He International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslaviaabout to quit the job permanently, he sentenced two senior officials of Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia in the 1990s to 15 years in prison on Wednesday afternoon, in an unprecedented decision.
AND first time that this tribunal, set up by the United Nations at the end of the conflict, sentences high officials of the Serbian state. It had done this before with the Bosnian Serbs, but Serbia could always claim that people like Ratko Mladic or Radovan Karadzic were not its officials despite being Bosnian Serbs.
Now convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes two heavyweights of the Milosevic administration: the then head of the secret service Jovica Stanisic and the former commander of a special unit of the Serbian police Franko Simatovic.
After being acquitted in 2013, they were sentenced to 12 years in prison last year. They appealed against that verdict and this Wednesday they received the final sentence, which increases the years they will have to spend in a Dutch prison.
the last damned
Stanisic, 72, and Simatovic, 73, will be the last convicted on appeal by this court whose days are numbered after three decades of work which started later wars that have caused more than 200,000 deaths and millions of internally displaced persons and international refugees.
Stanisic’s lawyer, head of the secret services of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, affirmed during the trial that his client was a man of peace and that he had been one of the few Serbian officials to maintain contact with the international community to try to find a solution go to war
The judges held that the proven facts say it was one of the major figures responsible for funding, training and arming irregular paramilitary groups Bosnian Serbs and Serbs who killed thousands of people. Among them are the famous, for criminals, “Tigers of Arkan”. Armed and financed by Serbia, these groups have terrorised, killed, tortured and raped thousands of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was established in 1992 by a resolution of the United Nations Security Council. Since 1993 convicted 91 people responsible for crimes in those warsbe it Bosnian Serbs, be it Bosniaks or Croats.
Among them war criminals of the caliber of Mladic and Karadzic. Slobodan Milosevic escaped sentencing because he died a few months before it was handed down, in March 2006. A Serbian official had never been convicted until Wednesday.
The responsibility of Serbia
The sentence on appeal that has now been announced is the first, about to close the Tribunal, that one leaves the responsibility of the Serbian state in writingthrough its senior officials, in crimes committed by irregular paramilitaries and Bosnian Serbs on Bosnian and Croatian territory.
It is the criminal confirmation that was missing to establish the role of the Serbian regime in the wars that raged in the Balkans in the early 1990s.
The judges believe that the convicts were part of it a “common criminal organization” with Slobodan Milosevic (its top political leader) who sought with his actions (financing and delivery of weapons to irregular paramilitary groups) a policy of ethnic cleansing and elimination of non-Serb civilians from most of the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina and of Croatia.
They wanted to carry forward Milosevic’s irredentist plan to create a “Greater Serbia” on the territory of the former Yugoslavia without taking into account the rights of the other national communities that had formed the federal republic governed for decades by Marshal Tito.
The chief prosecutor of the court, the Belgian jurist Serge Brammertz, denounced in his latest appeal the “glorification” that takes place in the Balkans of people convicted of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity: “Glorified people are the opposite of the heroes. No one was convicted of saving their people. They were convicted of violating the Geneva conventions, murdering civilians, rape, using sexual violence as a weapon of war, destroying churches and mosques.
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Source: Clarin
Mary Ortiz is a seasoned journalist with a passion for world events. As a writer for News Rebeat, she brings a fresh perspective to the latest global happenings and provides in-depth coverage that offers a deeper understanding of the world around us.