Turning Up The Heat on Human Rights

BELGRADE: Meeting on Monday with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck made it clear that the United States expects Milosevic to help resolve the war crimes issue. So far the international tribunal in The Hague has indicted 45 Serbs and seven Bosnian Croats, including once-close Milosevic allies Gen. Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, but has been able to arrest only one person. On Sunday, Shattuck visited an area near the former Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, up to now sealed from all allied officials and reporters, where as many as 7,000 civilians may have been massacred by Bosnian Serbs. "Two thousand missing people very nearby could mean that up to 2,000 people could be buried in this mass grave," Shattuck said, after seeing a blood-spattered warehouse and the nearby field that investigators believe is the burial site. "Shattuck was seeing what the United States has long known about," says TIME's Mark Thompson. "The State Department has filed eight reports to the tribunal over the last four years, larded with eyewitness reports of the atrocities. Dispatching Shattuck to the area sends a clear message that we intend to see that justice is done."