THE HAGUE, Netherlands: A United Nations court sentenced two of late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s spy chiefs to 15 years in prison on appeal Wednesday in the last major Hague war crimes trial from the 1990s Bosnian conflict.
The judges rejected appeals by former state security service boss Jovica Stanisic and his deputy Franko Simatovic against their 2021 convictions, rather added three years to their original sentences of 12 years. Stanisic, 72, and Simatovic, 73, were convicted of backing a Serb death squad that terrorised the Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac in 1992 with looting, rapes and killings.
The pair had challenged their convictions for the war crime of murder and the crimes against humanity of murder, forcible transfer and deportation, persecution and appealed the sentence. The prosecutors had appealed against their acquittal on several other charges and asked for a major sentence from the court, known as the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (MICT).
“The appeals chamber dismisses the appeals by (Jovica) Stanisic and (Franko) Simatovic… and imposes a sentence of 15 years” on each, head appeals judge Graciela Gatti Santana said. The case has been running for two decades, making it the longest and the last at the United Nations tribunal dealing with crimes from the wars that tore apart Yugoslavia after the fall of communism. The pair were arrested in 2003 and cleared at an initial trial in 2013, but the court ordered a retrial.
“This pronouncement marks a milestone in the mechanism’s history… The appeals chamber pronounces the last appeal judgment”, Gatti Santana said.
The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals has taken over cases left over from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which closed in 2017 after bringing key suspects to justice over the Balkans wars.
‘Campaign of terror’
Suspects including Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and military chief Ratko Mladic have previously been convicted by the original international court, while Milosevic himself died in custody in The Hague in 2006. But the case of Stanisic and Simatovic has dragged on far longer.
The two spymasters were acquitted a decade ago after a five-year trial, but the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ordered a retrial in 2015 after a public outcry.
Judges in 2021 convicted the pair of helping train and deploy Serb forces during the takeover of Bosanski Samac in April 1992.
Serb forces launched a “campaign of terror” to drive out non-Serbs involving looting, rapes and the destruction of religious buildings in the town, judges said at the time. They also held Bosnian Muslims and Croats in six detention centres where they were subjected to forced labour, repeated beatings, torture, and sometimes killings.
The appeal judges overturned a finding from the original trial that said there was not enough evidence to prove that Simatovic and Stanisic were part of a concerted plot led by Milosevic to drive out Croats and Bosnian Muslims and create a Serb homeland.
Lawyers for the defendants had said the 2021 judgment failed to show that the pair exerted any control over the Serb forces that brutalised Bosanski Samac. The Balkans wars left about 130,000 people dead and millions displaced. — AFP
