U.N. Commission Charges Serbs With Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

By R. Clemente Holder

A case study of "ethnic cleansing" by Bosnian Serbs in the Prijedor district in the extreme northwest portion of Bosnia-Herzegovina was released June 1 by the five members of a United Nations commission established by the Security Council to lay the groundwork for war crimes trials in the former Yugoslavia. The study by the Commission of Experts, which was established on Oct. 6, 1992, details the killing or deportation of more than 52,811 people and the destruction of non-Serbian houses in the district.

The commission, headed by Cherif Bassiouni, Egyptian-born professor of law at DePaul University in Chicago, said its Prijedor findings were based on 300 to 400 statements by survivors, as well as accounts from the local Serb media and other sources. The final report, based on 65,000 pages of documents, 300 hours of videotape and a computerized database, was submitted to the U.N. International Tribunal on war crimes in the former Yugoslav federation established in the Hague.

The commission urged the Security Council to name a replacement for the first prosecutor, a Venezuelan former attorney general, who resigned before taking office when the U.N. cut the budget he had been led to believe the tribunal would receive. When named, the lead prosecutor will assess the evidence submitted by the commission, prepare indictments and prosecute any of the accused who can be brought before the tribunal.

"The crimes committed have been particularly brutal and ferocious in their execution," the commission reported. 'The magnitude of victimization is clearly enormous ... It is unquestionable that the events in Opstina (county) Prijedor since April 30, 1992 qualify as crimes against humanity. Furthermore, it is likely to be confirmed in court under due process of law that these events constitute genocide."

The Prijedor study is one of a number of reports prepared by the commission which suggest that Serb "ethnic cleansing" was concentrated in an arc of territory extending from Foca and Gorazde in the extreme southwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina, north through Zvornik, Brcko and Banja Luka to Prijedor. All of these areas form a continuous arc running along the border with Serbia and then extending across northern Bosnia to link up with Krajina, the area of Croatia seized and still held by Serb forces.

The pattern suggests that the purpose of the atrocities was to spark a mass, voluntary exodus of Muslims and Croats from areas in which Muslims constituted a majority, but which the Bosnian Serbs hoped to annex to their breakaway Bosnian Serb state, or to Serbia itself. The Serb campaign in these areas was carried out "with extreme brutality and savagery in a manner designed to instill terror in the civilian population, in order to cause them to flee and never to return," the commission charged.

"The same patterns and practices described in the study on the district of Prijedor repeatedly occurred in many opstinas," the commission reported. "Indeed, the patterns of conduct, the manner in which these acts were carried out, the length of time over which they took place and the areas in which they occurred combine to reveal a purpose, systematicity and some planning and coordination from higher authorities. Similar policies and practices of 'ethnic cleansing' have occurred in the Serb Krajina area and eastern and western Slavonia of Croatia by Serbs against Croats and also by Croats against Serbs."

The report dealt with the715 camps and detention facilities about which the commission had received information, rape and other forms of sexual assaults, and details of 187 mass graves reported in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Of these, 143 were in Bosnia and 44 in Croatia. Thirteen of these mass graves were said to contain 500 bodies or more, and 20 had between 100 and 500 bodies each.

The commission accused the Croats of destroying the Mostar Bridge, which goes back to the Ottoman Turkish era, and the Serbs of destroying large sections of the picturesque old Croatian town of Dubrovnik for no apparent military objective. The report also charged that, in violation of international law, Bosnian Serbs deliberately targeted the civilian population of Sarajevo in the more than a year and a half the city was shelled.

Previous reports have indicated that civilians have been murdered by all sides in the three-cornered war, but that the vast majority were killed by Serbs, and the least, by far, by Muslims. The portion of the report detailing rapes indicated the same proportion of crimes. The commission estimated that up to 20,000 women may have been raped during the Bosnian war and reported it had the names of some 600 alleged rapists and information about the identities of another 900.

"Rape has been reported to have been committed by all sides to the conflict. However, the largest number of reported victims have been Bosnian Muslims, and the largest number of alleged perpetrators have been Bosnian Serbs. There are few reports of rape and sexual assault between members of the same ethnic group," the commission reported.