The former Bosnian Serb interior minister and the chief of police went on trial in The Hague on Monday, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, according to dpa. War-time interior minister Mico Stanisic and his police chief Stojan Zupljanin appeared at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) charged with "persecution, extermination, murder, deportation and torture of non-Serb civilians in various areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina between April and December 1992," a tribunal statement said. In her opening statement, British ICTY prosecutor Joanna Korder said the two participated in "a widespread and systematic campaign of criminal activities of Bosnian Serbs against fellow Bosnians of Muslim or Croat ethnicity." As interior minister of the Serb Republic - self-proclaimed on Bosnian soil in 1992 and propped up by Slobodan Milosevic's regime in Belgrade - Stanisic, 55, allegedly planned, prepared and carried out the persecution and deportation of tens of thousands non-Serbs. The Bosnian-Serb police, which fell under Stanisic's interior affairs department, was allegedly responsible for "ethnic cleansing". Zupljanin, 57, has been indicted over his alleged role in those crimes, committed while he served as chief of the Bosnian Serb security services in Banja Luka, the then-capital of the Serb Republic. Zupljanin also served as advisor for interior affairs to Radovan Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb leader also standing trial at the Hague-based court. The Stanisic-Zupljanin trial is linked with proceedings against Karadzic and his military chief, Ratko Mladic, who remains at large, presumably in Serbia. Karadzic and Mladic were charged with genocide for atrocities such as the 1995 slaughter of 7,000 Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica and the shelling and sniping of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. Zupljanin was arrested and transferred to The Hague in June 2008, after a nine-year run from justice. Since its establishment in 1993, the UN-sponsored ICTY has indicted 161 persons for violations of humanitarian law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001. Proceedings against 120 of them have been concluded.
