Most of the indictments issued by the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office last year, including charges against high-ranking Bosnian Serb Army officers, were actually products of someone else’s work, the Humanitarian Law Centre said in a report.
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Belgrade Higher Court and War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office building. Photo: BIRN.
A new report published by the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre on Friday accuses the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office of being “extremely inefficient”, while also raising concerns that over a half of the court hearings in war crime trials last year were postponed for COVID-related reasons.
Outside the courtroom meanwhile, Serbian officials continued to promote war criminals and misrepresent the history of the 1990s wars, the report says.
The Humanitarian Law Centre’s annual report on war crimes trials in Serbia says that “the negative trend of raising a small number of indictments against a small number of suspects continued” in 2021, and that most of the cases were actually not originated at the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office, but taken over from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Over the course of the year, seven indictments were filed charging nine people, four of which were indictments originated by the Bosnian prosecution.
“Given that the War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office has a prosecutor and 12 deputies, raising only three indictments throughout the year as a result of its own investigations can be considered extremely inefficient,” the HLC says in the report.
“It is very worrying that for the third year in a row, the TRZ has a larger number of deputy prosecutors than the total number of indictments filed in a year,” it adds.
Cases opened against high-ranking officers, such as Rajko Kusic, former commander of the Rogatica Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, Branko Basara, former commander of Bosnian Serb Army’s Sana Brigade and Nedeljko Anicic, former commander of the Sanski Most Territorial Defence force, “were not indictments resulting from independent investigations by the War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office, but indictments from proceedings ceded from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the result of the work of other prosecutor’s offices”, the report explains.
In cases that have already gone to trial, “trials have been postponed several times because judges, defendants and witnesses fell ill or were isolated” because of COVID-19, it says.
“Due to the absence of witnesses, defendants or members of court chambers, out of a total of 127 main trial hearings scheduled for 2021, only 62 main trial hearings were held, which is less than half. The trend of low response of witnesses, especially those from [outside Serbia], due to problems caused by the epidemic or the need to apply isolation measures, also continued,” it adds.
The HLC report says that away from the court building in 2021, “the previously established practice of revisionism of the wars of the 1990s continued in the Republic of Serbia, ignoring and minimszing court-established facts, promoting war criminals, providing public spaces and state resources for publishing and promoting books by convicted war criminals and film and TV productions”.
The report lists numerous examples such as Serbian tabloids hailing Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Madic as a hero after his life sentence for the genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica and other wartime crimes was confirmed in June 2021. A large mural celebrating Mladic was also painted in Belgrade, and was repainted every time activists tried to remove it.
In March 2021, Hague Tribunal convicts Nikola Sainovic and Vladimir Lazarevic’s appeared on the state broadcaster Radio-Television Serbia programme to mark the anniversary of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, claiming they were not responsible for war crimes against Kosovo Albanian civilians despite their convictions.
In August 2021, the local assembly in Pantelej, a municipality of the city of Nis in southern Serbia, made Lazarevic an honorary citizen.
In September, the municipality of Negotin in eastern Serbia supported a PR event to promote convicted Serbian war criminal Veselin Sljivancanin’s latest book.
A couple of weeks later, the Serbian Defence Ministry organise the screening of a film about the now-disbanded Yugoslav Army 125th Motorised Brigade to commemorate the 40th anniversary of its establishment, despite claims that it was involved in war crimes during the Kosovo conflict.
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