Bosnian Muslim beast and former army commander, Rasim Delic dead at 61

[Serbian Canadian]

 

Rasim Delic, Bosnian Army Commander, Dies at 61

Gen. Rasim Delic, who commanded Bosnia’s Army during much of the catastrophic ethnic war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, died on Friday at his home in Sarajevo. He was 61. A lawyer for General Delic, Vasvija Vidovic, confirmed in a telephone interview that he had been in poor health and died from what appeared to be a heart attack.

At the time of his death, General Delic, a Bosnian Muslim, was awaiting a ruling on his appeal of a three-year prison sentence handed down by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. In 2008, he was found guilty of failing to punish cruel treatment of Serbian captives by some of his subordinates, and he became the most senior Bosnian Muslim commander to be convicted by the tribunal. He was acquitted of murder charges.

General Delic had gained respect from some Western diplomats who knew him as the army chief from 1993 to 1995, when he also played a role in peace negotiations.

But his sentence was widely criticized as exceedingly mild in Serbia, where his case had drawn much attention, not only because he was the army chief , but also because charges involved the behavior of the so-called El Mujahedeen detachment. This group of about 1,000 Islamic fighters who had flocked to Bosnia had gained a reputation among Serbs for brutality, in some cases proudly displaying the severed heads of their captives.

Tribunal judges found that General Delic or his fellow officers had little or no control over the mujahedeen, who had come from countries including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Algeria, and that General Delic and other senior Muslim officers wanted them expelled from Bosnia. But two of the three tribunal judges ruled that General Delic should have made greater efforts to punish the fighters’ excesses.

The appeals decision, even if ready, is not likely to be disclosed following his death, according to lawyers familiar with tribunal proceedings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/world/europe/18delic.html