Milan Babic, the former leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia, this week failed in his appeal against a 13- year prison sentence, to the quiet satisfaction of the Croatian government.
Babic, 49, received the sentence after pleading guilty in January 2004 to being co-perpetrator of persecutions of Croats on political, racial, and religious grounds, as a crime against humanity.
In an emotive address to the trial chamber, he admitted that the political leaders of Serbs in Croatia aimed in 1991 to cleanse part of its territory of Croats and attach it to Serbia proper in an attempt to build a Greater Serbia.
Thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands expelled during the short but brutal war in Croatia that started in the summer of 1991 and ended with a cease fire in the early 1992. Babic proclaimed himself at the time the president of the so-called Republic of Serb Krajina, with its capital in the provincial town of Knin.
Adressing the judges some 13 years later, Babic spoke of the shame and remorse he felt and said he had hoped to relieve the collective shame of the Croatian Serbs, asking his "Croatian brothers to forgive their Serb brothers" for their actions.
The prosecutors asked for a sentence of 11 years in prison, after the court found that while Babic may not have been the prime mover in the operation, he chose to remain in power during this period.
Judges then ruled that the severity of crimes committed and the degree of Babic’s involvement required a sterner verdict, and sentenced him to 13 years instead.
The Hague tribunal judges are not bound by the prosecutors’ recommendations on the length of sentence.
Babic’s lawyers appealed the sentence on eleven different grounds, ranging from legal to factual errors, and errors made by the judges when assessing the degree of his seniority, his remorse and his subsequent cooperation with the court’s prosecutors in other cases.
Babic testified as a prosecution witness in the case against the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, describing in details the degree of his involvement in the wars in Croatia and to some extent in Bosnia.
According to his testimony, during the summer of 1991 the Serbian secret police - under Milosevic's command - set up "a parallel structure of state security and the police of Krajina and units commanded by the state security of Serbia". A full-scale war was launched in which a large area of territory, amounting to a third of Croatia, was seized and the non-Serb population was either massacred or ethnically cleansed. The bulk of the fighting occurred between August and December 1991.
Last year, he also testified against the former top Bosnian Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik, and it is expected he will continue testifying in other trials as well.
The tribunal judges granted Babic’s appeal only on one of the 11 grounds - ruling that the trial chamber erred when it failed to consider as a mitigating circumstance his conduct subsequent to the crime and his attempts to further peace after 1992.
But the judges also ruled by a majority that, on balance, this error should not have an impact upon the length of the prison sentence.
One of Babic's more controversial grounds for appeal was his claim that he was in fact coerced by the trial chamber to enter a plea of guilty as co-perpetrator in the crime he was charged with, rather than as an aidor and abbettor, as he first defined his role.
The trial chamber said at the time it was not convinced this was the appropriate description of his role. Babic then pleaded again, this time as a co-perpetrator, and his plea was accepted.
In a telephone interview for IWPR, Croatian justice minister Vesna Skare-Ozbolt said that the appeals chamber decision spoke for itself, but added that it showed the court’s “awareness about the severity of the crimes [Babic] committed”.
Babic will now wait in the UN Detention Unit in Scheveningen for the tribunal to decide where he will serve his sentence.
Goran Jungvirth is an IWPR contributor in Zagreb.
