Waiter accused of 'most horrific affront to humanity'
The UN war crimes court has heard how a Bosnian Serb waiter locked 65 women, children, babies and old men in a house before setting it alight.
Prosecutor Dermot Groome at the UN court in The Hague said Mitar Vasiljevic, 47 committed the murders in the Bosnian town of Visegrad.
Screams were heard for two hours after the fire began.
All but six of those locked in were killed. Among the victims were young children and babies, and 46 members of one family.
"There was a small baby among them. She had yet to see her third day on this earth," said Mr Groome.
The prosecutor said Vasiljevic "by his own hands committed an act that is perhaps one of the single most horrific and egregious affronts to humanity."
He said some tried to escape through the windows, but another Serb stood outside shooting at them while Vasiljevic shone a light on the victims.
"Mitar Vasiljevic is not the most infamous among the tribunal's indictees. He is no powerful politician accused of the grand plans behind the carnage in Bosnia. He is a simple waiter," Mr Groome told the hushed court.
"But he is one who by his own hands committed an act that is perhaps one of the single most horrific and egregious affronts to humanity in the war to the most innocent of victims."
Vasiljevic, who was a member of the White Eagles paramilitary unite denies 14 counts of extermination, murder, persecution and violence to life and property in June 1992.
In another court room, prosecutors accused two Croat officers of using captured Muslim soldiers as human shields in 1993, dressing them in Croat uniforms and forcing them to march in front of advancing Croat tanks to face the bullets of their own comrades.
The case against the Croats, whose nicknames Tuta and Stela inspired fear among Muslims in the medieval sector of Mostar, was one of three trials that began today, as the UN tribunal tries to clear its docket of old cases and prepare the prosecutions of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and other high-ranking Serb, Croat and Muslim war crimes suspects.
The appointment of six additional judges last week allowed the tribunal to step up the pace to a level unprecedented since it was created in 1993 to investigate crimes against hundreds of thousands of civilians during the Balkan wars.
Increasingly, the trials are focusing on the generals and the policy makers rather than the prison guards and local commanders directly responsible for atrocities.
The defendants in today's trials were five Serbs and two Croats charged with the persecution, torture and eviction of their enemies, as Bosnia's three communities were driven to excess in a ferocious three year war that ended with the Dayton peace accord in 1995. All pleaded innocent to the charges.
In the case against the Croatians, prosecutor Kenneth Scott accused Mladen Naletilic of commanding the special elite combat unit known as the Punishment Battalion or more simply as Tuta's Men.
Tuta and his subordinate, Vinko Martinovic or Stela, were charged with 22 counts of murder, beatings, torture, plunder and the displacement of thousands of Muslims.
In September 1993, Martinovic ordered his troops to select four prisoners to walk with fake rifles at the head of a Croatian advance into the Muslim sector of Mostar.
"When one fainted for fear, Stela ordered another one to be selected," Scott said. In this incident all four prisoners survived, and they will be called as a witness in the trial, Scott said.
Prisoners were taken for forced labour or human shields from the notorious internment camp at Heliodrom, a few miles south of Mostar, where up to 5,000 people were kept in hangars for more than a year.
Tuta and Stela "led by example," said Scott. "And not a good example, but by atrocities from their own hand."
The trial also started of Milan Simic, Blagoje Simic, Miroslav Tadic and Simo Zaric in the so-called Bosanski Samac case, named for a crucially situated town where nearly the entire Muslim population of 17,000 was killed or driven out.
Blagoje Simic was the highest-ranking civilian authority in the multiethnic Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac.
Along with his subordinates, he faces allegations of forceable transfer, detention, torture and inhumane treatment of women, children and the elderly in 1992-93. Simic was the first Yugoslav citizen to voluntarily give himself up.
