Death in The Hague

Slavko Dokmanovic, the former Vukovar mayor charged with involvement in the death of over 200 Croat civilians and war prisoners on the Ovcara farm in 1991, was found dead in his cell in the Scheveningen jail on he night between July 28th and 29th. "The Hague Tribunal and Dutch police will conduct separate investigations to determine the cause of death, but we believe that it is suicide", the Tribunal's spokesman Christian Chartier said. Details concerning Dokmanovic's death haven't been published. The unofficial version is that Dokmanovic appeared to be fine at 11.30 a.m. on July 29th, when the guard on duty checked on him in his cell. There was a power cut in the cell fifteen minutes later, and the prison authorities believe that Dokmanovic caused it by using his electric shaving machine. The cell door couldn't be opened in the resulting darkness. When power was restored and the prison guards walked into Dokmanovic's cell, they found him hanging on the window bar. They said that Dokmanovic had hung himself with the cord of his shaving machine.

"You are now in heavenly Serbia and the wings of Saint Sava, along with generations of Serbs who laid their lives for the freedom of their fatherland", wrote Dusan Vucicevic of Chicago after Dokmanovic's death. Vucicevic is a lawyer representing Milan Kovacevic, also a prisoner in Scheveningen.

The Yugoslav justice ministry issued a statement saying the "International War Crimes Tribunal" in The Hague was responsible for Slavko Dokmanovic's tragic death, because Dokmanovic felt innocent about the charges brought against him. A vast majority of the Yugoslav public says that Dokmanovic's tragic death shows that the Hague Tribunal is nothing but a mechanism created to exert the most severe forms of pressure on the Serbs, and that Serbs accused of war crimes can expect neither justice nor a fair trial. Apart from all that, some people believe that the cause of Dokmanovic's death is not suicide but murder.

Such allegations fit the stands of both national patriots and official Belgrade, but Dokmanovic's death is certainly a severe blow to the Hague Tribunal and the ideas it represents. Dokmanovic's poor mental condition while he was incarcerated was no secret. Vera Petrovic started treating him on October 19th 1997, after he had set his cell on fire in the belief that his family was being tortured in the cell next to him. Her diagnosis was "prison psychosis caused by hallucinations paranoia and occasional depressive reactions". Her April report on Dokmanovic's condition showed high sensitivity and accumulated stress, which sometimes leads to paranoid defense from depression. "Suicidal behavior is not rare in such circumstances", she said.

Dokmanovic's lawyer, Toma Fila, last saw his client on June 25th. He said he had alerted the prison authorities because of Dokmanovic's condition and asked for maximum surveillance and more medicaments. All this implies that Dokmanovic should have been put in the prison hospital. A lot of things about Dokmanovic's alleged guilt will never be clarified, but one thing is certain; the prison authorities in Scheveningen were negligent. One can always say that some suicides in prison just can't be averted, and give examples from when the leaders of the RAF terrorist organization committed suicide under mysterious circumstances in the late seventies. However, Dokmanovic's death can't be compared to those cases. What we are talking about here is inexcusable negligence of those who couldn't afford to make such an error because of the specific and delicate nature of their work.

The proceedings against Dokmanovic started on June 27th last year and ended on June 24th this year. The prosecutor, Grant Niman, asked for life imprisonment while Dokmanovic's lawyer Toma Fila asked that his client be set free. The verdict was due on July 7th.

"The case has been closed with Dokmanovic's death, and there will be no verdict", Chartier said.

This way, the entire case has become a subject of myths and speculations, to be sued for various purposes. Dokmanovic's case has three unprecedented details concerning suspects for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. The first is his arrest.

After talking to the Hague Tribunal prosecutors in his Sombor home (Dokmanovic moved there in 1995), Dokmanovic went to the UNTAES Vukovar headquarters on June 26th 1997. The purpose of his trip to Vukovar was a meeting with Eastern Slavonia's interim governor Jacques Cleine and the above mentioned prosecutors, to clarify his status concerning the events that took place in Vukovar in 1991. Dokmanovic was arrested when he crossed the Bogojevo bridge and taken to Scheveningen the same day. It was the first arrest in the former Yugoslavia by the international peace keeping force and the Hague Tribunal's officials. A General of the Bosnian Serb Republic's Army, Djordje Djukic, had been arrested by the Bosnian Moslem police and handed over to the Hague tribunal after long negotiations.

The second unprecedented detail is the secret indictment. When he was already handcuffed and on his way to Holland, Dokmanovic was given the indictment neither he nor anyone outside the Tribunal knew anything about. "There will be no more public indictments because that's irresponsible", said the Hague Tribunal's chief prosecutor Louise Arbour. "Not a single police force or prosecuting office announce who they will arrest and why", she added.

The third unprecedented detail is Dokmanovic's suicide. Croatian state-controlled media say that Dokmanovic killed himself because he couldn't face a guilty verdict, while those in Serbia write that virtually none of the charges pressed against the former Vukovar mayor would stick. The Serbian media quote Niman as saying that "Dokmanovic was not formally in power, but he was in practice because that's how people saw him and he felt like that himself".

Naturally, a proceeding that ended without a verdict can't be commented on. However, all the details related to the case have been surrounded with enough controversy and adversity to qualify the outcome as the Hague Tribunal's unforgivable error. Quite simply, justice has not been served, regardless of whether Dokmanovic was guilty or innocent.
No matter how cruel it sounds, unscrupulous manipulations will be all that's left of Dokmanovic's tragedy. The former Vukovar mayor was brought to trial in a "package" with former JNA officers Veselin Sljivancanin, Miroslav Radic and Milan Mrksic. Although the Hague tribunal and the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, insisted on their extradition a number of times, the Serbian regime refused to give in. Last year's public outcry in the Belgrade daily Politika over the Ovcara atrocities was the highest level of accusations ever achieved. Even if any progress was made in the meantime, the whole affair will go back to square one. Quite simply, the Hague Tribunal will be charged with being unable to provide basic safety or treatment to war crimes suspects it incarcerated.

Serbia's state-controlled institutions are not concerned with the Serbs left at the mercy of "the world's evil powers", for not a single one of them has offered any kind of assistance to their families. The regime will try to take advantage of Dokmanovic's tragedy to obstruct the efforts to determine the truth about war crimes that occurred between 1991 and 1995. One must not forget that those who caused Dokmanovic's tragedy were in power then and still are. Slavko Dokmanovic's death, especially with regard to the circumstances surrounding his arrest and indictment, has dented the Tribunal's reputation to a great extent. The only way The Hague Tribunal will be able to dismiss charges to come from self-declared champions of justice is to determine the cause of Dokmanovic's death and to come out in public with the results of the investigation. The consequences for those responsible must be harsh and impartial, at least as impartial as the Tribunal claims it is when it puts its suspects on the stand.