Easy War Crimes Charges

AIM Zagreb, July 3, 2001

At the beginning of July the trial of six Serbs from Baranja will continue. They are only several of a long list containing the names of 112 alleged "war criminals." The list has for years been one of the most controversial papers produced by the Croatian judiciary, otherwise an inexhaustible source of scandals, and not only when war crimes are involved. The six Serbs are part of a group of 18 Serb inmates who were on hunger strike in the Osijek detention center at the end of June, and because of whom Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica also intervened by saying that Croatia has been violating human rights. The inmates went on strike to inform the public of their plight and of what they called delays in the justice process.

"These people are merely models the Croatian government has been parading before the public after failing to lay its hands on real war criminals," says Stevan Dobos, one of the lawyers of the Serb suspects. During the war in Croatia Dobos was a military judge, and because of that his knowledge of events in Eastern Slavonia and Baranja during the war should not be doubted. Given that he was a military judge at the height of the war, when great care was taken of who was to hold sensitive offices, he cannot be accused of bias. The Osijek district prosecutor compiled the list of 112 alleged war criminals as early as 1995, asking that an investigation be launched, and the district court issued warrants for their arrest. It was an extremely shoddy job: the prosecutor, probably with the blessings of the ruling party of the time, the Croatian Democratic Union, ordered the arrest of a number of Serbs on charges of war crime on the basis of unclear and incomplete statements from witnesses who lived in Baranja before the war or were exiled after the rebel Serbs established their rule there.

The Baranja list is only one of several "lists of war criminals" that were published by judicial authorities at various levels over the past years. Jacques Paul Klein, the former transitional administrator of the UNTAES region, the area today better known as the Croatian Danube Basin Region, gave what was maybe the best description of how the lists were compiled, who they included, and what happened once the gathering of evidence began. Upon seeing one of the lists issued by a Croatian judicial office, U.S. Gen. Klein, the man who should be credited the most for the peaceful reintegration of Eastern Slavonia and Baranja with Croatia, said cynically: "I'm surprised my name isn't listed here!"

And, indeed, Klein was right. No national judiciary can be content with the consequences of a job poorly done by one of its district prosecutors, which reduced its list of wanted "war criminals" from 112 to 58 people. And this is exactly what the Osijek district prosecutor was forced to do by eliminating on two occasions almost one-half of the suspects by dropping all charges against them.

The case of Stevan Borjanic, a Serb from Baranja, is a good illustration of the criminal sloppiness and irresponsibility of Croatia's courts, not only when war crimes charges are concerned, but also in regard to warrants arbitrarily issued for the arrest of ordinary people. Borjanic was arrested on Feb. 9 this year and held in detention 18 days only because his name was the same as that of another man from Beli Manastir, who was accused by a witness of beating a Croat at the Beli Manastir police station while the Serb rule there was in effect. The other Stevo Borjanic left for Yugoslavia long before his namesake's arrest. Despite the fact that the two Borjanics have different dates of birth, that their fathers' names are different, as well as their personal ID numbers (registered by Croatian police, both of them being born in Croatia!), the Croatian judiciary didn't mind detaining a completely innocent person after being unable to arrest the actual suspect.

Stevo Borjanic, son of Kranislav Borjanic, was set free only after the witness who initially reported the case failed to recognize Stevo Borjanic, son on Milan Borjanic, in a lineup. "I do not want to say that the other Stevo Borjanic is guilty of what he is charged of, but I kept saying that I am not the Borjanic they were looking for. Nobody believed me until the lineup was organized, and until then a serious war crimes charge loomed above me," says Stevo Borjanic. "When I was arrested, the papers published my full name and said what I was suspected of. A local radio station in Beli Manastir reported all that and the next day that Croatian returnees to Baranja could feel safe because yet another war criminal had been put behind bars. Of course, when it turned out that I was arrested by mistake and when I was released, nobody published that," says Borjanic.

Serb leaders from the Danube Basin -- Milos Vojnovic, chairman of the Serb Joint Council of Municipalities, and Dr. Vojislav Stanimirovic, president of the Independent Democratic Serb Party -- agree that the new Croatian government is using the issue of Serb war criminals for its political endorsement much like the Croatian Democratic Union government did before the Jan. 3, 2000, elections it lost. "When last year Tihomir Oreskovic and some other Croats were arrested on charges of war crimes against Serb civilians in Gospic in the autumn of 1991, several Serbs were immediately arrested in Baranja on similar charges. When this year Gen. Mirko Norac was arrested, again several Baranja Serbs found themselves behind bars as well. It isn't simply a coincidence that on the day the Norac trial was to begin in Rijeka, the trial of six Baranja Serbs for war crimes was set to begin in Osijek," says one of the Serb leaders in the region.

Now that the former Serbian and Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, the main protagonist of the bloody Balkan drama (whose indictment will be expanded to include the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina) is in The Hague, and with the pending extradition of Milan Martic, the leader of the rebel Serbs in Croatia, as well as the handing over of Sljivancanin, Mrksic, and Radic -- the Vukovar Trio responsible for numerous deaths in the city and its destruction – the time has come for the Croatian judiciary to investigate charges of war crimes in a more responsible manner. If what has happened so far can be explained, but not justified, by pressure from numerous victims of the war, especially those who lost loved ones, to which the judiciary succumbed in a bout of rashness, there is no reason to continue making the same mistakes any longer.

Drago Hedl

(AIM)