Momcilo Krajisnik, a Bosnian Serb leader who was convicted of crimes against humanity for his involvement in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, died on Tuesday in a hospital in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was 75.
The cause was the novel coronavirus, the hospital said.
Mr. Krajisnik, a hard-line Serbian nationalist, was one of the most prominent politicians in the Bosnian war, which claimed 100,000 lives and displaced more than two million people. As the speaker of the separatist Bosnian Serb Parliament and a close adviser to the wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, he was among the leadership that oversaw plans to persecute and expel non-Serbs from parts of Bosnia.
In 2006, after a 30-month trial before the United Nations tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the judges found Mr. Krajisnik guilty of the deportation, persecution, murder, extermination and forced transfer of Bosnian Muslims and Croats. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison.
At the time, with Mr. Karadzic still at large, Mr. Krajisnik was the highest-ranking Serbian politician convicted by the court. Mr. Karadzic was convicted of war crimes in 2016.
Mr. Krajisnik was acquitted on counts of genocide for lack of evidence, and his sentence was reduced to 20 years in 2009.
He had been arrested in 2000 at his parents’ Bosnian home by French NATO troops and taken to the international tribunal in The Hague. He ended up spending a total of 13 years in detention and prison before being released from a British prison in 2013.
Throughout his incarceration he claimed his innocence, saying he had been unaware of any crimes, even as prosecutors charged that he had played a crucial role in coordinating ethnic separation campaigns in dozens of Bosnian townships.
“Momcilo Krajisnik was involved in both political and military and police activities,” said Eric Gordy, a professor of sociology at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. “But right until his death, he never acknowledged any of the damage that he had done. You can imagine how crushing it is for victims of the genocide.”
Momcilo Krajisnik was born on Jan. 20, 1945, in Zabrde, a village near Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. An economist by training, he started his career at Energoinvest, a state-owned energy company, where he became a finance executive and met Mr. Karadzic, a fellow employee.
Mr. Krajisnik held high-ranking political positions in the 1990s, including speaker of the Bosnian Serb Parliament and board member of the Serbian Democratic Party.
As a representative of the rebel Serbs during the Bosnian peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, he earned the nickname “Mr. No” for his uncompromising stance during negotiations.
He spent his final years in Pale, his former wartime stronghold near Sarajevo.
He was married to Milenka Micevic, who died in 1992. His survivors include a brother, Mirko; a daughter, Milica; two sons, Milos and Njegos; and five grandchildren.
