Judges at The Hague tribunal sentenced a former Bosnian Serb politician to 10 years in jail on Tuesday after he admitted ordering an attack on a village in which more than 60 Muslims were killed during the Bosnian war.
Miroslav Deronjic, a prominent member of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) in the Bratunac region of eastern Bosnia during the 1992-95 conflict, pleaded guilty to persecution, a crime against humanity, at the war crimes tribunal last year.
Yugoslav army and Bosnian Serb forces razed the village of Glogova to the ground, setting alight its mosque, homes, warehouses, fields and haystacks on May 9, 1992. More than 60 Bosnian Muslims were killed in the attack.
"The events in Glogova on the ninth of May 1992 are a classical case of ethnic cleansing and precisely the reason why the (UN) Security Council established this tribunal," judge Wolfgang Schomburg told the court as he announced the sentence.
"The attack on Glogova was not an isolated or random event, but a critical element in a larger scheme to divide Bosnia and Herzegovina and create Serb ethnic territories."
Deronjic, who initially pleaded not guilty to six counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war, changed his plea to guilty after prosecutors scaled down the charges against him in a new indictment.
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