Bosnia charges six suspects with war crimes

SARAJEVO: Six former Bosnian soldiers and policemen were charged on Monday with war crimes against Serb detainees at a camp near Sarajevo during the 1992-1995 civil war that killed nearly 100,000 people.
They include Zijad Kadric, 72, who was described by witnesses as the commander of the camp in Visoko, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) northwest of the capital Sarajevo.
Hundreds of civilians were detained here for around eight months in 1992, according to prosecutors.
The six are accused of “acts of torture, inhuman treatment, pillaging and physical and mental abuse” in the Visoko region, “in a systematic and continuous manner.”
The indictment also says they committed “particularly humiliating acts against women and adolescents.”
According to a victims’ associations, nearly 600 people — including around 40 women and a dozen children — were detained at the Visoko camp.
“The torture of women... was not very different from that of men” said a report published in 2012 by the War Crimes Research Center based in the country’s Bosnian Serb entity.
The report also said that at least “eight Serb women were raped there,” including “one of whom succumbed to her injuries.”
Around 90 witnesses will be called by the prosecution to testify in the trial.
Hundreds of detention camps were set up across Bosnia during the war that saw brutal fighting among the country’s three major ethno-religious groups.
The most notorious centers included a string of detention camps in the Prijedor region, where more than 6,000 people — mostly ethnic Muslims and some Catholic Croats — were detained between April and August 1992 by Bosnian Serb forces.
Monday’s indictment comes just days after authorities arrested five former Bosnian Serb soldiers suspected of participating in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.