New impetus to capture Serb war criminals
Sixty Bosnian Serb officials were dismissed Wednesday for failing to arrest indicted war criminals still at large.
The scene had all the markings of a car accident. Four police directed traffic while onlookers peered over the rusty guardrails of a two-lane road that winds near Bratunac. But the half-dozen men at the bottom of this ravine in eastern Bosnia were looking for victims of a much more serious event. Diggers worked the ravine bottom with pickaxes and spades until a shoe emerged - then a mud-stained shin bone. Forty minutes later, they had uncovered four huddled bodies.
In all, workers uncovered some 20 bodies here - civilians killed during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces killed up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys after overrunning what had been a UN-declared "safe area."
This scene is one of 32 mass graves that Bosnian Serb authorities acknowledged in mid-June, following arm-twisting from the international community that runs Bosnia as a de facto protectorate. Authorities also reported that Serb military and police had "liquidated" Muslims and committed other large-scale human rights violations after taking the area in July 1995.
Such admissions, after nine years of feigned ignorance by officials, are a "watershed," says Gordon Bacon, head of the International Commission for Missing Persons, which uses DNA technology to identify bodies found in mass graves.
While the release of this information could help Bosnia move on from the 1992-1995 war, the Bosnian Serbs' refusal to arrest war criminals - believed to be walking freely in their half of postwar Bosnia - resulted in Bosnia's top international official sacking 60 Bosnian Serb officials Wednesday.
"We have to get rid of the cancer of obstructionism and corruption in the [Serb Republic] structures and nothing less than major surgery will do," Bosnia's top international official Paddy Ashdown told a news conference.
The firings were a political repercussion of Bosnia's failure to be invited to join NATO's Partnership for Peace at the summit in Istanbul earlier this week. NATO was set to decide whether Bosnia's military reforms - which involve putting its former warring Croat, Muslim, and Serb militaries under a single command - warranted an invitation into the group, the first step toward joining NATO.
The military reforms, along with the Bosnian Serbs' recent acknowledgements about Srebrenica, could have been interpreted as signs that the country was ready to move on. But NATO had required Bosnia to produce some war-crimes fugitives as a condition of membership.
The most notorious of these fugitives, former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, was indicted by the UN war-crimes tribunal for genocide at Srebrenica in 1995. He's widely thought to be moving around the mountains of eastern Bosnia under heavy guard. The tribunal's public indictment list also includes more than a dozen other Bosnian Serbs who are still at large.
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