The Colonel on Trial

Radoman Bozovic, speaker of the FRY parliament chamber of citizens, found it simplest to agree. Antonio Cassese, the president of the International War Crime Tribunal in the Hague said in Belgrade on June 5: "Bozovic told me that the federal military tribunal had launched an investigation into the three officers (Sljivancanin, Mrksic and Radic) and that the tribunal will decide what to do with them". The next day that was denied by Captain Radomir Gojkovic president of the Belgrade military tribunal ("The army prosecutor has not started any proceedings against the former JNA officer in this court"), and a day later by Milos Gojkovic, president of the supreme military tribunal ("The competent court has launched no proceedings against the charges raised against Sljivancanin, Mrksic and Radic by the Hague tribunal... I don't know what Bozovic meant"). VREME asked the Hague tribunal spokesman Christian Chartier if the tribunal had been informed about the proceedings against the three officers being launched in Belgrade and said simply No.

It's not impossible that the commanders of the JNA forces in Vukovar could face a court martial in Belgrade.

Colonel Veselin Sljivancanin, General Mile Mrksic and Captain Miroslav Radic were charged by the Hague tribunal last November for the mass killing of approximately 260 non-Serbs in Ovcara near Vukovar. Allegedly, those people were taken out of Vukovar hospital on November 20, 1991 and taken in groups of 10-20 to an area between Ovcara and Grabova where JNA and para-military troops commanded by the three officers killed them and buried them in mass graves. The Hague tribunal said the massacre was "well orchestrated and organized". The victims were the wounded, hospital staff, unarmed defenders of the town, Croatian political activists and other civilians which means the Geneva conventions were violated as well as the customs of war and a crime against humanity committed.

If something has to be done with the Vukovar three in the end, the authorities have two possibilities. They can hand them over to the Hague or arrest and try them in the FRY. As things stand now, there will be no extradition. The problem isn't so much domestic laws since laws were never an obstacle for anything. A formula has even been found to extradite the three officers without upsetting legislature. The FRY constitution which bans the extradition of FRY citizens to other countries can be circumvented by stating that the Hague tribunal is not another country but an international organization which is not explicitly banned. That formula was used by Croatia. A slightly bigger problem is the law on criminal proceedings article 525 which lists exemptions and states that the first supposition is that the person is not a FRY citizen. That law could be changed although parliament would have to be enlisted for the change. There's also another possibility; article 524 says extraditions will be performed under this law unless other arrangements have been made under an international treaty. The Dayton agreement which Milosevic signed does not say anything about extraditions but article nine obliges all sides to cooperate by investigating and prosecuting war criminals and other violators of international humanitarian law.

More importantly, Milosevic has his own ideas on war crimes and criminals which he explained in an interview to German weekly Der Spiegel: "The opinion in Serbia is that all war criminals must answer for their deeds. In that sense Serbia will hold responsible every war criminal in it. I don't think that the trials of Serbian war criminals, if there are any, should be held outside Serbia. In any case, two years ago the first war crimes trials started in Serbia. Our criminal legislature treats war crimes as the worst crimes punishable only by death."

Milosevic, although a lawyer by education, did not show much legal knowledge. For a start, in Serbia the death penalty cannot be passed for war crimes because the Serbian criminal code does not include that crime. Those crimes are punishable under the FRY criminal code which does not proscribe the death sentence because it was abolished in federal legislature before this war.

His statement that war crimes trials began in Serbia two years ago is also not quite right. The Sabac district court has been trying Serbian Dusan Vuckovic on charges of war crimes in 1992 for three years. Judging by everything, Vuckovic will probably be freed because there is no hard evidence against him. He did admit to cutting the ears off kidnapped Moslem civilians and killing seven in a detention center.

Military tribunals did launch proceedings against a number of JNA and territorial defence troops in 1991-92 on charges of killing civilians but that was stopped in late 1992. No investigation was ever launched into the Ovcara events although JNA colonel Milan Eremija sent a telegram on October 23, 1991 informing his command of war crimes by para-military formations in Vukovar. No one reacted to that report.

Although the West would like him even more if he extradited Sljivancanin and the others, Milosevic feels he doesn't need the risk in the middle of preparing for elections. The VJ is clearly polarized into factions that oppose the extradition and others that think it wouldn't be such a bad thing. But why should Milosevic risk losing the VJ votes that are his traditionally, let alone the votes of army pensioners. Also the three officers would be under less control in the Hague and who knows what they might say.

So the remaining option is to try them in Belgrade. Formally, there is nothing to stop an investigation and someone would come up with an excuse why that wasn't done sooner. The propaganda machine would turn it into a moral achievement.

The FRY criminal code copied articles from the Hague and Geneva conventions on war crimes which state that criminals are also persecuted by international tribunals so there's no problem.

The Hague tribunal has nothing against a trial in the country on certain conditions. The crime has to be qualified as a war crime and the trial has to be unbiased. From the standpoint of the local judiciary, the rules of the Hague tribunal are disputable. They state that the prosecutor, in any stage of the trial even after a sentence is passed, can demand the case be handed over to the international tribunal if the conditions are not met, i.e. if the accused is protected from accountability. If that demand from the Hague is not met, the tribunal panel of judges could ask the tribunal president to inform the UN Security Council.

But all that does not have to happen. Military legal experts believe that the proceedings, if they happen, would be conducted very carefully and added that informed sources have been saying for months that the trial could take place.

On a wider scale, the people who will decide are certainly thinking about effects on the domestic political scene.

But listen to what the president told Speigel: "In the tradition of the Serb people, the most dishonorable thing is to kill prisoners of war, people without arms, especially civilians and women and children. You won't find anyone in Serbia who will justify those crimes, whoever commits them."

Federal Law

The Vukovar three, if they go on trial in the Belgrade military tribunal, could be held accountable under the following articles of the FRY criminal code:

141 (genocide): Whoever orders murders or the harming of members of a group with the intention to completely or partly destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group or commits those acts with the same intention will be punished with a jail sentence of five to 20 years.

143 (war crime against prisoners or the wounded): Whoever violates international law in war or armed conflict, orders the killing, torturing, inhuman treatment, biological experiments or suffering against the wounded, sick, shipwrecked or medical staff or commits those acts will be punished with a minimum of five years to 20 years in prison.

144 (war crimes against POWs): Whoever violates international law and orders the killing, torture, inhuman behavior, biological experiments, suffering or harming of prisoners of war or commits those acts will be punished with a minimum of five years in prison or 20 years.

146 (illegal killing or wounding of the enemy): (1) Whoever violates international law in war or armed conflict and kills or wounds an enemy who has laid his weapons or surrendered unconditionally or has no means of defence will be punished with a minimum of one year in prison.

(2) if the killing from article 1 was committed in a cruel or inhuman way, for profit, or if several people were killed, the perpetrator will be punished with a jail sentence of 10 to 20 years.