Serbia prosecutors bring charges against Srebrenica massacre suspects News
Serbia prosecutors bring charges against Srebrenica massacre suspects

[JURIST] Serbia’s Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor [official website] on Thursday indicted eight former policemen suspected of taking part in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre [BBC backgrounder; JURIST news archive]. The suspects are charged with war crimes [Balkan Insight report] for participating in the killing of civilians in a Kravica warehouse, where the victims were placed in the structure and then killed with grenades and machine guns. The bodies of more than 1,300 people massacred in the warehouse were found in mass graves and identified as Bosniak prisoners captured after Srebrenica fell to the Bosnian Serbs. The Serbian prosecutor is charging the men with war crimes because they felt they could not prove genocide, though international courts have in fact ruled that other actors in the Srebrenica massacre committed genocide [JURIST report].

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) [official website] and the Balkan States continue to prosecute those accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity that left more than 100,000 people dead and millions displaced during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. Last month Serbian prosecutors charged [JURIST report] former Bosnian Army general Naser Oric [JURIST news archive] with war crimes against prisoners of war in 1992. In April the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina indicted [JURIST report] 10 former Bosnian-Serb soldiers for war crimes committed during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. Also in April Bosnian prosecutors indicted three men [JURIST report] for crimes committed against more than 300 Serb civilians between April 1992 and July 1993. In February the International Court of Justice ruled [JURIST report] that Serbia and Croatia did not commit genocide against one another’s citizens during the 1990s war.