Posted on 03/09/2004 2:57:18 PM PST by nuconvert
Landmark War Crimes Trial Tests Serbia's Ability to Deliver Justice for Balkans Atrocities
Mar 9, 2004
By Katarina Kratovac/ Associated Press Writer
BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) - A landmark war crimes trial opened Tuesday for six Serbs accused of slaughtering 192 Croatian prisoners during the Balkan conflicts, a key test of Serbia's ability to find justice for its wartime atrocities. The trial over the killings in Vukovar, Croatia - a notorious massacre in the fighting that broke apart Yugoslavia - comes amid a resurgence of nationalist sentiment in the Serb republic, now run by a prime minister who opposes the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, as biased against Serbs.
Serbia's judiciary hopes that if the trial meets international standards, it will be able to try more cases at home rather than at the U.N. tribunal, where former Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic is now on trial for war crimes including genocide.
"This is a historic moment for our judiciary," said Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for the prosecution at Belgrade's Special Court, recently established in conjunction with the U.N. tribunal.
The proceedings "will show the ability of our courts to handle war crimes cases, which is important for further transfers of cases from The Hague," Vekaric said.
At the time of the massacre, the six suspects were members of a Milosevic-backed paramilitary group of ethnic Serb Croats fighting Croatia's 1991 secession from Yugoslavia. In mid-November 1991, the Serb side gained control of Vukovar.
After that victory, according to the indictment, Serbs took the Croat prisoners of war from a Vukovar hospital on the evening of Nov. 20, 1991, and bused them to a nearby pig farm.
There, the six defendants allegedly lined up the victims, strafed them with machine-gun fire and dumped their bodies into a freshly dug pit. Exhumations in later years revealed the scope of the massacre, which came to symbolize the brutality of the war in Croatia.
At the trial's opening Tuesday, the names of the 192 victims were read aloud along with charges against the suspects. Chief defendant Miroljub Vujovic, a Vukovar native who allegedly commanded the Serb paramilitaries, professed his innocence.
"The indictment is a complete fabrication," he said, adding that he only had "a second hand knowledge" of the killings at the Ovcara pig farm by hearing about it from others.
Three ranking officers of the former Yugoslav Peoples' Army accused of ordering or allowing the Vukovar massacre are being tried in The Hague. The six alleged killers - lower-level suspects - are being tried in Serbia-Montenegro, the two-republic state that remains after the breakup of Yugoslavia, with the permission and monitoring of the U.N. tribunal.
Eight people were originally indicted in the Vukovar killings; one committed suicide in detention, another went into a witness-protection program in exchange for testifying against the others.
The defendants face up to 20 years in jail if convicted.
"This is certainly a significant start for Serbia," said Sam G. Nazzaro, a legal adviser from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade who is among several Western observers at the trial. "The prosecutors and the investigators here have worked diligently and conscientiously in this case. We hope justice will be done."
Serbia's new prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, has bitterly criticized the U.N. court as anti-Serb and has advocated war crimes trials in domestic courts. His minority government depends on the support of Milosevic's Socialists in parliament, who share his opposition to the tribunal.
Some analysts doubt that local courts - widely seen as having lost their impartiality during Milosevic's rule - are capable of delivering justice.
"This is just the first case. It remains to be seen if The Hague will transfer more to domestic courts," said Natasa Kandic, chief of a prominent legal watchdog group in Belgrade.
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