The Bosnian Serb wartime interior minister Mico Stanisic and his police chief Stojan Zupljanin were appearing at the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague Friday in the final hearing ahead of the trial starting date on September 14, according to dpa. The two men are charged for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Serb security apparatus against Muslims and Croats during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. As interior minister of the Serb Republic - self-proclaimed on Bosnian soil in 1992 and propped by Slobodan Milosevic's regime in Belgrade - Stanisic, 55, allegedly planned, prepared and executed the persecution and deportation of tens of thousands non-Serbs. Zupljanin, 57, has been indicted over his role in those crimes, committed while he served as chief of the Bosnian Serb security services in Banja Luka. The Stanisic-Zupljanin trial is heavily linked with proceedings against the wartime Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic and his military chief, Ratko Mladic, who remains at large and is presumably hiding in Serbia. Karadzic and Mladic were charged with genocide for atrocities such as the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica and the shelling and sniping of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. Stanisic, indicted in 1999, and Zupljanin, indicted in 2005, face charges of violations of laws and customs of war, including murder, torture, and cruel treatment against the non-Serb population. Their indictments were joined last year. 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.
