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Sarajevo:
Bosnia’s war crimes court convicted four former Bosnian Serb
soldiers Friday of
participating in the execution of hundreds of Srebrenica Muslims
during the country’s 1992-95 conflict and sentenced them to a
total of 142 years in prison.
About 800 captured Muslim Bosniaks
were shot and killed at Branjevo military farm, near Srebrenica.
It was one of several sites where more than 8,000 such victims
were killed in what became known as the 1995 Srebrenica massacre
and a major development in the Bosnia war. U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan called the mass murders the worst crime on European
soil since the Second World War.
The four former members of the Bosnian Serb Army’s elite 10th
Sabotage Detachment were convicted on Friday of crimes against
humanity, but were acquitted on genocide charges when the court
found it had not been proven they had “genocidal intent.”
The
court sentenced Franc Kos and Zoran Goronja to 40 years in jail,
Stanko Kojic to 43, and Vlastimir Golijan to 19. But the sentences
are the harshest given so far by Bosnia’s war crimes court for the
July 1995 massacre.
Other Bosnian Serb soldiers have been convicted of taking part in
the Srebrenica massacre by Bosnia’s court and by the U.N. war
crimes tribunal for former Yugoslaviain The Hague, and several other
suspects remain at large.
Judge Mira Smajlovic said Friday that
the killings at Branjevo farm took five hours, during which time
the soldiers involved found time for a lunch break. “Their
attitude toward the killings can be best understood when one knows
they even took a break to have lunch and drink beer in the meadow
full of corpses, while other prisoners looked on from the buses,”
waiting for their turn to be murdered, Smajlovic said while
reading the verdict.
The judge said the four soldiers carried out the crime in “an
organized and systematic” manner. They led small groups of
prisoners — some of them blindfolded and with their hands tied —
from buses that drove them to the killing site, ordered them to
line up in the meadow with their backs toward the killing squad,
then opened fire.Kos and Kojic also shot wounded prisoners in the
head using pistols to “make sure no one will survive,” the judge
said.
More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica were
killed in just a few days after Srebrenica — a U.N. declared “safe
area” — was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995.
The mass killings in Srebrenica were the only episode of Bosnia’s
1992-95 war labeled an act of genocide by the International Court
of Justice and the special U.N. War Crimes Tribunal for
former Yugoslavia.
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