Retrial Begins for 2 Serbs at U.N. War Crimes Tribunal

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/world/europe/serbia-war-crimes-hague-yugoslavia.html

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PARIS — Two former secret police chiefs, once held to be among the most powerful men in Serbia, went on trial Tuesday for the second time, accused of running a lethal network of covert operations during the 1992-95 conflict that broke up Yugoslavia.

The operations, according to prosecutors, were intended to impose as well as conceal the wartime policies of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president.

The defendants, Jovica Stanisic, the former head of Serbia’s state security, and Franko Simatovic, his deputy, were acquitted of similar charges in 2013 after a three-year trial at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The acquittals shocked legal experts and survivors of the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, where special combat units of the Serbian secret police directed paramilitary forces who burned churches and mosques and killed and raped civilians in village after village to drive out non-Serbs. They often went into action ahead of or alongside Bosnian Serb military units.

But in late 2015, appeals judges ruled that they had found legal and factual errors in the first trial.

While the judges in that trial ruled that the defendants had issued no “specific direction” to commit crimes, the appeals judges said no such proof was required to prove a criminal conspiracy or the aiding and abetting of crimes.

Since two of the three original judges had left the chamber, the case could not be sent back and had to be tried anew, the appeals judges ruled.

Even as the tribunal, established by the United Nations Security Council in 1993, now prepares to close down, human rights activists and war crimes experts welcomed the new trial as a timely opportunity to set the record straight.

They point to an alarming rise of fervor among Serbian nationalist groups who are rewriting the history of the conflict, denying that Serbs committed any war crimes, banning references to the conflict from schoolbooks and glorifying convicted war criminals.

Serge Brammertz, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, told the Security Council last week that despite the large body of evidence proven in “case after case,” the denials and the refusal to accept facts, even by government officials, were “loud and clear.”

“Genocide is denied. Ethnic cleansing is denied,” he said.

“When irresponsible officials use division, discrimination and hate to secure power, conflict and atrocities can gain a logic of their own,” Mr. Brammertz said. “That was true two decades ago when genocide and ethnic cleansing began, and it remains true today.”

At the opening of the trial on Tuesday, Douglas Stringer, a prosecutor, portrayed the two former secret police chiefs as close to Mr. Milosevic, who had himself gained control of the institutions and agencies of the federal government of what was then Yugoslavia.

Mr. Milosevic entrusted them with all the critical aspects of secret police activities leading up to and during the wars, Mr. Stringer said.

The men set up clandestine training camps for paramilitary fighters and acted as chief organizers, paymasters and suppliers for those units, he said. The paramilitaries, some of whom were convicts, became notorious for their brutality and, according to Mr. Stringer, “looted on an industrial scale.”

Far from spontaneous, the prosecutor said, the Serbian state security at first placed their operatives in positions in Bosnia and Croatia that were scheduled for “ethnic cleansing.” He said these operatives were known as “doublehatters,” at once linked to the Belgrade government and also key players locally who relayed orders to the paramilitaries. All the activities “were covert to conceal the hand of Milosevic,” Mr. Stringer said.

The fate of Mr. Stanisic and Mr. Simatovic will be crucial in legally determining the role of the Serbian state in the wars in Bosnia and Croatia that killed more than 130,000 people. After two decades of trials at the tribunal in The Hague, no officials of the Belgrade wartime government are serving sentences, only Bosnians and Croats.

Mr. Milosevic, considered the war’s main architect, was facing a battery of charges, including genocide, when he died in a tribunal cell in 2006 shortly before the end of his trial.

His chief of staff, Gen. Momcilo Perisic, was convicted and sentenced to 27 years for aiding and abetting war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia, but the verdict was overturned on appeal in 2013 because no “specific direction” to commit crimes had been proved.

That ruling also led to disagreements among legal scholars and judges.

The latest trial is likely to be the last major case of the Balkan wars as the tribunal winds down its work. It is expected to deliver a verdict for Gen. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military chief, in November.