The ruling stands as a groundbreaking statement of ultimate guilt, and a comprehensive refutation of Serbia’s denial of involvement in ethnic cleansing.
The verdicts pronounced on two former Serbian intelligence chiefs in May 2023 marked the final act in the 30-year history of the international tribunals set up to investigate the worst crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
But the guilty verdicts against Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic represent more than the closure of the first international war crimes court since the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals following World War II.
For the first time since the founding of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993, a UN war crimes court ruled that Serbianofficials were part of a joint criminal enterprise linked to former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and other high-ranking officials. That enterprise bears ultimate responsibility for the murder, torture, and mass expulsions of non-Serb populations in both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia between 1992 and 1995. In that sense, the ruling stands as a groundbreaking statement of ultimate guilt, and a comprehensive refutation of Serbia’s denial of involvement in those crimes.
Some of those high Serbian officials have been convicted: Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the military and political leaders of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska during the war, are serving life sentences. Milosevic, who led Serbia into war, died in a prison cell in 2006 during his lengthy trial at the ICTY.
In another first for the court, the final verdict in the Stanisic and Simatovic case names Milosevic, Mladic, and Karadzic as other members of the joint criminal enterprise. Momcilo Krajisnik and Biljana Plavcic, wartime leaders of Republika Srpska who served sentences for crimes against humanity, are also named as members of the criminal group.
A Conspiracy “to Forcibly and Permanently Remove” Non-Serbs
Stanisic, who headed the Serbian intelligence service during the Bosnian war, and his then-deputy Simatovic were each sentenced to 15 years in prison (including the years they have already been held in custody) in May 2023 by the Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), for taking part in what the court deemed a joint criminal enterprise in six localities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and one in Croatia.
The IRMCT took over the prosecution of Yugoslav war crimes cases after the ICTY completed its work in 2017. It also carries on the work of the former UN tribunal for Rwanda.
Stanisic and Simatovic were found guilty of deportation, forced relocation, and persecution in Bijeljina, Zvornik, Bosanski Samac, Doboj, and Sanski Most during 1992, as well as the murders of six people from Srebrenica near Trnovo and the murders of 12 civilians near Sanski Most, Bosnia, in September 1995.
The court found that Stanisic and Simatovic did not physically commit any of these crimes. Rather they were found guilty of “participating in a joint criminal enterprise with the objective to forcibly and permanently remove, through the commission of the charged crimes, the majority of non-Serbs, principally Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Bosnian Croats, from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
In 2021, both men were found guilty on lesser charges of aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise by training Serbian and Bosnian Serb paramilitary units. Prosecutors appealed, arguing that evidence of more serious crimes had not been produced at that trial, leading to the ultimate verdict last year.
The Slow Mill of Justice
The trial of former Serbian spy chief Stanisic and his deputy Simatovic was the longest proceeding conducted by the Yugoslav war tribunals in The Hague. Final judgment was pronounced 20 years after the two men were indicted and brought to The Hague in 2003, after several intermediate verdicts, partial reversals of those convictions, and trial postponements.
Both men had previously been convicted of war crimes, but last year’s trial was the only proceeding in The Hague to explicitly find that senior Serbian officials had participated in the organization of war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia.
The suspects were granted temporary release from detention several times, by both the ICTY and IRMCT. The IRMCT trial lasted from 2017 to 2021. During an appeal session in January 2023, defense attorney Joe Holmes said Stanisic had spent 2,471 days in custody.
“His case has lasted longer than the International Criminal Court,” Holmes said.
A few months later, when the final verdict was handed down, the presiding judge of the Appellate Chamber, Graciela Gatti Santana, said that Stanisic had spent 2,634 days in custody, and Simatovic 3,048 days.
Stanisic and Simatovic controlled and deployed combat units to achieve Belgrade’s goals in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to the verdict.
These forces included the Special Operations Unit (SOU) of Serbia’s State Security Service, known as the “Red Berets,” the “Scorpions,” and the Serbian Volunteer Guard (aka the “Tigers,” the most notorious paramilitary force of the war, led by underworld boss Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic).
- More than 60 judgments in UN tribunals reflected on Serbia’s role in the Bosnian and Croatian wars.
- Early ICTY judgments concluded that the 1992-1995 Bosnian War was at least in part an international conflict rather than a civil war within the disintegrating state of Yugoslavia.
- The ICTY was granted jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity “when committed in armed conflict, whether international or internal in character, and directed against any civilian population.”
- Other verdicts did not deal so much with the character of the conflict itself, but primarily with proving individual criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Appeals Chamber accepted evidence that in December 1994 and throughout 1995, at least, the State Security Service, led by Stanisic and Simatovic, paid daily allowances to “Tigers,” especially at the time of the Sanski Most killings in 1995.
The payments, as stated in the verdict, generally show systematic support for the “activities of the ‘Serbian Volunteer Guard’ as an organization,” and the Appeals Chamber concluded that there is no doubt that Stanisic knew that he was partly responsible for such payments.
Reactions in Bosnia and Serbia
Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik, the entity’s most powerful figure for two decades, said that enough evidence was lacking to convict Stanisic and Simatovic. In his reaction to the final verdict, he minimized the responsibility of those Serbs previously convicted of war crimes and stated that Stanisic and Simatovic have spent enough time in detention to warrant their immediate release.
In Serbia, where Stanisic and Simatovic served as chiefs of the Milosevic-era security service, authorities made no comment on their convictions. Unlike their categorical denials of Serbia’s participation in the wars in Bosnia and Croatia in reaction to previous Hague verdicts, on this occasion Serbian leaders held their silence, Serbian civil society organizations noted.
Where previous cases at The Hague made connections between the state of Serbia and war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Yugoslav wars, for the first time, the 2023 verdict declared those links to be an established fact, Nenad Golcevski of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center said.
In his view, “The official narrative, which has been in force since the 1990s, according to which Serbia did not participate in the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, has been completely overthrown. This is the key element that this verdict has brought in relation to the interpretation and perception of wars.”
Nevenka Tromp, an Amsterdam-based academic who helped ICTY prosecutors research cases, told El Pais that previous court judgments failed to nail down Serbia’s responsibility for the worst atrocities of the Bosnian War.
The United Nations International Court of Justice found that “although there was a genocide in Srebrenica, Serbia was not directly responsible or complicit in it, although it erred in failing to prevent it,” Tromp said. “In other words, absent a conviction of Stanisic and Simatovic, the ICTY would have ended its mandate without implicating the Serbian government.”
After the final verdict was pronounced against Stanisic and Simatovic, Serge Brammertz, the Hague tribunal’s chief prosecutor, expressed satisfaction that prosecutors had proved their participation in a joint criminal enterprise.
He also reflected on the Hague tribunal’s previous findings that the Yugoslav wars constituted an international conflict, not, as Serbia has claimed, a civil war.
“This verdict showed that in Bosnia and Herzegovina it was not a civil, but an international conflict in which the political leadership of neighboring countries, in this case specifically Belgrade, also participated,” the Sarajevo Times quoted him as saying.
The tribunal reflected on the specific nature of its mission in its summary of the 2021 trial of Stanisic and Simatovic.
“The Trial Chamber does not see its task as writing the definitive history of the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” the court said.
“Identifying the historical scars, defining the complex political and socioeconomic reasons, the turbulent processes of political transformation, the diverging political agendas, and peoples’ hopes and aspirations that accompany the dissolution of a State must be left to historians.”
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Haris Rovcanin is an assistant editor with the Bosnian bureau of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN). He was a winner of the 2023 Srdjan Aleksic Award for his work on the Database of Judicially Established Facts about the War in Bosnia.
