Bosnian Serb Leader Jailed For War Crimes

Taken from The Guardian, UK on Wednesday September 27, 2006
By Ian Traynor

A former Bosnian Serb political leader was found guilty today of the extermination, murder and forced expulsion of Bosnia's Muslims in 1992, in the most important war crimes trial to reach a conclusion at the UN tribunal in The Hague dealing with former Yugoslavia.

Momcilo Krajisnik, the former head of the wartime Bosnian Serb parliament and the political right hand of the fugitive genocide suspect Radovan Karadzic, was sentenced to 27 years on five counts of crimes against humanity.

Today's judgment will have a strong impact on the cases against Karadzic and his military commander, General Ratko Mladic, if they are put in the dock. They have been on the run for 11 years.

The judges found that the crimes in which Krajisnik was involved bore features of "genocide", but he was acquitted on two counts of genocide and complicity in genocide.

That finding indicates that the only prospect of obtaining a genocide verdict in the trials of Karadzic and Mladic, if they are captured, relates to the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995.

The verdict concluding the 30-month trial was seen as a watershed because the judges found that an ethnic cleansing campaign that killed tens of thousands and uprooted millions was definitively political, masterminded and implemented by a political clique of Serb leaders.

Krajisnik is the most senior Bosnian Serb political figure to face trial. "Krajisnik wanted the Muslim and Croat populations moved out of Bosnian Serb territories in large numbers, and accepted that a heavy price of suffering, death, and destruction was necessary to achieve Serb domination," said presiding Judge Alphons Orie reading the verdict.

"Immense suffering was inflicted upon the victims. The crimes were committed over a long period, often through brutal methods, with hatred or appalling lack of concern. Krajisnik's role in the commission of the crimes was crucial."

The court has already ruled that the Srebrenica massacre of almost 8,000 Muslim males was an act of genocide, although no one from former Yugoslavia has yet been found guilty of the gravest crime of all.

The most important trial yet held in The Hague - that of the former Serbian and president, Slobodan Milosevic - was inconclusive because the defendant died in March.

The Krajisnik trial was being closely watched because of the defendant's political prominence. He was a founder member of the Serbian Democratic party in Bosnia, the party led by Karadzic that was the key instrument of the mass programme of pogroms and ethnic cleansing in the 1992-95 war. Krajisnik was also speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament during the war and, the judges found, a de facto member of a five-strong Bosnian Serb presidency that devised the programme for the systematic purges of non-Serbs from the territory it controlled.

"The common objective was to ethnically recompose the territories targeted by the Bosnian Serb leadership by drastically reducing the proportion of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats through expulsion," the judges found. "Krajisnik gave the go-ahead for the expulsion programme to commence."

The Bosnian Serb political leadership, the judges found, was guilty of "exterminating" Muslims in 14 municipalities in Bosnia, murdering them in 28, forcibly expelling them from 27, and persecuting them in all 35 municipalities which featured in the indictment.

But the judges found that there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide in the period up to the end of 1992, nine months into the war. Today's verdict was the fourth time that the tribunal in The Hague has thrown out genocide charges, all relating to different parts of Bosnia, suggesting it would have been difficult to obtain a genocide verdict against Milosevic had he lived.

But today's judgment proves that a political clique masterminded and ordered a vast and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in which, according to the most detailed forensic study in Sarajevo, around 70,000 Muslims, overwhelmingly civilians, were killed, and up to two million were uprooted.

Krajisnik, the judges said, was empowered to supervise the police, military, and paramilitary forces carrying out orders from him and his political peers.

"In the early stages the common objective may have been limited to the crimes of deportation and forced transfer, [but] the criminal means very soon grew to include other crimes of persecution, as well as murder, and extermination."