Former Bosnian Serb Gen. Vinko Pandurevic will be asked to plead to genocide charges for the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Bosnia, when he appears before the Yugoslav tribunal Thursday. U.N. prosecutors indicted Pandurevic for genocide, violations of the laws or customs of war and crimes against humanity. The indictment against him was secretly issued in 1998 and unsealed in 2001. During Bosnia's 1992-1995 war, Pandurevic commanded the Zvornik Brigade, accused of participating in the mass execution of Bosnian Muslims in July 1995 at Srebrenica, a U.N.-declared safe zone. The brigade was under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic, a leading suspect who remains at large. The fall of Srebrenica, which was under the protection of Dutch peacekeeping troops, was followed by weeklong summary executions in what became Europe's worst carnage since World War II. Thousands of bodies were dumped into mass graves. The indictment alleges Pandurevic intended to ethnically cleanse Srebrenica in an orchestrated effort to "destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslim people as a national, ethnical or religious group." Pandurevic was the 10th Serb to surrender to the U.N. court since October as Balkan states come under pressure to meet the court's demands or be refused negotiations to join the European Union. Around half a dozen other suspects have said they too will turn themselves in. Mladic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic top the list of about a dozen suspects still wanted by the court, established in 1993 by the U.N. Security Council.
