Croat Gets 45 Years For War Crimes

The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal sentenced Croat Gen. Tihomir Blaskic Friday to 45 years in prison, the longest sentence it has issued and the first verdict against a senior military officer in the Balkan conflict.

The ruling of the three-judge court, chaired by the tribunal's president, Claude Jorda of France, could influence the way the history of the Balkan conflict is written.

"The crimes you committed, General Blaskic, are extremely serious," Jorda said. "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."

As the verdict was read, Blaskic's wife, Ratka, broke down in sobs and a young child seated next her let out a shriek and collapsed to the floor.

It was the longest sentence yet handed down by the U.N. tribunal, set up in 1993 to punish those responsible for the atrocities in the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. In December, Bosnian Serb Goran Jelesic was sentenced to 40 years for atrocities at the notorious Luka prison camp in Bosnia.

The maximum sentence the tribunal can impose is life imprisonment.

Blaskic's sentence reflected an apparent trend at the tribunal, under Jorda's leadership, to hand down exceptionally long terms against defendants deemed to have borne command responsibility for the crimes committed.

It follows a mammoth 25-month trial with testimony from 158 witnesses and around 30,000 pages of evidence presented to the judges, who took seven more months to reach a decision.

Blaskic, 39, was commander of Croat fighters in central Bosnia during the war. In a snub of the tribunal, he was promoted to general in Croatia's standing army after his indictment by the tribunal was made public in 1995.

He was held responsible by the court for a blitz across the Lasva River Valley that left hundreds of Muslims dead and sent thousands more fleeing the area.

In particular, the court said Blaskic ordered the April 1993 rampage in which more than 100 men, women and children were killed and the Bosnian village of Ahmici was emptied of every one of its Muslim inhabitants.

Blaskic was convicted of 20 counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which seek to protect civilians caught in warfare.

The indictment accused him of systematic attacks on cities and villages, destruction of homes and mosques, forcible transfer of civilians, taking hostages and using them as human shields.

By Jerome Socolovsky
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