Secret Agents from Sherwood Forest

AIM Zagreb, 31 October, 1997

Tudjman himself ordered at the meeting with them: continue the investigation to the end. Two days later, Antonio Lekic, Ivan Drvis and Nikola Kristo, member of the military counter-intelligence Security Information Service (SIS), were suspended and soon after, dismissed from the army. This happened in autumn 1994. Ever since, these three have been trying to set the record straight: they offered documents including data on numerous financial abuses and embezzlements of state funds at the ministry of defence in the beginning of last year, first to the deputies in the assembly, sticking strictly to the rules of procedure. Members of the HDZ immediately proclaimed this file a state secret. The oppositionists agreed to silence making no fuss about it.

The persistent three men started giving parts of what they knew to the press. In the past several days they increased the rate. In independent journals they published a new letter to assembly deputies demanding establishment of a parliamentary commission for verification of their allegations. Although there are still no official reactions, it seems that something is changing after all: last week it was possible to learn unofficially that at the ministry of defence replacements of heads of certain departments have begun - for the realestate affairs, finances, at the political administration - exactly those who the former members of SIS had pointed their fingers at. New replacements of exposed officials in the ministry have also been announced. The pretext for the operation should publicly be "reform of the ministry by the model of NATO". In the end, with praise and applause, even the minister Gojko Susak would leave office, since due to illness it is increasingly hard for him to perform his duties.

There are guesses that in this way, Tudjman and the HDZ are trying to reduce the damage made by the revealing numerous scandals that shook up this ministry by the press. A part of them were revealed by Lekic, Devis and Kristo, soldiers since 1990 who are in their early thirties and who were members of the first units of the Croatian army. As members of SIS (the service which along with counter-intelligence tasks, is in charge of control within the ministry) they started investigation after they had received reports that certain high officials of the ministry were receiving money in order to fix business deals for certain private providers. That is how the tangle started to unravel. Heads of departments, officials, logistics officers, and other employees started to confess, surprised that "some of us" were annoyed that along with orders for the military considerable commissions ended up in somebody's pockets.

The three men soon collected a large number of data. >From small cases, in which a clerk "earned" 50 thousand German marks by taking salaries of long demobilized soldiers by forging their signatures, or the case of a head of a department who bought two golden Rolex watches with state money in order to worm their way into Tudjman's and minister Susak's affection, all the way to enormous shipments of coal or canned meat which were regularly paid for (by millions of German marks) which have never, or were just partly delivered to the ministry. Chains of trade with stolen cars started to be discerned, which were pinched for example in Zagreb under supervision of the military, and then with military licence plates transported to markets in Bosnia & Herzegovina or somewhere in eastern Europe.

But, not long after that the empire struck back: when time came to complete the investigation, approach the big fish and raise criminal charges, the superiors attempted to interrupt the investigation. The three men addressed themselves to minister Susak. "We explained for several hours who in the ministry of defence of the Republic of Croatia was stealing and in what way. He listened patiently, and in the end banged his fist on the table: 'So what if that is the way things are?'", Antonio Lekic says in his interview. They requested reception by Tudjman. He also listened to them, shaking his head in surprise and smiled at mischief of his men. He praised the intelligence officers, took the material they had showed him and sent them away to complete the investigation. But soon after that they were dismissed from service in the army, despite the support of their colleagues (who are probably still supplying them with new documents).

At first, indefinite threats arrived from the ranks they had named. They were accused of being members of extremist nationalistic organizations. They admit membership in one of them - The Croat Nation-Building Movement, but claim that it is not extremist, and that they had put their membership on ice. Then the whole ministry shut itself against the public as it usually does. Scandals with housing units, information such as the one that the ministry is facing bankruptcy because eight thousand companies have not been paid for the jobs done for it, that the ministry has "swallowed" about 30 thousand cars (some legally, by mobilization, and now the owners are seeking their cars back, and some illegally...), and similar - are passed over in complete silence from the ministry.

A rumour goes in Zagreb that in the ministry - on the day when a story about a new case from it appears in the press

• a board of high officials meets, analyzes the situation and usually reaches the decision: we will not give a statement for the public, there will be neither a denial, nor an explanation, we continue to work as before. Stories will be told for a day or two, and then they will die down... In the society without a strong opposition, that is exactly what happens. Zlatko Tomcic, president of the Croat Peasants' Party and member of the assembly commission for national security which is supposed to supervise the army and secret services, agreed to the interpretation that the matter referred to a state secret although he had read 150 pages of serious accusations of financial abuses and organized criminal acts. He says that "it might have been thoughtless and incautious, but in circumstances in which the chairman of an assembly commission officially proclaimed a document to be state secret, it would have been a violation of the law on state secret if quotations from it were brought up in a public discussion".

Antun Vujic, member of the commission from the SDP, says that he knew about the documents, but adds that it is ungratifying to get involved in the internal squaring of accounts in secret services. He also mentions that the opposition has no intention to open issues which will cause its death, in the political environment in which it is impossible to achieve anything. Nowadays, Vujic assesses, the circumstances are much more favourable than two years ago, and his party is "intensely considering" the possibility of initiating the discussion about the problem in the assembly.

The three originators of the whole affair - who are, according to Vujic, probably determined to be the scapegoats - say that different messages are reaching them now from the ministry: they are calling them to come back and offering them much higher posts than the ones they had occupied before. But they wish to resolve the issue in the right way, with full rehabilitation for themselves, with no compromise with the corrupt parts of the ministry of defence. After they had come out in public they have become some kind of Robin Hoods - frustrated people are sending them documents, video-films, facsimiles of evidence about various forms of crimes. They have seen the system both from within and from without, their warnings about the need of civilian control of the army sound convincing. "Check what we are saying. If it is true, arrest and punish the perpetrators, improve the situation in the ministry. If we are wrong - here we are. Arrest us!"

In the latest interview published on Tuesday in the weekly Nacional, Lekic and Drvis declared, among other, that they possessed evidence that each company which had dealt with the ministry of defence had had to pay five or ten per cent of the profit to a secret account opened in one of the banks. This deposit was used by the HDZ for financing its election campaigns. A whole week has passed since then, and everybody is silent again. Both the regime and the opposition...

IGOR VUKIC