'Tadić claims Hague war crime cases are completed'

By: A.Čorbo-Zećo

As early as 2015, the then Chief Prosecutor of BiH Goran Salihović stated yesterday in Sarajevo that war crime cases that arrived at the Court of BiH from the Hague Tribunal would be completed very soon, and to this day we have no official statistics on what has been completed.

The Prosecutor's Office of BiH has apparently never completed work on war crime cases from category two, i.e., on cases where investigations were initiated and conducted by the Hague Tribunal, and were transferred to the Prosecutor's Office. 

If they had resolved these, a certain number of prosecutors would have been freed up and transferred to other departments; that was the plan, but it was not realized.

However, the current Chief Prosecutor Gordana Tadić claims the opposite, although she did not clarify the number of cases or which specific ones they are.

“Cases marked A are all cases that were in the Prosecutor's Office of BiH, and which now have different markings in accordance with the Strategy for working on war crime cases, and they have mostly been completed,” Tadić said, responding to a question from a Patria journalist.

The Prosecutor's Office of BiH reveals to us that by “resolved cases” the prosecutor considers the fact that she assigned the cases to prosecutors!

If the cases are completed, how is it possible that the case from Nova Kasaba, where about 30 people were executed, has not received a final judicial epilogue. A surviving witness to this event has testified several times in The Hague, and the Prosecutor's Office of BiH certainly has data about this witness, but the perpetrators and masterminds have never been prosecuted.

The case from OŠ Vuk Karadžić in Bratunac, where 300 people were killed in two days, also has no end. The perpetrators and masterminds of these monstrous murders are known, witnesses know, but they have no one to tell.

In the Liplje camp (Zvornik), 56 people were executed, mostly women and children. A witness to this event, in another case before the Court of BiH, spoke about this event, but was warned by the Court panel, as well as the acting prosecutor, that it was a different case and that they would deal with it later. That later has not yet come.

The case of Bijeli Potok, also in Zvornik, has not been resolved either. Around 700 people were killed, half of them were found in a mass grave in Snagovo in JNA bags, and the rest are still being searched for. The Prosecutor's Office of BiH has not yet made a final decision regarding this case.

An investigation into the suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo has never been brought to an end; several locations have been excavated, but the Prosecutor's Office of BiH is still without a final decision.

The listed cases are only some of those returned from The Hague to BiH, and there are hundreds more, so it remains unclear how Prosecutor Tadić thinks the cases from The Hague are resolved.