Serbian Court Convicts Four over Killings in Scorpions Tape

A special war crimes court in Belgrade convicted four former members of the Scorpions paramilitary group of war crimes on April 10 in connection with the killing of six Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica in 1995, actions that were recorded on a videotape shown on Serbian television in June 2005.  Two of the defendants, the unit’s commander Slobodan Medic and an assistant, were sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment, and two others received sentences of 13 and five years respectively.

The case was the first relating to the killings that followed the fall of Srebrenica to come before the Serbian war crimes court, one of a series of courts set up in the countries of the former Yugoslavia to handle cases not taken up by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.  When the tape of the killings came to light in 2005, after being shown during the trial at The Hague of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic , it caused a public sensation in Serbia because it was the first concrete evidence of the involvement of Serbs in the massacre of unarmed captives from Srebrenica.

The three defendants who received the longest sentences were convicted of war crimes against civilians and the last defendant was convicted of abetting war crimes.  Specifically, they were charged with violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, applicable during internal conflicts, which forbids the murder of people who are not taking an active part in fighting.

Many Bosnian Muslims and Serbian human rights groups expressed disappointment at the verdict.  Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, said, “From a moral and factual point of view, this is not justice...The verdict neither brings justice to the defendants for what they have done, nor for the victims killed only because they were Bosnian (Muslims) from Srebrenica."

One striking aspect of the verdict is that it treats the killings as an isolated war crime, rather than attempting to tie them to the broader massacre of around 8,000 men from Srebrenica.  The court said there was no evidence to tie the killings to the overall campaign of slaughter directed at Srebrenica’s men, which has been established as an act of genocide by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague and more recently by the International Court of Justice.

If they had been tried before the Yugoslavia tribunal at The Hague, rather than before Serbia’s own war crimes court, it seems likely that the former Scorpions would have faced charges of taking part in a joint criminal enterprise to commit genocide and the crimes against humanity of extermination and persecution, in addition to war crimes.  It is impossible to know if they would have been convicted of these additional crimes, but it is possible that if they had been convicted they would have faced longer sentences.

The involvement of the Scorpions in the Srebrenica killings has been at the centre of the debate about how far Serbia (as opposed to the Bosnian Serbs) were responsible for the massacres that took place.  The Scorpions were a Serbian group; officially they had been attached to the military forces of the self-declared Serbian state in Croatia, the Republic of Serbian Krajina, but according to Natasa Kandic they in fact operated under the control of the Serbian police, answering to Serbia's Ministry of the Interior.

In its recent decision in the Bosnia v. Serbia genocide case, the International Court of Justice said it did not have sufficient evidence to establish that the Scorpions were a legal organ of the Serbian state at the time the massacres were committed.

The Serbian war crimes court did not endorse the claim that the Scorpions were acting under the authority of the Serbian Interior Ministry, leading Natasa Kandic to charge that the court had missed an opportunity to address Serbia's involvement in the crimes committed at Srebrenica.

Related chapters from Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know:

Bosnia

Genocide

Persecutions on Political, Racial or Religious Grounds

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