The Guardian: Today's verdict will prove Belgrade’s orchestration of ethnic cleansing

The Guardian: Today's verdict will prove Belgrade’s orchestration of ethnic cleansing

Stanisic and Simatovic are charged with war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1991 and 1995.

The significance of today's verdict is not just due to the length of the whole process, but also because of what it will say about Belgrade’s covert role in the 1992-95 Bosnian conflict and "about the legal accountability of covert state sponsors of paramilitary groups", the Guardian claims.

Jovica Stanišić, the former head of the state security service (DB) and his deputy, Franko “Frenki” Simatović, were first indicted in 2003.

David Scheffer, former US envoy on war crimes issues and vice-president of the American Society of International Law, says that “this exhaustively litigated case against two high-level Serbian officials is the litmus test to prove Belgrade’s orchestration of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia during the early 1990s”.

"The link to Belgrade’s leadership would be damning”, Scheffer concluded.

The Guardian further claims that Jovica Stanisic, the former head of the state security service (DB) and his deputy, Franko Simatovic were once two of the most powerful men in Serbia.

Stanišić was also reported to be a CIA informant and that "this secret service agency took the unusual step of submitting a classified document to the court describing his help".

International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals will pass the second first instance verdict on Stanisic and Simatovic in the afternoon, after the retrial, because the first one, by which they were acquitted of all charges, was revoked and a retrial was ordered in 2015 when an appeals chamber ruled that the trial judges had misinterpreted the legal threshold for proving complicity.