Video Alters Serbs' View of Bosnian War

Serbian journalists contacted the families of some of the Scorpions shown on the tape in their hometown of Sid. The relatives acknowledged that the men were members of the unit and expressed shock and dismay at their role in the killings. In subsequent days, however, some Serbs sought to diminish the effect, arguing that the killers on the video were simply psychopaths acting on their own and that Serbs were victims of similar crimes by Muslims which were not being shown.

Belgrade human rights activist Natasa Kandic, who helped bring the video to light, said the broadcast had allowed people to judge for themselves.

"The main result of the videotape is that people stopped denying that the Srebrenica [killings] happened," said Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Center, a research organization in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro, that has been gathering information for the war crimes trials in The Hague.

"Before the videotape, we heard daily of people saying, 'Srebrenica didn't happen.' This is a climate in which Karadzic and Mladic are heroes," Kandic said, referring to Radovan Karadzic, the wartime president of the Bosnian Serbs, and Mladic, his top general.

Mladic is widely believed to have either ordered the massacre in Srebrenica or failed to stop it. He was present in the town at the time of the killings.

Both men remain at large. One test of the tape's effect and that of other evidence emerging in The Hague trials will be whether the Serbian government arrests Mladic, who is believed to be hiding in Serbia. Karadzic, meanwhile, is believed to be hiding in the rugged Bosnian mountains.

The story of how the video came to light seems to reflect a crack in the Serb code of silence about Bosnian war crimes.

The tape appears to have been shot by a member of the Scorpions so that copies could be made as mementos for the participants. According to Kandic, the activist, at least 20 copies were handed out before the unit's commander realized that the images could be incriminating and ordered copies returned.

Most Serbs had never heard about the Scorpions, much less their violent missions. No one talked about the unit, its activities or the video until some Scorpion members were put on trial in Serbia in 2003 for the killing of 19 ethnic Albanians during the war in Kosovo province in the late 1990s. During the course of the trial, a Scorpion testified against others for the first time.