NGOs criticise war crimes trials in Croatia

From the Institute for War and Peace Reporting :

War crimes trials in Croatia remain hampered by political pressure and must be improved urgently before the Hague tribunal closes its doors, activists and politicians said at a conference held in Zagreb last week.

In a report presented at the event, three Croatian NGOs – Documenta, the Osijek Center for Peace, Nonviolence and Human Rights, and the Citizens' Human Rights Committee – oulined many weaknesses in the way in which local war crimes trials are conducted.

They cited an adverse political climate, insufficient staff and technical support, weak protection of witnesses and inabsentia cases.

In 2008, these NGOs monitored two dozen war crimes trials held in Croatia and the report presented in the Croatian capital on March 24 was a compilation of their findings.

“The judicial, executive and legislative bodies of Croatia have not made the expected and necessary step forward,” director of Documenta Vesna Terselic told the conference.

“Neither the administration of justice, nor the executive government has made any progress in trials [or] in creating a favourable atmosphere for witnesses. There are still problems when victims testify.”

Speaking of the politically charged atmosphere surrounding war crimes, Terselic noted that the Croatian parliament's decision to release from custody member of parliament Branimir Glavas – accused of war crimes against nine Serb civilians in Osijek in 1991 – was blatant interference into the theoretically independent judiciary and a “clear demonstration of the power of politics”.

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From What Karadzic Prosecutors Learnt From Krajisnik Trial

Krajisnik was originally sentenced to 27 years in prison for crimes against humanity – including persecution, murder, extermination and deportation – for his bid to permanently remove Bosniaks and Croats from large areas of Bosnia between July 1, 1991 and December 30, 1992.

Trial judges found him guilty of responsibility for the killing approximately 3,000 Bosnian Muslims and Croats and forcibly removing more than 100,000 non-Serbs from Bosnian Serb-held territory.

But he was acquitted of genocide charges after judges found that prosecutors had failed to prove that he possessed genocidal intent, an element necessary for a conviction.

In last month's appeal verdict, judges reduced Krajisnik's sentence to 20 years after overturning his convictions for murder, extermination, as well as several of the more serious persecution counts, including cruel and inhumane treatment and unlawful detention.

Appeals judges upheld his conviction for persecution, committed through deportation and forcible transfer, saying they were satisfied with the trial chamber's finding that Krajisnik “shared the intent” to commit these crimes as part of the joint criminal enterprise.

In explaining why the convictions were overturned, appeals judges said the trial chamber had erred by failing to establish which local politicians, military forces, police commanders and paramilitary leaders it was refering to when it mentioned lower-level members of the joint criminal enterprise.

It also failed to show exactly when the crimes of murder, extermination, and more serious counts of persecution became part of the Bosnian Serb leaders' criminal plan, the appeal judges said.

Karadzic is charged with many of the same crimes – including killings and extermination in the Bosnian municipalities of Bijeljina, Brcko, Foca, Ilijas, Kljuc, Kotor Varos, Novi Grad and Prijedor – of which Krajisnik has now been acquitted.

Some say that following the Krajisnik appeal judgement, the prosecution in the Karadzic trial will be under pressure to ensure that it can deliver on all the charges against the former Bosnian Serb strongman – particularly after appeals judges confirmed that he and Krajisnik were members of the same joint criminal enterprise at the top of the Bosnian Serb regime.

“Anyone concluding from all of this that [it is a matter of] going in there and putting on evidence and walking away with a conviction on Karadzic, I think is mistaken,” Michael Karnavas, a defence lawyer at the Hague tribunal, told IWPR.

“Karadzic is [Krajisnik's] political twin so the evidence that applies to one applies to the other.

“If they couldn't get Krajisnik [for several of the charges in his indictment], it's going to be very difficult to [prove similar charges against] Karadzic, unless there's additional evidence.”

But despite the strong links between the two cases, other observers do not believe that overturning many of Krajisnik's convictions will have a significant bearing on the Karadzic case.

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From Del Ponte ordered to return to Argentina and forget about her book's launch

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Fedyashin) - Carla Del Ponte, former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), has exhausted the patience of the invariably calm Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, where she works.

She received a message ordering her to immediately return to her position as ambassador to Argentina, and banning her presence at the launch of her new book, "The Hunt: Me and War Criminals," which was scheduled for early April in Milan. "Any public presentation of this work is incompatible with the author's status of a Swiss ambassador...Carla Del Ponte's book...contains statements, which are unacceptable for a representative of the government of Switzerland," department spokesman Jean-Philippe Jeannerat said in a special statement to the press on April 8.

Any other diplomat would have been knocked out for a long time by this public reprimand, but not the Swiss Iron Lady. She calmly left Italy, and is supposed to have arrived in Argentina by now. Indeed, how does this pinprick compare with numerous awful nicknames that Del Ponte is bizarrely proud of? They were coined by all those she punished as a former Swiss Attorney General, and head of the ICTY (from 1999 to 2007). In her latter position, she was dubbed "New Gestapo," Italian Cosa Nostra called her "La Puttana," and Swiss bankers gave her the name of "Unguided Missile."

But Del Ponte does not find these labels insulting because they only show how good she is at her job. Her former Italian colleague Giovanni Falcone called her the "incarnation of stubbornness," but she was unabashed. She has a strange attitude toward these assessments, but it is enough to see her in flesh and blood once, and many questions will disappear.

Ponte's 416-page book about her work as the head of the ICTY was published in Italian by the Milan-based Fertinelli publishers, and has already been translated into English and French. For 20 euros, one can get an insight into the prosecutor's inner world. In general, her book is dry and would have been even drier if she had not had a co-author - New York Times reporter Chuck Sudetic.

In principle, Del Ponte has not revealed any secrets. Serbian refugees reported that Kosovo Albanians cut the organs out of live Serbs, and shipped them to the West as donor organs for transplantations. But Serbs were not supposed to be trusted in the 1990s. The prosecutor's voice sounds more convincing, but suggests the following question - why didn't she do anything in order to find the culprits and punish them?

Del Ponte claims that she could do nothing because it was next to impossible to collect evidence in Kosovo, which was swarming with criminals. Witnesses were intimidated, and even judges in The Hague were afraid of the Kosovo Albanians. She writes in her book that some of the tribunal's judges were afraid that Albanians would come deal with them.

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