Bosnian Serb leader gets 32 years for war crimes
A Bosnian Serb leader was jailed for 32 years by the UN tribunal today for the torture, deportation, and other crimes against Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.
However, Radislav Brdjanin, 56, who headed the wartime political leadership of the self-declared Serbian autonomous region of Krajina at the start of the Bosnian war, was acquitted of genocide and the extermination of non-Serbs in the north-western area of Bosnia.
UN judges in The Hague said they were satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Brdjanin was the most powerful political figure in the region, but they absolved him of personal responsibility for the most serious crimes.
Presiding judge Carmel Agius said Brdjanin had helped carry out a strategic plan to create a united and ethnically pure Serbian nation within the republics of the former Yugoslavia.
The murder of more than 1,600 Muslims and Croats, the deportation of tens of thousands of civilians and the destruction of their villages were all aimed at seizing control of the area and “to permanently remove most non-Serbs from that territory,” the judgment said.
Brdjanin not only supported the plan but “knew that it could only be implemented by force and fear.”
As the president of the wartime crisis staff, Brdjanin also was convicted for overseeing prison camps where detainees were beaten, raped, sexually abused and killed, as part of what became known as the “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia.
“All the camps and detention facilities mentioned in the evidence came into being once the Krajina crisis staff had been established,” it said. “The accused was fully aware of the nature of these camps.”
