Yugoslav Wars

The retrial of Serb ex-policeman Milenko Maric for committing war crimes against the civilian population will begin on Tuesday in Osijek after he was extradited for the second time in six years from Britain, where he has been living for more than 25 years.

Maric, 63, who was extradited to Croatia on April 5, will be tried alongside 11 others.

Relatives of the victims along with members of the Tuzla Canton government and representatives of the Federal Ministry of Refugees and Displaced Persons laid 105 flowers by the fence of a school playground in Srebrenica on Wednesday in memory of those killed by shelling on April 12, 1993.

Hasan Hasanovic was a witness to the massacre, which also injured more than 100 people.

The appeals chamber of the Bosnian state court announced on Friday that it has rejected a prosecution appeal and cleared Hazim Fazlovic, the former commander of the Third Battalion of the 108th Motorised Brigade of the Bosnian Army, of bearing responsibility for crimes against prisoners of war in Brcko in 1993.

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."

Body is assumed to belong to a Serb who went missing in 1993 in the Hadzici area.

The Hague Tribunal's archives reveal fascinating details about the confidential meeting between Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and his Croatian counterpart Franjo Tudjman at Karadjordjevo in 1991, when they discussed forming their own expanded states at Bosnia's expense.

Former Bosnian Serb military policeman Momcilo Tesic was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his participation in the shooting of 17 Bosniaks from Srebrenica in July 1995.

In Croatia, there are numerous reactions to the confirmed indictment of Serbia against four pilots for war crimes against civilians on the Petrovac road in early August 1995.
Minister of Justice and Administration, Ivan Malenica, also believes that this is a political process, which, he says, can be the reason for blocking Serbia's entry into the European Union.

"I was in the hospital for six days, after that I wore a leg brace for a month," he added.

Some two-and-a-half years later Drca, together with many other Croatian Serbs, was forced to flee the country and come to Serbia.

Ever since, politicians in Croatia and Serbia have commemorated different parts of those events - the parts that suit them, ignoring the arguments and victims from the other side.