American Students Visit HLC: “Victims must not Become Statistics”
SIT Study Abroad, World Learning Center’s program, organized a visit for a group of American college students to the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center (HLC). The course titled: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo: Peace and Conflict Studies in the Balkans teaches students about the causes of the conflict in the Balkans. Through a series of meetings with peace and human rights activists, students learn about reconciliation and efforts to build a civil society. During this study program, students live in ordinary Serbian families, obtaining first-hand knowledge about the impact of the conflicts on the lives of the people in the region.
To the Serbian Office of the Prosecutor for War Crimes, the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) filed charges against more than 50 members of the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Serbia (MUP), the Serbian State Security (DB), and the Yugoslav Army (VJ) for the war crimes against the prisoners of war. The crimes were committed in the period between end of July 1995 and April 10, 1996 against more than 850 Muslims from Zepa and the surrounding villages in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in POW camps of the Republic of Serbia Sljivovica (Cajetina Municipality) and Mitrovo Polje (Aleksandrovac Municipality).
In its first part, the report discusses war crimes trials conducted before courts in Serbia starting with a short presentation of general characteristics of these proceedings. This is followed by the overview of the trials in which the Humanitarian Law Center represented victims and it contains the analysis of the proceedings in each individual case. The following part of the report contains an overview of the trials in which the HLC monitored the main hearing. There is a special text in the report, which contains an analysis of the proceedings and court decisions in Case Suva Reka. The last part of the report deals with the irregularities in the prosecution of war crimes in Serbia, i.e. with problems of the witnesses and the threats to their personal security in the case of members of the 37th Special Police Units Detachment, who have been indicted for war crimes committed in Kosovo during 1998 and 1999.
