War crimes trial begins for Azra Basic, Bosnia’s ‘Mistress of Life and Death’
Witnesses say she was once known as the “Mistress of Life and Death”, but in the court trying her for war crimes, Azra Basic hardly stands out.
Ms Basic is one of about a dozen women charged or convicted of crimes committed during Bosnia’s inter-ethnic war in the 1990s, which claimed nearly 100,000 lives.
There have been hundreds of men convicted by local and international courts for crimes committed during the 1992 to 1995 war, but few women.
Former prisoners have already testified, since the trial opened in February, to Ms Basic’s torture of detainees.
One witness on Friday recalled the glimmer of hope he felt on April 26, 1992.
Dusan Nedic said he saw a woman called Azra enter a detention unit in the northern town of Derventa, where he was being held by ethnic Croats.
“For me it was a glimmer of hope,” said Mr Nedic, 55. “I told myself that a woman would not be aggressive as men.”
He was wrong.
“She started to beat detainees, she was jumping on them while they were on the floor,” the shoe factory worker said.
Looking at her in court, it is difficult to link Ms Basic with the brutality, including a murder, of which she is accused.
A short, silent, bespectacled woman, she avoids eye contact when in court.
When the authorities caught up with her in 2011 she was
working in a food factory in the United States.
Ms Basic has pleaded not guilty to war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war.
“This person was not me,” she told the court on Friday. “I swear before God and that’s all.”
Slavisa Djuras, the son of Blagoje Djuras, the man she is accused of killing, looked on.
Biljana Plavsic, now 86 years old, remains the most famous woman war criminal from the former Yugoslavia. The former Bosnian Serb vice-president is also the only one tried before the UN war crimes court in The Hague.
She was sentenced to 11 years in jail in 2003 after pleading guilty to crimes against humanity for her leading role in a campaign of persecution against Croats and Muslims during the war in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s war crimes prosecutors say more cases are in the pipeline. Forty women are being investigated for war crimes.
Visnja Acimovic, a 45-year-old Bosnian Serb who now lives in neighbouring Serbia, is one of them.
She is accused of having taken part in the 1992 executions of 37 Muslims, most of them aged between 15 and 20, in the eastern Bosnian town of Vlasenica.
She denied the charges before a Belgrade court in January, and Serbia will not extradite its citizens for trial in Bosnia.
Most of war crimes by women took place in prisons.