A Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has acquitted a Bosnian Serb leader of genocide, while former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic told a separate panel the charges he himself faces are "empty words" and a "mutilation of justice."
Wednesday's verdict in the five-year trial of Radislav Brdjanin, wartime leader of the autonomous Krajina region of Bosnia, should encourage Milosevic, who launched his defense this week against charges of genocide and more than 60 other counts of war crimes.
Brdjanin, 56, a powerful Serb figure at the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, was convicted on eight of 12 charges and sentenced to 32 years imprisonment -- a surprisingly lengthy term in view of the acquittals on the most serious charges related to genocide and extermination.
Despite a Serb campaign of mass murder, torture and deportations of non-Serbs, the court said the brutality fell short of genocide, which requires stringent proof the sole intent was to wipe out the Muslim and Croat communities.
The acquittal was a setback for prosecutors who placed genocide at the center of Milosevic's indictment. He is accused of responsibility for the deaths of more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
The tribunal has set a high bar for a genocide conviction. Of more than a dozen Serbs charged with genocide, only one, General Radislav Krstic, has been convicted -- and the charge was reduced on appeal to aiding and abetting genocide.
On Wednesday, Milosevic concluded a 5 1/2-hour opening statement, denouncing his trial as "a farce, pure and simple."
"This indictment represents a sum of unscrupulous manipulation, lies, crippling of the law, and an unjust presentation of the history," he said. The charges are a "sheer mutilation of justice. Nothing else. What it says there are empty words."
Milosevic failed to address the specific charges he faces, instead arguing the Serbs faced a conspiracy of persecution by Croats, Islamic fundamentalists, the US, NATO and the Vatican.
"What the Serbs did was only making up for what the Muslims and the Croats took away from them," he said.
The court said it would announce yesterday whether it will impose defense counsel on Milosevic, who has insisted on defending himself despite repeated bouts of ill health that have delayed the trial by months.
"I really cannot accept at all that you do not give me the right, the opportunity to voice the truth," Milosevic said.
Prosecutors cited medical reports from last week that Milosevic was unfit to represent himself and was refusing to take prescribed drugs to control his high blood pressure in order to delay the proceedings.
"He has been manipulating this tribunal," said prosecutor Geoffrey Nice. Milosevic responded that the drugs made him too drowsy to work on his case.
The indictment accuses Milosevic of orchestrating or condoning murder, the destruction of towns and places of worship and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people in an effort to create an ethnically pure "greater Serbia" by funding and arming Serbian uprisings in Croatia and Bosnia.
"We did assist the Serbs, of course we did. We would have been the scum of the earth if we had not helped them when their lives were in peril," he said.
In the Brdjanin decision, the court found the Bosnian Serb leader complicit in the deaths of at least 1,669 Muslims and Croats. It also held him criminally responsible for routine brutality, sexual abuse and torture in detention camps.
In a complex ruling, the court said the number of deaths was high enough to constitute the crime of extermination. But it said Brdjanin was unaware of the massive scale of murders and acquitted him of the charge.
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