<<previous  |  index  |  next>>

Limited Progress on War Crimes Accountability

War Crime Cases in Republika Srpska prior to 2005 

While the task awaiting the Republika Srpska prosecutors and courts is enormous, and the potential impact of prosecutions significant, the entity has a poor track record on war crimes accountability.

Prior to November 2005, only two war crimes trials were completed in Republika Srpska. The first took place in 1997. The accused, Bosnian Muslim Ferid Halilovic, was tried before the Modrica “basic” (municipal) court for the beatings of twenty-nine Serb civilians detained in a camp run by the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) in Odzak. Four detainees died as a result of the beatings. The Modrica court sentenced Halilovic to fifteen years in prison, and the Doboj district dourt confirmed the verdict and sentence. Halilovic was soon transferred to a prison in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was released after serving less than one-third of the sentence.⁴¹   

There have been no other trials of non-Serbs on war crimes charges, for several reasons. Until 2004, war crime prosecutions before courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina required prior approval by the ICTY under the Rules of the Road regime. Until the end of the 1990s, the authorities in Republika Srpska were hostile to the work of the ICTY and made little effort to request that approval, even to facilitate prosecutions against non-Serbs.

After 2000, prosecutors in Republika Srpska began seeking approvals from the ICTY to prosecute Bosnian Muslim and Croat suspects. However, the material corroborating the requests was generally of poor quality.⁴² As the result, between 2000 and 2004 the ICTY approved only thirty-six requests from Republika Srpska.⁴³ In Doboj, for example, the requests concerning seven individuals received the “A” mark (designating ICTY approval to proceed), although the prosecutor had sent case-files concerning thirty-two suspects.⁴⁴ The East Sarajevo prosecutor sought approval to proceed against sixty-eight suspects but did not receive a single “A” classification from the ICTY Rules of the Road section.⁴⁵ In Bijeljina, cases involving four suspects were classified as “A,” out of approximately eighty requests.⁴⁶ Trebinje received “A” categories for six individuals, and Banja Luka for nineteen persons.⁴⁷ Most of the approved cases pertain to crimes committed against ethnic Serbs in the Federation. Prosecution in such instances will continue either before cantonal courts in the Federation or before the War Crimes Chamber in the State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (when the case is “highly sensitive”).

The second war crimes trial (and the first involving Bosnian Serb defendants) began on May 17, 2004 before the district court in Banja Luka, and ended in February 2005 with the acquittal of all eleven defendants.⁴⁸ The defendants, wartime members of the Prijedor police, were accused of the illegal detention in 1995 of Roman Catholic priest Tomislav Matanovic, who was later found murdered. The trial originated from the work of the Human Rights Chamber. (The case is referred to as Jakovljevic and others, from the name of one of the indictees.)

A trio of human rights groups from Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia, which monitored the trial, concluded that the court’s decision to acquit the defendants for lack of evidence was a result of an inadequate investigation, and the passive role of the prosecutor in collecting evidence.⁴⁹

The origins of the prosecution lie in a July 1997 decision by the Human Rights Chamber ordering Republika Srpska to report to the Chamber on the results of investigation into the case.⁵⁰ Republika Srpska failed to implement the decision until November 2000, when an investigative team from Republika Srpska reopened the case after heavy pressure from the (now defunct) United Nations Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina.⁵¹ In October 2001 Republika Srpska police discovered the bodies of Father Matanovic and his parents in the well of their family residence in Rizvanovici, near Prijedor. Autopsies revealed that their hands had been handcuffed and that each had been shot in the head.⁵² 

In other cases of forced disappearance during the conflict where the Human Rights Chamber ruled that Republika Srpska was responsible for the violations, the authorities there have made little progress in their investigations. In the case Avdo and Esma Palic v. Republika Srpska, the Human Rights Chamber found in December 2000 that Republika Srpska violated the right to life, the right to liberty and security of person, and the freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment, in connection with the incommunicado detention and eventual disappearance of Col. Avdo Palic. A military commander of the Bosnian Army, Palic was forcibly taken away by Bosnian Serb forces on July 27, 1995, in the presence of United Nations soldiers. Republika Srpska launched an investigation following the Chamber’s decision but, on September 7, 2005, the Human Rights Commission under the Bosnian Constitutional Court found that the investigation was inadequate and that the Chamber’s December 2000 decision had not been implemented.⁵³ 

The Human Rights Chamber also issued decisions on disappearance cases in November and December 2003. In one case, the Chamber ordered that Republika Srpska initiate a criminal investigation into the disappearance of seven Muslims from Visegrad in May and June 1992, and notify designated agencies, international and Bosnian, of the results of the investigation within six months.⁵⁴ Similar decisions were issued in cases concerning the disappearance of seven Bosnian Muslims from Foca in April 1992,⁵⁵ and the disappearance of ten Bosnian Muslims in Vlasenica in June and July of that year.⁵⁶

While the Human Rights Chamber’s decisions focus on inaction and failure on the part of the Republika Srpska authorities giving rise to human rights violations, it is also important that the war crimes underlying them are investigated and where possible prosecuted.

War Crimes Trials in Republika Srpska in late 2005

As noted above, courts in Republika Srpska completed three war crimes trials in November and December 2005, and two more trials were ongoing at the year’s end. All the defendants were Bosnian Serbs. Prosecutors in charge of war crimes prosecutions in Banja Luka, Trebinje, Eastern Sarajevo, and Doboj were also nearing completion of several investigations.

In the first completed trial (Radakovic and others), the district court in Banja Luka sentenced two former members of the Bosnian Serb police on November 17 each to twenty years in prison, and a third former policeman to fifteen years.⁵⁷ The same court sentenced Nikola Dereta, former soldier in the Republika Srpska army, on December 5 to thirteen years in prison.⁵⁸ On December 9, the Trebinje district court sentenced Dragoje Radanovic to two years in prison.⁵⁹ The ongoing trials were of Momir Skakavac in the Trebinje court, and Milanko Vujanovic in Banja Luka.

In three of these five cases, the investigation had begun in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was subsequently transferred to prosecutors in Republika Srpska through the Special Department for War Crimes. The Skakavac and Radanovic cases were originally investigated by the Sarajevo cantonal prosecutor,⁶⁰ and the Dereta case originated with the Zenica cantonal prosecutor.⁶¹ 

The two other war crimes cases—Radakovic and others and Vujanovic—occurred after the Banja Luka district prosecutor modified the indictments for “ordinary offences” into ones for war crimes.⁶² In 2004 and 2005, the Chief Prosecutor of Bosnia and Herzegovina convened several meetings with the chief cantonal and district prosecutors and encouraged them to review all pending indictments for ordinary offences committed in wartime and, where the underlying facts so warranted, to amend the indictments to reflect the war crimes underlying them.⁶³ 

It appears that the number of ordinary indictments in Republika Srpska suitable for upgrading into war crimes indictments is limited. The office of the district prosecutor in Banja Luka gave an estimate of ten such cases in its jurisdiction.⁶⁴ In the other two district courts in which Human Rights Watch made enquiries, in Bijeljina and East Sarajevo, there were no pending cases from this category.