The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former...

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted five ethnic Croats of ethnic cleansing in a 1993 rampage in a Bosnian village which left 116 Muslims dead. A Tribunal spokesman, Paul Risley, said the verdict was groundbreaking because it was the first instance in The Hague in which defendants were accused solely of the practices that became infamous in the Balkans as ethnic cleansing, and not of war crimes or genocide. "For the tribunal, this was a test of applying already existing international law toward a crime that essentially was invented during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia," Risley said. "Even the term 'ethnic cleansing' wasn't used before 1991." Vladimir Santic, at the time the local head of an infamous special Croatian military police unit known as the Jokers, was charged with ordering the massacre. He received the heaviest sentence - 25 years. One of his subordinates, Drago Josipovic, was given a 15-year prison term. The brothers, Zoran and Mirjan Kupreskic, were sentenced to 10 and eight years, respectively. A cousin, Vlatko Kupreskic, a police operations officer whose home was used as a staging point for ethnic cleansing operations, got six years. The three Kupreskics were residents of Ahmici, the hamlet in mountainous central Bosnia where they embarked on a terror campaign during the former Yugoslav republic's civil war. All of the village's 172 Muslim homes and two mosques were destroyed and entire Muslim families were executed with machine guns, their barns and livestock burned. Not a single Croat-owned home was touched.