Serbia joins appeal for abolition of the death penalty

BELGRADE – In view of the European and World Day against the Death Penalty, foreign ministers of 42 countries, including Serbia, have issued a joint appeal for abolition of the death penalty.

“Justice that kills is not justice. Convinced of the inherent inhumanity of the death penalty, the 42 countries represented here oppose its use under any circumstances anywhere in the world,” reads the appeal.

The ministers underscore that the death penalty is not only an intolerable affront to human dignity, but its use goes hand in hand with numerous violations of the human rights of the condemned and their families and has no positive impact on crime prevention or security and does not in any way repair the harm done to the victims and their families.

“Armed with these convictions, we take the opportunity presented by the 11th World Day against the Death Penalty to reiterate our unrelenting dedication to the abolition movement in Europe and all over the world,” the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a release.

Today, only about 50 countries still allow capital punishment, whereas twenty years ago it was almost twice as many, the release notes.

As the resolutions of the United Nations show, a growing majority of States support the establishment of a universal moratorium on death penalty.

The joint appeal for abolition of the death penalty was signed by the foreign ministers of Serbia, Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Macedonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania and Luxembourg.

The list of signatories also includes the foreign ministers of Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Source: In Serbia, October 11, 2013

Serbian Government fights to prevent execution of Serbian citizen by Nevada, USA, in historic first intervention in a death penalty case

Avram Nika

The Government of Serbia has this week appealed to a US court to spare the life of one of its citizens, Avram Nika, currently facing execution in Nevada.

In a ground-breaking intervention, the first of its kind for Serbia, the Government expresses “grave doubts as to the validity of the death sentence rendered against Mr Nika”, citing multiple failures by the State of Nevada.

Serbia’s amicus curiae ('friend of the court') brief, submitted today to Nevada’s Washoe District Court, describes how Mr Nika - a marginalised Serbian Roma who couldn’t speak English - was denied translation and consular services by the Nevada authorities, rendering him unable to participate meaningfully in his trial. As a result, his defence was perfunctory, with no mitigating evidence presented, and his death sentence became a virtual certainty.

Mr Nika, who is now being assisted by Reprieve’s EC Project, was sentenced to death in 1995 for murder. The Serbian consulate was not informed of his arrest, in violation of state and international law, and was thus prevented from providing crucial assistance which could have saved Mr Nika’s life.

The amicus brief notes that Mr Nika was “particularly vulnerable to the denial of consular assistance due to his inability to speak English and his lack of familiarity with the US legal system and culture”. It explains how “the state portrayed Mr Nika as an evil foreigner... Evidence that Mr Nika…was a hard-working family man who had been…forced to work in… chemically toxic glass factories as a child due to his family’s poverty, and discriminated against due to his membership in a marginalised ethnic group, could have balanced the impact of the state’s negative characterisation of Mr Nika on the jury.”

Explaining its intervention, Serbia cites a “national commitment to human rights” in line with European norms, as well as a determination to ensure fair trials for its citizens abroad.

Reprieve investigator Katherine Bekesi said: “If the Serbian consulate had been informed of Mr Nika’s arrest, it would have provided crucial assistance, including translation, legal advice and key mitigating evidence, which could have saved Mr Nika’s life. The state of Nevada must face up to its deplorable failings in this case and order a new trial.”

1. For further information, please contact Donald Campbell at Reprieve’s Press Office on +44 (0) 20 7427 1082 / (0) 7791 755 415

2. A beloved brother and uncle, Avram Nika was born in a small rural town not far from Belgrade, on February 12th, 1970. Born into a third generation of grinding poverty, he has also experienced long-term prejudice and discrimination due to his membership of a marginalised ethinic group, the Roma.

Avram was charged with murder in 1994 and, in a flagrant breach of the Vienna Convention on Consular Rights, arresting authorities in Nevada failed to notify the Serbian consulate of Avram’s detention. His trial counsel did nothing to correct this; nor did they conduct any investigation work into his family background, education or mental health problems in Serbia.

Avram’s beloved brother Sveta, and his family, are unable to visit him because they live in Serbia. They were not told about Avram’s plight until four years after his conviction, preventing them from testifying in his defense. In the end, only two people testified on Avram’s behalf.

Avram is currently held at the notorious Ely State Prison. The ACLU brought a lawsuit against the prison after an investigative report described the conditions as being “as horrific as any we have ever seen.”

Source: Reprieve, August 12, 2011

Serbia: Executions Were Mladic’s Signature, and Downfall

Ratko Mladic

With video cameras capturing the moment, Gen. Ratko Mladic’s bodyguards handed out chocolates to Bosnian Muslim children, promising terrified women that the violence was over.

“No one will be harmed,” the Bosnian Serb commander said on July 12, 1995, gently patting a young boy on the head. “You have nothing to fear. You will all be evacuated."

As he spoke, thousands of his soldiers formed a vast cordon around the town of Srebrenica, a United Nations-protected “safe area” that had just fallen to his forces. Over the next 10 days, his soldiers hunted down, captured and summarily executed 8,000 men and boys from the town. Women were raped. And pleas for restraint from the international community were mocked.

“Over 500 victims of the Srebrenica genocide were boys under the age of 18,” said Hasan Nuhanovic, a survivor from Srebrenica whose father, mother and brother were executed by Mr. Mladic’s forces. “They were 16, 17 years old when they were executed."

The mass executions around Srebrenica became Mr. Mladic’s ghastly trademark — and his undoing. The anger and humiliation felt in Washington and in European capitals prompted the international community to act against Bosnian Serb forces after years in which Serbian forces systematically pushed Muslims and Croats out of areas they claimed belonged to the Serbian ethnic group. Within weeks, NATO airstrikes reversed the course of the war. Within months, a peace accord had been signed and Mr. Mladic was a fugitive.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Mladic supported President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia as he reignited ethnic divisions and tried to turn the majority of the country into a “Greater Serbia” dominated by ethnic Serbs. In time, fighting erupted between Yugoslavia’s 3 main ethnic groups — Orthodox Christian Serbs, Roman Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians — in a series of overlapping civil wars.

Srebrenica was not the general’s first act of brutality. The massacre was the culmination of years of worsening cruelty that began with the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, the longest in modern warfare. The four-year bombardment killed 10,000 people, including an estimated 1,500 children. In Sarajevo, Mr. Mladic embraced a frightening form of warfare where a heavily armed military unleashed artillery and sniper fire on civilians. His forces were also accused of using systematic rape as a weapon of war.

“A professional army conducted a campaign of unrelenting violence,” war crimes prosecutors said in the opening statement of a 2003 trial of one of Mr. Mladic’s subordinates. “There was nowhere safe for a Sarajevan, not at home, at school, in a hospital, from deliberate attack.”

Born in a suburb of Sarajevo, Mr. Mladic grew up in a household haunted by the ethnic divisions that the Yugoslav dictator, Josip Broz Tito, managed to suppress for decades. Mr. Mladic’s father was killed in an attack against ethnic Croat forces allied with Nazi Germany that included some Bosnian Muslims. An infant at the time, Mr. Mladic never knew his father. German records showed that hundreds of thousands of Serbs died during the occupation, and Mr. Mladic had made it his mission to avenge them.

At news conferences, he was a silent, brooding and intimidating presence beside Radovan Karadzic. The 2 men were the leaders of Bosnia’s Serbian secessionists in their war with Croats and Muslims from 1992 to 1995. Both men said that their forces were defending Europe from a Muslim onslaught backed by wealthy Muslim nations. In truth, their opponents were poorly armed local people who had converted to Islam centuries earlier. From the first shots in April 1992 to the eventual peace accord at Dayton, Ohio, in December 1995, the war is commonly reckoned to have cost about 100,000 Bosnian lives, including 10,000 in the siege of Sarajevo.

As commander of the Yugoslav National Army’s Second Military District, headquartered in Sarajevo, Mr. Mladic was ideally placed to lead the Bosnian Serbs in their quest for secession from the newly independent Bosnia. In May 1992, Mr. Mladic ordered his forces to begin the siege of Sarajevo, cutting off all electricity, food and water to the city. United Nations airlifts allowed residents to survive, but the carnage steadily mounted.

In 1993, his forces fired a shell that killed 15 civilians at a soccer game. A month later, another shell killed 12 civilians as they waited in line for water. In 1994, a shell landed in the old city’s crowded Markale marketplace, killing 68 civilians. A year later, a second attack on the Markale market killed 34 people.

Early in the siege, an intercepted radio message caught the general ordering one of his commanders to “burn” the city.

He hitched his yearning for vengeance to a Napoleonic sense of himself, and a contempt for the United Nations forces that were trying, with faltering success, to prevent Mr. Mladic’s forces from breaking through the siege lines around Sarajevo. On one occasion in the spring of 1993, under threat from President Bill Clinton of American airstrikes if he failed to pull his troops back from a height above the city, he led reporters to the contested upland, on a ski slope that had been used for the 1984 Winter Olympics, and swept his arm across the horizon. “All of this, every bit of it, is mine,” he said. Hours later, he withdrew his troops.

Some of his threats were more personal. During a meeting of the Bosnian Serb Parliament, also in 1993, he pulled a reporter aside to send a message, he said, to a Serbian surgeon working with Croat and Muslim colleagues at the trauma center of the Kosevo Hospital in Sarajevo. It was time, he said, for the surgeon to heed demands from the Mladic forces that all Serbs in Sarajevo leave the city and join the secessionist cause. “We need her in our hospital, and she must come. She is a Serb, and it is her duty,” he said.

And what, the reporter asked, were the consequences if she did not? “You know that very well,” he said. Months later, after two attempts by Serbian snipers to kill her, and with a mounting toll of unexplained killings among Serbs remaining in the city, the surgeon fled aboard a United Nations relief flight.

In 1994, Mr. Mladic’s 23-year-old daughter, a medical student in Belgrade, committed suicide. Her death seemed only to increase his ferocity.

He grew increasingly disdainful of United Nations peacekeepers. In 1994, his forces tried to take Gorazde, a town that had been declared, along with Srebrenica, under United Nations protection. When NATO carried out airstrikes to halt Mr. Mladic’s attack, he ordered his men to take dozens of United Nations peacekeepers hostage. He eventually backed down, but the United Nations had been humiliated.

His 1995 attacks on Srebrenica brought the United Nations to one of its lowest moments of its history. Roughly 300 Dutch peacekeepers were defending the town, but his forces cut off their supplies for weeks. When he carried out a coordinated assault in July 1995, NATO jets dropped only 2 bombs on the advancing Serbian forces. Within days, the enclave of 30,000 Bosnian Muslims had fallen. After the fall of Srebrenica, Mr. Mladic mocked United Nations peacekeepers from the Netherlands and forced the commander of Dutch forces to drink a toast with him celebrating the fall of the city. And he promised his soldiers a victory that would linger in history.

While repeatedly telling Bosnian Muslim civilians that they would not be harmed, he aired his true intentions to a camera crew from Bosnian Serb television. As he strolled the center of the fallen town, he told his soldiers the time had come to avenge a massacre that the Ottoman Turks had carried out against Serbs in the area 190 years earlier. “We present this city to the Serbian people as a gift,” he said. “The time has come to take revenge."

Source: David Rohde was imprisoned by Bosnian Serb forces for 10 days in 1995 after he became the 1st reporter to discover mass graves near Srebrenica. John F. Burns covered the siege of Sarajevo; New York Times, May 27, 2011

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