...they Say War Crimes Tribunal
is Ignoring their Claims
BELGRADE, April 26 (AP) — Serb survivors of camps are coming forward with accounts of rapes, beatings and other tortures inflicted on them by Croats and Muslims. And they say the U.N. war crimes tribunal is ignoring much of their testimony. The tribunal so far has indicted one Bosnian Croat and three Bosnian Muslims for the 1992 killings of Serbs in the Celebici camp near the town of Konjic. Some survivors of detention camps say that isn’t nearly enough.The Association of Serb Survivors claims it has filed evidence against 170 Muslims and Croats from 16 camps in Bosnia and Croatia to the Hague tribunal, in charge of trying war criminals from former Yugoslavia. “Everybody knows who ran those camps,” asked Zoran Perkovic, a Bosnian Serb priest who survived a detention camp. “Why doesn’t someone react?”
Accuse Tribunal of Anti-Serb Bias
Bosnian Serbs and Serbia accuse the U.N. tribunal of an anti-Serb bias. Serbs are believed to have committed most of the crimes in the nearly four-year Bosnian war. Forty-seven have been charged with war crimes, including Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, and Gen. Ratko Mladic, his military commander. “We don’t want this to be the beginning of the end of our cooperation with the Tribunal,” Dragoljub Vasiljevic, legal adviser to the association, said Thursday. “Innocent victims hope their testimonies will not be forgotten.”Tribunal officials say the association has helped their work, and they deny ignoring any evidence. “They have helped the prosecutor’s office very much in investigating ... the Celebici events,” spokesman Christian Chartier said Friday. “I do not want to play down their concerns, but as a matter of policy we never discuss evidence. Also, I’m not sure they are in a position to know if we are using it.”
Perkovic, the Bosnian Serb priest, told a news conference Thursday that in spring 1992 he was kept for more than a month in what he described as the Lora prison camp in Croatian port of Split. International rights monitors, the International Red Cross and other organizations have made no mention of a prison camp in Split. Perkovic was possibly talking about a Croatian military compound of the same name.
Beatings, Sex Abuse, Starvation Cited
The priest said he and other Serbs in the camp were constantly beaten, tied with electric cables and starved. “Many people died of hunger and torture,” he said. “The worst pain was when they beat my feet.” An elderly woman from Mostar said Bosnian Croat forces arrested her in her apartment in July 1992 and took her to the Dretelj camp 20 miles away. The woman, who identified herself only as M.B., was 62 at the time and said she was sexually abused. “There were six men and seven women taken on that day,” she said, visibly shaken. “They beat and raped us all the way to the camp. They showed us a pit and told us we would end up there.”In the camp, an old Yugoslav army compound, women were ordered to clean the floors, toilets, and clothes belonging to the guards. “Every night they would pick one of us to rape,” M.B. said. “They could do anything they wanted with us. There was no one to complain to.” She said the treatment of male inmates was even more brutal. “We couldn’t sleep because of their screams at night,” M.B. said. Others held at Dretelj, most of them Muslims, also have complained of horrible abuses. The priest and the woman did not identify their torturers but said they had given names to the U.N. tribunal.
Silo Camp Tarcin, Witness Testimony
List of Camps for Serbs
The Mess in the Bosnia and Herzegovina Serbian Council Information Center
War Crimes: Karadzic Issued a Warrant for Izetbegovic
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