BOSNIA-WAR CRIMES/ARREST Swiss arrest Bosnian Muslim wartime commander on Serbia warrant - Bosnian mayor

Record ID: 151217

  • Title: BOSNIA-WAR CRIMES/ARREST Swiss arrest Bosnian Muslim wartime commander on Serbia warrant - Bosnian mayor
  • Date: 11th June 2015
  • Summary: SARAJEVO, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA (FILE - APRIL 2, 2001) (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (REUTERS) PROTESTERS GATHERED OUTSIDE U.N. BUILDING IN SARAJEVO TO PROTEST RUMOURED ARREST OF BOSNIAN MUSLIM WARTIME COMMANDER NASER ORIC VARIOUS OF PROTESTERS HOLDING BANNERS AND PICTURES OF NASER ORIC VARIOUS OF CROWD FIGHTING WITH POLICE; MAN PULLING DOWN A BOSNIAN POLICEMAN; BOSNIAN POLICE BEATING
  • Embargoed: 26th June 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA23B70JRJLHJNMIAVVAVWFP1X4
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: EDIT CONTAINS MATERIAL WHICH WAS ORIGINALLY 4:3
    Swiss authorities arrested a Bosnian Muslim wartime commander on Wednesday (June 10) on a warrant issued by Serbia over the alleged killing of Serbs during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, a Bosnian official told local media.
    Commander Naser Oric was indicted by The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes against Serbs but was acquitted of all charges in 2008, a ruling that angered the Bosnian Serbs and Serbia, who see the tribunal as biased against them.
    The official, Camil Durakovic, mayor of the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, said he had been with Oric at the time of his arrest because they were due to attend a series of events in Geneva to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica.
    "They [the Serbian authorities] play this game every year, and now Srebrenica is in big focus, and they are using Naser Oric as the biggest name of Srebrenica to distract all public attention, international attention on Srebrenica," Durakovic said about the timing of the Serbian arrest warrant.
    Durakovic, who spoke to Reuters in a hotel in Geneva after being released by Swiss authorities, said he felt he was being persecuted and that the arrest brought back "very harsh memories."
    Oric had been detained on a border crossing between France and Switzerland. He was handcuffed and taken to a police station in Geneva, Durakovic said.
    A spokesman for Switzerland's Federal Office of Justice told Reuters he could not comment on the matter.
    Serbia issued an arrest warrant for Oric in February 2014 over the killing of nine Serb civilians in the village of Zalazje near Srebrenica in July 1992. Oric, then a Bosnian army commander, was in charge of organising the defence of the town.
    "The only thing we will not allow is for him to be extradited to Belgrade, that would be the wrongest decision because we know what they think for us and we know what they want to do, so he cannot go there," Durakovic said.
    "[It's a] huge, systematic campaign to neutralize, or to minimize, genocide in Srebrenica," Durakovic, himself a survivor of the killings, said.
    In 2001, hundreds of supporters of Oric have clashed with police outside the United Nations building in Sarajevo, where he was being interviewed by war crimes investigators. The presence of Oric at the U.N. compound in Sarajevo sparked a violent protest by hundreds of women from the town of Srebrenica who burst in to demand his freedom.
    They denounced any attempt to accuse Oric of war crimes and called him a hero to the town that suffered Europe's worst wartime atrocity since World War Two.
    Two decades after the end of the Bosnian war, the country remains politically and ethnically divided, comprising a Muslim Bosniak-Croatian federation and a Bosnian Serb republic.
    Underscoring those divisions, Bosnian Serb lawmakers on Wednesday rejected a resolution describing the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of the Muslim men and boys as genocide, saying the motion was an attack on their community.
    The Srebrenica massacre, widely viewed as the worst atrocity on European soil since World War Two, was the culmination of an ethnic cleansing drive by the forces of Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic aimed at carving out a Serbian state from ethnically mixed Bosnia.
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