THE HAGUE: A Bosnian Serb was jailed for 20 years by the Hague war crimes tribunal yesterday for the 1992 murder of five Muslims who had begged for mercy.
Mitar Vasiljevic (48), a former waiter, was accused of belonging to a paramilitary group working with Serb military units and police in a reign of terror over the Muslim population around the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad in 1992-94.
The case against him had centred on two June 1992 atrocities - the shooting dead by paramilitaries of five Bosnian Muslim men by the Drina River, and the burning alive of 65 Muslim women, children and old men locked in a house in eastern Bosnia. Though the sentence was stiff, judges at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found Vasiljevic guilty on only two counts - persecution and murder - and acquitted him on eight others.
Judges notably dismissed the prosecution charge that Vasiljevic was directly involved in a house burning on Pionirska Street in the Visegrad municipality.
They accepted Vasiljevic's alibi that he was admitted to hospital at around the time of the atrocity, whose victims included babies and 46 members of one extended family.
Calling the Drina River murders a "cold-blooded execution", judges dismissed Vasiljevic's claim that he tried to persuade the paramilitary leader to spare the Muslims' lives and found instead that Vasiljevic had turned a deaf ear to the victims.
"Pleas by the men for their lives were completely ignored by the accused," presiding Judge David Anthony Hunt told the court in the latest judgment to stem from the 1992-5 Bosnian war, adding that one of the victims was well known to Vasiljevic.
Though Vasiljevic played no significant role in the broader Balkans conflict, he was guilty of serious crimes motivated solely by "sheer ethnic hatred", said Judge Hunt.
"The fact he was a low-level offender in terms of the overall conflict in the former Yugoslavia cannot alter the seriousness of the offences for which he has been convicted, or the circumstances in which he committed them," the judge said.
The accused had denied six counts of crimes against humanity and four counts of war crimes after being arrested by NATO-led troops and transferred to The Hague in January 2000. His trial began in September 2001.
During the Bosnian conflict, ethnicity was exploited to gain political prominence or power, to justify criminal deeds or "for the purpose of obtaining moral absolution for any act coloured by the ethnic cause," said the judge.
"No such absolution is to be expected from this tribunal," he said. "The trial chamber considers that crimes based upon ethnic grounds are particularly reprehensible." Also on the indictment with Vasiljevic were Milan Lukic, who allegedly formed the "White Eagles" paramilitary group of which Vasiljevic was accused of being a member, and Sredoje Lukic, who prosecutors said was another member of the group.
Milan and Sredoje Lukic are still at large. "Visegrad is important because it is a town with a long history of brutal cruelty," prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann said.
Vasiljevic's lawyer said his client was likely to appeal. - (Reuters)