Unforgiving Criminals Receive High Public Attention in Serbia

Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seheshel was found guilty by The Hague tribunal, but remains an MP, despite the fact that other war criminals continue to play public roles despite their sentences.

In April, the UN tribunal in The Hague dropped in part the appeal charges of Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Shesheli and sentenced him to ten years in prison for war crimes in Serbia.

Seheshel was found guilty of nationalist speeches calling for ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs, but he will not spend a day behind bars because the years he has spent in custody exceed his sentence.

The nationalist politician had already returned to Serbia in 2014 after being released temporarily on humanitarian grounds to be cured of cancer and refused to return to hear the decision against him. After the April sentence, he organised a series of incidents involving violations of the Croatian flag and insults of a delegation from Zagreb on a visit to Serbia.

Sheshel also tried to hold a rally in the northern town of Hrtkovci, where he delivered an anti-Croatian speech in 1992 for which he was convicted but was prevented by Serbian police.

He remains an MP, despite the fact that Serbian law says his sentence legally excludes him from office in parliament.

In October, the organisers of the State-sponsored Belgrade Book Fair gave a stage at this event to Serbia's “Great Serbia”, the Soheshel publishing house.

Serbian internet site Mondo reported that several elementary and high school students visited the Sezel station to ask him for autographs and to take photographs.

At the same event, the Serbian Defence Ministry promoted a book by former Yugoslav Army Chief of Staff Nebojsa Pavkovic, who is currently serving a prison sentence for war crimes in Kosovo.

Pavkovic, who is serving his 22-year sentence in Finland following his 2009 sentence by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, wrote a diary about NATO's air campaign to stop the attack of Serbian forces on ethnic Albanians in 1999.

The Defence Ministry's decision to publish Pavkovic's book continued the already established practice of Serbian state institutions and ruling parties for sponsorisation or celebration of war criminals.

Hague tribunal chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz warned in December the UN Security Council that praising war criminals and denying war crimes in the former Yugoslavia was still continuing.

Brammertz criticised state officials, who he said “were portraying as heroes men who committed the most serious violations of international law”.

Meanwhile, a Serbian court fined eight activists from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in August for interrupting a speech by convicted war criminal Veselin Sljivancani in January 2017.

The court found that activists violated the law by blowing whistles during Sljivancjan's speech at a event organised by the Serbian Progressive Party in the town of Beska.

Serbia seeks missing people, investigates NATO

In August, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic appointed the head of Serbia's commission for investigating journalists' killings, Veran Matic, as his representative for determining the fate of Serbs missing from the Croatian war.

Matic's job will be to co-operate with his counterpart, Croatia's special adviser to the missing persons issue, Ivan Vrkic.

Matic and Vrkic met in September and pledged joint measures to find Serbs and Croats who disappeared during the 1990s war.

In early August, the Serbian government also expanded Matic's commission's mandate to include murders and other crimes against media workers committed during the 1990s wars.

However, it remains unclear what the Serbian Crime Commission can do in other countries of the former Yugoslavia in which Belgrade has no jurisdiction.

Serbian leaders, like those in most former Yugoslav states, avoided signing a declaration establishing the KOMRA Commission to find wartime facts at the Western Balkans summit in London in July.

Serbia, however, established a parliamentary commission to review the alleged effects on public health of using NATO-dispensed uranium during the 1999 Yugoslavia bombings.

Serbian media widely blame NATO bombings for an alleged increase in tumor patients, ignoring the fact that the impoverished uranium has been used almost exclusively in Kosovo.

Experts have rejected claims that the impoverished uranium damaged Serbs and denied the existence of a cancer epidemic in the country.

“Every year we use fossil waste with more uranium than the one dropped in 1999 by NATO,” epidemiologist Zoran Radovanovic said in a debate broadcast by Serbian national television RTS in May.

But the head of the parliamentary commission, Darko Laketic, appears to have already decided that the impoverished uranium damaged Serbs before the commission has completed its work.

If uranium is not harmful, why is it spent so much money on its preservation? Why don't they just throw it into the environment?

Bosnian Serbs sentenced in Belgrade

After a long period of no war crimes sentence, the Serbian court handed down two crimes rulings committed during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In November, Belgrade's Supreme Court sentenced former Bosnian Serb soldier Ranka Tomic to five years in prison for participating in the torture and murder of a Bosniak Army nurse in July 1992 during the war in Bosnia.

According to the indictment, Tomic, as captain of the Bosnian Serb Army Women's Petrovac Front, participated in the physical abuse and murder of the captured nurse.

Also in November, the court sentenced Milanko Devic, another former Bosnian Serb Army soldier, to seven years in prison for killing a Bosnian civilian in 1992.

Both were first - degree decisions and could be appealed.

Meanwhile in July, another Belgrade Supreme Court department rejected a request to rehabilitate Serbia's pro-Nazi government leader of World War II, Milan Nedic.

The court rejected as groundless the request for rehabilitation by Nedic's family and supporters, who wanted to declare him the victim of political persecution by Yugoslavia's former communist authorities.

The process caused controversy because some experts stressed that Serbian law does not allow the rehabilitation of people who collaborated with the Nazis.

Nedic headed the so-called National Rescue Government, a puppet administration in Serbia during World War II that operated from August 1941 to October 1944.

The far right groups, as well as the anti-fascists and the left, met before the Supreme Court occasionally during the legal process to show support or opposition to the demand for rehabilitation.

Belgrade's Appeals Court in May also overturned the first-degree decision on the rehabilitation of Serbia's secularist World War II leader Nikola Calabic, who was declared <x0 national mic>” by the Yugoslav judicial system, ordering the issue to be re-elected from the start.

The decision turned the Kalabic case into a court in the town of Valjevo, demanding that it determine whether or not the secular leader participated in war crimes.