THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The United Nations war crimes tribunal said on Friday it had charged Slobodan Milosevic with genocide in Bosnia in its third and gravest indictment against the former Yugoslav leader.Milosevic, the most prominent European to face a war crimes court since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the end of World War Two, is charged in the new indictment with responsibility for Serb atrocities in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
Serbs, Croats and Muslims fought in Bosnia as communism yielded to nationalism in Yugoslavia with the fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s. Bosnia was the longest of three major conflicts to shatter the former communist state.
Milosevic, who turned from orthodox communism to Serbian nationalism as the six republics of the former Yugoslavia came apart at the seams, is charged in two earlier indictments with crimes against humanity in Croatia in 1991-2 and Kosovo in 1999.
The Bosnia indictment -- which rounds off charges covering all three conflicts during Milosevic's 13-year rule -- contains 29 counts, including genocide and complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.
``Slobodan Milosevic participated in a joint criminal enterprise, the purpose of which was the forcible and permanent removal of the majority of non-Serbs...from large areas of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina,'' the indictment said.