Bosnian general to go to UN tribunal
The wartime commander of the Bosnian Muslim army has said he will surrender next week to the UN war crimes court.
Accused of atrocities by foreign Islamist fighters in the 1992-95 war, some Bosnian Muslim officials and some analysts criticised retired General Rasim Delic’s indictment.
They say it is an attempt to distribute guilt in the three-cornered war equally but unfairly among Serbs, Croats and Muslims.
Muslims were heavily outgunned and suffered the highest number of casualties.
Bosnia’s BHTV1 television said Delic, a highly-regarded figure among Bosnian Muslims, would fly to The Hague on Monday to surrender to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
“I am the man who fought for this country … and a lawful man and as such I cannot act in a different way,” he said in an interview in a late-evening news programme.
UN prosecutors’ spokeswoman Florence Hartmann told Balkan media the Sarajevo authorities said Delic would surrender on 28 February but she could not give details of the indictment.
Delic is the sixth Bosnian Muslim charged with war crimes in the conflict, in which between 150,000 and 200,000 people were killed.
The tribunal has altogether indicted more than 120 people from former Yugoslavia, mostly Serbs.