did you have your most critical moment?

At one point I stopped work on the book.

Why?

One victim attacked me. The case involved a family whose war experiences are detailed in my files, and was centred on the testimony of a woman from Rogatica, a village in eastern Bosnia: her two daughters, four granddaughters and four daughters-in-law had been raped, and the rest of the family burnt alive in their house. The old woman agreed to talk to me, but her granddaughter attacked me physically. She broke my spectacles. I didn’t blame the girl, of course, but for a long time I couldn’t compose myself.

How old was the girl?

She was twelve. As soon as she heard that her granny intended to tell a reporter what had happened to them, she attacked me.

Presumably you wondered then what you were doing, what kind of assignment you had taken on, when even the victims you sympathized with didn’t understand you?

While writing this book, I’ve wondered many times what I was doing. So many victims begged me: ‘Please, don’t write about that.’ But people need to know the truth. If I hadn’t realized that a planned crime was involved, I wouldn’t have written the book at all; but as things were, I felt I had to do so.

In discussing that criminal conception, is the number of psychiatrists on the Serbian side in this war significant?

We do not have the crucial evidence, in the shape of a document like Nazi Germany’s Law on Concentration Camps, which proved that certain crimes were not just incidental, but an essential part of a policy. In the case of the Greater-Serbian aggression, we do not have any such document. It does not exist in written form, but the conception is clear. Look, for example, at what happened with the camps. Even civilians entered the camps, along with entire military units: the males would be given, say, half an hour to ‘do the job’. They didn’t have to ask what job they had to do, everybody knew. That couldn’t happen in the army without the knowledge and approval of the top military and political authorities. When later the conspiracy of silence was broken, when people began talking about rapes, the Serb authorities knew perfectly well what it was all about. They never called anyone to account. They merely denied the accusations. And the pattern was repeated. In Foca, in Bijeljina…

What pattern are you referring to?

The basic pattern was developed in a number of variants, depending on the context. The task was performed in one way in Banja Luka, in another in the villages. But behind it all lay just one idea: to expel the population of other nationalities from a given territory. Rape is a very effective means for that purpose: if three or four raped women arrived in a village, all the villagers would quickly take flight. They couldn’t kill everybody, you see: Banja Luka was too large a town for them to be able to kill all the Bosniaks and Croats there. Nor could they send all of them to camps, or to the front. So they dreamed up a monstrous plan: they went into the houses of non- Serbs and raped them. At Banja Luka rapes took place on a particularly massive scale, even though the town was outside the war zone the whole time. One rape victim from Banja Luka for a long while couldn’t believe something like this could happen at all. She knew about this kind of mass terror only from films about Nazism. But then, as she says, she ‘felt the fear’.

What are the other variants of the basic pattern?

The assault on Foca and its surroundings provides another example. This involved lightning terror: bombardment, burning, killing, raping… The aim was achieved very fast: within a few days, even a few hours in the case of the villages, the territory was ‘clean’. They took some people off to the camps, they killed some on the spot, and others they raped.

What happened to non-Serb women married to Serbs?

One experience has stuck in my memory. The woman was divorced from a Serb husband: for years she had consulted doctors, but she had been unable to conceive. They raped her and she conceived. I didn’t manage to verify whether Bosniak or Croat women married to Serbs were protected from that kind of terror. I think there was no rule about it. I know there were Serbs who tried to protect victims.

When people today discuss German resistance to Nazism, they usually conclude that it was very minimal, and that almost the entire nation fell victim to the Nazi psychosis. Isn’t it the case that a similar conclusion imposes itself with regard to Serbs in the present war, and that only very rare Serbs opposed this kind of terror by their co-nationals?

At the beginning I was astounded, then shocked, by the reactions of Serbs to the aggression of their army. Some didn’t react even though no explicit danger of reprisal could threaten them – I have in mind here especially Serbs living abroad. Few of them condemned the crimes, even fewer protested about them. That makes the achievement of those who did find enough civic courage to oppose the terror all the greater – I’m thinking here about Bogdan Bogdanovic, Mirko Kovac and a few others. But this was just a drop in the ocean of silence.

Taken as a whole, there really was a consensus to lie. With present-day communications, satellite programmes, world radio stations, they could not help knowing the truth. Moreover, lots of them followed the troops like vultures and looted. The majority defend themselves by saying they never saw anything with their own eyes, but then neither do they have any desire to know anything about it all. It’s like walking past a starving beggar and turning your head away in order to avoid being aware of his hunger.

Perhaps people in Serbia didn’t know the details of the terror their co-citizens were inflicting, but in principle they all knew what was happening. Perhaps at the beginning there were some naive souls who believed Vukovar was being destroyed by its own inhabitants, but after a few months everyone knew who was destroying Vukovar. They knew Sarajevo was under siege, with shells raining down on it.

It was only after the great shock of Germany’s defeat that the Germans experienced a catharsis. The Serbs haven’t…

The Serb nation too will come to its senses. But the success Milosevic is having at acting the role of peacemaker makes it clear this will not happen very soon.

Your book catalogues appalling crimes and appalling sufferings. The case of raped women who then became pregnant must be among the most dreadful traumas of this war.

Out of all the rape victims I spoke to, only eleven admitted to having become pregnant. Nine of these terminated the pregnancy, but two reached a late stage of pregnancy while still in prison, so that it was too late to terminate by the time of their release. They reached Zagreb and gave birth. This was at the time when a campaign was under way in Croatia to limit abortion rights, which added to the victims’ sufferings. The number of eleven raped women who became pregnant doesn’t even come close to representing the true state of affairs. Almost 80% of rape victims were between 15 and 35 years old, i.e. at the age of maximum fertility. Many victims were in prisons and camps, where they were subjected to mass rape. Some of these women were raped by soldiers and civilians literally hundreds of times. I spoke, for example, with one victim immediately after she left the Petrova Street hospital in Zagreb. When I asked her if she had become pregnant, she answered: ‘No, I certainly didn’t!’ That kind of attitude was typical.

You have paid special attention to the strange reaction of certain feminists, who have explained the entire phenomenon as a gender conflict rather than as aggression by one nation against another.

Unfortunately many individuals have compromised themselves with such views, including one wing of the feminist movement. I am not a feminist myself, but I consider that the feminist movement has an important place in the civilized world and great merits for improving the position of women in society, so I am intentionally expressing myself with great caution here. Perhaps the feminists I mentioned had no hidden political agenda, but they spoke as though rape victims were always women. So rape becomes a result of male nature and has always existed: even Zeus changed into a bull and raped Europa. And that’s how things still are today, in war and in peace. Many women still think this theory is correct.

But the victims are not just women. In the war in Bosnia- Herzegovina and Croatia, men and children were raped too. All those victims have forenames and surnames. If more than 80% of victims were of one nationality, then that is no accident. There were no rapes where perpetrator and victim belonged to the same nation, or if there were any the number was statistically insignificant. Yet certain feminists still spoke in terms of gender war.

In reality, it is quite clear in this case that certain men raped specific

Don’t you pay special attention, at one point in the book, to the question of rapists among the HVO [Croatian Council of Defence] forces?

International sources and various commissions have concluded that soldiers of the HVO committed many rapes at the time of the Croat-Bosniak conflict. There were indications that rapes in this conflict too served the purpose of ethnic cleansing. But there was no evidence that what was involved here was a military strategy devised by the HVO’s military and political command. I didn’t come across a single source pointing to that.

Out of 202 rape victims with whom I spoke, there was just one Serb woman and one Ukrainian. Serb rape victims suffer no less than those of other nations, nor are Bosniak rapists in any sense justified by the fact that their nation has been the victim of Serbian aggression. But no balance exists among the different nations in this case – neither among the victims nor among the perpetrators – however much international politicians may have disseminated the notion of a civil war of all against all. Yet some feminists were against any counting of rape victims. Not to look at the figures, however, would mean ignoring the problem.

But don’t you mention in your book how American feminists were responsible for warning about rapes at the time of the aggression against Croatia?

Certain American women spoke out very early on about rapes and the policy of ethnic cleansing in occupied areas of Croatia. Very little was said or written about this in Croatia during the war of independence. Even today I don’t know why it was hushed up.

The problem of rape is a universal civilizational problem, about which all the world’s citizens should know much more than they do. In Croatia this problem has long been ignored. That’s why I’d like as many people to read this book as possible. I didn’t write it to provoke intolerance between nations. I tried to be cool, but that wasn’t entirely possible. I wasn’t a cold observer, I was on the victim’s side. I presented the raw facts, irrespective of whom they might upset. If the facts I uncovered had indicted my own nation, I would still have written them down. My book wasn’t the result of any search for proof of given theses. And I checked all the statements in it several times over.

The publisher of your book is working with you on a series of events to promote the book in Croatia and throughout the world. It would be very useful for public opinion in Serbia too to be informed about the book. If some courageous organizer were to be found for a promotional meeting in Belgrade, would you accept an invitation?

I would go there. I’m ready to hear uncomfortable accusations. My book tells how several tens of thousands, perhaps even a hundred thousand, rapes have been committed in the name of one nation. This is a terrible accusation for that nation. If someone says such a thing and then presents solid evidence, the reactions cannot but be stormy. Despite the evidence, many people will claim that the book is anti-Serb. It will be hard for me to prove I haven’t written a book of hatred, nor will I attempt it.

A crime has been committed that in numerical terms is not the greatest in the history of warfare. But for the first time in the history of warfare rape has become a part of military strategy. For the first time human sexuality has been used for the purpose of what has euphemistically been termed ethnic cleansing, but which is in fact classic genocide.

Aerial view of the notorious Serb-run Omarska concentration camp in north-west Bosnia, near Prijedor, in August of 1992. Thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians were interned, tortured, raped, and killed in this camp.

Aerial view of the notorious Serb-run Omarska concentration camp in north-west Bosnia, near Prijedor, in August of 1992. Thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians were interned, tortured, raped, and killed in this camp.

The Sign reads CONCENTRATION CAMP. PROHIBITED ENTRY. Photo: Entrance to the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia, where Serbs interned, tortured, raped, and killed thousands of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims).

Here is a better quality of this image from the same source (images may be lighter or darker depending on how they were scanned and depending on the source they were scanned from, e.g. printed newspaper):

The Sign reads CONCENTRATION CAMP. PROHIBITED ENTRY. Photo: Entrance to the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia, where Serbs interned, tortured, raped, and killed thousands of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims).

Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in the notorious Serb-run Manjaca concentration camp in north-west Bosnia, near Prijedor, in August of 1992.

Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians the notorious Serb-run Manjaca concentration camp in north-west Bosnia, near Prijedor, in August of 1992.

Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in the notorious Serb-run Manjaca concentration camp in north-west Bosnia, near Prijedor, in August of 1992.

The Manjaca concentration camp was controlled by a Serb Lieutenant Colonel Bozidar Popovic.

One of entrances to notorious Serb-run Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) civilians were interned, tortured, raped and killed in this camp.

Inside view, hall, of the Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) civilians were interned, tortured, raped and killed in this camp.

Outside view from one of the rooms used by Serbian guards of the Omarska concentration camp where Serbs interned, tortured, raped and killed thousands of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) during the Bosnian Genocide.

Beds in the Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Beds were introduced as a media propaganda after the Serb leadership allowed British TV crews to visit Omarska. Prisoners slept on the floor. Thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) civilians were interned, tortured, raped and killed in this camp.

The building of the Serb-run Keraterm concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) civilians were interned, tortured, raped and killed in this camp.

Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in the Trnopolje concentration camp.

Badly beaten and emaciated Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) man from the village of Hrnici, later died, in the Trnopolje concentration camp (Bosnian Genocide)

Emaciated Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men in the Trnopolje concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia, during the Bosnian Genocide.

Emaciated Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) man in the Trnopolje concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia, during the Bosnian Genocide.

Tortured, beaten, and emaciated Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men in the Trnopolje concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia, during the Bosnian Genocide.

BBC TV crew speaks with emaciated Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) man in the Trnopolje concentration camp. Serb authorities allowed TV crew to enter the camp after international pressure mounted. Badly emaciated prisoners were removed from the camp, but Dr. Idriz Merdzanic managed to smuggle some photos of brutal beatings and abuse in the camp, which we will show beginning from the next photo.

Emaciated and visibly weak Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) man in the Trnopolje concentration camp in August of 1992 at the start of the Bosnian Genocide.

Covert images submitted to the British TV crew by Dr. Idriz Merdzanic from the Trnopolje concentration camp in August of 1992 during the Bosnian Genocide.

Covert images submitted to the British TV crew by Dr. Idriz Merdzanic from the Trnopolje concentration camp in August of 1992 during the Bosnian Genocide.

Covert images submitted to the British TV crew by Dr. Idriz Merdzanic from the Trnopolje concentration camp in August of 1992 during the Bosnian Genocide.

Covert images submitted to the British TV crew by Dr. Idriz Merdzanic from the Trnopolje concentration camp in August of 1992 during the Bosnian Genocide.

A 11 July 1995 file photo shows an elderly Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) woman and her husband getting treatment for injuries inflicted on them by Serb military forces as they fled Srebrenica as it was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces. The man on the right died shortly after the picture was taken. During the Srebrenica genocide, Serb forces rounded up and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, and expelled 25,000 women after abusing many of them. General Ratko Mladic ordered his troops to rape Muslim women and girls. Source: (Getty Images)

Author: Florence Hartmann
Interviewed by Dani (Sarajevo)
Translated by the Bosnian Institute, UK on 16 August, 2007

Florence Hartmann covered the former Yugoslavia for Le Monde, later became the most prominent spokesperson for the Hague Tribunal, and is the author of a study of Slobodan Miloševic entitled La diagonale du fou [The fool’s/bishop’s diagonal], expanded edition Paris 2002. She recently visited Sarajevo to take part in a Conference on research into crimes against humanity and genocide.

Dani: Not many people know that you were the first journalist to discover the existence of a mass grave at Ovčara in 1991. What did you speak about at the conference?

Hartmann: My experience as a journalist covering the area of the former Yugoslavia before the war, and the six years I spent working for the Hague Tribunal, encouraged me to remind the conference of certain essential facts which permit one to understand the nature of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Since the theme of the conference was prevention of genocide, it was important to recall that there were many signs pointing to what would happen in that war. Unfortunately the observers, including in the main the international community, chose to disregard the evidence and failed to act in a manner that might have prevented or halted the unfolding criminal enterprise.

Dani: At the start of the 1990s, you came to Bosnia as a reporter for the Paris daily Le Monde. Were you already then able to foresee the scope of the crime? In other words, were you able to recognise the genocidal intention?

Hartmann: Yes, in part. Some of Karadžić’s statements, such as the one he made in front of the Bosnian parliament building, were public and as such reported upon; but there were also ones that at the time were known only to the chief actors within the international community, because the Bosnian government made available to them the intercepted conversations between Karadžić and his collaborators who took part in the Great Serb project.

It is necessary, of course, to bear in mind that the intention associated with the crime of genocide need not be publicly stated by the perpetrators and their collaborators. The specific intention, therefore, is proved by the perpetrators’ words and deeds. The plan to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina was clear and precisely formulated in early 1991. Today, however, thanks to investigation undertaken by the Hague Tribunal, all the 250 intercepted conversations have been made publicly available.

Dani: The International Court of Justice has decided otherwise. That is to say, in its judgment in the case of the charge made by Bosnia-Herzegovina against Serbia and Montenegro it found that genocidal intent was present only in the area of Srebrenica. How do you explain this?

Hartmann: The war plan included the destruction of the Bosnian Muslims within a limited geographical area, i.e. within part of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the aim of joining that part to Serbia. Milošević was the initiator and the moving force behind the execution of the plan to secure for the Serbs certain areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was Serbia’s political leader and was considered and admired by them as the leader and protector of all ethnic Serbs living on the former Yugoslav territory. He utilised Karadžić to formulate and articulate their joint intentions. In a conversation between Milošević, Karadžić and Babić conducted in July 1991, Karadžić said that ‘the Muslims should be expelled from the valleys in order to join together all Serb territories in Bosnia-Herzegovina’. Milošević and his collaborators made their intentions clear even before the start of the Yugoslav crisis. It was obvious that the inclusion of territories of other republics, and changes to the established borders, carried with them a high risk or likelihood of violence. They needed to use violence in order to achieve their aim, especially in an ethnically mixed country such as Yugoslavia. In other words, everything was known and predictable, but nothing was done to prevent it.

Dani: In the research you have conducted and in the articles you wrote during the war, and later in your books and publications, you analysed the speeches, conversations and writings of the actors involved in the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. What are the most striking ones in your view?

Hartmann: The genocidal intentions of Karadžić and other Bosnian Serb leaders expressed especially in the speeches delivered at the 16th session of the Bosnian Serb assembly of 12 May 1992, and – as I have already mentioned – the conversations of Karadžić and others intercepted during 1991 and 1992. It is The six strategic aims of the Serb people, however, published on 12 May 1992 in the RS Official Gazette, that represents the clearest manifestation of the plan to remove non-Serbs from official positions in all the marked areas, and to physically remove non-Serbs from them regardless of whether they formed an ethnic majority in these areas or not. Bearing in mind the context of the growing desire on the part of Karadžić and his collaborators to destroy the Muslims in Bosnia, and everything that followed as a result, these documents can be seen as setting off the machinery for the implementation of the genocidal plan by the Bosnian Serb leaders.

The first strategic aim – the separation of the Serb people from the other two ethnic communities – was announced by Karadžić at the 16th session: ‘We can’t live in a unified state. We know it very well: wherever fundamentalism comes in, one can no longer live, there is no toleration. Serbs and Croats, given their birthrate, cannot control the incursion of Islam into Europe; in a united Bosnia, within 5 or 6 years the Muslims will go over 51% … This conflict was instigated with the intention of removing the Muslims.’

Still earlier, on 12 October 1991, Karadžić had a long discussion with Gojko Đogo. During the conversation Karadžić repeated five times that in the event of war the Muslims would disappear. Allow me to quote him at least in part: ‘They don’t understand that there will be bloodshed and that the Muslim people could disappear. Misguided Muslims, who do not know where he [Izetbegović] is taking them, that they could disappear’; and again: ‘they will disappear, this people will disappear from the face of the earth’.

A mere day later, on 13 October 1991, Karadžić, talking to Momčilo Mandić, said: ‘Within a few days there will be no Sarajevo, and there will be over 500,000 dead; within a month the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina will be destroyed!’

Again, on 15 October 1991, Karadžić foresees the extermination of the Muslims in the event of war. Talking to Miodrag Davidović and his own brother Luka, Karadžić said: ‘In the first instance, none of their leaders will remain alive, they will be killed within 3 or 4 hours. They will have no chance of surviving.’

On the same day, in his well-known speech in the Bosnian parliament, i.e. in a public speech, Karadžić again said: ‘The path along which you wish to take Bosnia-Herzegovina is a highway to the hell and suffering that Slovenia and Croatia have already experienced. Don’t think that you are not taking Bosnia-Herzegovina to hell and the Muslim people possibly to disappearance!’

At the start of the war, in April 1992, the crimes started to happen systematically and across a wide area, especially in Prijedor, Brčko, Sanski Most, Zvornik, Bratunac, and later in Srebrenica, as part of a genocidal campaign conducted across the whole desired Serb state in Bosnia. The evidence on repetition, on the model and on the system are indicative of the presence of a genocidal plan or campaign conceived at the leadership level. This should have drawn the attention of the international community, with the aim of taking the necessary measures designed to prevent the Serb leaders from realising not just their military aims, but also their genocidal ambitions.

The clear genocidal intention of the Bosnian Serb leadership in connection with Srebrenica was revealed during the war. At the 33rd session of the RS assembly, held on 20 and 21 July 1993, Karadžić stated that if the Bosnian Serbs entered Srebrenica, there would be ‘blood up to the knees’! A year later, in 1994, Karadžić said this about the enclaves: ‘If the international communities treats us like wild beasts, then we will also behave like wild beasts!’

During a meeting with British general Rupert Smith on 30 April 1995, he repeated such phrases: if the international community treats the Bosnian Serbs like wild beasts in a cage, then they will behave accordingly.

According to the well-known evidence that Miroslav Deronjić gave to the ICTY, Karadžić said on 9 July 1995 in Pale, following a meeting with Jovica Stanišić: ‘Miroslav, they must all be killed… All and every one you find there.’ For his part, Mladić openly stated this intention during a meeting on 11 and 12 July at Hotel Fontana. Mladić offered the Bosniaks the choice: ‘survive or perish’.

Dani: Nevertheless, in your book Milošević – the Fool’s Diagonal you have shown beyond doubt that Milošević was the main link in the chain of decision-making and command.

Hartmann: The essential part of my research was the role played by Belgrade, i.e. concretely Milošević’s regime. Also during my later work for The Hague tribunal, which started a few days after Milošević’s fall, I carefully followed up all the new evidence that emerged as part of his case and in other trials. Milošević always took care to minimise public knowledge about his role in, and influence on, the events in Croatia and Bosnia, which is visible also in many of the intercepted conversations during 1991. I recorded and recalled how in one of the intercepted conversation of December 1991 he warned Karadžić not to speak about a new concept of Yugoslavia, about Great Serbia, for example, but rather to use the expression ‘continuity of ex- Yugoslavia’! He put it like this: ‘Take care, it would be dangerous if they started to think that something new was being created.’ This is especially important when we recall that at that time Cyrus Vance was saying to Milošević: ‘You’ll never get Republika Srpska.’ During the first years of the war, the prospects for legalising the seizure of parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina territory were nil. Milošević felt already in June 1993 that ‘the Bosnian war option has been exhausted’. At a meeting at the highest level held in Belgrade he explained why: ‘They have taken all that is required.’ ‘They’ referred to his collaborators, but they did not in fact have all that they wanted. At some point in mid 1994, Milošević understood that the international community was willing to recognise the gains of war. He told his accomplices at a meeting in Belgrade: ‘They have offered us to extend our territory by a quarter and to legalise that. And to have a confederation straight away.’ But their plan demanded creating compact territory. The enclaves of Srebrenica, Goražde and Žepa stood in the way of this plan. It was this desire and determination to have a compact territory that determined the fate of the enclaves in the summer of 1995. In other words, the tragic events that followed were not a chaotic consequence of localised activity, but a consequence of careful planning and anticipation on the part of the Serb political leaders. This is why I insist that everything was predictable and as such could have been prevented. In January 1995, before the mass killings in Srebrenica, Milošević stressed that the international community would offer a solution – in the ratio of 50-50 – exclusively on the basis of the fact of military victory. Without military victory, he said, the international community ‘would never propose a 50-50 division of Bosnian territory, which never in history belonged to the Serbian state’. After the genocide in Srebrenica but before Dayton, in August 1995, Milošević declared that it would not be necessary to swap the enclaves for other territory, because they would be assimilated into Serb territory without struggle. He then thanked Mladić and his officers for completing ‘their task with honour’. And he added: ‘if the Muslims refuse a peaceful solution, they will be told they will be left alone with Mladić’s sword hanging over them.’ Immediately after Dayton, Milošević said: ‘We have created Republika Srpska on a territory where there never was a Serb state. This is a historic achievement. A great victory has been achieved and the result is Republika Srpska, a republic on half of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. … We have persevered and 50% has been entered into the books.’

Dani: But why was genocide not prevented? I am sure you do not go in for conspiracy theories. What in your view is the reason that permitted a genocide to take place before the eyes of the world?

Hartmann: In most cases, including Bosnia, preventing genocide in good time demands observation, recognition of signs, especially when the intent is clearly formulated at the very start of the war. No one was surprised by what happened in Bosnia – anyone who wanted could have foreseen the circle of violence and the intention to destroy the ethnic group called Bosniaks. Prevention of genocide thus depend on outside political will. In the case of Bosnia, the intention was clearly articulated and the great powers knew about it. That the genocide was not prevented was due to the lack of political will. I wish to stress that the absence of political will runs against legal obligations deriving from the Convention on Genocide, and that states which have signed it have a duty to intervene and prevent genocide. Avoidance of these obligations by the international community, and in the first instance the United States and the European Union, was accompanied by purposeful shunning of the use of the term genocide, which denied the genocide in Bosnia, just as was done in Rwanda in 1994.

Dani: You attended together with the other conference participants the commemoration and funeral of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre, and visited the Memorial Centre and the Black Room in Potočari. I must admit that I overheard your conversation with Hasan Nuhanović about the events in Potočari in the summer of 1995. Can you tell me what it was about?

Hartmann: was my second visit to the Memorial Centre. I went there first as spokesperson for the Hague Tribunal in 2003. Due to the protocol, I was then unable to walk round the area of the electric battery factory. What astonished me was that the UN base was sufficiently large and had enough capacity to accept the approximately 30,000 Srebrenica inhabitants who set off for Potočari seeking protection by the UN Dutch battalion. This is why I asked Hasan whether the present-day fence and perimeters are the same as those in 1995. Hasan confirmed this. After all, he described it in his exceptional book Pod zastavom UN-a [Under the UN Flag]. Of all the many questions that remain unanswered, related to the responsibility of the international community for what happened in Srebrenica, there is the fact that the UN troops did not open the gates to let in those who had fled to Potočari, to await there a political solution of the situation. They instead permitted and helped the separation of the men from the women and children. Separation of men from women and children is the widely recognisable first phase of a mass crime. This is unforgivable and shameful, because it was not a question of any military inferiority of the UN forces, as UN representatives and Western government have insisted ever since. If that had been done, it is likely that several thousand lives would have been saved.

Dani: Your unexpected departure from the Hague Tribunal caused much speculation as to the reasons. In your statements you stressed your desire to become once again an investigative journalist. What are you writing now?

Hartmann: The reason why I left the tribunal are to be found in its internal relations. I must admit, though, that I am very pleased about returning to my profession and journalistic investigations. One result of it is the book which I plan to publish in September. Its subject is one with which I have been dealing for a long time: the relationship between international politics and international justice. I have written it in the hope that it may help and stimulate a younger generation to continue the struggle for the truth even after the closure of the Tribunal. We do not have the right to stop and close our eyes before the facts which we now know. Because of the truth, and because of the future generations. There will, of course, be a Bosnian translation.

GENEVA, Sat. — A United Nations investigator yesterday accused Serbs of launching a campaign of rape and murder when they attacked the Bosniak-held enclave of Gorazde and surrounding villages earlier this year.

In his latest report on human rights in former Yugoslavia, former Polish Prime Minister [Polish Jew] Tadeusz Mazowiecki also accused Serb forces of deliberately directing artillery fire against hospitals during the fighting in March and April.

He said the attack — in which some estimates say around 700 people died — had let to animosity against Serb civilians in the area and some rights violations by Bosnian forces.

“The assaults on the [Bosnian Muslim] villages involved widespread terrorisation of the residents, eviction from and destruction of their homes, and the killing of livestock,” the report issued by Mazowiecki’s Geneva office declared.

“Eyewitnesses have also attested to the commission of rape by groups of [Serb] soldiers.”

“The attacks on the villages of Stanici and Kordici are indicative of the practices of the advancing troops. In these villages, a number of residents were summarily executed, including elderly women and a handicapped man.”

“Bodies of the dead were subsequently mutilated and decapitated,” the report said.

The attack on Gorazde in eastern Bosnia, which the Serbs argue was a response to an offensive launched from the town by forces of the Bosnian Government, lasted for almost a month and ended with a ceasefire on April 23.

The Serbs effectively suspended the assault after NATO airstrikes against their positions on April 10, called to protect personnel of the UN’s UNPROFOR peacekeeping force after they had come under fire from Serb positions.

Gorazde and four other Bosnian-held towns are UN-designated “safe areas” exempt from armed attack under a Security Council resolution.

Mazowiecki said that during their offensive the Serbs committed “numerous and clear violations of human rights and humanitarian law.”

“Attacks included the deliberate targeting of civilian and highly sensitive vulnerable targets like hospitals, and interference with attempts to bring care to those who were wounded.”

He said the main town hospital “was deliberately targeted on many occasions, causing heavy loss of life and wounding.” Many patients died because the assault prevented doctors from treating them.

The investigator, who has in the past been condemned by the Serbs for his criticism of their behaviour in the two-year Bosnian war, rejected Serb claims that the hospital had been a Bosnian military command centre.

He said the Serbs had also fired on vehicles ferrying wounded to the hospital, on a makeshift hospital in an apartment building causing heavy loss of life and on refugee centres as well as on a UN military observers’ building where many local people had taken shelter.

Mazowiecki said Government forces had also been responsible for some violations of human rights “though to a scale which is not comparable with that of the Serb forces.”

although before the attack there had been no significant harassment of Serb civilians in the enclave by Bosniaks, the report said, the present situation of Serb residents “gives cause for concern.” – Reuters

ZAGREB, Croatia — The Serbian fighters who have seized large parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina are being accused of systematic rape against captured Bosniak [Bosnian Muslim] women and girls.

The accusations, by Bosnian officials, foreign activists and by the victims themselves, have mounted along with reports of murders, beatings and forced relocations of civilians in the war-torn country.

In one account, Vazima Visovic, a slender, 12-year-old Bosniak girl, described her ordeal last summer in a Serbian camp for women in Foča, southern Bosnia.

“We were kept there for 27 days and got almost nothing to eat. The Chetniks [Serbian soldiers] beat us, abused us and raped us, including me,” she said, her stony voice sounding agonizingly adult.

“They were coming night and day, always in groups of two or three, and took us to apartments — me, my mother and another woman. One man raped all three of us. … I was always raped by two or three.”

2,000 Bosnians Pregnant by Rape
Kingman Daily Miner, p.14,
28 January 1993

GENEVA (AP) — At least 300 babies have been given up by women raped during the ethnic war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to a European Community report.

The report, released Tuesday, cited information from representatives of the mosque in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, who have been caring for refugees.

Officials at the mosque also said they knew of 2,000 women pregnant as a result of rape.

The whereabouts of the 300 babies, who are considered Bosnian, was not specified. But officials have said some such infants are receiving care in Croatia, while a team of lawyers studies their situation.

Bosnian Serb fighters have been accused of raping Muslim women as part of a campaign of terror to clear whole areas of non-Serbs. There are allegations of rape camps set up by Serb irregulars.

Kingman Daily Miner, p.14, 28 January 1993, reports about 2,000 Bosniak women pregnant by rape in the Bosnian genocide.

Photo: Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) woman Ferida Osmanovic hanging from a tree. Photo by Darko Bandic. U.S. Dept of State said another 14-year-old Bosniak child hung herself with her scarf in Potocari after she and her 12-year old cousin were raped by Serb soldiers.

The Last Rational Act in Bosnia

By Sue Reisinger
Miami Herald, p.A6
26 July 1995.

The Miami Herald’s wire services late last week sent us the picture of a woman about 20 who had hanged herself in a grove of trees in Bosnia.

Some editors found the picture in poor taste, and another said, “Well, we don’t really know why the woman hanged herself, do we?” Besides, several concluded, it was an irrational act.

Irrational?

Let’s look at what we do know: The woman was one of tens of thousands of terrorized Muslims [Bosniaks] who had fled to an emergency camp after the Serbs overran their United Nations-guarded “safe haven” [Srebrenica].

They sat all day in a blistering sun, with little to no food or water, washing in and drinking from the same stream used for latrines.

By their tearful accounts, they had witnessed horrible cruelties. They watched as Serbs slit the throats of friends, neighbors and relatives; as Muslim women were dragged away and raped; as mostly women and children were stripped of their possessions, packed into buses, and taken away as part of the Serbs’ “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia.

The road that they traveled was lined with the bound bodies of their male loved ones, their fathers, husbands and son, most dead, a few struggling to stay alive.

Irrational?

Egads! These people have been pushed to the farthest limits of rationality. The world for them has gone mad. And they are powerless.

Just as we seem to be powerless to decide what is the right thing to do for Bosnia.

Growing up after World War II, whenever I asked why the United States didn’t do something much earlier about the horrors suffered by the Jews in Germany, the answer was always: We didn’t know.

There were isolated stories, but we didn’t really know until it was too late.

Well, look at this picture. Fellow refugees said that the woman slipped into the woods sometime during the night and hanged herself in despair. They did not know her name [later it was revealed, her name was Ferida Osmanovic].

We may not know exactly who she is, or what specifically happened to her and her family. But, God help us, we really know what is happening in Bosnia.

This woman’s death crystallize the insanity of it all for the whole world to see. The picture could not be any clearer.

Irrational?

This may well have been the last rational human being in Bosnia.

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: On 31 March 1992, Serbian paramilitary group, led by Zeljko Raznjatovic (ARKAN), slaughtered hundreds of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians - women, children, and elderly men - in the town of Bijeljina in northeastern Bosnia, near the border with Serbia. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: A Serbian paramilitary soldier from Arkan's Tigers shoots Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in the street of Bijeljina on 31 March 1992, the first day of the Bosnian war. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: Serbian paramilitaries kick and kill Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians on the streets of Bijeljina on 31 March 1992, the first day of the Bosnian war. Serbian troops slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians - men, women, children and elderly - in during the attack on this norteastern Bosnian city. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: On 31 March 1992, Serbian paramilitary group, led by Zeljko Raznjatovic (ARKAN), slaughtered hundreds of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians - women, children, and elderly men - in the town of Bijeljina in northeastern Bosnia, near the border with Serbia. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: Frightened Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in the town of Biljeljina. On 31 March 1992, Serbian paramilitary group, led by Zeljko Raznjatovic (ARKAN), slaughtered hundreds of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians - women, children, and elderly men - in the town of Bijeljina in northeastern Bosnia, near the border with Serbia. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: Serbian paramilitaries during the attack on Bijeljina in northeastern Bosnia in the first day of war on 31 March 1992. They slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians - men, women, children and elderly. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: Serbian paramilitaries known as Arkan's Tigers desecrate Mosque in the northeastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina on 31 March 1993, the first day of the Bosnian war. Serbian troops slaughtered hundreds of Bosniak men, women, children and elderly during the attack on Bijeljina. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. The entrance to the Manjaca concentration camp reads in cyrillic letters CONCENTRATION CAMP - PROHIBITED ENTRY. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Antoine Gyori

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Sign (visible from Center to Right) written in cyrillic letters reads MINES. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. The camp was surrounded by mines to prevent escape of prisoners. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Sign (visible from Center to Left) written in cyrillic letters reads MINES. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. The camp was surrounded by mines to prevent escape of prisoners. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Emaciated prisoner in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Emaciated prisoners in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Antoine Gyori

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Emaciated prisoners in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. The camp was controlled by Lieutenant Colonel Bozidar Popovic.Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Antoine Gyori

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Emaciated prisoners in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Emaciated and tortured prisoners in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Pascal Le Segretain

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Antoine Gyori

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsenq

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Emaciated prisoners in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. The camp was controlled by Lieutenant Colonel Bozidar Popovic.Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Antoine Gyori

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Pascal Le Segretain

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Prisoner in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there.Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Prisoner in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Ron Haviv

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Isabel Ellsen

Bosnian Genocide, August 1992. Tortured prisoner in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croat (Bosnian Catholic) survivors of the Serb-run Omarska concentration camp in western Bosnia near Prijedor on August 6, 2006, c ommemorate the 14th anniversary of the reveleation of death camps by British journalists in August 1992. Photographer: Ranko Cukovic

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: TV pictures of the Serb-run Omarska concentration camp in western Bosnia near Prijedor, August 1992. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), died there.

An elderly Bosnian Muslim man holds up a poster at a rally in former Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor, Bosnia, on August 6, 2006, commemorating the 14th anniversary of the revelation of death camps by British journalists in August 1992. Photographer: Ranko Cukovic

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: TV Pictures of the Serb-run Omarska concentration camp taken on 7 August 1992.

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: TV Pictures of the Serb-run Omarska concentration camp taken on 7 August 1992.

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: Bosnian Muslim civilians at the Serb-run Omarska concentration camp pose for cameras. Photographer: Antoine Gyori

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: TV Pictures of the Serb-run Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor, Bosnia. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks, died there in 1992.

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: Relative of the Omarska concentration camp victims near the Western Bosnian town of Prijedor in Bosnia-Herzegovina holds photos of excavated bodies of her relatives on 06 August, 2006.

A Bosnian Muslim woman holds a poster during a visit to the former Serb-run Omarska concentration camp in western part of Bosnia, near Prijedor, on August 6, 2006, to commemorate the 14th anniversary of the revelation of death camps by British journalists in August 1992. Thousands of non-Serbs, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), were tortured and murdered in three notorious concentration camps in western Bosnia. Several of high-profile Serb commanders have been sentenced by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague for the atrocities committed there.

Ed Vulliamy addresses Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croat (Bosnian Catholic) survivors of the Serb-run Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor in western Bosnia, August 6, 2006, during the 14th anniversary of reveleation of death camps by British journalists. Photographer: Ranko Cukovic

Bosnian Genocide, 1992: 21-year-old Edna Dautovic was one of many Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) women who were tortured, brutally raped, and then killed by the Serbs in the Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor. Pre-war photo of Edna Dautovic courtesy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Close-up of the drain at the Brcko Luka camp facility. Witnesses detailed how Serbs executed victims, slaughtering their throats, and forcing their heads on the grate covering the drain. (Bosnian Genocide, 1992)

U.S. Department of State
November 6, 1992.

About 3,000 men, women, and children were killed during May and June at the Luka-Brcko camp, which held approximately 1,000 civilian internees at any one time. Some 95% were ethnic Bosniaks, and the remainder were Croatians. Approximately 95% were men. Until May, the bodies were dumped into the Sava River. Thereafter they were transported to and burned in both the old and new “kafilerija” factories located in the vicinity of Brcko.

All internees in the camp came from within a 14 kilometer radius of Brcko. The first hangar was occupied by Bosniaks from Brezovo Polje. The Serbian police appeared to have administrative control of the camp.

Upon arrival, all internees were questioned by one of three inspectors who decided their fate. For example, if a person was a member of the SDA [Bosniak Party for Democratic Action] or HDZ [Croatian Party for Democratic Action] political parties, he was executed at the camp. Other questions included whether the person had foreign currency, gold, or weapons, or if the neighbor might have any of these items. Without a signature from either the police chief at the camp, or one of the military officers, a person could not be released. Approximately 1,000 people were released from the camp when Serbs vouched with their lives – and signed documents to that effect – that the internees would not leave Brcko, discuss politics, or own weapons. These people were all released within a 48-hour period; thereafter releases were not authorized. One example was an individual who had his ears cut off with a knife by a Specijalci soldier. As he grabbed for his ears in pain, a young women cut off his genitalia with an instrument called a “spoon.” As he fell forward and lay on the ground, he was shot in the head by a guard. In other instances, ears and noses were cut off and eyes gouged out. Knives were used to cut into the skin of internees all the way to the bone; some fingers were cut off entirely. All was done in front of other internees.

Beatings with clubs were common. A Specijalci soldier used a wooden club with metal protruding from it to kill several people. He forced internees to lick the blood from the metal studs. Another shot an individual in the back several times after he had carried a dead body behind the third hangar. In June, some 50-60 men had their genitalia removed.

Approximately 10-15 Chetniks [definition: In World War II - Serbian nazi collaborators; In Bosnian war - Serbian paramilitary thugs], Yugoslav Federal Specijalci, and Serbian police were involved during the daily occurrences, but some participated on a more regular basis. Some were drunk. Internees were told to sing. Those who did not sing loud enough were shot point blank. After they had started singing, the men would come in and randomly start shooting. About 50 men, women, and children were killed in one case, allegedly in retaliation for the death of 12 Chetniks who had been killed on the front. This type of shooting occurred on a daily basis with anywhere form 15 to 50 victims.

There was also a torture room at Luka-Brcko camp. Those tortured were either killed immediately after being tortured or were left to bleed and, if they did not die in 2 to 4 days on their own, shot to death. They were left lying in their own blood in the living areas and other internees were not allowed to help in any way. People were beaten with clubs to the point that the bones in their faces caved in, and they died.

The internees were then “volunteered” by camp personnel to carry the dead bodies behind their living areas or to the camp garbage dump. During the movement of the bodies, additional internees were killed when a camp official took shots at them.

Another frequent occurrence was the shooting of internees with three bullets in the back of the head of each victim. This was done at a drain, and the blood was allowed to go down the drain that emptied into the Sava River. Internees carried victims, some still alive, and had to dump their bodies at the camp garbage dump. Internees were sent on a detail to clean the blood from the floor and dump dead bodies outside of a Serbian building in Brcko. A female internee was sexually assaulted by a soldier while her husband and other internees watched. One Chetnik sexually assaulted several women, some as young as 12, in front of internees as Specijalci soldiers held the women to the ground. The same man killed 80-100 people at the camp. Another Chetnik sexually assaulted women and killed internees, in some cases using an ax to the head.

Serbs burned dead bodies of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians at the old kafilerija factory in Brcko during the 1992 Bosnian Genocide. Some 3,000 victims perished in the systematic killings that occurred in May and June 1992.

The dead bodies of internees from the Brcko camp were burned at the old “kafilerija” factory. The trucks carrying bodies drove into a building that had three industrial-sized cooking vats with furnaces used ordinarily to make animal feed. The bodies were dumped inside the building with the three furnaces, then Chetniks dumped the dead bodies into the furnaces. Before the bodies were dumped, jewelry was removed from them and, in order to remove rings, fingers were cut off. Gold and silver teeth were removed from the bodies as well. Chetniks kicked the jaws of the corpses open to see if they had gold or silver fillings and, if so, removed them with pliers.

The transporting of the bodies to be burned began in mid-May. Trucks left every morning at about 4 am. On a typical morning, three trucks left together. One was a civilian refrigerator truck with the dead bodies and three Chetniks in the cabin, the second had 10-12 internees who unloaded the bodies at the factory, and the third had approximately 13 Chetnik guards.

After they arrived at the factory and had began unloading bodies, two or three more refrigerator trucks often arrived with approximately 20 dead bodies transported in each vehicle, perhaps from another location. All the trucks were Yugoslavian-made civilian trucks.

A sequence of photographs showing murders of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians by local Serb police officer Goran Jelisic. Jelisic was apprehended by a Team of US Navy SEALs (as a NATO SFOR Team) in January 1998. He was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment. Other photographs show mass graves of more than 3,000 Bosniak residents, slaughtered by Serbs, in and around Brcko during the 1992 Bosnian genocide.

Photo evidence courtesy: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague (ICTY).

Bosnian Genocide, Trnopolje concentration camp in 1992.

By Peter Maass
The Bulletin
16 August 1992.

OMARSKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — When the camp guards looked in another direction, the prisoners at the Serb-run detention camp here broke into nervous whispers.

“There is no doctor here,” one of them breathed. “As soon as you get sick you are shot.”

A handwritten note was slipped to a journalist.

“About 500 people have been killed here with sticks, hammers and knives,” the note said. “Until August 6, there were 2,500 people. We were sleeping on the concrete floor, eating only once a day, in a rush, and we were beaten while we were eating. We have been here for 75 days. Please help us. … Once there is no media attention focused on us, it is not known what will happen to us.”

Even more than recounting the abuses they say are taking place, the Muslims [Bosniaks] imprisoned here emphasized that they believe Serb authorities are turning Omarska into a Potemkin village. Over the past week, all but 175 of Omarska’s several thousand inmates have been transferred to other facilities. The ones left behind apparently are for show.

One prisoner said hurriedly that the meat in his lunch of bean soup was added to impress the half-dozen foreign journalists allowed to visit the camp. Mattresses and blankets also are new items, added another, who spoke as the sound of machine-gun fire rattled through the air.

Journalists enter camps

Since Aug. 6, the ethnic Serb authorities in Bosnia, who have taken control of two-thirds of the former Yugoslav republic during four months of fighting over its independence, have permitted a handful of foreign journalists to visit several of the dozens of detention camps, in which Muslim prisoners have described being abused and tortured. Some told of executions. None of the visitors has actually witnessed abuses taking place, but television pictures of emaciated prisoners and testimony by former prisoners have shocked the world. In addition, relief officials have received reports that almost every Serb-controlled village and city in Bosnia has a detention center – whether just a jail cell or an entire sports stadium.

According to Serb authorities, most of Omarska’s inmates were transferred to two better facilities over the past week – a military prison in Manjaca and a “refugee camp” in Trnopolje. But many Muslims in this swath of Serb-controlled territory in northwest Bosnia near the Croatia border fear that some Omarska inmates have been shipped to still-secret camps elsewhere, or simply executed.

Residents of the nearby town of Banja Luka said they watched in horror as heavily guarded bus convoys from Omarska carrying prisoners with shaved heads passed by on their way to Manjaca, to the south. Several of the witnesses said they saw prisoners holding up three fingers – the nationalist symbol for Serbia – apparently as an act of humiliation instructed by their ethnic Serb guards.

The Muslim-led government of Bosnia has accused the ethnic Serbs of running nearly 100 “concentration camps” and holding about 70,000 prisoners.

Tales of horror

Trnopolje, located only a few miles from Omarska, also was opened to journalists last Sunday, and, surprisingly, it was possible to talk relatively freely with some prisoners who had just arrived from Omarska. With guards watching but out of earshot, tales of horror tumbled out.

At least six prisoners said in interviews that they were severely beaten at Omarska and saw executions and piles of dead bodies. One prisoner said that almost every day he saw about 10 to 15 fresh corpses lying in a field where a truck would eventually pick them up.

The prisoners said many Omarska inmates were held in an open mining pit that had no toilets or protection from the daytime sun and evening chill. One Muslim – frail and with a shaved head – said he was held in the pit for 72 days and able to wash just once.

“It was horrible,” said an 18-year-old youth, running his hands along his torso, where his skin was stretched like a transparent scarf over his ribs and shoulder bones.

The youth said his first beating took place on the evening he arrived at Omarska. In an interrogation room, he said, he was forced to kneel on the ground and place his hands on the walls – and then was pummeled with kicks to his kidneys and rifle-butt blows to the rest of his body.

“For beatings, they used hands, bars, whips, belts, anything,” he said. “A normal person cannot imagine the methods they used. It was very difficult to survive psychologically.”

Midnight beatings

The prisoners said they were fed meager portions of thin soup once a day at Omarska, and that sometimes the water they drank came from a polluted river. They added that the beatings took place irregularly, though the guards had a preference for coming at midnight.

When Trnopolje guards were not looking, several inmates brought this reporter into the room in a filthy school building where they sleep, crammed next to each other like sardines. Lying on the floor were two men, both with wounds allegedly suffered during beatings at Omarska.

The fetid bandage made from tissue paper on one man’s limb was peeled off to show a softball-size hole. There was no skin – just crushed bone and infected tissue. The detainees said the Trnopolje guards have not given them antibiotics or disinfectants, and the man’s wound is festering.

The other man lay motionless on the ground. His lips, nose and eyes were severely bruised and swollen, and there were numerous gashes on his face. He could not speak, and he could barely blink. He looked like a battered corpse.

The Muslim prisoners who spoke out would not give their names. Some voluntarily approached the journalists, but their worried expressions sent a message that they feared punishment for their actions.

A police official filmed the interviews from a distance while guards looked on and, from time to time, approached the inmates, ending the interviews. A photographer in military fatigues took pictures.

At one point, a prisoner pulled off his shirt to show this reporter about a dozen small, fresh scars on his chest. The scars were thin and straight, as though the skin had been slashed with a razor blade. Suddenly, before the prisoner had time to explain the scars, a look of horror came over his face.

A guard was standing behind this reporter. The interview ended.

Trnopolje is described by the Serbs who run it as a refugee camp from which anybody, including the former Omarska prisoners, can leave if they wish. There is no barbed wire around the camp, which consists of a few school buildings, a large yard with open latrines and several thousand unwashed and haggard people, mostly men.

But the detainees do not feel free. They say they cannot leave – that walking away is academic because the surrounding region is heavily militarized.

Omarska is different. It is located inside a sprawling mining center and consists of a two-story building in which the remaining 175 prisoners sleep, eat and are interrogated. It is heavily patrolled by well-armed guards in military, police and civilian clothes.

Paradoxically, the journalists’ visit to the supposedly improved camp at Omarska seemed to terrify some prisoners. With guards listening, the inmates appeared unable to speak freely, except in a few stolen moments. When asked questions, they looked fearful and hung their heads low.

Bosnian Genocide, Four-year-old Jasmin Hreljic is being treated at Sarajevo's children's hospital for burns suffered to his face during the Serbian attack on the besieged Sarajevo.

Bosnian Genocide, Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor in 1992. They were badly beaten and deliberately starved to die.

Bosnian Genocide, A young Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) child lies in bed and plays with toys while recovering from face wounds received during the siege of Sarajevo, 2 February 1993.

Bosnian Genocide, Amputee Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) children, wounded by Serbs during the siege of Sarajevo, photographed in a Sarajevo hospital, February 1992.

Bosnian Genocide, A man in Sarajevo washes blood off of stretchers used to carry the dead and wounded citizens of the besieged capital, terrorized and killed by Serbs on a daily basis.

Bosnian Genocide, The body of a civilian victim killed by Serb snipers during the siege of Sarajevo. Dead civilian lies on a sidewalk, surrounded by broken glass.

Bosnian Genocide, Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians inside the notorious Manjaca concentration camp near prijedor in 1993.

Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians inside the notorious Manjaca concentration camp near prijedor in 1993.

Bosnian Genocide, A woman stands near the area of Sarajevo that was used for the 1984 Winter Olympic Games which now holds the graves of thousands of casualties of the international armed conflict between Bosnia and Serbia.

Bosnian Genocide, Bodies of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians killed by Croats in Vitez, 25-30 April 1993.

Gettysburg Times, p.8A
30 March 1993.
[two years before the Srebrenica Genocide]

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina – More than 2,300 Bosniak refugees took advantage of a ceasefire and a rare relief convoy Monday to flee the cold, hunger and encircling Serb force at the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica.

The refugees – women, children and old men – were packed so tightly into the 19 U.N. trucks that they had to stand on their luggage. But they waved with relief as they reached safety in the Bosnian government-held city of Tuzla.

Some apparently died en route.

Tales were common of people falling off the trucks – many of them open vehicles – as they traveled all day to reach Tuzla, 45 miles to the northwest.

“I have no one, I have no one,” sobbed 70-year-old Hajra Bosankic, lying on her side, safe, in the sports hall converted to a refugee center. She said one son was killed by Serbs. She did not know where her other five children were.

A teen-age granddaughter fell out of a truck as it left Srebrenica, Bosankic said. A sandwich left by aid workers lay untouched by her belongings.

Sefika Mehic cried uncontrollably, holding her feet and rocking. She said her month-old baby turned yellow and apparently died en route. Doctors rushed the child away upon arrival, and she had heard no further.

Relief workers were seen pulling a blanket over the face of an old man who died en route.

The cease-fire has been the most successful so far of the nearly year-long Bosnian genocide. It went into effect at noon Sunday, and U.N. officials reported no major violations.

The agreement by the Bosnian Serbs for the cease-fire, a convoy into Srebrenica and the evacuation out of the town came as the international community turned up pressure recently for a settlement. The convoy of food and medicine was only the second into Srebrenica since Dec. 10.

The war broke out last April 6 over a vote for independence by Bosnia’s Bosniaks and Croats. It has left at least 134,000 people dead and missing.

The Southeast Missourian, p.3A
22 March 1993.
[two years before the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide]

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina – As others fought to get on the U.N. trucks leaving besieged Srebrenica, Sabira Bosancic wa screaming to stay. But foreign relief workers didn’t understand her words: “Don’t tear me away from my family!”

Many fellow refugees from the town on Sunday savored their first day in nearly a year in which they did not have to fear dying of starvation or Serb shelling. But Mrs. Bosancic, among the 673 hustled by U.N. personnel into trucks and driven to Tuzla Saturday, wept while thinking of the two children she had been forced to leave behind.

Mrs. Bosancic said during the confused evacuation she couldn’t find anyone who understood her protest.

“I was crying and screaming,” the sunken-cheecked woman sobbed. “The foreigners didn’t understand me.”

The pain of the separation hurt the 37-year-old woman as much as her grossly swollen and discolored left leg. A Serb mortar shell shredded it in Februrary.

Back then she watched as a doctor in a field hospital picked out pieces of shrapnel and bone. There was no anesthesia,and she fainted in pain.

Mrs. Bosancic, who weighed nearly 200 pounds a year ago, said she was half that now. She said her 17-year-old daughter had carried her to the washroom in her last days in Srebrenica.

As Mrs. Bosancic told her horrible story, other women with leg wounds in hospital beds next to her sobbed over memories of their own suffering.

Ramzija Kladovic stared at her right leg, hit by shrapnel from a mortar 16 days ago in Srebrenica’s main marketplace. The leg was puffed to twice its normal size and gangrenous.

“How can this be?” asked the woman, 63 but looking 20 years older. The leg was amputated later in the day.

Mrs. Bosancic said she lost word of her husband and two other children last March, a day before armed Serbs came to her village of Nova Kasaba. They had gone to a doctor’s appointment and never came back.

The Serbs drove the villagers from the town. No one was hurt, although threats were made.

“They said we will kill you and push your bodies into the river,” Mrs. Bosancic recalled.

The village folk sought refuge in a forest, where they stayed for a month, slipping into neighboring villages to beg for food when it appeared safe.

“Sometimes we spent a week without a piece of bread,” Mrs. Bosancic said. “If we found something we gave it to the children and held our stomachs in pain as we watched them wolf it down.”

Her group fo hundreds of people – mostly women and children – played hide and seek with Serb gunners. Once Serb infantryman opened fire, killing about 50 people, she said.

In May, the group moved into Cerska, which fell to the Serbs three weeks ago. Though the town was incessantly pounded by Serb gunners even back then, the longing for shelter was irresistible.

As more refugees came, bombed-out houses, storage sheds and stables began to overflow with people. By autumn, some were living in tents made of blankets and branches.

“During the days we stayed inside,” said Mrs. Bosancic. “At night we begged for food, ready to dive for shelter in case shelling resumed.”

Serb barrages increased as fall turned to winter. “Sometimes 60 to 65 people died daily, others were crippled,” she said.

The mortar round that wounded her and two children on Feb. 8 killed two other women, she said. She was carried by stretcher to a field hospital in Hrncici near Konjevic Polje, also under Serb attack. There, she and others slept on concrete floors in an unheated room.

The Telegraph
10 November 1993.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — A school became a war zone filled with the screams and broken bodies of children Tuesday in the deadliest attack in Sarajevo in nearly a month.

Bosnian Radio quoted Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic as saying nine children died in the mortar attack.

But early accounts had said that at least seven people, including three to four children and one teacher, were killed when mortar rounds exploded near the school entrance. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy between Silajdzic’s toll and the earlier reports.

A woman who saw the attack from a neighboring apartment block said one mortar shell hit a classroom and another landed outside the French-sponsored school in the Alipasino suburb.

“I left my baby in the flat and ran downstairs to see what happened,” she said. “I saw the schoolteacher dead and I saw children dead. It was terrible.”

The radio quoted civil service officials as saying the shells came from Nedzarici, a suburb held by Bosnian Serbs. But the Serbs denied lobbing them.

“We were writing when we heard that something fired somewhere. Then we heard an explosion . . . and I started running out,” Mirza Huskic, one of the wounded children, told Bosnian Radio.

“Suddenly I heard screaming and noise. I went toward home to see where my mother was. Then a man picked me up and brought me to the ambulances.”

The attack was the deadliest single incident in the capital since mid-October, when shelling killed more than a dozen people. The sound of battle shook the city for much of the day Tuesday in the worst shelling in weeks.

Sarajevo has been under Serbian siege since April, 1992, when Serbs rebelled against Bosnian secession from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

The mortars exploded on the school as U.N. envoy Thorvald Stoltenberg became embroiled in a dispute with the Bosnian government over the abduction by Serbs of two Interior Ministry bodyguards traveling under U.N. protection.

The Muslim-led government suspended the humanitarian evacuation of 300 ailing Serbian civilians until the men, both Bosnian Croats, are released unharmed.

U.N. relief officials protested the government’s decision.

Shelling in the southwestern city of Mostar, meanwhile, destroyed one of Bosnia’s greatest architectural treasures, the graceful, arched 16th-Century stone bridge that gave the city its name.

The Stari Most (Old Bridge), already weakened in July by Croatian shelling, collapsed into the Neretva River on Tuesday under another Croatian assault.

“This is an attack on the heart of our history and culture,” said Muhamed Filipovic, a Muslim politician and historian in Sarajevo. “It was a beautiful piece of art, so harmonious.”

Whereas

in July 1995 thousands of men and boys who had sought safety in the United Nations-designated `safe area’ of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina under the protection of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) were massacred by Serb forces operating in that country;

Whereas

beginning in April 1992, aggression and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces, while taking control of the surrounding territory, resulted in a massive influx of Bosniaks seeking protection in Srebrenica and its environs, which the United Nations Security Council designated a `safe area’ in Resolution 819 on April 16, 1993;

Whereas

the UNPROFOR presence in Srebrenica consisted of a Dutch peacekeeping battalion, with representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the humanitarian medical aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) helping to provide humanitarian relief to the displaced population living in conditions of massive overcrowding, destitution, and disease;

Whereas

Bosnian Serb forces blockaded the enclave early in 1995, depriving the entire population of humanitarian aid and outside communication and contact, and effectively reducing the ability of the Dutch peacekeeping battalion to deter aggression or otherwise respond effectively to a deteriorating situation;

Whereas

beginning on July 6, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces attacked UNPROFOR outposts, seized control of the isolated enclave, held captured Dutch soldiers hostage and, after skirmishes with local defenders, ultimately took control of the town of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995;

Whereas

an estimated one-third of the population of Srebrenica , including a relatively small number of soldiers, made a desperate attempt to pass through the lines of Bosnian Serb forces to the relative safety of Bosnian-held territory, but many were killed by patrols and ambushes;

Whereas

the remaining population sought protection with the Dutch peacekeeping battalion at its headquarters in the village of Potocari north of Srebrenica but many of these individuals were randomly seized by Bosnian Serb forces to be beaten, raped, or executed;

Whereas

Bosnian Serb forces deported women, children, and the elderly in buses, held Bosniak males over 16 years of age at collection points and sites in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina under their control, and then summarily executed and buried the captives in mass graves;

Whereas

approximately 20 percent of Srebrenica’s total population at the time — at least 7,000 and perhaps thousands more — was either executed or killed;

Whereas

the United Nations and its member states have largely acknowledged their failure to take actions and decisions that could have deterred the assault on Srebrenica and prevented the subsequent massacre;

Whereas

Bosnian Serb forces, hoping to conceal evidence of the massacre at Srebrenica , subsequently moved corpses from initial mass grave sites to many secondary sites scattered throughout parts of northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina under their control;

Whereas

the massacre at Srebrenica was among the worst of many horrible atrocities to occur in the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina from April 1992 to November 1995, during which the policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing pursued by Bosnian Serb forces with the direct support of the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic and its followers ultimately led to the displacement of more than 2,000,000 people, an estimated 200,000 killed, tens of thousands raped or otherwise tortured and abused, and the innocent civilians of Sarajevo and other urban centers repeatedly subjected to shelling and sniper attacks;

Whereas

Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (done at Paris on December 9, 1948, and entered into force with respect to the United States on February 23, 1989) defines genocide as `any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’;

Whereas

on May 25, 1993, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 827 establishing the world’s first international war crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague, the Netherlands, and charging the ICTY with responsibility for investigating and prosecuting individuals suspected of committing war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991;

Whereas

nineteen individuals at various levels of responsibility have been indicted, and in some cases convicted, for grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, violations of the laws or customs of war, crimes against humanity, genocide, and complicity in genocide associated with the massacre at Srebrenica, three of whom, most notably Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remain at large; and

Whereas

the international community, including the United States, has continued to provide personnel and resources, including through direct military intervention, to prevent further aggression and ethnic cleansing, to negotiate the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (initialed in Dayton, Ohio, on November 21, 1995, and signed in Paris on December 14, 1995), and to help ensure its fullest implementation, including cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved,

That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that–

(1) the thousands of innocent people executed at Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 1995, along with all individuals who were victimized during the conflict and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995, should be solemnly remembered and honored;

(2) the policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing as implemented by Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995 meet the terms defining the crime of genocide in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide;

(3) foreign nationals, including United States citizens, who have risked and in some cases lost their lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina while working toward peace should be solemnly remembered and honored;

(4) the United Nations and its member states should accept their share of responsibility for allowing the Srebrenica massacre and genocide to occur in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995 by failing to take sufficient, decisive, and timely action, and the United Nations and its member states should constantly seek to ensure that this failure is not repeated in future crises and conflicts;

(5) it is in the national interest of the United States that those individuals who are responsible for war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, should be held accountable for their actions;

(6) all persons indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) should be apprehended and transferred to The Hague without further delay, and all countries should meet their obligations to cooperate fully with the ICTY at all times; and

(7) the United States should continue to support the independence and territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, peace and stability in southeastern Europe as a whole, and the right of all people living in the region, regardless of national, racial, ethnic or religious background, to return to their homes and enjoy the benefits of democratic institutions, the rule of law, and economic opportunity, as well as to know the fate of missing relatives and friends.

Attest:

Clerk.

H. Res. 199

In the House of Representatives, U.S.,
[Passed on] June 27, 2005.

Office of the Prosecution:

Florence Hartmann for the Office of the Prosecutor made the following statement:

Following the publication of press articles stating that there is no evidence linking Milosevic to the genocide committed in Srebrenica, I wish to recall first and foremost that this is a matter under consideration in an ongoing trial and it should be left to the judges’ determination rather than being the object of speculation. Although no final conclusion can be drawn before the completion of the trial, and before the Defense has completed its case, substantial evidence linking Milosevic to the worst atrocities committed in Bosnia has been submitted during the trial, and the Trial Chamber has apparently found that evidence sufficient at this stage to warrant the continuation of the trial on 66 counts in the indictment against Milosevic, including the charge of genocide (as indicated in the June 16, 2004 Decision on the Motion for Judgment of Acquittal pursuant to Article 98 bis of the ICTY Rules of Procedure and Evidence). However, once again, let me stress that this is a preliminary finding by the Trial Chamber, subject to the presumption of innocence of the accused and rendered before the presentation of the Defence case. The charge of genocide, as the rest of the charges against Milosevic, is being considered in the ongoing trial, and should be left to the Judges’ determination.

At this stage, and as a preliminary disposition, the Trial Chamber holds in the above mentioned document on page 134 – paragraph 323, that there is sufficient evidence that

(1) there existed a joint criminal enterprise, which included members of the Bosnian Serb leadership, the aim and intention of which was to destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group, and that its participants committed genocide in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi;

(2) the Accused was a participant in that joint criminal enterprise, Judge Kwon dissenting ;

(3) the Accused was a participant in a joint criminal enterprise, which included members of the Bosnian Serb leadership, to commit other crimes than genocide and it was reasonably foreseeable to him that, as a consequence of the commission of those crimes, genocide of a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group would be committed by other participants in the joint criminal enterprise, and it was committed;

(4) the Accused aided and abetted or was complicit in the commission of the crime of genocide in that he had knowledge of the joint criminal enterprise, and that he gave its participants substantial assistance, being aware that its aim and intention was the destruction of a part of the Bosnian Muslims as group;

(5) the Accused was a superior to certain persons whom he knew or had reason to know were about to commit or had committed genocide of a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group, and he failed to take the necessary measures to prevent the commission of genocide, or punish the perpetrators thereof.

The Chamber’s dispositions are detailed in the 142 pages document. I would encourage the public to consult the document through our website and I would underline the findings related to genocide, noting once again that they are preliminary and rendered pursuant Rule 98 bis by the Trial Chamber, before the presentation of the Defence case.

Page 91 – Finding

246. On the basis of the inference that may be drawn from this evidence, a Trial Chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that there existed a joint criminal enterprise, which included members of the Bosnian Serb leadership, whose aim and intention was to destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslim population, and that genocide was in fact committed in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi. The genocidal intent of the Bosnian Serb leadership can be inferred from all the evidence, including the evidence set out in paragraphs 238 -245. The scale and pattern of the attacks, their intensity, the substantial number of Muslims killed in the seven municipalities, the detention of Muslims, their brutal treatment in detention centres and elsewhere, and the targeting of persons essential to the survival of the Muslims as a group are all factors that point to genocide.

P.103-104 – Finding

288. On the basis of the inference that may be drawn from the evidence, including evidence referred to in paragraphs 250-287 and 304-308, a Trial Chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Accused was a participant in the joint criminal enterprise, found by the Trial Chamber in paragraph 246 to include the Bosnian Serb leadership, and that he shared with its participants the aim and intention to destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group, Judge Kwon dissenting.

On the basis of the evidence as to –

(1) the overall leadership position of the Accused among the Serbian people, including the Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina;

(2) the Accused’s advocacy of and support for the concept of a Greater Serbia;

(3) the logistical and financial support from Serbia to the Bosnian Serbs, which it is reasonable to infer was provided with the knowledge and support of the Accused ; the logistical support is illustrated by the close relationship of VJ personnel with the VRS;

(4) the nature of the Accused’s relationship and involvement with the Bosnian Serb political and military leadership, as evidenced by the request of Karadzic that the Accused keep in touch with him and that it was very important for Karadzic to have his assessment ;

(5) the authority and influence of the Accused over the Bosnian Serb leadership;

(6) the intimate knowledge that the Accused had “about everything that was being done “; his insistence that he be informed “about everything that was going to the front line”; and

(7) the crimes committed, the scale and pattern of the attacks on the four territories, their intensity, the substantial number of Muslims killed, the brutal treatment of Muslims in detention centres and elsewhere, and the targeting of persons essential to the survival of the Muslims as a group, a Trial Chamber could infer that he not only knew of the genocidal plan of the joint criminal enterprise, but also that he shared with its members the intent to destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group in that part of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina which it was planned to include in the Serbian state.

Answer to the First Question

(The question being: Is there evidence upon which a Trial Chamber could be satisfied that the Accused was a participant in the joint criminal enterprise and that he shared the required intent of its participants?)

The Trial Chamber concludes that there is sufficient evidence that genocide was committed in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi and, Judge Kwon dissenting, that there is sufficient evidence that the Accused was a participant in a joint criminal enterprise, which included the Bosnian Serb leadership, the aim and intention of which was to destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group.

Page 106. Finding and Answer to the Second Question

(The question being: Is there evidence upon which a Trial Chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Accused was a participant in a joint criminal enterprise to commit a particular crime and it was reasonably foreseeable to him that, as a consequence of the commission of that crime, a different crime, namely genocide, in whole or in part, of the Bosnian Muslims as a group, would be committed by other participants in the joint criminal enterprise, and it was committed?)

292. On the basis of the inference that may be drawn from the evidence set out in relation to the First Question, a Trial Chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Accused was a participant in a joint criminal enterprise to commit other crimes than genocide and it was reasonably foreseeable to him that, as a consequence of the commission of those crimes, genocide of a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group would be committed by other participants in the joint criminal enterprise, and it was committed.

Although this basis of liability is alternative to the liability of the Accused as a perpetrator sharing the intent of the other members of the joint criminal enterprise (First Question), the Trial Chamber will not make a final determination as to the one or the other basis at this stage, that is, whether to acquit the Accused at this stage of one or the other basis of liability. The reason is that a determination as to the Accused’s liability depends to a certain extent on issues of fact and the weight to be attached to certain items of evidence, which calls for an assessment of the credibility and reliability of that evidence. These issues do not arise for determination until the judgment phase.

Page 107. Finding and Answer to Third and Fourth Questions

(The questions being: Is there evidence upon which a Trial Chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Accused aided and abetted in the commission of the crime of genocide in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi?

Is there evidence upon which a Trial Chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Accused was complicit in the commission of the crime of genocide in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi? )

On the basis of the evidence set out above in relation to the First Question, a Trial Chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Accused aided and abetted or was complicit in the commission of the crime of genocide in that he had knowledge of the joint criminal enterprise, and that he gave its participants substantial assistance, being aware that its aim and intention was the destruction of a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group.

Although complicity and aiding and abetting are possible alternatives to the liability of the Accused as a principal, the Trial Chamber will not, for the reason stated in paragraph 293 in relation to the third category of joint criminal enterprise, make a determination at this stage as to the one or the other.

Page 111. Finding and Answer to Fifth Question

(The question being: Is there evidence upon which a Trial Chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Accused knew or had reason to know that persons subordinate to him were about to commit or had committed genocide, in whole or in part, of the Bosnian Muslims as a group in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi, and he failed to take the necessary measures to prevent the commission of genocide or punish the perpetrators thereof?)

309. On the basis of this evidence as well as other evidence, a Trial Chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Accused was a superior to certain persons whom he knew or had reason to know were about to commit or had committed genocide of a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi, and he failed to take the necessary measures to prevent the commission of genocide, or punish the perpetrators thereof.

Explanation of vote on complicity — Knowledge of principal’s genocidal intent necessary as a matter of law, but not shared intent — Evidence of aid and assistance established — Evidence of knowledge of the facts underlying the genocidal intent established — Finding of complicity in the genocide committed at Srebrenica.

1. This declaration explains my vote on the alleged complicity of the Respondent, in breach of Article III (e) of the Genocide Convention, in the genocide committed at Srebrenica in July 1995. In summary, my position on the law is that the Respondent, as an alleged accomplice, must be proved to have knowledge of the genocidal intent of the principal perpetrator (but need not share that intent) and, with that knowledge, to have provided aid and assistance to the perpetrator. My position on the facts is that those two elements are proved to the necessary standard.

2. The reasons for my conclusion on the law that it is sufficient in terms of Article III (e) to establish that the accomplice knew that the principal perpetrator had genocidal intent, relate to the definition and the nature of complicity in unlawful acts, the purpose of the prohibition on complicity in genocide, and the case law.

3. Dictionary definitions of “complicity” and “(ac)complice” provide both narrower and broader meanings. To put the matter in legal terms, the narrower meaning appears to equate complicity with aiding and abetting (or assisting) while the broader meaning also includes a co-author or co-perpetrator of the offence. Thus the Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online, 2nd ed., 1989) defines “complice” as “[o]ne associated in any affair with another, the latter being regarded as the principal”, and also as a “confederate” or “comrade”, words apt to include a co-perpetrator.

And Le Petit Robert (electronic version, version 2, 2001) defines “complicité” as participation by intentional assistance in the breach committed by another and in terms of agreement or entente. Legal dictionaries also include narrower and broader approaches. Gérard Cornu, Vocabulaire Juridique (7th ed., 2005, p. 188), drawing on Articles 121-6 and 121-7 of the French Penal Code, defines “complicité” as a contribution to the realization of a breach by aid or assistance to the author of the offence, or by instigation ; a “complice” in his definition is contrasted with a principal author or co-author; see similarly Jean Salmon, Dictionnaire de droit international public (2001, pp. 218-219).

Halsbury’s Laws of England (4th ed., Vol. 11, para. 43), says that persons are accomplices if they are participants in the offence charged, whether as principals, procurers, aiders or abettors. Mellinkoff’s Dictionary of American Legal Usage (1992, p. 463), defines “accomplice” as “a general term for a person who participates with others in the commission of a crime, whether as principal or accessory”, with the last word being equated with “someone who aids and abets”. My final reference is to a publication of the United Nations Office at Geneva, Law Terminology in English, French and Spanish (1990, p. 196). It helpfully distinguishes between the broader and narrower sense of “complice”; in the broader sense, the accomplice is the person who participates in the crime or wrong of another, including as a co-author; and in the narrower, by contrast to a co-author, the person who participates as an accessory.

4. As those definitions show, complicity is often equated in whole or in part with aiding and abetting. The present aspect of the case is concerned with complicity only in the sense of aiding and abetting. I agree with the Court that the Applicant has not established that the Respondent is in breach of its obligation, as a principal, not to commit genocide. I now turn to the mental element required if complicity in this more restricted sense is to be established.

5. In many national legal systems aiders and abettors need only be aware that they are aiding the principal perpetrator in the commission of its offence by their contribution (see e.g. the law of France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Canada, Australia and some of the states of the United States referred to in Prosecutor v. Krstic´, IT 98-33-A, Judgment of 19 April 2004, para. 141). More significantly, the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY in Krstic´, following earlier decisions, has ruled consistently with that body of national law that “an individual who aids and abets a specific intent offense may be held responsible if he assists the commission of the crime knowing the intent behind the crime” (Krstic´, para. 140).

Having recalled that consistent jurisprudence and principle, the Chamber applied it to the prohibition of genocide stated in its Statute, the wording of which is taken directly from Article II of the Genocide Convention.

6. That understanding of the mental element required by complicity when it is limited to aiding and abetting serves the purpose of sanctioning the actions of those who knowingly assist the unlawful act of the primary perpetrator, knowing in particular of the primary perpetrator’s genocidal intent. The necessary intent of the aider and abettor is the intent to provide the means by which the perpetrator may realize his own intent to commit genocide. As Judge Shahabuddeen said in paragraph 67 of his opinion in Krstic´, those preparing the text of the Genocide Convention could not have failed to criminalize the actions of the commercial suppliers of poisonous gas who knew of the intent of the purchasers to use the gas for the purpose of destroying a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, even if the suppliers themselves did not share that intent.

7. It is true that the Appeals Chamber in Krstic´ did go on to suggest that, for complicity to be established in some circumstances, the accomplice had to share the principal’s intent (Prosecutor v. Krstic´, IT 98-33-A, Judgment of 19 April 2004, para. 142). But, because that suggestion is expressly limited to conduct broader than aiding and abetting, as well as being unnecessary for the decision in that case (as the Chamber acknowledges at footnote 247), it is irrelevant to the present case. Further, the two reasons the Chamber gives for its suggestion are unpersuasive. The first reason — the natural reading of Article III (e) — is merely asserted.

Moreover, that reading would necessarily have to apply to aiding and abetting as well as to the broader matters encompassed within Article III (e), an application which would contradict the Chamber’s main ruling that knowledge is sufficient for aiding and abetting. That problem also arises with the second argument based on an examination of the drafting history in the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly in 1948.

In any event, that history is better read as requiring that the alleged accomplice know that the principal perpetrator has the necessary intent, not that the alleged accomplice share it (United Nations, Official Records of the General Assembly, Third Session, Sixth Committee, Summary Records of the 87th meeting, pp. 254-259). The discussion on the proposed amendment (which was to add the word “deliberate” before “complicity” but which was withdrawn on the basis that complicity in genocide must be “deliberate”) indicates that the actions had to be “deliberate” in the sense of knowing of the perpetrator’s intent ; the intent did not have to be shared.

8. I now turn to the facts and to the question whether the Applicant has shown that the Respondent, knowing of the perpetrator’s genocidal intent, continued to supply the perpetrators with the means to facilitate the realization of that intent. There can be no possible dispute about that supply and its continuation. It is seen in the very extensive involvement of the Respondent in the actions of Republika Srpska and the VRS in Bosnia and Herzegovina, notably in the provision from late 1991, and especially from 19 May 1992, of 1,800 officers to the VRS and their continued support (including “rehatting”, housing, promotion and discipline), of material, both initially and subsequently, of joint operations and the involvement of the Ministry of the Interior, and of funding, including the huge budget support and the integrating of the central banks. Extensive documentation of that was presented to the Court. One revealing acknowledgment is provided by President Karadžic´ speaking at a session of the Assembly of Republika Srpska in May 1994 — “[w]ithout Serbia nothing would have happened, we don’t have the resources and would not have been able to make war”. Or, as the Court concludes, had the Respondent chosen to withdraw its military and financial support from the Republika Srpska, this would have greatly constrained the options available to the authorities of Republika Srpska (Judgment, para. 241).

9. But did the Respondent have the necessary knowledge in the very short time the Srebrenica massacre was undertaken, essentially from 13 to 16 July 1995? My primary specific source in answering that question is the 1999 Report of the United Nations Secretary-General, “The Fall of Srebrenica” (A/54/549, Ch. VIII); see paragraphs 228-230 of the Judgment of the Court.

10. That specific information is to be understood in the context of the more general information about the very close relationships between the leaderships in Belgrade and in Pale and especially between President Miloševic´ and President Karadžic´ and General Mladic´, and particularly between President Miloševic´ and General Mladic´. The Court had extensive evidence of those relationships, for instance from two of the UNPROFOR Commanders, General Dannatt and General Rose. As the Court says, the leadership of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and President Miloševic´ above all, were fully aware of the climate of deep seated hatred which reigned between the Bosnian Serbs and Muslims of the Srebrenica region (Judgment, paragraph 438). More specifically they were aware of the dire and deteriorating situation in Srebrenica in the first part of 1995.

11. Coming closer to the time of the atrocities, not just the leadership in Belgrade but also the wider international community was alerted to the deterioration of the security situation in Srebrenica by Security Council resolution 1004 (1995) adopted on 12 July 1995 under Chapter VII of the Charter. The Council expressed grave concern at the plight of the civilian population “in and around the safe area of Srebrenica”. It demanded, with binding force, the withdrawal of the Bosnian Serb forces from the area and the allowing of unimpeded access for international humanitarian agencies to the area to alleviate the plight of the civilian population.

12. On the following day, 13 July, United Nations military observers reported that General Mladic´ had told them that there were several hundred bodies of dead Bosnian soldiers in one part of the enclave. There were other reports of murders and other atrocities that day. On that day the Chargé d’Affaires of Bosnia and Herzegovina in New York officially expressed his government’s concern about the fate of detainees and fears of their execution in a letter to the Secretary-General. The 1999 Report provides this summary:

“Thus, on 13 July, strong alarm was expressed at various levels that abuses might have been or were being committed against the men of Srebrenica, but none had been confirmed as having taken place at that time. Efforts were nevertheless focused at the highest levels to try to address the situation.” (A/54/549, para. 359.)

Also on that day the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy, Thorvald Stoltenberg, was given instructions on how he was to proceed with high level negotiations with the Bosnian Serbs and, if appropriate, with the authorities in Belgrade. Among other things he was to obtain commitments for humane treatment of the refugees and displaced persons.

He was urged to co-ordinate with the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and the European Union negotiator, Carl Bildt, who was hopeful of “be[ing] able to offer assistance through contact[s] with the authorities of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” (ibid., para. 360).

13. The mass executions began the next day, 14 July, and continued until 16 or 17 July. On 14 July Mr. Bildt met President Miloševic´ in Belgrade:

“According to Mr. Bildt’s public account of that second meeting, he pressed the President to arrange immediate access for UNHCR to assist the people of Srebrenica, and for ICRC to start to register those who were being treated by the BSA as prisoners of war.” (A/54/549, para. 372; the “public account” is in Carl Bildt, Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia (1998), p. 61.)

(The meeting is referred to as a second meeting because Mr. Bildt had met President Miloševic´ and General Mladic´ at the same place the previous week (ibid., pp. 52-54).) Mr. Bildt also made a number of other demands as the 1999 Report records:

“President Miloševic´ apparently acceded to the various demands, but also claimed that he did not have control over the matter. Miloševic´ had also apparently explained, earlier in the meeting, that the whole incident had been provoked by escalating Muslim attacks from the enclave, in violation of the 1993 demilitarization agreement.

A few hours into the meeting, General Mladic´ arrived at Dobanovci. Mr. Bildt noted that General Mladic´ readily agreed to most of the demands on Srebrenica, but remained opposed to some of the arrangements pertaining to the other enclaves, Sarajevo in particular.

Eventually, with President Miloševic´’s intervention, it appeared that an agreement in principle had been reached. It was decided that another meeting would be held the next day in order to confirm the arrangements. Mr. Bildt had already arranged with Mr. Stoltenberg and Mr. Akashi [the Special Representative of the Secretary-General] that they would join him in Belgrade. He also requested that the UNPROFOR Commander also come to Belgrade in order to finalize some of the military details with Mladic´.” (A/54/549, paras. 372-373.)

On the same day, 14 July, the Security Council had again convened and adopted a presidential statement expressing deep concern about the ongoing forced relocation of tens of thousands of civilians which it characterized as a clear violation of the rights of the civilian population.

“The Council was ‘especially concerned about reports that up to 4,000 men and boys had been forcibly removed by the Bosnian Serb party from the Srebrenica safe area’. It demanded that ‘in conformity with internationally recognized standards of conduct and international law the Bosnian Serb party release them immediately, respect fully the rights of the civilian population of the Srebrenica safe area and other persons protected under international humanitarian law and permit access by the International Committee of the Red Cross’.” (Ibid., para. 374.)

14. On 15 July Mr. Bildt briefed senior international officials on the result of his meeting the previous day with President Miloševic´ and General Mladic´, who also joined the officials for a largely ceremonial meeting over lunch. The UNPROFOR Commander and General Mladic´ then met to finalize the details. At that point, while the international officials were aware of reports that grave human rights abuses might have been committed against the men and boys of Srebrenica, they were unaware that systematic executions had begun (ibid., para. 375). The points of agreement on Srebrenica were as follows:

“Full access to the area for UNHCR and ICRC; ICRC to have immediate access to ‘prisoners of war’ to assess their welfare, register them, and review procedures at Bosnian Serb reception centres in accordance with the Geneva Conventions;

UNPROFOR requests for resupply of Srebrenica, via Belgrade, Ljubovija and Bratunac, to be submitted on 17 July;

Dutchbat troops in Srebrenica to be free to leave with their equipment on 21 July or shortly thereafter via Bratunac (both the UNPROFOR Commander and Mladic´ to observe the move);

UNPROFOR to organize immediate evacuation of injured persons from Potocari and Bratunac, including provision of ambulances ; UNPROFOR presence, ‘in one form or another’ [was] agreed for ‘key areas’.” (A/54/549, para. 377.)

General Mladic´ plainly did not honour those agreements over the following days (ibid., paras. 383-390).

15. Those agreements were of course between UNPROFOR and General Mladic´ on behalf of the Pale authorities. Their significance for me, however, is that they followed directly from the discussions and negotiations between President Miloševic´ and General Mladic´ on the one hand and Mr. Bildt on the other. Given President Miloševic´’s overall role in the Balkan wars and his knowledge, his specific relationship with General Mladic´, and his involvement in the detail of the negotiations of 14 and 15 July, by that time he must have known of the change in plans made by the VRS command on 12 or 13 July and consequently he must have known that they had formed the intent to destroy in part the protected group. I am convinced that that knowledge of the Respondent is proved to the necessary standard stated by the Court in its Judgment (para. 209).

16. Accordingly, I conclude that the Respondent was complicit in the genocide committed at Srebrenica in July 1995 in breach of Article III (e) of the Genocide Convention.

(Signed) Kenneth KEITH.

However, what is less commonly known is a fact that two years before the genocide, Serb forces carried out at least three separate chemical strikes against the enclave of Srebrenica. According to the report #262/93, published on 3 April 1993 by the Srebrenica War Presidency, Serb forces in the area used chemical agents in three separate attacks against the town.

In the report (below), the Srebrenica war presidency described in detail the events “on the Srebrenica front between 20 January and 3 April 1993.” For 15 March 1993, they recorded the following:

“15 March 1993 - Intensive shelling of the Biljeg, Kragljivoda and Osat areas. Three civilians killed and 12 wounded. Infantry attack on Biljeg, which the aggressor occupied during the day. The aggressor dropped chemical agents from helicopters in the Biljeg area.”

Then again:

“19 March 1993 – At 0530 hours, two places dropped chemical agents over the Osatnica MZ. Infantry attacks in the Kragljivoda, Osat and Poznanovici sectors intensified with artillery support from Serbia and Jezero. Shelling of the Potocari and Srebrenica areas increased, and there was an attempted infantry penetration in the Potocari sector. Eight civilians were killed and 18 wounded.”

And again:

“20 March 1993 – At about 0530 hours, chemical agents were dropped from a helicopter in Osmace. Attack on the Budak – Pale line. Potocari, Osmace and Skenderovici shelled. The aggressor captured ?ehita Hill near Tokoljak. 684 civilians (women and children) evacuated to Tuzla.”

Photo: Nurse Galiba Secibovic (Bosniak) cares for 72-year-old Vojin Nikolic (Serb), a deaf mute staying in the makeshift shelter in Sarajevo. Nikolic often tries to leave in search of his brothers in Serb-held territory.

“Death is at Home Here”
For elderly Bosnians, outlook is grim from a Sarajevo shelter

By Samir Krilic
The Free Lance-Star, p.A4
21 February 1995.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Crammed onto one floor of a former school, dozens of elderly Bosnians silently await the end of the war, or their lives, whichever comes first.

Sick and elderly Bosniaks, Abid Jahic (69) and Ajsa Smajlovic (81).

The makeshift old people’s home was set up in August 1993 in a shell-shattered school building several hundred yards from the front line. It shelters 64 sick and old people with no one to turn to.

One doctor, five nurses, four orderlies and a social worker try to cope with the needs both of their live-in charges and 150 other elderly people, many living on their own.

Conditions are miserable. Many of the elderly are too sick or feeble to make it to the toilet, so they relieve themselves on the floor or in bed. Natural gas for heat is scarce, so rooms are often icy. For most, frugal meals of beans, lentils and rice are the only break in a day of staring at the walls.

The Red Cross contributes some canned food once a month. U.N. peacekeepers from France provide occasional favors — food, medicine, gasoline for the home’s single car, and once old clothes donated by family members. Local charities have been able to help out with aid only three times since the home started.

“What they get is not nearly enough,” said Nina Winquist, a Red Cross representative.

Dobrila Mulina, a 70-year-old retired history professor, spends her days in the smelly, narrow corridor.

Sitting in her wheelchair at a table packed with books, Mulina, affectionately known to her companions as “Seka” (Sister”, reads daily in an effort to escape the harsh reality of her life.

“I live in my isolated little world of literature,” she said, absently stroking her gray hair. “The apathy and the boredom of others around me makes me miserable and desperate.”

Her resilience is all the more remarkable given her suffering — chronic diabetes forced doctors to recently amputate her right leg because increasingly poor circulation led to the threat of gangrene.

A daily shot of insulin each morning helps her relax and begin her day’s reading.

She prefers the dark corridor to the room she shares with nine other women, most of them so sick they rarely leave their beds. Despite a broken window, stale air is heavy in the overcrowded room.

Without a single television or a radio for entertainment the day ends with the onset of dusk.

“I take a sleeping pill so as not to think about the past, the present, and the grim future,” Mulina said. She clings to hope that once the war is over, her daughter and grandchildren, who live in Liverpool, England, will come to take her away from the misery.

Abid Jahic [Bosniak], 69, fled with his family from Rogatica, 35 miles east of Sarajevo, when Serbs captured it at the beginning of the war.

The Jahic’s left for Zepa, an eastern enclave held by the Muslim-dominated government. Jahic was seriously wounded by a shell and was evacuated by the United Nations to Zenica for medical treatment, while his wife and two daughters stayed behind.

Unable to return to the besieged enclave, Jahic came to Sarajevo where he was left to fend for himself.

“If the officials here in the home hadn’t allowed me to stay, I would have died,” Jahic said. “All I want is to see my family one more time before I die.”

“U.N. helicopters swooped into Srebrenica to fly Bosniak refugees to safety yesterday, but the operation was halted after Serbs shelled some of the refugees as they waited in a soccer stadium.

The attack killed one person and injured 21, including two Canadian peacekeepers, U.N. officials said.

They said 29 people, including women, children and the wounded U.N. soldiers, were flown out before flights were stopped.

In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali deplored the casualties and called for an immediate halt to the shelling. Brigadier Roddy Cordy-Simpson, the chief of staff of the U.N. force in Bosnia, called the attack “the ultimate in despicable behavior.”

Bosnian Serb military commanders issued a statement accusing the United Nations of trying to infiltrate soldiers into Srebrenica to “save Muslim criminals.” It also accused U.N. soldiers of firing at Serb positions to provoke shelling.

Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who approved the U.N. flights, also said Serb forces were not responsible. He accused Bosnia’s Muslim-led government of firing at the landing site then blaming it on the Serbs.

The shelling of the landing zone and also the Tuzla airport, where the helicopters are based, called into question Karadzic’s assurances that corridors would be opened to evacuate Srebrenica. Many such promises by Bosnian Serb political leaders have been ignored by their military forces.

Bosnian Serb militiamen appear intent on capturing Srebrenica, where tens of thousands of Bosniaks are trapped and being shelled.

If Srebrenica falls, the Muslim-dominated Tuzla region could be the next target of a Serb drive that has taken 70 percent of Bosnia’s territory since the war began 11 months ago over the republic’s secession from Yugoslavia.

In other developments:

Fighting around Sarajevo, the capital, abated after several weeks of heavy battles in the western suburbs. An international airlift was suspended for a fifth day, however.

The United States and its NATO allies sent the United Nations their plan for militarily enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia if the Security Council should order one. Karadzic has threatened to leave peace talks in New York if the council takes such an action.

For a third consecutive day, Russia delayed a Security Council vote on the flight ban. President Boris Yeltsin supports the no-fly zone, but some Russian lawmakers who are trying to oust him accuse him of kowtowing to Western influence and abandoning Russia’s Orthodox Slav Serb brethren.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany decided to join the nearly month-old U.S. airdrop operation in eastern Bosnia and to sent paramilitary patrol boats to the Danube to monitor the U.N. embargo against Serbia.

The decisions mark the deepest involvement by German forces in the Balkans since World War II.

Manila Standard, p.7
12 October 1992.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Warplanes took to the skies over Bosnia in apparently open defiance of a United Nations ban while civilians were trapped by fighting in the north of the republic and shelling claimed new victims among the children of Sarajevo.

Government-controlled Bosnian radio on Saturday reported fierce air attacks by Serb planes on the besieged Bosniak-held town of Gradacac which if true made a mockery of a ban on military flights decided by the Security Council on Friday.

It said they were “the heaviest attacks on Gradacac since the start of the war… the whole town is demolished and still burning.”

But the Serbian army in Bosnia quickly issued a denial.

“Allegations of Serb air force actions are aimed at provoking foreign military intervention,” an army statement said.

Independent confirmation was impossible but journalists in north Bosnia heard the sound of aircraft amid the cacophony of battle although the planes could not be seen due to overcast skies.

North Bosnia was ablaze with fighting and Serbian hopes that the fall of Bosanski Brod on Tuesday would secure a vital supply corridor were dashed.

Thousands of civilians, who had hoped the corridor linking Serbia proper with Krajina in the west was safe, were trapped by pitched battles between Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats.

In Sarajevo, mortars killed three children and wounded 10 who were playing in a square in the Mejtas district above the old town in a square bounded by residential buildings, a Catholic church and a mosque, witnesses said.

The casualties ranged in age from four years to 16. All were taken to nearby Kosevo hospital where doctor Mufid Lazovic described it as the wort day of the war for him.

“There were so many children who arrived at once, some already dead, some badly wounded,” he said. “It was very, very difficult.”

An earlier report by Bosnian television that the casualties occurred when bombs hit an orphanage was not true.

In the midst of a day of fighting, shelling, conflicting reports and general chaos, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic said that hostilities between Serbs and Croats had stopped.

“Hostilities between Serbs and Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina have stopped although no ceasefire agreement has been signed,” Karadzic said in Geneva where he is participating in a peace conference on the former Yugoslavia.

It underlined Karadzic’s thesis that Serbs and Croats who want to divide Bosnia along ethnic lines have common enemy in the Bosniaks, who want a unitary state.

But the Bosnian Serb army said it was waging fierce battles with Croat and Bosniak forces around Mostar, the main city in the Herzegovina region bordering Croatia.

The war in Bosnia began after its Serbs rebelled against international recognition of the republic as an independent state and occupied some 70 percent of its territory.

Croats control most of the rest of Bosnia, while the Bosniaks – the republic’s largest ethnic group – hold only central Sarajevo and a few other isolated pockets.

In neighboring Serbia, political tensions rose ahead of a referendum on Sunday that will decide whether the republic will hold early elections, a move opposed by its hardline president Slobodan Milosevic and his ruling Socialist Party.

ZAGREB, Croatia — At least 19 people were killed and 34 wounded in Serbian air attacks on the Bosnian town of Gradacac, less than 24 hours after the United Nations imposed a ban on military flights over Bosnia and Herzegovina, radio reports said.

Other civilians were hit in Serbian air strikes in Croatian-populated villages in northern Bosnia near Brcko, Sarajevo and Zagreb radios reported. They said Bosnian forces had shot down one Serbian MIG fighter.

A Western reporter in Brcko said he had heard aircraft in the area, and a second Western reporter said he had seen aircraft flying over the Serbian-held town of Banja Luka, the site of a major Yugoslav Army airfield controlled by Bosnian Serbs.

In a statement to a Serbian news agency, leaders of the Serbian forces fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina denied that their aircraft had engaged in any attacks since the United Nations Security Council imposed a flight ban over Bosnia on Friday.

“False stories are being spread in order to provoke international forces into attacking Serbian aircraft,” the statement said.

Serbian Weaponry Stronger

The airborne arsenal of the Serbian forces dismembering Bosnia and Herzegovina is vastly superior to the weaponry of the ethnically mixed forces loyal to the Sarajevo Government, which has no warplanes and few anti-aircraft weapons.

A United Nations arms embargo has prevented Bosnia from acquiring arms to defend itself against the Serbs, who received all the weaponry the former Yugoslav Army had in Bosnia when it formally withdrew in May.

The Security Council resolution on the flight ban did not contain any provisions for immediate enforcement. It said United Nations observer teams stationed at airfields would monitor compliance.

“Don’t bet that enforcement won’t come,” a Western diplomat said. “The Serbs know full well what will happen.”

But a Bosnian official who asked to remain anonymous called the resolution a sham.

“The no-fly zone resolution is a disgrace,” the official said. “Here was an opportunity to do something.”

‘The West Doesn’t Mean It’

“The Serbs know very well that the West doesn’t mean it,” the official said, citing the inability of international negotiators so far to end the siege of Sarajevo and the forced expulsions of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats from their homes by Serbian forces.

The Telegraph-Herald, p.11B
8 October 1992.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Rebel Serbs, heartened by their captured of a strategic border town, pounded other targets in northern Bosnia today, prompting warnings of possible foreign military intervention.

Sarajevo was relatively quiet. Repair crews set out to restore cut utilities to the capital and its surroundings, and a senior U.N. general warned the U.N. troops escorting them would return fire if the crews were attacked.

Serb artillery, meanwhile, pounded the towns of Gradacac and Maglaj with “destructive howitzer shells, particularly incendiary ones,” and attacked them by air, Bosnian radio said.

On Wednesday, Serb planes dropped cluster and napalm bombs on Maglaj and the towns of Tesanj and Teslic, all located in an area 60 to 90 miles north of Sarajevo, the radio said. It said 12 people were killed and 50 wounded in Maglaj on Wednesday. The reports could not be independently confirmed.

At the United Nations headquarters in New York, officials said the United States would provide a military field hospital for Bosnian war victims, marking the first time U.S. personnel participation in the U.N. peacekeepeing operation.

The field hospital is to be set up in the Croatia capital, Zagreb, however, far from the battle lines in neighboring Bosnia, said U.N. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

More than 14,000 people have been killed in Bosnia since February, when the majority Bosniaks and Croats voted to secede from Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia. Bosnian Serbs took up arms to create their own republic within Bosnia and maintain ties with Yugoslavia.

Bosnian radio said 10 villages in the Brcko area were retaken by government forces today, causing “confusion” in Serb ranks.

The resurgent fighting followed a major Serb victory late Tuesday.

The latest Serb advance means they have taken control of 70 percent of Bosnia in the 7-months-old civil war.

The Serbian push all but eliminated a Bosnian government threat to cut communication links between Serbia proper and the rebel-held Krajina region in western Bosnia.

The latest Serb advance prompted warnings of possible military intervention from abroad.

Iran’s IRNA news agency said today that the country’s Revolutionary Guards were ready to help Bosnia’s “defenseless Muslims.” It quoted the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as saying that “if Western governments are unable to stop the massacre of Muslims there, then they should allow our young Muslim combatants to give the Serbs their dues.”

NATO’s secretary-general, Manfred Woerner, said that if the United Nations decided military intervention was neede din Bosnia, then the alliance nations would not doubt follow suit.

“If the U.N. decided tomorrow that the only thing that can help is military intervention, then I cannot imagine that the NATO-member states could remain indiferent to the U.N.,” Germany’s mass-circulation Bild newspaper quoted Woerner as saying. He added that such a move would require approval of the 16 NATO members.

By Samir Krilic
Times Daily, p.10A
17 October 1993.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Months of relative tranquility in Sarajevo ended abruptly Saturday with the boom of Serb heavy artillery as well as tank and troop movements around the Bosnian capital.

The renewed military activity led to fears of an impending major attack, since artillery often is used to soften up targets for tanks and infantry.

The main Kosevo hospital reported seven dead and 40 wounded from the shelling, which began before dawn, but eased by evening.

Lt. Col. Bill Aikman, a spokesman for U.N. troops, described the shelling as the “heaviest for months.” The intensity of the barrage — U.N. monitors counted 540 projectiles hitting the city by midafternoon — caused the United Nations to cancel flights into the city for four hours.

U.N. monitors also reported that Serbs, who have besieged Sarajevo for 18 months, were redeploying armor and infantry in the high ground above the capital.

“There has been a whole series of movement of troops around the town,” Aikman said. “There (are) more tanks up there than normal.”

Sarajevo and most other front lines where Serbs are fighting Muslim-led government troops have been quiet for months, indicating a weariness of war and apparent Serb hope that the outgunned Bosniaks are ready to make peace.

But the Bosnian government has rejected the latest peace plan and is seeking other options. Aides to President Alija Izetbegovic said Saturday he has asked for new U.N. talks involving all Balkan nations to address all conflicts on the territory of former Yugoslavia.

Saturday’s attack may reflext Serb exasperation with the government’s refusal to accept the peace plan.

Renewed fighting also was reported in other regions.

Bosnian radio reported “one of the heaviest” infantry and artillery attacks on the norther towns of Maglaj and Tesanj since they were cut off by besieging Serbs in June.

Bosnian Croat troops were fighting alongside Serbs, the radio said.

In Zagreb, Croatia, Peter Kessler, a spokesman for the U.N. High commissioner for Refugees, said plans to send a convoy Saturday to the two towns about 75 miles north of Sarajevo had been scrapped. Aid officials were now hopping that convoys would reach residents there by midweek.

Two previous convoys turned back last week after a separate Red Cross convoy encountered a land mine.

About 150,000 mostly Muslim residents in the region have been forced to rely on air-dropped food and medicine for months.

Central and southern Bosnia, where Bosnian Croats and Muslim-led government troops are vying for territory unclaimed by the Serbs, remained in turmoil.

Bosnian radio reported a desperate situation among Bosniaks trapped in part of Vitez, with 80 percent of the homes destroyed. The Bosniaks have been without electricity or humanitarian aid during six months of Croat siege, the broadcast said.

In the town of Livno, hundreds of Muslim women and children were separated from the men on Wednesday and the two groups were trucked out in different directions by Croats, Aikman said.

The Spokesman-Review
13 January 1993.

ZAGREB, Croatia — She has no official name, but nurses at Petrova maternity hospital call her Emina [Bosnian Muslim name].

The baby was born in November to 17-year-old Bosniak girl who said she was raped repeatedly during three months in a Serb-run detention camp near Teslic in central Bosnia.

“She didn’t want to see the baby after the birth. She just left,” said Veselko Grizelj, the Zagreb hospital’s chief obstetrician. Where she went, is not known. Grizelj said the dark-haired infant has become the favorite of the hospital staff.

Baby Emina was to be transferred this week from the hospital to a home for abandoned children run by the local chapter of Caritas, a Roman Catholic charity.

Accounts of widespread rape by forces fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s civil war began surfacing earlier this year. Serb forces have been blamed most often.

The European Community, in a report issued last week, said some 20,000 women may have been raped by Serb fighters as part of a “deliberate pattern” of terror.

The charities and Croatian officials have received many offers to adopt such babies, but they say their hands are legally tied.

Children born to Bosnian women are technically Bosnian citizens, and thus their adoptions would fall under Bosnian law.

Emina is the second baby born to a raped mother in Petrova hospital, Grizelj said.

Last August, a Croat woman from a village near the Croatian town of Vukovar, gave birth to a boy. The child was adopted by a Croatian couple.

FRY’s continued presence within the United Nations — Effects of Serbia and Montenegro’s admission to the United Nations on 1 November 2000 — Serbia’s complicity in genocide — Accomplice’s mens rea as opposed to principal perpetrator’s — Relationship between individual criminal liability and State responsibility — Definition of complicity — “Scorpions”, a paramilitary force under Serbian control.

I wish by means of this declaration to expand upon and clarify certain aspects of the Court’s reasoning in reaffirming its jurisdiction to decide this case. I shall then explain why I disagree with the Court’s finding that Serbia was not complicit in the genocide committed at Srebrenica.

In respect of jurisdiction, I am in full agreement with the Court’s discussion of the authority of the 1996 Judgment as res judicata, in that the Judgment took as established the status of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) as a Member of the United Nations and a party to the Statute of the Court. While the Parties themselves did not dispute the question of membership status at the critical date when the proceedings were instituted, as the Court has pointed out, the world body was faced with an unprecedented situation, which, as observed by its Legal Counsel on 29 September 1992:

“is not foreseen in the Charter of the United Nations, namely, the consequences for purposes of membership in the United Nations of the disintegration of a Member State on which there is no agreement among the immediate successors of that State or among the membership of the Organization at large” (United Nations, doc. A/47/485).

The Security Council had taken note of the disagreement and drawn the conclusion that the FRY did not automatically succeed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (resolution 777 (1992)). Accordingly, the
General Assembly, in its resolution 47/1 of 22 September 1992, suspended the FRY’s participation in the work of the General Assembly and stated that the FRY should apply for membership in the United Nations; the FRY nevertheless continued to take part in debates in the Security Council and to circulate its documents as official documents of the United Nations.

In my view, the FRY’s “sui generis position” referred to by the Court in its Judgment of 3 February 2003 on the application for revision had to do with the will expressed within the United Nations to keep the State

within the Organization but with reduced rights, pending its submission to the test set out in Article 4 of the Charter and a showing that it was a peace-loving State accepting the obligations under the Charter and able and willing to carry them out. It was not until 1 November 2000 that Serbia and Montenegro was admitted to the United Nations after the Miloševic´ régime was overthrown and its leader surrendered to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. It cannot however be inferred from this that a legal void obtained between the time the former Yugoslavia broke up and the date Serbia and Montenegro was subsequently admitted to membership, that is to say for nearly eight years. The FRY’s continued presence within the United Nations allowed the Organization to retain means of applying pressure to the country, notably by way of sanctions under Chapter VII of the Charter, until its conduct again conformed with international legality. The Court was fully cognizant of this situation in 1996 when it found jurisdiction to adjudicate the dispute referred to it by Bosnia and Herzegovina. It appears obvious to us that, given the unprecedented circumstances confronting the international
community, Serbia and Montenegro’s change in attitude and its admission to the United Nations on 1 November 2000 could only take effect prospectively.

In the Judgment on the application for revision the Court considered that:

“Resolution 47/1 did not inter alia affect the FRY’s right to appear before the Court or to be a party to a dispute before the Court under the conditions laid down by the Statute.” (Application for Revision of the Judgment of 11 July 1996 in the Case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Yugoslavia), Preliminary Objections (Yugoslavia v. Bosnia and Herzegovina), Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 2003, p. 31, para. 70.)

And, in ruling on jurisdiction in 1996, the Court was perfectly aware of the FRY’s position vis-à-vis the United Nations. That is why the Court, acting on an application for revision, wished to emphasize that

“General Assembly resolution 55/12 of 1 November 2000 [on the FRY’s admission] cannot have changed retroactively the sui generis position which the FRY found itself in vis-à-vis the United Nations over the period 1992 to 2000, or its position in relation to the Statute of the Court and the Genocide Convention” (ibid., para. 71).

In respect of the merits of this case, it is my view that all the conditions were met to justify a finding by the Court that the FRY was responsible for complicity with the Republika Srpska and its army in genocide at Srebrenica.

This is why I have voted against point 4 of the operative clause.

Consideration of the issue of the FRY’s complicity in genocide, within the meaning of Article III (e) of the 1948 Convention, has shown the extent to which the Court, when assessing the responsibility of the State, has relied on the findings by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in respect of the guilt of the main culprits in this tragedy, whether Mr. Miloševic´ or Mr. Mladic´. Moreover, the Court has depended exclusively on the ICTY appellate judgment in the Krstic´ case in characterizing the crime committed at Srebrenica as the crime of genocide.

As the Miloševic´ trial could not be completed and Mr. Mladic´ has not been arrested and handed over to the ICTY, it was not possible for the Court to obtain all the evidence needed to assess Serbia’s complicity in the genocide committed at Srebrenica. As a result, the Court gave the FRY the benefit of what the Court believed to be the subsisting doubt as to the conduct of the FRY’s senior leadership in July 1995, when the groundwork was being laid for the crime at Srebrenica, notably on the issue whether the FRY knew or had reason to know that the Republika Srpska army was preparing to commit genocide. In my opinion, the mens rea required of an accomplice is not the same as that required of a principal perpetrator, namely the specific intent (dolus specialis) to commit genocide, and it cannot be otherwise, since requiring such intent would be tantamount to equating an accomplice with a co-principal.

In this connection, it is possible to refer, by way of analogy, to Article 16, entitled “Aid or assistance in the commission of an internationally wrongful act”, of the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility, providing:

“A State which aids or assists another State in the commission of an internationally wrongful act by the latter is internationally responsible for doing so if:
(a) That State does so with knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act ; and
(b) The act would be internationally wrongful if committed by that State.”

It follows from this Article, which can be seen as addressing “complicity” in inter-State relations, that the two requisite elements are assistance and knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act, not participation in committing it.

In this case the mens rea is the intent on the part of the accomplice to assist the principal perpetrator where the accomplice has actual or constructive knowledge of the nature of the crime which the principal is preparing to commit. This is the International Law Commission’s interpretation of Article III (e), on complicity, of the 1948 Genocide Convention (International Law Commission Report on the Work of its Fifty-third Session, 2001, pp. 146-147).

It is a fact that much concordant evidence before the Court showed that the FRY should have known that genocide was being plotted and nevertheless continued to assist the Republika Srpska and its armed forces in their operations, including at Srebrenica.

It is difficult to understand why the Court avoided any pronouncement on the definition of complicity, thereby leaving open the question whether an accomplice must share the specific intent (dolus specialis) of the principal perpetrator of genocide (Judgment, para. 421). The Court should however have rejected any such requirement, which the Respondent advocated, because it is contrary to the generally accepted definition of complicity and, as a matter of logic, because it would lead to the preposterous result of identifying accomplices with principal perpetrators. To avoid having to decide the question — and this is unfortunate for clarification of international law on the subject — the Court took the view that the accomplice must at least be aware of the principal’s specific intent ; this enabled it then to conclude, on the basis of an interpretation of the facts which we find misguided, that Serbia had not been complicit.

It is true that the ICTY’s findings in the trials of those mainly responsible, whether at the head of the FRY or the Republika Srpska, could have provided conclusive information dispelling all possible doubt as to the knowledge which the leaders of Serbia and Montenegro had of theplans being laid at Srebrenica. This naturally leads us to think that a
thorough determination as to the State’s responsibility must in fact await the arrest and trial of those primarily responsible for the tragedy of Srebrenica and the light which may thereby be shed on the role played by the FRY.

Thus, from the extensive argument made before the Court, I am convinced of the close relationship between individual criminal liability and State responsibility in proceedings of this type. Indeed, it is rare for a State bluntly to proclaim its intent to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnical, cultural or religious group or to disclose its knowledge that such a crime was going to occur or to admit to having committed it. Thus, it is through the conduct of those whose acts bind the State and by way of their prosecution that responsibility can be traced to the State itself, except of course where the State in question has been defeated and is under occupation, its demolished organizational infrastructure having disgorged all the secrets in its files to international justice. But this is not the case of the FRY (Serbia and Montenegro), which went so far as to
deny the Court access to the unexpurgated records of its “Supreme Defence Council” (letter of 16 January 2006 from the Agent of Serbia and Montenegro).

That said, it is my view that the evidence before the Court already established the FRY’s complicity in genocide.

The existence of the actus reus of the crime, namely the manifold aid and assistance furnished by Belgrade to the Republika Srpska and its army, the VRS, has been amply confirmed by the Court in its examination of the FRY’s responsibility for breach of the obligation to prevent genocide. This ongoing political, military and financial support existed before, during and after the massacre at Srebrenica.

It remains to be considered whether the requisite mens rea was present, that is whether the aid and assistance continued even though the FRY knew or should have known that the recipients were preparing to commit an act of genocide and the FRY thus supported them in the pursuit of their aims. It is when aid and assistance are furnished in full knowledge of the recipient’s genocidal intent that they constitute complicity, thus being distinguishable from a violation of the obligation of prevention, in respect of which all that is required is an awareness of the risk of genocide.

I recognize that the difficulty in proving in this case that Belgrade knew of the genocidal intent harboured by the Bosnian Serb Army arises from the fact that such intent did not come into being, according to the ICTY, until barely two days before the genocide was carried out between 13 and 17 July 1995. But this genuine difficulty does not automatically lead to the conclusion that Belgrade did not know and could not have known that genocide was being decided upon.

First, a number of officers in Belgrade’s Yugoslav army (the VJ) were assigned to the Bosnian Serb army (VRS) headquarters at Han Pijesak and it is inconceivable that they did not inform their superiors (see the 10 April 2002 report by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, “Srebrenica — a ‘safe’ area”).

Secondly, General Wesley Clark (an American military adviser) testified as follows at the Miloševic´ trial:

“General Clark: I was still wrestling with the idea as to how it is that Miloševic´ could maintain that he had the authority and the power to deliver the Serb compliance with the agreement. And so I simply asked him. I said, ‘Mr. President, you say you have so much influence over the Bosnian Serbs, but how is it then, if you have such influence, that you allowed General Mladic´ to kill all those people in Srebrenica?’ And Miloševic´ looked at me and he paused for a moment. He then said, ‘Well, General Clark’, he said, ‘I warned Mladic´ not to do this, but he didn’t listen to me’.

Question : Your understanding of what he was referring to, if you have an understanding beyond the words themselves, can you give it to us?

General Clark: Certainly.

Question : And explain, if it does have a context and understanding, how you arrive at that understanding.

General Clark: Well, it was very clear what I was asking was about the massacre at Srebrenica. When I said ‘kill all these people’, it wasn’t a military operation, it was the massacre. And this was in fact what had been in the news.” (Miloševic´, IT-02-54, hearing transcripts, 15 December 2003.)

Indeed, a number of sources attest that General Mladic´ was in continuous contact with Miloševic´ before the massacres began, in particular between 7 and 14 July 1995 (see the Secretary-General’s Report pursuant to General Assembly resolution 53/35, entitled “The Fall of Srebrenica”, United Nations, doc. A/54/549, pp. 76-77).

In our opinion it has therefore been shown that the authorities in Belgrade were fully apprised of the attack in Srebrenica and that they also should have known that preparations were under way for the slaughter of that city’s Muslim population.
For proof of this, it is sufficient to recall that the “Scorpions”, a paramilitary force controlled by the Minister of the Interior of Serbia and Montenegro, were present at the very site where the massacre took place.

The Court moreover acknowledges having received documents linking the “Scorpions” with the “MUP of Serbia [Serbian Ministry of the Interior]” or referring to them as “a unit of Ministry of Interiors of Serbia” (Judgment, para. 389), but it draws no conclusion from this in respect of complicity, confining itself to considering, for purposes of determining direct responsibility, whether these paramilitary forces were de jure organs of the Respondent or were completely dependent on it. Even assuming this not to be the case, the ties between these forces and the Serbian Ministry of the Interior and their proven participation in the massacre at Srebrenica could have led the Court at the very least to consider whether, as a result, Serbia was not kept abreast of the groundwork for and perpetration of the genocide at Srebrenica.

Serbia, which struggled to keep afloat the Republika Srpska and its army, the VRS, the ranks of which included many officers whose careers depended on Belgrade, had developed manifold ties with the political and military organizations which decided upon the genocide and carried it out; Serbia therefore had full knowledge of the genocide, which makes it an accomplice in the crime and gives rise to its international responsibility.

In my opinion, the Court, on the basis of the material already before it and without having to await further judgments by the ICTY, could have found complicity on the part of Serbia in the genocide perpetrated at Srebrenica; in so ruling, it would have done justice to the memory of the thousands of victims of the massacre, while meeting the expectations of their families.

At the same time, this would not have been excessively harsh on Serbia nor in any way hindered the reconciliation and co-operation needed between Balkan States ; while the Court is dealing with the actions of a country, that country was led by a régime described as follows by the Council of Ministers of Serbia and Montenegro in a declaration made on15 June 2005:

“Those who committed the killings in Srebrenica, as well as those who ordered and organized that massacre represented neither Serbia nor Montenegro, but an undemocratic régime of terror and death, against which the majority of citizens of Serbia and Montenegro put up the strongest resistance.”

It is undoubtedly true that one consequence of State continuity is that the State remains responsible for any wrongful act committed in its name. Is this any reason to lapse into negationist thinking? Certainly not. One of the most valuable lessons of the tragedies which have darkened the last century and shocked the conscience of all mankind is that the past must be accepted in its whole truth and forgiveness must accordingly be sought for the suffering inflicted. This, without doubt, is the only way towards building a common future. While this process extends beyond justice in the strict sense, justice can contribute greatly to it.

(Signed) Mohamed BENNOUNA.

The Report of the Security Council Mission, dated 30 April 1993, required Bosnian Serbs refused to withdraw their heavy weapons (to demilitarize) around Srebrenica, which they refused to do:

“The Serb forces must withdraw to points from which they cannot attack, harass or terrorize the town. UNPROFOR should be in a position to determine the related parameters. The Mission believes, as does UNPROFOR, that the actual 4 1/2 by 1/2 kilometres decided as a safe area should be greatly expanded.”

“Even though Security Council resolution 819 (1993) declared the city a safe area, the actual situation obviously does not correspond to either the spirit or the intent of the resolution. The Serb forces do not appear to be ready to withdraw. On the contrary, they are today larger than when the resolution was adopted.”

The Council also warned that:

“Srebrenica is today the equivalent of an open jail in which its people can wander around but are controlled and terrorized by the increasing presence of Serb tanks and other heavy weapons in its immediate surroundings. The UNHCR representative described the town as a ‘bad refugee camp’. During the Mission’s briefing at Srebrenica, the representative of ICRC informed it that the Serbs were not allowing surgeons to enter the city, in direct violation of international humanitarian law. There were many wounded requiring surgery. The only surgeon in the city has not been authorized to stay by the Serbs. To impede medical assistance is a crime of genocide. This action, together with the cutting of the water supply and electricity, have put into effect a slow-motion process of genocide.”

Full Document: Resolution 819, 16 April 1993.

Photo: Traumatized woman, Bosnian Muslim rape victim. Photo taken by Antony Loyd, noted war correspondent and former British Army officer. Image used for Fair Use Only and in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 for research and educational purposes.

By Teddie Weyr
Gadsden Times, p.A6
26 January 1993.

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) — No one knows how many there may be. Outwardly, they will carry no scarlet letter. But a fear they may be stigmatized by their horrible secret has sparked a scramble to save innocents from the sins of their fathers.

They are the babies of victims of rape – living reminders of its use as a tool of war in Bosnia.

Publicity has touched a nerve and led to adoption offers from across the world. With the first few of these children already born and many more on the way, much is left to be decided. But it is clear many of their mothers never want to lay eyes on them.

“This crime has horrible implications, psychological to existential,” Martin Raguz, the social services minister of the Muslim-led Bosnian government said. “I think we can project that a lot of these children will be up for adoption.”

Estimates of the number of women raped range from 20,000 to 50,000, and it is uncertain how many became pregnant and how many might have been able to obtain an abortion. Despite making a special study, the European Community says it cannot predict how many children will be born.

Many of the women are afraid to talk about their ordeals, and still live in war zones or as refugees in foreign countries.

One Muslim [Bosniak] woman interviewed in a Zagreb hospital acknowledged her unborn child was guilty of nothing, but added, “When I think of it, I remember everything and blood comes to my eyes.”

There are three known cases in Croatia of babies abandoned by rape victims. But Dr. Veselko Grizelj, chief obstetrician at Zagreb’s Petrova Hospital, believes there will be many more. The fighting in Bosnia began 10 months ago.

“We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

There are many pockets of Bosniaks resistance throughout Bosnia where decent medical care and access to the outside world are impossible.

There are chilling allegations of rape camps set up by Serb irregulars.

Many experts fear that women carrying these children will not come forward. In patriarchal Muslim society in Bosnia, there is almost nothing more shameful.

There are nearly 300,000 Bosnian refugees in Croatia, most of them Bosniaks who fled Serb attacks. Some are women who were raped.

Ivica Simunovic, Croatia’s minister of labor and social services, says the children are legally Bosnian, and their government must make the decisions about their future.

One thing it could do in the meantime would be to authorize Croatia to arrange adoptions for the duration of the war, he said.

The primary concern, said Raguz, the Bosnian minister who has two small children of his own, is to ensure all Bosnian children survive, not only those born to rape victims.

Raguz acknowledged that dealing with the babies of rape victims is a “special issue (which) can’t be regulated by the exiting legal procedure. We’re talking about an unprecedented war crime.”

Nevertheless, he said laws cannot be ignored. That is problematic. Both Bosnian and Croatian law require the signature of both parents for adoption.

Many women don’t even know where their husbands are, or if they are still alive. In any case, few want their husbands to know they were raped, let alone pregnant.

Raguz said his ministry must give its approval to foreign adoptions because priority is given to Bosnian couples.

He suggested babies could be temporarily placed with families wishing to adopt them and the legal details sorted out later.

The Bosnian and Croatian governments have set up crisis teams, but already adoption offers are flooding in.

“Almost no day goes by when people from the whole world don’t call,” said Jelena Brajsa, head of the Roman Catholic organization Caritas in Zagreb.

To learn more about the 1993 Cerska massacre, browse available documentation on our web site.

Srebrenica Orphans Recall Horror

Lodi News-Sentinel,
p. front, A88 July 1996.

Ferida Osmanovic hanged herself a year ago. She just walked off alone into a quiet wood, leaving behind her two children to fend for themselves.

Her despair was too much to bear. She endured the long siege of Srebrenica. Then came the terrifying end when Bosnian Serbs overran the Muslim enclave. The final horror was seeing the Serbs drag her husband away.

One July later, Osmanovic’s grave in a paupers cemetery is marked by a simple slab of wood inscribed: “No name: Srebrenica.”

Her children know where she is buried and have drawn the hard lessons of war, death and despair.

Ferida Osmanovic, hanged herself near the camp at Tuzla airport after being forcibly separated from her family and deported from Srebrenica during genocide. Photographed by Darko Bandic. According to the U.S. Dept of State, another 14-year-old Bosniak child hung herself with her scarf in Potocari after she and her 12-year old cousin were raped by Serb soldiers

The world is struggling with the lessons, too. International investigators are searching for the bones of the dead men of Srebrenica, and a U.N. war-crimes tribunal is hearing the grisly tale of their slaughter.

“I remember my mother’s eyes,” recalls her 15-year-old son, Damir. “They were red all the time, because she never stopped crying.”

Last July 11, Bosnian Serb tanks rolled into Srebrenica, an eastern enclave protected by Dutch U.N. peacekeepers. Thousands of people huddled for protection at the Dutch base; thousands more fled across the hills and forests. Neither choice was a good one.

Osmanovic’s husband, Selman, was plucked off a bus by Serb soldiers. He is among about 8,000 men who were never heard from again.

Damir, his sister Fatima, now 10, and mother made it to safety in Tuzla, about 55 miles northwest of Srebrenica.

But within days, 34-year-old Ferida walked away from a refugee camp and hanged herself from a tree.

Children found by grandfather

The children’s paternal grandfather found the children after two days – but it was not until a month later that he was able to identify his daughter-in-law from a police photo.

It was the children’s closest – but far from their first – experience of death and suffering.

War came in April 1992 when their mother’s brother, 28-year-old Sehid Dzanic, was shot dead while picking corn.

“I remember we were hungry, and he wanted to get us food, and then he was hurt and left us,” says Damir, a short boy who rarely smiles.

Then came three years of siege – shooting and shelling and hunger – a dark memory that Fatima, a shy little girl with an easy smile, says it is difficult to talk about.

Serbs squeezed Srebrenica at will. In March 1993, Lt. Gen. Phillipe Morillon of France, then the U.N. commander in Bosnia, entered the town to draw attention to its plight.

When the Serbs let U.N. trucks leave with Morillon to take out those who wanted to go, the panic was such that some people were crushed to death. Two of the children’s aunts, Seida Osmanovic, 30, and Hiba Hajdarevic, 41, made it out, but their family stayed.

In April 1993, the U.N. Security Council declared Srebrenica the first safe area protected by U.N. troops, and the enclave settled into the numbing routine of siege for the next two years.

That came to an end last July as the Serbs squeezed Srebrenica once more and built up their forces around its outskirts.

U.N. troops gave up the men

The several hundred Dutch peacekeepers were no match. When the Serbs moved in, the Dutch turned over the thousands of Muslims who sought safety at their base in Potocari just north of Srebrenica, and left.

“We were moved to a house in Potocari and spent the night there,” Damir says. “The noise of screaming people and shooting woke me the next morning.”

Then, evacuation buses came. Muslims climbed aboard, but Serb soldiers – whom the Muslims refer to as “Chetniks” – took off all the men.

“They took my father, and I never saw him again,” Damir says. “My mother wouldn’t stop crying, and I was very scared.”

Over the next several days, despite promises they would not be harmed, men ranging in age from their late teens to early 60s were transported to several killing fields, executed and buried in mass graves, according to eyewitnesses.

Husband not allowed to flee

Damir’s grandmother, Habiba, says her daughter-in-law may have felt guilty for forcing her 36-year-old husband to join her in Potocari instead of allowing him to try to flee through the woods with other men from their family.

“She did not kill herself because she was mentally ill, but I think she felt so sorry that she led her husband to his death,” she says.

Last week at the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, Dutch Col. Ton Karremans testified about his helplessness to stop Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic from capturing Srebrenica.

The hearing was aimed at highlighting evidence against Mladic and the Bosnian Serb civilian leader, Radovan Karadzic, for genocide and crimes against humanity.

One year after the Srebrenica massacres, both men remain at large. Under international pressure, Karadzic has turned his presidential powers over to a deputy but he appears no closer to standing before the Hague tribunal to answer charges. Mladic spends his time at a well-guarded compound about 15 miles west of Srebrenica.

Serb general placed at scene

Survivors of one mass execution say they saw Mladic at the killing fields.

One of the fields is Glogova, just northwest of Srebrenica, where Damir says his father worked as a locksmith.

Glogova is believed to contain the graves of up to 2,000 people herded and subjected to a barrage of grenades and firearms. The warehouse is peppered with bullet and shrapnel holes. Bits of human hair and tissue still are visible on walls.

War-crimes investigators have uncovered the bodies of bound civilian men buried in mass graves around the area and plan to begin exhuming some of their remains within days.

The families’ agony goes on.

Damir and Fatima’s 63-year-old grandmother says the two children are a burden to poor refugees who lost everything.

“I don’t know what to do with these children,” she says. “I can’t offer them much. Eight of us live here together, and sometimes I think I should give the children to the orphanage.”

“We can never forgive our mother for what she did,” the children say together. Damir adds: “It’s the Chetniks I will never forget.”

Photo: Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) woman Ferida Osmanovic hanging from a tree after the fall of Srebrenica. Photographed by Darko Bandic. According to the U.S. Dept of State, another 14-year-old Bosniak child hung herself with her scarf in Potocari after she and her 12-year old cousin were raped by Serb soldiers.

By STEPHEN KINZER
Published: July 14, 1995.
New York Times

TUZLA, Bosnia and Herzegovina, July 13— Thousands of stunned Muslim refugees streamed into this town in northern Bosnia today, telling of bodies left hanging from trees and littering the street after the Bosnian Serb conquest of the “safe area” of Srebrenica.

Busloads of refugees, many with just the clothes on their backs, continued to arrive late into the night. They camped under a full moon on mosquito-infested fields near the Tuzla airport, trying to come to grips with their sudden losses.

Dozens of refugees interviewed here told similar stories of atrocities. Many said they had hidden fearfully in their homes on Tuesday night, after Bosnian Serbs had entered Srebrenica late Tuesday afternoon with virtually no resistance.

On Wednesday morning, these witnesses said, when Bosnian Serb soldiers routed them out to waiting buses for shipment to Government-held territory, they saw “many men hanging” — words repeatedly used — and many more men lying dead in the streets. There was no independent verification of their accounts.

The refugees said that they had heard some shots during the night but that many of the men had apparently been stabbed to death.

“I saw men who seemed to have gone crazy, killing people with knives,” said Vahida Nukic. “We didn’t know what was happening,” she added.

Some of the refugees also described rapes and abductions of women, notorious weapons of degradation in past episodes of “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs.

United Nations troops in and around Tuzla were plainly overwhelmed by the sudden flood of refugees, who were living in a United Nations-declared “safe area” until Serbian troops stormed past a contingent of peacekeepers and fell upon them this week.

Relief workers, local volunteers and United Nations soldiers distributed blankets and rubber mattresses to a few lucky refugees and gave scraps of food to some children, but most refugees knew no comfort and ate nothing today.

The vast crowd sat almost completely motionless and silent, as if in a collective state of shock. The only sounds heard were plaintive wails of babies and small children, broken occasionally by amplified announcements from local fire engines that passed by with rations of water.

United Nations officials said more than 8,000 refugees had arrived in Tuzla by tonight, after they were dropped at the front lines by the Serbs and transported to Tuzla by the Bosnian Government.

Relief workers said the refugees were all women and children, and no men were seen among those camped at the airport tonight. Military-age men captured in the Srebrenica enclave were separated by the Serbs and sent to Bratunac, where Bosnian Serb officers said they would be questioned for possible war crimes [note: the only war criminals in and around Srebrenica were Serbian fascists who started massacring Bosniak people in April of 1992, three years before the 1995 Srebrenica genocide].

“I saw neighbors dead, and it made me crazy,” said Haka Nukic, 67, who was born in Srebrenica and has lived there all her life and is the mother of Vahida Nukic. “The first night the Serbs were in the town, we heard screaming in the streets until morning. They took women away and did bad things to them, and killed men the way you slaughter cattle.”

Mrs. Nukic said that her 16-year-old grandson had been captured, and that she fears he may have been killed.

“At first the Serbs said we shouldn’t worry, that they wanted peace, that nothing would happen to us,” she said. “But later, when it got dark, they turned into wild animals. I don’t see how we will ever be able to go back there.”

The Serbian decision to remove all of Srebrenica’s more than 40,000 Muslims, most of whom had moved there after being forced from their homes in previous Serb campaigns, was the latest spasm of the “ethnic cleansing” that has been a tactic of Serbian forces since the Bosnian war began three years ago.

It is an article of faith among Bosnian Serbs that their self-proclaimed state, which no other nation recognizes, cannot survive while pockets of Muslims remain.

Bosnian Serbs are seeking to consolidate their control over eastern Bosnia by overrunning the Muslim “safe areas” established by the United Nations in 1993. After their success in Srebrenica, they have begun to turn their firepower on nearby Zepa.

The commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, Gen. Ratko Mladic, asserted in an interview published today that the enclaves had never been truly demilitarized, and that in fact they had been used as bases from which Muslims had launched “terrorist actions.” In recent weeks there have been several reported incidents in which Muslim fighters evidently slipped out of the enclaves to raid Serb targets. [note: Serbs conveniently avoided to mention they also raided and attacked Bosnian Muslim  (Bosniak) villages around Srebrenica; Serbs blocked humanitarian aid from entering Srebrenica so they could starve Bosniak people to death.]

Asked if such assaults had been carried out by Muslim forces inside Srebrenica in recent weeks, a United Nations spokesman in Zagreb, Philip W. Arnold, replied: “It’s quite clear that there have been attacks by both sides that contradict their commitment to maintain this as a demilitarized area.”

Refugees interviewed today gave remarkably similar accounts of what they saw in Srebrenica. Their stories were graphic and horrific.

“I saw many bodies lying on the street,” said Beb Usmanovic, 25, as she cradled her 4-year-old son. “The men have all disappeared, and we think they may be dead. We are so scared, so sad, that we don’t know what to do.”

Muska Hasj, 24, said she saw women surrender themselves to rampaging Serbs in efforts to protect their families.

“The Serbs were running through the streets with knives,” she said. “They took some women away, and others hid inside their homes hoping not to be taken. A few went without protesting. I think they had lost their minds.”

“I have no idea where we will go now or what we will do. We have been thrown out into the wild like forest creatures, but we are normal European people. I don’t understand how this could happen.”

U.N. Condemns Serbian Actions

UNITED NATIONS, July 13 (By The New York Times) — The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, whose organization has led the relief effort in Bosnia, today used some of her toughest language yet in accusing the Bosnian Serbs of “ethnically cleansing” Srebrenica of its Muslim civilian population.

“It is inconceivable to me that the Bosnian Serbs can inflict such hardship on the people of Srebrenica — people who have already endured years of war and suffering,” Mrs. Ogata said. “This is one of the most blatant examples of ethnically motivated forced displacement we have seen yet in this war.”

Mrs. Ogata’s statement, issued here and in Geneva, referred to the “ruthless efficiency” with which the Bosnian Serbs were busing women, children and elderly people from Potocari, the United Nations base where thousands of refugees had fled, and detaining men and boys. Her criticism was echoed today by other humanitarian and human rights organizations.

Bosnian Genocide survivors from the conquered Srebrenica arrived in Tuzla on Monday night after seven days of death marches from Srebrenica to Bosnian government held territory. A U.N. truck helped them arrive to Tuzla and look for relatives who have also fled the fallen city.

Lawrence Journal-World, P.9A
19 July 1995.

Survivors who fled the Bosnian Serb army that bore down on Srebrenica have horror stories to tell and memories that won’t fade soon.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Bahrem Ektic, 16 and frail, saw dozens of Muslim [Bosniak] men lying dead or dying as he made a seven-day trek to safety from conquered Srebrenica. The memory of one victim will remain with him.

“One had nose and ears cut off, and only two fingers left on each hand. When we passed by, he whimpered. He begged us to kill him. But we could not shoot him, for fear Serbs will hear us. And nobody mustered strength to put him out of his misery with a knife.”

“So we left him there whimpering. The sound will always be in my head,” Ektic said softly Tuesday, his shoulders appearing too slight to handle the rifle he carried.

Ektic was among 15,000 Muslim men who fled Srebrenica to evade the Bosnian Serb fighters who overran the “safe area” last Thursday. Most [Bosniak men] had been conscripted for the defense of Srebrenica.

Fewer than 5,000 have made it safely to government-held Tuzla, 70 miles to the north-west, and there is growing concern about the fate of the 11,000 who remained missing.

Bosnian army spokesman Ekrem Avdic said Tuesday that a large group of Muslim men was reported to have broken through Bosnian Serb lines ringing Zepa, a U.N.-protected area that the Serbs have made their next target.

But with Zepa tottering, their fate was far from secured.

Men who have arrived in Tuzla say Serbs fired on the fleeing men and ambushed them. They suffered from thirst and a hunger that forced them to eat berries and even leaves.

But the worst suffering was caused by their fear of being discovered by the enemy. Mounting despair led several men to commit suicide, survivors say.

“About fifty meters (yards) in front of me, one older man shot himself in the mouth,” said Vejzo Mulkic, 27. “Then everybody started cursing and running, for fear we would be found.”

Young Ektic last saw his 18-year-old brother Bajro when Serbs fired on a group of Muslim men last Wednesday. The attack sent the men running in panic, and the brothers were separated.

“My brother’s gone,” Ektic said in a sad tone that harbored little hope of reunion.

He says his father was taken by the Serbs, and that he hopes to find his mother among the 23,000 refugees who arrived in Tuzla from Srebrenica last week.

Others shared his hope. Most of the newly arrived men were staying at military base near the Tuzla airport, but some ventured out to search for loved ones in the refugee camp nearby.

Looking lost in the sweltering heat, 23-year-old Osman Mulalic walked the tarmac of the tent city on a quest that showed little promise.

“I’m looking for my mother and father, Fatima and Camil, said the young man. “I’ve checked at three (collection) points, but nobody has seen them.”