Bosnian acquitted of genocide as Milosevic fights similar charges

? A Yugoslav war crimes tribunal acquitted a Bosnian Serb leader of genocide on Wednesday, while former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic told a separate panel the charges he himself faces are “empty words” and a “mutilation of justice.”

The verdict in the five-year trial of Radislav Brdjanin, wartime leader of the autonomous Krajina region of Bosnia, should encourage Milosevic, who launched his defense this week against charges of genocide and more than 60 other counts of war crimes.

Brdjanin, 56, a powerful Serb figure at the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, was convicted on eight of 12 charges and sentenced to 32 years imprisonment, but acquitted on the most serious charges related to genocide and extermination.

Despite a Serb campaign of mass murder, torture and deportations of non-Serbs, the court said the brutality fell short of genocide, which requires stringent proof the sole intent was to wipe out the Muslim and Croat communities.

The acquittal was a setback for prosecutors who placed genocide at the center of Milosevic’s indictment. He is accused of responsibility for the deaths of more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.

On Wednesday, Milosevic denounced his trial as “a farce, pure and simple.”

“This indictment represents a sum of unscrupulous manipulation, lies, crippling of the law, and an unjust presentation of the history,” he said. The charges are a “sheer mutilation of justice. Nothing else. What it says there are empty words.”