The Croatian Ambassador to the United Nations, Ranko Vilovic, said at the session of the U.N. Security Council in New York on Monday that former Bosnian Serb leader Ratko Mladic should be held responsible also for crimes committed during the war in Croatia.
"Justice must be served in these cases as well," Vilovic said at the session after ICTY President Patrick Robinson and Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz presented their six-month reports to the UN Security Council in New York.
Stressing that the ICTY cannot be closed down before the remaining fugitives are arrested, Vilovic said that in that context Croatia welcomed Mladic's arrest.
Croatia's judiciary held several war crimes trials against Mladic who, during the war, commanded the Yugoslav People's Army corps in the southern Croatian town of Knin. The County Court in Sibenik has sentenced Mladic in absentia to 20 years in jail for the attack on the village of Kijevo in 1991. Mladic was also accused of attacks on civilian targets along the coast, including Sibenik and Zadar, as well as of the shelling of Pozega from Bosnia and of ordering the destruction of the Peruca dam and the hydropower plant.
The 69-year-old Ratko Mladic is charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with genocide and other war crimes committed against Bosnian Muslim and Croats during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In 1995, the ICTY issued an indictment against Mladic and the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic for war genocide and crimes committed between 1991 and 1993 and later that year it issued a new indictment against them for genocide in Srebrenica where several thousand Bosnian Muslims were killed when that eastern Bosnian enclave fell into the hand of the Serb forces in mid-July 1995.
The two indictments were united into one document in 2002 in which Mladic and Karadzic are indicted on charges of genocide, complicity in genocide, persecutions, extermination and murder, deportation and inhumane acts, unlawfully inflicting terror upon civilians, murder, cruel treatment, attacks on civilians, taking of hostages.
The cases were separated after the arrest of Karadzic in Serbia on 21 July 2008 and his transfer to The Hague where his trial before the ICTY commenced in October 2009.
The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Serge Brammertz, has said that the indictment against Mladic would not be expanded to include Croatia.
