Serb political leaders in both Serbia and Montenegro continue to deny that the 1995 Srebrenica massacres were genocide, reject international courts’ verdicts and accuse them of anti-Serb bias, opposing attempts to come to terms with the past.
Bosnian and Serbian companies provided heavy machinery, buses and trucks that were used during the Srebrenica deportations and massacres in July 1995 and the subsequent cover-up operation, but none of them has ever been held accountable.
BIRN has identified at least 20 Twitter accounts that actively dispute the international court classification of the 1995 Srebrenica massacres as genocide. Their denial of the crime frequently goes unchallenged.
War survivors in Bosanski Samac still remember the brutality of Serbian State Security fighters deployed to their town in 1992, where they committed crimes that eventually led to landmark convictions this week for the security service’s top officials.
As the UN court prepares to rule on whether the Serbian State Security Service chiefs Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic illegally controlled wartime paramilitary units, BIRN looks at how they were deployed in the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts.
Former Serbian state security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic will hear the judgment in The Hague this week in their retrial for masterminding the most notorious Serb combat units that fought in the Croatian and Bosnian wars.
Records held by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia show how paramilitary units were set up and deployed to use violence to achieve political aims in the 1990s wars.
In less than two years, the Banja Luka police has filed at least 160 charges against activists seeking justice in the Dragan Dragicevic case – which experts see this as open intimidation of free citizens by the Bosnian Serb authorities.
Ahead of the initial verdict in the last trial at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, BIRN looks back on the landmark judgments, controversies, successes and failures in the UN court’s mission to seek justice for the atrocities of the 1990s.
Bosnian war survivors want former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic to be found guilty this week of genocide in five Bosnian municipalities in 1992 as well as genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, but experts believe this is unlikely to happen.
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