Bosnia: Mafia Prosecutors Under Fire

Pressure is increasing on international prosecutors in Bosnia as money runs short and criticism mounts that they’re cutting too many deals with mafia suspects.

The all too frequent use of plea- bargaining has angered Bosnians who accuse the prosecutors - currently appealing to western embassies for more funding - of shoddy investigative practices that allow organised crime figures to get off lightly.

A senior state court figure who has seen the prosecutors’ documentation is among many in Bosnia deeply critical of their performance.

“Poor investigative procedures have preceded badly-framed indictments,” said the source. “The result of such failures is the widespread use of plea bargains.”

An international legal specialist agreed that the organised crime prosecution unit has not lived up to early expectations.

“The international prosecutors have left a very poor impression with their cases so far,” said the specialist, who asked to remain anonymous. “If you read their indictments, a lot of them are based on hearsay.”

The prosecutors were introduced to Bosnia as part of the international community’s strategy for combating the country’s endemic organised crime problem.

The Office of the High Representative, OHR, Bosnia’s international supervisory organisation, had long identified the judiciary as a particularly weak point in the criminal justice system, and hoped foreign prosecutors would be immune to the threats and bribes regularly faced by local judges.

Canadians Jonathan Ratel and John McNair, and Jonathan Schmidt of the United States, arrived in 2003 to join a new unit tasked with fighting economic crime, and attached to the state court.

The department consists of seven international judges and six prosecutors, including three internationals - Ratel, McNair and Schmidt.

Several high profile indictments and arrests soon followed, including three senior members of the nationalist Bosnian Croatian Democratic Party, HDZ, Ante Jelavic, former member of the Bosnian presidency, Miroslav Prce, a former defence minister, and Miroslav Rupcic, director of the Hercegovina Osiguranje insurance company.

The three were charged with the embezzlement of millions of euro, welcome news to Bosnians whose hopes of an end to the country’s organised crime plague rose to an all time high.

But McNair struggled to prove all the complex charges of corruption and embezzlement, and in October 2004, two key indictees - Prce and Rupcic - negotiated a plea agreement with the prosecutor.

Prce was imprisoned for five-and-a-half years and his original indictment reduced from 18 counts to just two. His co-defendant, Rupcic, received a similar jail term.

The precedents set by the Prce and Rupcic trials don’t augur well for the case against the most senior member of the trio, Jelavic.

“Based on what we’ve seen in the trials of his associates, the indications for the Jelavic case are not good,” Senad Avdic, editor of the magazine Slobodna Bosna, told IWPR.

Meanwhile, the trial of Asim Fazlic a former deputy director of Interpol in Bosnia, who was detained on charges relating to for abuse of power, is reportedly on thin ice. A source in the Bosnian state court told IWPR that prosecutor Schmidt has attempted plea bargain negotiations with Fazlic’s lawyers on a number of occasions but has been rebuffed.

The July 2004 indictment for economic crimes against Abduladhim Maktouf, an Iraqi-born Bosnian national, has also run into serious problems.

Maktouf was indicted on charges of tax fraud, illegal exporting, drug smuggling and money laundering, but international prosecutors have since revised the indictment so that it now simply accuses Maktouf of “war crimes against civilians in 1993”.

“Maktouf was not a notable war criminal,” said a state court source. “It would have been much more pertinent to stick to the original charges, and the change in indictment reflects the lack of hard evidence against him for organised crime.”

In yet another case which ended early, Aleksandar Mandic - son of Momcilo Mandic, a Bosnian businessman who is on European Union and US blacklists - received 14 months after agreeing a deal. Co-defendants Drazenko Mandic and Dragoslav Popovic got 15 and 20 months respectively.

A court insider said hard evidence against Mandic was lacking, resulting in the plea bargain. Prosecutor Ratel, however, defended the relatively lenient sentence to IWPR, saying Aleksandar Mandic and the others were merely “intermediate targets” and are now helping with the case against Momcilo Mandic.

“Aleksandar’s father, Momcilo, is the most significant organised crime figure. His son and other associates are all cooperating with the prosecution,” said Ratel.

He went on to defend the prosecutor’s crime fighting record, though admitted gathering evidence can be difficult, because “few people in Bosnia are willing to step forward.

“I can tell you that while it’s very easy for these armchair quarterbacks to criticise, I’m happy we’re on the right track and we’ve gone from zero to here in two years.”

McNair, the chief international prosecutor, insists his team cuts deals with mid-level criminals to secure their cooperation in cases against crime kingpins. He is satisfied with the results to date, pointing out 16 people pleaded guilty in a 13 month period in 2004 and early 2005.

“I’m happy with the sentences imposed by the court,” said McNair.

Privately, however, OHR officials admit the prosecutors are struggling to build strong cases against powerful figures alleged to have committed serious economic crimes.

“We have not been systematic enough in gathering evidence against these people,” said a long-serving OHR staff member.

Another OHR source told IWPR, “The prosecutors were a main feature of [High Representative] Lord Ashdown’s strategy for fighting organised crime in Bosnia, but their effectiveness is being called into question as a result of the lack of serious convictions.”

Independent analysts also question the prosecutors’ effectiveness.

Transparency International’s Srdjan Blagovcanin said the large number of plea bargains “casts a shadow” over the their work.

“The law was amended to accommodate the possibility of the plea bargain, but it has now become practice to end cases with this, and that is not good,” he said.

The International Crisis Group’s Balkan director, James Lyon, was more sympathetic, pointing out that financial reporting in Bosnia is extremely irregular.

He pointed out companies often keep two or three sets of books, making it hard to detect questionable transactions.

“When the US or EU blacklist someone in Bosnia for supporting war criminals, or the OHR fires an official, they don’t have to substantiate the allegations in court. They can cite ‘intelligence sources’ and that’s it. The accused has no right of appeal as a way of shedding light on the evidence against him.

“But the prosecutors must back up accusations with court-admissible evidence, and that makes their job harder than most.”

All this comes amid serious concerns about the long-term future of the prosecutors’ mission as funds are running low, leading to appeals to the international community for donations to keep the project going.

The OHR had hoped the cost of the team would at some stage be borne by the state court.

But those hopes were dashed in December 2004, when the Bosnian parliament passed a law which reconfigured the state court’s prosecution service into three separate departments - war crimes, organised crime and common crime. The law made no funding provision for international prosecutors in the area of organised crime.

Despite the problems, foreign donors are expected to respond to the appeal for fresh funds as many see the presence of internationals in Bosnia’s judicial system as essential for some time to come.

“International prosecutors are still needed in the unit for organised crime because they are more independent, and it is much harder to put them under pressure than local prosecutors,” said Transparency International’s Blagovcanin.

Nerma Jelacic is IWPR’s project director in Bosnia and Hercegovina. Hugh Griffiths is an investigations coordinator with IWPR.