The former leader of Bosnia's Muslim army, Rasim Delic, is due to go on trial at the U.N. war crimes tribunal on Monday charged with responsibility for rape, torture and murder of Bosnian Croats and Serbs by his troops. Delic, one of the most senior Muslims to appear at the tribunal, is accused of failing to punish alleged atrocities committed by foreign Islamic fighters under his command, and of having been aware of their propensity for violence. | You'd have to be deaf, dumb, blind and a moron not to be. |
| Describes a fair bit of the EU, doesn't it? |
Prosecutors, however, are seeking a last-minute suspension of the trial and its transfer to a Bosnian court after the tribunal judges limited the amount of time to hear prosecution witnesses, as the court came under pressure to wind up its work by 2010. | How on earth are the prosecutors gonna accumulate enough pension points with that sort of time pressure, I ask you? |
Prosecutors say this limits the scope of the trial and makes The Hague, where those charged with the greatest responsibility are tried, an inappropriate venue. | You really cannot make this stuff up. don't even try. It takes trained Euros to do so. |
On Friday they renewed their plea for a postponement, after a first request was denied on Thursday.
Many Islamic fighters, or "mujahideen", came from North Africa and the Middle East to support fellow Muslims during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. They moved from giving out food to local Muslims to fighting alongside their forces.
The indictment details an occasion when mujahideen indiscriminately shot dead 24 captured Bosnian Croats outside the village of Maline in June 1993. It also alleges that in 1995 a captured Bosnian Serb soldier was beheaded in a prison camp and all other Serb prisoners were forced to kiss the severed head, which the mujahideen then placed on a hook in the room where prisoners were held.
Delic, 58, is one of a handful of Bosnian Muslims to stand trial in The Hague for alleged war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Most accused are Serbs but the court has indicted senior figures from all three Bosnian ethnic groups.
Delic surrendered to the tribunal in February 2005, and had been given provisional release before he was recalled into custody in The Hague last month | The crimes are horrific. But the international tribunal is a farce - the utter triumph of process over substance. |
| Carla del Ponte wouldn't have it any other way. |
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