By Emma Thomasson
Reuters
Thursday, September 28, 2006

THE HAGUE, Sept. 27 -- The U.N. war crimes tribunal on Wednesday sentenced the former head of the Bosnian Serb parliament to 27 years in prison for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Judge Alphons Orie pronounced Momcilo Krajisnik guilty of murder, extermination, deportation, persecution and forced transfer of non-Serb civilians, but said it had not been proved that Krajisnik intended to commit genocide, the wiping out of the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat ethnic groups.

Krajisnik, captured by NATO-led peacekeepers near Sarajevo in 2000, was the former right-hand man to Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and one of the highest-ranking Bosnian Serbs to be brought to the tribunal. He went on trial in February 2004 and pleaded not guilty to all counts.

"Mr. Krajisnik wanted the Muslim and Croat populations moved out of Bosnian Serb territories in large numbers, and accepted that a heavy price of suffering, death and destruction was necessary to achieve Serb domination," Orie said.

In one attack, Orie said, a paramilitary group used spiked metal bars and chains to assault Muslim detainees, who were also forced to beat one another. Men were sexually mutilated.

A former economist, Krajisnik was part of the presidency that controlled the army, together with Karadzic and former Bosnian Serb president Biljana Plavsic. Plavsic, who admitted responsibility for atrocities in the Bosnia war and was imprisoned in 2003 for 11 years, testified against Krajisnik.

Karadzic, still on the run, is charged with responsibility for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of as many as 8,000 Muslims and the brutal siege of Sarajevo.

Krajisnik, nicknamed "Mr. No" for his uncompromising stance in peace negotiations, stood without showing emotion, toying with a pen and nodding only when the judge said that the time he had spent in detention would count against his prison term.

Prosecutors have struggled so far to prove genocidal intent in the conflicts that tore apart the country that had been Yugoslavia. The tribunal has convicted two people of genocide, both for the Srebrenica massacre.

In Sarajevo, relatives of the Srebrenica victims blasted the acquittal on the genocide charge. "Yet another reward for the crime committed against us in Bosnia and Herzegovina, yet another disappointment," said Munira Subasic, president of a Sarajevo-based association of Srebrenica mothers.