Two former Bosnian Serb leaders accused of helping to mastermind one of the bloodiest campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia go on trial in the Hague today charged with genocide.
Former Bosnian Serb deputy prime minister Radoslav Brdjanin, 53, and general Momir Talic, 59, are accused of responsibility for the torture, murder and expulsion of Croats and Muslims in northwest Bosnia at the start of the conflict in 1992.
They are charged with playing a pivotal role in a campaign to wipe out non-Serbs in territory under Serb control, led by the two men who have become the tribunal's most wanted -Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military chief Ratko Mladic.
Serb atrocities in Bosnia horrified the outside world, provoking U.N. sanctions against Serbia and eventually U.S. air raids against the Bosnian Serbs in 1995, followed soon after by the Dayton peace accords.
Brdjanin and Talic pleaded not guilty to all 12 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, violations of the laws and customs of war and breaches of the Geneva Convention after they were arrested and handed over to the Hague in 1999.
As members of the Autonomous Region of Krajina (ARK) Crisis Staff, one of several committees allegedly set up by Karadzic to ethnically cleanse Serb-held areas, they are charged with murdering hundreds and expelling thousands.
Many of the men captured by Bosnian Serb forces in the early throes of the conflict were interned in brutal conditions in camps like Omarska and Keraterm, prosecutors said.
A census in 1991 showed Croats and Muslims then formed slightly less than half of the 1.2 million people in the Bosanska Krajina region.
By late 1992, only a handful of non-Serbs remained and even in the post-1995 peace few of the hundreds of thousands driven out have returned to their old homes.
Radoslav Brdjanin declared that two percent was the acceptable limit of non-Serbs in the Serbian state, the indictment reads.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who is set to go on trial for crimes against humanity in Kosovo in 1999, has also been charged with genocide in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war and crimes against humanity in Croatia in 1991.
Last August, former Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic became the first person to be convicted for genocide by The Hague court. It sentenced him to 46 years in prison for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys.