Croatia Rejects War Convict’s Miscarriage of Justice Plea
This post is also available in: Bosnian
Mirko Graorac. Photo: Al Jazeera Balkans/Screenshot
The Croatian Supreme Court has rejected a request for a retrial in the case of Mirko Graorac, who served a prison sentence for war crimes at Bosnian’s Manjaca detention camp in 1992, Novosti newspaper reported on Friday.
The request was denied even though Graorac’s lawyer proposed five new witnesses – two former detainees of the Manjaca camp and three former members of the camp system command – all of whom said that Graorac was never at the camp.
The Supreme Court issued the decision on February 23, saying that Graorac had offered no new reasons for reopening the proceedings.
Graorac, an ethnic Serb, has said he was living in Split in Croatia and went back to his home village of Bajinci in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the beginning of 1992, and was there at the time the alleged crime was committed.
He returned to Split and was detained by police in 1995, beaten for several days, and charged with war crimes, he said in a recent documentary film produced by Al Jazeera Balkans, ‘Mirko Graorac’s Burden’.
In 1996, Split County Court found him guilty of committing war crimes against a civilian and prisoners of war while he was the commander of the militia that guarded the exterior of the Manjaca prison camp, from April until September 1992.
The court sentenced him to 20 years in prison and ordered his expulsion from Croatia.
In the final judgment handed down by the Supreme Court in 2001, Graorac was sentenced to 15 years in prison. After serving his sentence, he returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he still lives.
Rights group Amnesty International said in a report in 1998 that the trial of Graorac “did not meet international standards for fairness”.
Graorac told Al Jazeera Balkans that he is trying to clear his name because he doesn’t want his children to live with the stigma of having a war criminal as a father.
His lawyer, Cedo Prodanovic, told Novosti that he will file a complaint to the Constitutional Court about the Supreme Court decision, and if that fails, he will take the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Bosnian Serbs imprisoned Bosniaks and Croats at the Manjaca camp during the war in 1992.
The camp operated from 1991-92 and briefly again in 1995. The majority of prisoners were Croat and Bosniak soldiers and civilians.
