The Sharks and the Small Fry

In the autumn of 1991, the night came quickly in Pakracka Poljana. Everyone would lock the doors tight and listen to the muffled barrage from the direction of Pakrac and Lipik, and to the dreadful screams coming from the elementary school building. Distant firing in the night wrecked the nerves; the screams made the blood freeze. The entire village listened. Tomislav Mercep, the advisor of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Croatia and the commander of the First Unit of the Zagreb Police, also listened, sitting in his headquarters among scattered weapons, paper work and military equipment. Those were the police officers under his command "questioning" the captured Serbs from the area, but also from other parts of Croatia.

At daybreak, both Mercep and the villagers could see several officers, with their guns hanging "hunter-like", taking somewhere two or three captured civilians who carried shovels. After a while, only the officers came back... Along the hedges, ditches and yards of the burnt down houses lie the corpses of old women and men dressed in overalls and mismatched uniforms of the Yugoslav Army.

Six years later, public confession of Miro Bajramovic, Mercep's former soldier, to the Split's Feral Tribune weekly has consternated Croatia. This man has admitted that in 1991 he personally had killed 86 Serbs - civilians and prisoners - in Pakracka Poljana. He also said that his unit had assassinated 280 people in the mentioned village, and between 80 and 110 in Gospic. He described the ways of torture in detail, and named the torturers. These crimes were not done by personal choice. Bajramovic says that "the order to reduce the percentage of the Serbs in Gospic came from the headquarters". Mercep knew about each and every assassination, and he ordered them saying "clean all that shit tonight." The precise orders for assassinations came from Ivan Vekic, the Croatian Minister of Internal Affairs at that time...

The police reacted swiftly - Bajramovic and three others he mentioned as assassins were arrested several hours after the newspaper was released. "The most shocking in the shocking confession of Miro Bajramovic is that everyone is so shocked," writes the editor of the Feral Tribune Viktor Ivancic.

In 1991, the drunken policemen and guard members talked about the events from Pakracka Poljana to anyone who would listen. The townsmen talked also: terrified, whispering, in confidence. After the war "froze" in 1992, the Croatian independent newspapers started publishing more or less documented texts about the crimes of Mercep's unit. In fact, Pakracka Poljana was some sort of the public secret. Everyone knew, except - as it turned out- the Croatian government.

It is clear that Bajramovic and other executors from Pakracka Poljana are the small fries. Mercep and Vekic also are not the sharks of Croatian politics, since both of them - each for different reasons - fell into disfavor with Franjo Tudjman. Nevertheless, it can be expected that the entire current political top of Croatia will support them.

It will be completely impossible for Tudjman and his people to give credible explanation that they did not know about the bloody feast of Mercep's "Autumn Rains", or to give the answer why didn't they stop the assassinations on time and punish the assassins. The war was led in the territory of Croatia, Pakracka Poljana is only some 60 kilometers from Zagreb, Vekic and Mercep were high government officers, and the murderers and torturers were under their subordination. The explanation that they were "random and uncontrolled elements" simply will not hold. Also, Mercep certainly knows much more than Bajramovic and others. Caught in an unfavorable situation for him, it is possible that he will try to defend himself by proving that he was simply carrying out the orders. And who might have issued them is well known.

To all likelihood, the official Zagreb will be, out of necessity, ready for anything. It will only try to avoid one thing at any price - to deliver Mercep, Vekic, Bajramovic, Rimac and others to the Hague. Nobilo himself, the lawyer of Tihofil Bajramovic, supports the trial in Croatia: "Sending the accused to the Hague will only help the government to homogenize the Croats, since, here we are delivering the Croats to the Hague because the world presses us to do so, otherwise we would not try them... However, if the trial of the Croat criminals is held in Croatia, this will certainly cause differentiation within the political and government body."

As far as it is known, the Tribunal is holding back for the moment. However, the meeting of the representative of the Hague Court Christopher Walker and the Croatian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mate Granic shows that they are following the case and testing the intentions of Zagreb.

As for the government, in whose name and on whose behalf Pakracka Poljana was created, it can hardly get organized and agree on the fair and honest trial. The same is true for the regimes who have "credited" Ov~ara, Omarska, Srebrenica, Vocin...