Road to Srebrenica:As Bosnian Serb troops brutally 'cleansed' their ethnic rivals from land they claimed, Karadzic defended their actions.
THE MASSACRE of about 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995 stands out as the worst carnage of the Bosnian war and the largest mass murder in Europe since the second World War.
The events in the Bosnian town, classed as genocide by the International Court of Justice and the UN war crimes tribunal, feature in the 15 counts faced by Radovan Karadzic of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities committed between 1992 and 1996. Even now, bodies of men and boys who were murdered at Srebrenica are being reburied after being reunited with their families following identification using DNA technology.
The shocking killings form part of the dramatic and violent changes that took place as the Yugoslav Federation, of which Bosnia-Herzegovina was a part, disintegrated during the 1990s.
Fighting had broken out in Croatia following declarations of independence by the Slovenes and Croats in 1991.
The following year, in a referendum, Bosnia-Herzegovina, with its mixed population of Bosniak Muslims (Bosnian Muslims), Serbs and Croats, opted for independence. But by then the country's Serbian population had declared a Bosnian Serb republic which was to remain in Yugoslavia.
An EU-hosted peace conference held in September 1991 initially brokered an agreement for ethnic powersharing, but this soon broke down.
On April 6th, 1992, Bosnia was recognised by the United Nations as an independent state and on May 12th, Karadzic was elected president of the three-person presidency of the Serbian republic.
Between December 17th, 1992, and July 19th, 1996, Karadzic served as sole president of the Serb Republic in Bosnia. He was also supreme commander of the armed forces.
In April 1992 war broke out with the Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo. The streets of the city were empty in broad daylight. The fledgling army of Bosnian Muslims was completely outgunned.
The Serbs held the craggy heights that ring the mountain capital and fired into the city at will, with mortars, artillery and anti-aircraft cannon, hot barrels tilted downward over the forested slopes under deceptively tranquil blue skies.
Residents scurried over exposed street crossings to avoid snipers' bullets. Many failed. The cemeteries were overflowing, with an estimated 11,000 dead.
Bosnian Serb forces advanced over the country, "cleansing" ethnic rivals - Bosnian Muslims - from the land they claimed. Villages were burned, and refugees fled, sometimes pursued by a murderous rain of mortar shells through the forests and over remote mountain tracks. Time and again, Karadzic would appear on television justifying the actions of his troops, denying charges of brutality, even accusing the Muslims of blowing up their people in a ruthless ploy to attract international sympathy.
It was more than two years before his star began to wane, as his mentor Milosevic took account of growing western disgust for the brutality of the Bosnian Serb army and Serb paramilitary units and was pressured to cut off support.
Yet even when exasperated Nato allies used their airpower to try to tame the Serb onslaught, defiant Serbs captured UNprofor troops and handcuffed them to military targets as human shields.
"Pinprick bombing" was denounced in the western media as an ineffectual swat at forces which at one point controlled 70 per cent of Bosnia, and in 1995 the US-led allies bombed in earnest to show they meant business. Yet worse was to come.
In July 1995 Serb forces closed in on a UN "safe haven" where thousands of Muslims were crammed in under the protection of a lightly armed Dutch force with no orders to fight. Srebrenica fell without a shot.
Karadzic's army commander, Ratko Mladic, took control and separated women and children from some 8,000 men "of fighting age" who were never seen again. They were systematically slaughtered, and bulldozed into mass graves, in what the UN war crimes court for ex-Yugoslavia charged was a deliberate act of genocide, the worst Europe had seen since the Nazis. Nato intervention ended the war and a peace was imposed at talks in Dayton, Ohio, in late 1995.
- (AP/Reuters)