Hadzic Transferred to Hague
Former Croatian Serb leader also charged with command responsibility in amended indictment.
Hadzic Transferred to Hague
Former Croatian Serb leader also charged with command responsibility in amended indictment.
Goran Hadzic has been transferred to The Hague and will have his initial appearance before the tribunal on July 25, prosecutor Serge Brammertz confirmed during a press conference this week.
Shortly before that, the court released a decision confirming a newly amended version of the 2004 indictment against him. In a significant change, Hadzic is now charged with not only individual criminal responsibility, but also with command responsibility.
This means that even if he did not plan or carry out the crimes himself, he knew – or had reason to know – that the crimes would be or had been committed by his subordinates, and he failed to take “necessary and reasonable” measures to prevent the crimes or punish the perpetrators.
The amended indictment will now also include a previously uncharged crime – the killing of 17 people at the Velepromet facility in Vukovar.
It also clarifies the existing counts and adds some towns and villages to the charges of plunder and wanton destruction.
Brammertz indicated that the prosecution will file an official version of the amended indictment shortly.
He also noted that while Hadzic might not be as high profile as indictees like former Bosnian Serb leaders Ratko Mladic or Radovan Karadzic, he is still “a senior political figure” whose alleged crimes were “extensive and grave”.
“Hadzic will be called to answer for the deaths of hundreds and displacement of thousands,” Brammertz said.
Hadzic was arrested in Serbia on July 20 after seven years on the run, and was the last remaining fugitive to be wanted by the Hague tribunal.
During the Croatian war, Hadzic was president of the government of the self-declared Serbian Autonomous District of Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem, known as the SAO SBWS, and was president of the so-called Republic of the Serbian Krajina, RSK - which absorbed SAO SBWS territory - from February 1992 to December 1993.
He is charged with 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed against the Croat and non-Serb population, including persecutions, extermination, murder, imprisonment, torture, inhumane acts, cruel treatment, deportation, wanton destruction and plunder.
He is also alleged to have been part of a Joint Criminal Enterprise, JCE, with various other political and military officials, the purpose of which was the “permanent forcible removal of a majority of the Croat and other non-Serb population from approximately one-third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia” in order to create a Serb-dominated state.
Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.
