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Milenko Lemic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague.

Milenko Lemic, a retired officer of the Serbian Security Service (SDB), told Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic’s retrial at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday that most of the paramilitaries present in Croatia’s Eastern Slavonia area in 1991 were from armed groups run by Serbian political parties, but said he did not hear anything about their involvement in fighting.

Stanisic, the former chief of the Serbian SDB, and Simatovic, former commander of the SDB-run Special Operations Unit, are charged with having been protagonists in a joint criminal enterprise led by then Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, aimed at permanently and forcibly removing Croats and Bosniaks from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to achieve Serb domination.

Lemic told the court that as an intelligence officer, he was present in the Eastern Slavonia area in August 1991.

He said he was collecting information through “informal interviews” and that paramilitary organisations were among the subjects of his interest.

“As far as I can remember now, [Serbian politician] Mirko Jovic’s group, the Serbian Radical Party’s group and a group from the Serbian Renewal Movement [were there]. These three groups were the most numerously represented in the area,” Lemic said.

“We were informed of their crossing into that area, there was a lot of indiscipline and a lot of this information came from the people we talked to. I did not have any contact that would give me direct insight into all those developments,” he added.

Asked whether these paramilitary groups carried out armed operations at the time, Lemic responded: “That is something I do not know.”

He also said he did not know about crimes committed in the same area by paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan, saying that he only heard of them from Croatian media.

Although the hearing was formally open to the public, most of it was not broadcast by the UN court’s website, which shows all open sessions of the court.

Stanisic and Simatovic defendants pleaded not guilty in December 2015 after the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia overturned their acquittal in their first trial.

The appeals chamber ruled that there were serious legal and factual errors when Stanisic and Simatovic were initially acquitted of war crimes in 2013, and ordered the case to be retried and all the evidence and witnesses reheard in full by new judges.

Defence lawyer Wayne Jordash told the court in June that the defence will call witnesses who will confirm that Stanisic was not in command of Serbian paramilitary or police units in Bosnia or Croatia during the war, as the indictment claims.

Stanisic has been on provisional release in Belgrade since July 2017 due to illness, but the trial has continued without him being present in court.