Serbs in Black

How did Stevan Todorovic, accused of war crimes committed in Bosanski Samac in the summer of 1992, get caught in the middle of Serbia? Stevan Todorovic is a citizen of the Bosnian Serb Republic. He wasn't on The Hague Tribunal's extradition list, meaning that Serbian police had no legal ground to cuff him and deliver him to international peace keeping troops in Bosnia. Neither could SFOR troops come to Serbia to arrest him. God forbid, that would be a flagrant violation of Serbia's sovereignty.

So, who did the dirty work and, for that matter, committed an illegal act by kidnapping Todorovic and taking him to Bosnia, where he was "officially" arrested by the SFOR and sent to The Hague Tribunal's Scheveningen jail?

The Belgrade media quoted Todorovic himself as saying in his prison cell that he had been abducted by four men, one of whom spoke Serbian with a clear Vojvodina accent. He said he was roughed up with baseball bats, blindfolded, taken to the Drina river with a Mercedes which had its number plates changed four times, and then his captors took him to Bosnia in a small rubber boat. Once on Bosnian territory, Todorovic was in the hands of the SFOR, who put him on a chopper to Tuzla and subsequently a plane that took him to his final destination, The Hague.

The locals at Mount Zlatibor and some sources in the Bosnian Serb Republic have revealed a few more details. Stevan Todorovic spent most of his time in the Zlatibor village of Rudine in the past three years, as he feared that he might be arrested. He lived in a log cabin that belongs to Slobodan Jeremic, his best man and a retired colonel of the Yugoslav army's airforce. Todorovic also did some business on Mount Zlatibor. He shared a motor oil shop with a partner in the nearby town of Cajetina. He drove a Volkswagen Golf that disappeared after the abduction and occasionally went to Pale.

Still upset with the event that rocked their daily routine, the locals say that four men wearing all black clothes got out of the Mercedes when it stopped outside Jeremic's log cabin. Three of them spoke with a clear Belgrade accent. They knocked, and Todorovic opened the door. They asked him if the owner was there, but he made a grave error when he told him he was alone.

According to a testimony by Boza Ninkovic, the head of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) in Bosanski Samac, Todorovic spoke to his mother and sisters moments before the kidnapping. He also spoke to Ninkovic, who was visiting Todorovic's family at their Donja Slatina home.

So, who were the "Serbs in black"?

One of the less likely answers is that the SFOR paid a local gang to apprehend Todorovic without the knowledge of Serbia's state authorities. However, that is a very unlikely theory. So far, only one war criminal has been arrested in a foreign country without the consent of that country's government. His name is Adolf Eichmann.

The more probable theory is that the SFOR kindly requested Serbian police to bring Todorovic to them so that they could arrest him "legally" and send him to The Hague. This "request" is actually contained in a document less official than an extradition demand. In the present circumstances, it could invoke legal consequences for those who comply with it. However, the Serbian police are no strangers to acting against the law, kidnapping people and sending them to whoever wants them. The former RSK president Milan Martic admitted that one of his ministers, Veljko Dzakula, was abducted in downtown Belgrade on 4 February 1994 by Serbian police and sent back to Krajina. Surely, everyone remembers the time when the Serbian police used to hunt down refugees from Bosnia and Croatia in 1995 to send them straight back to the battlefronts in Bosnia.
Serbia's authorities could even count on some political benefits from delivering Stevan Todorovic. NATO is threatening to drop tomahawk missiles on Belgrade so some degree of "cooperation" with the Hague Tribunal can do no harm. Delivering a war crimes suspect to US troops in Bosnia only hours before US defense minister William Cohen's visit to Sarajevo could prove very effective for the purpose of trying to avoid a conflict with NATO.

It is most interesting that international organizations showed as much disrespect for the law as Todorovic's abductors did. Javier Solana's report on Todorovic's detention says nothing about where and how he was apprehended. An SFOR spokesman in Bosnia denied that Todorovic was arrested on Yugoslavia's territory, having offered the explanation that he was arrested in an "incident-free" operation in northern Bosnia, in a sector controlled by US troops. International troops showed no interest in arresting Todorovic while he lived in Donja Slatina, a village exactly three kilometers away from a NATO base called Camp Colt. They will probably keep pretending they have no idea how Todorovic landed right in front of the chopper that took him to Tuzla. Even the Tribunal will probably ignore that Todorovic had been kidnapped illegally. Even if Todorovic is proved guilty a hundred times for all the crimes he has been accused of, his case will be remembered for something else. Todorovic's kidnapping has inaugurated a new international standard tolerating methods that international law is supposed to sanction unconditionally.

The Man and his Crimes

Stevan Todorovic, a.k.a. Steve the Monster, was born in Donja Slatina in 1957. According to his neighbours, he comes from a decent and wealthy family. He graduated at the Machinery Faculty and worked as a manager of a wood-processing plant before the war. He had no criminal record.

Todorovic is one of the founders of the Serb Democratic Party in Samac. He became the local chief of police in 1992, when Serb troops took the town and drove out all Moslems and Croats. He was indicted in 1995, along with 45 other individuals. The subject dealing with Todorovic's case is called "Miljkovic and the others", named after the first accused Slobodan Miljkovic Lugar, a volunteer of the notorious paramilitary unit called "The Grey Wolves" who was killed in Kragujevac earlier this year. The next three defendants on the list surrendered themselves to the Tribunal last spring. The three are Simo Zaric, Miroslav Tadic and Milan Simic. The only one from the lost still at large is Blagoje Simic, who was the chairman of the Samac municipality from 1992 to 1996.

Steve the Monster wasn't a member of the Grey Wolves formation, but he apparently took them to Samac to do "the job" when the local authorities headed by Blagoje Simic refused to take orders from the Bosnian Serb Army and its commander in chief Ratko Mladic.

Allegedly, the local authorities had feudal ambitions and wanted their own little army as well as some land and integrity. Observers in the Bosnian Serb Republic believe that the prompt and efficacious Croats are not entirely responsible for quick indictments against the "Samac lot". They believe that the Bosnian Serb Army played a more important role in the process.

Although Samac is not one of the notorious Bosnian towns where many atrocities happened, the six are accused of ethnic cleansing, or driving out 17,000 Moslems and Croats. Todorovic himself has also been accused of the murder of Ante Brandic, torturing prisoners, rape, crimes against humanity and other war crimes. Bill Clinton, the US president, said on September 27 that Todorovic "is personally responsible for some of the most hineous crimes that occurred during the Bosnian conflict".