3 Muslims, 1 Croat Indicted By Tribunal
Saturday, March 23, 1996
BRANJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., on Friday visitedwhat is said to be the killing field where 1,000 Bosnian Muslims were massacredby Serbs and where fragments of bone and decomposing flesh can still beseen.
Also on Friday, the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands,issued indictments Friday against three Bosnian Muslims and a Bosnian Croatfor raping, torturing and killing Serbian captives in a prison camp.
It was the first war crimes indictment for crimes against Serbian victims.
The indictment charges the four prison guards with 14 murders, rapes oftwo women prisoners and many counts of torture at Celebici, a Bosnian government-runprison camp. Named were Zejnil Delalic, a former commander in the Bosniangovernment army, Zdravko Mucic, Hazim Delic and Esad Landzo. Mucic is aCroat; the others are Muslims.
According to the indictment, Landzo, Delic and other guards beat a prisonernamed Scepo Gotovac, aged 60 to 70, "for an extended period of timeand then nailed an SDA badge to his forehead . . .
Gotovac died soon after from the resulting injuries." SDA are the initialsof the ruling Muslim party in Bosnia.
Another inmate, Momir Kuljanin, was kicked unconscious by guards, had across burned on his hand, was suffocated and had a corrosive powder appliedto his body by Delic, Landzo and others, according to the indictment.
The tribunal also charged Delic with taking part in the gang-rape of a BosnianSerb woman and the repeated rape of another.
Delalic had regional authority over the camp, the indictment says. Mucicwas the camp's commandant, Delic his deputy and Landzo a guard. Landzo wasindicted for personally committing five murders, Delic for four.
Delalic was arrested Monday in Munich; Mucic was arrested in Vienna. Bothwill be handed over to the tribunal for trial.
The U.N. court, set up by the Security Council in 1993, now has indicted57 suspects, most of them Serbs.
Bosnian Serb deputy leader Nikola Koljevic said Friday's indictments were"an obvious sign that the tribunal wants to present itself as beingimpartial, or at least less partial, and I would say just about time."In Branjevo, Albright picked her way past scraps of clothing, fragmentsof human bone and shards of skulls as she walked along the edge of a fieldsaid to be the mass grave of Bosnian Muslims and Croats.
"I'm so overwhelmed by the horror of this, and that it's possible forpeople to behave this way toward fellow human beings," she said.
The mass grave is on a farm near the town of Zvornik in territory assignedto the control of Bosnian Serbs under the Dayton peace accord. It is 18miles northwest of Srebrenica, where about 7,000 Muslims disappeared afterthe town fell to the Serbs last July.
The Srebrenica killings were well-documented, not only by survivors butalso by those who committed them, Albright said.
"What we now know from these killer witnesses was that in fact menwho outside of Srebrenica had been living with their families - the fightinghad stopped - were then transported by trucks and buses to this area, linedup and systematically shot," she said.
Albright's visit was designed to put pressure on Serbian President SlobodanMilosevic to cooperate with the International War Crimes Tribunal in TheHague.
Later Friday in Sarajevo, about 50 miles from Branjevo, Albright condemnedbystanders who looked the other way when the massacres were taking place.She said the site was only a few hundred yards from a highway and homeswhere people must have heard what has happening.
"I find it very difficult to deal with the fact that scores of peoplemust have known what was going on," she said.
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his top general, Ratko Mladic,have been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for their suspected rolesin ordering the Srebrenica killings. They remain at large.
Two hundred heavily armed Serbian special forces troops, some hidden inlivestock sheds, ringed the Branjevo farm Friday to prevent the kind ofdemonstrations Albright encountered the previous day when she toured Vukovarin the last Serb-held area of Croatia. Her car was stoned and angry Serbscalled her a fascist.
In her inspection of the killing field, she was accompanied by U.S. Adm.Leighton Smith, commander of the NATO-led peacekeepers in Bosnia, alongwith U.S. State Department, military security personnel forces and a forensicscientist from the international war crimes tribunal.
Albright said she and Smith had told Zivadin Jovanovic, Yugoslavia's deputyforeign minister, that local Bosnian Serb forces should secure the siteand prevent tampering.
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