PARIS -- The U.N. tribunal investigating war crimes in the Balkans charged the Serbian commander of a concentration camp in Bosnia with genocide yesterday, using a term for the mass killing of Bosnian Muslims that the United States and other Western governments have sought to avoid.
The tribunal indicted Zeljko Meakic, the overall commander of the Serbian-run Omarska camp in northwestern Bosnia, on charges of "genocide and crimes against humanity." It also charged 20 other Serbian commanders, guards, and visitors at the camp with war crimes.
The use of the term genocide for what happened at Omarska, a mine complex that was used by the Serbs as a concentration camp between May and August 1992, appeared significant in that it suggested precisely the kind of orchestrated project that Serbian leaders have sought to deny and Western governments have sought to gloss over.
More than 10,000 people from northwestern Bosnia, most of them Muslims but also many Croats, are known to have been imprisoned in Omarska, where executions took place daily and the Serbs eliminated the Muslim elite of surrounding towns, including Prijedor.
Christian Chartrier, a spokesman for the war crimes tribunal, which is based in The Hague, said that the court had decided to charge Mr. Meakic with genocide because his acts met the tribunal's criteria for such a charge: "Killing members of a group or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group."
When the existence of Omarska was revealed in early August 1992 by Newsday and the British newspaper The Guardian, the Bush administration tried to play down what was allegedly happening.
As a signer of the Prevention of Genocide Treaty, the U.S. government might have been obligated to act if it had been officially determined then that genocide was taking place in Bosnia.
On Aug. 2, 1992, confronted by reports and photographs of emaciated inmates of Omarska, the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said "abuses and tortures and killings" had taken place at Serbian "detention centers."
But a day later he was contradicted by Thomas M.T. Niles, the former assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, who said such reports could not be confirmed.
Thus was a pattern set for contradictory and sometimes evasive statements of policy -- variously describing the war as a case of Serbian aggression and as a civil war -- that was to endure from the Bush into the Clinton administration.
The bottom line of this policy has always been that the United States is not ready to fight a war for Bosnia-Herzegovina, although, as a Democratic Party candidate for the presidency, Mr. Clinton said, on Aug. 2, 1992, that the world must take action in the face of genocide.
Yesterday, the tribunal said prisoners in Omarska were "murdered, raped, sexually assaulted, severely beaten, and otherwise mistreated." The charges are based on investigations by 20 lawyers and detectives who traveled to 12 countries.