At the beginning of last year, the Montenegrin Committee of Lawyers for the Protection of Human Rights submitted an initiative to the local government of Rožaje to be supported in the intention of erecting a memorial to the victims of the war crime committed against Kosovo civilians who tried to find salvation in the Rožaje part of Montenegro in the first half of 1999. Indisputably, the crime against twenty-one civilians, among whom were children, women and the elderly, was committed by members of the then Army of Serbia and Montenegro, which at that time controlled the Rožaje territory militarily and in every other sense.
But the crime happened as it happened, and the belated report was decided only after five years. And if the forensic teams documented the crime, all those years there was an active silence about it. The local and Montenegrin police remained silent, the citizens perhaps out of fear, and of course the military structures, probably counting on habitual oblivion. There was also a silent accusation against the then “suspected” eight, and then the expected court decision that they were not guilty of the crime. Summing up all this, it seems obvious that such an epilogue defeated human justice, first of all, it struck at the irrefutable truth about the innocent blood shed in this country where they say there was no war. On one side, there are indisputable non-war civilian victims, on the other, also still unnamed perpetrators from the ranks of the then army. If you want, on the third, the institutions of state justice that decide on the cause, responsibility and consequences, it will turn out that they did not effectively interfere in their work.
Lawyers would say: yes, we have the victims as silent witnesses, neither the motive nor the act of committing the crime is in dispute, but those who were accused, in the end, reliably, due to the bad accusation, were not guilty. And indeed, following strict legal reasoning, according to the accusation that brought them to justice, they could not have been guilty. For the lay public, such an attitude may be problematic, least understandable, and even less acceptable. What is it about then? According to the prosecutor's indictment, seven military reservists are charged with responsibility for, among other things, opening fire on a column of civilians in the town of Kaluđerski laz on April 18, 1999, when six of them were killed at one point. The indictment accuses the commander of the military unit of allegedly ordering the killing of civilians at that and several other locations. It turns out that out of the twenty-one victims, for who knows why, five of them did not deserve the prosecutor's attention in terms of the status of victims of the crime. In addition, if it is known that the court judges only within the limits of the determined and factually designed accusation, the focus of the court's interest is limited by the law itself. Following this context, while not reducing its position to the names of the perpetrators of the crime, the court correctly determined that the victims of the crime were the result of the actions of members of the military, because access to the places where the crimes were committed was not possible for someone else to whom the crime would be attributed.
With such a deliberately designed accusation, because a possible mistake was ruled out, the defense of the accused found the key to the judicial legal resolution of the problem without any special effort or problem. In relation to the commander of that military unit, an answer was sought to the key question: has it been proven that he ordered the killing of civilians, and in relation to the seven military reservists, is it possible to prove that the specific crime was committed with their weapons? Without any doubt, even if all of this existed, there is no written, let alone verbal, evidence of all of this. In the context of the “truth denied, unproven, and relativized” by the accusation, it was necessary to determine with which weapon out of the thirty or so members of the military platoon, and only seven of them were accused, the crime against civilians was committed. Therefore, following the old rule “In dubio pro reo” (in case of doubt in favor of the accused), the defense of the accused had no problem proving the thesis: “it is not known with which weapon which of the victims was killed”. It was precisely according to this logic that the charges were dropped, unfortunately and by all accounts, the prosecutorial and judicial side of that crime was closed. It was closed because from 2014, when the trial was concluded, to all these years until today, in terms of investigating and prosecuting crimes, apart from the transparently announced strategies for investigating war crimes, which, at least as far as we know, have not come out of the prosecutor's offices - nothing new has happened.
Over time, although hopes have not been buried, instead of judicial justice, the families of the victims are comforted by undisturbed annual commemorations, gatherings at the places of execution of the innocent, with the sending of messages from those who call the crime by its true name. Although in a difficult collision with the undeniable truth about the crime, Montenegro "perseveres" in a peaceful state sleep. On the other hand, in its inability to investigate the crime and bring those responsible to justice, instead of a court verdict and for the sake of not forgetting and morally and humanly condemning the crime, for a year now, through the Montenegrin Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms, those affected by the consequences of the crime have expressed their intention to mark the crime site with a sign with the names of the victims and a human message: "Everyone is born to live once, shame and disgrace live forever" - Njegoš.
The realization of this intention was not prevented by any army or alien force, but by the government ministry in charge of culture and heritage, whose signature has been awaited for a year. Despite the fact that a very complex formal and legal procedure was followed, a special program of ideas supported by the local administration, and the preparation of the design and actual construction of a modest memorial to the victims and not the event, all this paperwork is mercilessly awaiting the obviously uncertain decision of the government ministry. In all this, a reasonable dilemma arises - whether the government ministry does not understand or does not want to understand the cultural and human aspect of the memorial, its apolitical but empathetic intentions of every reasonable person, or is perhaps guided by a one-way reading of the truth about the facts and victims - to all this, no real answer can be found. Finally, it seems quite certain that the ministry, which by nature should be the bearer of the entire matter, has in this case turned into a kind of administrative barrier, which is why a reasonable question from the victims of crime is looming and being imposed: "Who cares about the monuments and their innocently shed blood?"
The author is a lawyer; he is the executive director of the Montenegrin Committee of Lawyers for the Protection of Human Rights.
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