Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is scheduled to meet today with Bosnia-Herzegovina’s minister of defense, a man accused by Croatian officials of war crimes during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
Defense Minister Selmo Cikotic has never been formally charged with being a war criminal by international tribunals.
But in 1997, he was expelled from the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., because of accusations made by Croatian officials that he had “commanded soldiers who killed and tortured people in and around the town of Bugojno” in 1993, The New York Times reported.
Captured Croat and Serb prisoners in Bugojno were “severely beaten” while being held at a furniture shop, a school and a soccer field. “In some instances, the detainees were ordered to hit their heads against metal bars or were forced to give blood to wounded Muslim soldiers,” according to the United Nation’s criminal tribunal, which investigated war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Cikotic, a Bosnian commander in that area, was not directly charged with those acts.
In 2004, NATO peacekeepers rejected Cikotic’s candidacy to head a joint chiefs-of-staff post because of unspecified war crime allegations, Agence France Presse reported.
In March, a Croatian nongovernmental organization said it filed a war crimes suit with the country’s prosecutor’s office against Bosnian Muslim political and military leaders, including Cikotic, according to a Croatian state news agency.
Bosnia-Herzegovina Ambassador Mitar Kujundzic declined to discuss past allegations against Cikotic, but said, “Nothing official was raised against him.”
O’Malley’s meeting with Cikotic was arranged and paid for by a federal program designed to pair states’ National Guard units with new or emerging democracies, according to the governor’s spokesman. Shaun Adamec, the governor’s spokesman, said O’Malley didn’t know about the accusations but added, “It’s really not relevant.
“It is not an atypical meeting to visit with the minister of defense given the purpose of the governor’s visit,” Adamec said in an e-mail.
