War Crimes

The images were gruesome. In one grainy video clip, a figure in a blood-soaked shirt who looks like Moammar Kadafi is manhandled behind a truck by frenzied fighters shouting, "God is great!" The man stumbles and appears to struggle against his captors. In another clip, a shirtless body lies on the ground. Fighters roll it over to show what appears to be Kadafi's bloodied face to cheering fighters. Photos: Moammar Kadafi | 1942 - 2011 The amateur videos that flashed across television screens and were uploaded to YouTube on Thursday suggest that Kadafi was alive when he was captured after fighters loyal to Libya's provisional government overwhelmed the former strongman's hometown of Surt.

The green flag still flutters from some homes in this desert town, a remnant of its profound loyalty to a longtime patron, Moammar Kadafi, who made green the signature color of his domain. But the people of Tawurgha, more than 30,000, predominantly black, are all gone, refugees who mostly fled when rebels advanced last month from nearby Misurata with, former residents say, vengeance on their minds. The town, 25 miles south of Misurata, was subsequently looted, and many homes and shops were burned.

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.

As a U.N.-backed Cambodian tribunal opens Monday to try former Khmer Rouge leaders charged with genocide, critics accuse the Cambodian government of meddling and the United Nations of failing to uphold the court's independence. Standing trial are the four highest-ranking surviving former Khmer Rouge leaders: head of state Khieu Samphan, 79; Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, 85; his wife, Social Affairs Minister Ieng Thirith, 79; and the revolution's chief ideologue, Nuon Chea, 84. They face multiple charges that include war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

He's everything his country wants to be: confident, successful, comfortable in his own skin and able, at last, to put a violent past behind him. It's not often that a tennis star embodies the hopes of an entire nation. But in Novak Djokovic — the world's No. 2 men's player, whose perfect win streak this year was finally snapped here Friday at the French Open — Serbia has found what it thinks is the perfect pitchman for a rebranding campaign, someone who'll bring back the shine to its tarnished reputation.

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.

If Ratko Mladic is extradited on charges of mass murder, as even he now seems to believe is inevitable, his own words may come back to haunt him. Thousands of them. Prosecutors at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague are combing through a trove of diaries and audio recordings kept by the Bosnian Serb general throughout the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Mladic was an obsessive record-keeper, jotting down notes from even the briefest conversations. The habit was evidence, some say, of an outsize personality convinced of its own importance.

Jovana Vujcic is too young to remember the war that ravaged the Balkans in the early 1990s but old enough now to experience its baleful legacy. "We're labeled as a genocide nation," the 23-year-old Serbian economics student said. "When you travel around Europe and you meet people, they only know those years of our history. " The burden of that past felt a little lighter Friday, a day after Serbian authorities finally captured Ratko Mladic , Europe's most-wanted war crimes suspect.

Under an indictment last amended in November 2009, the U.N. war crimes tribunal has filed these charges against former Bosnian Serb military chief Gen. Ratko Mladic: • One count each of genocide in the town of Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia-Herzegovina; complicity in genocide; persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds; extermination; deportation; unlawfully inflicting terror upon civilians; cruel treatment; attacks on civilians;...