Dusko Tadic, 40, (born 10/1/55) is a former cocktail lounge owner from the town of Kozarac in northwestern Bosnia. He was also a part-time karate instructor, and by all accounts, this Serb, like many others, enjoyed good relations with Muslims and Croats before the war. He is married, with two daughters, and two brothers.

However, Tadic allegedly became intoxicated with Serbian nationalist propaganda, which was rampant in the region in 1991. He banned Muslims from his bar, and later allegedly helped compile lists of prominent Muslim intellectuals and politicians who were to be killed as part of the Serb ethnic cleansing of the region. Eventually, Tadic became a leader of Serb paramilitary forces, although he had no rank and did not wear a uniform.

Tadic was arrested in Munich by German authorities in February 1994 and placed in detention. He was then extradited to the tribunal after the German parliament passed a special law enabling the transfer. Tadics capture was partially the result of his own recklessness and stupidity. Tadic allegedly looted many Muslims. Although he had a lot of cash, back home in Kozarac he had no place to spend it. He then moved to Munich to spend his new wealth, making Tadic an easy target for arrest.

Omarska
In the spring and summer of 1992, military and police forces of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Republic of Serbia took prisoners at four major detention camps in northwestern Bosnia. The three main camps, Omarska, Keraterm, Trnopolje were in Prijedor. The fourth, Manjaca was south of Banja Luka. Omarska is considered to have been the most brutal of the camps. Some of Tadics alleged crimes were committed at Omarska, where an estimated 10,000 people -- mostly Muslims but some Croats -- were held between May and August 1992.

Omarska was a predominantly Serbian village in the Prejidor region where an open iron ore mine operated. After intensive shelling by the Serbs caused Muslims to flee their homes, the mine was converted into a prison camp. Muslims and Croats were rounded up and led to the camp. Omarska was where those who were considered to be leaders or prominent citizens in the non-Serb community, or had actively resisted the Serb takeover, were sent. Many were part of the local Muslim and Croat elite -- political, religious, intellectual and business leaders. The conditions were horrifying.

In the late summer of 1992, the world learned that Omarska was less like a refugee camp and more like a concentration camp. The first print reporter to uncover Omarska was Newsdays Roy Gutman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his efforts. The first video out of Omarska, which came at the same time, was shot by International Television News (ITN). The allegations against the Serbs who controlled Omarska are gruesome: murder, rape, torture, and sodomy. The allegations of the survivors provided the basis for many of the indictments now issued by the ICTYs prosecutor, including the case against Dusko Tadic.

Here are some excerpts from Helsinki Watch interviews with former Omarska prisoners:

When men left the bus [after arriving at Omarska], guards would beat them. Four men who observed this tried to escape. Three of them were killed with rifles...The bodies of the three who were killed were not removed -- they lay on the ground for seven days. It was hot, and the bodies putrified.

One hundred and fifty people were put into a garage, where they could barely stand. Three men there suffocated to death, and their bodies were just put near the other three corpses.

They put us in room number 15. Muslim policemen and local businessmen were taken out and killed that same night...For the first sixty hours, we were given no food or water and we had to relieve ourselves in the same room. Later, they started giving us an eighth of a loaf of bread each per day, although it often happened we would go for 48 hours without any food.

They kept 180 of us in a garage which was four by five meters in size. The first five days we were not given any water. It was so humid in there that the plaster was peeling off the walls. We had to relieve ourselves in the room. They started filling our shoes with water and letting us drink water out of our shoes. They sometimes urinated in the water we were given to drink.

Five or six [guards] were always standing in front of the kitchen armed with sticks. They enjoyed pouring water on the tiled floor, and whoever fell would be beaten to death.

The most traumatic experience for me was to see all the corpses. We saw corpses piled one on top of another, and some of the bodies had been there for 48 hours....The bodies eventually were gathered with a forklift and put onto trucks.... This happened almost every day -- sometimes there was a lesser number of bodies -- 20 or 30 -- but usually there were more. Most of the deaths occurred as a result of beatings.

There are no reliable estimates as to how many people were killed at Omarska, but some human rights advocates believe it is at least hundreds, and probably thousands.

Later, an October 1995 push by Bosnian forces turned Omarska back into a refugee camp. This time, Serbs were the refugees fleeing their homes and forced into the camp.

The Charges Against Tadic
Tadic is charged with crimes against humanity, violations of the laws or customs of war, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Tadic is not charged with the most serious crime -- genocide -- and he is not charged with command responsibility. Although Tadic was originally charged with one count of rape, marking the first time rape had been prosecuted as a war crime, this charge did not make it to trial. Prosecutors dropped the count on their own initiative, most likely because the alleged victim would not testify.

Crimes Committed Inside Omarska

• Belonged to a group of Serbs from outside the Omarska camp who one day called prisoners out of their rooms and severely beat them. After one of the four prisoners was beaten, two other prisoners were called on and ordered by a member of the group (it is unclear whether it was Tadic who gave the order) to lick his buttocks and genitals and then to sexually mutilate him. One of the two prisoners covered the third prisoner's mouth to silence his screams, while the other prisoner bit off his testicle. This prisoner and two others died from the attack, the fourth was severely injured and thrown into the back of a truck with the dead and driven away.
  
• Belonged to various groups of Serbs from outside the Omarska camp who severely beat and kicked at least five prisoners, three of whom died.
  
• Belonged to a group of Serbs from outside the Omarska camp who ordered prisoners to drink water like animals from puddles on the ground, jumped on their backs, and beat them until they could no longer move. As the victims were removed, Tadic discharged a fire extinguisher into the mouth of one of the prisoners.
  

Crimes Committed Outside Omarska

• Belonged to a group of Serbs who pushed four prisoners out of a column of Bosnian Muslim residents of the Kozarac area who were forced to march toward the town of Kozarac prior to being bussed to one of the camps, pushed them against a wall, and shot them. Another Serb indicted with Tadic, Goran Borovnica, is alleged to have also participated in this incident.
  
• Belonged to two groups of Serbs who forced Muslims in the villages of Sivci and Jaskici to leave their homes. In Sivci, five men were shot and killed in front of their houses. In Jaskici, six men were forced to lie on the ground, were beaten with a thick wooden stick, kicked, and then taken to an unknown destination.