Global Policy Forum

The U.N. war crimes tribunal has charged a former Croatian general over his role in a 1993 operation against a Serbian enclave, but U.N. prosecutors said on Tuesday they would ask for his trial to take place in Croatia.

Mirko Norac, considered by most Croats a hero of Croatia's war of independence from the Yugoslav federation, was charged with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war during an attack on the Serbian-controlled Medak Pocket in September 1993, the tribunal said.

Norac was sentenced in Croatia last year to 12 years in prison over the deaths of around 50 Serb civilians in the town of Gospic in 1991. He was in charge of defending Gospic from rebel Serb forces at the time. The high court will hear his appeal in June. U.N. war crimes investigators questioned Norac in jail last year.

"We will ask the judge in the coming days to transfer the jurisdiction to a local court," a prosecution spokeswoman said.

Croatia has been under pressure to improve cooperation with the tribunal, a requirement for Zagreb's integration into the European Union. The government is eager to hold some of the war crimes trials at home to prove that its judiciary is capable of handling such cases.

The U.N. tribunal in The Hague made the indictment public on Tuesday after it was issued last week. It includes charges of murder and cruel and inhumane treatment of civilians and captured soldiers, included burning alive a Serbian woman.

"Mirko Norac, acting individually and/or in concert with others... planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of persecutions of Serb civilians of the Medak Pocket on racial, political or religious grounds," the indictment said.

At the time of the attack, which expelled 400 Serb civilians from the region, Norac was a commander of the ninth guards motorised brigade and led a group formed for the purpose of conducting the operation, the court said.

Prosecution spokesperson Florence Hartmann told Croatian state radio on Tuesday that Croatian general Rahim Ademi, who surrendered to the tribunal in 2001, would also be handed over to the local judiciary and tried together with Norac for the Medak Pocket atrocity. Ademi, an ethnic Albanian who served in the Croatian army, was released from tribunal custody to await trial.