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Hague Tribunal Reveals Identity of Genocide Suspect
THE HAGUE, July 18 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The U.N. war crimes tribunal has made public a previously sealed indictment against a Bosnian Serb charged with genocide for his role in an "ethnic cleansing" campaign against Muslims and Croats in the early 90s.
Stojan Zupljanin, 49, who led the regional Bosnian Serb security forces under Radovan Karadzic - also indicted for war crimes - during the war from 1992 to 1995, is accused of playing a leading role in a crackdown on non-Serbs in the Krajina region on the border between Bosnia and Croatia.
"The indictment against Zupljanin is disclosed following a request from the office of the prosecutor," tribunal spokesman Jim Landale said on Wednesday.
Zupljanin's indictment charges him with 12 counts of genocide, torture, murder, persecution, extermination and deportation - every crime in the tribunal's statute - for atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, according to a Las Vegas Sun article.
Under his command, Serb forces allegedly undertook a brutal campaign to ethnically cleanse Serb-dominated regions in order to create a "greater" Serbia, the article said.
Prosecutors hold Zupljanin responsible - as a leader who could have prevented or punished atrocities - for the actions of forces under his command when they murdered inhabitants of Muslim and Croat villages in Bosnia and Herzegovina, deporting some to concentration camps where they were tortured, sexually assaulted and starved, the Sun article continued.
The prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has been insisting for months that the Bosnian Serb be arrested and transferred to The Hague, where the court is based.
The tribunal wants to try Zupljanin with Radoslav Brdanin, the president of the Krajina crisis staff, and Momir Talic, the former chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb army, prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann said.
The three men are charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Brdanin and Talic are already being held in the ICTY's detention center in Scheveningen, close to The Hague. Both pleaded innocent to the allegations against them in January 2000, according to the Sun article.
The indictment was made public because the prosecution believes that many people already know of the charges against Zupljanin so "there is no reason to keep the indictment under seal," Hartman said.
But the Sun article reported that war crimes prosecutors publicized the indictment in order to pressure authorities to arrest him and transfer him to the court.
The now public indictment has been transferred to the authorities in Sarajevo who will relay them to the appropriate authorities, Landale said.
According to the office of the prosecutor, Zupljanin is currently in Bosnia's Serb entity, the Republika Srpska (RS), near Banja Luka.
Although there has not yet been a genocide conviction, the number of officials openly indicted by the tribunal for genocide continues to rise - Zupljanin makes the 13th, according to the Sun article.
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