Prosecutors urge no mercy for alleged Bosnian Serb rapists

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - War crimes prosecutors on Monday urged a U.N. court to show no mercy toward three Bosnian Serbs accused of sexually enslaving and torturing Muslim women.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was asked in the strongest terms to put Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic behind bars for up to 35 years. The men have not been convicted or sentenced, but the prosecutors can call for a jail term.

''No sentence this court can possibly devise can adequately deal with the injustice the victims suffered at the hands of these men,'' prosecutor Dirk Ryneveld, a Canadian, told the three-judge panel in the first international prosecution of wartime sexual enslavement.

Prosecutors detailed the abuses inflicted on dozens of Bosnian Muslim women - including the 16 who bravely took the witness stand since the trial began in April. Although their identities were concealed from public view, the witnesses stood face-to-face with their former tormentors.

Victims as young as 12 and 13 years old were assaulted ''in all possible ways,'' said German prosecutor Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff.

One woman, identified as ''witness no. 75,'' was gang-raped for three hours by 15 men. Two teen-age girls were held for months by Kovac as personal sex slaves and then sold as chattel.

Women were assaulted in front of their children. Others were forced at gunpoint to strip and paraded outdoors. Several tried to commit suicide.

''Not one of them will ever forget,'' said Ryneveld.

The U.N. tribunal, established in 1993, has convicted 14 Bosnian Serbs, Muslims and Croats and handed down prison sentences of up to 45 years.

No date for a verdict in the rape case has been set by the trial chamber's president, Florence Mumba of Zambia.

The tribunal is known to take sex crimes very seriously in contrast to the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials following World War II, where they were not prosecuted. The court's statutes require no corroboration of rape victims' testimony.

The accused allegedly fought with paramilitary gangs in the southeastern Bosnian city of Foca, ''ethnically cleansed'' by Serb forces at the outset of the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Women were separated from their husbands and detained with their daughters for up to 2 years in a sports hall, a high school and Serb homes.

The defendants claimed the sex was consensual. Kunarac, the key defendant, went so far as to assert that one of the victims actually forced herself on him.

Prosecutors, however, rejected Kunarac's claim, saying the girl was coerced into having sex with the gang leader by his subcommander.

During the trial, defense lawyers challenged the motives of the witnesses, alleging they concocted the stories together.

''There was only one reason, and one reason alone, for the witnesses to point their fingers at these accused,'' said American prosecutor Peggy Kuo. ''These men did these unspeakable things to them.''

Kuo stressed that the women honestly conceded when they couldn't remember specific events and perpetrators and even praised those Serbs who refused to rape them.

One witness testified that she married a Serb soldier who rescued her from the camps.

Kuo dismissed ''slight inconsistencies'' in the testimony of the victims, which the defense cited in arguing that their memory of the events had been eroded by the passage of more than eight years.