Atrocities

In the face of increasingly lurid stories of Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, the United States and its Arab allies are coming under increasing pressure to put Iraqi soldiers, as well as their leader, Saddam Hussein, on trial for war crimes, officials say. With tens of thousands of Iraqi troops already being held as prisoners of war, experts say they are sure that at least some of the soldiers went beyond the bounds of permissible military action.

The book is entitled "Never Again," and its glossy cover shows Croatian fascists posing for the camera as they hold down a struggling Serb prisoner and prepare to saw off his head. Other chilling photographs in the 80-page publication of the Serbian government depict concentration camp inmates bound in barbed wire, decapitated bodies arranged in grotesque formations and Croatian officers standing triumphantly over trenches filled with the corpses of their victims.

Iris Chang grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., the daughter of an academic physicist and a microbiologist. But the stories she heard around the family dinner table were of another place and time. Her great-grandfather was a Chinese warlord who died mysteriously in the 1920s among his several concubines. Her grandmother escaped to Hong Kong in 1949 by convincing China's new Communist rulers that her husband was being held captive there by a fictional mistress and needed rescue.

Umar Mohammed Ahmed traveled with his terrible memories as he sprawled on the top of an overloaded truck rumbling over the corrugated road from Darfur to Khartoum. He escaped fear but not anger. During that weeklong trip, Ahmed, 38, thought often about his wife and five children left behind, his slain aunt and a 10-year-old girl named Kaltuna who was raped by militia members on her way to fetch water.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will be indicted on war crimes charges today by an international tribunal, well-informed sources said Wednesday, a step that will increase his isolation but could also complicate diplomatic efforts to end the war in Kosovo. The U.N. indictment will accuse Milosevic of involvement in killings, rapes and "ethnic cleansing" by Yugoslav forces that have driven most of Kosovo's 1.8 million ethnic Albanians from their homes, two of the sources said.

Lt. Col. Guillermo Bruno Laborda was upset he didn't get the promotion to full colonel that he felt he deserved. So he wrote an angry letter to Argentine army brass last month detailing the "meritorious" acts of his 28 years of military service. As a young lieutenant in the late 1970s, he wrote, he had personally executed prisoners, and then set their bodies on fire, just as his superiors had ordered.

Nine months after their daughter's charred remains were found outside a machine shop near Whittier, the parents of Kartrice Ann Whitfield visited the site of her gruesome death for the first time Friday. They were joined at a tree-planting ceremony by more than 100 people, many of them local residents who held weekly candlelight vigils at the site last summer. Neighbors beseeched police not to give up on the case, even as one lead after another dried up.

For 19-year-old David Stoliar and more than 700 Jewish refugees like him, their tickets on a ship called the Struma were a golden chance to trade persecution in Europe for new lives in Palestine. Only Stoliar made it to the Holy Land. That's because the crowded transport, adrift with a faulty engine, was torpedoed to the bottom of the Black Sea in a World War II atrocity.

In the first such visit by a high-ranking Western investigator, Washington's senior human rights official Sunday toured snow-covered fields thought to hold the bodies of thousands of massacred Muslims and indicated that evidence is mounting to substantiate allegations of the deadliest atrocity in the Bosnian war.

The British effort to regain the Falkland Islands long has been regarded here as the stuff of military legend--an air, sea and land triumph against a greater Argentine force. But a darker side of the campaign has emerged, involving charges of war crimes that could lead to civilian prosecution of combat paratroopers. An 18-month investigation--by Scotland Yard detectives--is scheduled to be submitted to the director of public prosecutions early in the new year.