Serbia in the Yugoslav Wars

The prosecution announced on Friday that it has charged a Kosovo Serb, who it identified only by the initials M.Dj., with participating in an attack on ethnic Albanian civilians during the war in 1999.

The former policeman Mfrom the village of Vitomirica in Kosovo Peja/Pec municipality has been charged with war crimes against the civilian population.

The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday increased the sentences handed down to the former chief of Serbian State Security, Jovica Stanisic, and his deputy Franko Simatovic, to 15 years in prison each, rejecting their appeals against their convictions.

In May 1999, in the midst of the Kosovo war, Serbia's assistant interior minister Obrad Stevanovic made a grim note in his diary while he was having a meeting with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Under the capital-letter heading "PRESIDENT", Stevanovic wrote: "No body, no crime."

Fighting units under the ultimate command of Serbian state security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic "controlled the situation on the ground" in Serb-controlled parts of Croatia and, to a lesser extent, Bosnia during the wars of the 1990s, veteran Serbian journalist Filip Svarm told BIRN ahead of the verdict in the pair's war crimes trial in The Hague.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's border police on Saturday arrested Mladen Grujic, who is sought by neighbouring Croatia for war crimes committed against Croatian prisoners of war in its western Slavonia region during 1991.

Former serviceman Predrag Vukovic, alias Madzo, who was arrested in Montenegro last year, appeared for the first time at Belgrade Higher Court on Friday at the trial of Yugoslav Army ex-soldiers for war crimes in Kosovo in May 1999.

Three brigades of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Army took part in fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993 and, like the special operations unit of Serbian state security, were known as 'Red Berets', a defence witness in the retrial of two top Serbian state security officials in The Hague said on Thursday.

Human rights groups in Serbia and Croatia have called on authorities in both countries to do more to recognise and aid victims of a 1995 Croatian military operation that ended the country's war against rebel Serbs.

Croatia on Monday marked the 24th anniversary of Operation Storm, a military blitz that quashed a breakaway Serb statelet but put to flight almost 200,000 Serb civilians.

A new report by the Humanitarian Law Centre NGO in Belgrade, published on Wednesday, said war crimes proceedings in Serbia are subject to long delays and that justice is being further postponed when retrials are held.

According to the newspaper, this list was handed over to the War Crimes Prosecution in April of last year and is the last one of this type that was submitted to domestic judicial authorities.