Prison for Nazi bookkeeper as a clear sign that crime does not pay

More than twenty years after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a large number of war criminals have still not been brought to justice, and given the (in)efficiency of our judicial institutions' work, it is quite certain that many of them will not even live to see indictments and verdicts.

However, what is particularly worrying is the attitude of the public, primarily official institutions, towards accused and convicted war criminals, and their glorification.

The institutions of Republika Srpska have several times allocated money from the entity budget to support accused war criminals Ratko Mladić, Radovan Karadžić, and other leaders of Republika Srpska from the nineties.

The situation is identical when it comes to accused persons from the so-called Herceg-Bosna. The BiH Presidency member from the Croat people, Dragan Čović, visited those accused of war crimes, Jadranko Prlić and other leaders of the so-called HZ HB, in The Hague detention center and gave them his support. There are numerous such examples in post-war BiH.

And while Čović's mouth is full of European integration and European values, he never casts a glance into the European yard to see what attitude Europeans have towards war criminals. 

The prosecutor's office of the German city of Hanover has decided that 96-year-old Oskar Gröning is fully medically fit to go to prison. 

During World War II, Gröning was the bookkeeper at the Nazi camp Auschwitz, where he worked for two years as a volunteer in the Waffen SS division. Gröning is suspected of having, as a bookkeeper in the camp, collected money from the luggage of arriving prisoners and shared it with other Nazi officers and camp guards.

Unlike the war criminals from the war in BiH, who actively participated in the commission of war crimes, directly or indirectly under command responsibility, Gröning was only a bookkeeper in World War II, but even that did not absolve him of criminal responsibility for the most serious war crimes.

Unfortunately, in our country, not even all the main masterminds of war crimes have come to criminal responsibility yet, let alone people who did "only" administrative work in the criminal regimes of the nineties.

Many of the leading figures from the war period are still in the highest political positions of power in BiH.

What is encouraging, however, as shown by the case of the 96-year-old Gröning from Germany, is the fact that justice is slow, but it does come eventually. Justice caught up with Gröning 75 years after the end of World War II, so many war bookkeepers and clerks from BiH and the region are not in a position to sleep completely peacefully either.