Serbian Security Chiefs’ Retrial Resumes after Six-Month Halt

Stanišić i Simatović. Izvor: MKSJ 

The retrial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic resumed on Tuesday with the first hearing since March at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, although Stanisic was not present in court because he has been granted provisional release due to health problems.

All the participants were separated from each other in transparent boxes in the courtroom and were wearing masks in order to curb the potential spread of the coronavirus.

“We were last together in this courtroom on the 11th of March. Our plan at the time was to hear one more witness, before an extended Easter break, to allow the Simatovic defence to reassess and to reduce its witness list,” presiding judge Burton Hall said at the beginning of the hearing.

But these plans were changed because of the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic which restricted international travel and stopped proceedings from resuming, Hall added.

Simatovic, the former head of Serbian State Security, and his former deputy Stanisic are charged with having been protagonists in a joint criminal enterprise led by then Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, aimed at permanently and forcibly removing Croats and Bosniaks from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to achieve Serb domination.

They pleaded not guilty in December 2015 after the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia overturned their acquittal in their first trial.

A defence witness at Tuesday’s hearing said that Serbian State Security did not have as many officers to stage operations in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina as Simatovic claimed at a ceremony in 1997.

“I was taken aback by the unbelievable information I heard on that occasion from Franko Simatovic,” said the witness, retired State Security officer Vojislav Cvetkovic.

“All this looked to me like an exaggeration that was meant to impress the president [Milosevic],” Cvetkovic added.

The speech by Simatovic to a number of senior officials including Milosevic at the Kula training centre in May 1997 was cited as one of the key pieces of prosecutorial evidence at the retrial.

The prosecutor quoted Simatovic as saying in the speech that Serbian units “successfully participated in six joint operations” in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Cvetkovic said he was an employee of Serbian State Security from the 1970s until October 1998, when he was pensioned off, right after Stanisic was dismissed from his position.

His main job was related to communications surveillance and wiretapping.

The retrial continues on Wednesday.