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| BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA: Bosnian Muslim Commander's Trial Begins |
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2004-10-07 10:16:39 |
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The U.N. war crimes tribunal on Wednesday started the trial of a Bosnian Muslim commander accused of overseeing the destruction of 15 Serb villages and the torture of prisoners in Eastern Bosnia.
Naser Oric, 37, one of only a few Muslims brought to trial alongside dozens of Serb suspects, is hailed by supporters as a heroic defender of the besieged Muslim enclave of Srebrenica.
The trial is important for the U.N. tribunal's attempts to demonstrate impartiality in prosecuting Balkan war crimes. But it is especially sensitive because Oric operated in the Srebrenica region, where Serb troops murdered more than 7,000 Muslim civilians in 1995, in Europe's worst civilian massacre since World War II.
Oric's actions in 1992 and 1993 are sometimes seen as having inflamed anti-Muslim sentiment among Serbs in the region in the years before the infamous massacre.
Oric knew and approved of his men beating prisoners "with iron bars and wooden poles, the forced extraction of teeth and broken jaws," prosecutor Jan Wubben said in his opening statement. Seven men allegedly died from their beatings.
Wubben quoted a 12-year-old girl who was being held in a nearby cell as saying she "recognized my grandfather moaning in pain. Every day and every night the men were beaten. I could hear the noises and it was horrible."
Oric pleaded innocent in April to six counts of violating the rules and customs of war, including murder, cruel treatment, wanton destruction and plunder.
If convicted, he could be sentenced up to life in prison.
Defense attorney John Jones asked the three judges to view events in Srebrenica in the context of the wider war. He urged them against putting Srebrenica's Muslim fighters on the same level as the Serbs, who already had killed 40,000 non-Serbs and expelled 300,000 from eastern Bosnia.
He said some Serbs were trying to rewrite history by saying the Muslims had provoked the onslaught. But the Muslims of Srebrenica "knew the fate that awaited them," Jones said. "It was David versus Goliath. The Muslims didn't have a chance."
During the siege of Srebrenica in 1995, Oric's fighters broke through weak spots in the Serbian front lines and raided Serb villages to get weapons and food to the enclave's starving inhabitants.
Ultimately, both Oric and U.N. peacekeepers could not protect the area when Serb troops overran it in July and the massacre began.
Oric later was awarded the "Golden Lily," the Bosnian army's highest honor, for his actions at Srebrenica.
Bosnian Serbs blame him for the killings of about 2,000 Serbs from villages around Srebrenica, including the so-called "Bloody Christmas" massacre in January 1993, when dozens of women and children died in the village of Kravice.
Oric was a police officer before the war. He served in Kosovo and Belgrade, where he was a bodyguard for then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who later became Yugoslavia's president. Oric disappeared in 1991 and resurfaced as a Muslim commander in Bosnia.
The United Nations established the Hague tribunal in 1993 to prosecute those accused of war crimes during Yugoslavia's violent disintegration in the 1990s.
By Toby Sterling
Source: Associated Press
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The Event: SEEF 2004
