Two former Serbian intelligence chiefs, close associates of Serbia, were convicted today (30/6) of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Slobodan Milosevic.
The convictions relate to war crimes committed during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the APE-MPE notes.
Jovica Stanisic, 70, former head of Serbia’s internal security service under Slobodan Milosevic, and his deputy, Franco Simatovic, 71, have been sentenced by The Hague International Court of Justice. sentenced to 12 years each. They were accused of aiding Serb paramilitary groups terrorizing Muslims and Croats in a Bosnian town in 1992.
The case was one of the latest to be linked to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, following the sentencing to life of former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic in early June.
Judge Burton Hall, announcing the verdict, said that Stanisic and Simatovic were found guilty of war crimes, murder, and crimes against humanity. persecution, forced displacement and exile.
Munira Subasic, president of one of the Srebrenica Mothers’ Associations, which is fighting for justice for the victims of the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, told AFP that the ruling “justifies all Bosnian victims”. ».
“The victims are never acquitted, but it is important to convict them, even if only for the crimes they committed in Bosanski Samac,” he told a Bosnia-Herzegovina television channel shortly afterwards.
According to the court, the two spy chiefs helped organize and deploy Serbian forces during the occupation of Bosanski Samac in April 1992. Serbian forces launched a “terror campaign” to expel non-Serb residents in which included rapes, looting and the destruction of religious buildings, as well as the imprisonment of Bosnian Muslims in six detention centers.
“Prisoners were held in inhumane conditions, forced to work, ill-treated, tortured, forced into sexual acts and killed.” Sixteen men lost their lives in a specific incident in May 1992, according to the court.
Prosecutors allege that Stanisic and Simatovic were involved in a criminal operation, along with Milosevic (who died of a heart attack in 2006 before his trial was over) and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, who was sentenced to life in prison. They were accused, among other things, of financing and reinforcing paramilitary groups after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in 1991, such as the elite Red Berets and the notorious Zeljko Raznatovic or Arkan Tigers.
The court ruled, however, that although the two defendants were aware of the “campaign of murder, persecution and forced displacement” of non-Serbs, the prosecution did not prove, beyond any doubt, that they had taken part in the operation.
In May 2013, at their first trial, judges ruled that prosecutors had failed to prove the guilt of the two defendants and acquitted them. Two years later, however, the ICC Court of Appeal overturned the decision, referring them to a new trial.
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