Svetozar Andric, a former general in the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS), was elected to the City Council of Belgrade, although there is a criminal complaint against him before the local judiciary for war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) during the war in the 1990s.
The application was submitted to the War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Serbia in 2018 by the Fund for Humanitarian Law.
The Fund told Radio Free Europe (RSE) that when asked about the stage of the case, they received only general answers from the Prosecutor’s Office – that they were “proceeding according to the criminal complaint”.
Andric, who for most of the war was the commander of the Bircanska Brigade of the VRS, and under his jurisdiction were several municipalities in the east of BiH, according to the Fund, ordered the “emigration” of Bosniaks from Zvornik in 1992.
In the same year, Andric ordered the establishment of the Susica camp, through which more than 8,000 people passed, and more than 1,600 of them were killed.
RSE was unable to get in touch with Andric. Journalistsreceived information from the Belgrade City Council that he has not yet started working, and that they currently do not have his email or phone number.
The City Council of Belgrade is an organ of the city government that coordinates the functions of the mayor and the City Assembly and performs a control-supervisory function over the work of the City Administration.
What kind of camp was it?
That the camp was founded on Andric‘s order was established during the trial of Ratko Mladic, former commander of the VRSat the Hague Tribunal, when the document on its establishment was presented as evidence by one of the Hague prosecutors.
According to official data, more than 8,000 Bosniaks from Vlasenica and its surroundings passed through this camp, and according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1,617 people were killed in and around Susica.
Andric, as a defense witness at the trial of Ratko Mladic in 2015, claimed that the Susica camp was an asylum, and that the inmates came there on their own “for their safety.”
Lost his father, brother and uncle
Damir Kicic was 13 years old and lived in Vlasenica when the war started.
His older brother Galib, father Munib and uncle Mujo were killed there. He never found his father’s remains. Today he lives in Vienna.
Later, he says, this corps withdrew, and everything was taken over by the locals, and “then the abductions, murders, attacks on the villages around Vlasenica, which were ethnically Muslim, began.”
“They came to our house, shouted ‘open the door’, ‘we will kill you if you don’t open’, but no one was there. They broke down the door, entered the house, tried to set it on fire, but luckily the fire went out,” explained Kicic.
Namely, Andric was born in 1954 in Kalesija in the east of BiH, he graduated from the Military Academy in Belgrade, and in 1992 he was transferred to BiH.
Since June 21st, 2020, he has been a member of the National Assembly of Serbia, and was elected from the electoral list “Aleksandar Sapic – Victory for Serbia”, RSE reports.
E.Dz.
