Belgrade DMH 211113

LOCAL PRESS

Dacic: Advanicing relations with India (RTS)

“India is a big country, inclined to us and the principles of the international law, so we are especially thankful for extending the support to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia, with regards to the Kosovo issue,” Prime Minister Ivica Dacic has stated after talks with Indian Foreign Minister Preneet Kaur, Dacic has emphasized that Serbia wishes to renew the high level of political relations with India. He also said it was necessary to improve the economic cooperation, because last year the trade exchange amounted to only $160 million. While underlining that the good relations of the two countries are based on the strong foundations of friendship and cooperation, laid 65 years back, Kaur has stressed that India understands the importance of Serbia for the stability of the Balkans and Europe in general, and also supports Serbia with regards to the issues that are of crucial national importance, including Kosovo and Metohija. 

Rodic, Osmic: Boosting B&H-Serbia military-economic cooperation (Tanjug)

The B&H and Serbian Defense Ministers, Zekerijah Osmic and Nebojsa Rodic respectively, have assessed in Belgrade that there are possibilities for boosting military-economic cooperation. The ministers established the procedure for finding a quick solution for the employment status of professional military officers from B&H, members of the former 30^th  personnel centre who have a hard time exercising their rights from the pension and disability insurance. Rodic pointed out that the exchange of experiences and engagement of teachers in national training centers for participation in peace-keeping operations in Butmir and Belgrade will create conditions for eventual joint engagement in the UN and EU peace-keeping operations. Osmic stressed that the fact  that the defense industry in B&H is based on entity levels shouldn’t be an obstacle for achieving mutual interest wherever possible.

Six steps towards Union of Serb Municipalities (Novosti)

All details regarding the formation of the future Union of Serb Municipalities should be known in two weeks, after the new meeting of Prime Ministers Ivica Dacic and Hashim Thaqi with the EU High Representative Catherine Ashton on 5 December in Brussels. Novosti learns that by this date there should be a draft of the Statute of the Union and a special constitutional law, which will be verified by the Serbian MPs with a two-third majority. According to Novosti, the Statute should define the ways of forming, functioning and decision-making of the Union of Serb Municipalities, its financing and who will be its president. There is still no decision on whether all deputies of ten municipalities of the Union will enter the assembly of the Union or whether the delegate principle will be applied, depending on the size of the municipality. Dacic will request guarantees from Ashton at the Brussels meeting that Pristina will not hinder the formation of the Union. Pristina still hasn’t adopted the laws on amnesty, budget and local self-government; it is hindering new networks of judicial organs and appointment of members of the team of the regional police command in the north of Kosovo and Metohija. The Chair of the Committee for Kosovo and Metohija Milovan Drecun tells Novosti that the working group is already drafting the Statute and the constitutional law and that the entire process on the formation of the Union should be completed very soon after the elections and the announcement of official results.

Kostunica: Political neutrality or the EU (Danas)

The Brussels agreement of 19 April 2013 and the Plan of its implementation are the deed of the previous and present governments in Belgrade, while the most significant and decisive step in the implementation of these agreements are the local elections in Kosovo on 3 November 2013. These elections were slated and organized by the authorities of the false Kosovo state. Belgrade seemingly doesn’t recognize that state, but it not only calls but also forces its citizens to turn out for these elections slated by the Kosovo authorities. By signing the Brussels agreements, the authorities in Belgrade have recognized separatist laws, separatist courts, separatist ministers and, through this, they accepted the demand of the EU for the Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija to take part in the local elections organized by the separatist authorities in Pristina. That is an unprecedented example for one state to waive its state institutions and its people in favor of separatists. There have been examples in history of capitulation before an armed force, but there haven’t been examples for one government to voluntarily destroy and abolish, so to speak burry its own state institutions, literally appearing in the role of a real state-killer. The authorities in Serbia are doing all this for the sake of continuing European integration…Unfortunately, as rarely in history, the current authorities are behaving towards the EU, as an international power centre, in an obedient and vassal manner. The EU is an unquestionable value for the authorities in Serbia, which must subordinate and compel every Serbian national interest and value. Therefore, the authorities aren’t raising the question whether the people of Serbia want to join the EU at all costs, but whether the EU has devised and established all conditions that it needs to set to Serbia. Above all, the authorities in Serbia find the EU an ideal and wanted creation for which no Serbian national sacrifice is too big, and every sacrifice must and can be endured.

REGIONAL PRESS

Eighteen years of Dayton Accord (Fena/Srna)

Today is the 18^th anniversary of the initialing of the Dayton Accord in the air force base Wright-Patterson, as the general framework agreement for the peace in B&H. After three weeks of negotiations, the Dayton Peace Accord was initialed by then presidents of Serbia – Slobodan Milosevic, B&H – Alija Izetbegovic, and Croatia – Franjo Tudjman. The agreement was later officially signed on 14 December 1995, in Paris. On this occasion the cabinet of the Republican Srpska (RS) President Milorad Dodik has published the document “Dayton structure of B&H and the legal position of the RS”, which reads that there are two possible future avenues for B&H: the confederation with competencies as envisaged by the Dayton Accord, or the fall apart into three ethnic territorial units. The date when the Dayton Accord was initialed is marked as the state holiday in the RS.

Wasser meets SDA and HDZ B&H officials (Oslobodjenje)

Principle Deputy High Representative in B&H Tamir Waser has stated following separate meetings with the leaders of the SDA and HDZ B&H city organizations that Mostar must be unique but that it is also acceptable that lower levels of authority have certain competencies. “The process of the mediation of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in inter-party negotiations on Mostar has resulted in a framework document that is still on the table. We remain open for any solution for Mostar that is in line with the principles agreed by parties one year ago. That includes decrees that Mostar should be a unique town but with some sort of local control of internal matters,” said Waser, adding that Mostar remains a multi-ethnic town. “Mostar residents deserve to elect their political representatives and it is important for these representatives to reflect their political will. We must find a solution that is in line with the decision of the B&H Constitutional Court. Responsibility for finding this solution is with the local party authorities,” said Waser. Murat Coric, the SDA Mostar official, has stated that the SDA requested the OHR to introduce a protectorate over Mostar. “The SDA remains with the stand that Mostar should be organized according to the principle of several units of local self-government. Mostar has many problems today and it is unnatural for only man to manage this town, and as things stand, Mayor Ljubo Beslic will be managing the town until the holding of elections. For this reason we have asked for the intervention of the OHR, including the introduction of a protectorate for Mostar. That protectorate should manage the town, because the present state-of-affairs is unsustainable,” said Coric, adding that Mostar needs a person that will manage the town instead of the mayor. “The OHR has the responsibility for Mostar, because all this is the result of their documents,” said Coric. The HDZ B&H Mostar official Sladjan Bevanda said after the meeting that the talks on Mostar have never stopped, but that there have been no concrete agreements. “The negotiations on Mostar are ongoing, but I can’t say in what phase they are entering. I hope we will soon reach agreement and not only with the SDA. I expect a broader agreement. Mostar must be organized like other units of local self-government in B&H,” said Bevanda. 

INTERNATIONAL PRESS

Kosovo, Serbia PMs Trade Blame Over Poll Violence (BIRN, by Edona Peci, 20 November 2013)

Hashim Thaci and Ivica Dacic gave contradictory assessments about the troubled local elections in Kosovo at a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday.

Leaders of Kosovo and Serbia have given opposing verdicts on the troubled local elections in mainly Serbian parts of northern Kosovo.

While Kosovo's PM Thaci described the process as a “victory” for all citizens, Serbian PM Dacic said Pristina had “failed” in prepare for the elections in the north.

“Whereas Serbia invested maximum efforts to encourage Kosovo Serbs to turn out in large numbers, Pristina failed to provide even the most basic conditions for the ballot," Dacic claimed in his speech held at the UN Security Council meeting.

Nationwide local elections were held in Kosovo on November 3, the Serb-run northern part included.

But most Serbs in northern Kosovo boycotted the vote. Masked men also attacked several polling stations in the divided town of Mitrovica, causing several to close early.

As a result, a repeat vote had to be held in parts of northern Mitrovica on November 17.

Thaci said the attacks on polling stations were “orchestrated” and would “harm [Kosovo's] aspiration to establish a comprehensive and tolerant state and to integrate in the European Union".

As none of the candidates in northern Mitrovica, achieved an outright victory on November 17, Krstimir Pantic and Oliver Ivanovic will compete again on December 1 in runoffs.

Runoffs will also be held in 24 other municipalities throughout the country.

The results of the local elections in Kosovo are seen as a crucial element of the EU-brokered deal on normalizing relations between Pristina and Belgrade.

It is also a pre-condition for the formation of the Association of Serbian Municipalities, an autonomous body foreseen in the deal.

Serbian Prosecutor Vows to Clear the Road to Justice (BIRN, by Marija Ristic, 21 November 2013)

Serbia is trying to bring suspected war criminals to justice despite attempted cover-ups, political problems and fugitives trying to evade arrest, deputy prosecutor Bruno Vekaric told BIRN.

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.

He cites the loss of crucial evidence as one major blow to potential prosecutions, alongside the unwillingness of Serbian officials who may have something to hide.

“You remember how hard it was to provide all the requested documents from Serbian institutions to the Hague Tribunal. Now imagine how hard it was for The Hague, which had all the support of the international community to get all the data, and imagine how hard it is for one Serbian institution,” Vekaric explained.

“It is not a secret that the state security archives were destroyed after the democratic changes [following the ousting of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000] with the aim of hiding war crimes, and it is also not a secret that one part of the current state structure feels responsible for some war crimes and that they are unwilling to cooperate,” he said.

Even when the war crimes prosecution believes it could make a case, sometimes the suspected perpetrators are out of reach.

Vekaric said that his office was is investigating seven cases in relation to war crimes committed during Operation Storm, which in 1995 saw Zagreb’s forces take back swathes of Croatian land occupied by Serbs.

“Here in Serbia we have witnesses, a lot of material and information is in Serbia that can shed light on these events. However, the perpetrators are in Croatia, and here we need help from our Croatian counterparts. But here sometimes politics also get involved and this can be very dangerous for the truth,” Vekaric said.

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. Together we did a search for a mass grave in Raska, and 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.

Consent from the victims

Thanks to the landmark protocol on cooperation over war crimes cases that was signed by Belgrade and Sarajevo at the beginning of this year, Serbia is currently exchanging a series of other cases with Bosnia.

These include cases of alleged genocide by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995, the abduction of 18 civilians from the train in Bosnian town of Strpci, and attacks on Serb and Bosniak soldiers at the end of the war in the so-called Tuzla column and Dobrovoljacka Street incidents.

In order to prosecute people in Belgrade for war crimes in Srebrenica - an unprecedented event in the two countries’ history - Serbia asked for and received consent from the Bosnian victims’ group, the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica.

“Consent from the victims is a characteristic of the protocol with Bosnia and Herzegovina, after the Bosnian side insisted, because the issue is very sensitive,” Vekaric explained.

“We now had a chance to meet with Munira [Subasic, president of the association] and she gave us her consent. She said: ‘We want this to be taken out of deadlock, we realise this is the only way, and you are now being tested out,’” he said.

But he said that many people do not realise the obstacles faced by his office that must be overcome before suspects can go on trial – obstacles which limited the number of new indictments in 2013.

“In this period there were a small number of indictments, but there are many reasons for that. First, there was a new criminal code introduced in 2012, and practically the whole year we spent on training for this new procedure,” he explained.

The new criminal procedure legislation, which came into force in January 2012, introduced the principle of prosecutorial investigations and let prosecutors and defence lawyers take the lead in investigations. Previously, the court was obliged to collect the evidence and judges guided it.

“Also we had more than 20 court hearings, and there are only eight of us,” Vekaric added.

But he said expressed pride that the current investigations into the Srebrenica case, the Strpci abductions and some of the war crimes cases from Kosovo would soon reach the courtroom.

“I think for the small number of people in the prosecution, this is a big success,” he said.

Bosnian court trims sentence for US embassy gunman to 15 years (Reuters, 20 November 2013)

SARAJEVO - A Bosnian appeals court on Wednesday trimmed the prison sentence given to an Islamist gunman after he apologized for opening fire on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo in 2011, seriously wounding a police officer.

The court cut Mevlid Jasarevic's sentence from 18 years to 15, citing mitigating circumstances such as the fact that he was not part of a criminal group.

Jasarevic, being re-tried for the attack, had last week apologized for firing on the embassy for more than 40 minutes, calling it a "stupid act". He appeared in court clean-shaven and wearing a white shirt and jeans, instead of with the long Islamist beard and traditional robe and skullcap he had before.

The attack by Jasarevic, a Muslim originally from neighboring Serbia who recently said he had distanced himself from the strict Wahhabi form of Islam, had revived debate over the threat of radical Islam in the Balkans.

Most Bosnian Muslims practice a moderate form of Islam. Analysts say, however, that recent years have seen a rise in the number of home-grown Islamist militants, many raised abroad and radicalized to fight for global causes unrelated to Bosnia.

Jasarevic was a member of the Wahhabi branch of Islam, which gained a foothold in Bosnia after its 1992-95 war. He had lived for three years in an isolated community of Wahhabi adherents in the northeastern village of Gornja Maoca.

His previous conviction was overturned in July after judges ruled the original trial was flawed. Defense lawyers had argued they did not have access to witness testimony and evidence.

Sentencing him on Wednesday, the court said the new verdict was an "adequate reflection of the severity of the criminal act and the convict's responsibility".

"The panel has delivered the verdict with the conviction that it will send out a clear message ... that the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina is determined to root out terrorism and protect equally foreign and local citizens," presiding Judge Hilmo Vucinic said.

Bosnian Serb Chief Says Country Should Split (BIRN, by Elvira M. Jukic, 20 November 2013)

President of Republika Srpska on Wednesday said Bosnia should split if it does not become a confederation - and that his entity is already virtually a state.

Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated entity in Bosnia, has said it would be the best for Bosnia and Herzegovina to split it into two.

Speaking in Belgrade on Wednesday to law students, he said that Republika Srpska already has all the elements of a state in terms of the number of citizens, its size, competences and independent relations to other countries.

“It would be best if Republika Srpska was a state”, Dodik said, adding: “It will happen one day, we just have to have patience.”

Ahead of the 18th anniversary of the 1995 Dayton Accords on November 21, which ended the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, his cabinet also published a document detailing the roots of Republika Srpska, its authorities and significance.

Meanwhile Cedomir Antic, historian and analyst,this week said in Belgradethat the Dayton Peace Accords had been a victory for Serbs.

The solution for Bosnia was to turn it into a confederation or split it onto two units, he added.

Some experts say Serbian calls to divide Bosnia are being rendered redundant by the EU accession process, however.

Vehid Sehic, member of the experts group drafting a new constitution for Bosnia's Federation entity, told Balkan Insight that history showed how difficult it was to divide Balkan states peacefully.

“Bosnia and Herzegovina surely sees its future in the EU, in which case it will not matter if it is a federation or a confederation,” Sehic maintained.

Recalling that Bosnia comprises three constituent peoples, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, he said none can claim exclusive rights to any part of the country.

In his latest report to the UN Security Council, Valentin Inzko, the High Representative to Bosnia, tasked with overseeing implementation of the Dayton Accords, voiced concern about Bosnian Serb calls for independence.

“The Republika Srpska President remains the most frequent and vocal critic of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of BiH, recently boasting again that he will lead the entity to independence,” Inzko said in New York last week.

Justice and Crime to Dominate Montenegro-EU Talks (Analitika.me/RTCG, 20 November 2013)

New session of the EU's Intergovernmental Conference with Montenegro in Brussels will be dominated by Chapters 23 and 24, on judiciary, borders, and tackling crime.

At the Intergovernmental conference in Brussels on December 18, the main topic on the agenda will be Chapters 23 and 24, local media have reported.

The two chapters deal with the establishment of an independent and efficient judiciary, and issues such as border control, visas, external migration, asylum, police cooperation, the fight against organised crime and against terrorism.

Along with these, other chapters will be opened for the first time, it has been reported.

The body in charge of Montenegro’s EU accession process, headed by the Prime Minister, Milo Djukanovic, approved the negotiating platform for the opening of Chapters 23 and 24 on October 7.

This came after the government earlier adopted action plans for the implementation of the chapters.

The European Commission gave the thumbs-up to the action plans in its progress report on Montenegro in 2013.

The EU's new approach to negotiations, which is being implemented for the first time with Montenegro, means Chapters 23 and 24 are to be kept open until the end of the negotiations.