PARIS — The court session in The Hague was meant to be the final act of a decades-long legal process over the atrocities of the Bosnian and Croatian wars. Instead, it descended into chaos, confusion and, ultimately, death.
As judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia were delivering rulings on Wednesday on appeals related to Croatia’s involvement in the 1992-95 Bosnian conflict, one of the six defendants, Slobodan Praljak, addressed the court.
“Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal,” he declared slowly and deliberately in Croatian, just moments after judges upheld Mr. Praljak’s 20-year jail sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity. “I reject your judgment with contempt.”
In a scene befitting the movie director Mr. Praljak had been before the Bosnian war erupted, he pulled out a small container, raised it to his lips and ostentatiously swallowed the contents.
His lawyer then announced that Mr. Praljak, a tall, distinguished-looking man with silver hair and a goatee, had ingested poison.
Mr. Praljak was taken from the courtroom, and the hearing was suspended. Guards seized the container. The curtains that divide the court from the public gallery were drawn.
It was an exceptional moment in a courtroom that has been the scene of ritual courtesy among robed lawyers, of witnesses choking on stories of torture and rape, and of once powerful men hurling insults at judges. But never a staged suicide.
Mr. Praljak, a former general, 72, later died in a Dutch hospital, according to Nenad Golcevski, a tribunal spokesman. “Mr. Praljak drank a liquid while in court, and quickly fell ill,” the court said in a statement.
Many questions, however, remained unanswered, including the most significant one: How did Mr. Praljak obtain and smuggle poison into the tightly secured courthouse?
As is typical, the defendants were transferred to the courtroom from a detention center within a high-security Dutch jail compound near The Hague on Wednesday morning. They are driven into the tribunal building through an underground parking lot, escorted by guards. Detainees have no contact with the public gallery, and any visitors who meet with them in jail — including lawyers, family and friends — pass through a security check.
Dutch investigators and police officers declared the courtroom a crime scene and are carrying out an independent inquiry. Mr. Praljak’s suicide is the third by a defendant facing the tribunal, but the previous two had taken their lives in the court’s detention cells.
Judges upheld the sentences against all of the six defendants, but the suicide of Mr. Praljak — the most senior member of the group — quickly overshadowed those decisions.
Before the Bosnian and Croatian wars, Mr. Praljak had been a filmmaker and a writer. He joined the Croatian Army as a senior official when it was formed after the country achieved independence in 1991. He was eventually named commander of the Croatian forces fighting in Bosnia.
He was a key figure, in particular, during the long siege and shelling of the ethnically mixed city of Mostar. The siege was the most widely publicized Croatian military action during the war and included the destruction of the town’s 16th century stone bridge. At the time, he was the main liaison between political and military leaders in Croatia and the Croatian force fighting in Bosnia.
Mr. Praljak had been convicted of a number of crimes, and while the judges on Wednesday overturned some parts of his conviction, they did not reduce his sentence.
The hearing also drew attention to Croatia’s often-overlooked role in the Bosnian war.
The tribunal has for the past 24 years largely focused on the dominant Serbian role in the conflict, most recently sentencing Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander, to life in prison for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
But Croatia, trials at the tribunal have shown, also orchestrated brutal ethnic cleansing to seize Bosnian lands once the Yugoslav federation began to disintegrate in 1991.
Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia held secret talks early in 1991 to divide Bosnia. Mr. Mladic, court records showed, had at least two subsequent meetings with his Croatian counterparts.
Forces led by Mr. Mladic moved first, in 1992. But the next year, Mr. Tudjman’s campaign to occupy lands that he claimed were historically Croatian kicked into gear. Croatia used militia forces to terrorize non-Croats and force them to flee, tactics similar to Mr. Mladic’s, though there was less coldblooded killing, and the numbers of prisoners and refugees were smaller. Mr. Tudjman died in 1999, before the tribunal had completed his indictment.
Prosecutors said militias that were funded and staffed by the Croatian government, and following its orders, rounded up non-Croatian men, imprisoning up to 10,000. Women and the elderly were abused, raped and at times killed. Tens of thousands fled. Most of the victims were Bosnian Muslims, but Serbs and Roma people also suffered.
Though none of the trials involving Croatia concerned the killings on the scale carried out by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica or Sarajevo, a dozen ethnic Croats have been convicted by the tribunal for crimes related to their campaign of violence.
The case being heard on Wednesday was an appeal involving Croats sentenced to prison terms of 10 years to 25 years for their role as military or political leaders during the Bosnian campaign.
Both the prosecution and the defense had brought appeals against the judgments handed down against the men.
Prosecutors had sought longer sentences and affirmation from the tribunal that the Croatian government funded and controlled the militias inside Bosnia, following direct orders from Mr. Tudjman.
They offered evidence that included extensive records kept by Mr. Tudjman of his conversations, meetings and telephone calls, released to prosecutors after his death, and documents showing that his government sent funds, vehicles, weapons and senior military commanders to run the operations in Bosnia.
The defense sought the release of the accused or reductions in their sentences.
But the main objective of the Croatian government appeared to be to clear the name of Mr. Tudjman, his defense minister, Gojko Susak, and the commander of the army at the time, Janko Bobetko. Croatian authorities have contended that the three, who have all since died, played no role in the Bosnian violence and were not, as an earlier judgment found, part of a “joint criminal enterprise.” Both within Bosnia and in neighboring Croatia, Croatian officials have characterized their actions as defensive.
Their reaction to the appeals and the drama on Wednesday indicated, however, that many of the wounds from the conflict remain fresh.
Croatia’s prime minister, Andrej Plenkovic, denounced the ruling, promising to seek ways to challenge it, and expressed sympathy for Mr. Praljak’s family. Dragan Covic, the Croatian member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, declared that Mr. Praljak’s suicide had been “most honorable.”
The tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, expressed satisfaction, however, that the judges upheld rulings that the six men in court, “together with senior Croatian officials including President Franjo Tudjman, wanted to seize territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to establish a Croatian entity and facilitate the reunification of the Croatian people.”
The timing of the latest ruling was unrelated to last week’s sentencing of Mr. Mladic. But the pair of decisions amounted to a historic moment for the tribunal, with the Croatia judgment expected to be its final act before it closes at the end of the year. It was established by the United Nations Security Council in 1993. A small appellate court will handle pending appeals and the retrial of Serbia’s former intelligence chiefs.
Joe Orovic contributed reporting from Zadar, Croatia, and Christopher F. Schuetze from The Hague.
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