The Dead Travel…

The man has a name and last name, but we’ll just call him Nikola; that was a name he chose for himself in May 1999, fearing for his life; Milosevic’s rifle was far reaching that year. The man is around forty years old and comes from Eastern Serbia. His story is simple and dry; he keeps to what he has seen and heard himself, firsthand. He is aware that in a short moment of decision he has changed the rest of his life. Namely, there are things which one cannot live with any longer.  

Nikola was mobilized at the beginning of February, 1999 as a reservist. His war assignment was in the army barracks in Bor, meaning, in the vicinity of the place where he otherwise lived.

ALWAYS AT NIGHT: “Since I was a driver in the army, immediately after I arrived I was given a refrigerated truck, empty, with orders to drive it to Kosovo, to an army camp east of Pristina. The minute I arrived, a general took me to the side and started questioning me. He questioned me for almost an hour about my past, political preferences, whether I had traveled abroad and the whole story – whether I was a patriot, if I wanted to defend the country and other such things. Since I had completed my compulsory military service, I knew the answers to those questions from before. While we were talking, the truck was loaded and sealed somewhere – I don’t know where, they never allowed me to get close – and driven back. It was my duty not to ask any questions, but to drive. I made around a dozen or so Kosovo – Bor tours; it seemed strange to me that such a large truck was moving back and forth while battles were being waged in Kosovo; there was a lack of personnel, vehicles, supplies while I was driving an empty refrigerated truck back… I soon realized that something was wrong. I drive an empty truck from Bor; into a camp full of soldiers, policemen and various paramilitary units, I didn’t know who they were nor who they belonged to, a policeman gets into the truck and drives it away. Then he returns it, loaded and sealed, and the travel orders, against all the rules, had Confidential! written on it and nothing else. I always drove from Kosovo to Bor at night; I would hand over the truck to the police at the entrance to the copper smeltery in the complex of the Bor Mining-Smelter Basin. I would wait at the entrance for them to return the empty truck. I soon came to realize that I was driving corpses; one didn’t have to be intelligent to realize that… It was clear to me where those corpses were coming from; I didn’t know where they ended up once the refrigerated truck was unloaded in Bor. I supposed they were burned in the furnaces for smelting copper ore; maybe not… Maybe they were buried somewhere on the premises of the mine; there are a lot of surface excavation sites there, a lot of waste dumps, a lot of places where a mass grave can be dug up… I don’t know what happened to the bodies afterwards. I only know that I couldn’t stand it anymore. I started having phobias and nightmares: like, I was driving the truck, and someone inside who wasn’t dead gets up and comes with a rifle in his hand to kill me. I couldn’t take it anymore; beside that, I was afraid they would kill me once the job was completed; as a witness, sooner or later; what’s it to them – to kill a man…  

Once I’d made up my mind, I asked two of my friends from my town for help who I trusted. We agreed that they would wait for me at a hidden spot before Bor; I drove faster, since I had a strict time schedule when I had to report to the police at the entrance to the smeltery, and I didn’t want anything to look suspicious; I saved half an hour for the entire job. My friends waited for me, as planned, and while I was changing into civilian clothes, they opened up the refrigerated truck. It was full of corpses, up to half a meter from the ceiling… My friends took photographs of the truck’s interior, and I ran ahead. They then drove the refrigerated truck to an even more hidden spot and counted the bodies. There were 78 of them: mainly civilians, amongst them a woman as well, but also three Yugoslav Army soldiers. They recognized one of them – he was a young man from our town.”

FLIGHT FROM SERBIA: Before that evening, Nikola told his wife what he would do and asked her to go to Republika Srpska: whatever the outcome of the opening up of the refrigerated truck, he believed both of them would be in danger. That’s what happened: Nikola also managed to make it to Republika Srpska. He doesn’t want to disclose the details of his journey, but he hints that he obtained false Bosnian documents there for himself and his wife. As to what then happened to the refrigerated truck, Nikola either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to disclose, protecting his friends. He also doesn’t say how many photographs were taken that night, but he shows two, technically well executed: on them, legs and shoes of the corpses piled almost to the top of the refrigerated truck can be seen, along with army registration plates on the refrigerated truck. He didn’t want to disclose how many photographs he took with him. From Republika Srpska, Nikola and his wife went to Croatia at the beginning of May, 1999, i.e. almost three months following his decision to open up the truck. Where they were and what they were doing in those three months, Nikola doesn’t wish to say. After his arrival in Croatia, however, his trail can be followed with greater reliability: he got in touch with a certain humanitarian organization of reformed Christians, which referred him to a certain lawyer from Zagreb, known for his moral integrity and human rights support. The lawyer acted extremely cautiously, contacting certain diplomatic agencies which he supposed – or knew – were close to The Hague tribunal. Due to operative security and justified distrust of the Croatian government and its feelings when The Hague is in question, it took several days of cautious work to set up the contacts. 

Around May 20, 1999 Nikola enters an embassy of one world power in the center of Zagreb. The conversation which ensued was conducted in a specially protected embassy soundproof room, with the presence of heavily armed uniformed security men. Nikola told his story and showed his photographs, “from firsthand evidence”, without any deviations; his interlocutors requested a few days to check the authenticity of the photographs before giving Nikola guarantees for his personal safety and moving him out of Croatia to a third country. Nikola requested that they first remove his wife and him from Croatia after which he would give them all the details and photographs and answer all their additional questions, which were numerous. This wrangling went on for a while, at the end of which the representatives of that world power agreed to Nikola’s conditions; it seems as though the photographs were too convincing. Quietly and discreetly, Nikola and his wife were taken to a certain EU country where they live under the protection of that country’s otherwise extremely efficient secret service.

Tracing Nikola’s footsteps, VREME confirmed this story in both Zagreb and some other places, and received additional information, which was given in the upper part of this text without quotation marks. Following your reporter’s further insistence, the sources from the investigative bodies of The Hague tribunal – two investigators, of whom one is directly involved in this case – somewhat unwillingly confirmed that they do have such a witness and that his story is true. In numerous conversations with top officials of the old and new governments in Yugoslavia and Serbia, VREME acquired a well-founded impression that neither Milosevic’s nor the new government were aware of either Nikola’s existence nor of this whole story. That is just one more illustration of the sloppy, superficial and careless tactics of Milosevic’s regime in such issues: from 1991 until October 5, 2000 they weren’t capable of committing a war crime properly; in one place people ran away from the firing squad (Ovcar 1991), in another they left loads of witnesses (Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo; throughout all the wars), in yet another the executors started spilling the beans of their own free will (the Erdemovic case) or witnesses concluded that it is wiser for them to turn themselves in and request protection; someone lost their nerve and – against orders – dumped the refrigerated truck into the Danube and ran God knows where. Not taking into account the sudden increase of nervousness of a part of the key people involved in the dirty history of our famous war waging techniques in these ten years; it isn’t accidental that all of a sudden mass graves are being uncovered which were believed to have been buried forever or that some people are all too frequently creating public incidents, as though they are asking to be arrested while still alive…

SMELTING TEMPERATURES: Nikola’s story, as relayed here, is based on his personal testimony and additional statements of “honorable men and reliable witnesses” (Danilo Kis in Grave for Boris Davidovic). Whether this story is criminally true and to what extent, VREME wasn’t in a position to confirm in its entirety due to a number of reasons, of which two suffice: The Hague tribunal got to Nikola before we did; fear amongst those who could clarify the details is still great. That, however, doesn’t free us of the obligation to analyze what we have. First of all, there are photographs which Nikola and his friends took and which have passed all tests, otherwise The Hague tribunal would have made him turn away from their doorstep (remember forger Ceda Mihajlovic and his “secret security service documents” which he tried to press upon The Hague in 1995). One should also suppose that Nikola’s story was verified and compared with intelligence data of all kinds; during a critical period, the territory of Serbia was under increased surveillance of spy satellites, electronic devices and operative personnel on the ground… In other words, that story is regarded as reliable. 

So, now: where does all of this leave us? First of all, Nikola’s story testifies that the burial of bodies from Kosovo secretly began before the commencement of hostilities between FR Yugoslavia and NATO, on March 24, 1999. That is also confirmed by the case of the refrigerated truck from the Danube (“Depth 2”). On Tuesday, June 19, 2001 minister Dusan Mihajlovic announced that another mass grave exists “in a different part of Serbia”, beside the existing locations of 13th May in Batajnica and in Petrovo Selo in the vicinity of Kladovo. How many more hidden mass graves will we uncover?

Namely, the problem of those graves isn’t only that they are mass, but hidden ones. An otherwise harmless army-expert term of “cleaning up the terrain” has been introduced to the public; however, one detail has been left out: corpses collected during clean-up terrain actions are listed, identified, if that is reasonably possible, or described in detail pending subsequent identification, they are buried in well known spots in clearly marked or numbered graves. Therefore, they aren’t loaded in secret, during the night, into refrigerated trucks which are subsequently driven somewhere far off, into police bases or copper smelters, where those corpses are secretly buried or burned (the temperature of smelting copper is 1083 degrees Celsius…). Nikola says he drove some dozen or so trucks prior to his flight; the editor of the Timocka Crime Review Dragan Vitomirovic says for Glas Javnosti daily (Tuesday, June 19) that only a single driver from that area, a retired policeman, drove thousands of bodies from Kosovo from April to June 1999 to various mass grave sites throughout Serbia. The basic question is so clear and demanding that Serbian public opinion, as usual, didn’t even notice it – why were those bodies driven by night, in secret, throughout Serbia and buried secretly, in police backyards where uninvited guests don’t venture? Why were statements signed on preserving official secrets on the subject of those bodies? Why is everyone so scared when those bodies are mentioned? The army and police are pointing fingers these days on that subject, laying command responsibility for Kosovo actions from one to the other; all of a sudden it is no longer known who is “subordinated” to whom while those corpses were being produced, collected and transported; corpses, namely, don’t grow on trees, as is a well known fact; someone has to kill live men, women and children to get corpses. A corpse is a human being who has lost his or her life in a natural or violent manner; if the corpses talked about in Serbia, starting with the dumped refrigerated truck in Tekija until today, have lost their lives in a natural way (heart attack, cancer, old age) or due to unfortunate circumstances (a car accident, natural disasters and similar) – that’s one thing: what is called, God’s will. If they were deprived of their lives in a violent way (that is killed) – that’s a completely different story. Either they were killed in a justified armed clash, in war actions, with weapons in their hands – or they were killed as unarmed civilians, which is a war crime. If they were killed in battle and with weapons in their hands, a soldier’s honor and good custom demand they be buried on the spot, or in a military cemetery which exist in Serbia since 1912 in abundance, following their identification, publicly and without any shame; they are, after all, adversaries, honorably killed in battle and there is no reason for shame. However, if they were unarmed civilians, women and children – well, that’s an entirely different matter. Anyway, the commands of the Yugoslav Army general Vladimir Lazarevic, the commander of the Pristina Corps, recently published in the press, with regards to “cleaning up the terrain of battle” during the 1999 war, clearly determine the investigation of military courts in cases when reasonable doubt exists that a criminal act has been committed. Those commands also obligate the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs bodies (MUP headquarters for Kosovo and Metohija), theoretically subordinated to the Yugoslav Army.  

Therefore, the situation is clear: a justified doubt exists that severe criminal acts of multiple murder (if not genocide) have been committed here, interference with investigative work, hiding evidence, abuse of official position in order to cover up evidence against himself or some other perpetrator of the criminal act of murder, forcing others to execute a criminal act; not to mention violations of utility and sanitation regulations on transporting and burying bodies, hiding evidence on the deceased etc; in comparison to everything else, that’s negligible. Slowly data on the most horrendous crimes and the covering up of those most horrendous crimes are coming to light; the problem with the dead lies in the fact that they know how to holler extremely loudly and demand justice.

 (with the assistance of the ANSA agency and others)