Regional youth group: Serbia's official reaction to Mladic verdict ‘disgraceful’

NEWS 09.06.202118:06 0 komentara
Ratko Mladić
Ratko Mladić (Peter Dejong/Pool via REUTERS)

Regional Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR) described Serbia's official reactions to Ratko Mladic, Bosnian Serb wartime military leader, life imprisonment sentence by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) as a "disgraceful attempt to avoid responsibility."

As for Prime Minister Ana Brnabic’s statement about Serbia’s commitment to investigating war crimes, YIHR said it was “absolutely untrue.“

“The reactions by Serbia’s authorities and their media machinery to the verdict and the IRMCT’s report to the UN Security Council are a shameful try to avoid responsibility, galvanise nationalist hysteria and spark mistrust between Serbia’s people and the rest of the world,” YIHR statement said.

According to the Initiative, Serbia “was Mladic’s safe house.”

“Serbia institutions have never disclosed and condemned those sheltering Mladic from the judiciary for 15 years; or those responsible for him receiving the pension despite being at large; or those who killed two soldiers on guard in the (Belgrade) Topcider barracks in October 2004,” they said.

YIHR believes there is no will in Serbia to investigate war crimes and mentions an example of the Bosniaks fleeing Srebrenica to Serbia to end up in a camp where they have been tortured and humiliated.

The Initiative added that President Aleksandar Vucic’s appeal for the convicted war criminals to serve their sentence in Serbia was “extremely hypocritical.”

“Serbia not only avoids to implement but ignores the war crime Tribunal verdicts,” it said, adding that the convicted war criminal and the ultra-nationalist leader Vojislav Seselj was not deprived of his MP’s immunity after the sentence despite the Law on Deputies.

YIHR also said that “war criminals don’t lose privileges but get protection and promotion from the state institutions and pro-regime media.”

It added Serbia “is not a reconciliation player in the region, being a safe house for war criminals for a long time, as it is today for Novak Djukic” (sought by Bosnia and Herzegovina).

“No one trusts Serbia which celebrates and protects war criminals, and no one wants to offer it their hand,” YIHR said.

YIHR is a network of autonomous non-governmental organisations from Serbia, Kosovo, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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