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| |  | | Vojislav Seselj | | | context : | Former Yugoslavia  | | judgement place : | ICTY (Yugoslavia) | | status : | On trial | | particulars : | His trial started on 7 November 2007; trial suspended awaiting an appeals decision | | position : | President of the Serbian radical party (SRS) |
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| | | | Born on 11th October 1954 in Sarajevo, Vojislav Seselj was a brilliant Law student in his town's university.
He first was a communist but then started to criticise the regime. In 1984 he was arrested and sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for counter-revolutionary activities. He was supported by Yugoslavian dissidents and by international pressure, which managed to set him free after 18 months behind bars. He then went to Belgrade where he started to be a militant in the nationalist circles. In 1989 he went to the USA where he was granted the title of "Duke" (vojvoda) from Momcilo Dujic, president of the "Movement of the Tchetniks of the free world". After that he toured the USA, Canada, Australia and Western Europe to raise funds to finance his nationalist activities.
In June 1990 he created the "Serbian Tchetnik Movement" which won more than 100'000 votes during the December 1990 elections. As the Yugoslavian authorities banned his party, he funded on 23rd February 1991 the Serbian radical party (SRS). In June 1991 he was elected deputy at the Republic of Serbia Assembly.
During his election campaign, he exhorted the Serbs to unite and fight the "hereditary enemies" of Serbia, in other words the people of Croatian, Muslim, and Albanese origin who lived in the territories of ex-Yugoslavia.
During and after the war Vojislav Seselj was a very important political personality in the Socialist federative Republic of Yugoslavia then in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). He openly supported the idea to gather "all the Serbian territories" in a homogenous Serbian state.
Consequently he actively participated in forcing the majority of the non-Serbs, amongst whom the Muslims and the Croats, to leave about a third of Croatia, great parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and some parts of Voivodina for good. This was done in order to integrate these regions into a new State dominated by the Serbs. This criminal enterprise supposedly started before 1st August 1991 and may have continued at least until December 1995. Vojislav Seselj worked with several other people to achieve what he wanted, amongst hom Slobodan Milosevic, Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic, Zeljko Razjnatovic (alias Arkan), Biljana Plavsic (see “related cases”), the forces of the Yugoslavian popular army (which became the Yugoslavian army) as well as different Serbian armed groups. Vojislav Seselj may have been a member of this common criminal enterprise until September 1993 when he started to be in conflict with Slobodan Milosevic.
Later Vojislav Seselj kept playing an important political role in Serbian when he even stood at the presidential elections in 2002 where he obtained the third greatest number of votes.
Finally he gave himself up voluntarily at the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) on 24th February 2003. | |     click for more... | | Trial Watch would like to remind its users that any person charged by national or international authorities is presumed innocent until proven guilty. | |  |  | | nationality : | | | Bosnia and herzegovina | | | date of birth : | | | 11.10.1954 | | | last time seen : | | | The Hague (Netherlands) | | | period of charges : | | | 06.1991 - 09.1993 | | | judgement period : | | | 27.11.2006 | | | charges : | | | Crimes against humanity
War crimes | | | profile last modified : | | | 30.08.2008 |
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