By Anne Swardson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 4, 2000; Page A11

PARIS, March 3—Tihomir Blaskic, a Croatian general accused of overseeing the killings of hundreds of civilians during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, was found guilty today by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague and sentenced to 45 years in prison--the toughest penalty handed down by the court in its 6 1/2-year history.

Blaskic, 39, is the highest-ranking commander to be tried by the court. In addition to the killings, he was accused of overseeing forced relocations and the destruction of property belonging to Muslims. He was convicted of 19 of the 20 counts he faced.

"The acts of war carried out with disregard for international humanitarian law and in hatred of other people, the villages reduced to rubble, the houses and stables set on fire and destroyed, the people forced to abandon their homes, the lost and broken lives are unacceptable," French judge Claude Jorda said in his written opinion concluding the two-year trial.

Court officials and observers said today's result bodes well for the upcoming prosecutions of three former Bosnian Serb commanders, including a key figure in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, one of the worst war crimes of the conflict.

Until now, "it's been all small fish," tribunal spokesman Paul Risley said. "This trial was of a senior figure, responsible for ethnic cleansing. And the judge accepted the lion's share of the prosecution's charges."

Blaskic had argued that communication difficulties and breaks in the chain of command had made him unaware that war crimes were being committed, but the court rejected that defense and held Blaskic responsible not only for allowing ethnic cleansing but also for not acting to prevent it.

Unlike all previous defendants to come before the tribunal, Blaskic was charged only with ordering killings--not killing anyone himself. But his complete authority over all Croatian forces was well established in documents that showed he oversaw regular and special forces, military and civilian police, and the "Jokers," a particularly ruthless special unit.

"It is the first very strong case of command responsibility," said Ben Ward, a researcher on the former Yugoslavia for Human Rights Watch in New York. "That finding moves forward the jurisprudence and should make it easier in subsequent cases."

In Washington, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said the United States believes the verdict "shows the progress that the international tribunal is making in bringing justice to the victims of war crimes in Bosnia."

While today's result was hailed as a victory for the sometimes-beleaguered tribunal, its three most senior indictees remain at large: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and Karadzic's former general, Ratko Mladic.

Blaskic, who has been in custody since he surrendered in 1996, was Croatia's supreme commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina and controlled Croatian and Bosnian-Croatian forces in the Lasva Valley, an area northwest of Sarajevo that was home to both ethnic Croats and Bosnian Muslims. According to the judge's opinion, Blaskic's troops stopped at nothing to terrorize Muslims.

Beginning in April 1993, the opinion said, "the Lasva Valley became the theater of many crimes--civilians were killed or wounded, houses set alight, minarets brought down, mosques destroyed, women and children separated from the men and left with no choice but to flee, women raped and men imprisoned, beaten and led to the front to dig trenches."

According to documents presented in the case, Blaskic's own written orders for such villages as Vitez, Kiseljak, Zenica and Ahmici called for "cleansing" and asked that certain villages be subordinated "in all respects." Blaskic was in charge of combat units that killed more than 100 Muslim civilians in the village of Ahmici on April 16, 1993, and burned their bodies and their homes.

When the verdict was read in the courtroom, Blaskic remained impassive and took notes. His wife, Ratka, collapsed in tears and had to be carried from the room. The sentence is to be served at the tribunal's detention facility near The Hague, but Blaskic's lawyer said he will appeal.

Next up for trial is Radislav Krstic, a Bosnian Serb commander who was the top field leader in what became known as the Srebrenica massacre in which as many as 10,000 civilians are believed to have died. Later this year, trials will begin for two other Bosnian Serb generals, Momir Talic and Stanislav Galic. All were brought in after Western governments began picking up the pace of arrests in the last two years.