Serbian ex-spy chiefs had ‘key role in Balkans wars’
Two former Serbian intelligence chiefs played a major role in running death squads that terrorized Bosnia and Croatia in the bloody 1990s Balkans wars, a UN court heard yesterday. Jovica Stanisic, 66, and Franko Simatovic, 67, are back in court on four charges of crimes against humanity and a war crimes charge after their acquittal in 2013 was overturned. “These accused made these crimes happen through their direction and unflagging support to the Serb forces who committed them,” UN prosecutor Douglas Stringer told judges in The Hague.
Stringer said the accused “repeatedly deployed their... units in attack operations in Croatia and Bosnia where many crimes of persecution, murder and expulsion were committed.” “The evidence will show that this relentless pattern continued for over four years and that the accused supported and advanced it every step along the way,” he said, as the two men listened attentively, with Stanisic occasionally shaking his head.
Stanisic and Simatovic’s acquittal before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) unleashed a storm of protest and was overturned in 2015 after prosecutors 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 nonSerbs to force them out of large areas, seeking to establish a Serb-run state, prosecutors alleged, seeking 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.
Stringer on Tuesday made a pointed reference to Milosevic - who died in 2006 during his own genocide and warcrimes trial in the ICTY’s custody. “The substantial powers and authority wielded by Stanisic emanated not only from his position as head of the Serbian (security service) but also from the trust and confidence placed in him by Milosevic,” the prosecutor said.