Bosnian Serb gets 20 years for war crimes

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnia’s war crimes court on Friday
sentenced Bosnian Serb former officer Dragoje Paunovic to 20
years in prison for crimes against humanity during the Balkan
country’s 1992-95 war.

The court said Paunovic “ordered and carried out
persecution against the Muslim civilian population from the
Rogatica area on political, national, ethnic, cultural and
religious grounds by committing murders and other inhumane
acts.”

The indictment said that on August 15, 1992, while leading
a small group from the Rogatica battalion based in eastern
Bosnia, Paunovic ordered his soldiers to capture 27 civilians
and use them as human shields on a frontline.

Later that day he ordered soldiers to shoot the captives,
also taking up a gun himself. Only three people survived.

Bosnia’s war crimes chamber was established in 2005 to
alleviate some of the workload of the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It will increasingly take
over low- and mid-level cases as the Hague court winds down by
2010.