Two Serbian secret police chiefs have been sentenced by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, to 12 years in prison for their role in atrocities during the war in Bosnia.
Jovica Stanisic, the former head of the Serbian State Security Service and his deputy, Franko “Frenki” Simatovic, who ran the agency’s special forces unit, were ruled to have been “involved in providing some support” to Serb paramilitaries who carried out ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac.
The ruling marks the first time that senior Serbian officials from former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in the 1990s have been found guilty of war crimes committed in Bosnia.
Photo: AP
It has been the longest-running international war crimes case in history, as Stanisic and Simatovic were first charged in 2003.
On Wednesday, the two men were detained in The Hague, pending arrangements for transfer to another prison.
Both have served more than six years in jail, which is to be deducted from their sentences.
Announcing the verdict, Judge Burton Hall said the prosecution had failed in most cases to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the two men orchestrated crimes committed by Serb paramilitaries across Croatia and Bosnia.
However, Hall said there was proof of their involvement and legal responsibility for killings in Bosanski Samac, through their provision of “practical assistance” in the form of training the paramilitaries, who later committed “crimes of murder, forcible displacement and persecution.”
The two defendants were also aware that their own acts contributed to the crimes.
Samac is a town that straddles the Sava River, with part of it in Croatia and part in Bosnia.
It came under attack on April 17, 1992, from units of the Yugoslav National Army, controlled from Belgrade, and Serb paramilitary groups.
After local Serbs took over the town, Muslims and Croats were rounded up. Many were executed on the spot, while others were sent to brutal prison camps.
However, the tribunal found that while the two men were well aware of the campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out in Croatia and Bosnia, the prosecution failed to show that the “only reasonable inference from the evidence was that Stanisic and Simatovic shared the intent to further the common criminal purpose.”
Despite the narrowly drawn nature of the verdict, Kada Hotic, whose son, husband and two brothers were killed in the genocide at Srebrenica, expressed partial satisfaction.
“They were sentenced to 12 years each. The charges are terrible, but the court did not take everything into account. And all in all, they are guilty. And Serbia is [shown to be] involved in these crimes,” Hotic told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in The Hague.
The prosecution also gave a muted welcome to the verdict.
“The convictions of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic today are steps forward in ensuring accountability for those most responsible for the atrocity crimes committed during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia,” said Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor of the International Residual Mechanism for the Criminal Tribunals, the body also charged with overseeing war crime cases from the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
“As senior officials in the State Security Service of the Republic of Serbia, Stanisic and Simatovic contributed to the commission of crimes by paramilitary forces and other armed groups in furtherance of ethnic cleansing campaigns against non-Serbs,” he added.
Wayne Jordash, a lawyer representing Stanisic, said the verdict was a face-saving compromise aimed at justifying the lengthy process.
“Basically they were found guilty with very weak evidence, and they convicted them to justify that they were being tried twice,” he said.
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