Four members of a notorious Serbian death squad received prison sentences from a special Serbian tribunal on Tuesday for their role in the summary execution of Bosnian civilians during the genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995.
In what was the first time a Serbian court had put suspects on trial in connection with the massacre of almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, the four men, members of the infamous Scorpions paramilitary group which carried out atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, were jailed for between five and 20 years. One other defendant was acquitted.
The killers were hoist on their own petard since they filmed the gruesome scene from 1995 when they ordered six bound Muslim males off a truck, fired at four of them with machine guns and ordered two other Bosnian Muslims to dispose of the corpses before shooting them.
The video surfaced in 2005 at the trial of the late Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague in the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the massacre.
The video was shown widely across former Yugoslavia and Serbia -- long in denial about the atrocities perpetrated in its name during the 1990s Yugoslav wars -- was shocked into confronting some of the war crimes.
The issue of what happened at Srebrenica, a hill town in eastern Bosnia near the Serbian border, continues to haunt the region. In February the world court in The Hague ruled that the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 was an act of genocide, in effect the first in Europe since the Nazi Holocaust, but ruled against the state of Bosnia in deeming Serbia not responsible for the genocide.
Serbia was not required to pay reparations to Bosnia but was found to have done nothing to prevent the crime when it knew what might happen there.
As a result of the authoritative genocide finding, however, Muslim inhabitants of Srebrenica, which lies in the Serbian half of Bosnia and is governed by a Bosnian Serb administration, are threatening to abandon the town next week unless it is accorded a special status that is not under the control of the Bosnian Serb administration. Muslim leaders argue they cannot remain under the government of Bosnian Serb officials, many of whom were involved in the crimes of 1995.
The international official running Bosnia, Christian Schwarz -- Schilling, has dismissed the Muslim threat as "gesture politics" while the Bosnian Serb government has offered extra funding for Srebrenica to try to defuse the row.
In Belgrade, Serbia's special war crimes court sentenced the Scorpion commander, Slobodan Medic, and another defendant each to 20 years. The only defendant of the five to plead guilty received 13 years, another received five; one was acquitted.
Gordana Bozilovic-Petrovic, the judge presiding over the case, said there was no doubt about the guilt of the defendants.
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