The Hague: The ex-Yugoslav war crimes court will next year hear appeals by former Bosnian Croat leader Jadranko Prlic and five others, jailed in 2013 for murdering and deporting Muslims in Bosnia’s war, officials said.
“The Appeals Chamber orders that a hearing shall take place on 20-24 and 27-28 March 2017,” the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) said in a ruling.
The six former top Bosnian Croat officials were sentenced in May 2013 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed against Muslims in the early 1990s as part of greater Balkans wars that broke out after Yugoslavia crumbled and which claimed more than 100,000 lives.
Judges at sentencing said Prlic, now 57, “made a significant contribution to a joint criminal enterprise and to a criminal purpose to drive out the Muslim population,” from Bosnia in a bid to create a “greater Croatian state.”
Prlic was sentenced to 25 years behind bars, while his five accomplices were handed between 20 and 10 years in prison.
A former president and later also prime minister of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Croat state of Herceg-Bosna, Prlic has been on trial before the Hague-based ICTY since 2006.
The ICTY’s judges ruled that the six defendants removed Muslims and other non-Croats by force, intimidation and terror “by conducting mass arrests of Bosnian Muslims who were then either murdered, beaten, physically exploited, assaulted, robbed of their property and otherwise abused”.
It included the nine-month siege of the southern city of Mostar from June 1993 by Bosnian Croat troops, which saw the destruction of its historical four-century-old bridge, an act which the court said caused “disproportionate damage for the Muslim civilian population of Mostar”.
The suspects, who handed themselves in to the tribunal voluntarily, had all pleaded not guilty.
