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"By accepting responsibility and expressing her remorse fully and unconditionally, Mrs Plavsic hopes to offer some consolation to the innocent victims," her lawyer
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SARAJEVO,
October 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Bosnian Muslims
expressed outrage Wednesday, October 2, after the U.N. war crimes
court announced it will drop genocide and other war crimes charges
against former Bosnian Serb president Biljana Plavsic.
Plavsic
pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity, becoming the highest level
former Yugoslav leader to acknowledge a role in atrocities in the
Balkan wars, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.
"If
they can drop charges against her I would not be surprised that they
do the same for [Radovan] Karadzic and [Ratko] Mladic and one day call
them to The Hague as witnesses and not as indictees," said Munira
Subasic, survivor of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
In
Srebrenica, more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were killed when Serb
forces overran the enclave in July 1995, in the worst massacre in
Europe since World War II.
Karadzic,
the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, and Mladic, his military commander,
are both charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) with genocide, war crimes and crimes against
humanity for the campaign of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, including the
Srebrenica massacre.
The
two remain at large.
"There
is a lot of evidence that she acted together with Karadzic and Mladic
all the time" during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, another survivor of
the Srebrenica massacre, Sabra Kulenovic, told AFP.
During
the Bosnian war, Plavsic was a member of the presidency and national
security council of Republika Srpska, the then self-declared Bosnian
Serb breakaway entity. She was one of Karadzic's closest allies.
Plavsic
changed her initial plea of not guilty, entered in January 2001 after
she turned herself in to the court.
All
other charges against Plavsic including genocide and war crimes will
be dropped when she appears again before The Hague-based tribunal for
sentencing on December 16 and 17, the ICTY prosecution announced.
"By
accepting responsibility and expressing her remorse fully and
unconditionally, Mrs Plavsic hopes to offer some consolation to the
innocent victims – Muslim, Croat and Serb – of the war in
Bosnia-Herzegovina," said lawyer Eugene O'Sullivan.
The
former Bosnian Serb leader, 72, had initially been accused of
genocide, other war crimes and crimes against humanity during the
1992-95 Bosnian war.
Dressed
in a powder-blue suit, she sat expressionless at the other end of a
video link from Yugoslavia and spoke only to utter the word
"guilty" when the charge was read out by the judge, AFP
said.
Earlier,
Richard Dicker from U.S.-based Human Rights Watch had hailed Plasvic's
change of plea.
"This
is potentially an enormous breakthrough for the prosecution. She is
uniquely positioned to provide potentially damaging evidence against
senior indictees including Slobodan Milosevic," he said.
But
Plavsic's lawyer dashed that hope.
"Mrs
Plavsic has not agreed to testify in any other case pending before
this tribunal," O'Sullivan said, insisting that his client was
taking "individual and personal" responsibility for her
actions.
"The
legal responsibility of an individual, even if he or she is a leader,
cannot be attributed to a group of people," he said.
He
said there had been no discussions or agreement between Plavsic and
the prosecution about the sentence she would receive in December and
that the former Bosnian Serb president understood she was
"subjecting herself to a possible sentence of life
imprisonment".
Plasvic
was given permission to remain on bail ahead of her sentencing in
December, AFP said.
She
was provisionally released on bail on September 6, 2001, after the
court was given assurances she would return for trial and has since
been living under police surveillance in Belgrade.
Judge
Richard May told her: "We have taken a wholly exceptional course
in your case because these are wholly exceptional circumstances and
for reasons of security will continue your provisional release."
War
crime suspect Slobodan Milosevic, meanwhile, clashed dramatically with
his old adversary, Croatian President Stipe Mesic, in a day of
courtroom drama, as they crossed swords in court Wednesday as the
former Yugoslav leader cross-examined his bitter adversary at his war
crimes trial.
Mesic
is the first head of state to testify against Milosevic, who is in the
dock on more than 60 charges of genocide, other war crimes and crimes
against humanity for his involvement in the 1990s wars in Kosovo,
Croatia and Bosnia.
A
discussion over who was actually responsible for the break-up became
heated and both men raised their voices, both agreeing that the
perpetrators of crimes committed in the republics should be brought to
justice.
"I'm
not the person on trial," Mesic shouted triumphantly.
"That's the point!" Milosevic snapped back.
