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Bosnian Serb's life term quashed
 The only person jailed for life by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague has had his sentence cut on appeal to 40 years. Milomir Stakic, the 44-year-old former mayor of Prijedor in northern Bosnia, was held responsible for the notorious detention camps set up there in 1992.
Pictures of emaciated prisoners behind barbed wire, reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps, shocked the world.
| But not the Euros, and especially not the court. |
The appeals court said the original sentence was inappropriate. It upheld Stakic's conviction for the extermination and persecution of Prijedor's non-Serb population in order to create a Serbian municipality to join a pure Serbian state. But it also upheld his acquittal of genocide.
| Apparently killing 1,500 people isn't enough to qualify for the genocide finals. |
It said the evidence was consistent with the trial chamber's conclusion that Stakic "intended to displace but not to destroy" non-Serbs.
| They just up and died anyway. |
But correspondents say the ruling could mean that Stakic actually spends longer in jail. His life sentence would have been subject to a review after 20 years, but the 40-year sentence has no such provision.
As a top administrator in the Prijedor region, Stakic, oversaw the setting up of the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje camps, in which more than 1,500 Bosnian Muslims and Croats died.
Posted by: Steve White 2006-03-23 |
