Posted on 10/05/2004 6:39:08 AM PDT by Jane_N
The trial of Naser Oric, the former commander of the Muslim forces in the Srebrenica enclave, on war crimes charges for alleged atrocities against Bosnian Serbs during the first two years of the Bosnian war, will open at the UN court at the Hague tomorrow.
Oric, 37, is the first Muslim to be charged with war crimes committed in the Srebrenica area but his alleged crimes are not related to the 1995 massacre of 7,000 Muslims by Bosnian Serb troops.
The arrest and transfer of Oric in April last year sparked controversy among Bosnian Muslim survivors of the massacre.
Some were outraged because they consider Oric a hero who fended off Serb troops, while others say he is a criminal and profiteer who made a fortune on the black market in Srebrenica.
Oric, a former bodyguard of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, defended Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia during the war as the Bosnian Serb troops laid siege to the Muslim enclave.
"I believe Naser is an honourable and honest man who was just trying to defend his people," Srebrenica survivor Munira Subasic said.
"Let them try and prove his guilt, I don't think they will succeed," she added.
Oric left the town two months before before it fell to the Bosnian Serb forces who summarily executed over 7,000 Muslim men.
Some claim this was done to exact revenge for the fierce resistance put up by Oric's men.
The prosecution alleges that in the two-year period between the start of the war in 1992 and 1993 when the enclave was officially placed under UN protection, troops commanded by Oric destroyed some 50 predominantly Serb villages around Srebrenica, causing thousands of Bosnian Serbs to flee.
He has also been charged with seven murders and several cases of cruel treatment committed by men under his command.
According to the indictment, Oric's military police held several Serbs in the Srebrenica police station in inhumane conditions.
Prisoners were regularly beaten and kept in overcrowded and insanitary conditions.
Oric has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
His attorney John Jones told AFP that the defence plans to contest all the charges in the indictment.
Although the trial will not formally centre on the 1995 massacre, the first legally recognised genocide in Europe since World War II, the killings will loom large in the background.
"It will be essential for the judges hearing this case to have regard to the persecutory, indeed genocidal, campaign of the Bosnian Serbs against the Bosnian Muslims in eastern Bosnia," Oric's lawyers said in a court document outlining the defence case.
"It was in response to this brutal campaign of Serb 'ethnic cleansing' that Mr Oric ... organised the resistance against the Serbs."
They argue that Oric had no knowledge of any crimes committed against detainees.
According to the defence, the attacks on Serb villages listed in the indictment were legitimate actions against military and strategic targets or operations to obtain food for the starving population of Srebrenica, cut off from the outside world by the Serb siege.
In Bosnia some Srebrenica survivors have lashed out at Oric's version of events.
"I know how difficult it was, how we were hungry, exposed to torture and destruction on a daily basis," Bosnian journalist Emir Suljagic, who lived through the siege of Srebrenica, said.
"But if it was food we needed, there was no reason to burn (Serb) houses and destroy already deserted villages.
"No community must place itself above the law ... no circumstances justify that," he wrote in Dani magazine after Oric's plea of not guilty in April.
The prosecution and the defence have been given four months each to present their case to the court.
-- AFP
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