Eagleburger Seeks Balkan Atrocity Trials

Comparing the Yugoslav ethnic horror to Nazi genocide, Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger demanded Wednesday that those responsible for the atrocities--including Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic--be brought to trial for war crimes.

This was the first time that any world leader in so prominent a public forum had named Serbian officials and linked them with possible prosecution.

In a stinging speech to a 29-nation conference called to review the results of a Yugoslav peace conference held last August, Eagleburger said the earlier meeting must be regarded as a failure because Serbia and its ethnic allies in Bosnia-Herzegovina have failed to keep their promises.

He said that sterner measures must be taken, both by tightening existing sanctions and by bringing war criminals to justice. And soldiers and militiamen who rape and kill must be held responsible, he said, along with the political leaders who ordered the crimes or, at least, failed to prevent them.

“We know that crimes against humanity have occurred, and we know when and where they occurred,” Eagleburger said. “We know, moreover, which forces committed those crimes, and under whose command they operated. And we know, finally, who the political leaders are to whom these military commanders were--and still are--responsible.

“Leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, Radovan Karadzic, the self-declared president of the Serbian Bosnian Republic, and Gen. Ratho Mladic, commander of Bosnian Serb military forces, must eventually explain whether and how they sought to ensure, as they must under international law, that their forces complied with international law,” he said.

Talking to reporters later in Brussels, where today he attends a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting on the Yugoslav crisis, Eagleburger made it clear that, despite his elliptical wording, he believes the Serbian leaders should be brought before an international court of law.

“On the basis of what we know at this time, I’d have to say they are going to have a hard case to make,” he said of Serbian leaders who might hope to prove their innocence.

The co-chairmen of the international conference, former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, representing the United Nations, and former British Foreign Secretary Lord Owen, appointed by the European Community, both called for the creation of an international court to bring war criminals to justice.

But neither they nor any of the other diplomats at the conference followed Eagleburger’s lead in naming names.

Eagleburger said that Slavic Muslims and Croats were also guilty of atrocities but that most of the war crimes have been committed by Serbs. In addition to the political leaders, Eagleburger named seven lower-ranking militiamen--five Serbs, two Croats and one Muslim.

The men he identified and the allegations against them were:

* Borislav Herak, a Bosnian Serb who has confessed to killing more than 230 civilians.

* Adil and Arif, noms de guerre of two members of a Croatian paramilitary force that in August allegedly attacked a convoy of buses carrying more than 100 Serbian women and children, killing more than half of them.

* Zeljko Raznjatovic, whose Serbian paramilitary forces, the Tigers, have been linked to brutal “ethnic cleansing”--the practice of expelling non-Serbs from Serb-controlled areas--and to the mass murders of up to 3,000 civilians near Brcko.

* Vojislav Seselj, a Serb linked to atrocities in a number of Bosnian cities, including the incident at Brcko.

* Drago Prcac, commander of the Serb-run Omarska detention camp, where mass murders and torture occurred.

* Adam Delic, the camp commander at Celebici, where at least 15 Serbs were beaten to death in August.

Eagleburger conceded that he does not know how Milosevic, Karadzic and the others can be taken into custody.

He said the world has “a moral and historical obligation not to stand back a second time in this century while a people faces obliteration,” a clear reference to the Nazi Holocaust.