Wheels of Justice Grind Slowly in Doboj

Fifteen years since the war ended in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the courts have not yet cast light on the roles of all top political, military and police officials implicated in war crimes in Doboj, northern Bosnia.

The Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo says more than 2,000 people were killed in the Doboj area during the 1992-5 war. Another 104 remain missing.

Till now, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina sentenced in October 2009 Predrag Kujundzic first-instance verdict to 22 years for the murder, rape and enslavement of Bosniak [Muslim] and Croat civilians in the Doboj area.

The indictment said Kujundzic had commanded the “Predini vukovi” squad that was a part of the Republika Srpska army, VRS.

The trial before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina of Miodrag Markovic, former member of the VRS, is ongoing. He is indicted for the rape of girls in Doboj in July 1992.

In February 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, ICTY, sentenced former Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavsic to 11 years in prison for war crimes in Doboj. Plavsic was released after serving two-thirds of her sentence in October of last year.
Nikola Jorgic received a life sentence before the Supreme Court of Germany in 1997. The court proclaimed Jorgic, former commander of the «Jorgina grupa» squad, guilty of genocide in the Doboj region.

But the investigation is not complete into several other suspects.

These are Milan Ninkovic, wartime and postwar president of the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, and member of the Crisis Staff in Doboj, Andrija Bjelosevic, then chief of the Public Safety Station, and Milovan Stankovic, Yugoslav National Army, JNA, major and former commander of Serbian paramilitary forces in Doboj.

Zenica’s Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office said the investigation into these men had been transferred to the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they were working on completing the documentation.

Ninkovic says the accusations against him are based on a misunderstanding. He says he did not work with the breakaway Assembly of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, then located in Pale, eastern Bosnia, as he is suspected.

Bjelosevic said he would dispute the charges against him with documents and arguments when the time comes. Stankovic is not in Bosnia. Investigators assume that he is in Serbia.

Detentions and beatings:

Zahid Kremic, member of the Association of Detainees of the Zenica-Doboj Canton, is one of those awaiting justice for what he experienced in the war.

On June 8, 1992, Kremic says he was handcuffed and taken from his apartment in Doboj’s Stadion district to the police station and beaten.

Until July 1992, when he was exchanged, he was detained in the Percin disko, then serving as a jail, and in military hangars located near the offices of the Poljoremont company.

The Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina believes that the “Predini vukovi” squad detained a number of civilians in the Percin disko, where they subjected them to physical and mental abuse and killed some of them.

“Milan Ninkovic, Andrija Bjelosevic and Milovan Stankovic are the most responsible persons,” Redzo Delic, deputy chief prosecutor at the Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office in Zenica, said, referring to the overall death toll in Doboj.

In the course of their investigations, Delic said they had interviewed more than 100 witnesses.

Ninkovic and Bjelosevic had presented their defence before the investigating judge of the Cantonal Court while Stankovic did not appear, as he was not in Doboj.

In 2005, the Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office transferred the case of “the Doboj group”, to the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

They had assessed it as “very complex, sensitive and comprehensive”. According to Bosnia’s National Strategy for Processing of War Crimes Cases, adopted in December 2008, sensitive cases come under the jurisdiction of the State Prosecutor while less sensitive cases come under cantonal or local courts.
The criteria to assess the complexity of the cases are the gravity of the offence and the post that the suspect or accused held at the time.
Selma Hecimovic, spokeswoman for the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina, maintained that the “completion of documentation [for the Doboj group] was finished”.

Slow investigation:

Neither suspects nor victims are happy with the prolonged state of the investigation.

Bjelosevic, former chief of Doboj’s Public Safety Station, told BIRN-Justice Report that that there was “a lot of arbitrariness in this case”.

He was not willing to comment on claims made by Obren Petrovic, former mayor of Doboj, on May 10, at The Hague Tribunal trial of Mico Stanisic, former interior minister of the Republika Srpska and Stojan Zupljanin, head of the CSB of Banja Luka.

At the trial, Petrovic said that Bjelosevic “could hear the sounds of non-Serbs being beaten in the police building in Doboj because his office was on the first floor”. Bjelosevic said he did not want to comment on these claims to the media.

Ninkovic, meanwhile, said he was preparing a letter to the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina, urging them to speed up matters and “clear the case up”.

In 2004 the former head of the SDS in Doboj was banned from politics by the former High Representative Paddy Ashdown on account of suspicions that he had been involved in the support of indicted war criminals.

Ninkovic told BIRN-Justice Report that was all the result of a misunderstanding. Because of the ban, he had suffered adverse consequences, he added, because in 2007 Ashdown’s successor as High Representative, Miroslav Lajcak, had seized his personal documents.

In mid-2007 Lajcak confiscated the travel documents of 93 people, including Ninkovic, on suspicion that they were directly associated with either war crimes or the networks of assistance to Hague tribunal fugitives.

“I had nothing to do with this,” Ninkovic said.

He went on to note that he was not the only member of the wartime Crisis Headquarters in Doboj – other members of which had since gone on to take senior positions in the country.

“The president of the Crisis Headquarters was later elected to the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the second member of the Crisis Headquarters is now a judge of the Republika Srpska constitutional court,” he said.

Borislav Paravac was elected to the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2003. Testifying at the trial of Predrag Kujundzic in October 2008, he confirmed that in May 1992 he had been president of the Crisis Headquarters in Doboj.

“The Crisis Headquarters was responsible for the organization of civilian life; I didn’t know about the suffering of civilians,” Paravac said at the trial. “I heard something regarding the existence of the camp, but we did not interfere in the affairs of the army or police,” he added.

Milorad Ivosevic, a judge of the Republika Srpska constitutional court, told BIRN-Justice Report that he may once have been a member of the Crisis Headquarters in Doboj, but no one had asked him about it.

While Ninkovic wants the case the cleared up once and for all, so do the former detainees and victims.

“It’s easy to bring some ordinary perpetrator who did what he did, following orders, to justice,” Kremic said, commenting on the current prosecutions. “[But] there are also a number of people who committed crimes on their own initiative.”