Croat fury at mild penalties for massacre

Croatia:Croatia reacted with fury yesterday to the verdicts handed down to three Serbs charged over the massacre of more than 260 Croats at Vukovar in 1991.

The United Nations court at The Hague on Thursday sentenced former Yugoslav army officer Mile Mrksic to 20 years in prison for allowing the killings to take place. Another ex-officer, Veselin Sljivancanin, was given a five-year term for torture but was acquitted of more serious charges while a third, Miroslav Radic, was cleared on all counts.

Vukovar fell to the Serbs after a three-month siege that drove civilians and defeated Croat fighters to take refuge alongside staff and patients in the local hospital.

Serb officers had pledged to hand over the patients to the Red Cross, but on the night of November 20th Mrksic was found to have ordered regular forces to withdraw and let notorious paramilitary units torture and kill 264 people in a nearby field at Ovcara.

The court found that Sljivancanin failed in his duty to defend the prisoners from the "brutal conduct" of the paramilitaries, but judges believed the men's claim that they thought many of those in the hospital were disguised Croat soldiers.

This absolved them of crimes against humanity, a category of offence which relates only to crimes intentionally committed against civilians.

"We shall lodge a protest with the UN Security Council," said Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader, calling the "shameful" verdict a "defeat for the whole idea of the Hague tribunal".

Mr Sanader had rushed to Vukovar after the verdict on Thursday evening to meet outraged survivors of the massacre and relatives of its victims, amid signs that anger at Western-backed institutions could boost right-wing parties in November's general election.

President Stipe Mesic called the verdicts "utterly unacceptable" and said "the confidence in the court has now been seriously shaken".

"It would not be good if these convictions become an issue in the pre-election campaign," added Mr Mesic, who supports Zagreb's co-operation with The Hague.

The Jutarnji List newspaper condemned the decision and enumerated the victims of Vukovar, which marked the beginning of Croatia's 1991-1995 war of independence from the former Yugoslavia that claimed 20,000 lives.

"This is another blow to those who have survived 1991," said Ivan Psenica, head of an association of Croatian detainees.

"We expected that the international community that had not done enough in 1991 to prevent that evil would now punish the perpetrators, not because of us but for the future generations, so something like that would never happen again."

Even the court's chief prosecutor expressed disbelief at its decision. "The prosecutor finds it incomprehensible that someone who is convicted for the torture of 200 people can receive only a sentence of five years," said a spokeswoman for prosecutor Carla del Ponte.