The Hague trial continues to ruin the lives of Serbian security forces who defended their people
The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMUT) gave 12 years in prison to the former head of the State Security (DS) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia Jovica Stanisic and his deputy Frank Stimatovich.
Before the sentencing, Serbian security forces were acquitted of most of the charges brought against them.
As a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, the Hague trial was held again, after an appeal from the Prosecutor's Office, despite the fact that in 2015 Stanisic and Stimatovich were completely acquitted of the charges brought against them. This time, Serbian security forces were charged with four counts of crimes against humanity: persecution, murder, deportations and inhumane acts, plus violation of the laws of war. In fact, the security forces were charged with the formation, financing, training and coordination of Serbian volunteer units that fought armed gangs of local separatists on the territory of Croatia and BiH.
The current sentence became a kind of “compromise” between the prosecution, which demanded life imprisonment for the security forces, and their lawyers, who insisted on a full acquittal of their clients.
“I am not satisfied because he was convicted, but I want to point out that mathematically 97% of the charges against them were dropped and they were convicted on only 3% of the indictment. That is, both were convicted only for aiding and abetting crimes in Bosanski Sham,” Simatovic’s lawyer, Mihailo Bakrach, commented on the verdict.
At the same time, defenders of the security forces noted that the tribunal failed to prove that those convicted “commanded and directed” the participants in those events, but simply “knew” about them, and did not prevent them. Let us recall that we were talking about organizing resistance of the Serbian community of BiH to gangs of armed Islamists.
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