Two Serb war crimes suspects transferred to UN tribunal in The Hague

Two Serb men accused of committing war crimes during the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts in the 1990s were transferred today from Serbia to the detention unit of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

Nikola Sainovic, an adviser to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, and Momcilo Gruban, a former prison warden in Bosnia and Herzegovina, are charged in separate indictments with several counts of crimes against humanity and other war crimes for their alleged involvement, respectively, in the 1999 Kosovo campaign and the war in Bosnia during the early 1990s.

Mr. Sainovic, who held the post of Deputy Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and acted as the liaison between President Milosevic and various Kosovo Albanian leaders, is charged with leading FRY and Serb forces on a "campaign of terror and violence" directed at Kosovo Albanian civilians between 1 January and 20 June 1999.

The indictment alleges that the operations targeting the Kosovo Albanians were undertaken with the objective of expelling a substantial portion of that population from the province in an effort to ensure continued Serbian control and describes a series of well-planned and coordinated operations undertaken by FRY and Serbian forces.

For his part, Mr. Gruban is charged with multiple counts of grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, violations of the laws or customs of war and crimes against humanity for his role as a shift commander at the Omarska camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

According to the indictment, from about 25 May to about 30 August 1992, Serb forces collected and confined more than 3,000 Bosnian Muslims and Croats from Prijedor municipality - including many of the town's intellectuals, professional and political leaders - in the Omarska camp, a former mining complex.

Living conditions at the Omarska camp were allegedly brutal and inhumane and severe beatings were commonplace, the indictment says. The camp guards and others who came to the camp and physically abused the prisoners used all manner of weapons during these beatings. Both female and male prisoners were beaten, tortured, raped, sexually assaulted, and humiliated. In addition to regular beatings and abuse, there were incidents of multiple killings. Many, whose identities are known and unknown, did not survive the camp.