S. MILOSEVIC, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY IN KOSOVO

Today, The Grandma has been reading about one of the worst moments in the European history, the Balkan Wars.

 

On a day like today in 1999, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands indicted Slobodan Milošević for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)  was a body of the United Nations established to prosecute the war crimes committed during the Yugoslav Wars, and to try their perpetrators.

The tribunal was an ad hoc court located in The Hague, Netherlands.

The Court was established by Resolution 827 of the United Nations Security Council, which was passed on 25 May 1993.

It had jurisdiction over four clusters of crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991: grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, violations of the laws or customs of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The maximum sentence it could impose was life imprisonment. Various countries signed agreements with the UN to carry out custodial sentences.

A total of 161 persons were indicted; the final indictments were issued in December 2004, the last of which were confirmed and unsealed in the spring of 2005. The final fugitive, Goran Hadžić, was arrested on 20 July 2011. The final judgment was issued on 29 November 2017 and the institution formally ceased to exist on 31 December 2017.

Residual functions of the ICTY, including oversight of sentences and consideration of any appeal proceedings initiated since 1 July 2013, are under the jurisdiction of a successor body, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).

United Nations Security Council Resolution 808 of 22 February 1993 decided that an international tribunal shall be established for the prosecution of persons responsible for serious violations of internationalhumanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991", and calling on the Secretary-General to submit for consideration by the Council... a report on all aspects of this matter, including specific proposals and where appropriate options... taking into account suggestions put forward in this regard by Member States.

The Court was originally proposed by German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel.

By 25 May 1993, the international community had tried to pressure the leaders of the former Yugoslavian republics diplomatically, militarily, politically, economically, and –with Resolution 827– through juridical means.

Resolution 827 of 25 May 1993 approved S/25704 report of the Secretary-General and adopted the Statute of the International Tribunal annexed to it, formally creating the ICTY.

The indictees ranged from common soldiers to generals and police commanders all the way to prime ministers. Slobodan Milošević was the first sitting head of state indicted for war crimes. Other high level indictees included Milan Babić, former President of the Republika Srpska Krajina; Ramush Haradinaj, former Prime Minister of Kosovo; Radovan Karadžić, former President of the Republika Srpska; Ratko Mladić, former Commander of the Bosnian Serb Army; and Ante Gotovina, former General of the Croatian Army.

The very first hearing at the ICTY was a referral request in the Tadić case on 8 November 1994. Croat Serb General and former President of the Republic of Serbian Krajina Goran Hadžić was the last fugitive wanted by the Tribunal to be arrested on 20 July 2011.

An additional 23 individuals have been the subject of contempt proceedings.

More information: ICTY

Milosevic will never stop,
because he is fighting for personal power in Serbia.
The only way to stop him is cutting the functioning of his war machine.
He is spending $1.7 million a day on his war machine in Kosovo.

Fatos Nano

JOVAN DIVJAK, THE GENERAL WHO DEFENSED SARAJEVO

Today, The Grandma has read sad news about the death of Jovan Divjak, the army general who defended Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. The Grandma remembers the Balkan Wars as one of the most horrible historical moments of the last century.

Jovan Divjak, in Serbian Cyrillic Јован Дивјак (11 March 1937-8 April 2021) was a Bosnian army general who served as the Deputy Commander of the Bosnian army's main staff until 1994, during the Bosnian War.

Divjak was born in Belgrade to parents originally from the Bosanska Krajina region of Bosnia. His father was stationed in the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) in Serbia. His family, like himself when he was alive, currently reside in Sarajevo, where Divjak moved in 1966. From 1956 to 1959, he attended the Military Academy in Belgrade. In 1964 and 1965, he attended the École d'État Major in Paris. Although Divjak was an ethnic Serb born in Serbia, he identified as a Bosnian.

From 1969 to 1971, Divjak was in the Cadet Academy in Belgrade, and from 1979 to 1981, he served in the War and Defence Planning School there. After several posts in the JNA, he was appointed Territorial Defence Chief in command of the Mostar sector from 1984 to 1989 and the Sarajevo sector from 1989 to 1991.

Between 1991 and 1993, Divjak was court-martialled by the JNA for issuing 120 pieces of light armour and 20,000 bullets to the Kiseljak Territorial Defence and was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment. He avoided the sentence by leaving the JNA and joining the Territorial Defence of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the first days of the war, he was arrested under the charge of collaborating with the Serb forces and was imprisoned for 27 days. In prison, Divjak was on a hunger strike for four days.

More information: Sarajevo Times

Divjak later became the Deputy Commander of the Territorial Defense forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a month later he oversaw the defence of Sarajevo from a major JNA attack.

Between 1993 and 1997, Divjak served as the Deputy Commander of the Headquarters of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, charged with co-operating with civilian institutions and organizations (administration, economy, health, and education).

Divjak, as an ethnic Serb, was made a general in order to present a multiethnic character of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He himself commented on the issue by saying that he felt like a flower arrangement and said that of course, someone has to be a flower arrangement too.

He expressed that it was shameful if his service to the army were only temporary. Indeed, he and Stjepan Šiber (as a Croat) were the only non-Bosniaks in the Chief of Staff. Both of them were offered retirement in March 1996 by the Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegović.

At the beginning of the war, out of 18 percent of Croats and 12 percent of Serbs, only one percent of both remained in the ranks of the Bosnian army. Divjak complained about that to Rasim Delić, then a Chief of Staff, as well as Izetbegović, but it was explained that it was because Bosniak soldiers didn't trust the Serb commanders.

Divjak was later excluded by Delić from the decision making process in the Army. The Bosniaks in the Army allegedly had no confidence in Serb commanders according to Oslobođenje.

Divjak was the executive director of OGBH, Obrazovanje Gradi BiH: Education builds Bosnia and Herzegovina, which he co-founded in 1994. The association's goals are to help children whose families are victims of the war, by providing grants of money, but also to help education in Bosnia, even in the poorest parts of the country, by providing financial and material support.

Divjak has won many international and national awards, including the French Legion of Honour, Order of Lafayette, Sixth of April Award of Sarajevo, the International League of Humanists Plaque, and the Plaque of the Sarajevo Canton.
From 2004 until his death, he was a member of the Steering Board of the NGO Reference Group, Sarajevo. From 1998 until his death, Divjak was a member of the Association of Independent Intellectuals Krug 99, Sarajevo.

Before 1998, he was an active member of other associations, including sports associations, and the faculty of physical education in Sarajevo, and he has been a member of various NGOs in Bosnia.

Divjak was married to his wife Vera from 1960 until her death in 2017. The two had two sons, one of whom served in the Bosnian army. He also had a godson who is a Bosniak whose brothers were killed in the Bosnian War.

He appeared in the BBC documentary The Death of Yugoslavia in 1995 and is the subject of a 2013 Al-Jazeera World documentary, Sarajevo My Love.

In 2006, he was awarded the title of Universal Peace Ambassador by the Worldwide Council of the Universal Ambassador Peace Circle in Geneva.

On 8 April 2021, Divjak died in Sarajevo at the age of 84.

More information: Reuters

General Jovan Divjak defended Sarajevo
during the terrible siege to which
the Bosnian capital was subjected.
He defended a criminally attacked population
because he had decided to live free.

Carles Puigdemont

PABLO PICASSO: THE UNIVERSAL GENIUS OF CUBISM

Pablo Picasso

The Grandma is in Belgrade. She arrived on The Orient Express and she's going to stay until tomorrow. Belgrade was the capital of Yugoslavia, a republic built with the union of different old nations. It's impossible to forget the Balkan Wars at the end of the last century. Thousands and thousands of people died as a consequence of them and The Grandma remembers the city of Srebrenica in Bosnia clearly and dramatically.

Today is the anniversary of Pablo Picasso. Picasso painted one of the most beautiful pictures, Gernika. Gernika is a Basque town which was bombed by the Italian and German aviation during the Spanish Civil War.

Gernika remembers Srebrenica as clearly as remembers Aleppo or Mossul nowadays. The question is how much time we need to take conscience about war only creates destruction, pain and horrible consecuences to the future generations.  

Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Gernika (1937).

More information: Picasso Museum Barcelona

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art. 

The bombing of Gernika, 26 April 1937, was an aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It was carried out at the behest of the Spanish nationalist government by its allies, the Nazi German Luftwaffe's Condor Legion and the Fascist Italian Aviazione Legionaria, under the code name Operation Rügen.

More information: Gernika-Lumo Town Council

The attack gained infamy because it involved the deliberate targeting of civilians by a military air force. The number of victims is still disputed; the Basque government reported 1,654 people killed at the time, while Spanish figures claim around 126. An English source used by the Air War College claims 400 civilians died. Russian archives reveal 800 deaths on 1 May 1937, but this number may not include victims who later died of their injuries in hospitals or whose bodies were discovered buried in the rubble.

 Everything you can imagine is real - Pablo Picasso