Opposition party activist Miodrag Malic was sentenced to three years in prison for hailing convicted war criminals at a political rally, but can appeal.
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Miodrag Malic (L) with his lawyer, Milan Petkovic. Photo: BIRN.
The Bosnian state court on Monday found Miodrag Malic guilty of glorifying former Bosnian Serb military and political leaders Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic – contravening a state law that prohibits the public praising of war crimes and genocide convicts.
The court found that Serb Democratic Party activist Malic committed the offence at a rally of opposition parties in Banja Luka, the administrative centre of Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska, in November 2022.
Malic took to the stage holding photographs of Mladic and Karadzic in one hand, while raising three fingers in a traditional Serb salute with his other hand.
Based on the evidence, the court determined that Malic’s actions committed the offence of inciting national, racial and religious hatred, discord and intolerance, and that he acted with direct intent.
“There is no basis for the defendant’s claim that he did not know about the verdicts, because such verdicts are public,” said presiding judge Sena Uzunovic.
The verdict was a first-instance judgement and can be appealed.
A legal change to ban the denial of genocide and war crimes and the glorification of war criminals if it is “likely to incite to violence or hatred” was imposed in July 2021 by High Representative Valentin Inzko, the international official responsible at the time for overseeing the implementation of the peace deal that ended the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
Inzko said he was imposing the changes because he was “deeply concerned that prominent individuals and public authorities” in Bosnia and Herzegovina were continuing to deny that the Srebrenica genocide. Serb leaders in the country refuse to accept that the 1995 massacres of Bosniaks by forces under Mladic’s command constituted genocide.