Tribunal to rule in general's genocide trial
The United Nations war crimes tribunal was today delivering a verdict in the genocide trial of a Bosnian Serb general charged with Europe’s worst civilian massacre since the Holocaust.
The case of Radislav Krstic is the most important so far for prosecutors trying to win their first conviction for genocide the harshest crime in the court’s statute.
If the panel of three UN judges at The Hague, in the Netherlands, supports the prosecution case in its ruling, atrocities committed in the Bosnian war would be classified as the first genocide on European soil since the persecution of Jews during the Second World War.
The Rwanda tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, has convicted eight people for genocide, including the former prime minister, and handed down sentences of up to life imprisonment.
The tribunal’s statutes defines genocide as ‘‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’’.
Those acts include murder, inflicting living conditions designed to eliminate a group, preventing births or transferring children from one group to another.
Krstic, the highest-ranking Bosnian Serb military officer tried by the court, is charged with leading a campaign of persecution and murder that virtually wiped out the entire non-Serb population in the predominantly Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in south eastern Bosnia.
In July 1995, Serb forces attacked the UN-declared ‘‘safe haven’’ where about 30,000 Muslims had sought refuge from the Serb onslaught at a Dutch-manned UN base. At least 8,000 men and boys were killed or missing, prosecutors allege.
Exhumations of mass graves conducted by investigators in Bosnia, some as recent as last month, have revealed the bodies of more than 4,000 victims.
Women and children were separated from the men and boys, who were loaded on to buses and taken to collection stations throughout the region.
Dozens of survivors testified about what became known as the killing fields of Srebrenica. Several witnesses told how they lay in a field of bleeding corpses for hours as Serb soldiers discharged round after round of automatic weapon fire into columns of prisoners.
Krstic told the court he knew of the mass killings, but was unable to do anything to stop them. He has denied eight counts of genocide, murder, persecution, extermination, deportation and inhumane acts.
The defendant told the court that his immediate superior, General Ratko Mladic, took control of the forces that overran the enclave just days before the killings. Krstic said he kept quiet for fear that Mladic would harm his family.
Despite Krstic’s testimony, prosecutors maintained that Krstic jointly masterminded the genocide plan with Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, then the Bosnian Serb political leader. Both Mladic and Karadzic are wanted for the events in Srebrenica but remain at large.
In closing arguments last month, prosecutors requested the judges to sentence Krstic to eight consecutive life terms. The defence asked that the genocide charge be dropped.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was established in 1993 to punish those responsible for atrocities during the break up of Yugoslavia after the start of war in 1991.
