Vlado Trifunovic in 2010. The former Yugoslav army general’s treason conviction by Serbia’s wartime leadership became a symbol of the senselessness of the Balkan conflict. (Darko Vojinovic/Associated Press)

Vlado Trifunovic, a former Yugoslav army general whose treason conviction by Serbia’s wartime nationalist leadership became a symbol of the senselessness of the 1990s’ Balkan conflict, died Jan. 15 in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. He was 78.

Serbia state television reported his death. Details were not immediately available.

Gen. Trifunovic was in charge of a Yugoslav army unit in the town of Varazdin in independence-seeking Croatia as war broke out there in 1991. He disobeyed orders from Belgrade to fight and instead negotiated a safe passage for his troops.

Yugoslavia’s once multiethnic military became dominated by Serbs and controlled from Belgrade after the western republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1991.

Gen. Trifunovic was convicted of treason by the nationalist government of Serbia’s then-President Slobodan Milosevic. But antiwar Serbs hailed Gen. Trifunovic as a hero for saving the soldiers’ lives.

“Varazdin would have been destroyed if I gave the orders to fight,” Gen. Trifunovic told the Associated Press in 2010. “My soldiers and I would probably have ended up in some mass grave that would become a symbol of Serb-Croat hatred.”

The opposing views of Gen. Trifunovic’s move mirror the divisions that still exist in Serbia over the country’s role in a war that claimed more than 100,000 lives and left millions homeless.

His conviction was thrown out in 2010, years after Milosevic was ousted from power and handed over to a U.N. war crimes court to face a genocide trial. Milosevic died in his cell in The Hague in 2006.

Croatia and Slovenia accused Gen. Trifunovic of war crimes, further reflecting the animosities among the former Yugoslav republics following the breakup.

Largely forgotten, he spent most of his postwar years in a drab Belgrade hotel occupied by Serbs expelled from other former Yugoslav republics.