Marija Ristic, BIRN, Belgrade
10 February 2012
The denunciations of the Humanitarian Law Centre’s report on the head of the Serbian army reveal the strength of Milosevic’s ideology in Serbia today and the politicisation of the war crimes office.
The Ljubisa Dikovic File, which the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) published on January 23, 2012, has re-opened the issue of war crimes in Serbia. War crimes became a public topic in Serbia after Slobodan Milosevic’s arrest and extradition to the Hague Tribunal. In order to justify its decision to hand Milosevic over to an ‘anti-Serb’ court, the then new government revealed the existence of mass graves in the police training field in Batajnica near Belgrade. There was no public debate about this issue – instead, the official explanation about Milosevic’s extradition being the condition for international loans was insistently reiterated. A video recording of the execution of six Muslims, first revealed the by the HLC in June 2005, caused a strong emotional reaction among ordinary people in Serbia, who sided with the victims and against the perpetrators who came from ‘their own national community’. The government hastened to explain that the crime had been committed by an isolated group of criminals, who would be tried, and that Serbian state institutions had nothing to do with the crime itself. And this is when we missed the opportunity to broach the question of our own responsibility, to start thinking in a new way, and to build a new attitude toward the victims from the ‘other side’.
Reaction of the Yugoslav Army Intelligence Service to the Interview of Nataša Kandić in the Danas Daily on August 17th, 2000 and her response published on August 24th, 2000
Here you can download the documents of the Yugoslavian Army [Source: Judicial data base of the ICTY], which further confirms the allegations of the HLC, presented in the File ‘Ljubisa Dikovic’, in their integral form.
The annex contains excerpts from public documents of the Yugoslav Army, which additionally prove the allegations made by HLC, which have been expressed in the Ljubiša Diković Dossier, published on January 23rd, 2012 regarding the presence of the Yugoslav Army 37th Motorized Brigade units in the area of Drenice in Kosovo, where mass killings of Albanian civilians and other gross violations of international humanitarian law occurred. You may download the document here.
Sorry, this entry is only available in srpski.
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Here you can read the aforementioned items of the “Ljubiša Diković” file that these documents relate to: (soon in English).
