The head of the Army of Serbia is a man of a problematic past; those convicted or suspected of war crimes are deputies in Serbia’s parliament — they can be found in the top ranks of ruling parties, whereas the highest officials get advice from, and shake hands with, convicted war criminals, some being lecturers at the Military Academy. This is the image of Serbia today, more than 20 years after wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina ended, and almost 20 years since the termination of the war in Kosovo. During the war in Kosovo, General Ljubisa Dikovic was the commander of the 37th Motorized Brigade of the Army of Yugoslavia (VJ), within whose area of responsibility (the area of Drenica), from late March to the middle of June 1999, around 1,400 Kosovar Albanian civilians were murdered, and tens of thousands of people were banished. No, they were not killed and expelled by paramilitaries and outlaw groups that were not under Dikovic’s control. The “Ljubisa Dikovic File,” compiled by the Humanitarian Law Center, contains documents that show that it was almost exclusively police and military units participating in these crimes. Military units were controlled by Dikovic, whereas he cooperated with the police forces. For instance, on March 28, 1999, in the Izbice village in Municipality of Skenderaj, more than 130 male Kosovar Albanian civilians were executed in a brutal manner immediately upon the arrival of Serbian troops. The majority of the civilians were old people, and there were also disabled people among them. They were killed by the police, while Dikovic’s brigade secured the perimeter. Afterwards, in April 1999, in the territory under the command of the 37th Brigade, soldiers partook in violence in the Qirez village, where people were persecuted, and women were locked up and raped. Six girls and women were ultimately murdered. Hundreds of other civilians were killed in other crimes in the villages of Shavarine, Baks and Verboc. Undoubtedly, Dikovic’s brigade did participate in actions in the villages of Rezala and Staro Cikatovo, where 68 civilians were murdered in 1999. This is shown by attack orders and battle reports of the brigade from that period. The bodies of 47 victims from those two crimes, alongside the bodies of an additional five victims from Donje Zabelje and Gladno Selo, were found in early 2014 in a mass grave at Rudnica, close to Raska, where the main barracks of the 37th Brigade were located. Besides this, there is a police document that proves that members of one department of Dikovic’s brigade had the bodies of the Rezala victims in their possession a few days after the killing. In short, General Ljubisa Dikovic is today the chief-of-staff of the Serbian Armed Forces.

Bozidar Delic, ex commander of the 549th Brigade of the VJ, in whose area of responsibility in Kosovo around 2,200 civilians were killed, including a large number of them murdered in military actions, is today a deputy in the Parliament of Serbia, as a member of the Serbian Radical Party.

Vucic has never given a clear stance toward his war past, claiming that his calls to conflict were taken out of context, or that he never even said them.