Dragomir Pećanac has been sentenced to three months in prison by judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for contempt of court.

"Contempt of the Tribunal is a serious offence, which goes to the essence of the administration of justice,” Judge Christoph Flügge told Pećanac. “By your failure to comply with the subpoena and to appear at the seat of the Tribunal and testify, you have acted against the interests of justice.”

Pećanac has refused to testify at the trial of Zdravko Tolimir, who is charged with genocide, extermination and other crimes in Srebrenica and Zepa in 1995. One reason he gave for ignoring the subpoena is that he is in poor health, but judges ruled Friday that he never substantiated that claim. He’s been in the Tribunal’s detention centre in The Hague since 9 October.

Close ties

According to the SENSE News Agency, which closely follows the Tribunal’s proceedings, Pećanac’s name has come up several times in previous Srebrenica trials. General Radislav Krstic, a former commander in the Bosnian Serb army who has been convicted of aiding and abetting genocide by the Tribunal, told prosecutors that Pećanac was the third most responsible person for the Srebrenica massacres—after only Ratko Mladic and Ljubisa Beara and ahead of Zdravko Tolimir.

SENSE also says that several witnesses identified Major Pećanac as the officer who picked seven or eight members of the 10th Sabotage Detachment for a “special task" on the morning of 16 July 1995: the execution of more than 1,000 Muslim men at the Branjevo farm.

There’s also been much speculation that Pećanac was at one point Mladic’s chief of security—close enough, in any case, to both Mladic and Tolimir that he waved to Tolimir at one court appearance. A search of Pećanac’s Belgrade apartment also produced some 11,000 documents that have been admitted into evidence in Tolimir’s trial and handed over to Karadzic, former political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, as possible exculpatory material for his own genocide trial.

Not over yet

Given his senior position in the Bosnian Serb military during the war and what many feel he must know, prosecutors are intent on putting Pećanac on the stand and have not given up trying to secure his testimony. Earlier this week, prosecutors filed a motion asking judges to “set a date for Mr. Pećanac to appear as a witness for the purposes of providing testimony and should he refuse, for the Chamber to order him to do so.”

If Pećanac refuses to testify again, he could face yet another contempt charge. He wouldn’t be the first: Shefqet Kabashi refused to testify in the case of Ramush Haradinaj, former leader of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that was fighting for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia in 1998. Kabashi refused to say why he wouldn’t testify and was sentenced to two months in prison at Haradinaj’s original trial (he is currently being retried). He already served this sentence.

Pećanac, too, is also almost free, having served 74 days already, making him now eligible for release. That led one courtroom observer to call Friday’s sentence largely symbolic. Whether there will be further attempts by the ICTY to enforce talk-orders remains to be seen.