Two Bosnian Serbs were convicted of genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday for the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica — the harshest judgment ever delivered by the UN war crimes tribunal on the Balkan wars.
A third Bosnian Serb officer was given a 35-year prison sentence for aiding and abetting genocide. Two others were acquitted of genocide charges, but convicted of extermination, murder and persecution, while a final two officers were found guilty of lesser charges of war crimes. Sentences for those four ranged from five to 19 years.
It was a dramatic conclusion to the largest trial conducted by the tribunal, set up in 1993 to prosecute the worst war crimes offenders even while fighting was still under way among ethnic groups in the disintegrating Yugoslavia.
The slaughter of the Muslim men and boys around Srebrenica was the worst massacre on European soil since World War II. Tens of thousands of Muslim civilians were evicted from their homes in that area in what the UN court has called a deliberate attempt to wipe out the Muslim community there.
Thursday’s verdict could indirectly affect another trial, that of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, which began last year following his capture in Belgrade in 2008. Karadzic, a key figure throughout the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, is also accused of genocide for the Srebrenica slaughter.
Judges on Thursday wrote that the defendants’ most brutal crimes were carried out under a directive issued by Karadzic to create “an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival” for the Srebrenica population.
Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara, convicted of the worst crime in the war crimes statute, were high-ranking security officers with the Bosnian Serb army that overran Muslim forces and thinly armed UN troops in the Srebrenica enclave. Drago Nikolic, convicted of aiding and abetting genocide, was a brigade security commander.
All three served under General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander who remains a fugitive 15 years after his indictment.
It was not clear on Thursday whether any of the verdicts or sentences would be appealed.
Natasa Kandic, a prominent human rights activist who has investigated war crimes in the Balkans, said the convictions were “extremely important” for the case against Karadzic, and for future trials against lower-ranking suspects believed to be living in Serbia.
“All those facts determined by the court are important for the trials,” Kandic said in Belgrade.
Kadira Gabeljic, who lost two sons, her husband and her brother in the Srebrenica massacre, met the verdicts with resignation.
“Whatever the sentence is, it’s not enough, although these two that got life, that’s all right I guess,” Gabeljic said. “These people committed such horrific crimes that history will remember them.”
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