Ex-Commander Blamed for Bosnia Killings

One of the most important defendants at the U.N. war crimes tribunal blamed former Bosnian Serb Commander in Chief Ratko Mladic for the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, evidence released Friday showed.

In videotaped evidence broadcast by the court, former Maj. Gen. Radislav Krstic named Mladic and a group of top aides as the driving force behind the July 1995 slayings of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.

It was the first time that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had heard evidence directly placing Mladic in charge of the forces that carried out the killings.

Mladic, still at large, has been indicted by the tribunal for his role in the 3 1/2-year war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Krstic is accused of leading the massacre after the fall of Srebrenica, a U.N.-designated “safe area.”

“The responsibility for everything . . . lies with Gen. Mladic and the senior officers that he engaged for the operation,” Krstic said, speaking through a translator.

Dressed in casual clothing and looking subdued, Krstic acknowledged that a serious war crime had been committed.

His testimony was recorded during two days of interviews with war crimes investigators in February. It was originally shown to a closed session of the court July 28, but judges decided to make the evidence public.

During his testimony, the 52-year-old Krstic said Mladic and his aides effectively sidelined him and other commanders of the Bosnian Serb army’s 15,000-strong Drina Corps, which took Srebrenica on July 11, 1995.

Krstic, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, said he and other brigade commanders were sent to the nearby town of Zepa and played no role in the killings.

Prosecutors at The Hague allege that after Srebrenica’s fall, Serbian forces carefully organized the massacre and deportation of up to 30,000 of the region’s Muslim population.

The prosecution is trying to demonstrate that, as commander of the Drina Corps, Krstic reported to Mladic and through him to Radovan Karadzic, the wartime political leader of Bosnia’s Serbs.

But Krstic laid the blame squarely at the door of the 10th Sabotage Detachment and a group of military policemen--the 65th Protection Regiment--who had no connection to the Drina Corps. Trying to distance himself from Mladic, he promised to cooperate fully with investigators.

“Those who have committed this crime have harmed their people enormously. If they had been thinking of their own people, they would not have done it,” Krstic told investigator Jean-Rene Ruez, who has led the Srebrenica investigation.

Krstic denies being at any of the sites of the massacres that took place in the villages around Srebrenica in the days after the enclave’s fall. But that is in stark contradiction to a television interview introduced by the prosecution showing him in Potocari, one of the massacre sites.