Serb ‘Death Camps’ Confirmed by U.S. : Balkans: Washington acknowledges their existence but plans no military action against them. It had known about them ‘for months,’ State Dept. official says.

Serbian military forces have set up concentration camps in Bosnia where non-Serb civilians are systematically tortured and killed, the Bush Administration said Monday, confirming accounts that are hauntingly reminiscent of the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the U.S. government strongly supports the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has demanded the right to inspect all the “detention centers” in the region, but he said the Administration has no plans to take military action to liberate the camps or to call on the United Nations to do so.

“Are we going to drop paratroops on it?” Boucher said. “I’m not going to say anything new about military action.”

A senior State Department official said later that Washington had known of the camps “for weeks and months.” But, he said, it did not reveal the grim details until the Long Island newspaper Newsday reported Sunday that thousands of Muslim and Croatian civilians have been shipped in sealed boxcars to the centers, where they are being held without sanitation or adequate food and where many have been shot to death by firing squads, others killed by throat-slitting.

Basing its report on interviews with survivors, Newsday said mutilations often accompanied the wholesale murder of prisoners. The paper said that over a six-week period, guards at the Brcko camp slaughtered nine-tenths of the 1,500 prisoners brought there in early May, then turned on Bosnian townspeople in the area who had not already been captured, killing hundreds. They then ordered camp prisoners to drive the townspeople’s bodies to an animal feed plant, according to the accounts.

“We do know from our own reports . . . that the Serbian forces are maintaining what they call detention centers for Croatians and Muslims, and we do have our own reports--similar to the reports that you’ve seen in the press--that there have been abuses and torture and killings taking place in those areas,” Boucher said.

“We have reports (that) Bosnians and Croatians also maintain detention centers, but we do not have similar allegations of mistreatment at those,” he added.

In Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross said all sides in the Yugoslav conflict are violating international law in their treatment of civilians from other ethnic groups. Red Cross spokesman Pierre Gauthier was quoted by the British news service Reuters as saying that all sides maintain internment camps.

“Very serious violations of internationally recognized humanitarian law and practice on the treatment of civilians in military conflicts are being perpetrated by all parties,” Gauthier said.

Boucher agreed that no party is blameless. But he insisted: “We have pointed the finger very particularly and very specifically at the actions of the Serbian forces and the government in Belgrade in unleashing many of the attacks. . . . Both in specific terms and in terms of overall policy, they bore the overwhelming burden of responsibility for the violence that’s going on.”

Gauthier said teams from the Swiss-run Red Cross, set up in 1863 as a neutral intermediary to protect victims of war, visited a total of eight detention centers on both sides of the conflict and interviewed more than 4,000 prisoners. But he said the organization was denied entry into many other camps.

In a related development, almost 40 children, survivors of a sniper attack near Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, arrived in the Adriatic port of Split, Croatia, Monday night on their way to safety in Germany. Two children were killed in the Saturday night attack on an unprotected bus taking war orphans to a rendezvous with two German officials in the town of Fojnica.

Reuters reported that U.N. peacekeepers in Sarajevo were infuriated by the incident because they have consistently warned Western relief organizations against trying to evacuate children from the city, which has been under siege for four months by Serbs opposed to Bosnian independence.

A U.N. spokesman said the operation was almost “criminally negligent.”

At the State Department, Boucher rejected suggestions that the Administration was doing too little to stop the Yugoslav atrocities. He said Washington is prepared to use military force, if that proves to be necessary, to get relief supplies into besieged cities, but he added that it is not willing to send troops to rescue civilians from concentration camps.

“We have made absolutely clear our condemnation of this practice of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and I would make absolutely clear our condemnation of these kinds of abuses that are being reported in these camps,” Boucher said. “It’s just horrible.”

A senior State Department official said that economic and political sanctions against Serbia and its tiny ally, Montenegro--all that remains of the splintered Yugoslav federation--are already about as stringent as possible.

“The only thing left is the question of military action,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bosnian authorities said that 18 people had been killed and 56 wounded in fighting in Sarajevo over the previous 24 hours, while 33 were killed and 170 wounded across the war-torn republic. Serbian forces reported fierce attacks by Muslim troops on towns around Sarajevo, and both sides reported heavy fighting in northern Bosnia.

In Bonn, a U.N. peacekeeping soldier died in a German military hospital after being wounded by a mortar shell in Sarajevo last week, the German Defense Ministry said.

Elsewhere, President Franjo Tudjman appeared to be the winner of Croatia’s first national elections since it declared its independence from Yugoslavia more than a year ago, wire services reported from Zagreb, the Croatian capital.

With 74% of the vote counted from Sunday’s balloting, Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union, was headed for an absolute majority in Parliament. According to unofficial results issued by the electoral commission, Tudjman had 55.7% of the vote for president and his party had 41.5% in the parliamentary elections.

Drazen Budisa of the Croatian Social Liberal Party was in second place with 22.5%, while his party had 18%. The reelection of Tudjman, 70, a historian and retired army officer, would give him another five years in office.

Balkan Rivalries, Conflicts

A look at conflicts tearing Yugoslavia apart:

Serbs vs. Croats: Serbs and Croats last year fought a civil war on Croatian territory that killed at least 10,000 people. Serbs and Croats are the two largest ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. Hatreds are fanned by memories of hundreds of thousands of Serbs slaughtered in death camps run by Croatia’s Nazi puppet state during World War II.

Serbs vs. Bosnian Muslims: Almost 2 million Muslim Slavs make up nearly half the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbs, who make up almost a third, rebelled when the Muslim-Croat majority voted for independence from Yugoslavia. Backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federal army, Serb nationalists captured two-thirds of Bosnia in a bid to create their own republic.

Croats vs. Bosnian Muslims: Croats, 17% of Bosnia’s population, formed a military alliance with Muslims in the Bosnian war, but a Bosnian Croat leader has now declared a separate Croat state in Bosnia, which would leave the Muslims with virtually no territory at all.

Serbs vs. Kosovo Albanians: Muslim Albanians who make up 90% of the 2 million people in Serbia’s province of Kosovo reject Serbian domination and are seeking republic status or even union with neighboring Albania.

Serbs vs. Slovenes: Slovenia humiliated the Serbian-controlled Yugoslav army in a brief war after declaring independence June 25, 1991. It controls its own borders with Hungary, Italy and Austria and has introduced its own currency.

Source: Times wire service reports