Serbian Paramilitaries Convicted of Killing Bosnian Muslims

Serbia’s war-crimes court, established in 2003 to handle “lesser” crimes referred by the ICTY, has convicted four Serbian paramilitaries of murdering six young Bosnian Muslims during the infamous Srebrenica massacre. Although one soldier was acquitted, the case against the defendants was straightforward: they filmed themselves committing the murders:

The trophy video – which lasts about 20 minutes – shows several members of the “Scorpions” police unit with six Muslim prisoners dressed in civilian clothes.

Five of the captives have since been identified as Safet Fejzovic, Sadik Saltic, Smail Ibrahimovic, Fadil Salkic and the youngest, aged 16, Azimir Alispahic.

They were all Muslims from Srebrenica who were captured when the town fell to Bosnian Serb forces in 1995.

The prisoners – dirty, bruised and with their hands tied behind their backs – are ordered from the back of a lorry in which they had been transported from the Srebrenica area.

They are marched to a clearing in woodland near Sarajevo, where, one by one, four of them are shot in the back. Two more are forced to move the bodies of their fellow victims, before they too are shot.

At one point during the executions the cameraman, apparently drunk, is heard complaining that the battery on the camera is running down.

This was an extremely important trial — the first time a Serbian court heard a case directly related to Srebrenica. And, of course, the symbolic importance of a Serbian court convicting Serbians of killing Muslims cannot be emphasized enough.

Still, it is easy to sympathize with the victims’ families, who believe that the court imposed sentences that were far too lenient given the severity of the crime:

The former commander of the Scorpions unit, Slobodan Medic, and his main accomplice, Branislav Medic, were each given 20 years in jail.

Pera Petrasevic, the only defendant to have confessed to the crime, was given 13 years. The fourth defendant, Aleksandar Medic, was given five years while a fifth man, Aleksandar Vukov, was acquitted.

But several relatives of the victims, who had been brought from Bosnia under police escort, expressed disappointment at the verdicts.

“Whatever the ruling, my child is not here,” said Nura Alispahic, who saw her 16-year-old son being killed in the video. She said it was disgraceful that one of the former paramilitaries had been given only five years – and another acquitted altogether.

“These people will leave jail one day, but my child will never come out of the ground,” she said.

Another one, Alispajic Azmira, said: “There is no other place where you can kill somebody without being punished for it.”

Their views were echoed by well-known Serbian lawyer Natasa Kandic.

“Considering the seriousness of the crime committed, justice was not done with the verdict,” Ms Kandic said.

“The verdict neither brings justice to the defendants for what they have done, nor for the victims killed only because they were Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica.”

Kandic’s point is well-taken. How could Slobodan Medic, for example, deserve less than the maximum 40-year sentence, given that — according to the judge — he “ordered the three defendants and two others to execute the prisoners, take them away from the site and make it seem as if they had been killed in conflict”? Indeed, it seems clear that the court was reluctant to impose even the overly lenient sentences. The following statement by the judge says it all: “By committing such acts against defenceless civilians, by showing off their power and not showing remorse, the defendants did not give the court the choice to pass lower sentences.”

In the end, I can’t help but wonder how the case would have turned out in the absence of the execution video. Would the defendants even have been convicted? Prior to the video’s dissemination on Serbian television, most Serbs believed that Western accounts of the Srebrenica massacre were vastly overstated. That opinion has changed somewhat since the video was released, but how much is anyone’s guess.