14 Apr 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.
Kevin,
Great post really. A couple of points, starting backwards.
First, there’s no need to wonder about how the case would have turned out without the video, as there simply would have been no case without the video. I don’t just refer to any possible lack of evidence, but to the fact that these criminals would never have been prosecuted. Up until the video was discovered, these people were living undisturbed in a small Serbian town, resting easily on their spoils of war. The video itself was indeed discovered by Natasa Kandic (who is not a lawyer btw, but is an incredibely brave woman and activist), not by the Serbian police, and it is Natasa who gave the video both to the ICTY and to the Serbian prosecutors.
Second, there is also no need to guess on how much the public opinion in Serbia has changed due to the video – we know exactly how much. Namely, the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, an NGO for which I have worked for for several years, conducts annual, detailed surveys on the Serbian citizens’ trust into domestic and international war crimes trials and generally on their views of the recent past. The most recent survey, for 2006, has just been published, but is available in Serbian only (go here, then click on the little picture on the left which is the second from above – ‘Javno mnjenje u Srbiji’). The surveys for 2004 and 2005 are available in English as well.
If you take a look at slide 17 of the 2006 survey, the first graphic shows you how many people polled believe Srebrenica was a crime, the second shows how many people believe that something, but not necessarily a crime, happened in Srebrenica, while the third shows the number of people who have only heard that something happened in Srebrenica.
So, you can see that, in 2001, in the first year after the ousting of Milosevic, 77% heard of something happening in Srebrenica, while 48% believed it was a crime. In 2004, that number fell to 37% percent – collective amnesia can indeed be very convenient. In 2005 and 2006, i.e. after the showing of the video and the immense ruckus that caused, that number jumped to 42 and 43% respectively. So, in other words, the video persuaded exactly 5% of the Serbian population. At the same time, however, less people in 2006 say that they have even heard of Srebrenica than in 2001 – 71 compared to 77%.
Let me crunch the numbers a bit differently: after all that the ICTY, NGOs and other actors fighting for transitional justice in the Balkans have done during the past decade, when it comes to the single worst crime of the wars, the Srebrenica genocide, 43% of Serbian citizens believe it was a crime, 28% of people have heard of Srebrenica but believe it was not a crime (i.e. that it was ‘liberated’), while 29% of people say that they have never even heard of it. Denial is the name of the game, and it is even worse for crimes other than Srebrenica (see slide 16). For example, in 2001, 70% of people polled say that the knew that Sarajevo was under a siege for more than 1000 days, while 92% know that many civilians were killed by sniper fire during the siege. In 2006, these numbers are 58% and 68%, respectively. My only consolation is that there is some improvement in 2006 in relation to 2005.
Finally, when it comes to the sentences passed by the Serbian court in the Scorpions case, even though I have not read the judgment itself I see no possible reason for acquitting one of the defendants and giving an accomplice in the crime only 5 years. That notwithstanding, the basic legal problem is that the court has ruled that 20 yrs, not 40 years, is the maximum possible prison sentence, as that was the punishment prescribed at the time of the commission of the crime. However, a chamber of the Serbian Supreme Court has ruled before that the 20 yrs punishment was a substitute for the death penalty which nominally still existed, and that therefore a sentence of 40 yrs could still be imposed, as it is more lenient for the defendant than the now abolished death penalty. So, we’ll see what happens now in the Supreme Court.
As Marko says: ‘Denial is the name of the game….’ By way of wanting to get a handle on such denial, in other words, to place it in the proverbial big picture, I still recommend Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).