Ratko Mladic’s Appeal Causes Anxiety for Bosnian War Survivors

“He saw us. I saw him too. He raised his hand, he waved… They went off towards Potocari. I have never seen him again,” she said.

Malagic has testified at four trials of Bosnian Serbs military and political officials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague – the cases against Radislav Krstic, Radovan Karadzic, Zdravko Tolimir and Ratko Mladic.

She is now awaiting the final verdict in Mladic’s trial this month with particular attention, because she personally saw the Bosnian Serb Army commander in Potocari at the time of the massacres in July 1995.

“You know what it would mean if they pronounce him guilty. It would mean a big victory,” she said.

She is one of thousands of people from Srebrenica who are anxiously awaiting the hearings set for March 17 and 18, at which the defence and prosecution will present their appeals in the Mladic case.

He was initially convicted by the UN court in 2017 and sentenced to life imprisonment for the Srebrenica genocide, terrorising the population of Sarajevo during the siege of the city, waging a campaign of persecution across Bosnia and Herzegovina and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

The defence wants Mladic to be acquitted on appeal, while the prosecution is hoping that he will be further convicted of committing genocide in several other Bosnian municipalities in 1992.

But relatives of the victims of Srebrenica are worried that changes to the judging panel could have an effect on the verdict. The appeals chamber in the Mladic case is now being headed by judge Prisca Matimba Nyambe, who in a previous trial expressed doubt that the Srebrenica massacres constituted genocide.

Nyambe filed a separate opinion from the other judges in the case against senior Bosnian Serb military officer Zdravko Tolimir, questioning the definition of the crime as genocide and Tolimir’s responsibility for it.

‘Biased’ judges replaced

Miodrag Stojanovic, one of Ratko Mladic’s defence lawyers. Photo: BIRN.

Emir Suljagic, a survivor of the genocide who followed the Hague Tribunal proceedings as a journalist and is now the director of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre in Potocari, says that there are “grounds for concern” about the judging panel in the Mladic appeal.

“The appeals chamber is composed of people who have previously had a somewhat different opinion from the mainstream of legal opinion at the tribunal, or people who have never been in contact with the tribunal and the former Yugoslavia,” Suljagic said.

However, he noted, there is a “mountain of legal precedents” and previous court decisions that will have a strong bearing on the verdict in the Mladic case.

“Any decision that would not be in line with the earlier judgments and earlier judicial policy of the tribunal would be drastic, radical and pretty much revolutionary,” he said.

Besides judge Nyambe, there are three new judges on the appeals chamber panel which is due hand down the final verdict in the Mladic trial at the end of this year. The new judges were appointed after the Hague Tribunal accepted a request filed by Mladic’s lawyers to remove three judges from the appeals procedure for alleged bias.

Judges Theodor Meron, Carmel Agius and Daqun Liu were removed on the grounds that they had previously made certain conclusions relating to Mladic in other cases.

One of Mladic’s lawyers, Miodrag Stojanovic told BIRN that the defence “rejoiced” when the decision was announced.

“The arguments we used in our request [for the judges’ removal] referred primarily to the fact that the three members of the appeals chamber had already tried other cases dealing with appeals against judgments related to events in Srebrenica and its surroundings,” Stojanovic said.

In those cases, the three judges had said the accused, who were Mladic’s subordinates, were guilty of participating in a joint criminal enterprise led by Mladic and others, Stojanovic explained: “That is why we thought they might be prejudiced when trying him [at the appeal].”

However, lawyers and experts said they thought it was illogical that the three judges were removed because of their previous decisions in sentencing Mladic’s subordinates, while judge Nyambe remains despite her stance in the Tolimir case.

Professor of international criminal law Enis Omerovic said the decision, made by Hague judge Jean Claude Antonetti, was “legally disputable”, while researcher Hikmet Karcic said that it was “a legal nonsense”.

“We have a situation in which Antonetti claims that certain judges are biased because they handed down verdicts of conviction at previous trials, while judge Nyambe is unbiased despite having absolved Tolimir of responsibility for his participation in a crime,” Karcic said.

‘Justice will catch up with them’

Mirsada Malagic, whose family members were killed in July 1995. Photo: BIRN.

A total of 40 people have so far been sentenced to over 610 years in prison, plus four life sentences, for genocide and other crimes related to Srebrenica. Despite this, the denial of the Srebrenica genocide continues in Bosnia and Herzegovina and elsewhere.

Legislation to ban genocide denial has been proposed in Bosnia and Herzegovina several times, but it has never received support from legislative authorities.

The verdict in the case against Ratko Mladic is unlikely to change the minds of political leaders in Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska and in Serbia, where the classification of the Srebrenica massacres as genocide is firmly rejected.

But for Mirsada Malagic, whose loved ones were killed in the July 1995 massacres, a conviction for Mladic would forever stand as a warning to others.

“All those who might even think about doing the same thing, they would know that justice will catch up with them,” she said. “That is what the verdict would mean to me.”