Milestones

CONVICTED

During the final months of the Bosnian War, nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered in the fallen U.N. enclave of Srebrenica--the worst European massacre since World War II. On June 10, two high-ranking Bosnian Serbs were convicted for those 1995 killings. The U.N. war-crimes tribunal at the Hague found military officers Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara guilty of genocide--defined by the U.N. as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Their life sentences could prove precursors to bigger convictions, specifically those of Radovan Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader currently on trial, and military commander Ratko Mladic, who remains at large. "The plain intention ... to eliminate every Bosnian Muslim male who was captured or surrendered proves beyond reasonable doubt that this was genocide," the judges wrote. "In the context of the war in the former Yugoslavia, and in the context of human history, these events are arrestive in their scale and brutality."