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Sainovic (centre) at the Socialist Party main board’s assembly. Photo: Beta.

The Socialist Party of Serbia appointed Sainovic as a member of its main board on Thursday evening, only a week after he returned to Belgrade after serving two-thirds of his war crimes sentence.

Sainovic has been a member of the Socialists since the party once led by Slobodan Milosevic was founded in 1990.

But he has not been involved in politics since he surrendered to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which convicted him of being responsible for a campaign of violence during the 1999 Kosovo war.

He was initially sentenced to 22 years in jail, but last January the court reduced his sentence to 18 years, finding him guilty of participation in a joint criminal enterprise aimed at forcibly displacing the Kosovo Albanian population.

As a result, more than 11,000 people were killed and more than 700,000 Kosovo Albanians expelled.

On his return to Belgrade last Wednesday, Sainovic told reporters that he was not guilty of war crimes but felt responsible for what happened during the conflicts in the 1990s.

“I will not give heroic speeches and I will not say that I sleep peacefully and my conscience is clear because someone who lived through war, as I did, cannot sleep peacefully. I am not guilty, but I feel responsible,” he said.

Sainovic added that he and other Serbian officials were convicted by the UN-backed court in The Hague as individuals, which meant that “the Serbian people were not convicted” as a whole.

He has made no public statements since then.

The Hague Tribunal also established that Sainovic was one of the closest and most trusted associates of Yugoslav president Milosevic, which led to him taking a leading role during the Kosovo war.

After Milosevic died in 2006, during his war crimes trial in The Hague, the Socialist Party appointed Ivica Dacic as its leader.

Dacic pledged to transform the party and adopt a European perspective. He is now Serbia’s foreign minister.

The Socialists were Serbia’s biggest political party for more than a decade. They are now the second-largest and have some 200,000 members.

Media have previously speculated that another two Hague Tribunal defendants, former Serbian security chiefs Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, would join the party, but Dacic denied the claims.

Simatovic and Stanisic were acquitted of war crimes last year, and are now awaiting their final appeals verdict which is due in December 2015.