JUNE 17
The tribunal was not in session.

JUNE 18
Two Muslims accused of war crimes pleaded not guilty and their attorneys said the defendants were acting only in self-defense to protect themselves from the aggression of Bosnian Serbs.

Hazim Delic and Esad Landzo were named in the Celebici indictment, named for the Muslim-run Celebici prison camp in the Konjic municipality. Two other men named in the indictment, Zdravko Mucic and Zejnil Delalic, entered not guilty pleas earlier this spring.

"It is common knowledge in the tribunal and the world that the aggressor was Serbia," an attorney for Landzo told the court. "It was not an attack, it was self defense. It was the only way to save the city from the same fate as Prijedor and Kozarac."

The indictment against the Muslims is important because it is the first dealing with alleged crimes against Bosnian Serbs. The prosecution wants to try all four men together but attorneys for Delalic and Mucic already have filed motion for separate trials.

Three of the four men -- Delalic, Mucic and Delic -- are accused of holding command positions at the camp. Landzo is accused of being a camp guard.

In a related development, a Serb incarcerated since March was released after prosecutors became convinced that they had the wrong man in custody. Goran Lajic was returned to Germany, where he was arrested in March.

In the trial of Dusko Tadic, a second survivor of the Omarska prison camp testified about the brutal conditions he was forced to endure. Ferid Mujcic said he saw Tadic several times at the camp but never saw him commit a crime. He said Tadic, whom he has known since childhood, was wearing a camouflage uniform and carrying a gun each time he saw him.

JUNE 19
A Muslim laborer described how his adult son was yanked from his arms as they marched though Kozarac in May of 1992. Salko Karabasic said Dusko Tadic singled out his son and had one of his colleagues pull him away. Karabasic said he fought to save his son from being pulled to a near-certain death, but the guards forced him to let go by threatening to take him too. The son has not been seen since that day.

Karabasic identified Tadic in court and said he is "1,000 percent sure" he is the same person he saw singling people out of a column of Muslims during the siege on Kozarac. He said Tadic was issuing orders and Goran Borovnica was carrying them out.

JUNE 20
Two more survivors of Omarska testified today but neither one offered particularly incriminating evidence against Dusko Tadic.

One witness said he saw Tadic twice at the camp but did not see him doing anything other than standing with other Serbs wearing camouflage uniforms. The other witness said Tadic beat him up but not when he was at Omarska. He said he took karate lessons from Tadic when he was a kid (he's 35 now) and that Tadic got mad and once beat him up after he accidentally kicked another kid in the head. The witness has not yet testified about Tadic in relationship to anything that happened to him during the war.

One strange thing happened in court while the witness, Nihad Haskic, was testifying. When he was asked if he saw Tadic in court, Tadic stood up and said, "I'm Dule Tadic." (Dule is a nickname for Dusko.)

It was one of the first times Tadic has spoken in court, and appeared as if he thought it was ridiculous for the prosecutor to ask the witness if Tadic was in the room when everyone in the court knew who he was and where he was sitting.

JUNE 21
A Muslim survivor of Trnopolje offered the most graphic testimony yet about life inside the prison camp.

Sulejman Besic told the tribunal that there was constant shooting at the camp. "They were shooting for fun," he said. "It was like music to them. They couldn't do without it."

In testifying about conditions at the camp, Besic said he wasn't given food during his first four days at Trnopolje. On the fourth day, the guards brought food for the children because a Serbian television crew was present. The guards passed out chocolate to the children but as soon as the television crew was gone, the guards picked up the food and no one was allowed to eat it.

There were no toilet facilities for the prisoners. Some inmates were forced to dig ditches to use as toilets, but the unsanitary conditions made disease spread quickly.

One day, Besic said he was sent to the interrogation room. Guards wanted to know what he had done with his weapon. He insisted he did not have a weapon and he was beaten. As he was being beaten, a man walked in and told the guards to stop. The man turned out to be Besic's former boss, a Serb. The former boss said, "I know him and he had no rifle." That ended the particular beating, but there were many others.

Once, the guards told the inmates they could go if they got on a bus. There was a mad rush for the bus, but Besic didn't try to get on., He later heard that everyone on the bus had been shot. The Trnopolje camp commander, however, told the remaining inmates that the people were freed and that about 20 of them were killed by Muslims.

Another time, he said he and four others were given shovels and told to start digging. Besic said he began to think something was suspicious because the guards were sitting nearby drinking cognac and arguing over what was going to go in the hole. Besic faked a stomach cramp and asked to if he could go to the toilet. He said he never saw any of the four men again, leaving the implication that they had dug their own graves.

He also offered detailed testimony these atrocities:

@ A Serb soldier killed a mother in front of her adult son, who was incarcerated in a prison camp. The guard then forced the son to disrobe and ordered him to rape his mother. The son was killed, apparently before he was forced to touch his mother's body.

@ A professor held prisoner apparently was shot by one of his former students, who was irritated about his bad grades. The student-turned-guard said, "If my marks had been better, your life would have lasted longer."

@ A group of elderly Muslim men were stabbed in the throat and killed when they tried to protect several Muslim teenage girls from being attacked by guards.

Besic said he met Tadic twice before the war. He has not yet mentioned Tadic in connection with anything he saw during the war.

Besic took the witness stand after Saud Hrnic, a Muslim survivor of Omarska, completed his testimony.

He testified that he once saw Dusko Tadic at the camp. Hrnic said he was lying on the ground in an outdoor area of the camp when he looked up and saw Tadic. He said he did not know what Tadic was doing, whether he was carrying any weapons, whether he had a beard or whether he was alone or in a group.

The witness said that when he saw Tadic, his former karate instructor, he put his head down so Tadic would not see him. He said the guards seemed to kill anyone they knew in Omarska and he didn't want Tadic to recognize him.

During cross-examination, the defense pointed out that it's difficult to believe Hrnic would be face down on the ground and still see Tadic. Defense attorney Stephen Kay wondered why Hrnic would risk his life by lifting his head to see who was around.

Kay also suggested that Hrnic might have gotten Tadic confused with Dusko Banovic, who also was at Omarska. The witness said it was impossible because he knew Banovic only by the nickname of Duca. And at one point, Hrnic seemed to bristle at Kay's suggestion that he did not really see Tadic at the camp.

"I don't know, were you there or was I there," he said.