Posted on 07/31/2003 9:58:46 AM PDT by NYC Republican
(AP) The U.N. war crimes tribunal sentenced a prominent Bosnian Serb politician to life imprisonment Thursday for exterminating and persecuting Bosnian Muslims, but acquitted him of genocide.
It was the first time in the court's 10-year history that a life sentence was passed.
Milomir Stakic, a 41-year-old doctor, was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for establishing a network of brutal prison camps where hundreds of Muslims were killed and thousands tortured, raped or treated with extreme brutality in 1992.
“Dr. Milomar Stakic is hereby sentenced to life imprisonment,” said Judge Wolfgang Schomburg, reading the verdict as Stakic stood, looking stunned. The court said he would be eligible for parole in 20 years.
Although it has never been imposed before, Schomburg said the maximum penalty was “not restricted to the most serious crime” of genocide.
It was the third time the court has handed down an acquittal of genocide charges, the most serious crime to come before the court and the hardest to prove. The court has convicted only one person, Bosnian general Radislav Krstic, of genocide.
The balding, bearded Stakic had faced two counts of genocide and six counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes for the murder, rape and torture administered in the camps set up in the Prijedor region of northwestern Bosnia during the summer of 1992.
The outcome was being watched closely for its possible influence on the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who also faces two counts of genocide among the 66 charges against him.
Without referring to the Milosevic case, however, the judge said the genocide ruling applied only to Stakic and should not mean another trial cannot reach another conclusion when presented with other evidence.
To prove genocide, the prosecution must prove a prior intent to destroy an ethnic group wholly or in part.
The Milosevic trial has been adjourned until Aug. 25 because of concerns about his health.
The court said that as the top administrator of the Prijedor region, Stakic was responsible for the atrocities committed there.
He presided over establishment of two notorious detention centers where thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats were held captive until international exposure forced the Serbs to close them.
Stakic's indictment listed specific incidents of murder and brutality, such as the killing of 120 people taken in two buses from the Keraterm and Omarska camps in August 1992, the month the camps were closed.
Stakic has been at the tribunal's detention unit since he was handed over by Serb authorities in March 2001. In the seven months of hearings that ended last April, 101 witnesses testified.
Stakic claims he was a “marionette” in Bosnian Serb wartime politics and had no real power.
But the court ruled that he actively carried out his duties as president of the Prijedor administration, signing orders that perpetuated hatred of non-Serbs and assisting military campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” of tens of thousands of civilians.
By conservative estimate, more than 20,000 people were deported from the Prijedor region as part of a policy of ethnic cleansing, the judge said.
Both sides will have two weeks to file an appeal of the judgment by the three-member panel of judges. The U.N. tribunal cannot impose the death penalty.
In the only previous conviction of genocide by the Yugoslav court, Krstic was sentenced to 46 years in prison for his role in the July 1995 killings of at least 7,500 Bosnian Muslims in the enclave of Srebrenica, then a U.N. protected zone.
Until Thursday, Krstic's was the longest sentence imposed by the court.
The court's two most-wanted suspects, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and wartime military commander Ratko Mladic, were also indicted on genocide charges for the massacres.
Why should they scare me? Do you think I live in the Balkans, in Bosnia? Do you think I'm a Serb?
http://www.gov.yu/cwc/engleski/7-IZV-EN.html:
IX-164
DESIGNATION OF CRIME: Ethnic cleansing
PLACE AND TIME: Banovici, year 1991-1994
BRIEF DESCRIPTION: Serbs at the beginning of war were making some 18% of population in Banovici. After the elections and the coming into power of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) Serbs were dismissed from the leading positions in the Municipality.
When the war started in Croatia in 1991, president of the Municipality Hukic Mirsad organized the departure of some 300 able-bodied Muslims from the area of the Municipality of Banovici for Croatia for military training and participation in the Croat armed forces.
Most of these men returned in 1992 to the Municipality of Banovici. At the same time, a large number of Muslims were admitted to the reserve units of the police force, while Serbs employed in the interior affairs services were dismissed...
http://www.crucibleofwar.com/adnan.htm:
Adnan didn’t so much fight for his country, as much as he fought against another country - Yugoslavia. This stocky traffic cop from Srebrenica first fought against the Serbs in Croatia.
I don't believe a thing that one of those kangaroo "judges" in the illigitimate New World Order "court" in the Hague says!!!
But I do know that around 500,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Krajina in 1995, by the Croat army with the active support of clinton.
And I also know that around 200,000 non-Albanians (mainly Serbs) were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo by the muslim terrorist KLA, with the active support of clinton. The KLA/clinton cabal also destroyed over 100 Christian churches in Kosovo, many of them of priceless historical and spritual value for world Christianity!!!!
The illigitimate statelet of muslim "Bosnia" was estblished solely to give the international islamist jihad a forward base in Europe!!! Muhammad Atta--the leader of the 9/11 suicide hijackers--was based in "Bosnia" before he moved on to Germany and then onto his murderous attack on New York and Washington.
Anyone who spreads anti-Serbian lies and propaganda is supporting islamist subversion against America and Europe! And--unfortunately--ALL of us Americans are forced to spend our tax dollars to suport islamism in the Balkans, whether we like it or not!!!!
Your post is a disgrace. And Joan/Destro , you're constantly posting from purely partisan Serb sights...it's getting really old, and VERY predictable.
Thank God the current Serb government and its people are far more moderate than the Slobo regime, which was a disaster. For you to support that, rather than move forward and be happy with a democratically elected gov't is really a disgrace...
More BS propoganda... While it's true that at the end of the war, the aggressors were pushed out of Krajina, it was nowhere near the 500,000 figure.
WRONG!!!! I wish 911 NEVER happened! And if it weren't for clinton support of islamofascism in the Balkans and elsewhere, if never would have happened!!!!
Where do you get off calling the Krajina Serbs (or for that matter, the Bosnian Serbs) the "aggressors"? They were living in those areas for hundreds of years!!! It was they who found themselves suddenly surrounded by enemies when the FASCIST successions of Croatia and "Bosnia" occurred.
And where do you get off calling the current Serbian government "democratic"? Djindjic (and his successors) were never suported by more than a few percent of the Serbian electorate. They are mere puppets of NATO and the kangaroos of the Hague, controlled by IMF and Soros money!!
If you value democracy so highly, why don't you look to our OWN democracy, which we've been losing for years due to campaign finance corruption? We should leave Serbia alone to elect the kind of government they would really want (probably moderate nationalists, not Slobo-style socialists), and fix our own democracy before we try to fix other people's!!
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