Free Republic

Milan Babic, the leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia and one-time president of the Croatian Serbs in the 1990s, has committed suicide in his cell at a U.N. detention facility where he was serving a 13-year term for war crimes, officials said. Babic was found dead in his cell at the prison in Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague, at about 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, according to a statement from the U.N. war crimes tribunal. "The Dutch authorities were called immediately. After conducting an investigation, they confirmed that the cause of death was suicide," the statement said.

Marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of the 'Republic of Serbian Krajina', an eloquent comment from IWPR's Balkan Crisis Report by a journalist who covered the parastate's four-year existence for The Independent (London)Ten years ago I sat in the front room of a house in west London in company with a number of Croats, all eyes glued to the fast-changing footage of the satellite television that was carrying programmes from Croatian state television. ‘Come round,’ my friend had said. ‘Something’s up.’ That ‘something’, it turned out, was the ignominious fall of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK), the Serb entity that...

MILOSEVIC TRIAL, PART III Witness after witness came to the Hague to testify against Milosevic. Let us have a look at Milan Babic. In an unprecedented step, judges in the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic revealed the identity of a key witness. Milan Babic first appeared as a secret witness, but all of Yugoslavia knew who he was. The man, who has so far been referred to as Witness C-61, was named as Milan Babic, a former senior Croatian Serb leader and former ally of Mr Milosevic. Mr Babic has been giving evidence in secret for...