Balkan

[Merowig]

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Maltese judge to preside over trial of Muslim commander of Srebrenica

Staff Reporter

This week The Hague tribunal will hold another high-profile trial – that of Naser Oric, the former commander of Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica.

The presiding judge is Carmel Agius together with two newly sworn-in ad litem judges from Demark and Germany.

Oric was in charge of the enclave’s armed forces until the town fell to the Serbs in 1995 and some 7,000 of its male inhabitants were killed, in the largest massacre on European soil since the end of the second world war.
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Oric, 37, is accused of crimes against Bosnian Serbs that he and the forces he commanded allegedly committed in the months between the outbreak of hostilities in Bosnia in the spring of 1992 and the designation of Srebrenica as a UN safe area in 1993.

The prosecutors allege that between June 1992 and March 1993 the troops under Oric’s command destroyed at least 50 Serbian hamlets and villages in the wider Srebrenica area, expelled thousands of their inhabitants and plundered their property – notably livestock and food supplies.
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Oric is also accused of alleged torture, beatings and murders of Serb detainees committed by his subordinates at the Srebrenica police station, where inmates were regularly beaten and kept in insanitary and overcrowded conditions. The prosecution has listed in the indictment a case of an inmate tortured by extracting his teeth with rusty pliers, and several cases of prisoners beaten to death.

The indictment officially charges Oric and his alleged subordinates – whose names it does not mention – with six counts of violations of the laws or customs of war.

Oric has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
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