Bosnian War Victims Demand Review of Early Release of Kordic

The Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide on Monday asked the president of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, Graciela Gatti Santana, to review the 2014 early release of convicted Bosnian Croat war criminal Dario Kordic.

Their letter, the latest in a number of reactions, came after a video showed Kordic over the weekend saying that "it was worth every second". 

"When he asked me (a friend) if it was worth the imprisonment, if it was worth the war, I told him I would do it all over again, I wouldn't exchange a single second," Kordic said in the video, which was allegedly recorded last year. 

"When a convict sentenced for the most severe crimes is released eight years and four months earlier than the sentenced term of 25 years, and then, after nine years, says they would do it all over again, they not only mock international justice, insult the victims, and undermine the international legal order, but they are also willing to commit new crimes," the letter states. 

Kordic, a commander of the paramilitary Croatian Defence Council, HVO, during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ICTY of planning and instigating killings in the village of Ahmici and neighbouring hamlets and ethnically cleansing the area on April 16, 1993, where 116 civilians, including elderly people and children were killed. 

He was released in 2014 after serving two-thirds of his 25-year sentence.

The president of the Croatian Republican Party, Slaven Raguz, has come to Kordic's defence, saying that when he said he he would "do it all over again", it did not refer to the mass killings.

"Last year, someone asked him 'was it worth...