A Montenegrin soldier raped a woman, threatening to tear off her arms and legs and take her to a church to baptize her. Two Montenegrin soldiers sexually assaulted two women. Two victims were sold to some Montenegrin soldiers for 500 German marks each.
These three cases are mentioned in the documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and are related to war crimes committed in Foca, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the 1990s. They can be found on their website.
For now, Montenegro has no legal basis to use these data as evidence to prosecute the perpetrators of war crimes.
This should change by the end of the year, through amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure and their adoption by the Parliament of Montenegro.
And that justice for war criminals in Montenegro is only at the beginning, states the November 2023 report of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Courts.
That Mechanism is the successor of the ICTY in The Hague.
“There was almost no accountability in the case of Montenegrin citizens for crimes committed during the conflict”.
“Montenegro headquarters” in Foca
The documents describe examples of sexual abuse suspected to have been committed by soldiers from Montenegro in the wartime 1990s.
For example, court documents mention that the house in the Aladza neighborhood of Foca, at Street Osmana Djikića 16, served as the “Montenegrin headquarters”.
The house was used by Dragoljub Kunarac, the commander of a special volunteer unit made up of “Serbian soldiers, mostly from Montenegro”.
“He stayed there with at least 10 Montenegrin soldiers after the seize of Foca,” according to the court’s website.
Some of the victims testified about what happened in that house in 1992.
Two decades later, Kunarac was sentenced to 28 years in prison for torturing, raping and enslaving Muslim women. He is serving his sentence in Germany, Slobodna Evropa writes.
E.Dz.
