Srebrenica

THE HAGUE - Radovan Karadzic orchestrated the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys and his only regret was “that some Muslim men got away,’’ a UN prosecutor said yesterday at the former Bosnian Serb leader’s war crimes trial. Karadzic again boycotted his own trial at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, but pledged in a letter to judges that he would attend a procedural hearing today on his defense. Prosecutor Alan Tieger focused on Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II as he wound up his opening statement yesterday for the tribunal’s...

A man accused of commanding a police squad that rounded up Bosnian Muslims for slaughter in 1995 fashioned a new life in Las Vegas as a modest grocery store owner before being arrested and deported to his native country, a lawyer and U.S. officials said Thursday. Dejan Radojkovic arrived in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, after an overnight commercial airline flight from Las Vegas accompanied by federal agents, Bosnian authorities and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Women wept as they finally buried husbands and sons yesterday, 10 years after Europe's worst massacre since World War II -- funerals made possible by the excavation of mass graves of victims killed by Bosnian Serb forces. An extraordinary gathering of 30,000 people -- including the Serb president -- came to Srebrenica to mark the anniversary and honor the dead. To the sound of Muslim prayers echoing across a sprawling green valley, family members wandered among 610 caskets of the most recently identified victims of the July 11, 1995,...

THE HAGUE - An apparent clerical error prompted judges to postpone the long-awaited war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic on Thursday, possibly for months. The delay cast a shadow over one of the court's biggest cases - and over the reputation of the court itself, where most prominent trials have proceeded at a snail's pace, frustrating many victims. It also highlighted problems faced by international tribunals in prosecuting sweeping indictments covering allegations of atrocities spanning years in countries far from the courts where defendants face justice.

BELGRADE -- Serbian police have arrested at least eight men they say are shown in a video killing a group of Bosnian Muslim prisoners from Srebrenica, a top Belgrade official said yesterday. Up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed in Srebrenica in 1995 -- Europe's worst mass killing since World War II. The arrests came after the footage was shown Wednesday at the UN court in The Hague, Netherlands, said Rasim Ljajic, head of the Serbia-Montenegro government body in charge of cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Thousands were lined along Sarajevo’s main street yesterday while trucks bearing 775 coffins passed through on their way to Srebrenica, where the victims of Europe’s worst crime since the Nazi era will be buried. There were pained sighs mixed with Muslim prayers when the four trucks appeared around a corner. The weeping crowd tucked white and red roses into canvases covering the coffins as the trucks drove slowly down a street sprinkled with rose water.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The opening night of an opera about the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica in Bosnia will be dedicated to the hundreds of people who died after terrorists seized a Russian school last week, an official said yesterday. The "Srebrenica Women" opera, inspired by the worst massacre of Bosnia's 1992-95 war, opens in Oct. 15 in Sarajevo. The opera, composed by Ivan Caviovic with a libretto written by Gojko Bijelica, deals with the suffering of the women whose husbands, sons and fathers were killed in July 1995 when Bosnian Serbs overran Srebrenica, at the...

ON JULY 30, 1995, I traveled to Tuzla in Central Bosnia to investigate the fate of 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men who had disappeared after Bosnian Serb troops overran the UN “safe haven’’ of Srebrenica two weeks earlier. I found survivors of the worst genocide in Europe since World War II, and heard the first testimony about the crimes of Ratko Mladic. Sitting on a rickety chair in the back of a refugee center, I listened to the story of Hurem Suljic, a grizzled Bosnian Muslim farmer.

THE HAGUE - Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander, went on trial here Wednesday facing charges of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity in some of the bloodiest events of the Bosnian war in the 1990s, including the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo. The court heard a prosecutor's recitation of atrocities said to have been committed by soldiers directly under Mladic's command as Bosnian Serb units carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and, in Sarajevo, directed a "spigot of terror" that could be opened or closed at...

An apparent clerical error prompted judges to postpone the long-awaited war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic on Thursday, possibly for months. The delay cast a shadow over one of the court's biggest cases — and over the reputation of the court itself, where most prominent trials have proceeded at a snail's pace, frustrating many victims. It also highlighted problems faced by international tribunals in prosecuting sweeping indictments covering allegations of atrocities spanning years in countries far from the courts where defendants face justice.

THE HAGUE - Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander, went on trial here Wednesday facing charges of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity in some of the bloodiest events of the Bosnian war in the 1990s, including the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo. The court heard a prosecutor's recitation of atrocities said to have been committed by soldiers directly under Mladic's command as Bosnian Serb units carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and, in Sarajevo, directed a "spigot of terror" that could be opened or closed at will against...

An apparent clerical error prompted judges to postpone the long-awaited war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic on Thursday, possibly for months. The delay cast a shadow over one of the court's biggest cases — and over the reputation of the court itself, where most prominent trials have proceeded at a snail's pace, frustrating many victims. It also highlighted problems faced by international tribunals in prosecuting sweeping indictments covering allegations of atrocities spanning years in countries far from the courts where defendants face justice.

Twenty years after his troops began brutally ethnically cleansing Bosnian towns and villages of non-Serbs, Gen. Ratko Mladic went on trial Wednesday at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal accused of 11 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The ailing 70-year-old Mladic's appearance at the U.N. court war crimes tribunal marked the end of a long wait for justice to survivors of the 1992-95 war that left some 100,000 people dead. The trial is also a landmark for the U.N. court and international justice — Mladic is the last suspect from the...

She remembers Ratko Mladic looking straight into her eyes and promising to spare the other children. A soldier had just killed a 3-year-old who was crying too loud. She remembers, too, the arrogant swagger as he barked murderous orders to his troops that showed his promise to be a lie. For Munira Subasic, these are the two sides of the Bosnian Serb general who goes on trial Wednesday on genocide charges: the sly deceiver and the ranting bully. Now Subasic wants to see the man who called himself "the Serbian God" try to defend himself as he faces...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal sentenced the former chief of the Yugoslav army to 27 years' imprisonment yesterday for providing crucial military aid to Bosnian Serb forces responsible for the Srebrenica massacre and for a deadly four-year campaign of shelling and sniper fire in Sarajevo. The case against General Momcilo Perisic was the first time the UN court convicted a civilian or military officer from Yugoslavia of war crimes in Bosnia, and underscored the Yugoslav army's far-reaching support for Serb rebels in both Bosnia...

THE HAGUE - Ratko Mladic repeatedly disobeyed and shouted at judges yesterday during his arraignment at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. A judge finally ejected the former Serb general and entered not guilty pleas on his behalf to 11 charges of ordering the worst atrocities of the Bosnian war. Mladic, 69, put on a cap, defying the rules of the courtroom. He gestured to the packed public gallery despite a judge ordering him not to. He threatened a boycott because his chosen lawyers were not there.

THE HAGUE — The Dutch prime minister yesterday denounced as “irresponsible’’ an assertion by a retired US general that gay Dutch soldiers were partly to blame for allowing Europe’s worst massacre since World War II. Dutch officials, from the Cabinet to the military, were outraged by retired General John Sheehan’s remarks at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington on Thursday. Sheehan said that Dutch military leaders had called the presence of gay soldiers in the army “part of the problem’’ that allowed Serb forces to overrun the Srebrenica enclave in...

AMSTERDAM -- The UN war crimes tribunal yesterday took custody of a former senior Bosnian Serb commander accused of genocide for the 1995 mass killing of Muslims in the UN-protected zone of Srebrenica. Ljubisa Beara, who was a colonel and the security chief for the Bosnian Serb army's main staff, is one of the most senior officers to fall into the court's hands in recent years. He was delivered to the UN detention unit near The Hague after midnight, following his arrest Saturday in Serbia, tribunal officials said.

ON JULY 30, 1995, I traveled to Tuzla in Central Bosnia to investigate the fate of 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men who had disappeared after Bosnian Serb troops overran the UN “safe haven’’ of Srebrenica two weeks earlier. I found survivors of the worst genocide in Europe since World War II, and heard the first testimony about the crimes of Ratko Mladic. Sitting on a rickety chair in the back of a refugee center, I listened to the story of Hurem Suljic, a grizzled Bosnian Muslim farmer.

BELGRADE — General Ratko Mladic’s ruthlessness was legendary: “Burn their brains!’’ he once bellowed as his men pounded Sarajevo with artillery fire. So was his arrogance: He nicknamed himself “God,’’ and kept goats he reportedly named after Western leaders he despised. Mladic, 69, had eluded capture since he was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in 1995. But his days as a fugitive were numbered after Serbian security forces captured his partner in crime, Radovan Karadzic, on July 21, 2008, in Belgrade.