More Indictments For Ovcara

Slavko Dokmanovic (1949), the former mayor of Vukovar and a resident of Sombor since 1995, left for Vukovar on Friday morning. His wife Danica said he was invited to meet with UNTAES chief, Jacques Klein, and some people from the Hague war crimes tribunal "to clear up his status" (confirmed in the Hague). He took his own car in the company of Milan Knezevic (of Tenja, known for being wounded in the attack on Osijek Police Chief Josip Reihl-Kir in 1991). Two days earlier, two Hague tribunal investigators met Dokmanovic in his apartment in Sombor, had a short talk and (probably) invited him to Vukovar. At around 15:00, Dokmanovic (in agreement with UNTAES, Knezevic said) left his car in Bogojevo and crossed the bridge into UNTAES-controlled territory on foot with Knezevic. They were met by UNTAES personnel in a UN vehicle. The two men were given ID cards, and the vehicle left. That vehicle was intercepted by another UN car which drove straight at them after just a couple of kilometers. The UN driver was obviously surprised but managed to avoid a collision and did not stop. They were immediately intercepted by another car. Some uniformed and armed men with face masks surrounded the Dokmanovic’s car and arrested him and Knezevic. Both were taken to a building where Knezevic was held under guard, while Dokmanovic was then taken to the Klisa airfield where the Russian battalion is stationed. He was put into a light aircraft and flown to the Netherlands. Before nightfall, Dokmanovic was in jail in the Hague. Milan Knezevic got an apology from a UN official, was driven to the bridge at Bogojevo and released.

Dokmanovic said the masked, armed men handed him over to people who said they were Hague tribunal investigators. They informed him that he had been arrested and read him his rights. He had the right to a phone call but had to wait to get to the Hague tribunal’s jail before he was allowed to contact his wife.

Dokmanovic was indicted by the tribunal on March 1996, and at that time, the charges against Veselin Sljivancanin, Milan Mrksic and Miroslav Radic were expanded. To date, there has been no indication of new information concerning the Ovcara massacre in tribunal statements. In a statement released on Wednesday, as this article is being written, the tribunal has charged Dokmanovic over the actions of "forces under his command" (his and the three JNA officers). Tribunal chief prosecutor Louise Arbour even told a press conference that Dokmanovic took part in the killing and torture of POWs in Ovcara, something that has yet to be proved in court.

The Croatian press carried interesting reports about the arrest: a mix of elation and suspicion (that this is a search for symmetry because of what Croatia sees as pressure by the tribunal). Vjesnik daily quoted an alleged eyewitness who claimed to have escaped the massacre while Dokmanovic was in a hangar beating prisoners. On the other hand, Vjesnik also quoted Jacques Klein who feels that "Dokmanovic is obliged to help the Hague tribunal investigate the events in Ovcara he has been charged with" which could lend support to the theory that Dokmanovic is needed as a witness and could make a deal.

So what actually happened to the men found in the Vukovar hospital?

In mid-November, 1991, a guards brigade from Belgrade under the command of Mile Mrksic, along with other Yugoslav National Army units (General Andrija Biorcevic’s Novi Sad corps and General Zivota Panic's first army district), the Western Slavonia territorial defense (under the command of ranking Serbian police official Radovan Stojicic Badza), Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan’s Serb Volunteer Guard, Vojislav Seselj’s Chetniks and other para-military formations all joined to capture Vukovar.

The single command of Croatian forces in the town practically stopped functioning: section commanders withdrew or stayed within the blockade.

The Vukovar hospital in the center of town was filled with wounded, staff, family members and anyone else who thought it was the safest place to be. This included Croatian troops dressed in civilian clothing, claiming to be patients or staff. They all believed they would be evacuated in the presence of EC monitors. This had been agreed in talks between the Croatian government, its representative in Vukovar (Marin Vidic), the commander of his forces (Branko Borkovic) and the JNA on November 18 (according to the charges against Mrksic, Sljivancanin and Radic dated January 13, 1995).

On the night of November 18-19, the JNA and other Serb units more or less took control of the town. There was some sporadic fighting, but nothing serious. Vukovar had fallen.

On the afternoon of November 19, the JNA took control of the hospital. No one could enter or leave it. The next morning, November 20, Sljivancanin the security officer from the guards brigade came to the hospital. He refused to allow Cyrus Vance, the International Red Cross and EC monitors into the hospital "for security reasons". He made his tough speech to the press in front of the hospital that day.

As soon as he entered the hospital, Sljivancanin ordered it's staff to come to a meeting. Meanwhile, JNA troops, local Serb fighters and para-military troops entered the hospital. They took away almost 420 men including some of the staff, the wounded, Croatian troops hiding there, Croatian political activists and, perhaps, some people from the village of Bogdanovac who disappeared after that village was taken. There have been claims that one group of about 20 men was killed while being taken out. When Sljivancanin ended his meeting, there were almost no men left in the hospital.

Some 300 men were put onto buses and, after waiting at the hospital grounds for awhile, they headed for the Petrova Gora JNA barracks at around 11:00. Fifteen were taken off the buses at Sljivancanin’s orders: they were hospital staff or family members. The buses and prisoners spent two hours in the barracks. Those two hours might have been key moments for future developments. That same day, the Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem Autonomous Region government met in Vukovar. It's Prime Minister, Goran Hadzic, told Politika daily on November 21:

"The government met in liberated Vukovar for the first time. The only topic on the agenda was the treatment of the worst criminals. We reached agreement with the army chiefs to try them here in Vukovar, at least the first hearings. We believe that the courts in Serbia and federal courts have jurisdiction only after that in cases of war crimes in Vukovar. One of the main motives that kept people going in this terrible fighting for Vukovar was that the crimes were so horrifying that we had to stop them. Those criminals knew that the torture and killing of children are the worst possible crimes. I am convinced that we will be very humane towards those who found themselves with the enemy because of pressure."

That government session was attended by Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan "who captured Luzac and played a key role in capturing Borovo Selo (Politika). He said: "All of us who fought in Vukovar were under the command of the JNA, which has great officers and soldiers of all nationalities."

Hadzic, Arkan and other political and paramilitary leaders were reported to have asked the JNA (Sljivancanin and Mrksic) to give them the prisoners. In that context, there was mention of treason (typical for the JNA at the time), "the revolt of the fighters and the people" and potential anarchy, and some officers were reported to have been threatened. They seem to have backed down: we don’t know whether it was because of the pressure or because they felt it was the right thing to do.

In any case, the prisoners were taken from the barracks at around 14:00 on November 20 to the Ovcara farm four kilometers south of Vukovar. The Hague tribunal charges claim they were forced to go through a cordon of troops before being taken to a farm machine hangar where the beatings allegedly continued for hours. At least two prisoners are said to have died, and seven were released after Serbs spoke up for them.

The others were identified in the hangar and divided into groups of 10-20 men at around 18:00. "The soldiers took group by group to a truck which left the farm and returned empty 15-20 minutes later" (charge 11 by the tribunal). "The truck headed south from the farm, taking the road to Grabovo; about a kilometer from the building the truck turned south onto a dirt road between a field and a wooded ravine. About 900 meters from the Ovcara-Grabovo road, at the start of the ravine, the soldiers took the prisoners off the truck (charge 12). "JNA and Serb para-military forces were there under the command of Colonel Mile Mrksic, Captain Miroslav Radic and Major Veselin Sljivancanin on the northern side of the site. In the evening hours of November 20, 1991, those soldiers killed some 260 men shooting from the south. After the killings, the bodies were buried by bulldozer in a mass grave at the site" (charge 13).

Over the next couple of weeks, some of the allegedly involved troops spoke about Ovcara in Vukovar’s cafes. Various members of para-military groups spoke about the killings in Ovcara and Petrova Gora. They said small units of volunteers were formed that evening, were given ammunition and left drunk. They are reported to have said: we shot them from six that evening to midnight. They cried and begged for mercy claiming they hadn’t fired a single shot at us. One newspaper article said that volunteers claimed to have gotten a message from Sljivancanin on one of those nights telling them not to kill everyone before he got there; allegedly he wanted to try out his AKSU-74 assault rifle which was not a typical weapon in the region at the time.

Some of the perpetrators are known, but even more information could be provided by a certain Slavko (or Stanko) Vujanovic, commander of a territorial defense unit, and by volunteers, Spasoje Petkovic, Ivica Andric, Milan Lazarevic, Dragoslav Milosavljevic and others.

The mass grave was shallow and lay untouched for awhile. Then, under the Vance plan, UNPROFOR was deployed in Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem. Reports of the massacre had reached the UN and its war crimes commission; at least one witness survived the shooting and fled to Croatia and his drunken bragging fell on the wrong ears. In mid-1992, UNPROFOR was keeping the site under discrete control. In October 1992, there was public talk of the massacre. In December, the first preliminary investigations and exhumations began. To date, 260 bodies have been dug up, the cause of death has been determined as firearms and some have been identified. It was hard to deny the massacre.

Slavko Dokmanovic’s name never appeared anywhere in connection with the massacre.

Dokmanovic is a native of Trpinja and had a job in Vupik as a clerk in charge of dealings with farmers. He was a member of the Croatian League of Communists and then the SDP. In May 1990, he was elected councilor in the Vukovar municipal assembly. Under an inter-party agreement he became mayor and his deputy was Croatian Democratic Union member, Marin Vidic. Some sources said Dokmanovic made statements in 1991 to the effect that Vukovar was a Serb town, but such statements were common in those days. He remained mayor until mid-May 1991, when the Croatian government appointed Vidic its representative to run the town. Dokmanovic kept coming to Vukovar till mid-June, most often in a JNA armored car, because the barricades were up.

On August 18, 1991 he was elected agriculture secretary in the Eastern Slavonia government based in Erdut, and he kept that job until the assembly in Borovo Selo on February 28, 1992. Incoming Prime Minister Zdravko Zecevic offered the agriculture ministry to Sime Sijan and Dokmanovic returned to the Vukovar vineyards, although he was formally still mayor and councilor of the Serb municipality of Vukovar. He was attacked fiercely at the Krajina parliament session in Srb earlier, because he wouldn’t join the Serb Democratic Party. Friends said he was never close to the SDS or the Radicals. He kept out of politics up to 1995 when he took part in elections as an independent candidate, winning a seat in the Vukovar assembly. Dokmanovic’s whereabouts during the critical 24 hours that the massacre took place (from midnight on November 19 to midnight on November 20) aren’t known.

What’s important in regard to the Hague tribunal in this case is the change of strategy. There are no more public indictments because, as Arbour put it, that would be irresponsible. No indictment will be made public from now on. In that context, Arkan should not rely on the letter from the Hague tribunal telling him that he hasn’t been charged; when reporters asked tribunal spokesman, Christian Chartier, what he would have said a week ago if asked whether charges against Dokmanovic existed, he coldly replied "no".

This change of strategy has brought some anxiety to the rulers of the two Serb states. FRY Foreign Minister Milan Milutinovic fiercely protested the way Dokmanovic was arrested and added that he is innocent; internal affairs minister Zoran Sokolovic called the arrest "a brazen trick" and added that all cooperation with the tribunal could end. Former Krajina President Goran Hadzic said he is careful and would not allow himself to be captured alive. For its part, the UN Security Council said the outer wall of sanctions will remain in place against the FRY until it cooperates with the tribunal.