ZAGREB, April 11, 2018 – Croats in Vojvodina, Serbia, believe that Vojislav Šešelj’s conviction for the persecution and deportation, primarily of Croats in the Srijem area, is of little solace for everything that was done to the Croat community during the 1990s.
The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) on Wednesday convicted the leader of the Serb Radical Party for being responsible for the persecution and deportation of Vojvodina Croats during the 1990s sentencing him to 10 years. Šešelj however will not be going to prison because he had spent 11.5 years in detention already.
The president of the Democratic Alliance of Croats in Vojvodina (DSHV) Tomislav Žigmanov said that this was the first official admission by a high international court that crimes were committed against Croats in Vojvodina.
“We could say that a little justice has been served. We won’t talk about whether the length of the sentence corresponds to the crimes but we have to say that the tribunal confirmed what representatives of the Croat minority and victims have been saying for years – that crimes against Croats in Vojvodina did occur. And that these were not individual crimes but part of broader policies and activities committed by paramilitary units and political stakeholders in Serbia,” Žigmanov underscored. “The crimes committed were backed by state structures and paramilitary and police forces.”
He expects that now, after this admission, “policies of facing the past will continue to be implemented,” and that other crimes against Croats in Vojvodina too will be brought to trial and their perpetrators brought to justice. “It is to be expected that the MICT ruling will strengthen policies of facing the past in the former Yugoslavia,” Žigmanov told Hina, “because we shouldn’t forget that 25 people were killed and about 35,000 were deported,” from Vojvodina.
He recalled that “there was no war in Serbia,” and that Serbian citizens – ethnic Croats – did not show any disloyalty to that state.
