War Crimes Suspect Surrenders

A Bosnian Serb official charged with crimes against humanity flew to the Netherlands on Monday to surrender to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

“I want to . . . remove the stain from my name and the name of my family, and to release as much as possible the pressure on Serbia, Yugoslavia and the whole Serbian nation, Republika Srpska [the Bosnian Serb entity] and [Bosanski] Samac, the city from which I come,” Blagoje Simic, 41, told reporters at Belgrade’s airport. “I firmly believe in my innocence, and I’m certain that I will prove that innocence in front of the international community and the Hague tribunal.”

The new, democratic leaders of Yugoslavia and its dominant republic, Serbia, are under great pressure from Washington, The Hague and European capitals to show serious cooperation with the tribunal or face a cutoff of U.S. and perhaps other aid.

While the arrest and transfer to The Hague of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is the main goal of this pressure, officials in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, are also being pressed to cooperate in other ways. In recent days, Belgrade authorities hinted that a voluntary surrender by an indicted war crimes suspect was imminent.

“We asked them [Yugoslavia] to give a concrete sign of cooperation. . . . That’s good if it’s the beginning of the process,” tribunal spokeswoman Florence Hartmann said in The Hague.

“If Simic is the beginning of the list and at the end we have Mladic, Karadzic and Milosevic, it’s very good,” she said. Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, also remain at large, as well as other associates of Milosevic.

Some war crimes suspects have turned themselves in, but Simic is the first Yugoslav citizen to voluntarily surrender to the tribunal, said Igor Pantelic, his lawyer.

“I’m making this act absolutely voluntarily,” Simic said.

Simic was indicted on charges of crimes against humanity, breaches of the Geneva Conventions and violations of the laws and customs of war committed while he was the top civilian official in Bosanski Samac in northeastern Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The indictment accuses several others of working with Simic to plan and carry out a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” after Serbian forces seized control of the town in April 1992. Two are imprisoned in The Hague. Two others, both Bosnian citizens, turned themselves in and have been paroled so that they can be free during the court proceedings.

Simic “made the decision to voluntarily surrender to the custody of the Hague tribunal because he doesn’t think the whole Serbian nation should be held hostage for the sake of individuals,” Pantelic said. “Also, from this act he will draw certain advantages. It turns out that those who surrender voluntarily have the right to ask to be provisionally released--in other words, to be free while defending themselves.”

Simic, a physician, was the mayor of Bosanski Samac starting in April 1992. About 17,000 Bosnian Croats and Muslims lived there at the time, forming approximately half the town’s population. After Bosnia seceded from the Yugoslav federation in a bloody war that ended in 1995, fewer than 300 remained.

Holding the town helped the Serbs secure a corridor across northern Bosnia that connected Serbia with Serbian-held territory in Croatia.

According to allegations against Simic and those indicted with him, non-Serbs, especially civic leaders and professionals, were forced into camps run by Serbian police. Many allegedly were sexually assaulted, tortured or killed. Many other non-Serbs fled or were forced to move.

Simic helped direct the “ethnic cleansing” of the town, the tribunal said in its 1995 indictment.