Striking At the Systems

On the morning of Thursday July 10, former Prijedor police chief Simo Drljaca was fishing from his beached boat on the banks of the Gradina lake. Just a short way away his son Sinisa and his brother in law were making breakfast in front of his parked BMW and trailer. None of them knew that four members of the British Special Air Service (SAS) had been watching them for days from the nearby woods, nor that one of them was keeping the commanders of the British forces in Bosnia up to date about every movement they made via a special radio link. A few kilometers down the road a second group of commandos were waiting for a signal to strike. At around 9:30 that morning, the signal came. They came down the road in three cars and a van all with local (Cyrillic) license plates. The vehicles stopped and the commandos jumped out wearing flak jackets and helmets. Drljaca’s son and brother-in-law were thrown to the ground and six men jumped on Drljaca. He broke free and ran back to the boat. There was a struggle and two shots were fired.

There are at least two versions of what happened in the next few moments. One, launched in Pale with the help of the Serbian state TV, says Drljaca was hit in the back by automatic weapon fire before a soldier came up and coldly fired a bullet into his head. The other, voiced by an SFOR spokesman at a press conference, says Drljaca drew his pistol and wounded one man in the leg before the others returned fire. Autopsy reports made no mention of a bullet wound to the head. The autopsy was performed by SFOR experts and Dr. Zeljko Karan from Banja Luka. No tests were performed to establish whether Drljaca had fired or not.

Drljaca’s son and brother in law were flown to Tuzla by helicopter where a plane was waiting to take them to the Hague. That same plane carried Prijedor hospital director anesthesiologist Dr. Milan Kovacevic who had been arrested in his hospital. That arrest was incident free. Three SFOR officers walked into his office at 9:30 dressed in British uniforms and seemingly unarmed. They were followed by a civilian who said he was a translator. One of the three officers was carrying Red Cross parcels, allegedly a shipment from Serbia for the Prijedor hospital. As soon as they were in the office, the four men drew concealed weapons, shoved the frightened secretary into a corner and handcuffed Kovacevic. There was no resistance while they took him to a white Nisan without license plates and drove to a waiting helicopter. Two days later, Drljaca’s son and brother-in-law were released and Dr. Kovacevic was transferred to the medical facility at the Sheveningen prison in the Hague.

The Hague War Crimes Tribunal said charges of genocide over non-Serbs in the Prijedor area in the April-August 1992 period had been filed against Drljaca and Kovacevic in March.

Anyone who was in the Prijedor area during the war knows who Drljaca and Kovacevic are. Simo Drljaca was born in 1947 not far from the place he was killed. He graduated law school in Banja Luka. He was a clerk in the education system before the war but he is reported to have had good contacts with the police even then. Late in April 1992, when the Prijedor Serb Municipality Crisis Headquarters took control of the area, Drljaca became public security chief for the area (which includes the Keraterm, Omarska and Trnopolje camps). He became known for his efforts and Radovan Karadzic appointed him deputy RS Internal Affairs Minister that year. It’s not quite clear why Drljaca left that post a year later to return to Prijedor as police chief. By April 1993, Drljaca said, he had issued 20,000 exit visas to local Croats and Moslems which said that they were voluntarily abandoning their property and the right to stay in the RS. Those exit visas cost up to 10,000 DEM each.

Once the non-Serbs were gone, Drljaca turned to the Serbs. He made sure no deal was done in the area without him. His friends could get cars and apartments for free while his enemies could find themselves thrown out of their own homes. The situation was similar in the local companies which were either under the patronage of Drljaca’s friends or paid him great amounts of money for protection. The British government recently admitted that some of its money had found its way to Drljaca: the government agency for reconstruction and development earmarked almost 200,000 pounds for construction companies controlled by Drljaca.

He didn’t like reporters but he liked giving interviews. Besides several statements to the local Kozarski Vjesnik newspaper which were included in evidence in the Hague, he spoke to a London Guardian reporter who asked him why the Moslems in Omarska and Keraterm were so very thin. "That’s how they are naturally because they don’t eat bacon and fast for a whole month during ramazan. Haven’t you read the Qu’ran?" On another occasion he explained that it’s not enough just to tear down the minarets on mosques. "They just build a new minaret. The foundations have to be destroyed with explosives because the Moslems never return to the same place later".

The Dayton agreement, signed in November 1995, brought no changes to Drljaca’s life; he was still the undisputed master of Prijedor and chief of police. In September 1996, prior to the Bosnia elections, he had some bad luck: a patrol of Czech SFOR troops wanted to check his car to see he had no automatic weapons. Drljaca fired towards them and the Czechs fired a few shots into the air and fled. Although no one was injured, that event had its consequences because it was used to demand that RS Internal Affairs Minister Dragan Kijac dismiss him. After some resistance, Kijac backed down and Drljaca traded his old job for a new one as the police minister’s logistics advisor. Since then, reliable sources reported, Drljaca’s main job was to organize protection for Bosnian Serbs charged with war crimes and to organize their evacuation if necessary. That is logical: of the 79 published indictments, 32 are against people in the Prijedor area mainly for acts committed in the camps. Drljaca, whose name was not on that list, was the ideal man for the job.

The career of Dr. Milan Kovacevic, who Biljana Plavsic described as a humanist, is similar but not as spectacular. He liked to say that no one could teach him about concentration camps because he was born in Jasenovac (not quite true although he was taken there during WWII as a baby). He was part of the Prijedor Crisis Headquarters organizing the camps and went on to become head of the hospital where he could redirect medical supplies donated to the hospital into privately owned pharmacies for money. He wasn’t a happy man. He drank a lot recently and told a reporter that his conscience was bothering him. We know reliably that he had been sending signals to the Hague tribunal over the past year saying he could say a lot about Karadzic and Krajisnik on certain conditions but there were no negotiations. Hague tribunal investigators are overjoyed: Kovacevic is said to know as much as Drljaca if not even more.

Bearing all that in mind, it’s clear why the leaders of the RS (and Belgrade) were shaken by reports of the arrest. This isn’t just about another Serb being arrested and one being killed by foreigners but about the fact that the international community has struck at a high-ranking Serb police officer for the first time. "This endangers the survival of the RS," SPS spokesman Ivica Dacic said. Similar sentiments were voiced by Radmilo Bogdanovic and Dragan Tomic. There was panic in the RS until it became clear that the SAS operation Tango was over.

Pressure is growing to get any kind of promise from the international community that nothing similar will happen. By Thursday, July 16 there were three bomb attacks on international forces vehicles in Bosnia and one US soldier was wounded with a sickle.

Despite all that and pressure from Russia who called operation Tango a cowboy action which does not contribute to peace in the region, US and British spokesmen refused to make any kind of promise.

The problem is that, despite propaganda from Pale, everyone knows that NATO is the only guarantee against a possible Croat and Moslem offensive against the RS and that it is much more powerful than the Serb army and police.