Bosnia: Muslims mutilated dead Serbs soldiers, witness tells tribunal

The Hague, 20 Sept. (AKI) - A witness for the prosecution at the trial of wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic told the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal on Tuesday that Muslims in eastern Bosnia mutilated bodies of dead Serb soldiers during Bosnia’s 1992/95 war.

The witness, Petko Panic, a Serb, said sixty Serbs were killed at the Glodjansko brdo, near eastern town of Zvornik in the spring of 1992. Their bodies were later found mutilated, some beheaded and circumcised according to Muslim tradition.

Panic testified that Muslims were tortured and killed by Serb paramilitary groups, which operated out of Karadzic’s control. “Muslims feared paramilitary forces, not Serb soldiers and police,” Panic said.

“Muslims’ security was jeopardized by paramilitaries who abused all citizens of Zvornik, regardless of religion,” Panic testified. Some paramilitaries were expelled across the Drina River to Serbia in July 1992 and later arrested, he said.

After that, “a rule of law” was established in Zvornik, Panic said. But he pointed out that local leaders in some municipalities behaved like a “state within state. I don’t know whether they did it because of disrupted communications or for some other reason,” he said.

Karadzic has been indicted on eleven counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed by forces under his command. The indictment centers of 44-month siege and shelling of the capital Sarajevo and a massacre of some 8,000 Muslims in eastern town of Srebrenica in July 1995.

He was arrested in Belgrade in July 2008 and refuted charges, saying he was just defending his people in a civil war that followed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.