War Crimes Plea Bargains Provoke Questions

The Bosnian prosecutor hasn’t made a single plea bargain with a war crimes suspect for two years, sparking debate about whether vital information about wartime burial sites is being missed.

Despite the lack of plea bargains in the past two years, the state prosecutor’s office told BIRN that it has not changed its policy and will continue to offer more lenient sentences to perpetrators who admit their guilt and offer information, particularly about hidden wartime graves.

“What is the most important for the prosecutor’s office is to obtain useful information and testimony. We are particularly interested in information about the location of the remains of the victims which families have been seeking for two decades,” said Bosnian prosecution spokesperson Boris Grubesic.

Out of a total of 103 war crimes cases which have so far ended in a final verdict in the Bosnian courts, 26 were concluded with the signing of a plea bargain between the offender and the prosecutor. Most of these guilty pleas were made from 2009 to 2011.

“It is true that there have not been any plea bargains in recent months, but there probably will be in the future, because the defence is always negotiating or seeking negotiations with the prosecutors,” Grubesic said.

Although there have been plea bargains in 26 cases so far, Amor Masovic from the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina said he believed that only one deal between a perpetrator and the prosecutor had provided useful information which led to the victims’ bodies so far.

“I know that one of the agreements took us to the exact location at Koricanske stene [on Mount Vlasic] where we found the remains of victims who were killed on August 21, 1992. There was another attempt, when we were taken to a place in Visegrad, but nothing was found there,” Masovic said.

The Koricanske stene remains were found in 2009, when a former policeman from Prijedor, Damir Ivankovic, pleaded guilty to the killings of more than 150 civilians and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

But the president of the Association of Prison Camp Detainees, Jasmin Meskovic, said that he was not sure whether plea bargains were worthwhile at all.

“It is only important to us to establish the truth, and that the truth about the suffering and the perpetrators is known,” Meskovic said.

He added that it was also important for the perpetrators to “make a sincere apology and express their remorse for the crimes” when signing a deal with the prosecutor.

“It may happen that a person did something or committed a crime, but if he eventually sees what he has done and wants to give a message that it should not happen again, we like to hear that,” he said.

But Ivan Sijakovic, a sociologist from Banja Luka, said that such apologies have no value.

“The admission of guilt is not part of our culture. It does not mean anything,” Sijakovic said.

“When people hear that someone pleaded guilty, they say ‘Well, you did it, it is not important to be repentant now’ or ‘he was always weak, a trouble-maker, a problem’. It is different in Western culture; there the plea is part of the act, the man who does commits crime has already calculated the plea as a mitigating circumstance. But it is also worthless,” he said.

He said he believed that despite the lack of plea bargains in recent years, pragmatic criminals would continue to try to strike such deals with prosecutors: “A man who is in jail and in court just thinks about how to get a lower sentence,” he said.