“I would do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a second. Every second was worth it”. This is how the convicted war commander of the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) Dario Kordic recently answered the question, was it worth the prison and the war?
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague sentenced Kordic to 25 years in prison for war crimes against the Bosniak population in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), including for the crime in Ahmici, in central BiH, where members of the HVO committed a crime against humanity, killing more than a hundred Bosniak civilians on April 16th, 1993.
Kordic’s words caused numerous reactions, and brought into focus the fact that Hague convicts are unpunished in the eyes of the BiH judiciary – domestic judicial institutions do not enter Hague verdicts into criminal records.
Why are Hague verdicts not entered in the criminal records?
“It is obvious that there is, first of all, an institutional block to introduce Hague verdicts into a single register,” says Semsudin Mehmedovic, a member of the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH (PABiH).
Furthermore, he explains that there were several parliamentary initiatives and attempts to put pressure on the Council of Ministers of BiH to include the Hague verdicts in the criminal records. He adds that it is first of all a legal issue, but “it is obvious that there are deep political reasons”, which is why the ministers of justice in the previous and current terms of office did not do this.
What do victims’ associations say?
“We see that they are trying to rehabilitate convicted war criminals and return to the political rut of BiH,” says Murat Tahirovic, president of the Association of Genocide Victims and Witnesses.
He recalled the statement of the president of the entity Federation of BiH (FBiH) Lidija Bradara from the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), who publicly said that when a convicted war criminal serves his sentence, he is no longer a war criminal.
“It is obvious that this is the reason because we know who has been leading the Ministry of Justice of BiH for a long period of time, for more than 20 years. And this is what they are obviously advocating for,” Tahirovic stated.
Namely, the position of Minister of Justice in BiH has been held by members of the HDZ since 2007. It was the leadership of this party that organized the welcome party for Dario Kordic in 2014 after he was released from prison.
“There is this visible link between politics,” says Tahirovic, and adds that Hague convicts have no criminal record and they can get a certificate of impunity and thus apply for jobs in public administration and public companies, even though they have committed the most serious forms of war crimes.
He points out that there is a revolt among the members of the victims’ association because it is incomprehensible that such a practice continues.
“We had a lot of contacts with the former Minister of Justice trying to solve it and we failed. Now that the new Minister of Justice and his deputy came, we sent them letters again asking them to solve the issue. Unfortunately, we have not received answers as to whether, in what way, and when it will be resolved,” Tahirovic concluded, Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
