Croatia Army Accused of Atrocities : Balkans: U.N. officials report 70 Serbian civilians killed, 500 buildings razed. They suggest Zagreb condoned the slaughter.

Croatian army troops gunned down at least 70 Serbian civilians and torched every building in 11 villages in an organized and brutal application of “scorched earth” tactics, the United Nations charged Thursday.

In a separate report alleging human rights abuses by Croats, a U.N. refugee official said nationalist gunmen rounded up more than 500 Muslims from the divided city of Mostar and expelled them across a dangerous no-man’s-land riddled with mines and corpses.

The latest documented atrocities testified to the anarchy spreading across the Balkans as well as to the U.N. mission’s inability to protect civilians from such barbarity.

The report by the U.N. Protection Force on the killing of Serbs in the Medak region was the most damning to date on scores of massacres since the peacekeepers arrived in Croatia 18 months ago.

It suggested that the Zagreb leadership condoned the civilian slaughter, which investigators described as too “systematic, thorough and well planned” to have been the work of renegades.

“Evidence indicates the intentional killing of Serb civilians who were unable to escape the attack, regardless of age, sex or status,” the peacekeepers’ report said.

Croatian soldiers poisoned wells, looted houses, slaughtered livestock and razed more than 500 buildings, according to the report delivered to special U.N. human rights investigator Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

Mazowiecki, a former prime minister of Poland, protested to Croatian government officials about what he described as “executions” conducted as Croatian soldiers retreated from 11 Serbian settlements that President Franjo Tudjman had agreed to yield to U.N. protection.

U.N. investigators discovered 12 mutilated corpses in the charred rubble; Croatian soldiers handed over another 58, and 48 Serbs remained missing after the offensive that began Sept. 9.

Croatia’s Defense and National Security Council has said only that it is investigating the charges.

The U.N. report was being forwarded to a special war crimes tribunal.

“Whole villages have been flattened. I’ve really never seen anything like it,” said the U.N. force’s deputy chief, Cedric Thornberry, who toured the Medak region Tuesday. “There’s nothing larger than a good-sized brick left. You can see how they wanted to obliterate all traces of human settlement.”

Among those killed was an 84-year-old blind woman, who witnesses said was machine-gunned to death by at least 10 Croatian soldiers. Two other wounded Serbs were caught and thrown into a burning building, the report said.

In Sarajevo, the capital of neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, spokesman Ray Wilkinson of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said Bosnian Croat forces evicted 530 Muslim civilians on Sept. 29 from the city of Mostar, which Croat nationalists want to make the capital of their self-proclaimed state.

“The women in the group were all strip-searched and forced to give up all their money, jewelry and other valuables they carried,” Wilkinson told reporters at the refugee agency’s daily briefing.

The group was driven from the mostly Croatian western sector of Mostar across an obstacle course of sandbags, barbed wire and dead bodies, survivors told refugee agency officials.

The United Nations has deployed more than 24,000 peacekeepers to Bosnia and Croatia in the largest and most expensive peacekeeping mission the world body has ever undertaken. However, they are empowered only to observe and report on hostilities and abuses and can use armed force only to protect themselves, not civilians.