Hague court hands out 10- to 20-year sentences for 1990s wartime chiefs' terror campaign to seize Muslim territory

This article is more than 7 years old

This article is more than 7 years old

Croatia's wartime leaders of 20 years ago have been found guilty of orchestrating a campaign of terror and atrocities to drive Bosnian Muslims away and to seize their territory.

On Wednesday, during a landmark trial at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, six Bosnian Croat leaders received sentences of 10 to 25 years for leading the campaign to carve an ethnically pure Croatian mini-state out of Bosnia, through violence and terror, with plans for Croatia to annex the territory.

The trial, which has lasted seven years, amounted to the first close judicial examination of the Bosnia policies of Croatia's first president, Franjo Tudjman, an extreme nationalist.

The verdict was damning. The judges stated: "All six were found guilty for their participation in a joint criminal enterprise with the objective to remove the Muslim population from the territories on which the Bosnian Croat leadership, with the leadership of Croatia, wanted to establish Croat domination.

"These crimes were not committed in a random manner by a few undisciplined soldiers. On the contrary, they were the result of a plan put together by the JCE [joint criminal enterprise] members to remove the Muslim population."

The six guilty included the political, military, and police chiefs of the Croats in Bosnia. The judges also named Tudjman, his defence minister, Gojko Šušak, and his army chief of staff, all now dead, as co-plotters in the brutal land grab of 1993-94.

The land grab triggered a Muslim-Croat war-within-a-war in Bosnia, the main conflict being between Serbs and Muslims.

It was the first time the leadership in Zagreb had been found responsible in court for what, to many, including one of Tudjman's successors, the former president Stipe Mesić, was a disastrous policy.

The most spectacular and dramatic episode of the systematic campaign came in November 1993 when Croatian forces in Herzegovina shelled Mostar's 16th century Ottoman bridge spanning the Neretva river.

The destruction of the architectural masterpiece, known as the "stari most" or old bridge, was condemned globally as an act of cultural barbarism. The officer held responsible for directing the attack, Slobodan Praljak, a former assistant minister of defence, received a 20-year sentence on Wednesday.

The Croats forced Muslims out of their homes on the west bank of the city into the ancient Ottoman quarter on the east side, then shelled and besieged them for months.

The city remains ethnically divided until this day. The Croats erected a soaring Roman Catholic cross to dominate the skyline above the mainly Muslim eastern side.

Before the Croatian then Bosnian wars erupted in 1991-92, Tudjman met the late Serbian leader, Slobodan Milošević at a hunting lodge near the Serbia-Croatia border to plot dividing up Bosnia between them.

At that time, in January 1991, during a break one day from a tennis game in Zagreb, Tudjman told the Guardian the aim was to replicate the arrangement of 1939 when Belgrade and Zagreb split Bosnia between them to create Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia.

In a whirlwind of violence against civilians in the first months of the Bosnia war from April 1992, the Serbs seized more than half of Bosnia.

In early 1993 the Croats then moved on their land grab, encouraged by the efforts of Lord Owen whose territorial division awarded tracts of ethnically mixed central Bosnia to the Croats.

The Croats torched Muslim villages, massacred hundreds of elderly peasants, set up a string of camps where inmates were tortured, conducted night-time roundups in the towns to evict non-Croats, and prosecuted the siege of east Mostar.

The aim was to establish the mini-state called Herceg-Bosna in the south-west of the country bordering Croatia proper.

Croatian forces, the court found, "exercised extreme violence, Muslims were woken up in the middle of the night, beaten and forced to leave their apartments, often still in their pyjamas. Many women, including a girl of 16, were raped".

One of the three judges dissented from the verdicts.

The tribunal concluded: "The ultimate purpose was to create a Croat entity, to unify the Croatian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Later these areas were to be either joined with the Republic of Croatia, or remain in close association with it."