A Bosnian Serb general was convicted of genocide and other war crimes Wednesday by a United Nations tribunal in the Netherlands for his role in plotting and carrying out the murder of thousands of Muslim men in Eastern Bosnia in 1995.
Zdravko Tolimir, intelligence chief and deputy to wartime Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic, was found guilty of murder, persecution, deportation and genocide by a 2-1 judgment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Tolimir, 64, was a key architect of the criminal conspiracies to eradicate Muslims from Bosnian territory coveted by Serbs, including the killing of at least 6,000 Muslim men from the purportedly U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
"The harm inflicted upon these men rises to the level of serious bodily and mental harm and constitute acts of genocide,” Presiding Judge Christoph Fluegge of Germany said in reading the judgment in The Hague. The trial, which ran for more than two years, established that the systematic killings at Srebrenica and Zepa and deportation of tens of thousands of civilians from Eastern Bosnia during the 1992-95 conflict "was carried out to ensure that the Bosnian Muslim population of this enclave would not be able to reconstitute itself."