Serbia Urged to Prosecute Arkan’s Paramilitaries for War Crimes

The Humanitarian Law Centre NGO published a dossier on Thursday about the crimes committed by the Serbian Volunteer Guard paramilitary unit, also known as Arkan's Tigers, and urged the authorities in Belgrade to prosecute any suspects who are still alive.

The HLC's director Ivana Zanic said that so far, none of the unit's members has been put on trial in Serbia. Arkan himself was shot dead in Belgrade in 2000 and several of his fighters have also been killed since the 1990s.

Zanic explained that the dossier was based on publicly available police and military documents and testimonies from the Hague Tribunal, media coverage of the unit's crimes and testimonies gathered by the HLC in itself. In the dossier, the HLC identifies by name 189 alleged members of the Serbian Volunteer Guard.

"The goal of this dossier, definitely, is that after 30 years these crimes are investigated and that those responsible, who are still alive and are in Serbia, are prosecuted and punished," Zanic told media at a presentation of the dossier in Belgrade.

The dossier's author, Jovana Kolaric, said that "the findings of this file show that members of the Serbian Volunteer Guard participated in murders, captures, imprisonments, mistreatment and forced displacement of civilians" in various areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period from 1991-95.

"Their activities in all these areas were accompanied by looting," Kolaric told the presentation.

The dossier alleges that the Serbian Volunteer Guard was involved in crimes in villages like Laslovo, Dalj, Tenja, Luzac and Erdut in Croatia, and in Bijeljina, Zvornik, Sanski Most and other places in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It says that the Serbian Volunteer Guard worked with the Yugoslav...