BELGRADE, SERBIA — The doctors treating a former Serbia security chief charged with war crimes made an appeal to a Netherlands-based U.N. court Thursday, saying he was too sick to stand trial and shouldn’t be forced to return to detention.
Jovica Stanisic, 58, has chronic ulcerous colitis, depression and kidney stones. The trial against him and co-defendant Franko Simatovic, his former deputy, was halted May 16 for at least three months so Stanisic could undergo a health review.
Stanisic, who headed Serbia’s state security during the rule of former President Slobodan Milosevic, was temporarily released from detention at The Hague-based tribunal for the former Yugoslavia last month and returned to Serbia pending the outcome of the health review.
It was not immediately clear if doctors appointed by the tribunal would examine Stanisic or when it would make a decision on whether to resume the trial. In the meantime, he remains under strict surveillance.
“We undoubtedly conclude that the stay in detention … has made both his physical and psychological state worse,” the doctors said in a statement obtained by The Associated Press.
There was no immediate comment from the tribunal to the statement, a copy of which was sent to tribunal president Fausto Pocar, the court’s chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz, Serbian President Boris Tadic and others.
Stanisic and Simatovic have pleaded not guilty to charges of training, arming and directing paramilitary units that murdered and persecuted non-Serbs during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Stanisic was a close aide to Milosevic, who instigated the wars.
Milosevic himself died of heart failure in 2006 while on trial at the tribunal, which was established in 1993.
Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor, meanwhile, launched an investigation Thursday against 28 former fighters of Kosovo’s pro-independence rebels for alleged atrocities against Serbs in 1998.
The war in Kosovo erupted in 1998 when ethnic Albanians launched a rebellion to fight for independence from Serbia. The region declared independence earlier this year, but Serbia refused to acknowledge the split.
