THE HAGUE, June 1 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has increased prison sentences on two top former Serbian security officials.
Jovica Stanišic and Franko Simatovic were convicted of training death squads accused of ethnic cleansing during the break-up of Yugoslavia.
They will serve 15 years instead of the 12 they were originally given in 2021.
The court’s final verdict on the former Yugoslavia is also the first to prove a direct link between the Serbian state and a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Stanisic, a former head of Serbia’s State Security Service, and his deputy, Franko Simatovic, a senior intelligence operative, were key allies of Serbia’s late ex-President Slobodan Milosevic.
The court found the spymasters guilty of establishing training camps and deploying infamous death squads, the paramilitary units called the Red Berets.
They were also held responsible for involvement in crimes across Bosnia and in one town in Croatia as members of a joint criminal plan to eliminate non-Serbs from swathes of land during the Balkan wars.
The evidence gathered during these trials provides a historical narrative of what happened during the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
Many hope it will help to heal the scars of the past and bring divided communities together to build a peaceful, unified future.
“It’s the missing piece of the puzzle,” Nenad Golcevski, from the Humanitarian Law Centre said.
“Now there can’t be more denying of the role of Serbia, as a final judgment it completes the legacy, now it’s up to us, the people in the Balkans, to take that legacy forward, to use it, to find lessons from it, so that something like this is never repeated again.”
