Former Bosnian Serb general loses genocide appeal

A Bosnian Serb general sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the Srebrenica massacre lost an appeal against his conviction for genocide at a UN court on Wednesday evening.

Zdravko Tolimir, described by prosecutors as number two in the Bosnian Serb army, was found guilty in November on eight counts of crimes, including genocide, committed during the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s.

At a hearing of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Judge Theodor Meron, the court's president, dismissed most of Tolimir's 26 grounds for appeal.

But the court overturned Tolimir's conviction for forcibly transferring Muslims from Zepa, a town near Srebrenica in Bosnia, and acquitted him of specific small-scale killings. The sentence was unchanged.

"In light of these genocide convictions alone, the appeals chamber considers that Tolimir's responsibility does not warrant a revision of his sentence," Mr Meron told the court.

The verdict comes almost 10 years after the slaughter of an estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, near the present-day border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. The town's name has since become synonymous with the worse excesses of the conflict in former Yugoslavia, which claimed more than 100,000 lives.

Srebrenica and Zepa had been declared "safe havens" by UN Security Council Resolutions in Spring 1993. But in July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the enclave at Srebrenica, which had been protected by a battalion of 450 Dutch UN peacekeepers.

The subsequent massacres in both towns, the largest in Europe since the end of the second world war, have been described by the court as "massive in scale, severe in their intensity, and devastating in their effect".

Tolimir was arrested in Republika Srpska on May 31 2007 after a two-year manhunt that ended when Serb authorities found him living in an apartment near the family of Ratko Mladic, his commander.

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During proceedings, the presiding judge described the former general as Mr Mladic's "right hand man" adding that Tolimir "sometimes knew more than Mladic himself".

Mr Mladic is presenting his defence against an indictment for 11 charges, including genocide and crimes against humanity, at the court in The Hague.

Prosecutors called 183 witnesses to present evidence of Tolimir's co-ordinating and directing role in events culminating in the Srebrenica massacre.

"The accused had knowledge and was aware of the genocidal intent of the Bosnian Serb leadership and was responsible for genocide," the judge said.

As Mr Meron read out the judgment of the court on Wednesday, Tolimir listened in silence and made the sign of the cross.

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