Serbian Municipal Honour for War Criminal Dismissed as ‘Political Game’

The decision of the local assembly of Pantelej, a municipality of the city of Nis, the biggest city in southern Serbia, to make a convicted war criminal, Vladimir Lazarevic, an honorary citizen is not surprising and represents part of the "petty political game" of the ruling party, NGO activists told BIRN.

The now pensioned general during the 1998-9 Kosovo war commanded the Pristina Corp in the Yugoslav Army and was later sentenced to 14 years in prison by the Hague tribunal, ICTY, for murders, deportations and inhumane treatment of Kosovo Albanians during the war together with other Serbian army and police officials.

According to the news portal Juzne vesti, Lazarevic has lived in Nis since his release from prison but not in the municipality of Pantelej.

Ivana Zanic, director of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre, says the decision is not much of a surprise since few voices ever spoke publicly about Lazarevic's ICTY conviction.

It was "the practice in general and the public discourse that all Serbian generals convicted before the Hague Tribunal - this is something incidental in their biographies, which does not determine them, and they are exclusively honourable people who contributed to the defence of the homeland", Zanic told BIRN.

The director of the Nis-based NGO, the National Coalition for Decentralization, Mladen Jovanovic, said: "We are victims of the petty political game of the ruling [Progressive] party" in which the "much more important interest of the state is sacrificed" for the sake of wooing part of the electorate.

"This flirtation is going in a way that, on several occasions already very important and good initiatives are launched at state level … and then the same party … through these...