BERSERKISTAN IN BOSNIA: Tribunal Expected to Announce New Indictments

Announcements Expected on Friday
(THE HAGUE, March 21—Reuters) The U.N. war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia said on Thursday it would make important announcements on Friday, a phrase it usually employs to signal new indictments. Earlier this week the tribunal said it expected to issue indictments soon against two men arrested in Munich and Vienna on suspicion of war crimes against Serbs in Bosnia in 1992.
Action on Krsmanovic is Due Soon
Prosecutors must also decide by April 3 whether to indict or release Bosnian Serb Colonel Aleksa Krsmanovic who is being held as a war crimes suspect at the tribunal's detention centre. Krsmanovic and General Djordje Djukic were captured on January 30 by Bosnian government forces who later handed them over to the tribunal. Djukic was charged on March 1 with crimes relating to the 43-month Serb siege of Sarajevo in which more than 10,000 people are believed to have died.
The tribunal—set up by the U.N. Security Council in May 1993—is the first international body for the prosecution of war crimes since the Nuremberg trials held after World War Two. It has no police force of its own and relies on the former Yugoslav republics, other states or the international peace implementation force (IFOR) in Bosnia to make arrests. So far it has indicted 53 suspects—46 Serbs and seven Croats—including Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander General Ratko Mladic. The tribunal currently holds just two indicted suspects at its detention centre, Djukic and Bosnian Serb Dusan Tadic who is accused of atrocities at the Omarska prison camp in Bosnia.
Vukovar Atrocities Highlighted
The U.N. war crimes tribunal heard that the massacre of 261 Croats at Vukovar in eastern Croatia in 1991 marked the start of "ethnic cleansing" in the Former Yugoslavia. Prosecutor Grant Niemann, speaking at hearings in the case of three senior officers of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) charged with the Vukovar killings, said the massacre had served as a chilling blueprint for systematic mass murder. "It was the very beginning of what became known as ethnic cleansing, planting the seeds of genocide in the former Yugoslavia,'' he told the tribunal.

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

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