SARAJEVO, Bosnia: She may once have been known as “the mistress of life and death,” but in the court trying her for war crimes Azra Basic hardly stands out.
Basic is among around a dozen women charged or convicted of crimes committed during Bosnia’s inter-ethnic war in the 1990s, which claimed nearly 100,000 lives.
Compared to the several hundred men convicted by local and international courts for crimes committed during the 1992-1995 war, the number of women is not many.
But several ex-prisoners have already testified in court to Basic’s brutal torture of detainees since the trial opened in February.
One witness at Basic’s trial recalled in testimony Friday the glimmer of hope he felt on April 26, 1992.
Dusan Nedic said he saw a woman called Azra enter a detention facility in the northern town of Derventa, where he was being held by ethnic Croats.
She spoke with other detainees, he recalled.
“For me it was a glimmer of hope,” said Nedic. “I told myself that a ‘woman should not be aggressive as men.’”
But he was wrong.
“She started to beat the detainees, she was jumping on them while they were on the floor,” the 55-year-old shoe factory worker said.
Looking at her in court, it is difficult to link Basic with the brutal violence, including one murder, of which she is accused.
A short, silent, bespectacled woman, she avoids eye contact when in court.
When in 2011 the authorities finally caught up with her after the war, she was working in a food factory in the US.
Basic has pleaded not guilty to war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war at the start of her trial, including a charge that she killed a prisoner.
“This person was not me,” she told the court on Friday, her voice trembling.
“I swear before God and that’s all,” she added, as Slavisa Djuras, the son of Blagoje Djuras, the man she allegedly killed, looked on.
Biljana Plavsic, now aged 86, remains the most famous woman war criminal from the former Yugoslavia. The former Bosnian Serb Vice President Plavsic is also the only one tried before the UN war crimes court in The Hague.
She was sentenced to 11 years in jail in 2003 after pleading guilty to crimes against humanity for her leading role in a campaign of persecution against Croats and Muslims during Bosnia’s war.
“Women are just as capable of committing crimes,” prominent Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic, told AFP.
That much is clear from her essay on war criminals in the former Yugoslavia titled “They Would Never hurt a Fly.”
“A woman in such a position has to be ‘better’ than men,” Drakulic wrote in an essay on Plavsic.
“In the given circumstances it meant taking more radical views.”
Drakulic recalled the scientific-racist rhetoric used by Plavsic during Bosnia’s war, the kind of ideas the Nazis would not have rejected.
Plavsic, a former biology professor, labeled Bosnian Muslims a “genetic mistake on the Serbian body.”
Bosnia’s war crimes prosecutors say more cases against women suspects are in the pipeline. According to local media, some 40 women are being investigated for war crimes.
Visnja Acimovic, a 45-year-old Bosnian Serb who now lives in neighboring Serbia, is one of them.
She is accused of having taken part in the 1992 executions of 37 Muslims in the eastern Bosnian town of Vlasenica, most of them between 15 and 20 years old.
She denied the charges before a Belgrade court in January, and Serbia will not extradite its citizens for trial in Bosnia. They do not trust Bosnian justice, her lawyer Krsto Bobot said. But not everyone enjoys such protection.
In March, Switzerland extradited Elfeta Veseli, a former member of Bosnian Muslim forces, back to Bosnia.
She is accused of the 1992 murder of a 12-year-old Serb in eastern Bosnia. As his family had fled, the boy returned for a forgotten dog and paid for it with his life. Veseli’s trial has yet to start.
But as well as Basic, the US has also extradited Rasema Handanovic, 44. She had lied about her past as a former member of a special Bosnian Muslim unit.
In 2012 she pleaded guilty to the execution of three civilians and three ethnic Croat prisoners of war in the central Bosnian town of Trusina.
“The order was to do the work at Trusina, so that no one remained alive,” she told the court. She was jailed for five and a half years.
“Each of these women had her own personal reason that could explain her sadistic outburst that targeted men in particular,” said Bosnian psychologist Ismet Dizdarevic.
While there were fewer women war criminals they were notably cruel “to prove their power among men,” he told AFP.
Most of war crimes committed by women took place in a detention context.
Bosnia’s wartime ‘mistresses of life and death’
Bosnia’s wartime ‘mistresses of life and death’
UK’s Starmer calls Trump’s remarks on allies in Afghanistan ‘frankly appalling’
- Britain lost 457 service personnel killed in Afghanistan, its deadliest overseas war since the 1950s
LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called US President Donald Trump’s comments about European troops staying off the front lines in Afghanistan insulting and appalling, joining a chorus of criticism from other European officials and veterans.
“I consider President Trump’s remarks to be insulting and frankly appalling, and I’m not surprised they’ve caused such hurt for the loved ones of those who were killed or injured,” Starmer told reporters.
When asked whether he would demand an apology from the US leader, Starmer said: “If I had misspoken in that way or said those words, I would certainly apologize.”
Britain lost 457 service personnel killed in Afghanistan, its deadliest overseas war since the 1950s. For several of the war’s most intense years it led the allied campaign in Helmand, Afghanistan’s biggest and most violent province, while also fighting as the main US battlefield ally in Iraq.
Starmer’s remarks were notably strong coming from a leader who has tended to avoid direct criticism of Trump in public.
Trump told Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria” on Thursday the United States had “never needed” the transatlantic alliance and accused allies of staying “a little off the front lines” in Afghanistan.
His remarks added to already strained relations with European allies after he used the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos to again signal his interest in acquiring Greenland.
Dutch Foreign Minister David van Weel condemned Trump’s remarks on Afghanistan, calling them untrue and disrespectful.
Britain’s Prince Harry, who served in Afghanistan, also weighed in. “Those sacrifices deserve to be spoken about truthfully and with respect,” he said in a statement.
’WE PAID IN BLOOD FOR THIS ALLIANCE’
“We expect an apology for this statement,” Roman Polko, a retired Polish general and former special forces commander who also served in Afghanistan and Iraq, told Reuters in an interview.
Trump has “crossed a red line,” he added. “We paid with blood for this alliance. We truly sacrificed our own lives.”
Britain’s veterans minister, Alistair Carns, whose own military service included five tours including alongside American troops in Afghanistan, called Trump’s claims “utterly ridiculous.”
“We shed blood, sweat and tears together. Not everybody came home,” he said in a video posted on X.
Richard Moore, the former head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service, said he, like many MI6 officers, had operated in dangerous environments with “brave and highly esteemed” CIA counterparts and had been proud to do so with Britain’s closest ally.
Under NATO’s founding treaty, members are bound by a collective-defense clause, Article 5, which treats an attack on one member as an attack on all.
It has been invoked only once — after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, when allies pledged to support the United States. For most of the war in Afghanistan, the US-led force there was under NATO command.
POLISH SACRIFICE ‘MUST NOT BE DIMINISHED’
Some politicians noted that Trump had avoided the draft for the Vietnam War, citing bone spurs in his feet.
“Trump avoided military service 5 times,” Ed Davey, leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats, wrote on X. “How dare he question their sacrifice.”
Poland’s sacrifice “will never be forgotten and must not be diminished,” Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said.
Trump’s comments were “ignorant,” said Rasmus Jarlov, an opposition Conservative Party member of Denmark’s parliament. In addition to the British deaths, more than 150 Canadians were killed in Afghanistan, along with 90 French service personnel and scores from Germany, Italy and other countries. Denmark — now under heavy pressure from Trump to transfer its semi-autonomous region of Greenland to the US — lost 44 troops, one of NATO’s highest per-capita death rates.
The United States lost about 2,460 troops in Afghanistan, according to the US Department of Defense, a figure on par per capita with those of Britain and Denmark. (Reporting by Sam Tabahriti and Elizabeth Evans in London, Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen and Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Malgorzata Wojtunik in Gdansk, additional reporting by Andrew MacAskill, Muvija M and James Davey in London and Bart Meijer in Amsterdam; Writing by Sam Tabahriti; editing by Gareth Jones, Andrew Heavens, Ros Russell and Diane Craft)
