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Veselin Sljivancanin (centre) in the court room in The Hague, December 2010. Photo: EPA/PETER DEJONG/POOL.
The municipality of Negotin has posted an announcement on its official Facebook page for an event on Wednesday evening to promote a new book by convicted Serbian war criminal Veselin Sljivancanin in the eastern Serbian town.
The event to promote Sljivancanin’s book, Ovo je Moja Zemlja, Ovde Ja Komandujem (This is My Country, Here I Command), will be held in a municipal park after it was initially scheduled at a public library in Negotin, sparking complaints from anti-war organisations that the use of public facilities for the event was unacceptable.
Former Yugoslav People’s Army officer Sljivancanin was found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 2007 of aiding and abetting the torture of prisoners, and sentenced to five years in prison.
The light sentence caused an outcry, and in May 2009, the Hague Tribunal added a conviction for complicity in the murder of some 260 captives, increasing his sentence to 17 years.
In 2010, however, the Tribunal reversed a valid sentence for the first time when its appeals chamber reduced his jail time to ten years.
After serving two-thirds of his sentence, he was released and returned to Belgrade in July 2011.
The title of the book refers to an incident in the besieged Croatian town of Vukovar in November 1991. After the town fell and Serbian forces took control over city, Yugoslav People’s Army officers blocked representatives of the European Monitoring Mission and the International Committee of the Red Cross who were trying to reach Vukovar hospital. Some 200 people were then taken from the hospital and massacred.
In September 2020, Sljivancanin told Serbia’s Happy TV that he wrote the book to showcase “some of my memories, and to have the truth written”.
He has already held a promotional event for the book in a public library in the town of Rekovac in central Serbia in October 2020.
This is Sljivancanin’s third book. In 2012, he published I Defended the Truth, about his days spent in custody in The Hague and in 2015, he published Son, Be a Human, his wartime memoirs about fall of Vukovar.
He has also appeared as a guest at Serbian Progressive Party events in recent years. At one party event, eight activists from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights who staged a disruption were physically attacked and were later each fined 50,000 dinars, about 420 euros.
NOTE: This article was updated on September 9, 2021 to reflect the fact that the venue for the book event was moved from the public library in Negotin to a municipal park.
