Srebrenica massacre, former Serbian officer jailed for 30 years

Former Serbian army captain Milorad Trbic was jailed for thirty years on Friday. He was charged with genocide for the killings of dozens of Muslims in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

In a decision which angered victims relatives, the head of the judicial council Davorin Jukic said that he was acquitted of three other counts of genocide after the court ruled there was a lack of evidence. Trbic was found guilty for his role in persecuting Bosnian Muslims from the Srebrenica enclave and for his role in their detention, execution, burial and the subsequent covering up of the crimes. Approximately 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in the Srebrenica massacre after the 11 July 1995 capture of the eastern enclave by Bosnian Serb forces. It's described as the worst atrocity in Europe since those committed during World War Two. Judge Jukic said that Trbic took part in a "joint criminal enterprise" with other officers in the Serb army. They organised the forced transfer of Muslims from Srebrenica between 10 July and 30 November 1995. Trbic supervised the detention of thousands of Muslims in many schools around Srebrenica. They were kept in inhuman conditions in these schools. He also supervised the transportation of the detained Muslims to the killing fields where they were executed en-masse. On one occasion Trbic himself personally shot dead a group of "at least 20 Muslims" at Grbavci school and on another occasion a group "of at least 5 Muslims" at Rocevici school. Trbic was also involved in trying to cover all traces of the massacre by helping with the exhumation of the victims from their original mass graves and then helping with the transportation of the bodies to secondary mass graves. In eastern Bosnia the remains of more than 6,000 Srebrenica victims have been found in mass graves but only 3,800 have been identified so far. In court Judge Jukic failed to refer to the genocide charge with which Trbic had been convicted, leading relatives to believe that he had been acquitted on all charges. Hatidza Mehmedovic who lost her husband and two sons in the massacre told Reuters, "The sentence was a reward for him. The court might as well have set him free." Despite the court releasing a statement to clarify the verdict relatives remained upset by the outcome. Trbic ran to the United States after the end of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia but there he was found guilty of breaking immigration laws. In 2005 he was handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He was transferred to Bosnia for trial in June 2007 after the ICTY had indicted him on genocide charges, crimes against humanity and violations of laws or customs of war.