MAY 7
Today in The Hague, history was made and a trial began.

The first international war crimes trial since the end of World War II will attempt to determine whether Bosnian Serb Dusko Tadic is guilty of atrocities ranging from murder and sexual assault to crimes against humanity.

The trial, likely to take months with over 100 witnesses, will focus on alleged crimes by Serbs against Moslems and Croats at Omarska and other places in the Prijedor area of northern Bosnia. Created by the Security Council in May 1993, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia marks the first attempt by the United Nations to enforce international treaties on the conduct of war and protection of civilians.

The proceedings opened with Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald gently reminding the lawyers to be on their best behavior. "Be at ease," she told them, "but discharge your responsibilities in a professional manner."

In addition to Judge McDonald, a U.S. law professor and federal court jurist, Tadic will be judged by Sir Ninian Stephen of Australia and Datuk Lal Vohrah of Malaysia. There is no jury, but defendants can challenge a ruling by one of the two trial chambers before a separate appeals body. Tadic is one of 57 people charged with war crimes by the tribunal but one of only three held in its 24 jail cells.

Then prosecutor Grant Niemann began his opening argument by saying, "what man has done to man in the former Yugoslavia strains the most agile capacities of human reason."

The prosecutor then sketched the historical circumstances surrounding the Bosnian conflict. He sought to emphasize the manner in which the Serbian authorities in the former Yugoslavia manipulated the army and the political structure to seize power and territory. Next, he spelled out the prosecution's understanding of how Serbs in Bosnia "cleansed" the territory of non-Serbs. There were, he said, careful preparations, a sudden coup, martial law, then terror, torture, rape, murder and the driving out of the non-Serb populations.

Niemann then addressed the scene of the crimes -- Opstina Prijedor, the county in northern Bosnia where Tadic and the alleged victims lived. He detailed the command structure of the Yugoslavian National Army (JNA) which ran operations in that part of the country.

Then, he got to Tadic.

The prosecution has a problem in that Tadic was not openly involved in the radical Serb elements in his hometown of Kozarac. So Niemann offered a theory: Tadic was a secret agent, just waiting for his masters to seize power so he could exercise his sadistic anti-Muslim instincts.

Niemann claimed Tadic "emerged from his undercover role" and fired flares into the night sky on May 23-24, 1992, when the JNA shelled Kozarac. He also, Niemann said, helped round up his Muslim neighbors in the succeeding days, even murdering one of his best friends.

Then came the camps, and another problem for the prosecution. Whatever else these camps were, they were officially established. Tadic, the prosecution admits, had no official position enabling him to enter these top-secret institutions, so ho did he commit all the crimes? Niemann implied Tadic was a hired sadist, an expert torturer brought in to assist the terror squads and train the killing teams.

"His position was one of importance and trust," the prosecutor said. "He seemed to be in a superior position to guards and perhaps even commanders."

Niemann outlined Tadic's alleged crimes one by one. As he did so, the defendant, who was sitting rather impassively, began sighing, shaking his head and taking notes.

Niemann said prosecutors will call up to 80 witnesses. The trauma they have suffered and the passage of time, he said, "may sometimes prevent the neat dovetailing of all the evidence." He went on, "it is almost beyond human capacity to witness such appalling torture" and keep all the stories straight.

In his opening remarks, defense attorney Michail Wladimiroff first challenged the tribunal. He told the judges that the question of whether Tadic can get a fair trial is an open one and the search for a scapegoat and the historical pressures in the trial must be resisted.

"The tribunal has not been established to satisfy victims," he said. "The tribunal must be wary of the desire for revenge and the need for a scapegoat ...The thirst for revenge must not be satisfied at the well of polluted justice."

Much of the first part of his opening statement was a complaint. He listed the obstacles to mounting a decent defense for his client. Most importantly, he told the court that the situation in northern Bosnia made defending Tadic almost impossible.

All of the prosecution witnesses are refugees living outside the former Yugoslavia. All the defense witnesses live in the Serbian entity in that war-torn land, Republica Srpksa. The civil order in the northern Bosnia region has been replaced by a kind of fiefdom, ruled by a man named Simo Drljac.

And Drljac is the kind of man, according to numerous government sources, who thrives in the madness of war. He has built his power through what is practically a private army -- the police of Opstina Prijedor. Since the war stopped last year, many discharged soldiers looking for regular pay have swelled the ranks of Drljac's men.

And people are afraid of him.

Wladimiroff quoted "one high-ranking official in northern Bosnia who told him: "No one can order me to allow witnesses for the defense to my interviewed in my area ... No witnesses can make a statement without my permission."

And that is the problem for the defense. All their witnesses live in the area controlled by Drjlac and he does not want the tribunal on his turf.

Wladimiroff then addressed why Drjlac would not want to help a fellow Serb.

Tadic did not commit the crimes, he said. Another man who looks just like Tadic did them. That other man works for Drljac.

Wladimiroff did say that Tadic is viewed by many Serbs in Bosnia as a deserter and draft dodger who escaped the fighting by landing a job as a reserve traffic police officer in Prijedor. Because of his refusal to fight, Tadic has been abandoned by his people, Wladimiroff claims.

And the people who have come forward against Tadic are wrong, he continued. Wladimiroff noted the intense psychological and political pressures on the witnesses. The defense contends that many of the corroborating stories about Tadic were picked up in the media, or passed down from person to person in the refugee communities.

As far as an alibi is concerned, Wladimiroff told the court that the defense will try to present witnesses who were with Tadic on most of the days in question and back up those claims with documents -- duty rosters and time-cards from his job. The defense also is trying to get the testimony of guards or others who worked at the Omarska camp.

Wladimiroff ended his opening statement by returning to the fairness question. "We are standing on the edge of a fair trial," he told the court. "Please do not push us over...If you enable us, if you enable our witnesses to testify, you will not convict Dusko Tadic."

MAY 8
The testimony of the first witness, University of London war studies professor James Gow, is important for establishing the elements of some of the crimes with which Dusko Tadic is charged.

Tadic is charged under three broad categories of crimes: grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war.

Gow's testimony is the start of the prosecutions efforts to answer some of the following: What makes a murder a crime against humanity? What makes a brutal interrogation torture and therefore a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions? Who is bound by the laws and customs of war, and who is protected by them?

Grave Breaches
The Geneva Conventions of 1949 were originally agreements among states to behave when they went to war against each other. The conventions prohibit the following acts: willful killing; torture and inhuman treatment including biological experiments; willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health; extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; compelling a prisoner of war to civilian to serve in the forces of a hostile power; unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a civilian and the taking of civilians as hostages.

But the law only applies when the acts are committed by persons linked to a party of a conflict or an occupying power against persons protected by the Conventions.

So the question arises: who were Tadic's alleged victims? His neighbors or protected persons? Thats one of the questions the prosecution is trying to answer through Gow's testimony.

Under the Geneva Conventions, protected persons are defined as prisoners of war and civilians who, in the event of a conflict or an occupation, find themselves in the hands of a party to the conflict or occupying power of which they are not nationals.

Lets say the United States goes to war against Mexico. Its pretty clear who protected persons are under the convention: Mexicans on one side of the border, Americans on the other side. But Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia is a more complicated question.

The issue of nationality is a mixed question of law and fact to be answered at trial, according to prosecutors in the Tadic case.

Gow says Serbia destroyed Yugoslavia. He sees the raw nationalism of the Serbian people and the lust for power of Slobodan Milosevic as the driving force behind the break-up of the country, the start of the war and the perpetration of war crimes.

This is important in the Tadic case because, after Slovenia, Croatia and then Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence and were recognized by the world community, they were sovereign nations, and the citizens were protected by the Geneva Conventions against any foreign armed force or occupying power -- like say, Serbia.

Gow says the war in Bosnia was launched and directed by the military and political leadership in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and of the new Yugoslavia. He says what in effect happened was that the Serb-dominated Yugoslavian National Army (the JNA) teamed up with local Serb militias and waged war against the independent state of Bosnia. If he is right, the war in Bosnia was an international armed conflict, not a civil war, and Tadic was working hand-in-glove with an occupying power, a foreign armed force.

Gow's proof lies in the numerous speeches, documents and even memoirs of the major participants, as well as the order of battle and movement through territory of the JNA itself. Gow says the comments of Serb leaders in Belgrade prove that they wanted to create a Greater Serbia by ripping out of the map of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina those territories where Serbs lived in large numbers, cleansing them of non-Serbs and attaching them to the country calling itself Yugoslavia. It was a simple land-grab, he says.

But theres another version of this history that the defense will no doubt rely on. In this version, the welling up of nationalist feeling in Croatia especially but also in Bosnia-Herzegovina, threatened the security of hundreds of thousands of Serbs whose families had lived there for centuries. And it was no idle threat. The Croatian fascist regime in World War II liquidated hundreds of thousands of Serbs. And some of the first things the Croatian nationalist party did in the 1990s when it came to power was restore the flag of the fascist regime, restore the police uniforms, re-name schools and streets after the leadership of the regime, and change the constitution to alter the status of Serbs living there.

In Bosnia, the rise of Alija Izebetgovic's Muslim nationalist party also frightened the Serbs living there. Serbs always point to Izebetgovic's writings, in which he suggests that Islam ought to know no secular boundaries. Bosnia-Herzegovina ought to become part of the international Islamic revolution.

So the defense will argue that what happened in Bosnia was the rising up of native Bosnian Serbs against a regime they didnt like. Any JNA troops in Bosnia who helped them were just the Bosnian-Serb element of the JNA coming to the defense of their people.

Crimes Against Humanity Gow's testimony concerning the other two categories of crimes in which Tadic is charged track his testimony relevant to "graves breaches," with significant differences.

There are the crimes against humanity the tribunal is empowered to judge: murder; extermination; enslavement; deportation; imprisonment; torture; rape; persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds, and other inhumane acts.

The tribunal only has jurisdiction over these crimes -- can only convict Tadic of murder, say -- if it finds they were committed in armed conflict, whether international or internal in character, and directed against any civilian population.To show Tadic's crimes were directed against any civilian population, prosecutors must show that at the time of the commission of the accused's acts...there was ongoing a widespread and systematic attack directed against a civilian population, and that Tadic knew or had reason to know that by his acts he was participating in the attack.

Violations of the Laws or Customs of War
Tadic is charged with the following violations of the laws or customs of war: murder; cruel treatment; plunder or pillage of public or private property.

The laws and customs of war is a kind of catch-all for bad deeds done during battle. There are some specific laws of war -- like the Hague Conventions of 1907 -- but the customs of war are more vague.

The prosecution in the Tadic case must show a nexus between the crimes and an armed conflict for them to constitute violations of the laws and customs of war. This is easier than it sounds. The geographical and temporal frame of reference is broad, according to the Appeals Chamber of the tribunal. The chamber ruled on the matter last year.

So all the prosecution has to do is show that Tadic committed these acts while war was going on nearby at roughly the same time.

MAY 9
The direct examination of James Gow concluded today, with the prosecution's expert witness getting to the heart of his version of history, and the prosecution's theory of the context of the case against Dusko Tadic.

Gow discussed what happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1991 and 1994. Once again, his conclusion was conspiratorial: After the declaration of independence by the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo in March 1992, and the recognition of the state as an equal among nations in the world, Serbs from within and without her borders set upon her and sought to tear her apart, all at the direction and behest of authorities in Belgrade, especially Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Gow once again backed up his contention by the words, official documents and actions of Serbian leaders. The most chilling moment of the day came in the videotape clip of a notorious speech by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in the Bosnian parliament, a speech in which Karadzic can be understood to be threatening genocide. "You Muslims are not ready for war," he said. "If it comes, it will mean your extinction." The videoclip was another piece of evidence from the British documentary Gow helped to produce, "Death of Yugoslavia."

When Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence, Karadzic and the rest of the Serbian nationalists withdrew from parliament, reconvened in Banja Luka, and declared their own state, the "Republica Srpksa," which Gow noted ominously, considered itself linked to Belgrade as "part of the territory of Yugoslavia." Once again, the prosecution contends, a foreign power was making war on Bosnia, bringing all the force of international law into play.

But there was another purpose to Gow's testimony, one referring to Tadic. It emerged as the witness discussed what happened once war began, and it dovetailed nicely with prosecutor Grant Niemann's opening statement.

Planned Takeover
Serbs planned a military and political takeover of vast portions of Bosnia, Gow contended. They did so by careful planning and preparation, in the army and on the ground.

The Yugoslavian People's Army (the JNA) was fighting Croatia throughout most of 1991. Bosnia was a major base of operations. As the Croatian war came to a close, the JNA pulled back through Bosnia. When it became clear that Bosnia was going to secede, Belgrade began sending in every Serb officer and enlisted man born in Bosnia into the JNA forces there. Then, on May 4, 1992, under intense international pressure, Belgrade ordered the JNA out of Bosnia -- but allowed Bosnian Serb personnel to remain in the country, fully armed.

The effect of this was, according to prosecutors and Gow, to establish on the territory on an independent state of Bosnia-Herzegovina a fully equipped army operating at the behest of a foreign power. That's why the early stages of the war went so horribly for the Muslims. They were fighting not just their neighbors but an occupying army.

That's the army prong of Gow's Serbian conspiracy theory. The other two prongs dealt more closely with Tadic: paramilitaries and a shadow Bosnian Serb government, a "fifth column."

The Role of Paramilitaries
Gow says that the military actions of the JNA were closely coordinated with paramilitary irregular forces and with local Serbs who would take power once the legitimate Muslim authorities were cleaned out. The paramilitaries were directed by several radical Serb leaders in Belgrade. They recruited Serbs throughout Bosnia and they went house to house cleaning Muslims out of the towns.

Prosecutors have not claimed that Tadic was in the paramilitaries, but given the manner in which they describe his role in the Serb takeover of northern Bosnia, it's clear they will contend he was working closely with them. Tadic, prosecutors allege, was armed secretly. He helped round up Muslims in his hometown of Kozarac and he provided lists of names of prominent Muslims who were selected for liquidation later.

Gow also claimed that Serbs had, lying in wait for the military attack, secret shadow governments of local Serbs who would replace the Muslim civil authorities once victory was secured. Here too, his general description of what happened coincides with the prosecution's claims about the defendant. Tadic did indeed become an official in Kozarac after the battle of May 23-24, 1992, and the defeat and "cleansing" of the Muslims.

Defense Seeks Freer Access to Tadic
The defense filed a motion asking the court to order the registry, the neutral, administrative arm of the tribunal, to allow defense experts to meet privately with Tadic in the holding cell in the courthouse. The Registry, for security purposes, had sought to draw a line between counsel and witnesses when it came to private access to Tadic. Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald ordered that the access be granted, as long as lawyers were present with the experts and no more than four people were in the cell with Tadic at one time.

MAY 10
The court was not in session.