The Known and the Unknown

One of the most unusual trials is due to take place in Belgrade on 16 December, when this issue of the weekly Vreme will already be in circulation. Three officers of the former JNA, Veselin Sljivancanin, Mile Mrksic and Miroslav Radic, will be asked to tell the court what they know about the execution of 260 Croat prisoners at the Ovcara agricultural estate in Vukovar.

The officers, known as the Vukovar trio, will appear in court as witnesses against unidentified perpetrators rather than the accused. However, another court has been holding them responsible for the crime for quite some time. The Hague Tribunal for war crimes indicted the three back on 7 November 1995 and demands their extradition. The Yugoslav authorities ignored and even openly rejected the demand, having claimed at one point that the Ovcara massacre has been fabricated. This theory was denied by a team of international experts who exhumed the bodies and identified them beyond reasonable doubt.

The victims were mainly men who were in the Vukovar hospital when it fell into the hands of the JNA on 20 November 1991. That day, Colonel Sljivancanin stopped Red Cross representatives from getting into the hospital while his men boarded the prisoners onto a bus through the back door. Sljivancanin threatened to throw the Red Cross officials into the river if they didn't go back where they came from straight away. The entire incident was taped by Serbian television and broadcast several times, probably to reinforce the country's moral and fighting spirit.

According to the indictments raised by the Hague Tribunal, this is what happened that November morning; Sljivancanin's men, led by General Radic, detained around 300 men suspected of being Croat troops and took them to the Pterova Gora barracks. A few of them were released after persuading their captors that they were medics, while the rest where sent to a hangar at the Ovcara agricultural estate. At least two prisoners died in the resultant torture, after which all prisoners were identified and divided into small groups. "The soldiers loaded each group separately onto the truck that left the agricultural estate and returned empty after about 15 minutes" (article 11 of the indictment).
"The truck went south in the direction of Grabovo. Around 1,100 meters southeast of the estate, it turned left. At the entrance to the canyon, some 900 meters away from the Ovcara-Grabovo road, the soldiers took the men out of the truck"(article 12). "That's where JNA troops and paramilitary units were deployed, under the command of Colonel Milan Mrksic, Captain Miroslav Radic and Major Veselin Sljivancanin. On the evening of 20 November 1991, the soldiers executed 260 people shooting south. After the execution, the bodies were buried with a bulldozer into a mass grave on that location" (article 13).

The indictment is based on the testimonies of several witnesses who managed to survive the execution. However, it is unclear whether Sljivancanin and Radic have been accused of direct participation in the execution, while Mrksic has been charged with instructing it.

Sljivancanin and Mrskic have been promoted twice in the years that followed, while Radic was discharged in 1993 at his own request. Sljivancanin became something of a celebrity after the incident outside the Vukovar hospital, shown on Serbian television. The patriotic press called him the knight of Vukovar, he started mixing with uptown celebrities and never failed to give himself credit for "liberating" Vukovar. It seems somebody didn't like all this, so the knight was transferred from Belgrade to Podgorica. All of a sudden, he stopped giving interviews. Soon after the Hague Tribunal pressed charges against the Vukovar trio four years ago, Sljivancanin was returned to Belgrade and placed at the inconspicuous Banjica military academy, where he resides today.

Last week, media in Sarajevo and Croatia said that Sljivancanin had been promoted for the third time and appointed as the assistant head of security in the Yugoslav Army General Staff.

Mrksic was promoted in 1993 and appointed commander of the newly formed special forces corps. Several months before operation "Storm", someone remembered that Mrksic comes from western Serbia, so he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Krajina Serb troops. Shortly after the defeat at the hands of the Croats, he retired. Mrksic was occasionally seen at a Belgrade marketplace helping a relative load fruit onto a truck. Not much is known about the post-Vukovar days of Miroslav Radic, who started a private business somewhere in Serbia after leaving the army.

All that time, the Hague tribunal exerted constant but futile pressure on the Yugoslav authorities to extradite the three. Our authorities asked the Tribunal to produce evidence that would incriminate Sljivancanin, Mrkisc and Radic, but the Hague would have none of it. Progress was made when Madeleine Albright personally handed Slobodan Milosevic files incriminating the three, after which the authorities published columns in the dailies Politika and Vecernje Novosti announcing the demand to extradite Sljivancanin, Radic and Mrksic to The Hague.

The Tribunal was asked to present evidence about Sljivancanin and his comrades after an proceeding against "unidentified" perpetrators of the Ovcara executions was started in Belgrade. The Tribunal's representatives were told that they could attend the hearing scheduled for 17 December in Belgrade. The request to the Hague Tribunal to present the required evidence said that it was needed to build a case against unidentified perpetrators, and that the Vukovar trio indicted by the Hague Tribunal would appear in court as witnesses.

It appears, however, that the Tribunal's officials weren't too impressed with the request. According to Grant Neeman, the chief prosecutor's representative, the Belgrade Court's investigation is nothing but a front giving the three indicted officers a chance to come up with their own story. Neeman said that the chief prosecutor has assessed that the Belgrade Court is neither impartial nor independent. Nevertheless, the Tribunal has sent four representatives to attend the trial.

Bearing in mind that the Belgrade proceeding will be held behind closed doors, we probably won't know what the Vukovar trio said during the hearing. However, the prosecutor will have two options after their testimonies. If he feels that they are guilty, he can detain them until the main hearing. If he finds that they are not guilty and assumes that the Ovcara executions were carried out by some paramilitary units, he can declare himself incompetent and put the ball in the backyard of the Federal Court. Even at this moment, it is apparently unlikely that he will elect the first option.

Naturally, that doesn't mean the Hague Tribunal will give up the extradition demand. The Tribunal's chief prosecutor has continued to exert pressure on the UN Security Council to reinstate sanctions against Yugoslavia for lack of the cooperation stipulated by Milosevic's signature in Dayton, Ohio. The Russians have come to Belgrade's rescue once again by vetoing fresh sanctions, but the Belgrade authorities have apparently realized that they can't defy the Tribunal indefinitely.

The Federal Justice Minister, Zoran Knezevic, has been invited by the Tribunal to visit The Hague this week. Bearing in mind that he denied the Tribunal's competence and legitimacy on a number of previous occasions, it seems that Sljivancanin and company won't get much sleep for quite some time.