THE HAGUE: The former head of the Yugoslav army was acquitted yesterday of charges of aiding and abetting atrocities committed in Bosnia and Croatia during the 1990s, in a ruling that was condemned by victims but welcomed by Serb officials.
United Nations war crimes judges said Momcilo Perisic had provided legitimate military support to the ethnic Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) forces in Bosnia, but ruled he had not ordered them to commit war crimes.
“While Mr Perisic may have known of VRS crimes, the Yugoslav Army aid he facilitated was directed towards the VRS’s general war effort rather than VRS crimes,” said Theodor Meron, president of the appeals chamber at the tribunal in The Hague.
Perisic, 68, showed no emotion as Meron ordered his immediate release.
Rebel Serbs fought to carve out an ethnically Serb state in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 after its Muslims and Croats voted for independence from Serbian-led federal Yugoslavia.
Judges said he also was innocent of ordering Serbian forces to shell the Croatian capital Zagreb.
Serb forces committed some of the gravest crimes during Yugoslavia’s break-up, including the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, and the siege of Sarajevo in which more than 10,000 civilians died.
The acquittal means the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has not convicted a single Belgrade official for involvement in crimes in Bosnia and Croatia, which claimed tens of thousands of lives.
The court put Slobodan Milosevic, the long-serving Yugoslav president who appointed Perisic and presided over the break-up of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, on trial but he died in detention in 2006 before its conclusion.
Serbian officials welcomed the verdict, which follows the acquittal on appeal last year of Ante Gotovina, the Croatian general who led the counter-attack that took the Croatian region of Krajina back from Serb forces.
REUTERS
