The UN’s Yugoslav war crimes court cut seven years off the 27-year sentence of former Bosnian Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik on Tuesday, as it reversed some of his convictions for crimes against humanity.
“Krajisnik’s convictions for three counts of the indictment: deportation, forcible transfer and persecution remain intact,” said Judge Fausto Pocar of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
“The seriousness of these crimes demand a severe and proportionate punishment,” he said, while quashing counts of murder and extermination.
“The trial chamber committed a legal error in failing to make the findings necessary for Krajisnik’s conviction” on a number of counts, he said.
Krajisnik’s new 20-year sentence would take into account time spent in custody since April 2000.
In September 2006, the ICTY found Krajisnik to have been at the center of a campaign to “ethnically recompose” targeted territories of Bosnia by reducing the number of Muslims and Croats.
A key ally of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, with whom he founded the nationalist Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), Krajisnik was initially found guilty of 3,000 killings and 100,000 displacements.
The judges found he had been a key figure in the Bosnian Serb leadership during that country’s 1992 to 1995 war that killed 100,000 people and displaced some 2.2 million.
They also found he had been Karadzic’s “very own, private prime minister.”
Krajisnik, who later became the president of the Bosnian Serb Assembly, pleaded not guilty at the start of his trial. The 64-year-old then appealed his conviction and sentence.
The prosecution also appealed, asking for the penalty to be replaced with life imprisonment.
The SDS party on Tuesday accused the court of bias saying it was trying to pin responsibility of the wrongs committed by others on Krajisnik.
Slamming the “draconian ruling,” the party accused the court of trying to “cover up certain wrong decisions taken by the international community which have led to a bloodbath in the former Yugoslavia.”
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