Two Serbian ex-spy chiefs back on trial for Balkans wars

THE HAGUE: Two former Serbian intelligence chiefs go back on trial before UN judges on Tuesday, accused of running death squads which terrorised Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s Balkans wars.

Jovica Stanisic, 66, and Franko Simatovic, 67, were initially acquitted in 2013 of four charges of crimes against humanity and one charge of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ( ICTY).

But their acquittal, which triggered a storm of protest, was overturned two years later after the prosecution appealed.

The two men were ordered to return to the tribunal in The Hague to face a retrial on the same charges.

Stanisic, the former head of Serbia’s old state security service and a key figure in the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, and his deputy Simatovic now stand accused once again of organising, financing and supplying paramilitary groups.

These groups cut a swathe of terror and destruction across Croatia and Bosnia during the conflicts that erupted amid the collapse of Yugoslavia.

They included an elite unit dubbed the ‘ Red Berets’ and the feared paramilitary outfit run by Zeljko ‘Arkan’ Raznatovic, called ‘Arkan’s Tigers’.

The death squads attacked towns and murdered Croats, Muslims and other non- Serbs to force them out of large areas, seeking to establish a Serb-run state, prosecutors alleged, as they called for life sentences for both men in the original trial which opened in 2008.

UN prosecutors maintain that Stanisic and Simatovic were part of a joint criminal enterprise that included the late Serbian president Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

An estimated 100,000 people died in the Bosnian conflict, which saw some of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II, and during which 2.2 million people were forced from their homes. — AFP