War crimes in the Bosnian War

Ten days after her term in office began, one of the first tasks undertaken by Graciela Gatti Santana, the new president of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, was to deliver a speech at the commemoration of the 27th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide.

It commemorates the issuing of a decree in May 1992 by the wartime Bosnian Serb authorities in Prijedor, which was announced on Radio Prijedor, telling all non-Serbs to mark their houses with white flags or bedsheets and to wear white armbands when going outside - an incident that has become symbolic of the deadly campaign of persecution in the area at the time.

The appeals chamber of the Bosnian state court on Friday confirmed a first-instance verdict sentencing Senad Dzananovic to 11 years in prison and Edin Gadzo to five years for crimes against Serb civilians in the Alipasino Polje neighbourhood of Sarajevo.

The court said that the defendants' appeals had been rejected as "unfounded".

Hundreds of people joined a gathering in Prijedor on Tuesday to mark White Ribbon Day and commemorate the 102 children and more than 3,000 other civilians who were killed in the area during the war.

People tied white ribbons to fences and laid red roses in the square in tribute, as well as holding up banners with photographs of the victims.

"The aforementioned buses must head towards the sports stadium in Bratunac on July 12, 1995, by 4.30 pm at the latest," it added.

The order was signed by Milenko Zivanovic, a general who at the time was the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army's Drina Corps.

Belgrade Higher Court on Monday sentenced Husein Mujanovic, the commander of a military prison in Hrasnica near Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, to ten years of prison for the abuse of Bosnian Serb inmates in 1992.

A new report published by the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre on Friday accuses the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor's Office of being "extremely inefficient", while also raising concerns that over a half of the court hearings in war crime trials last year were postponed for COVID-related reasons.

Ex-soldiers Zoran and Radenko Ilic went on trial on Monday at the Bosnian state court in Sarajevo for persecuting Bosniak civilians in the municipality of Rogatica on ethnic and religious grounds.

Commemorations will be held on Saturday to mark the anniversaries of wartime killings on April 16, 1993 in the villages of Ahmici, near Vitez, and Trusina, near Konjic.

"I am not guilty," Novica Tripkovic told the Bosnian state court on Thursday, denying that he forced two female Bosniak captives to have sex with him between August 2 and 9, 1992 in the Foca municipality.