U.N. War Crimes Tribunal Charges 21 Bosnia Serbs

Acting 2 1/2 years after the world discovered Serbian concentration camps on the nightly news, the United Nations’ Yugoslav war crimes tribunal charged 21 Serbs on Monday with war crimes and crimes against humanity at the most infamous of those camps.

One of the suspects, Zeljko Meakic, the commander of the notorious Omarska camp in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, was charged with genocide for his role in the “ethnic cleansing” of Serbian-held regions of Bosnia.

But while the case marks the international community’s first attempt to seek justice for the mass rapes, torture and murder of Bosnian Muslim and Croat prisoners in the Serbian-run camps in the summer of 1992, U.N. officials admit that they have little hope of bringing most of the suspects to trial.

Meakic and 19 of the other indicted commanders, guards and visitors to the camp are believed to be in Serbian-held Bosnia, where rebel leader Radovan Karadzic said Monday that he will not surrender any citizens for an international trial.

Only one of the suspects, Dusan Tadic, is in custody. He is being held in Germany and awaiting extradition to The Hague for what could be the first international war crimes trial since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following World War II.

The 38-year-old Tadic is charged with “the collection and mistreatment, including killing and rape, of civilians within and outside the Omarska camp.” In one fatal case, U.N. officials have said, Tadic and his cohorts beat three prisoners unconscious and then forced a fourth to bite off the others’ testicles.

Tadic reportedly moved to Germany on a Muslim prisoner’s passport in 1993 and was recognized by other Muslims, who reported him to police. The German government is expected to pass a law allowing for his extradition next month.

An estimated 3,000 Muslims and Croats are believed to have been held in the barbed-wire camp in the Prijedor region of northern Bosnia between May and August, 1992, as Serbs purged them from communities to set up an “ethnically pure” territory there.

Among the prisoners were much of the local Muslim and Croatian elite, including political, religious and business leaders, the tribunal said.

“The prisoners were held under armed guard in brutal conditions. They were murdered, raped, sexually assaulted, severely beaten and otherwise mistreated,” the tribunal said in issuing the charges.

“One of the four buildings at the compound was known as the ‘red house’: Most of the prisoners who were taken to it did not emerge alive,” it said.

Tribunal spokesman Christian Chartier said that investigators did not have a figure for the number of dead and missing from Omarska but said that “we call it a death camp.”

The tribunal was created by the U.N. Security Council in 1993, and critics view it as a palliative for the Western conscience for its general inaction in the nearly three-year Bosnian conflict.

Chartier defended the tribunal, saying that the indictments--the result of a five-month, 12-country investigation--show “we are moving ahead, we are doing our job.”

He acknowledged, however, that the court is not likely to detain the suspects any time soon.

“We believe them to be still in the Prijedor area, which is still a Bosnian Serb-controlled territory,” Chartier said.

At a news conference earlier in the day, deputy prosecutor Graham Blewitt said, “We are not expecting any significant cooperation from the Bosnian Serb administration.”

His expectations were confirmed by Karadzic, who told the Reuters news agency that he was unfamiliar with the specific charges and list of suspects but that “our constitution forbids us to give up any of our citizens.”

In a printed statement, Justice Richard Goldstone, the tribunal’s prosecutor, said there will be further indictments, possibly including Serbian political and military leaders. Goldstone, a South African, was responsible for bringing many police officers accused of crimes to trial in his homeland.

But the rebels remained defiant Monday as the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb parliament once again rejected an international peace plan. The rejection of the latest peace proposal from the United States, Russia, France, Germany and Britain had been expected after Karadzic said he could not accept the plan, already rejected by the parliament last year.