Prosecutor's Office of BiH - Archive for the Toughest Cases!

By Amina Čorbo-Zećo

---

More than twenty years have passed since the war. And Bosnia and Herzegovina is still stagnating. The Prosecutor's Office of BiH, which should be a pillar of justice and a place where the state is defended, has become an archive for difficult cases that burden our society.

Nothing has been clarified, nothing has been brought to light. And new scandals emerge daily.

Will we ever learn the true story behind the numerous cases stored deep in the drawers of known and unknown prosecutors? 

Media controlled by "these" or "those" present different versions tailored to "their" truth, making it difficult to navigate this staged spectacle and conclude with certainty from newspaper headlines what is a well-concocted lie created in some intelligence kitchen, and what is actually true.

This is precisely why the responsibility of the Prosecutor's Office of BiH and the Court of BiH is the greatest, because without their final decisions and verdicts, it is difficult to arrive at the truth.
It remains unclear according to which priorities work is being done and how it is possible that the murders of Jozo Leutar, Nedžad Ugljen, Mediha Halilović, the wife of General Sefer Halilović, Taib Torlaković, Ramiz Delalić Ćelo, in RS the murders of engineer Milan Vukelić, Risto Jugović, and even the assassination attempt on journalist Željko Kopanja, remain unclarified to this day...

Twenty-five years after the first murders, prosecutors have not managed to complete the investigation in any case and bring the killers to justice. After a quarter of a century of darkness over these liquidations, the political oligarchies can be accused with a clear conscience of involvement in these deaths, and these murders can be declared political. 

Upon taking office, no prosecutor wants to deal with these unresolved murders. After all, they are not properly dealing with recent liquidations either. The murders of Sarajevo police officers Adis Šehović and Davor Vujinović remain a mystery, as do the deaths of young men Dženan Memić in Sarajevo and David Dragičević in Banja Luka.

The situation in the area of war crimes is equally difficult. Everything has been documented and published by OSCE. Simply put, the Prosecutor's Office of BiH is wasting resources and time and even distorting historical facts.

Therefore, the statements of victims that the Court and Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina are the greatest deniers of the Srebrenica genocide should not be surprising. 
There is no control whatsoever, nor accountability. The weak oversight body, the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council (HJPC), which serves only itself, testifies to this. The scandal involving Milan Tegeltija, the head of the HJPC, "shook" the entire country. Everything except him!

He continues to perform his function, which amounts to weakening justice, and when you have no justice, the state weakens too, which analysts would understand as the goal. Destroy the judiciary and you destroy the state. Even the foreigners who designed the existence of the HJPC have admitted they made a mistake.

The President of the HJPC, Tegeltija, is now publicly and increasingly loudly stating that the scandal he found himself in was staged. On September 25th, I asked Tegeltija what he would undertake or had undertaken to prove his claim that it was a setup?

What damage did the scandal cause to the HJPC, to whom did he turn for help in protecting this important institution, was it the Prosecutor's Office, OSA, SIPA, Parliament, foreigners in BiH, OSCE, embassies?

We received no answer. Thus, citizens have been waiting for the truth for two decades, and it is nowhere to be found. I fear that newer cases will also end up this way. That some of my future colleagues will be writing about events they don't even remember!

Until a system of accountability is introduced, there will be no progress, and the Prosecutor's Office of BiH will remain an archive for the toughest cases.