Conviction of two Serbian spy chiefs brings major Balkan war trials to a close
After 30 years, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concluded its final case and determined that Belgrade was accountable for spearheading a criminal ethnic cleansing enterprise
Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, former heads of Serbian intelligence services, appear in court in The Hague on June 13, 2017.
MICHAEL KOOREN (AFP)
The Hague – JUN 02, 2023 – 16:08 GMT+1
The major trials of the Balkans war have finally concluded, 30 years after the United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993. The ICTY was formally closed in 2017, but appeals and minor cases dragged on, including an appeal of the case against Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, Serbian spy chiefs under the country’s former president Slobodan Milosevic. [Important to note that the ‘establishment’ of the ICTY by the UN Security Council was in clear breach of the UN Charter which gave the UN no power to establish an international criminal court. The UN Secretary-General at the time pointed out in the clearest terms that the only way the UN could establish such a court would be via the unanimous agreement of the UN General Council or by an international treaty. Neither of these courses was taken].
On June 1, the ICTY reached a ground-breaking verdict that Serbian officials were involved in a criminal enterprise at the behest of political and military powers in Belgrade, and acted under their orders in the regions seeking independence during Yugoslavia’s dissolution. The court found in other cases that the defendants were linked to Bosnian Serb or Croatian Serb leaders. [A further fundamental abuse perpetrated by the ICTY was to ignore the strict instructions of the UN Security Council that the ICTY should enforce only existing humanitarian law and should uphold the highest standards of international jurisprudence. In the Statute the ICTY wrote for itself, it gave itself enormous powers, which it then used to invent new crimes such as Joint Criminal Enterprise – or Just Convict Everyone as was it was known even within the ICTY].
After being found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, the defendants were sentenced to 15 years in prison. The verdict also confirmed that the goal of their crimes was to eliminate non-Serb ethnicities, thus branding it ethnic cleansing. [The defendants were initially acquitted at the end of their ICTY trial. The ICTY then invoked a right they had given themselves to appeal this judgement. Using the bent appeal process they had introduced whereby appeals were heard by members of the same team of ICTY judges, and not by a higher, independent court as is now customary in all good justice systems, the ICTY reversed the first verdict to sentence the defendants to 12 year prison terms and then later appealed that sentence to allow themselves to hand down new 15-year sentences.]
The Stanisic and Simatovic case highlights the challenges of proving Serbia’s political and military involvement in the atrocities committed in Bosnia and Croatia. Despite organizing and directing the armed units responsible for the murders, deportations, beatings, illegal detentions, sexual abuse, and forced labor, the duo was acquitted in 2013 due to lack of evidence linking them to those crimes. [The ICTY never attempted to investigate and gather evidence in a systematic and professional way. They knew this would not provide what they needed because the claimed crimes had never taken place. They depended instead on the testimony of hundreds of witnesses who mostly gave their evidence anonymously via video link. To support this they had a verbal report of evidence gathered by the US-run, Bosnian Muslim staffed, International Commission for Missing Persons or ICMP, without any of the primary DNA and forensic evidence the ICMP claimed to have gathered. This was a legal travesty in itself. So too was the passing of laws in Bosnia and Croatia which gave the ICMP total immunity to deny any request for this material to be made available for independent scrutiny.]
However, in 2015, the appellate court ordered a retrial because of a misinterpretation of the concept of criminal complicity. In 2021, both defendants were sentenced to 12 years in prison. The latest appeal has now led to a 15-year sentence and has exhausted the legal recourse in this case. [They simply changed their concept of criminal complicity to suit their own purposes.]
Nevenka Tromp, a Croatian investigator for the prosecution during the Milosevic trial, explained the difficulty of establishing the link to Belgrade. [Why would anyone for even a single moment think that it was right to appoint a Croatian investigator to research the wartime behaviour of Serbia?] Despite life sentences for former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic, “not even the convictions for the Srebrenica genocide established that link to Belgrade.” The United Nations International Court of Justice found that “although there was a genocide in Srebrenica, Serbia was not directly responsible or complicit in it, although it erred in failing to prevent it… In other words, absent a conviction of Stanisic and Simatovic, the ICTY would have ended its mandate without implicating the Serbian government. It’s easy to focus on the evil of Mladic, Karadzic, and Milosevic, but it is important to understand the complex machinery of the criminal enterprise for which Stanisic and Simatovic were convicted.” [Srebrenica was a lie. The town fell to a Serbian force of around 200 without a shot being fired because the 4,000 soldiers of the 28th division of the Bosnian Muslim Army had abandoned the town during the night of 10/11 July 1995. They did so on orders from the Bosnian Muslim government in Sarajevo which believed that all that was needed to bring the US into the war on their side was to proclaim a huge massacre. The US duly obliged, immediately launching intensive bombing of Bosnian Serb positions.]
Serge Brammertz, a war crimes prosecutor in cases pertaining to the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, said this was “the last chance to convict individuals for participating in a joint criminal enterprise involving Belgrade, whose aim was ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia… There was always a political narrative, both from Belgrade and from Zagreb, the Croatian capital, that denied any involvement, alleging that it was an internal armed conflict between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” From the outset of the Milosevic case, prosecutors identified a direct link between the leadership in Belgrade and the atrocities under investigation, says Brammertz. [ICTY prosecutors made repeated attempts to link Milosevic with atrocities. All of them failed in spectacular fashion. Geoffrey Nice, the Chief Prosector in the case, admitted that, after a prosecution case lasting 4 years, he was still seeking the evidence to support the indictments issued against Milosevic.]
Jovica Stanisic, the former head of Serbian state security, was portrayed by the prosecution as one of Milosevic’s most zealous supporters. During the trial, Franko Simatovic (aka Franki) rejected the notion that special forces existed within the state security division. Yet evidence showed a connection between the secret services and paramilitary groups that operated in Croatian and Bosnian territories under Serbian control. [Yet again, this connection was strongly suggested by the ICTY.. Yet again, there was no hard evidence to support the claims.]
The ICTY’s International Residual Mechanism is responsible for wrapping up minor trials and appeals by supporting local jurisdictions in Bosnia and Croatia. It faces an arduous challenge — there are hundreds of unsolved cases related to the conflict, with alleged criminals still at large. [The ICTY was certainly energetic in making all sorts of allegations. It had no success in producing evidence to support these allegations.]
The 10 million documents collected by the ICTY are critical evidence for these courts. However, a disconcerting impunity persists, while the underlying political complexities further muddy the situation. Brammertz acknowledges the magnitude of the task. “It’s tough for them. Hundreds of perpetrators of crimes committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina have found refuge in Croatia or Serbia. Since they hold dual nationality, they cannot legally be extradited to Bosnian territory.” [This is nonsense. The ICTY never had any intention of pursuing Croatians or Bosnian Muslims. The documents were of no importance – if they had been, they would have been used in court. Their only purpose was to create an illusion of a case by parading endless ‘witnesses’ whose testimony could not be independently confirmed.]
Before Croatia became a member of the European Union (EU), it showed a commitment to regional cooperation. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia now aspire to join the EU, which Brammertz says has driven more enthusiasm for bringing war criminals to justice. But he is alarmed by the ongoing glorification of war criminals in these communities despite the many years that have elapsed since the conflict. “Denial of the Srebrenica genocide [perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995] still has a firm grip on some parts of the former Yugoslavia,” said Brammertz. [Milosevic was the only Yugoslav leader who fought to keep the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia together. He was also the only leader who was passionately committed to multiculturalism. Both Croatia’s Tudjman and the Bosnia Muslim leader Izetbegovic were openly racist and wanted their countries to become respectively Croat-only and Muslim-only.]
Tromp acknowledges the ICTY has provided some level of justice, “but if you look at who started the war, I don’t think the sentences handed down fully reflect that.” She believes that although “Serbia lost the wars it started, it has not been treated as a loser. Public opinion seems to think that the court only focused on Serbs.” [The Serbs did not start any of the civil wars in Yugoslavia.]
To illustrate the problem of reconciliation, she points to how Kosovo and Bosnia are still struggling from territorial divisions. “Look at Northern Kosovo [an area inhabited mostly by ethnic Albanian Serbs seeking autonomy]. And in Bosnia, we have the Republika Srpska [with a majority Serb population], one of the country’s two political entities, established by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. All the main victims argue that reconciliation is difficult under these conditions.” [The United States precipitated economic crisis in Yugoslavia in 1989 by passing legislation which made all future aid to Yugoslavia condition on the holding of free elections in all the Yugoslav republics. It was this that fed the flames of nationalism in Croatia and Bosnia. The US then sabotaged the Carrington / Cutileiro peace deal for Bosnia which had been freely signed by all three sides in the conflict. The mess was and is entirely the result of illegal international intervention in the sovereign affairs of the former Yugoslavia.]
In the 30 years since it was established, the ICTY tried 161 defendants, handed down 90 sentences, acquitted 19 people and heard 4,650 witnesses. Brammertz says that although some cases of contempt and witness intimidation have yet to be resolved by the International Residual Mechanism, the ICTY’s message is clear: “International justice takes time, but it will prevail”. [The message that has become clear is that the ICTY was always a despicable organisation that had nothing to do with justice. Some 80% of those indicted by the ICTY were Serbs. A few token Croatians and Muslims were added to give an impression of impartiality. These experience of these individuals was very different to the experience of Serbian indictees. Even Nasir Oric, Commander of the more than 4,000 strong Bosnian Muslim forces garrisoned in Srebrenica throughout the war in defiance of the safe areas agreement, who led his troops in attacks on outlying Serbian villages, murdering some 3,000 people in what were unarmed peasant farming communities, received only a short sentence which was quickly made even shorter on the basis of a trumped-up technicality. And this despite the fact that Oric had proudly played his ‘greatest hits’ tape to two North American journalists which showed his men playing football with the decapitated head of one of the men they had killed].
Look at the arrest of Fulgence Kayishema, one of the most wanted men for the Rwandan genocide.” A fugitive for 22 years, he was arrested on May 24 in South Africa. Kayishema is accused of direct involvement in the massacre at the Nyange church, which was set on fire and demolished, killing 2,000 people inside.
Experts like Tromp believe the ICTY offers a model and legacy for future cases related to the war in Ukraine. ICTY prosecutors always emphasized the link between Balkan war crimes and Serbian territorial aspirations. “There is a clear analogy between what Serbia did in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead of saying that he wants to expand Russia’s borders, he alludes to rescuing Ukrainians of Russian origin. This is what Milosevic said about Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.” [This is contemptible nonsense. The 250,000 Serbs ejected from Krajina by the US-backed Croatian ‘Operation Storm’ were from families that had lived on this land in Krajina for over 400 years. They were a virtually unarmed population mainly composed of peasant farming communities. Equally, Serbs made up more than a third of the population of Bosnia. Izetbegovic’s illegal and unconstitutional declaration of independence, followed by the illegal recognition by some nations of the new state, though it met met none of the internationally agreed criteria for statehood, left the Bosnian Serbs fighting for their existence. If this a ‘a model and legacy for future cases, God help us.]
Putin illegally annexed Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions, says Tromp, which replicates how the Republika Srpska [in Bosnia] and the Republic of Serbian Krajina [in Croatia] were carved out. If the Russian president is eventually tried for invading Ukraine, “the ICTY’s work will show that political leaders can be prosecuted, although these cases shouldn’t take so long,” adds Tromp. [Total garbage.]