An ex-Bosnian Serb mayor was sentenced to life in prison by The Hague war crimes tribunal today for orchestrating the extermination of non-Serbs in Bosnia in 1992, the first life sentence imposed by the court.
Milomir Stakic, who was the top official of the Prijedor municipality in northwest Bosnia during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, was cleared of the gravest crime of genocide but convicted of persecution, extermination and murder of Bosnian Muslims and Croats.
Stakic, a doctor by profession, was described as a leading politician who played a key role in Bosnian Serb moves to expel Muslims and Croats from the Prijedor area and in setting up a brutal camp where non-Serbs were killed, tortured and beaten.
"The trial chamber has found that the crimes of persecution and extermination constitute the core of the criminal conduct of Dr Stakic. Dr Stakic was one of the main actors in this persecutorial campaign," presiding judge Wolfgang Schomburg said.
Judges said Stakic had presided over a decision to set up the notorious detention camp at Omarska in May 1992 and had justified on television the setting up of other camps at Keraterm and Trnopolje.
Media footage from the camps in August 1992 which showed starving men behind barbed wire fences - evoking memories of the Nazi death camps in World War Two - sparked outrage and accusations of a sadistic Bosnian Serb plan to exterminate their ethnic rivals.
The sentence was the stiffest imposed by the United Nations tribunal since it was established by a UN Security Council resolution a decade ago to try perpetrators of crimes during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The previous longest sentence was imposed on Bosnian Serb commander Radislav Krstic who was given a 46-year jail term in a landmark verdict in 2001 for his role in the slaughter of up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.