The court in Belgrade sentenced 4 people to a total of 35 years in prison because they participated in the abduction of 20 civilians of non-Serbian nationality who were then killed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Reactions from Serbia and BiH: the punishments are mild and almost shameful.
The High Court in Belgrade sentenced former members of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) Gojko Lukic, Dusko Vasiljevic and Jovan Lipovac to ten years each in a first-instance verdict on Tuesday, February 7th, because it was established that in 1993 they were on a train on the Belgrade- Bar, in the town of Strpci, they kidnapped 20 non-Serb civilians who were later killed.
After forcing the train dispatcher in Strpci to stop the train at gunpoint on February 27th, 1993, the defendants, as the court found, drove 20 passengers to the elementary school in Prelovo, near Visegrad. They beat them there, took all their valuables, forced them to take off almost all their clothes, and then took them to the village of Musici, where they were killed by two people from the same armed group as the accused.
The abducted passengers from the train were citizens of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), except for one person whose nationality has never been established. Almost all of them were of Bosniak nationality, and they were taken off the train after the defendants had given them identification.
Extenuating circumstances
Although the War Crimes Prosecution requested twenty years in prison each for Gojko Lukic, Dusko Vasiljevic and Jovan Lipovac, and ten for Dragana Djekic, the first-instance verdict sentenced all the defendants to half the sentence.
Judge Nikolic-Garotic said that when sentencing, the fact that none of the defendants had committed any other criminal offense, the fact that Jovan Lipovac has health problems, the fact that Dragana Djekic was a minor at the time of the crime, as well as the serious the economic situation of all defendants, were taken into account.
The message that “war crime pays off“
“Such a mild punishment leads to the conclusion that war crime pays off. This is evident based on the amount of sentences received by the four now convicted for that war crime,” said Marko Milosavljevic from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights to the gathered journalists in front of the court. “In addition, due to the lack of legal regulations, the status of the families of the kidnapped victims in Strpci in Serbia is still not regulated. Therefore, this discrimination still exists, and we see that mitigating circumstances are easily taken into account for the defendants,” Milosavljevic concluded.
“Twenty people were killed in this crime. Get ten, that is, five years, for such a monstrous crime, it is a shame for the state of Serbia and for its judiciary,” Marina Kljajic, advocate of the victims in the process, assessed, DW reports,
E.Dz.
