Dario Kordic, a Bosnian Croat wartime leader who was sentenced before the UN court in the Hague for war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was recorded in a video after the release where he says every second in the war and prison “was worth it” and that he would “do it all over again.”

Kordic served as commander-in-chief of the Bosnian Croat army HVO during the 1992-95 Bosnian War and in the late 1990s was who put on trial at the Hague war crimes tribunal (ICTY) for his role in the 1993 Ahmici massacre in central Bosnia, where HVO soldiers killed over a hundred Muslim Bosniak civilians during the Bosniak-Croat conflict which was part of the larger Bosnian War.

In 2001, Kordic was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and was later released in 2014 after serving two thirds of his sentence, having spent some 17 years in detention.

In a leaked video, whose timing is not confirmed but is assumed to have been recorded in August 2022, Kordic retells a story of when he was asked “if it was worth the prison and the war?”.

“I replied, I would do it all over again. I wouldn't change a second of it. Every second was worth it,” he said and his words were welcomed by a strong applause of the group.

Commenting on the statement, head of the Association of the Victims and Witnesses of Genocide in BiH Murat Tahirovic said Kordic would have been arrested already if this was a “serious state.”

“Dario Kordic rehabilitated. With a smile that freezes the blood in your veins, without the slightest remorse, he shows it with pleasure that the slaughter committed by the units under his command was prepared for it. With what pleasure he says it, it is obvious that he would repeat it. If we were a serious country, Kordic would have been arrested already,” he stressed.