Bosnian Serbs admit to massacre.
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| Sat, 06-12-2004 - 11:04am |
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/06/12/bosnia.massacre.ap/index.html
Bosnian Serb officials have acknowledged for the first time that their security forces carried out the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, according to an investigative report Friday.
An official commission examining Europe's worst massacre since World War II "established participation of (Bosnian Serb) military and police units, including special (police) units" in the deaths, international administration spokesman Vedran Persic told The Associated Press, quoting from the panel's report.
During the height of the three and a half-year Bosnian war, Serb troops overran a U.N.-declared safe zone in Srebrenica and slaughtered up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in what the U.N. war crimes tribunal has declared an act of genocide.
The Bosnian Serbs have long been blamed for the 1995 massacre, but no official has clearly acknowledged that until now.
"In July 1995, several thousand Muslims were liquidated in a way that represents grave violations of international humanitarian law," said Persic, quoting from the report. Persic is a spokesman for Paddy Ashdown, Bosnia's international administrator.
U.N. and Muslim experts have found the remains of about 5,000 of the victims from mass graves across eastern Bosnia and find new remains every month. The fate of the others is still unknown. Nearly 1,200 Srebrenica victims have been identified through DNA analysis.
The Srebrenica Commission was formed last year by Ashdown to investigate who was involved in the massacre and where victims' bodies were buried. It's composed of Bosnian Serb judges and lawyers, a victims' representative and international expert.
The report said that the perpetrators "undertook measures to cover up the crime by moving the bodies" to other locations, said Persic.
The 1992-1995 war -- pitting Serbs opposed to Bosnia's independence from Yugoslavia against Muslims and Croats backing it -- claimed about 250,000 lives and left around 20,000 missing and presumed dead.
Former Bosnian Serb soldier Drazen Erdemovic, who confessed to playing a role in the Srebrenica massacre, testified at former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial last year how his battalion alone killed up to 1,200 people.
U.N. protection sought
The victims had sought protection in the U.N. compound, but the vastly outnumbered and lightly armed Dutch U.N. peacekeepers were no match for the Serb forces.
He said that after Srebrenica fell, Serb forces rounded up an estimated 30,000 refugees who had sought safety at a U.N. base. As Dutch peacekeepers looked on, the women were deported to Muslim-held territory and the boys and men were taken on buses to execution sites and shot.
"I was personally ordered to do it," said Erdemovic -- who pleaded guilty to murder as part of a deal in 1996 and served a five-year sentence. "This could not have happened if it had not been allowed by the main staff" of the Bosnian Serb military command, he said.
Prosecutors say the massacre was the result of Milosevic's alleged political aim of creating an ethnically pure Serbian state. Milosevic denies all wrongdoing.
Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, has been indicted by the war crimes tribunal for genocide in connection with the Srebrenica massacre, along with his wartime top general, Ratko Mladic. Both remain at large.
For its part, the Dutch government, acknowledging its peacekeepers failed to protect the Muslim refugees, resigned in April 2002.
The work of the Srebrenica Commission initially was obstructed by some of its members and authorities who refused to provide information. Only after Ashdown fired several Bosnian Serb officials and threatened others with dismissal was information made available.
Under the 1995 peace accord that ended the war, Ashdown has the power to impose laws and to fire officials who fail to comply with the peace process. The same agreement also divided postwar Bosnia into two mini-states, a Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat federation.
Persic said Ashdown welcomed the report, saying that "a dynamic of obstructionism on war crimes issues is being replaced by a dynamic of greater cooperation" on the part of Bosnia's Serbs.


Man's inhumanity to man...
I hope that Ashdown can bring an end to this stupidity.
cl-nwtreehugger
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