War Crimes Panel Sentences General

Setting an important double precedent, the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal Friday gave its highest-ranking defendant so far, a Bosnian Croat general, its heaviest sentence yet: 45 years in prison.

Accused of ordering repeated attacks during the 1992-95 Bosnian war on Muslim towns and hamlets in which hundreds of civilians died, Tihomir Blaskic was found guilty on 20 counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes and violations of the Geneva Conventions, which set ground rules to protect civilians in wartime.

“It’s a critical day for the tribunal,” said Paul Risley, a tribunal spokesman. “This sentence promises to be the beginning of a phase at the tribunal where the sentences are taken very seriously.”

Chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte has said she intends to concentrate on bringing to justice the leaders who gave orders for the atrocities of the Bosnian conflict, rather than only rank-and-file soldiers who carried them out. Friday’s verdict demonstrated the U.N. court’s willingness to mete out tough sentences to high-ranking officers such as Blaskic who did not commit war crimes and other offenses with their own hands but ordered others to do so.

Although the most notorious war crimes suspects in the Bosnian war, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, remain at large, a trial is scheduled to begin March 13 of another general, Bosnian Serb Radislav Krstic, who is accused of leading the 1995 slaughter of 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, the worst massacre of the war.

Reporters present Friday at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague said Blaskic’s wife, Ratka, broke into sobs and collapsed as the verdict was read and had to be carried from the chamber. Blaskic, 39, standing with militarylike rigidity, reacted with glacial silence.

The prison term, which Blaskic’s American lawyer, Russell Hayman, said he will appeal, was the most severe given by the tribunal since its creation by the United Nations in 1993.

Blaskic was found guilty by a three-judge panel of “personally ordering” systematic attacks on the civilian Muslim populations in the Lasva Valley as commander of HVO Bosnian Croat forces in central Bosnia-Herzegovina from mid-1992 until the beginning of 1994. Hundreds lost their lives, and survivors fled by the thousands.

During the trial, which lasted more than two years, Blaskic also was accused of uprooting civilian populations by force, taking civilians hostage and using them as human shields, and destroying homes and mosques. Specifically, he was charged with leading an anti-Muslim pogrom in the village of Ahmici in April 1993 in which more than 100 men, women and children were killed and every Muslim home burned to the ground.

“The crimes you committed, Gen. Blaskic, are extremely serious,” the presiding judge, Claude Jorda, said Friday. “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.”

In January, five Bosnian Croats of lower ranks were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to 25 years for their part in the rampage at Ahmici.

Blaskic held the rank of colonel at the time of the events for which he stood trial. The day after he was indicted, he was promoted to general in Croatia’s regular army--a slap in the tribunal’s face by the nationalist government of the late President Franjo Tudjman.

In its verdict, the U.N. tribunal accused Tudjman’s government of actively participating in the Bosnian war. According to Jorda, numerous soldiers of the Croatian army fought in the HVO after “orders were given that they remove their insignia.” Most officers of the Bosnian Croat force, the French judge said, were in fact from Croatia’s regular army.