Miroslav Deronjic, a confessed war criminal and an important prosecution witness in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the UN tribunal in The Hague, received a modest 10-year sentence on Tuesday. The sentence, suggested by the prosecution and accepted by two judges, seemed so light that it openly angered the leading judge in the case.
Deronjic, 49, once a high-ranking Bosnian Serb official, painted many powerful pictures in court. He described how arms, advice and plans flowed into Bosnia from Belgrade in the early 1990s while Serbs and Bosnian Serbs prepared for war. He spoke with eloquence and detail of the strategy to drive Bosnian Muslims from lands wanted for Serbs. He took responsibility for ordering the burning and razing of Glogova, a Muslim village where at least 64 people were killed.
For Deronjic, his guilty plea and the evidence he subsequently provided in five different trials, appear to have paid off.
But Judge Wolfgang Schomburg, in a strongly worded dissent, wrote that Deronjic's 10-year sentence was not proportional to the "heinous and long-planned crimes," and violated the spirit and the mandate of the tribunal. Instead, he wrote, the crimes deserved a sentence of "no less than twenty years."
The judge's reaction is the latest example of the discomfort felt by a number of court officials since the tribunal has embarked on its new strategy to encourage plea bargaining as a way to speed up cases and clear its backlog.
The tribunal is under intense pressure, including from Washington, to prepare itself for closing down, which means ending all investigations this year and completing trials by 2008. As part of that exit strategy, the court is aiming to focus on the most senior suspects of war crimes from the 1990s wars and to send lower-level cases back to special courts now starting up in the Balkans.
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