War victims’ associations in Bosnia and Herzegovina condemned the role late Bosnian Serb leader and convicted war criminal Momcilo Krajisnik played in the atrocities that were committed across the country throughout the 1992-1995 war.
Wartime leader and first speaker of the parliament of Bosnia's Republika Srpska (RS) entity died on Tuesday in Banja Luka from complications related to COVID-19, the RS University Clinical Centre (UCC) said.
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The head of the ‘Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves’, Munira Subasic, said she was “sorry he died, he should have lived another 100 years with his crimes, he should have gone to sleep with them and woken up with them, so he would always have our children on his mind.”
She stressed that Krajisnik “is not only a war criminal for the mothers of Srebrenica, but also for Serb mothers.”
“He forced many mothers to leave their homes and go to collective accommodation and to suffer even today after 25 years. He is a double criminal for both his own people and the Bosniak people,” she said.
The head of the Association of Genocide Victims and Witnesses, Murat Tahirovic, pointed out that Krajisnik was part of the team that damaged Bosnia and Herzegovina greatly.
“He was convicted for war crimes and he will be remembered as a war criminal,” he said.
The Croat member of Bosnia’s tripartite Presidency, Zeljko Komsic, also made a statement in light of Krajisnik’s passing, calling him “one of the biggest war criminals in the history of Europe.”
“His role in the genocide was explained in detail in the rulings of the Hague Tribunal and Krajisnik can not be talked about outside of the context of those rulings,” Komsic said.
Krajisnik was in 2006 sentenced to 27 years in prison for crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, persecution, deportation, and forced transfer. He was acquitted of murder as a war crime, genocide, and complicity in genocide.
The judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found that Krajisnik was part of a joint criminal enterprise which carried out the extermination, murder, persecution and deportation of non-Serbs during the 1992 – 1995 Bosnian war.
He was acquitted of genocide or complicity in genocide on the grounds that the court had found no evidence of a genocidal intent on his part to destroy in full or part ethnic or religious communities. The charges of murder and extermination were dropped in 2009 and the sentence was reduced to 20 years.
The ICTY judges found that while there was evidence that crimes committed in Bosnia constituted the criminal act of genocide, they did not establish that the accused possessed genocidal intent or was part of a criminal enterprise that had such an intent.
