Charges
Mirsad Repak stands charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and rape. According to the prosecution most of the crimes were committed in the Dretelj detention camp in Southern Bosnia, which was known for the brutality of its guards. Repak pleaded not guilty to the most serious charges. He insisted that he was only following orders. Repak could face up to 21 years in prison. The trial is expected to last eight weeks.

Mirsad Repak (42), a former member of a Croatian paramilitary organization, came to Norway in 1993 as an asylum seeker and obtained Norwegian citizenship in 2001. The court will have to decide whether the Norwegian judicial system has the right to try a person who did not hold Norwegian citizenship at the time the alleged crimes were committed.

New laws

Norway introduced new war crimes legislation in March this year, enabling war crimes trials to be held in Norwegian courts even if the case concerned took place outside the Norwegian borders. The new laws cover crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorism. This is the first war crimes case to be heard in Norway since the Nazi tribunals held after the end of World War II.

Unfair

Repak’s lawyer, Heidi Bache-Wiig, said before entering the courtroom that her client “suffered after what he had to do and what he was ordered to do, and it has haunted him ever since.” “In big conflicts like this one, we should content ourselves with apprehending the decision makers and most senior officials. We never manage to catch them all and it’s perhaps unfair to just go after the little soldiers.”
She called for the case to be thrown out, arguing that the Norwegian constitution prohibits a new law from being applied prior to its enactment.
The prosecutor, on the other hand, argued that the Norwegian parliament had taken that factor into account by adopting the law with a clause stipulating that it could be applied retroactively.

Norwegian media have reported that around 100 war crimes suspects are believed to be residing in Norway. Most are either fugitives from the wars that split up Yugoslavia in the 1990s or from the Rwandan genocide in 1994. With this trial, the Norwegian government aims to demonstrate that Norway is no haven for war criminals.

International Crimes Law in the Netherlands

Crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and torture are punishable in the Netherlands since 1 October 2003. The Law International Crimes follows from the Statute of Rome and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although not stipulated in the Statute, a large number of ICC members have over the last years penalized crimes that fall under the authority of the ICC in their own national legislation and apply the new laws to crimes committed outside the national borders.
The Dutch justice system is authorized to prosecute crimes such as deportation, torture, disappearance, persecution, extermination and slavery, even if they have taken place outside the Netherlands by persons with a non-Dutch nationality. The only requisite is that the suspect is in the Netherlands. The law cannot be applied retroactively. Heads of state and diplomats cannot be prosecuted under this law.

Saltspring Island resident Josip Budimcic is Living Free in Canada

Josip Budimcic, who was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison for war crimes in 1995 in Croatia, will remain in Canada. The Canada Immigration and Refugees` Board reached this decision, which announced that there were no evidence to point that Budimcic has committed war crimes.

Canada`s Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has filed a request before the Canada Immigration and Refugees` Board on 2007, for the refugee status to be revoked, which would enable Budimcic`s deportation. He was given the status of a refugee for claiming he and his wife in Croatia were in danger because he is a Croat and his wife is Serbian. The committee elaborated its provision to refuse the minister’s request in a 57-page document.

During the Osijek County Court trial, four former Croatian Army members testified, saying Budimcic took part in executions and tortured prisoners during the Serbian aggression on Croatia in 1991. However, Board member Ross Pattee said the witnesses were not brought to Canada to testify at the immigration hearing.

Osijek County Court spokesperson Miroslav Rozac said that Croatia cannot do anything, although Budimcic was validly sentenced to 15 years in prison.

- Budimcic has Canadian citizenship and nothing can be done unless Canada extradites him – Rozac said.

With regard to the four witnesses who did not come to testify in Canada, the court spokesperson said the Justice Ministry had jurisdiction.

- The Canadian and Croatian Justice Ministries were supposed to have agreed on giving depositions from Croatia – Rozac said, adding that the witnesses could have testified via video link.

Budimcic left the area of the so-called Serb Krajina during the period of peaceful reintegration. This area was under integration of the Canadian battalion, so he went to Canada and took Canadian citizenship.

Witnesses stated in their deposition that they recognized Josip Budimcic among Chetniks who had tortured prisoners. They said they tied the prisoners up, beat them, extinguished cigarettes all over their bodies and shot above their heads to frighten them.

A Sao Paulo state court said former Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra tortured the three Brazilians when he headed the Sao Paulo secret police from 1970-74.

Local news media report that Thursday’s verdict is the first of its kind in Brazil. The media say the verdict represents only a recognition of guilt, however. Ustra is protected by a sweeping 1979 amnesty that exempts both leftist guerrillas and the military from prosecution for any political crimes committed during the regime.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/AP/story/721079.html

STAHL: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person — if you listen to the expression “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?

SCALIA: No. To the contrary. You think — Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.

STAHL: Well I think if you’re in custody, and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody–

SCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you? What’s he punishing you for? … When he’s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn’t say he’s punishing you. What is he punishing you for?

Watch it:

Julio Salazar Monroe, a retired army general and former head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN), was sentenced to 35 years in prison as an accessory before the fact, for instigating the crimes.

The court also sentenced three former members of the Colina Group, ex-army intelligence service (SIE) agents Fernando Lecca Sequen, José Alarcón Gonzales, and Orlando Vera Navarrete, to 15-year prison terms, for having participated in the kidnapping, torture and murder of the professor and students and the incineration of their bodies.

The Colina Group is also connected to the Nov. 3, 1991, attack in Lima’s Barrios Altos district, in which hooded Colina group members stormed into a squalid tenement building and opened fire on party goers with submachine guns fitted with silencers, killing 15 people. One of the victims was an 8-year-old boy, who was struck by 11 bullets.
In line with a 2006 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the First Anti-Corruption Court ordered those convicted to pay reparations equivalent to 50,000 dollars to each parent, spouse and child of the victims, and 20,000 dollars to each sibling.

Former presidential adviser Montesinos, and former army commander Nicolás Hermoza (1991-1998), are awaiting sentencing.

The alleged leader of the Colina group, ex-army Maj. Santiago Martin Rivas,(a decorated graduate of the U.S. School of the Americas), and Carlos Pichilingüe, as well as some other members of the organization, were not on trial because they are serving 20-year sentences handed down by a military tribunal in 1994. See Abducted Below

The three-judge panel aquited another member of the squad and three officers accused of providing support for it. Acquitted were, retired officers Aquilino Portella, Carlos Miranda and Julio Rodríguez, as well as Manuel Hinojosa and Ángel Pino, for lack of evidence. The verdict made no reference to a ninth man charged
The killings became a landmark human rights case in Peru, where security forces fought a bloody war against Shining Path Rebels in the 1980s and early 1990s. The insurgency began to fade after Abimael Guzman and other key rebel commanders were captured in 1992.
The death squad operated out of the Army Intelligence Service Headquarters as part of a “low intensity” war allegedly sanctioned by former President Alberto Fujimori against Shining Path guerrillas and suspected sympathizers of their Maoist-inspired insurgency.
According to the newspaper La Primera, the military officers who organized Peru’s commandos and the counterinsurgency “dirty war” were trained at SOA, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). (Prensa Latina, Feb.

Fujimori, whose decade-long authoritarian regime crumbled in 2000 amid mounting corruption scandals, is currently facing a separate trial for Colina group massacres. Fujimori has denied any knowledge of the death squad’s existence and says he never approved a dirty war against leftist rebels.
A truth commission determined in 2003 that the insurgency took nearly 70,000 lives between 1980 and 2000, including non-combatants, members of the security forces and rebels.
In 2000 Fujimori fled to Japan, his parents’ homeland, as his 10-year autocratic regime collapsed in a corruption scandal involving Vladimiro Montesinos, his closest adviser.
In 2005, he flew unexpectedly to Chile, from where he was extradited in September 2007 to face trial on human rights and corruption charges.

Abducted

In the pre-dawn hours of July 18, 1992, nine students and one professor “disappeared” from La Cantuta University in the Peruvian capital, Lima. Witnesses saw them being beaten and forcibly dragged away.

In April, 1993, a group of Peruvian military officers calling themselves “Sleeping Lion”, anonymously released a document detailing the La Cantuta massacre. They stated, an official government death squad had kidnapped the ten victims, tortured and murdered them, and then hurriedly buried, exhumed, burned, and reburied the bodies. The document named the death squad members, including its chief of operations, Major Santiago Martín Rivas, and revealed that it operated under orders from the de facto head of the National Intelligence Service, Vladimiro Montesinos, a close ally of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori.

In response to these charges, the Fujimori government suggested that perhaps the ten people at La Cantuta had “kidnapped” themselves and were, in fact, hiding from the authorities.

But on July 8, 1993, Mariella Lucy Barreto Riofano, an agent of the Peruvian Army Intelligence Service, leaked a marked map to a Peruvian magazine. Reporters found the brutalized remains of the “La Cantuta 10″ in Cieneguilla, a holiday resort near Lima. Investigation suggested strongly that the Peruvian intelligence services and the Peruvian army were responsible for the torture and murder, and that the actions were approved by the highest levels of the Peruvian government.

The case was taken to court in 1994, and for the first time military personnel had to answer for their official acts. Charges were brought and eleven perpetrators were convicted, but the court officially cleared the military and the intelligence services of any complicity in the crime. In July, 1995 the government released even those individuals who had been convicted.

The US State Department’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Peru 1996:

A 1995 law granted amnesty from prosecution to those who committed human rights abuses during the war on terrorism from May 1980 to June 1995. When lower court judge Antonia Sacquicuray declared the Amnesty Law unconstitutional, Congress immediately passed a second law blocking any judicial review of the law’s constitutionality. Subsequently, a split decision by a superior court overturned the Sacquicuray decision. These events created considerable concern over military and police impunity for past abuses. The Amnesty Law also cleared the records of security force personnel who had already been convicted of human rights abuses, including the eight military perpetrators of the 1992 La Cantuta massacre, who were sentenced in 1994 but released by military authorities a few days after the Amnesty Law’s passage.
In July the United Nations Human Rights Committee severely criticized the Amnesty Law and called for its repeal. Committee members considered the Amnesty Law a violation of the Constitution, reflecting the earlier Sacquicuray decision. The Amnesty Law demonstrates a lack of serious commitment to accountability and the protection of human rights.

Meanwhile, two months after the State Department released its annual report on Peru, 28-year-old army intelligence agent Mariella Barreto, (former girlfriend of Colina Group Chief, Army Major Santiago Martin Rivas), the Peruvian intelligence operative who had confessed to leaking the information about the La Cantuta massacre, was herself found murdered.

Her body had been decapitated and dismembered by her colleagues in the Army Intelligence Service. “It is believed that Barreto was tortured to death, as her body was bruised, her spine broken, and some of her joints had been cut with a scalpel” (El Diario-La Prensa, April 8, 1997).

To cover up this crime (as is usual for crimes of the regime) then Defense Minister Tomas Castillo Meza announced that the military courts would assert jurisdiction over the Barreto case. Thus, the murderers become prosecutors and judges.

A few days later, Leonor La Rosa, another female SIE agent and partner of Barreto was tortured in the basement of the office of the high military command. In an April 6, 1997 interview, by Peru’s Channel 2 (Frecuencia Latina) La Rosa had revealed in detail that her superiors and fellow SIE intelligence officers had tortured her. Speaking from a military hospital ward, she displayed burn marks from electric shocks to her body. According to La Rosa’s account she was first tortured in January 1997, following a SIN investigation of some press leaks and then in February she was tortured again after refusing to participate in an undercover task linked to a sting operation against Air Force General Waldo Richter.

On June 5, 1997, La Rosa was released from the military hospital, transferred to a private clinic, and then fled to Mexico to save her life.

For publishing this interview and other similar ones, the regime retaliated against the owner of the TV, the Israeli Born Baruch Ivcher Bronstein with the loss of ownership of his TV station, and his Peruvian citizenship.

Victims and their Families

Professor Hugo Muñoz Sánchez
Roberto Edgar Teodoro Espinoza
Luis Enrique Ortiz Perea
Armando Richard Amaro Cóndor
Marcelino Manuel Rosales Cárdenas
Heráclides Pablo Meza
Juan Gabriel Mariños Figueroa
Dora Oyague Fierro
Bertila Lozano Torres
Felipe Flores Chipana

“Justice comes late, but it has come,” said Raida Cóndor, mother of one of the students killed at La Cantuta, who waited with other relatives for nine hours outside the Callao Naval Base to hear the reading of the sentence. “The verdict confirms everything that Fujimori denies. It’s clear that he authorized the murders, and he should pay for them.”

Gisella Ortiz, the sister of another of the murdered students, stressed that the court had determined that the Colina Group was part of the structure of the army and the SIN.

“The order to kill came from above. It’s no longer only we who are saying this: the justice authorities are now saying it,” said Ortiz.

Also, two former Peruvian military officers who attended arms orientation classes at SOA in 1981-1982, Telmo Ricardo Hurtado and Juan Rivera Rondon, are currently being sued in federal court in Miami for leading the units responsible for the death of 69 unarmed civilians living in the Andean highlands of Peru on Aug. 13, 1985. The plaintiffs, survivors of the massacre who lost relatives, are suing under the Alien Torts Statute; they are represented by the San Franciso-based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA).

Swedish soldiers saw French soldiers participating in hours of torture involving a Congolese man in civilian dress, allegedly choking and beating him.

This operation, sanctioned by the United Nation’s, is seen as the European Union’s first joint effort. The force contained approximately 1,500 soldiers, with orders to go to the DR Congo in an effort to provide safety to civilians in the region during 2003.

While the action was a joint effort by EU troops, reports clearly indicated the show was run by the French. It will be interesting to see whether we now have another instance similar to Abu Ghraib

We have requested a transcript from the producers of the documentary. We will post this soon.

http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=2232

The following is the resolution that started it all

COUNCIL DECISION 2003/432/CFSP of 12 June 2003
on the launching of the European Union military operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo
THE COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION,
Having regard to the Treaty on European Union, and in particular
Article 17(2) and Article 25 thereof,
Having regard to the Council Joint Action of 2003/423/CFSP
of 5 June 2003 on the European Union Military Operation in
the Democratic Republic of Congo (1), and in particular Article 6 thereof,

Whereas:
(1) On 30 May 2003, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1484 (2003) authorising, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the temporary deployment of an interim emergency multinational force in Bunia, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
(2) Following the request by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the European Union has decided to provide a temporary stabilisation force in the Ituri Region in implementation of the mandate provided in the UNSC Resolution 1484 (2003) of 30 May 2003.
(3) The Council has authorised the Political and Security Committee to take relevant decisions concerning the political control and strategic direction of the operation.
(4) In conformity with Article 6 of the Protocol on the position of Denmark annexed to the Treaty on European Union and to the Treaty establishing the European
Community, Denmark does not participate in the elaboration and implementation of decisions and actions of the European Union which have defence implications.
Denmark does not participate in the financing of the operation,
HAS DECIDED AS FOLLOWS:
Article 1
The Operation Plan is approved.
Article 2
The Rules of Engagement Authorisation message is approved.
Article 3
The EU military operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo shall be launched on 12 June 2003.
Article 4
The Operation Commander is hereby authorised with immediate effect to release the activation order (Actord) in order to execute the deployment of the forces, prior to transfer of authority following their arrival in theatre, and start execution
of the mission.
Article 5
Without prejudice to Article 15 of the Joint Action 2003/423/ CFSP, this Decision will remain in effect until such time as the forces committed to the operation in Bunia have been redeployed.
Article 6
This Decision shall be published in the Official Journal of the European Union.
Done at Luxembourg, 12 June 2003.
For the Council
The President
G. DRYS

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — The 600 skeletons are packed into fruit cartons and stacked on shelves in the walk-in closet of a forensic lab, in the dim glow of a single bare light bulb. They are “Skeleton No. 4″ or “Skeleton No. 21,” and nothing more.

But a quarter-century after Argentina’s dictatorship and “dirty war” against its own citizens ended, DNA technology raises the possibility of finally learning the identities of these skeletons in the closet, collected from mostly unmarked graves across Argentina.

Funded by U.S. taxpayers, anthropologists have launched an ambitious campaign, drawing on techniques pioneered in Bosnia and at New York’s World Trade Center after 9/11.

On television and radio, celebrities exhort relatives of “the disappeared” to provide blood samples for a nationwide DNA database. A weekday call center advertises its toll-free number on banners at soccer games.

“If you have a family member who was a victim of a forced disappearance … a simple blood sample can help identify them,” says a popular Argentine soccer sportscaster in a TV ad.

The campaign began in November and is already paying off.

“We’ve received some 2,000 telephone calls,” said Luis Fondebrider of the independent Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which was founded in 1984 to document the missing and has since applied its know-how in more than 40 countries, from El Salvador to Iraq to East Timor. It also led the identification through dental records of Cuban revolutionary Ernest “Che” Guevara’s remains, exhumed in the 1990s.

The nonprofit group hopes soon to recruit a U.S. lab to cross-match the samples with DNA from all 600 skeletons in the closet, many of which have bullet holes in their skulls or signs of torture.

Large-scale DNA sampling has become quicker and cheaper since it was pioneered in Bosnia, according to Mercedes Doretti, a founder of the group and a recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”

After Bosnia’s war in the early 1990s, the International Commission for Missing Persons developed a system to conduct sophisticated DNA tests on thousands of exhumed bodies. After 9/11, U.S. experts expanded the technology, building software to compare thousands of DNA samples simultaneously from the fragments from the Twin Towers.

But Doretti’s group didn’t have money to use these new technologies until the U.S. Congress gave it a grant last year of nearly $1.5 million.

The Argentine government provides logistical support, arranges free air time for the advertisements, puts public blood banks at the group’s disposal and speeds the importation of equipment through customs.

Adding to the urgency of identifying the dead, Argentina’s new president, Cristina Fernandez, has pushed to speed up trials in hundreds of human rights cases that were blocked by an amnesty for alleged perpetrators. The amnesty was repealed in 2005.

The campaign could also lead to a more accurate death toll from the “dirty war” against leftist opponents by Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, and bridge the gap between the more than 12,000 officially listed as dead or missing and the 30,000 estimated by human rights groups.

“We hope there might be more people coming forward, especially in the provinces,” to report missing relatives for the first time, said Luis Alen, a government undersecretary for human rights.

In most cases, victims’ remains have never been found, and of those recovered by Doretti’s group, fewer than 300 have been identified.

The last identification was in 2005, when DNA testing gave a name to remains that years earlier had washed ashore, apparently tossed from a “death flight” in which drugged prisoners were thrown alive into the sea. French nun Leonie Duquet was given an emotional funeral at the Buenos Aires church where she had been abducted in 1977.

Such matches were made by steadily improving DNA technology, which helped identify Hugo Omar Argente’s brother Jorge, a youth activist whose body was among 30 dynamited after a 1976 massacre.

“They wanted to make the bodies disappear,” said Argente, 55. “I found out on March 17, 2000, when they called me on the phone and said the test results had identified him. I just cried and cried.”

Unconfirmed reports suggest that hundreds have been arrested. Chinese authorities have not specified the number of detainees. Human Rights Watch and others have previously documented torture and ill-treatment of detainees in Tibet, especially those accused by the Chinese authorities of “separatist” activities.

“Given the long and well-documented history of torture of political activists by China’s security forces there is every reason to fear for the safety of those recently detained,”
said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Only by giving access to independent monitors can China give the world some confidence that detainees are not being tortured or mistreated.”

Chinese officials announced that those who had been involved in the protests must “surrender” to police by midnight on March 16 and that they would be shown leniency if they did so. The officials insisted that the detention of protesters was necessary to ensure public security.

The Chinese government has virtually sealed off Tibet, expelling or turning away foreign journalists and tourists. The Chinese government has long banned independent human rights observers from Tibet and punishes Tibetans who send information out of the country regarding the human rights situation.

“The exclusion of independent monitors and expulsion of foreign media from Tibet only suggest that China wants to retaliate against these protesters unfettered by global scrutiny,” said Adams. “China is in direct violation of its commitment to the International Olympic Committee to allow foreign journalists free access to the whole country, a point the IOC should be making publicly if it is to retain any credibility.”

Before returning the verdict, the military auditor of Mbandaka Military Court, Captain Lingwema Likanza, asked for all who followed the case to break the fear of denouncing any similar act made by men in uniform.

After pointing out the facts, Judge Kole Mukengeshayi thereafter pronounced his verdict which condemned Botuli Itofo, the recognised principal author of the massive rapes, to 20 years in prison.

The eleven other police officers, joint authors of these acts, of which ten are on the run, were condemned to 5 years in prison. All the 12 defendants will have to jointly pay 5,000 dollars to each of the 38 rape victims as damages, in conjunction with the Congolese state, who are civilly responsible for police officers on mission of service.

Overall, 52 women and young girls came forward as rape victims by the police officers. Because of lack of evidence, the court declared the complaints of 22 of the alleged victims as non-founded

Counsel for the state, Mr. François Tshiteya, said he was satisfied with the judgment. The population of Waka and Lifumba, which held their breath for the verdict last Tuesday, is also satisfied with the judgment.

The victims however, are not so confident that the damages awarded will be paid. The Chief of Waka sector, spokesperson for the victims, transmitted this concern to the court immediately after the verdict.

Mr. Tshiteya Counsel promised that upon obtaining the copy of the judgment, he will undertake the procedure whereby the Congolese state will pay the damages. Among the victims, some were repudiated by their husbands after the rapes, and others suffer from sexually transmitted infections.

It should be noted that on the same day another verdict was pronounced by the military tribunal against four police officers, for the murder of one demobilized soldier and the rape of his wife and her mother.

The culprits were condemned to between 6 months and 5 years in prison. They will have to also pay jointly with the Congolese State 5,000 dollars in damages to the family of the deceased demobilized soldier, and 5 thousand dollars to the widow of the demobilised and her mother respectively, in damages relating to the rapes.

Furthermore, MONUC mobilised its helicopter for the transfer of the court to Waka, and in conjunction with the UN High Commission for Human Rights made the open court proceedings a reality.