The Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, in the first international war crimes hearing since World War II, asked Germany Tuesday to surrender jurisdiction in a torture-murder case against a Bosnian Serb.
The panel of three judges ruled from behind bulletproof glass and protected by U.N. armed guards. Anti-Serb demonstrators marched outside as the hearing took place before an overflow crowd in a room rented from an insurance agency.Presiding Judge Adolphus Karibi-Whyte of Nigeria said Germany must take all necessary steps to comply with the tribunal's request for jurisdiction in trying Dusan Tadic. The court did not ask for Tadic in person, since it has not yet indicted him.
Tadic would become the first international war crimes defendant since the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials of the 1940s.
Germany had no objections to handing Tadic's case over to the tribunal, which cannot try suspects in absentia. However, it had noted constitutional and legal barriers to surrendering Tadic's case.
Tadic, accused of murder, torture, forced evacuations and gang rape, is being held in a Munich prison, after being identified last February by a Bosnian Muslim in a German refugee center. German authorities indicted him Monday on 15 counts of genocide and 10 of murder.
Tadic's legal representative, Joeng Sklebitz, told the court his client was willing to be tried by the tribunal but said Tadic denies the charges.
Prosecutor Richard Goldstone opened the hearing by lamenting that the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals had failed to end crimes against humanity.
"(After) Nuremberg, it was generally anticipated by the international community that a new era had begun," he told the court. "It was not to be. The past five decades have witnessed some of the gravest violations of humanitarian law."
The Hague Tribunal is patterned on the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes courts, but it faces obstacles that didn't hinder victorious World War II allies who already had defendants under lock and key.
Set up by the U.N. Security Council a year ago, the tribunal has no one in custody and wants to try suspects who for the most part are protected by their governments.
Goldstone said witnesses' statements implicate Tadic directly in atrocities committed in the northwestern Prijedor region of Bosnia in 1992.
Tadic, a 38-year-old former bar owner and karate instructor, allegedly helped create death lists of Muslim citizens and was involved in forced deportations. Tadic and a group under his command summarily executed unarmed non-Serbs, according to eyewitness accounts cited by Goldstone.
Citing a statement by American war crimes investigator Michael Keegan, Goldstone described how Tadic and others beat three prisoners at a Bosnian Serb-run concentration camp unconscious with metal rods and truncheons.
In court Tuesday, Judge Elizabeth Odio Benito of Costa Rica noted one significant change from earlier war crimes courts.
"Rape is for the first time being considered as a crime against humanity," she said. "There will be no justice unless women are part of that justice."
Meanwhile in Sarajevo Tuesday, sniper fire killed a girl and a shell wounded four other children as tension roses over the Bosnian army's gains in the countryside.
The shooting followed a nightlong artillery battle on the western edge of Sarajevo.