The UN court sentenced Vlastimir Djordjevic to 27 years in prison after pronouncing him guilty of murdering at least 724 Kosovo Albanians, as well as committing inhumane acts, persecution and deportations.
The verdict marked the end of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal’s final trial dealing with atrocities in the Kosovo conflict. The five trials included some ethnic Albanians, but taken together were a stinging condemnation of Serbia’s campaign of terror in Kosovo, which only ended after NATO airstrikes pounded Serb forces and strategic targets in the capital, Belgrade.
The court will, however, revisit the conflict when it conducts a partial retrial of former ethnic Albanian separatist fighter and ex-Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj for alleged crimes against Serbs.
Djordjevic, 62, stood in silence and blinked several times as presiding Judge Kevin Parker passed sentence.
Parker said Serbian forces, often police controlled by Djordjevic, expelled at least 200,000 Kosovo Albanians from Kosovo and murdered civilian women, children and the disabled. Prosecutors say about 800,000 Albanians were forcibly ejected from Kosovo during the conflict.
In one massacre on March 26, 1999, Serb forces herded 114 men and boys into a barn, including a disabled man whose wheelchair was used to block one of the exits, according to the judgment. The Serbs then riddled the barn with bullets from automatic weapons before torching it and all those inside.
In another mass murder, 45 members of the same family were killed, including 32 women and children who hid in a cafe.
“Police threw hand grenades inside the cafe and then opened fire on them,” Parker said.
Parker also said Djordjevic played a “key role” in trying to cover up more than 800 killings by secretly having bodies removed from Kosovo, sometimes in refrigerated trucks, and buried in mass graves in Serbia.
Djordjevic, who was arrested in 2007 in Montenegro, had pleaded not guilty, saying he had no control over the Serb forces.
“I did not know, I did not have reason to know that my subordinates committed widespread crimes against the Albanian population,” he told judges during his trial.
But the tribunal rejected that defense, saying he had “effective control” of police and other Serbian forces.
It said he was a crucial player in a plot led by former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to drive Albanians out of Kosovo, the province that has since declared independence from Serbia.
Parker said Djordjevic “contributed significantly to the campaign of terror and extreme violence by Serbian forces against Kosovo Albanians, which had the purpose of changing the demographic composition of Kosovo.”
