Serb prisoners `forced to eat soap' during months of beatings in solita ry confinement

In northern Bosnia's Serbian sector women wait in vain for word of captive husbands. Lynne Reid Banks reports

Doboj, Bosnia - Outside the door of the Red Cross office here in the Serbian sector of northern Bosnia, a dozen anxious women gather on the off-chance of news. Their husbands are not among the 109 prisoners released by the Bosnian Muslims in Tuzla, 60 miles away, but perhaps one of the former captives has seen or heard of their men, most of them missing since the Serbs were pushed back in the September 1995 offensive.

No news is not good news. One woman, pale and jumpy, poured out her fears that her husband had been "ritually murdered" by the mujahedin, whom many Serbs believe were sent in their thousands from Arab countries to fight for the Muslims.

The Red Cross managed to register lists of Tuzla prisoners last month, but many men are unaccounted for. Former prisoners said they were not visited by any humanitarian agency for the first three or four months of their captivity.

All the newly released prisoners I talked to were reluctant conscripts, and none seemed to know what the war was about. One, a grizzled, unshaven sergeant wearing a bright new jacket, described his 45 days of solitary confinement and of interrogation - on how many women he had raped and how many Muslims he had killed - accompanied by blindfolding and beatings. Later, he said, he was put in a shared cell in a regular prison. "Work" consisted of being handcuffed to a fence and made to pull grass. Sometimes he was taken into the prison yard to pick up cigarette butts dropped by more-kindly treated Muslim prisoners - deserters - who were kept separate from the Serbs, but who could watch him at his task. His guards got some fun out of making him shout: "I'm a dirty Chetnik!"

Another prisoner, Goran Pandurevic, told of being captured when Muslim forces overran Serb positions. He was shut in a disused ambulance shed for two days, where he claimed he and his companions were beaten and humiliated, forced to "eat paper and soap", and given one-and-a-half litres of water a day for 30 men.

Later, the prisoners were taken to Tuzla and put into a civilian prison, he said. Forty men were held in a cell measuring four metres by five and were kept there for three months without exercise or medical attention, apart from aspirins, for the wounded and sick. The men were often forbidden to sit down during the day. Drinking-water had to be collected in bottles from the toilets, which they visited three times a day. They were given no changes of clothes, no heating, and nothing to do.

After three months they were taken out on work details, digging canals and rebuilding ruined buildings. After the months of darkness and confinement, Mr Pandurevic said, they "could hardly see or walk". He claimed that as the prisoners worked, guards subjected them to random beatings.

Mr Pandurevic described his release as "a new birth". I asked him what he had done the night before, after being reunited with his family. "No going out drinking", he said. "I was drunk on the alcohol of life."

n The Hague (Reuter) - The United Nations criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia said yesterday it was returning the Bosnian Serb Colonel Aleksa Krsmanovic to the custody of the Bosnian government in Sarajevo. Colonel Krsmanovic was captured with General Djordje Djukic by Bosnian government forces on 30 January and was transferred to the tribunal's custody on 12 February.

Djukic was later charged with war crimes in connection with the siege of Sarajevo. The chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone told the tribunal there was no reason to hold Krsmanovic any longer as he was unwilling to co-operate as a witness.