Serbian Prosecutor Vows to Clear the Road to Justice

The Serbian war crimes prosecution will bring a series of high-profile cases to court in the coming months despite difficulties with evidence which has been intentionally destroyed to protect the guilty, the political intricacies of dealing with neighbouring ex-Yugoslav states, and local problems with bureaucracy and limited resources, deputy war crimes prosecutor war crimes Bruno Vekaric said in an interview with BIRN.In the year when the Serbian war crimes prosecution marks its first decade of existence, the lowest number of indictments has been raised, but Vekaric says that although some of the critics of his office are reasonable, they don’t usually understand the complex job done by just eight prosecutors.Organ trafficking and mass graves.There are other difficulties when dealing with cases arising from the Kosovo war in the late 1990s.The Belgrade war crimes prosecution works only with the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, not with Pristina’s judiciary, because Serbia opposes the independence of Kosovo.“With EULEX we cooperate on two levels. The first is technical cooperation we have with the EU team that investigates organ trafficking, the second is the cooperation we have with the EULEX prosecution.Currently we are cooperating on the cases that EULEX is currently running in Pristina,” Vekaric said.Here again however, some of the suspects - the alleged perpetrators of war crimes against Serbs during the conflict in Kosovo - can be out of reach.The Serbian prosecution is currently investigating more than 100 former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, while the KLA’s former commander Ramush Haradinaj is a suspect in three cases where 63 people are said to have been killed.“There is no will currently in Kosovo to process KLA members and as long as this is a taboo in Kosovo, there is no chance for rational and real cooperation. But I hope this will change over time. If look back, you couldn’t imagine processing someone for war crimes in Croatia or Serbia back in the 1990s, and look what we have now,” Vekaric explained.  “If we could manage to find some solution for the joint processing of war criminals by Belgrade and Pristina, this would lead to completed regional cooperation and the removal of barriers for prosecution of war crimes in former Yugoslavia,” he said.Regional cooperation is a key topic for Vekaric – and could, he believes, ensure the prosecution of suspects who would otherwise walk free.So far, the Serbian prosecution has exchanged 212 cases with other Balkan countries’ prosecutors – 120 of them with Croatia, 55 with EULEX in Kosovo, 28 with Bosnia and Herzegovina and nine with Montenegro.“With bilateral agreements we are making the regular procedure more shorter and simpler, as sometimes bureaucratic  procedures force us to wait for six months for some small data, and this is where the cases collapse. With these regional agreements we are settling issues by phone much faster; we are providing information to each other and transcending borders. If we could eliminate the politics, then this would be a lot easier,” says Vekaric.