here - Humanitarian Law Center/Fond za humanitarno pravo

how it is possible that a person elected to such an important judicial office and who heads the
government body whose task is to strictly and unreservedly implement the law, was unaware of
the details of this law.
A second reason why the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor dropped the charges, according to
Vukčević, was the decision by the Serbian government of 2000-2002 to treat the LAPBM as a
terrorist organisation rather than a party to the armed conflict. Consequently, the criminal
offences committed by the LAPBM cannot be considered war crimes, because in order for an act
to be considered a war crime it must fulfil the necessary requirement of having been committed
during an armed conflict.
However, contrary to prosecutor Vukčević’s claims, offences committed in 2000-2001 in south
Serbia, both by members of the LAPBM and members of Serbian forces may be treated as war
crimes because an internal armed conflict between the LAPBM and Serbian forces was ongoing,
something which can be clearly inferred from the ceasefire agreement in southern Serbia,
brokered by Peter Faith, the Special Envoy of the NATO General Secretary, and signed by the
LAPBM and the Serbian authorities in 2001. Article 3 of this agreement states as follows: “The
parties to the agreement recognise and abide by the Additional Protocol to the Geneva
Conventions (Protocol II) of 12 August 1949 relating to the protection of victims of noninternational
[internal] conflicts.”
Many of the circumstances surrounding these arrests indicate that they were politically
motivated: they took place two days before the Serbian general election and gained the Minister
of the Interior, Ivica Dačić, who ran for President of Serbia, a lot of publicity during the
blackout period. Contradictory, inadequate and divergent public statements made by
representatives of various institutions on this occasion, reveal that the arrests were hastily
organised. And the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor, in acting the way it did, not only 'went
on the campaign trail' but also sent a poor message to the victims of the gravest human rights
violations and the general public – that prosecution of war crimes in Serbia depends not just on
evidence and applicable laws but also on politics.
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