Bosnian

Harun Mehmedinovic remembers the hungry wild dogs clawing through the snow, trying to get to frozen bodies of victims of the siege of Sarajevo. He was 10 years old. The Bosnian war was in its second year. Less than 15 years later, the war was over, and Mehmedinovic had graduated from UCLA film school and earned a master's degree from the American Film Institute, where he wrote and directed his thesis film, "In the Name of the Son. " The 25-minute short helped the young filmmaker become the first student in AFI's history to win both its top directing prizes, the Franklin J. Schaffner Fellow Award and the Richard P. Rogers Spirit of Excellence Award.

Two Bosnian Serb officials each must spend 22 years in prison for their roles in a campaign of murder and torture against Muslims and Croats in the 1990s, a U.N. war crimes tribunal ruled Wednesday. As interior minister for the breakaway Serb Republic of Srpska, Mico Stanisic “both intended and significantly contributed to the plan to remove Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from the territory of the planned Serbian state,” as did senior security official Stojan Zupljanin, said a judgment read out by Judge Burton Hall in The Hague.

Croatian gunmen fired on about 200 Muslims visiting a cemetery Monday, killing one person, wounding many others and jeopardizing a key element of the Balkan peace agreement. The attack was one of the worst outbreaks of violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina since the 1995 Dayton accord. The mayor of Muslim east Mostar, Safet Orucevic, was beaten; the city's Islamic leader, Seid Smajkic, sustained a minor gunshot wound. "I heard noise and then shots.

A Bosnian Serb general was convicted of genocide and other war crimes Wednesday by a United Nations tribunal in the Netherlands for his role in plotting and carrying out the murder of thousands of Muslim men in Eastern Bosnia in 1995. Zdravko Tolimir, intelligence chief and deputy to wartime Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic, was found guilty of murder, persecution, deportation and genocide by a 2-1 judgment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Tolimir, 64, was a key architect of the criminal conspiracies to eradicate Muslims from Bosnian territory coveted by Serbs, including the killing of at least 6,000 Muslim men from the purportedly U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.

You wouldn't expect there would be "a fairy tale" associated with a film about Bosnia, but that's exactly how writer-director Danis Tanovic describes the experience of getting his first feature film made. Within days of pitching his blackly absurdist "No Man's Land" to French-based Noe Productions in the fall of 1999, the company had him signed to a deal and several co-production partners lined up. Six months later, filming began in Slovenia.

Five-month-old Muhammed smiles at the caress of his day-shift nanny, exposing two little bottom teeth and an innocence of the horror that gave him life and the stigma that stalks his future. Muhammed is one of the hundreds of infants born to Bosnian women who were raped, children of wartime atrocity who probably will never know a normal family life, especially as long as their country remains mired in deadly turmoil.

The Times' Jan. 28 editorial, "The Atrocity of the Food Weapon," by quoting only December deliveries to Bosnia, is a distortion. The joint commission for delivery of humanitarian aid has stated that aid convoys passed unhindered through the Croatian Defense Council-controlled territory for the period Oct. 17-Dec. 13, as follows: 244 aid convoys with 14 tons total; 134 convoys, 8.5 tons, Muslims; 98 convoys, 4 tons, Croat; 12 convoys, 1.5 tons, Serb. How can you call Croats "genocidal" when they have fed and sheltered nearly 300,000 Bosnian Muslims in Croatia for nearly two years?

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic appeared in court for the first time since his trial for genocide started but said he would not take part again unless he had more time to prepare. Karadzic, acting as his own lawyer, boycotted the start of proceedings last week before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where he faces 11 war crimes charges including genocide during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Karadzic, who has denied all charges, was the leader of the Serb republic that sought to carve its own state from Bosnia during the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Do your letter writers really believe that the money spent on space exploration or the arts or the Bosnian peace intervention or any government spending, were it not spent on that particular item, would therefore go to feeding, educating or otherwise assisting the poor and the diseased? Don't they know the savings would merely go to lowering the taxes for the rich? MURRAY LAMISHAW Laguna Hills

In response to "A Matter of Conscience--as Well as Policy," editorial, Aug. 5: Your excellent editorial correctly spells what our Administration should have done long ago: push for the military pressure on Serbia--this is after all the only language that an aggressor understands. It can also be added, that unlike the misleading statements from our Administration and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, there is, as yet, no need to send "hundreds of thousands of our soldiers" to Bosnia.

NEW YORK -- A Bosnian immigrant convicted of plotting to blow up New York subways and other targets was sentenced Friday to spend his life in prison, the first member of a three-man team of would-be jihadists to be punished in connection with a plan that collapsed shortly before the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Adis Medunjanin, 28, a naturalized U.S. citizen who attended high school in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, was convicted in federal court last May on terrorism charges that included conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder and providing material support to Al Qaeda.

LONDON — Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic confronted the accusations against him at the opening of his war crimes trial in The Hague on Wednesday with contemptuous gestures to the court and the victims who had come to see him face justice for atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Slowed by age and the hardships of 15 years on the run from the indictment by the United Nations tribunal, Mladic still mustered a hint of his trademark swagger as...

Harun Mehmedinovic remembers the hungry wild dogs clawing through the snow, trying to get to frozen bodies of victims of the siege of Sarajevo. He was 10 years old. The Bosnian war was in its second year. Less than 15 years later, the war was over, and Mehmedinovic had graduated from UCLA film school and earned a master's degree from the American Film Institute, where he wrote and directed his thesis film, "In the Name of the Son. " The 25-minute short helped the young filmmaker become the first student in AFI's history to win both its top directing prizes, the Franklin J. Schaffner Fellow Award and the Richard P. Rogers Spirit of Excellence Award.

For Ermin Bravo, it was the peanut butter that triggered the flashbacks. Years after the war in Bosnia ended, Bravo, a film and theater actor, still couldn't touch the condiment, fearful of what it would evoke. "It was the only thing sweet from those [aid] packages we got, and we ate so much of it during the war," Bravo, now 32, recalled. "Until this shoot [reacquainted me with it], I couldn't eat it. It brought back too many memories. " "This shoot" was the filming of "In the Land of Blood and Honey," a drama about some of the darkest events of the modern era, directed by one of its shiniest celebrities, Angelina Jolie.

What Angelina Jolie has accomplished in "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is both impressive and unexpected. But because the task she set for herself is so difficult, it is not quite enough. Though not appearing on screen, Jolie functions as writer, director and co-producer of a film with subject matter so painful and emotionally complex it would be a challenge for even the most experienced creator. Not surprisingly for someone serious about involvement with humanitarian causes, Jolie has set "Blood and Honey" in the violent maelstrom of the former Yugoslavia during the war in Bosnia that lasted between 1992 and 1995.

War crimes suspect Ratko Mladic was thrown out of court Monday at The Hague after he shouted in protest and refused to hear the allegations against him. The court entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf to charges that he oversaw unspeakable acts of genocide during the 1992-95 Balkans conflict. "I'm not going to listen anymore. You're talking in vain," a contemptuous Mladic told the International Criminal Court as the presiding judge began reading out the counts against him. As the former Bosnian Serb general pulled off his headphones and continued to hurl abuse, the judge asked security officers to remove him from the courtroom.

"Mostar Refugees Return to Cast Ballots" (July 1) is deceptive. Not a single word was written about the 24,000 Mostar Serbs, "cleansed" in 1992, or the 4,000 Mostar Serbs still listed as "missing," and presumed dead. The Times has so successfully cleansed the Serbs of their rights in Bosnia that their lack of participation in this election does not even entitle them to the simple recognition of their absence. The buses promised to the 13,000 Mostar Serbs, now living as refugees in Belgrade, were not forthcoming--they were denied an opportunity to vote in this "trial run" for the national election, as praised by your article.

Jonathan Power makes a good case for the importance of the United Nations' Cambodian peacekeeping operation and its relevance to the Bosnian quandary (Commentary, May 14). In this vexatious situation, the U.N. ought to enlist as head of its mission to Cambodia our senior foreign policy pundit and renowned practitioner of shuttle diplomacy, Henry Kissinger. He might well be grateful for an opportunity to atone for the damage he and Richard Nixon did by involving Cambodia in the Vietnam War, a terrible miscalculation that ultimately led to Pol Pot's seizure of power and the massacre of a million people.

The man accused of overseeing the worst massacre of civilians in Europe since World War II was flown to The Hague on Tuesday for trial after judges rejected his argument that he was too frail to be extradited. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general, was bundled onto a plane in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, late Tuesday afternoon to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for his part in the savage ethnic cleansing campaigns of the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Mladic's lawyer had tried to prevent his transfer on the grounds that the onetime military commander, 69, had suffered at least two strokes and was too mentally clouded to stand trial.

Thousands of supporters of war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic rallied Sunday to protest the arrest of the man whom they revere as a national hero but whom much of the West considers a mass murderer. Ultranationalists, government foes and rowdy soccer fans gathered in front of the parliament building in downtown Belgrade to wave Serbian flags and denounce Mladic's capture and expected extradition this week to The Hague to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. As darkness fell, a few clashes broke out as demonstrators threw rocks at riot police, who were deployed in large numbers throughout the city center and around Western embassies.