Tuesday, 20 February, 2007
Tuesday, 20 February, 2007
That’s four years more than the prosecution requested at the end of the trial in December last year and the chamber’s longest sentence so far.
Jankovic, 53, was found guilty of seven of nine counts on the indictment, including rape, torture and sexual enslavement of Bosnian Muslim women and girls.
He was indicted by the Hague tribunal in 1996, together with seven others - Radovan Stankovic, Dragan Zelenovic, Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac, Zoran Vukovic, Dragan Gagovic and Janko Janjic - for crimes allegedly committed in Foca in 1992.
Kunarac, Kovac and Vukovic were convicted by the tribunal in February 2001and sentenced to 28, 20 and 12 years respectively. Gagovic and Janjic died during NATO troops’ attempts to arrest them.
Stankovic, whose case was also transferred to the Bosnian War Crimes Chamber, was sentenced to 16 years in prison in November last year.
Zelenovic was arrested in Russia in 2005, and extradited to The Hague in June last year. Last month, he pleaded guilty to some of the charges in his indictment, including rapes of Muslim women and girls in Foca. The tribunal is expected to issue a judgment in his case this week.
Jankovic surrendered to the tribunal in March 2005, but his case was referred to the Bosnian War Crimes Chamber few months later. The trial began in April 2006 in Sarajevo.
The charges included multiple rapes of women and girls and the expulsion and murder of the non-Serb civilian population. According to the indictment, over a period of a few months Jankovic held captive and repeatedly raped four Bosniak girls - the youngest only 12-years-old - the others aged 14, 16 and 25.
Jankovic pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.
Over the nine months of proceedings in Sarajevo, the trial chamber heard testimony from 53 witnesses. Statements by three protected witnesses given earlier to the Hague tribunal’s prosecutors were also read in court.
Probably the most incriminating testimony came from protected witness 186, who was only 12 at the time she was allegedly raped by Jankovic. She claimed Jankovic picked her out “as his own sex slave” and told her he would be the only one who would have the right to rape her in the future.
The witness said she knew Jankovic had a wife and three children in Montenegro, one of whom was an 11-year-old girl. She said she asked him once how he could rape someone who is almost the same age as his own daughter, which apparently enraged Jankovic.
Last week, Jankovic was found guilty of raping this girl and keeping her as his sexual slave for several months in various locations around Foca in 1992 and 1993. He was also convicted for the multiple rapes of other girls, who were detained in a village near Foca.
Judges also found Jankovic guilty of leading a group of Serb soldiers who attacked Muslim civilians hiding in the woods around Foca in 1992. According to the judgment, seven men and 30 women and children were captured after the attack. Some were beaten and brutally interrogated. And soon after, Jankovic and his men executed seven male prisoners, it said.
Presiding Judge Zorica Gogala said the trial chamber was satisfied with the evidence presented by the prosecutors during the trial and found it very convincing. The only mitigating circumstance in the Jankovic case, she said, was the fact that he is a family man.
Members of the victims’ associations were also present in court when the judges delivered the sentence. The head of the Women – Victims of War association, Bakira Hasecic, congratulated lead prosecutor Philip Alcock. However, she wasn’t entirely happy.
“Although this is the most severe sentence rendered so far by Bosnia’s War Crimes Chamber, I cannot say that justice has been fully served,” she said, adding a life sentence would have been more appropriate.
Merdijana Sadovic is IWPR’s Hague programme manager.
