Bosnia Confirms Indictment of Srebrenica Commander Oric
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The Bosnian prosecution told BIRN on Thursday that the state-level court has confirmed the indictment charging Oric with killing three Bosnian Serb prisoners of war in the villages of Zalazje, Lolici and Kunjerac in 1992.
“All the counts of the indictment have been confirmed,” said the Bosnian prosecution spokesperson Boris Grubesic.
Oric was arrested in June this year on the French-Swiss border at the request of the Serbian prosecution, which wanted to charge him with involvement in war crimes. But he was ultimately extradited to Bosnia and Herzegovina, not to Serbia.
He has already been acquitted of war crimes against Serbs in the Srebrenica area by the Hague Tribunal, when the UN-backed court ruled that he did not have control over the Bosnian Army which committed the crimes.
His lawyer Vasvija Vidovic, who defended him in The Hague, told BIRN that she had received the confirmed indictment and will soon file objections.
“We have the possibility of filing objections to the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague and we can also file them under the local criminal code. We will definitely do that,” Vidovic said, insisting that Oric cannot stand trial twice for the same crimes.
Oric has not been remanded in custody, but is banned from travelling.
Bosniak and Bosnian Serb politicians have criticised the indictment for diferent reasons.
Srebrenica’s Bosniak mayor Camil Durakovic has called it “a political document against a hero of Srebrenica” aimed at showing that the state court was not based against Serb war victims.
But Stasa Kosarac, a Serb lawmaker in the Bosnian parliament, said that Oric should have been charged with more deaths. “No one in Republika Srpska, in particular the families of war victims, can be satisfied with the scope of the indictment,” he said.
It has also been alleged that the indictment is a politically-motivated reaction to a planned referendum questioning the powers of the state-level judiciary over Bosnia’s Serb-led entity Republika Srpska.
The state court on Thursday also confirmed the indictment of Sabahudin Muhic for the same alleged crimes as Oric.
