Krstic found guilty of genocide

Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic has been convicted of genocide for the Srebrenica slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

It was the first time the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as ruled that genocide was committed in the Bosnian war, and the first genocide conviction in Europe since the Second World War.

Krstic was jailed for 46 years.

The court ruled that even though Krstic may have received orders from others to carry out mass executions of men and deportations of women and children UN the UN haven, he bore responsibility for genocide.

"You were there, General Krstic," said Judge Rodrigues.

"You were guilty of the murder of thousands of Bosnians Muslims," he said.

"In July 1995, General Krstic, you agreed to evil. This is why the trial chamber convicts you today and sentences you to 46 years in prison."

The sentence was the longest delivered yet by the tribunal in any of the score of convictions it has handed down for the Balkan wars. But it fell short of the eight consecutive life sentences sought by the prosecution.

Krstic was charged with leading a week long campaign that prosecutors say left at least 8,000 men and boys dead or missing.

He told the court he knew of the mass killings, but was unable to stop them. He pleaded innocent to genocide, murder, persecution and other charges.

Krstic, the highest-ranking Bosnian Serb military officer tried by the court, is charged with superior authority for planning and implementing a policy of persecution and murder that virtually wiped out the entire non-Serb population in the predominantly Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in southeastern Bosnia.

In July 1995, Serb forces attacked the UN declared "safe haven" where about 30,000 Muslims had sought refuge from the Serb onslaught at a Dutch-manned UN base.

Exhumations of mass graves conducted by investigators in Bosnia, some as recent as last month, have revealed the bodies of more than 4,000 victims.

Women and children were separated from the males, who were loaded onto buses and taken to collection stations throughout the region.

Dozens of survivors testified about what became known as the killing fields of Srebrenica. Several witnesses told how they lay in a field of bleeding corpses for hours as Serb soldiers discharged round after round of automatic weapon fire into columns of prisoners.

Krstic told the court that his immediate superior, General Ratko Mladic, took control of the forces that overran the enclave just days before the killings. Krstic said he kept quiet for fear that Mladic would harm his family.

But prosecutors maintained that Krstic jointly masterminded the genocide plan with Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, then the Bosnian Serb political leader. Both Mladic and Karadzic have been indicted but remain at large.

In closing arguments last month, prosecutors requested the judges to sentence Krstic to eight consecutive life terms. The defence asked that the genocide charge be dropped.

The UN court for Yugoslavia was established in 1993 to punish those responsible for atrocities during the break up of Yugoslavia that began in 1991.

The Krstic trial began in March 2000, and summations were heard last June. The trial heard 102 prosecution and 12 defence witnesses during 94 trial sessions, but was delayed frequently because of Krstic’s health problems related to the amputation of a leg during the war.