ZAGREB, April 13, 2018 – Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Šešelj, who was given ten years’ prison sentence by the Appeals Chamber of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) for war crimes against Croats in the early 1990s, said on Thursday that he was ready to repeat his crimes, this time against two lawmakers in the Serbian parliament – ethnic Croat leader Tomislav Žigmanov and Nenad Čanak, leader of the centre-left League of the Social Democrats of Vojvodina.
Šešelj, also a member of the Serbian legislature, made this threat a day after the appeals chamber of the MICT, the successor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), ruled that he was responsible for the persecution and deportation of Vojvodina Croats by giving a hate-mongering speech in Hrtkovci on 6 May 1992, and sentenced him to ten years in prison.
The threat was published in the Blic newspaper that quoted Šešelj as saying that he is “preparing intensively to commit again my war crimes, and I will start with Tomislav Žigmanov and Nenad Čanak.”
In a comment on the threats, Žigmanov said that this was what used to happen on the Serbian political scene in the 1990s and that it was “unacceptable”.
Čanak remarked ironically that Šešelj ‘s condition was “rapidly deteriorating” and that he should be urgently hospitalised. If the threats are not due to “his impaired understanding of reality, rule-of-law agencies should react promptly,” said Čanak.
