Andal Ampatuan makes first court appearance on massacre charges

Agence France-Presse

MANILA // The head of a powerful Philippine clan pleaded not guilty yesterday to murdering 57 enemies and journalists.

In his first court appearance on charges of masterminding the country's worst political massacre, the 70-year-old Andal Ampatuan Snr faced more than two dozen relatives of the victims in the heavily guarded courtroom.

He nodded when asked if he understood the charges read out to him, as the judge, Jocelyn Reyes, ordered the trial to proceed after denying Mr Ampatuan's last-minute appeal to delay proceedings.

"Not guilty", Mr Ampatuan muttered to jeers from emotional family members of the victims who had packed the small room.

The Muslim clan patriarch, his son and namesake Andal Ampatuan Jnr and four relatives are among more than 80 people arrested and charged with murder over the November 2009 massacre of 57 people, 32 of whom were journalists.

After the trial got under way, police announced that two more suspects, an ex-policeman and an armed Ampatuan follower, had been arrested in the southern province of Maguindanao, where the killings took place.

More than a hundred other suspects, including Ampatuan relatives and members of a government-armed militia that worked under the family's direct command, remain at large.

The court has yet to read the charges against 21 of those in custody, and legal experts had earlier warned that the trial would stretch for years in the notoriously slow Philippine justice system.

The victims and some of their vehicles were found buried in mass graves in a deserted farm on a hillock, near an excavator, which bore the Ampatuan patriarch's name.

A witness earlier said that the Ampatuans had planned the killings six days beforehand, with the patriarch telling the group to make sure the murders were carried out carefully. The Ampatuans, who had ruled Maguindanao for a decade, are alleged to have ordered the murders to stop a rival from challenging Mr Ampatuan Jnr for the post of Maguindanao governor in last year's elections.

On Wednesday, relatives of the victims crowded into the courthouse, built in a suburban Manila jail compound specifically for the trial,- and cried and shouted as Mr Ampatuan Snr was ushered into the courtroom in handcuffs.

Juliet Evardo, 50, mother of one of the murdered journalists, cried during a break in the hearing as she recounted how she felt when she saw Mr Ampatuan Snr.

"How can he plead not guilty when the backhoe [excavator] bore his name?" Ms Evardo said.

Ms Evardo's 24-year-old son, Julito, was a television editor who defied her appeals not to join supporters and relatives of a rival candidate on their ill-fated convoy to submit candidacy papers to the local election watchdog.

Esmael Mangudadatu, the rival Maguindanao politician who was elected governor after the massacre, expressed satisfaction that his wife, sister and other relatives, who were among the victims, would finally get justice.

The Ampatuans had ruled Maguindanao under the patronage of former president Gloria Arroyo, who rights monitors said had allowed the clan to keep a large private army as a proxy force against Muslim rebels.

Mr Mangudadatu, meanwhile, said members of the Ampatuan private army were among the suspects still at large. They were continuing to harass witnesses, he said, including one man who was shot and a woman they allegedly raped.

Mr Mangudadatu said these witnesses "are now out of danger and will continue to testify" and added that "this illustrates the lingering power of the clan".

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A child's meeting with Ratko Mladic, hours before the massacre of thousands

Associated Press

PROHICI // The footage horrified the world: a grinning Ratko Mladic patting a Muslim boy on the head and assuring him everyone in the Srebrenica area would be safe, just hours before overseeing the murder of 8,000 men and boys.

The boy in the video is now a 24-year-old man. He recalls with crystal clarity the sunny day in 1995 when he met the Bosnian Serb military commander, who gave him chocolate.

"I was 8 and I didn't know what was going on, or who Ratko Mladic was," Izudin Alic said on Tuesday.

Mr Mladic, now 69, was captured last week by Serbian intelligence agents after 16 years on the run, and the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague plans to try him on charges of genocide. Mr Mladic was sent to the Netherlands on Tuesday, hours after judges rejected his appeal of an extradition order.

In 1995, Mr Alic was among thousands of Bosnian Muslims who fled to the Srebrenica area, seeking protection from UN troops. That July evening, he joined other kids flocking to a grassy field where they heard an important soldier was handing out chocolate.

"I went there with other children and took that chocolate bar from Ratko Mladic," said Mr Alic, a lanky man with sunken eyes. "He asked me what my name was and I said Izudin. I was not afraid. I was just focused on the chocolate."

Mr Alic's grandfather had forbidden him to go, but he sneaked out of the factory where the family was hiding because he could not resist the lure of chocolate.

He was devouring it with gratitude while his father was being hunted down by Mr Mladic's men in nearby woods. His father, Sahzet, had fled the night before along with 15,000 other Srebrenica men, moving through mountains and minefields. Mr Mladic's troops soon caught up with them.

"He was found years ago in one of the mass graves," Mr Alic said, flipping through a photo album showing the family in a garden in front of their home.

The footage that captures Mr Mladic patting Mr Alic on the head generated worldwide revulsion because of the contrast between feigned benevolence and the reality of the massacre to come. Mr Mladic parades among Bosnian refugees, smilingly promising evacuation with his soldiers handing out chocolate to kids. In the video, Mr Mladic asks Mr Alic his age, and Alic responds "12." He says he lied to appear more grown-up, not realising the risks. The youngest known Srebrenica victim was 14.

The United Nations had declared the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, besieged by Serbs throughout the conflict, a protected area for civilians. When Mr Mladic's troops overran the enclave, some 20,000 people flocked to the UN base outside Srebrenica for protection.

So did the Alic family - the young boy, his two sisters, mother and grandfather.

When Serb troops reached the base, the outgunned and outnumbered Dutch peacekeepers never fired a shot, and Mr Mladic's troops began separating out the men for execution.

The family returned to settle in Prohici, just outside Srebrenica, a few years after the war. Mr Alic earns a living as a construction worker and making sandwiches at a fast-food stand.

He often prays at his father's grave in the town's memorial centre, where thousands of Mr Mladic's victims, unearthed from mass graves, were finally laid to rest.

For Mr Alic and his family, some solace came when Mr Mladic was captured last week in a village north of Belgrade.

"I was glad," Mr Alic said. "He should get the biggest sentence possible. He killed my father, my uncle and so many of our people."

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Footage of Muslim boy, 8, whose father was among those killed by Bosnian Serb troops, meeting those troops' leader shocked the world. Izudin Alic, now 24, recalls the day perfectly.

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War crimes prosecutors move swiftly against Mladic over Bosnian Muslim massacre

Ferry Biedermann

THE HAGUE // Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) yesterday moved quickly to start the case against Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army commander who was extradited to the Hague on Monday.

Mr Mladic will appear before the court tomorrow to be arraigned on charges of war crimes and genocide during the conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s.

The chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, yesterday acknowledged the importance of the capture of Mr Mladic, 69, to help Europe move past the deep wounds that were left by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the most violent conflict on European soil since the end of the Second World War and one that pitted mostly Christian Serbs against mostly Muslim Bosniaks.

The arrest of Mr Mladic in Serbia was helped by that country's wish to apply for EU membership, he said at a press conference. The extradition of the fugitive was one of the conditions for the talks to start. But Serbia still has to answer questions over how the former general was able to evade justice for nearly 16 years.

"We want to verify who over the past five years have been instrumental in helping Mladic to stay in hiding and we want them to be accountable," Mr Brammertz said.

Speed is imperative in the case of Mr Mladic because of his apparently precarious health as well as the looming deadline for the tribunal to finish its work. The mandate of the ICTY, set up by the UN Security Council in 1993, ends in 2014. But that may be extended to allow the cases against Mr Mladic and his former political boss, Radovan Karadzic, to be completed.

"It would have been a grave injustice if we had to close our door without having him put on trial here," said Nerma Jelacic, spokesperson for the tribunal and a Bosnian who fled the violence in the 1990s. The conflict between 1992 and 1995 displaced two million people and more than 100,000 lost their lives.

The court is paying special attention to the prisoner's health, which his lawyers have said is failing. The most high-profile accused to stand trial in The Hague, the former Yugoslav and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, died in his cell of a heart attack in 2006 before the case was completed.

Mr Brammertz yesterday presented a pared down indictment for Mr Mladic, reducing the number of charges from 15 to 11, another indication the court wants to expedite the trial. The accusations include one of genocide for the killing of more than 8,000 Muslims in the UN-protected safe haven of Srebrenica in 1995. The former general also stands accused in the death of 10,000 civilians during the siege of Sarajevo and of other crimes during the conflict.

Even as the prosecutor was outlining the charges against Mr Mladic, the case against him was being cemented down the hall in three courtrooms where four other Bosnian Serb defendants are standing trial.

Most poignantly, in the proceedings against Mr Karadzic yesterday, the general was placed at a meeting in the early 1990s in which the Serb leadership decided on measures against the Bosnian Muslims to ensure that "either the whole of Bosnia or the Serbian parts will remain in Yugoslavia".

Bosnian Serbs are not the only ones to stand trial even though they form the majority of the cases. In total, the tribunal has issued 161 indictments to Serbs, Croats and Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims. "We did not indict people on the basis of their nationalities. We indicted them on the basis of the crimes they committed," Ms Jelacic said. Of the 161, just one is still a fugitive, Goran Hadzic, a Serb politician from Croatia who was seen moving freely in Serbia in 2004.

The ICTY has helped the countries of the former Yugoslavia strengthen their own judiciaries to deal with further war-crimes cases, beyond the 2014 deadline for the tribunal.

Ms Jelacic said that the tribunal is helping the countries in the Balkans to move on. "Through doing its job, it is having an impact on the way people's ability to deal with the past, to accept the facts and to discover the scale of the atrocities that were committed in the 1990s and finding those responsible," she said. Next page

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Pared down indictment for Ratko Mladic, reducing the number of charges from 15 to 11, is indication the the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia wants to expedite the trial against he former Bosnian Serb army commander.

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