Ex-Serbian official [Vlastimir Dordevic] guilty of war crimes - murderer of women and children
Ex-Serbian official [Vlastimir Dordevic] guilty of war crimes - murderer of women and children
“In the large majority of cases the victims, including many women and children, were civilians, who were unarmed and not in any way participating in any form of armed conflict,” the court found.
Serbian War Criminal, Vlastimir Đorđević
THE HAGUE, Netherlands, Feb. 23 (UPI) — Former Serbian police official Vlastimir Dordevic was convicted of war crimes by a U.N. tribunal Wednesday and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
Dordevic, a former assistant minister of the Serbian Internal Affairs Ministry and chief of its Public Security Department, was convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, Netherlands.
Dordevic was found to have participated in a “joint criminal exercise in 1999, whose aim was to change the ethnic balance of Kosovo to ensure Serbian dominance in the territory,” the tribunal said in a release.
Vlastimir Đorđević (born 1948 in Koznica, Serbia) is a Serbian colonel general.
Đorđević was born in 1948 in Koznica and graduated from University of Belgrade Faculty of Law. Đorđević was Assistant Minister of the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Chief of the Public Security Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1997, Đorđević was promoted from Lieutenant General to Colonel General by presidential decree. He remained the Assistant Minister and Chief of the Public Security Department until January 2001. Until 17 June 2007, he was believed to be hiding in Russia. On the morning of 17 June 2007, Đorđević was arrested in Montenegro, near the city of Budva.
Đorđević was on the run charged with war crimes in Kosovo. He is indicted for being part of the 1999 Serb crackdown on Kosovo Albanian citizens. As Chief of the Public Security Department, he was responsible for ensuring that all units of the Public Security Department in Serbia and Kosovo carried out their orders.
The Vučitrn massacre was mass killing of Kosovo Albanian refugees near Vučitrn, during the Kosovo conflict on May 2 1999.
A column of about 1,000 refugees were travelling in a convoy of about 100 tractors, who were fleeing fighting between the KLA and Serbian forces east of Vucitrn. Serbian Police and Serb paramilitary forces caught up with the convoy that traveled south. On May 2 and 3 between Gornja Sudimlja and Donja Sudimlja (alb. Studime e Eperme and Studime e Poshtme) near Vučitrn, police and paramilitaries killed an estimated one hundred men.
Romeu Ventura, an investigator for the UN war crimes tribunal, stated that 120 civilians were murdered on 2 May by Serb forces and buried two days later in a mass grave five miles east of Vucitrn. After the war, forensic teams from the War Crimes Tribunal discovered ninety-eight bodies in Gornja Sudimlja.
Vučitrn case has been raised at the trial of Serbian police general Vlastimir Djordjevic. The indictment against general Djordjevic alleges that some 105 Kosovo Albanians were killed in the massacre near the village of Sudimlje on 2 May 1999. Eventually, Djordjevic was sentenced to 15 years in prison.