Serbia Did Control Brutal Aggression Against Croatia

Borivoja Savic
at UN MICT Hague
Photo credit: MICT

Serb Borivoje Savic’s (a witness for the prosecution at the UN Mechanisms for International Criminal Tribunals/MICT in The Hague), 2012 amalgamated  statement (PDF) in the war crimes committed in Croatia proceedings against Goran Hadzic was, 5 September 2017, admitted by court decision as evidence in the Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic war crimes retrial.

Stanisic, who was the chief of the Serbian Secret Service SDB from 1992, and his former assistant Simatovic are being retried for the persecution, murders, deportations and forcible resettlement of Croat and Bosniak civilians during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1991 to 1995.

According to the charges, they were part of a joint criminal enterprise led by former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, aimed at forcibly and permanently removing Croats and Bosniaks from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to achieve Serb domination.

Two former secret police chiefs – Jovica Stanisic, the former head of Serbia’s state security/SDB , and Franko Simatovic, his deputy, once held to be among the most powerful men in Serbia, went on trial Tuesday 13 June 2017 at The Hague for the second time, accused of running a lethal network of covert operations during the 1990-95 conflict in which Serbia wanted to prevent the break-up of Yugoslavia despite the fact that majority of people in states that made up Yugoslavia, except Serbia, voted to secede from communist Yugoslavia.  The ICTY/MICT prosecutors hold that the operations were intended to impose as well as conceal the wartime policies of Slobodan Milosevic, the then Serbian president. The policies that with their intent could perhaps be captured in a sentence uttered by Milosevic in 1989: “Either Serbia will be united or there will be no Serbia!” With this non-Serbs across former Yugoslavia began to tremble.

Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic
Photo credit: MICT

A former Serbian Democratic party official from Vukovar (Croatia) Borivoje Savic’s appearance at the UN MICT yesterday, on Tuesday 12 September 2017, in relation to the Stanisic and Simatovic retrial strongly reiterated his former statements’ claim  that the Serbian State Security Service (SDB) played a key role, established, controlled and armed Serb forces that waged war in Croatia (early 1990’s).

He said to the court  that the plan and goal Serbia had at the time was for “all Serbs to live in one state”, and that Serbian politician Mihalj Kertes had passed that goal-related resolution as  “Serbia’s unambiguous stance” to Serbian politicians from Croatia in late May 1992. As evidenced by Savic’s testimony Kertes was “Slobodan Milosevic’s trusted man”. According to his further testimony, Kertes was a close associate to defendant Stanisic and played a key role in arming Serb forces in Kninska Krajina and Eastern Slavonia, which began in August 1990 “seemingly under the auspices of the SDS, but actually under the auspices of the Serbian SDB”.

Savic said the Serbian SDB also deployed paramilitary units controlled by Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan, to the Croatian region of Eastern Slavonia in the spring of 1991. Arkan’s men committed grave crimes against Croats and other non-Serb civilians in Croatia, he testified.

“As soon as they arrived in the field, they executed all the Croats and Hungarians and threw them into wells… Arkan’s guards had the role of both the law and the court,” Savic said to the court and continued, “the victims who were killed in the Croatian villages of Erdut, Dalj and Aljmas were “civilians who did not want to leave” after the Yugoslav National Army “had expelled the local population”.

“Old men and women were killed,” he said, and told the court that the local Serb authorities knew about this.

Savic was clear and insisted that it was “only the Serbian SDB” who was responsible for Arkan’s actions and that “the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia had nothing to do with what Arkan did”.

Given Savic’s testimony so far it somehow does not surprise, even if it does enrage and anger, that Croatian Serb politician Milorad Pupovac has been most aggressive and forceful the past week or so regarding the HOS Plaque (Croatian defence forces) in memory of the men who were killed there in 1991 defending Croatia from Serb aggression, and insisting it be taken down because, according to him and other communist liars, it represents the WWII fascist regime (which is untrue). The HOS plaque from Jasenovac was removed from its original place and relocated to a place of Novska some 9 km away.

Pupovac keeps dumping hateful material how HOS Plaque marking the place where Croatian defenders were killed in defending Croatia from Serb aggression cannot remain in Jasenovac because nearby is the WWII Jasenovac camp which marks the place of Jew, Roma, Serb and Croat WWII exterminations. Pupovac is evidently trying every way to hide the atrocity that his Serb people perpetrated against Croatians in the 1990’s. One wonders how much his heightened activities regarding that HOS plaque and likening it to fascist symbol had to do with him trying to divert attention from what was and is going on with the Simatovic and Stanisic case in The Hague. That is, Pupovac being politically active in 1990’s, promotion of Serb agenda during the Serb aggression against Croatia, was very likely one of those Serbian politicians Savic’s testimony speaks of in Croatia who knew Serbia’s plan to ethnically cleanse of Croats and non-Serbs the territory of Croatia Serbs wanted for themselves – and permitted the atrocities to occur. It is a terrible and almost an unthinkable thing to have to be placed into a situation where one is required by politics to tolerate in such important public role such people as Pupovac, who neither show remorse nor regret anything about the ethnic cleansing, mass murder, rapes, devastation Serbs in the name of Serbia committed against Croats and Croatia. Croats in Croatia are being placed in the situation where they must tolerate Pupovac; how utterly unacceptable and awful, especially for the victims of Homeland War. Pupovac is a member of the Croatian parliament representing a part of Serb minority and the feathers of his political wings have grown noticeably since the struggling HDZ took him into their coalition for governing majority in May/June 2017. Any such government that permits such political alliances that go against everything Croatian people have fought for, lost lives for…deserves to be harshly judged by the people and ousted from government if necessary. For the sake of its survival as a democratic state, removed from communism and Serbia, Croatia simply must base its existence and its principles and foundations of its existence upon the goals and achievements of its 1990’s Homeland War. Ina Vukic