SEND US MAIL
Newsday, Monday, April 19, 1993.
By Roy Gutman (Newsday)
EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Using flashlights and torches of lighted paper, the Serb military police stole through the darkened indoor sport center in search of female victims.
Each night they selected 10 or more Muslim women. The men led them at gunpoint to a nearby house and raped them, witnesses and victims said. One 27-year-old woman told Newsday she was raped up to six times at night. Another woman was raped in the hall before the eyes of the others held there, witnesses said.
The site of these crimes, known as the Partizan sports hall, was in the center of Foca, a small, predominantly Muslim town in eastern Bosnia. At time, it was used as a transit facility for women and children about to be deported from the town. But for two months in 1992, between June and August, it functioned as a rape camp, holding 74 people, including about 50 women.
Partizan was but one of dozens of Serb rape camps in Bosnia - some are said to be still in operation - and it was prominently located, next door to the police station. Muslim women victims said they complained about the routine raping to the police, but police said they had no power to intervene.
Power in Foca had been seized by three top associates of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. Velibor Ostojic, a minister in Karadzic's breakaway government, and other two close aides, Vojislav maksimovic and Petar cancar, organized the military assult on Foca in April 1992, and took charge of the town, even stationing their own guards in front of the police station.
Until now, report on "ethnic cleansing" have focused on the men and women who implemented the policy - paramilitary groups led by self-promoting nationalists from neighboring Serbia aided by local extremists. In Foca, the apramilitaries wore camouflage fatigues and called themselves the "Serbian Guard."
But a three-month Newsday investigation into ethnic cleansing in Foca suggests that close those directing the process were members of Karadzic's inner circle. They called in paramilitary troops to conquer the town and gave the orders to "cleanse" Foca of all non-Serbs, a broad array of witnesses said. They set up concentration camps and rape camps, and on their orders, Serb forces destroyed the mosques abd nearly every other sign of half a millenium of Muslim culture, according to a variety of government and Muslim sources.
Karadzic said in a telephone interview last week that he had no knowledge of systematic rape anywhere in Serb-coqnuered Bosnia. "We know of some 18 cases of rape altogether, but this was not organized but done by psychopaths," he told Newsday. Claims of mass rapes were "propaganda... designed" by "Muslim Mullahs," he added. (A special mission of the European Community estimated that 20,000 or more Bosnian Muslim women had been raped by Serb forces through the end of last year; numerous investigations by other governmental and non-governmental organizations all have concluded that rape has been widespread.)
In Sarajevo, the besieged capital of the devastated state of Bosnia, the State Commission on War Crimes, headed by Croat Stjepan Kljuic, is in investigating all three men. Its allegations against Ostojic alone read like a page from the Nuremberg Nazi War Crimes Tribunal. It says Ostojic conceived and organized war crimes in the Foca region, helped plan and organize the arming of the Serbian Democratic Party members, prepared the attack, and invited paramilitary forces from Serbia "to undertake the armed conquest of a large portion of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina and ethnic cleansing through annihilation, terror, persecution, detention, mistreatment and murder."
Ostojic refused to comment. A Newsday special correspondent in Belgrade submitted to Ostojic seven questions in writing about his role in the conquest of Foca in April, 1992, asking him to describe the structure and authority of the crisis staff, and to comment on the extensive eyewitness accounts of the rape camp in the middle of Foca.
The questions were submitted by fax at Ostojic's insistence, but after considering them for several days, he refused ..... questions, " he said in a telephone interview. During a subsequent visit to Belgrade, he again refused to comment.
Bosnian Serb sources who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed that Ostojic had been in Foca during the height of the terror and said he had traveled frequently to Pale, Karadzic's war headquarters on a mountain outside Sarajevo, for consultations.
Serb forces have denied foreign reporters and international organizations access to Foca since the conquest, and the Newsday investigation has relied on witnesses and victims how in Germany, Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the remaining Yugoslavia, as well as Bosnian officials in Sarajevo and abroad.
Seven victims at a refugee camp at Kirklareli, Turkey, and in southern Serbia retold the story of systematic rape in and around Foca and of the rape camp in the heart of the town. Written statements by 10 others were made available by the gynecologist who first examined them after their release last August. All spoke on condition that they not be identified. But current and former Bosnia government officials spoke on the record.
Foca, whose population of 40,000 was 52 percent Muslim and 45 percent Serb prior to the Serb conquest, was among the first towns Serb forces seized in Bosnia, and some observers believe that what happened there set a pattern for ethnic cleansing in the rest of Bosnia. Foca could be a case study in the role played by civilian politicians in the brutality against the non-Serb population.
According to a witness, Ostojic was spokesman for the conquering Serbs, while Maksimovic actually picked up the phone and called in the troops. For Ostojic, it was a familiar role. Prior to the Serb insurrection one year ago, he was minister of information in the coalition of Muslims, Serbs and Croats who ran the Bosnian government, and he held the same job in Karadzic's self-declared government of the "Serbian Republic" of Bosnia until January.
Famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in an interview with Newsday called him the "Goebbels" of the Bos..... out of Pale. Karadzic and Ostojic were born in neighboring villages at the foot of Montenegro's Mount Durmitor did not meet until 1990, Karadzic said. Both are 47.
Maksimovic was a professor of literature at the University of Sarajevo and the leader of Karadzic's Serbian Democratic Party in the Bosnian Parliament. Karadzic has just named him head of the "University of the Serbian Republic," which he said will be established in Serb-controlled territory in Sarajevo. Cancar, an attorney, was formerly president of the chamber of municipalities, the second chamber of the Bosnia parliament. He is now a member of Karadzic's parliament.
According to Bosnia Muslim sources, Ostojic played a critical role in establishing a pattern of abuse of women. Alija Delimustafic, who was Bosnia's interior minister at the time of the capture of Foca, said he had received direct evidence from wiretaps that proved Ostojic had ordered the raping of women in Foca. Delimustafic left the Bosnia parliament some months ago and is now working in Vienna as a private businessman.
Jusuf Pusina, Delimustafic's successor in Sarajevo, said he was unable to find any such evidence in his files and denied Newsday direct access to them. Although Delimustafic has been regarded in government circles with distrust since he quit his post, Kemal Kurspahic, editor of Sarajevo's independent daily newspaper, Oslobodjenje, said Delimustafic was a trustworthy source.
In a written statement to Newsday, Pusina did not, however, that Ostojic had been fired as a high school teacher for his "sexually deviant behavior toward young female pupils which on many occasions led to physical showdowns with individual parents. " While employed in the personnel department at Sarajevo television, his next job, Ostojic "continued to satisfy his sick desire for girls by promising them certain work if they fulfilled his desires, " Pusina said. His last job was as proof-reader at Sarajevo television, but he also had been Communist Party secretary.... and was appointed by him to the Bosnian Serb governments, in fact used the incidents to advance his political career. In May, 1991, the ministry said, Ostojic was beaten up on his doorstep by an angry husband but he "and the extreme wing of the SDS [Karadzic's Democratic Party] built this up into a political thriller of a Mujahedeen conspiracy that was the beginning of the night of the long knives against the Serbian prince, " the ministry said.
Ostojic arrived in Foca around April 5 last year, three days before the attack, according to Enver Pilaff, who subsequently fled to Sarajevo, where he was interviewed.
Ostojic then demanded that all Muslims leave Foca for a concentration camp at nearby Jabuka mountain "or else the last Muslim seed will be destroyed in Foca, " according to a public statement cited by the Bosnian Interior Ministry.
The next day, Ostojic, Maksimovic and Cancar met at their favorite restaurantm the Ribarski Dom. "I was outside when Maksimovic came out and told his people that if they would not take up arms and start shooting Muslims, he would call for reinforcements from Serbia, " Pilaff said.
In the presence of his two associates, Maksimovic went to the telephone and "invited in" troops from nearby cities of Niksic in Montenegro, and Uzice in Serbia, Pilaff said. Pilaff said he heard the call through the open door.
"I said to the three of them: 'Aren't you ashamed for what you did?' " Pilaff said. As the first of 40,000 paramilitary troops arrived in trucks and buses. Pilaff and his family prepared to flee.
Molestation of Muslim women began almost immediately. On April 11, the third day after the attack on Foca, Pilaff said he heard from a close associate that a local Serb nationalist had raped a Muslim woman. Ostojic's forces also began rounding up Muslim civilians, taking them to the state correctional prison in Foca where the Bosnia government says more than 1,000 men were executed.
By mid-April, the trio set up their headquarters at a villa just outside Foca, next to the Velecevo state prison for women and overlooking the Cehotina River.
There, guarded by several hundred paramilitary troops, they established a summary military court, witnesses said. Newsday has obtained a sworn statement by a former Yugoslav army officer of Muslim descent who said he was brought before them and other Serb leaders. On the advice of a senior Serb officer, they spared his life. According to other Bosnia state and Muslim party sources, Ostojic, Maksimovic and Cancar decided the fate of hundreds of Muslims in the area, whether they would be executed by the paramilitary forces or sent to the concentration camp at Foca prison. According to Pilaff and Muharem Omerdzic, an official of Riyaset, a Muslim benevolent association in Sarajevo, they then turned the women's prison at Velecevo into a woman's concentration camp.
Both Pilaff and Omerdzic said their information came from refugees or the families of women still being held in Bosnia. Omerdzic believes those taken to Velecevo either were killed there or still are being held. He also estimated that thousands of Muslim women are still held in Serb camps inside Bosnia, where widespread rape continues. Newsday was unable to confirm assertions.
Karadzic told Newsday he had not visited Foca since the conquest and was unaware that aides had set up their headquarters at Velecevo. He also said he had not known that Velecevo was the site of a woman's prison. Karadzic said that he had not heard that women had been held and systematically raped nightly over two months at Partizon hall. "We will investigate any allegations of rape, including this one, " he said.