SERBIA: Trial of former militia members accused of 1991 massacre of Croatian prisoners re-opened
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- ITN Source
SERBIA: Trial of former militia members accused of 1991 massacre of Croatian prisoners re-opened
The re-trial of 14 Serbian militia members accused of executing 200 Croatian prisoners at a pig farm in Ovcara in 1991 began on Monday (March 12). The men who arrived at the Supreme Court in police vans, were previously found guilty of the 1991 killings by a lower court in Serbia. The ruling in December 2005 had been hailed as a milestone for Serbia's judiciary and its efforts to face up to its bloody past, but was overturned on a technicality. The massacre came at the end of a three-month siege of the Croatian town of Vukovar by local Serb rebels backed by Yugoslav army troops, tanks and artillery. Natasa Kandic of the NGO Humanitarian Law Fund, which collected evidence of the crimes, said she was optimistic about the trial because of the presiding judge's experience with war crime trials. "I expect the Court's Council, headed by judge Vesko Krstajic, who is one of the best judges, very experienced and knows how to try such complicated and difficult issues such as war crimes, to try the case in a safe way and with authority regarding the law and that this case will finally be clarified," Kandic said. Lawyer Rajko Danilovic, who represents the victims' families, was not so optimistic. "I am not optimist because there are many people and institutions, starting with the courts, which are ready to help the accused, meaning the war criminals. In a way they indirectly participated in it (crime)," Danilovic said. The slaughter, at the start of Croatia's war of independence, took two days. Members of the Serb territorial defence rounded up victims from a hospital where they had sought shelter from bombardment, put them on trailers and took them to pits where firing squads shot them seven or eight at a time. The pits were later bulldozed over. Serb commanders, Veselin Sljivancanin, Mile Mrksic and Miroslav Radic were charged with orchestrating the massacre are currently on trial before the United Nations war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia, in The Hague.
ITN Source | March 13, 2007
