EC TEAM CONFIRMS REPORTS OF RAPES BY SERBS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 9, 1993                   TAG: 9301090079
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: B6   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: PARIS                                LENGTH: Medium
EC TEAM CONFIRMS REPORTS OF RAPES BY SERBS
A European Community team of investigators has concluded that Serbian forces have raped up to 20,000 Muslim women and girls in Bosnia as part of a systematic policy of terror designed to intimidate, demoralize and drive them from their homes.
The inquiry, the first official effort to collect evidence for a Nuremberg-like war crimes tribunal, was led by former British diplomat Anne Warburton and a former French health minister, Simone Veil, who is now a leading member of the European parliament. They were accompanied by lawyers, forensic psychiatrists and experts in rape counseling.
The group was assigned its task by the EC's 12 government leaders, who issued a harsh condemnation of these "acts of unspeakable brutality" at their summit meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, last month.
The EC investigators spent five days in Croatia in late December interviewing Muslim refugees. They also collated other eyewitness accounts, first gathered by the Red Cross and other humanitarian aid groups on the scene, that will serve as a body of evidence to bring the perpetrators of war crimes to justice.
In their report, the investigators said they found that rape was occurring in Bosnia on a mass scale, not as random attacks but as part of a deliberate policy to build a "Greater Serbia" through "ethnic cleansing" - the driving out of non-Serbs.
"A repeated feature of Serbian attacks on Muslim towns and villages was the use of rape, or the threat of rape, as a weapon of war to force the population to leave their homes," the delegation said in a five-page report.
The investigators said "rape is part of a pattern of abuse, usually perpetrated with the conscious intention of demoralizing and terrorizing communities, driving them from their homes and demonstrating the power of the invading forces."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB