By Nadina Ronc

LONDON

On Monday, war-time commander of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), Naser Oric, was cleared of all war crimes charges by the court in Sarajevo.

In the years since the war crimes trials started, Bosnia and Herzegovina have not had justice, because the Serbian war criminals who were caught were often given lenient sentences or were released after serving a third of their sentence.

Yet their victims are either buried in mass graves or still live with the nightmares of war, such as torture and rape.

None of the Serbian war criminals went to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague voluntarily.

Radovan Karadzic evaded justice for 13 years and General Ratko Mladic for 16 years before they were both caught (while living in Serbia) by Serbian authorities who claimed they did not know that they were there, even though they were getting pensions from the Serbian government.

But Oric took a different route. Speaking to OBN TV, before his indictment, he said: “It's a fact that I was one of the main commanders in Srebrenica and, if I have to answer to someone, I'll answer; but I'd first have to bring up the time, space and situation in which we lived, as well as what the Serbs did to us compared to what we did to them.

“If Naser has to answer to someone, I'm right here and I'm not running away from responsibility, I'm not running away from the court, I'm not running away from The Hague or anyone. You just have to call on me and no problem.”

True to his word, Oric turned himself in to the court in The Hague on April 10, 2003, and on June 30, 2006, he was found guilty “of failing to take steps to prevent the murder and cruel treatment of a number of Serb prisoners in the former UN 'safe area’."

He received a two-year sentence, however on July 1, 2006, he was released from prison as he was entitled to credit for the time served in detention since April 10, 2003.

He appealed his guilty verdict and was found not guilty on July 3, 2008.

During the appeals, the chief prosecutor at that time, Carla Del Ponte, requested a longer sentence for him despite the fact that he was innocent.

Defender of Srebrenica

Oric’s troubles did not stop there: he was arrested by the Swiss border police in 2015, acting on the arrest warrant issued by Interpol National Central Bureau for Serbia on Feb. 2, 2014, despite the ICTY’s having cleared him of all charges.

Eventually, the Swiss government extradited him to Bosnia, not Serbia.

Bosnian Serbs then brought a case against him in a Bosnian court for the alleged murder of three Bosnian Serbs. But on Monday, justice prevailed yet again when Oric walked free, acquitted of all charges.

As he exited the court, he shouted: “Justice has won.”

Justice did win, but not only for Oric. It won for the 250,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) who were killed during the war in Bosnia; for the 50,000 raped women; for the more than 8,500 men and boys who were murdered during the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995; for the Mothers of Srebrenica; for the ARBiH; for the innocent civilians whose bodies are still in mass graves and for all of the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Oric, a native of Potocari in Bosnia, served in the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), reaching the rank of corporal before joining a special unit within the police in Belgrade.

He would later serve in the unit as a bodyguard to the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

In August 1991, he was transferred to a police station in Sarajevo, and then subsequently to Potocari, where he would become a police chief, and then commander of the Potocari Territorial Defense under General Sefer Halilovic, the chief of the Supreme Command Staff of the ARBiH.

Oric’s duty as a commander was to defend his people and his country from the Bosnian Serbs, the Serbs from Serbia and the Montenegrins who were in Bosnia to commit war crimes and genocide.

The voices of those defending Bosnia and Herzegovina echoed loudly, and men like Oric fully committed themselves to their country and its people.

If Bosnia was allowed to have weapons, Oric and other members of the ARBiH would have kept Bosnia complete and that war would not have lasted for as long as it did and it would not have taken so many innocent civilians, and today there would probably be no Dayton but instead a united Bosnia and Herzegovina, a whole country under its original flag of six golden lilies representing the Kings of the Bosnian Kotromanic dynasty, and would have unity and respect.

Arms embargo

Oric and his men managed to take most of the Bosnian villages back from the Chetniks (members of a Serbian nationalist guerrilla force that was formed during World War II), but due to the lack of technology to know what was going on on the other side, and a lack of ammunition, the fight for territory became a constant defense and losing territory to the Chetniks who were well-equipped with weapons.

Remembering one event in the war, Oric described the time the Chetniks entered one part of the demilitarized zone of Srebrenica and threw out the Dutch peacekeepers.

This was a frontline, 50 meters (yards) from a village where Bosniaks lived. The ARBiH asked the Dutch to remove the Chetniks from that area but the Dutch did not.

One night a group of ARBiH men got into that frontline and threw out the Chetniks. The Dutch peacekeepers then came and asked ARBiH to leave that position but ARBiH asked that the Dutch guarantee the Serbs will not come back there, but the Dutch did not oblige.

The Dutch peacekeeping force had no power to tell Serbs in Bosnia to back off.

During Oric’s trial at the ICTY on Feb. 12, 2004, Judge Robinson asked French Gen. Philippe Morillon: “Are you saying, then, general, that what happened in 1995 was a direct reaction to what Naser Oric did to the Serbs two years before?”

Morillon responded: “Yes. Yes, your Honour. I am convinced of that. This doesn't mean to pardon or diminish the responsibility of the people who committed that crime, but I am convinced of that, yes.”

However, a month and a half before Srebrenica fell, Oric was removed as commander of the Potocari Territorial Defense under the order of the chief of staff of the ARBiH and sent to another area held by the Bosnian Army.

Knowing how reluctant the Dutch were to help the ARBiH and knowing that Gen. Morillon refused to help Bosniaks when they asked him for help, he still managed to blame Oric for the events which occurred in Srebrenica in July 1995.

Had Oric still been the commander of the Potocari Territorial Defense, Srebrenica would have had a different ending.

But Europe had other interests, starting with the EU’s arms embargo against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on July 5, 1991, which had no effect on Serbia who had all the weapons they had previously removed from the army barracks of Bosnia and Herzegovina and other former Yugoslav republics.

The ARBiH was left to fight with hunting rifles they shared amongst themselves. The EU was not alone in their embargo, UN Security Council did the same paving the way for Serbs to butcher Bosnia.

Justice has won

But it was the British and French politicians that had the most influence against Bosnia, especially Britain’s Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and French President Francois Mitterrand, who were consistent in preventing Bosnia defend itself.

While the British people were in favor of dispatching troops to Bosnia and bombing Bosnian Serb positions, Hurd defended the arms embargo saying that lifting it would create a "level killing field”.

This received a stinging retort from the former British prime minister, the late Margaret Thatcher, that there already was a "killing field the like of which I thought we would never see in Europe again. It is in Europe's sphere of influence. It should be in Europe's sphere of conscience”.

Further to that, when the Russians pulled out of eastern Europe, they took with them 4,000 wagons of ammunition that they gave to Serbia to use in the killing fields of Bosnia, but no one in the EU objected.

EU states, especially Britain and France, believed that the only way to bring peace to Bosnia was to partition the country between Serbs and Croats.

However, lifting the arms embargo and providing weapons to the 100,000-strong Bosnian army to properly defend the territory of Bosnia, would ruin the British and French dreams of dividing Bosnia.

According to the American Prof. Paul R. Williams, a member of the delegation during the Dayton Peace Agreement negotiations, speaking to the Wall Street Journal in 1995: “…those states continuing to enforce the embargo violate some of the most basic principles of justice and international law.

“It is my firm belief that the act of denying Bosnia the right to prevent its own destruction and the genocide of its nationals calls for the determination that the embargo is illegal and exceeds the authority of the Security Council.”

If the embargo was not holding Bosnia back, Oric would have defended Srebrenica and the rest of Bosnia.

After all, Bosnia had the right to defend itself, something that, thanks to the EU and the UN, was not accorded to the Bosniaks.

While Oric is a free man, the ruling can be appealed by the Bosnian Serb side. But for now, Oric is free to enjoy the life with his family that was denied to him since 2003.

He should never have been dragged through courts because the cases against Oric only sought to deny that what took place in Srebrenica was a genocide.

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu Agency.