Two former senior Serbian security officers have had their convictions for war crimes upheld and widened by a tribunal in The Hague, in the last major war crimes trial from the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.
UN judges significantly expanded the convictions of two allies of the late Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, holding them responsible for involvement in crimes – across Bosnia and Herzegovina and in one town in Croatia – as members of a joint plan to ethnically cleanse non-Serbs from the areas during the 1990s wars in the Balkans.
The appeals chamber at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunal (IRMCT) overturned their acquittals of involvement in the criminal plan and raised the sentences of Jovica Stanišić, 72, and Franko Simatović, 73, from 12 to 15 years.
Both men were top Serbian security officials who served Milošević as linchpins in his plan to ethnically cleanse large parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.
The judges overturned a 2021 verdict that said there was not enough evidence to prove that Stanišić and Simatović were part of a concerted plot led by Milošević to drive out Croats and Bosnian Muslims and create a Serbian homeland.
The judges rejected appeals on all counts by Stanišić and Simatović.
Instead, they ruled that Stanišić and his subordinate Simatović could be held responsible for crimes in several Bosnian municipalities and another in Croatia due to their role in financing and training Serbian militias during the breakup of Yugoslavia.
The chamber found that Stanišić and Simatović “shared the intent to further the common criminal plan to forcibly and permanently remove the majority of non-Serbs from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia”, said the presiding judge, Graciela Gatti Santana, reading a summary of the verdict expanding their convictions.
The final verdicts come at the end of a tortuous legal process that became the longest international war crimes process in history, in which the men were tried, acquitted and retried. Many believe their prosecution concerns only a small portion of the crimes they were involved in.
The judgment also marks the final verdict that the IRMCT – the successor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia – will hand down.
The defendants and their prosecutors both appealed against the men’s previous conviction in 2021, in which they were found guilty of aiding and abetting crimes in just one town, Bosanski Šamac.
In upholding the prosecution’s appeal, the two men were found guilty of a far wider pattern of war crimes committed across the Balkans in service of Milošević’s violent nationalist agenda.
Only Stanišić was present in the courtroom for the verdict, with Simatović absent but following the proceedings via video link.
Their initial 2021 trial cleared them of many of the charges. The judge, Burton Hall, said the prosecution had failed in most cases to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the two men orchestrated crimes committed by Serbian paramilitaries across Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Instead, they were convicted for providing “practical assistance” in the form of training the paramilitaries, who later committed “crimes of murder, forcible displacement and persecution”, and were sentenced to 12 years in jail.
That ruling marked the first time senior Serbian officials from Milošević’s regime in the 1990s had been convicted for war crimes committed in Bosnia.
For many, however, the course of the 20-year long proceedings had encapsulated the struggle of prosecutors to secure justice for the victims of the wars in the Balkans and the wider difficulties of securing war crimes prosecutions on the most serious of charges.
Transferred to The Hague in 2003, the pair were first acquitted by the court in 2013. That acquittal was overturned two years later due to legal and factual errors. Their retrial started in 2017, leading to a conviction in 2021.
At the heart of the legal process has been the two men’s roles in Milošević’s campaign against certain ethnic groups. Milošević was put on trial for his alleged involvement in fomenting the bloody conflicts that erupted as Yugoslavia crumbled, but he died in his cell in 2006 before verdicts could be reached.
Perhaps most notorious was Simatović who, although a deputy to Stanišić, was more widely known.
The multilingual Serbian intelligence officer, often seen sporting a pair of Ray-Bans, was sent to Croatia in 1991 to recruit a unit of police, ex-criminals and nationalist volunteers who would act as a paramilitary force for state security.
The unit, known as the Red Berets, attracted a more familiar nickname they took from their founder – Frenki’s boys – a byword for terror and murder, credited with the Balkan iteration of ethnic cleansing.
When the wars of the former Yugoslavia moved on, first to Bosnia and then later Kosovo, Frenki’s boys followed, a key component in Belgrade’s wars in service of Serbian nationalism.
Their initial conviction related to one incident in the Bosnian war in Bosanski Šamac, a town that straddled the Sava River, with part of it in Croatia and part in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which came under attack on 17 April 1992 from units of the Yugoslav National Army. After local Serbs took over the town, Muslims and Croats were rounded up with many killed on the spot, while others were sent to brutal prison camps where survivors described beatings and rape.
