The chief prosecutor at the Hague war crimes court, Serge Brammertz, told the UN Security Council that the Croatian government has been taking “political decisions” to block cooperation with Serbia and Bosnia in cases from the 1990s wars.
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Serge Brammertz in October 2019. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR.
Serge Brammertz, the chief prosecutor at the UN’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, told the Security Council in New York on Tuesday that Croatia is “taking political decisions to block the justice process” in 1990s war crimes cases.
Presenting his latest report, Brammertz said that “in the former Yugoslavia, the most significant issue remains regional judicial cooperation” in war crimes cases.
Brammertz said that his office had “facilitated a number of positive developments between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia”.
But he expressed concern that “both countries are experiencing severe difficulties obtaining cooperation from Croatia”.
“As my written report details, the Croatian government is taking political decisions to block the justice process,” Brammertz said.
“For example, prosecutors in Bosnia and Herzegovina are waiting for cooperation in more than 80 cases, some of which have been pending for seven years,” he added.
Brammertz said that a decade ago, “Croatia was at the forefront of efforts to improve regional judicial cooperation in war crimes cases”.
“Today, there is a widespread impression that in Croatia there is the will to pursue justice for Croatian victims but not for victims of other ethnicities,” he said.
“There is a simple step Croatia can take to start changing that view: send all pending requests for assistance currently blocked by the Ministry of Justice to relevant judicial authorities, and encourage them to urgently process those requests,” he urged.
Officials in Croatia and Serbia have often clashed over war crimes issues and their differing interpretations of their conflict in the 1990s.
The most recent row erupted when Serbia indicted four wartime officers of the Croatian Air Force for committing war crimes against civilians.
The Croatian officers are reportedly accused of ordering an airborne attack on a column of Serb refugees the Croatian Army’s Operation Storm. Both incidents happened on Bosnian territory. Because of the lack of judicial cooperation, it is expected that they will be tried in their absence.
In his speech, Brammertz also urged the countries of the former Yugoslavia “to put their political differences aside and significantly increase their cooperation in the search for missing persons”.
“This is a humanitarian imperative,” he said. The bodies of several thousand people who disappeared during the 1990s wars have still not been found.
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