Serbian Court Rejects Restart of Srebrenica Trial

The Higher Court in Belgrade on Tuesday rejected the motion filed by the war crimes prosecutor, Snezana Stanojkovic, to continue the trial of the eight former policemen charged with committing a massacre of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in the village of Kravica in July 1995.

The court said that the motion was incomplete, since it was based on charges that were thrown out by an appeals court earlier in July.

This means that prosecutor Stanojkovic will have to file new charges, which have to be accepted by the court before a new trial is scheduled.

The original charges were dismissed because they were not filed by the authorised prosecutor, since the Serbian war crimes prosecutor’s position was vacant at the time.

The charges were filed in January 2016, when the previous war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, had already retired, and his replacement had not yet been selected.

The eight former members of a Bosnian Serb special police unit went on trial in February this year, accused of organising and participating in the shooting of more than 1,300 Bosniak civilians in an agricultural warehouse in the village of Kravica near Srebrenica in July 1995.

Nedeljko Milidragovic, Aleksa Golijanin, Milivoje Batinica, Aleksandar Dacevic, Bora Miletic, Jovan Petrovic, Dragomir Parovic and Vidosav Vasic were accused of committing a war crime by killing Bosniak prisoners who were captured after Srebrenica fell to Bosnian Serb forces.

The killings in the warehouse in Kravica were among several massacres by Bosnian Serb forces after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995 that left some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys dead.

So far more than 1,300 civilians who were massacred in Kravica have been identified. Their bodies were found in several mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Bosnian prosecution previously launched genocide indictments against Milidragovic and Golijanin, but couldn’t arrest them because they have been living in Serbia since the war in Bosnia ended in 1995.

After Serbia and Bosnia signed a protocol on cooperation in war crimes in 2013, evidence from the Bosnian prosecution was transferred to Belgrade.

According to the charges filed by the Bosnian prosecution, Milidragovic, a former commander of a squad from the Bosnian Serb police special brigade’s Jahorina Training Centre, and Golijanin, a former deputy commander of a Jahorina Training Centre squad, committed genocide against Bosniaks from Srebrenica between July 10 and July 19, 1995.

However, the Serbian prosecution said it couldn’t prove the genocide charges laid by the Bosnian prosecutors and instead charged the men with committing a war crime.

Serbia does not accept that the Srebrenica massacres constituted genocide, despite rulings by international courts.