The Tribune

FORMER Bahamas Chief Justice Sir Burton Hall has sentenced two former Bosnian senior officials to 22 years in prison for their role in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

According to the Associated Press, Sir Burton – now a judge at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands – convicted Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin on Wednesday of key roles in a campaign of murder, torture and persecution against Muslims and Croats.

Stanisic was the interior minister in the breakaway Bosnian Serb republic set up during the war and Stojan Zupljanin was in charge of the police.

“Prosecutors had sought life sentences for both men after charging them with involvement in a criminal conspiracy led by Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and his military chief, Gen Ratko Mladic, to force Muslims and Croats out of what they considered to be Serb territory in Bosnia,” the AP report said.

Sir Burton Hall ruled that the men were both in a position to prevent or punish crimes and neither did as Serb police and paramilitaries went on a rampage in early 1992, killing and mistreating non-Serbs as they tried to carve out a “Greater Serbia” during the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

The two men “both intended and significantly contributed to the plan to remove Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from the territory of the planned Serbian state,” Sir Burton said.

The AP said Zupljanin stood and crossed himself as Sir Burton said he was guilty of persecution, extermination, murder and torture.

“Stanisic stood stoically as he was convicted of persecution, murder and torture but was acquitted of extermination,” the report said.

“Zupljanin was convicted of extermination in part because he set up a notorious police unit that the court ruled ‘committed heinous crimes against Muslims and Croats, including rape, torture and murder’ and that he deliberately shielded police under his command from prosecution in at least two massacres of Muslims.

“The court’s detailed judgment, running more than 600 pages, provided a grim reminder of the horrors of war that erupted in Bosnia more than two decades ago.”

The AP report quoted Sir Burton as saying one group of Serb paramilitaries, known as the Yellow Wasps, tortured Muslim prisoners near the town of Zvornik in April 1992, “including forcing fathers and sons to perform sexual acts on each other. Other members of the Wasps forced prisoners to eat body parts cut off from other people, Hall said, adding ‘if a prisoner did not do so, he was killed’.”

Both Karadzic and Mladic are still on trial on genocide charges for allegedly masterminding the persecution and mass deportation of non-Serbs during the war, which left over 100,000 dead.

The AP noted that the tribunal has indicted 161 people for their roles in atrocities in the former Yugoslavia over a decade starting in 1991, most of them Serbs. Only six trials remain to be completed.

Sir Burton Hall was elected to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in August, 2009.

He served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the Bahamas from February 1991 and then as a Justice of Court of Appeal from April 1997.

On September 5, 2001, he became Chief Justice of the Bahamas.