"I Would Acquit Him Again!"

The first trial for General Trifunovic and a group of officers of the Varazdin Corps was held in a court-martial in Belgrade from April 13 until June 17, 1992. The board of judges presided by Colonel Milos Saljic acquitted them, believing that they acted in circumstances of extreme necessity, which excluded their criminal liability. Following a complaint lodged by the military prosecutor, the Supreme Military Court annulled General Trifunovic's first acquittal verdict. Shortly after, Colonel Saljic quit the military judiciary system. According to many, he was actually forced to leave the court in which he had worked for 25 years.

Otherwise, that first "Varazdin trial" was held under rather unusual circumstances. General Trifunovic and other officers of this Corps were sentenced long before they had actually entered the courtroom. Immediately after the fall of the Varazdin Corps many "aces" of Serbian "patriotic journalism" organized a trial before the trial in their respective newspapers. In the monstrous campaign and pursuit which was held in the autumn of 1991 and the spring of 1992, General Trifunovic was labeled as a traitor and coward. Messages directed at him (but indirectly at judge Saljic as well), in certain newspapers stated that "if the Court fails to sentence him, the fighters from the war zones shall". In various cabinets, as could be seen by the later published diaries and testimonies of those times, the same question was posed - what is keeping the sentence for "that traitor from Varazdin". In a certain TV-duel, the at the time "favorite opposition leader", the Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, claimed that "the traitor Trifunovic should have been shot in order to serve as an example to the other traitors".

In that journalistic indictment an enormous amount of lies existed which they later persistently kept repeating so that the whole "treason" story would sound more convincing. They claimed that for Trifunovic a formal farewell was organized in Varazdin, and that, during the "farewell", as a token of their gratitude for the surrender of the Corps, he was presented with an artistic painting. In one of the journalistic indictments, it was written that Trifunovic had left in Varazdin some hundred or so most advanced T-84 tanks with which the Croatian army is killing Serbian civilians. The next day it turned out that there were no T-84 tanks in Varazdin. Caught in a lie, that same journalist, without blinking an eye, wrote a new article and concluded that Trifunovic the "traitor" didn't get a chance to present the Croats with that miracle of technology because, prior to that, the "traitor Ante Markovic" had sold those tanks to Kuwait. In an atmosphere of "if the court won't hold a trial, we will" it wasn't easy to conduct the first Varazdin trial. The judge, Milos Saljic, who works as an attorney today, reminisces and talks of the trial and all that had happened prior to it and following it for VREME. Even today, three and a half years after that case and military judiciary system which he had left shortly after having handed down the acquittal verdict, Milos Saljic claims that, given the same circumstances, he would make the same decision again. He immediately arguments that statement by a longish list of facts which, as he says, further strengthen such a conviction.

Saljic: "Certain events, the appearance of new books dealing with those times and the writings of certain people occasionally induce me to re-think this "Varazdin Case". As time goes by, I am more and more certain that today I would not hand down a different verdict to the one I stated at the time. All the facts which I had ascertained at the time stand even today.

It is indisputable, for example, that General Trifunovic was left by higher command at the mercy of the adversary. The General Staff ordered him not to abandon Varazdin since allegedly the dislocation of units from Slovenia was imminent, therefore making it obligatory to save the barracks in Croatia for their accommodation. At the beginning of September, also by a decision of the military top, a trained group of soldiers which could have offered eventual resistance was discharged from this Corps. Only young men, untrained for war, remained. Even that insufficient number of soldiers continuously kept diminishing since the units were massively being abandoned by many of the non-Serbian nationalities. Even officers ran, and to make matters stranger still, all those who had at the time, before the beginning of the action in Varazdin, submitted a request for termination of their military service, were hastily granted that wish. Such a small number of soldiers and officers were not capable of protecting, as far as I can remember, 54 objects so that many soon fell into enemy hands. In certain cases, objects fell due to open treason of some officers who were leaving the Yugoslav Army (JNA).

All of the above mentioned brought about a change in the relation of forces. The Varazdin Corps found itself in circumstances in which an enormous advantage in the number of tanks and transporters didn't mean all that much. Some seventy or so tanks don't actually mean that much when all you have is scarce personnel capable and trained to handle those tanks. It was possible to pull out of Varazdin only prior to combat actions. But the order was that Varazdin was not to be abandoned.

After one week of combat in which even artillery fire was used, ammunition was almost at an end. The witnesses were contradictory and differed in their evaluation of whether ammunition was left for only two more hours or two more days. But they all agreed that it was almost gone."

VREME: What was the role of higher commands in all of this?

Higher commands did nothing to help this Corps, nor did they give the surrounded forces any encouraging promises. All they did was send out messages such as - hold out a while longer, everything will be resolved through negotiations. But out of the 22 concluded cease-fires, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in Varazdin did not uphold a single one, instead using them for further armament and organizing. Supposedly, the Varazdin Corps could have been aided by aircraft. It all boiled down to two planes which flew to Varazdin and their output amounted to one hit agricultural plane on the local airport. Due to all this, I believe even today that all the options open to General Trifunovic were the chance to die with the remaining young soldiers and officers, or to conclude some kind of peace in which HDZ would enable him to break out of the surrounding troops and cross to safer territories.

A week after Varazdin, the garrison in Bjelovar fell into Croatian hands, also a part of the same Corps.

Upon his return to Belgrade, Trifunovic had, as was ascertained during the trial, informed General Staff of the former JNA that the Bjelovar garrison was in urgent need of help in order to escape falling into the same situation of being either destroyed or surrendering. No one did anything about it for a full seven days. At the end, the commander of this garrison, Colonel Kovacevic, after fighting with superior circumstances, was forced to surrender. On the JNA side more that twenty people had lost their lives, all arms and equipment fell into Croat hands, and Colonel Kovacevic was shot in front of a line of soldiers because of the resistance he had offered up to that moment.

All of those facts were ascertained in later trials, yet the officers of the Varazdin Corps are in prison today.

It's true that after two acquittals, General Trifunovic and Colonel Popov and Raduski were sentenced to long prison sentences. I do not wish to comment that last court decision. In judicial practice, it is not unusual that different boards of judges with the same facts come to a different conclusion and hand down different sentences. Maybe in their third try they came upon some new knowledge which was not available to me. Personally, I am convinced that I had, with the board over which I presided, reached a just and lawfully based decision.

And despite the pursuit which was carried out in parts of the media.

The atmosphere prior to the trial was extremely negative. I wasn't afraid that I would succumb to that atmosphere, but I knew that I had people on my board who daily had the chance to listen to and read about Trifunovic and the other officers exclusively as of "traitors". Various lies without a realistic understanding of what really happened in Varazdin. Messages were arriving from all sides - what are you waiting for, isn't he sentenced yet... At the end it turned out that the board was composed of sensible people who managed to distance themselves from that atmosphere.

Were any direct pressures used on you to change your verdict?

Direct pressures weren't used, even though I know that much was said on the subject of that later. But there were indirect pressures in terms of - "there can be no doubt of his guilt", or "you will most certainly sentence him"... The awkward thing was that such statements came from certain senior officials of the General Staff and from certain judicial circles. That most certainly could have had some influence, but as you saw, in my case it did not.

Yet it is indicative that shortly after your acquittal verdict you left military justice?

It's true that I didn't make that decision willingly. I was a judge for 25 years. At the time, my term was running out and it was already arranged that I was to join the Military Supreme Court. That didn't happen because it had obviously been ascertained that after General Trifunovic's trial I was "no longed suitable". I waited four months to be transferred elsewhere. At the end, they sent me to the Administrative Department of the Federal Ministry where I was given the position of legal officer. After one year, I became Head of a department. However, I did not wish to remain further in the department and therefore asked for retirement. I then became an attorney.

Reactions

General Vlada Trifunovic, the Commander of the Varazdin Corps at the time, was found guilty while innocent, and sentenced to seven years of prison. Sick and depleted, they drag him from cell to prison hospital. Looking for a culprit for the defeat of unfeasible political projects, the military administration of justice threw an officer into the dungeon whose only sin was that after dramatic appeals made in vain for military help he refused to sacrifice 260 young soldier's lives who found themselves in a hopeless situation. He was sentenced along with two of his officers, Colonels Sreten Raduski and Berislav Popov, because they failed to defend Varazdin "employing a decisive defense to the last man", a city deep in Croatian territory with almost no Serb citizens in it.

We, the citizens of Belgrade, who live in peace, and - so they say - were not at war, and who are now hearing every day how there is no alternative to peace and how all conflicts should be resolved by peaceful means, beg that this great injustice be redressed, and beg for the abolition of Vlada Trifunovic and his friends, honorable officers who refused to allow, at a time of general chaos and collapse of the former Yugoslavia, youngsters to be killed in vain in name of uncertain military goals of the half crazed Yugoslav Army. Amongst tens of thousands of innocent civilian victims, the jailed Vlada Trifunovic, by his honorable conduct, with each passing day is becoming more and more the sole hero of this dirty war.

A group of citizens of Belgrade

A simple reason

I wish to join VREME's initiative to release from prison and set free General Vlada Trifunovic. The reason is simple: a large number of those who had a lot more to answer for than General Trifunovic are not in prison. There is no justice if he is the only one who is put behind bars and is burdened with other people's blame.

Bozidar Djokic (retired general)

Political goal

Trifunovic was cut off and abandoned from the supreme command. The most important thing being that nobody really knew what general Trifunovic's mission was in that part of Croatia, around Varazdin, on the territory on which Milosevic never counted on.

The third trial was a product of the General Staff's insistence which refused to abandon the idea that Trifunovic be pronounced guilty. The previous judges were dismissed, they found a third one who was prepared to sentence Trifunovic for as long as needed, after which even the experts changed their testimonies.

The key issue being: why the insistence upon General Trifunovic's guilt who refused to ruthlessly and criminally shoot the civilian citizens of Varazdin? The way I see it, the insistence upon General Trifunovic's guilt lies in the fact that the top military officials wish to achieve a certain political goal. The defeats sustained by that army and the goals which they could not justify for the war they were waging - needed to be attributed to the mythological idea of treason.

Vesna Pesic (leader of the Civic Alliance)

War Against Everybody

We wish to join VREME's appeal for the abolition of General Trifunovic, Colonel Sreten Raduski and Berislav Popov. Their decision to save their soldiers from horrendous suffering - is a humane act. We hereby call General Trifunovic's soldiers and their parents to join this appeal.

"Women In Black", Belgrade