Bosnian War

The war in Bosnia has focused international horror on the phenomenon of wartime rape - as a consequence of war, a calculated tactic of war, an act of ethnic cleansing. News reports tell of women - and girls as young as 10 or 12 - raped in front of their fathers and mothers; some taken from their homes to camps where they are used repeatedly and then slain; some impregnated and imprisoned to await the births of unwanted children. The victims number in the thousands. How can this be happening - on such a scale, in this century, in this particular land?

Days after British soldiers arrested one suspect and killed another, President Clinton is facing new pressure at home to order U.S. soldiers into action against accused Bosnian war criminals. Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D., Conn.) - joined by 83 groups ranging from the AFL-CIO to the YMCA - called on Clinton yesterday to risk American lives if necessary to arrest dozens of men accused of crimes against humanity. "We have to take some risks now for the sake of peace," declared Dole, the losing Republican candidate in November's presidential elections.

Before war broke out here a decade ago, this handsome city was a small wonder behind the Iron Curtain: modern, ethnically mixed, and filled with an energy hard to find elsewhere in the plodding communist bloc countries. The Bosnian war changed all that. For more than three years, Sarajevans were forced to live in a frantic state of siege, dodging Serbian sniper bullets, mortar shells, and grenades from the surrounding hillsides. Homes and offices were reduced to rubble. About 12,000 people were killed and 60,000 wounded - a substantial toll for a city whose population then was 500,000.

The pace of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has been glacial: two convictions in four years. But officials predict that the rate of prosecutions is about to pick up. They cite recent arrests and full funding from the United Nations for the tribunal investigating the atrocities of the Bosnian conflict. In a case that illustrates the tribunal's difficulties, last week it seemed that rape had been successfully prosecuted, for the first time in history, as a crime of war. Former Serbian military official Drogoljub Kunarac pleaded guilty last Monday to raping four Bosnian women in the town of Foca in 1992.

The Central Intelligence Agency has confirmed what journalists who covered the Bosnian war already knew: 90 percent of the acts of "ethnic cleansing" were committed by Serbs and leading Serbian politicians were almost certainly involved in planning the atrocities. In plain English, this means that Serbian officials plotted the systematic expulsion of Muslim and Croats from targeted towns and villages in Bosnia, helped by campaigns of rape, murder and torture. This information refutes the claims of Western European governments - and sometimes of U.S. officials - that the Bosnian conflict is a civil war in which Serbs, Muslims and Croats are equally to blame.

It shakes your faith in human nature. Unless, like us at "SideShow," you had none to begin with. Comes word that that Kleen-kut Kanadian Kid Justin Bieber , in the last throes of being 16, is being investigated in connection with - OMG! - assault charges. We knew there was something false with his affable, lovable, squishy little cute-boot equability, didn't you? Police in British Columbia are investigating claims that the savage, menacing J-Bieb pushed a 12-year-old boy during a game of laser tag. What ?

Sarajevo was once a living symbol for Yugoslavs who wanted to see tolerance triumph over divisive ethnic nationalism. Before the fighting began, more than 40 percent of Sarajevo's population was linked together by marriage across ethnic lines. Serbs, Croats and Muslims were mixed within the same families. Sarajevans identified themselves as Yugoslavs, not as members of a single ethnic tribe. No more. The pluralistic principles Sarajevo embodied have been shattered by the mortars that pummel its citizens every day. And to its shame, the West has simply stood by - and watched.

Winning a grant to arrange performances in Zagreb may sound like copping fourth prize, but to composer David Hahn it is a chance to build musical bridges. Hahn, a Philadelphia native now living and teaching in Seattle, left last week for the Croatian capital of Zagreb to prepare concerts of his music with local musicians. He is a winner of an ArtsLink Collaborative Grant designed to bring American musicians together with artists from Eastern Europe and Russia. "Actually, I've spent several summers there," Hahn said.

TUZLA MOVING MOSLEMS OUT FOR GOOD After routing thousands of civilians from their homes and burning their villages, Serbs yesterday reportedly offered to escort the beleaguered Moslems from the region and told them they could never return. The statement, reported by the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug, apparently confirms the Serbs' goal in the offensive: driving all Moslems from eastern Bosnian regions bordering Serbia in a quest for a so-called Greater Serbia. Serbs have been accused of widespread "ethnic cleansing" in the Bosnian war. LONDON MAJOR: MERIT RULES THE MEDALS Prime Minister John Major has taken a whack at the "gongs," announcing yesterday that merit will dictate who gets the 2,000-odd knighthoods, peerages and shiny gold medals awarded each year.

Why is a Balkan war that seemed mired in endless slaughter suddenly reversing course and heading toward a peace settlement? If Western leaders don't focus on exactly what made this startling change possible, they could botch the chance for long-term peace. The turnaround came because the Clinton team and NATO allies finally recognized that keeping peace in the West after the Cold War still requires strong leadership and the exercise of military power. President Clinton, prodded by French President Jacques Chirac, finally showed some muscle in pushing NATO to bomb Bosnian Serb military targets.

NEW YORK - Angelina Jolie is dressed in elegant black, her arms bare, the Roman-numeral tattoos, the Arabic tattoos, prominent on her thin, sinewy arms. It is a quiet Sunday, the week before the Hollywood Foreign Press Association selected In the Land of Blood and Honey as one of its five Golden Globe contenders in the foreign-language category. And Jolie, holding court at the Waldorf Astoria, is here to talk about said film. It's her first screenplay. It's her first time as a director.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Last seen as a swaggering general in the Bosnia war, Ratko Mladic yesterday help rising from his chair for war-crimes judges, his limp right hand too weak to put on earphones without assistance. But as his arraignment proceeded, his old bluster returned as he called his indictment "obnoxious" and told judges he doesn't want help walking "as if I were a blind man. " The capture and trial of the Bosnian Serb wartime commander on charges of genocide and war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war closes the bloodiest chapter in European history since World War II and is nearly the final act of the Yugoslav tribunal, a court that launched a renewed era of international justice after the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Last seen as a swaggering general in the Bosnia war, Ratko Mladic needed help rising from his chair Friday for war-crimes judges, his limp right hand too weak to put on earphones without assistance. But as his arraignment proceeded, his old bluster returned as Mladic, 69, called his indictment "obnoxious" and told the judges he didn't want help walking "as if I were a blind man. " The capture and trial of the Bosnian Serb commander on charges of genocide and war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war closes the bloodiest chapter in European history since World War II. It is also nearly the final act of the Yugoslav tribunal, a court that launched a renewed era of international justice after the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.

BELGRADE - Ratko Mladic received family visits in a Serbian jail and ordered strawberries to eat, but as early as Monday the former general, nabbed in a predawn raid, could be on his way to facing a war-crimes tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands. There he could possibly join his former political ally, Radovan Karadzic, on trial for some of the worst horrors of the Balkan wars. The former Bosnian Serb army commander known for his cruelty and arrogance began issuing demands from behind bars Friday, calling for a television set and Tolstoy novels, and regaining some of his trademark hubris after the raid in a Serbian village the day before ended his 16 years on the run. His family said that he was too ill to stand up to the rigors of a genocide trial and that he's not guilty of any crimes, including his alleged role in the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II - the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Srebrenica enclave in Bosnia.

It shakes your faith in human nature. Unless, like us at "SideShow," you had none to begin with. Comes word that that Kleen-kut Kanadian Kid Justin Bieber , in the last throes of being 16, is being investigated in connection with - OMG! - assault charges. We knew there was something false with his affable, lovable, squishy little cute-boot equability, didn't you? Police in British Columbia are investigating claims that the savage, menacing J-Bieb pushed a 12-year-old boy during a game of laser tag. What ?

B-52 crashes; 3 known dead HONOLULU - An Air Force B-52 bomber crashed off Guam yesterday morning, killing at least three airmen and leading to the search of a vast area of the Pacific Ocean for the remaining three crew members, the military said. Six vessels, three helicopters, two F-15 fighter jets and a B-52 bomber were involved in the search, which had covered about 70 square miles of ocean, said Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Elizabeth Buendia. Most-wanted Serb captured BELGRADE, Serbia - Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, a war-crimes fugitive and one of the world's most-wanted men, was arrested yesterday in a sweep by Serbian security forces.

It's not easy mixing edgy satire and ethnic cleansing, the high-speed antics of a buddy picture with the grim business of torture and rape. And Richard Shepard's The Hunting Party doesn't always succeed in its tricky juggling act, but the balls are up there, spinning. Just having thrown them aloft is a feat. A frantic, fictionalized adaptation of Scott K. Anderson's Esquire article about a band of journalists on the trail of a Bosnian war criminal, The Hunting Party stars Richard Gere as a veteran TV newsman and Terrence Howard as his longtime cameraman/compatriot.

A Sarajevo street will be named in honor of American writer and activist Susan Sontag, who helped the city's residents during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. "The city of Sarajevo [and] its citizens express their sincere thanks to an author and a humanist who actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo," a statement from Mayor Muhidin Hamamdzic said. Sontag, who died Tuesday at 71, visited Sarajevo many times and lobbied for international intervention to end the war. In '93, she helped stage a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Youth Theater.

Before war broke out here a decade ago, this handsome city was a small wonder behind the Iron Curtain: modern, ethnically mixed, and filled with an energy hard to find elsewhere in the plodding communist bloc countries. The Bosnian war changed all that. For more than three years, Sarajevans were forced to live in a frantic state of siege, dodging Serbian sniper bullets, mortar shells, and grenades from the surrounding hillsides. Homes and offices were reduced to rubble. About 12,000 people were killed and 60,000 wounded - a substantial toll for a city whose population then was 500,000.