Lack of Funds Endangers Probe of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia

By R. Clemente Holder

Atrocities associated with Serb "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia have reached levels of horror not seen in Europe since World War II. Led by U.S. representative to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, the U.N. Security Council therefore has turned to a remedy not applied since the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that followed World War II. In May 1993 the Security Council established the bureaucratically named "International Tribunal for the Persecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of Former Yugoslavia since 1991." The Tribunal consists of an 11-judge panel, including one American, that meets in the Hague.

U.S. support for such a move began with a speech by President George Bush on Aug. 7, 1992 after the discovery of concentration camps in which Serbs were systematically torturing, raping and murdering Muslims from areas of Bosnia seized by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army after Bosnians voted to secede from Yugoslavia. Later that year, in the waning days of the Bush administration, Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, a former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, startled participants in a Geneva meeting on Bosnia by naming eight Serb leaders he believed would be indicted for war crimes. Among them were President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia (which now is limited to the former Yugoslav constituent republics of Serbia and Montenegro and the autonomous areas of Kosovo and Vojvodina), Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Bosnian Serb military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic and the Bosnian Serb commander of the Omerska concentration camp.

The successor Clinton administration seems equally determined to advance the war crimes process, despite attempts to sidetrack it by Russia, which appears willing to sacrifice its improved relations with the U.S. in order to avert international prosecution of Serbs held responsible for the atrocities. The Russian government held up U.N. war crimes proceedings by insisting it would veto the nomination of any citizen of a NATO country as chief prosecutor for the tribunal. This derailed the expected nomination of Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-born, naturalized American professor of international law who, as chairman of a U.N. Committee of Experts, already had gathered much of the evidence needed to launch the first trials (see story on page 14).

The Russian delaying tactics were foiled with the appointment of Richard Goldstone, a respected South African judge, as chief prosecutor. In December he issued his first indictment against Dragan Nikolic, a Bosnian Serb who commanded the Susica concentration camp where some 3,000 Bosnian Muslims are believed to have been executed or to have died of injuries sustained at the hands of Serb torturers.

Increasingly, however, the British and French governments seem closer to the Russian than to the American position. While the U.S. has made available to the tribunal $3 million and the services of 25 prosecutors and investigators to prepare charges and take depositions, neither promised funds nor staff have been forthcoming from Britain and France.

However, their lack of interest is not reflected in other Western European countries, some of which already have contributed support to the tribunal. In November, Denmark tried and convicted Rafik "Mara" Saric, a Muslim married to a Croat who originally served in a Croatian militia fighting the Serbs in Bosnia. When, in the summer of 1993, the alliance between Muslims and Croats was broken temporarily, Saric and other Muslims in the Croatian militia were put into the Croatian Dretelj concentration camp. There Saric allegedly volunteered his services to his captors and tortured fellow inmates.

When the camp was closed, Saric, a waiter, returned to his village and converted to Catholicism. In January 1994 he and his family turned up as "Croatian refugees" in a Danish camp for displaced persons. There he was recognized by former Dretelj inmates who nearly lynched him before a Danish riot squad transferred him from the camp to a Danish jail and subsequent trial.

Austria already has begun the trial of a Serb accused of three murders in a Bosnian village, and Switzerland is preparing a military trial of another accused war criminal, whose identity has not been released. However, it is the case of Dusan Tadic, accused of torture and particularly heinous murders of former Muslim neighbors from the village of Kozarac in the Prijedor district of northwestern Bosnia that is bringing the issue of international prosecution to a head.

Tadic's alleged crimes, which included ordering one inmate to bite off the testicles of two others, who then bled to death, were committed in the Serb Omerska and Keraterm concentration camps. His brutal services allegedly led, after the camps were "discovered" by the international media and subsequently closed by the Serbs, to Tadic's appointment as mayor of Kozarac. This appointment seemingly connected Tadic's atrocities to higher authorities in Serb-ruled Bosnia and is a key link in the chain of evidence running from the murder and rape camps to Serb political leaders.

Eventually, to avoid being drafted into the Bosnian Serb army, Tadic entered Germany as a refugee. In Munich he was recognized by camp survivors. They alerted German authorities, who arrested him and have held him in a Munich jail while German volunteers helped prepare a legal case against him through extensive interviews with Bosnian witnesses in Germany.

However, the German minister of justice was reluctant to proceed with a trial, fearful that it would rekindle animosities dating back to the brutal Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II, and the atrocities committed against Serbs at that time by the Croatian puppet regime.

The tribunal therefore has asked German authorities to hand over Tadic for prosecution. With Tadic already in custody, and the investigative work largely completed, there is little to stop such a trial. Tribunal staff members believe it could help them progress through the prosecution of concentration camp offenders such as Nikolic and Tadic upward to regional leaders such as Karadzic and Mladic who are believed to have authorized establishment of the Serb camps and, finally, to such national political leaders as Milosevic, who would thus be linked personally with implementation as well as enunciation of the policy of ethnic cleansing.

The struggle within the United Nations between those seeking to establish legal precedents based upon the Bosnia and Croatia experiences, which also might later be applied outside Europe in such countries as Rwanda, Cambodia and perhaps Iraq and Haiti, and those opposed to such trials is not new. In some respects it mirrors the struggle within the organization between those who sought to use military force to punish Serb violations of United Nations "safe areas," and those who vetoed the use of force.

The tribunal's battleground, however, has moved beyond the U.N. Security Council's one-year delay in appointing a chief prosecutor. Now it focuses on a delay until next spring by the U.N. General Assembly's 16-member budgetary panel in considering the funding for Goldstone's investigations and the actual functioning of the tribunal.

The U.N. Secretariat has requested $28.4 million for the tribunal in 1995. That is a pittance compared to the $1.26 billion spent by the U.N. Protection Force in the Balkans in 1994. Another enlightening comparison is with the American special prosecutor's Iran-Contra investigation, which led to trials of no more than a dozen officials of or contractors to the Reagan administration, but cost the United States government more than $40 million. The tribunal request therefore seems paltry.

The stakes, however, are enormous. In a world where, increasingly, U.N. peacekeepers are stretched so thinly that Security Council members no longer are willing to answer every call for help from around the globe, the threat of war crimes trials may be the only deterrent to persecution by the strong of the weak. What happens in Bosnia could profoundly influence events in a line of countries stretching from the Balkans to East Asia which, like the republics of former Yugoslavia, have been both liberated and destabilized by the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

Croatian Serbs Also File Charges

Serb authorities in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia all have said they do not recognize the authority of the international tribunal established in the Netherlands to deal with breaches of international law in the former Yugoslavia. To underline their claims that their own courts will prosecute perpetrators of crimes committed in Serbian territory, self-proclaimed authorities in a Serb-held area of Croatia have filed war crimes charges against 47-year-old restaurant owner Dusan Boljevic and his 45-year-old wife, Jagoda.

The couple, both Serbs, are charged with murdering 18 Croats, Muslims and ethnic Hungarians in Serb-held Baranja between October and December of 1991. Dusan Boljevic, a member of the Serb rebel forces known as "Rambo" and "Legend," is accused of killing his victims in their homes while his wife stood guard outside the houses with a machine gun. The couple also robbed their victims.

Dusan Boljevic is in custody in Beli Manastir, administrative capital of Baranja, site of the trial. Jagoda Boljevic was released from military custody in May 1992 and her whereabouts are unknown.

Iraqi National Congress Compiling War Crimes List

The Iraqi National Congress, umbrella organization for Sunni Muslim, Kurdish and Shi'i Muslim opponents of the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, has compiled its own list of 40 accused war criminals. The opposition group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi and headquartered at Salahuddin in Iraqi Kurdistan, demands that those it accuses be brought before an international tribunal to answer charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Saddam Hussain heads the list, which also includes 7 of his relatives, 5 of his top advisers, and 27 officials of the Iraqi Ba'th party and army officers. Posters containing photos of the accused leaders and details of the charges against them have been posted throughout the U.N.-protected "safe zone" in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the charges also have been broadcast on the group's clandestine radio and on its television station, whose programs can be seen in northern Iraq beyond the security zone.

Whatever the chances of its effort, the Iraqi National Congress reasons that naming those it seeks to bring to trial will reassure other Iraqi officers and party officials that the war crimes effort will be limited to the top levels of Saddam's regime.

"We want the army to know we can work with them," Chalabi told New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges last summer. "We do not reject all elements of the regime."

Ethiopia Genocide Trial Scheduled

Former Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, who fled to exile in Zimbabwe in 1991, and 21 top officials of his government will be tried in absentia on charges of genocide or "crimes against humanity" in March, along with 47 of their colleagues currently in Ethiopian government custody. The defendants were arraigned on Dec. 13 on 211 counts of mass murder, torture and forced disappearance.

During four days of preliminary hearings, the names of 2,199 alleged victims were read in an Addis Ababa courtroom. Then, on Dec. 17, the presiding judge adjourned the trial until March to enable defense lawyers to respond to the unprecedented genocide charges.

One defendant, former Prime Minister Fikre-Selassie Wogderes, challenged the validity of the trial, saying he and some 1,200 other former government officials had been held without charges by the current government, in contravention of both Ethiopian and international law. Among charges aired at the December hearings was one that the Mengistu government ordered the strangling on Aug. 26, 1975 of 82-year-old former Emperor Haile Selassie, whom Mengistu had overthrown in 1974 and kept under house arrest.

The current government, which overthrew Colonel Mengistu in 1991, has spent two years documenting the charges, which it expects to involve trials of some 1,300 people currently under arrest and to implicate some 3,500 others, many of whom have escaped the country. They will be charged with responsibility for killing between 40,000 and 100,000 Ethiopians, with the heaviest toll occurring in the period of the "red terror" between 1976 and 1978, when anyone thought to oppose Mengistu was likely to be seized and executed, and when corpses of young victims of government death squads were found in the streets of Addis Ababa nearly every morning.

The defendants will be tried under existing Ethiopian laws which provide for capital punishment and include provisions for war crimes. These laws had been enacted by Emperor Selassie in hopes of bringing to trial Italian perpetrators of crimes committed during the occupation of Ethiopia between 1935 and the defeat of Italy's fascist government in World War II.

One man likely to testify is former army Colonel Berhanu Meshesha, 71. He is eager to describe the early morning of April 22, 1976, when his four sons and two nephews were pulled from their beds to be taken to a police station for questioning. One nephew escaped but the next day Meshesha found the bodies of his four sons and the other nephew in a hospital morgue.

"I know exactly who the people are who dragged my sons away," the former officer in the army of Haile Selassie told a New York Times correspondent. "Finally, after so many years, there will be justice."