\n An international tribunal on Thursday convicted and jailed a top Kosovo Serb politician for nine years for committing war crimes against ethnic Albanians during the late 1990s conflict.\n<\/p>\n
\n Oliver Ivanovic, 62, was found guilty of encouraging the killings in April 1999 of captured civilians in the northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica, by telling Serb paramilitaries at a checkpoint to \"ask nothing and carry out orders\". Four of the prisoners were subsequently killed.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Oliver Ivanovic knew that an operation of expulsions and killings of (ethnic) Albanians was under way in Kosovska Mitrovica and knew that murders would follow,\" said tribunal president Roxana Comsa, reading the verdict.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"He encouraged paramilitaries to commit this crime,\" she said.\n<\/p>\n
\n He and four others were however acquitted of other alleged war crimes in 2000.\n<\/p>\n
\n The 1998-1999 war pitted ethnic Albanian guerrillas seeking independence for the southern Serbian province of Kosovo against Serbia's forces, who withdrew from the territory after an 11-week NATO bombing campaign.\n<\/p>\n
\n Kosovo, whose population is predominantly ethnic Albanian, unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008, a move not recognised by Belgrade.\n<\/p>\n
\n Ivanovic, who is considered a political moderate, became the first senior Kosovo Serb official to be charged and tried by the European Union Rule of Law Mission (EULEX) on suspicion of war crimes against ethnic Albanians.\n<\/p>\n
\n Arrested in January 2014, he pleaded not guilty to the charges and has held hunger strikes in protest.\n<\/p>\n
\n A former Serbian state secretary for Kosovo, Ivanovic was a key interlocutor with NATO, the UN and later the EU after the war and was seen as backing dialogue with the Kosovo Albanian community.\n<\/p>\n
\n EULEX, the EU's police and justice mission in the region, has the power to step in and take on cases that the local judiciary and police are unable to handle because of their sensitive nature.\n<\/p>\n
\n About 120,000 of Kosovo's 1.8 million inhabitants are ethnic Serbs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An international tribunal on Thursday convicted and jailed a top Kosovo Serb politician for nine years for committing war crimes against ethnic Albanians during the late 1990s conflict. Oliver Ivanovic, 62, was found guilty of encouraging the killings in April 1999 of captured civilians in the northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica, by telling Serb paramilitaries […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-25539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n