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THE HAGUE/SARAJEVO, August 22 (FENA) - The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has extended the provisional release in Serbia for Jovica Stanišić – charged with committing crimes against non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia – until January 2019.
The retrial of Jovica Stanišić, former chief of the Serbian State Security Service, SDB, and of Franko Simatović, alias Frenki, an intelligence officer with the same service, continued before the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals on Wednesday, following a month's summer break.
Stanišić has remained on provisional release in Belgrade due to his illness since July 21 last year, reports BIRN – Justice report.
The release granted to him under a previous decision of the Trial Chamber expired on August 19.
However, on Wednesday, the judges accepted the defense’s request filed in mid-August to extend Stanišić’s provisional release.
Stanišić’s defense team requested that their client be allowed to stay in Serbia until the prosecutors had completed presenting their evidence, but the Chamber extended the defendant’s temporary liberty until January 10 next year.
The prosecution did not object to the decision.
Previous findings by medical doctors in The Hague and Belgrade said Stanišić is suffering from chronic intestinal disease and depression.
The former chief of the SDB and his assistant, Simatović, are charged with the persecution, murder, deportation and forcible resettlement of Croat and Muslim civilians in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the wars of the 1990s.
The prosecutors allege that the crimes were committed during the execution of a joint criminal enterprise aimed at permanently removing Croats and Muslims from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia to achieve Serbian domination.
The Hague trial against Stanišić and Simatović continued after the summer break with testimony by Stipan Kraljević, who said the Croats were forced to leave the town of Ilok in eastern Croatia in autumn 1991 because the Yugoslav National Army, JNA, gave them an ultimatum, saying they would “burn the town to the ground”.
Kraljević, who said in his testimony that he conducted negotiations with JNA, added that “people did not want to leave Ilok but there was no other way out”, because the JNA was “just outside the town” and intimidating the local population.
The witness said JNA and Serbian paramilitary forces previously attacked the nearby villages of Tovarnik, Bapska, Lovas, Sarengrad and Ilaca, where they had destroyed and burnt houses and killed and expelled non-Serb civilians.
“Besides JNA forces, irregular [Serbian] units, whose members committed crimes, were also present there,” Kraljević said.
The witness was told by refugees from Lovas that the JNA ultimatum was followed by an attack on the village in which “there were massive casualties” and “most local residents had fled”, while “those who stayed were killed – not in combats, but in the attack”.
The witness also claimed that, in those attacks, the JNA “collaborated with Chetniks [Serbian paramilitaries] with the aim of banishing Croats and spreading terror”.
Kraljević said that, on October 11, 1991, JNA general Dragoljub Aranđelović threatened that the army would “burn Ilok to the ground”.
The residents of Ilok chose to leave the town in a quick referendum held on October 14.
“We requested them to give up everything without any other hope for the future but to stay alive … It was a matter of life … Saving your skin … We had no courage to make any other decision and let those people be killed … Lives were more important than material possessions,” the witness recalled.
The defense lawyers of Stanišić and Simatović will continue to cross-examine Kraljević on Thursday.
Both pleaded not guilty in December 2015 after the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the ICTY, overturned their acquittal in their first trial.
The appeals chamber ruled that there were serious legal and factual errors when Stanišić and Simatović were initially acquitted of war crimes in 2013, and ordered the case to be retried and all the evidence and witnesses reheard in full by new judges.
(FENA) S. R.
