Bosnia war ‘evoked horrors of World War II’

THE “unimaginable” rapes, killings and camps of the 1992-5 Bosnian war evoked the horrors of World War II, former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright told the UN war crimes tribunal yesterday.

At a landmark hearing to determine sentence for ex-Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, Albright the most senior US official ever to testify at The Hague described her horror as she learned of ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs in the Bosnian war.

"It was unimaginable that these kinds of things could be going on and that they were being done ... in a deliberate way, not some accident of a drunken soldier marauding, but part of some kind of plan to eradicate various groups of people," Ms Albright said as Plavsic listened intently from the dock.

Ms Albright, whose long-standing support for the war crimes court has earned her the tag "mother of the tribunal," was appearing on the second day of a three-day hearing for a woman once dubbed the "Iron Lady" of the Bosnian war.

Plavsic, 72, could face life in prison after changing her plea in October to guilty of one count of crimes against humanity for persecution of Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the 1990s conflict, which left 200,000 dead or missing. The highest-ranking figure to admit atrocities and the only woman publicly indicted in the UN tribunal's nine-year history, Plavsic avoided trial after a surprise plea volte-face that her lawyers said was born of deep remorse.

The Czech-born Ms Albright, who lived in Yugoslavia for some years as a child and spent more time there in the 1960s, described her shock at seeing what had seemed a harmonious multi-ethnic society descend into "barbarity".

"It became very evident to anyone who was watching what was going on that it was reminiscent of pictures that reminded one of World War II," she said, referring to the separation of families and herding of victims onto buses and trains. We saw pictures of people being taken into what could only be labelled as concentration camps ... People were being driven from their homes only because of who they were."

Ms Albright said she had negative impressions of Plavsic, based on what she had heard and read, before they first met in 1997 but those gradually improved as it became clear Plavsic backed the 1995 Dayton accord that ended the Bosnian war.

Plavsic served as deputy to Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, one of the tribunal's most wanted men, and later took over from him.