It’s not too late to stand trial

Late last week the BBC reported that a97-year-old Hungarian accused of massacring civilians in Serbia in 1942 has gone on trial in Hungary.

Sandor Kepiro was listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as the world's most wanted Nazi war crimes suspect.

More than 1,200 Jewish, Serb and Roma civilians were murdered over three days by Hungarian forces in a massacre in the city of Novi Sad. Hundreds of families were rounded up by the Hungarians, in January 1942 on the banks of the Danube River in Novi Sad and then shot.


The former police captain is accused of "complicity in war crimes".
Prosecutor Zsolt Falvai detailed the charges. He said Mr Kepiro was directly responsible for the death of 36 Jews and Serbs - including 30 who were put on a lorry on the defendant's orders and taken away and shot.

Mr Kepiro denied the charges. He said that, in fact, he had been "the only person to refuse the order to use firearms", and that he had intervened to save five people about to be killed by a corporal.
'No clemency'

Sandor Kepiro was convicted of involvement in the killings in Hungary in 1944 but his conviction was quashed by the fascist government and he later fled to Argentina.

He returned to Hungary in 1996 and was tracked down by the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center a decade later to a flat opposite a synagogue in Budapest.

Lets see how this develops. While this must surely one of the last war crimes trials relating to WWII it shows that even nearly 70 years on the last surviving war criminals cannot all rest easily in their bed.

Khmer Rouge butcher faces trial

Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary appeared before Cambodia's genocide tribunal to appeal against his detention. The 82-year-old is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the regime's rule in the late 1970s.

Some 1.7 million people are thought to have died under the brutal regime. Hundreds of thousands starved as the Khmer Rouge tried to create an agrarian society. Many others perceived as educated were tortured and executed.

Ieng Sary is the most prominent surviving Khmer Rouge. He received a royal pardon 12 years ago after reaching a deal with the government that resulted in the eventual surrender of the Khmer Rouge. On this basis his lawyers are arguing that he should not now be facing charges. They will also argue that a trial would amount to double jeopardy.

The Vietnamese-backed forces which ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979 tried Ieng Sary in absentia and found him guilty of genocide. That verdict was overturned by the pardon. But Cambodians who survived Khmer Rouge prison camps feel particularly strongly about the former foreign minister. Many of them were well-educated people who returned to the country after personal appeals from Ieng Sary to help rebuild Cambodia. They were arrested on arrival, and thrown into brutal detention centres.

Ieng Sary's wife, former social welfare minister Ieng Thirith, is also facing charges.Trials are expected to begin later in the year.

It’s a shame he wasn’t tried in 1979. He would have been rotting in prison for the best part of 30 years already. Here’s hoping he spends the end of his life there.

Serbia not guilty of genocide but...

Serbia has been acquitted of committing genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) but it violated its obligation to prevent the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. It also flouted the genocide convention by failing to arrest Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, even though he was hiding in the country.

In the first case of its kind, Bosnia had asked the ICJ to rule on whether the Serbian nation had committed genocide during the war of 1992-95, which left about 100,000 dead. The binding ruling that Serbia was not guilty of genocide, or of conspiracy to commit genocide.

Reading the landmark ruling, Judge Higgins said: “The acts committed at Srebrenica . . . were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina as such, and accordingly. . . these were acts of genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces. The court has found that [Serbia] could, and should, have acted to prevent the genocide, but did not…. It has not been established that these massacres were committed under the instructions or the direction of the organs of the respondent state [Serbia] nor that the respondent exercised effective control over the operations.” Rejecting Bosnia’s claim for monetary reparations, it added: “Financial compensation is not the appropriate form of reparation for the breach of the obligation to prevent genocide.”

Boris Tadic, the Serbian President, said: “It is important that the Serbian Parliament, as soon as possible, passes a declaration condemning the crime in Srebrenica without any doubt.” He added that Serbia must improve its cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which is still seeking six Serbs indicted for war crimes, including Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader. “If Serbia fails to complete that cooperation . . . I believe we will face dramatic political and economic consequences,” he cautioned. Talks on Serbia joining the EU are suspended over the issue

As far as I am concerned the first thing Serbia should do is not to pass a declaration condemning Srebrenica but to hand over Mladic et al for trial forthwith.