Demands for Serbian Prison Investigation
NGO claims hundreds of Croats were tortured and killed in detention centres run by the army in Serbia in the early Nineties.
Demands for Serbian Prison Investigation
NGO claims hundreds of Croats were tortured and killed in detention centres run by the army in Serbia in the early Nineties.
A Croatian non-government organisation has called for Serbian and Croatian war crimes prosecutors to investigate allegations of abuse at Yugoslav-army run camps in Serbia during the early Nineties.
The Vukovar 1991 group says it has compiled a dossier of evidence to support claims that thousands of Croatian civilians and prisoners of war were killed, tortured and beaten in camps in Sremska Mitrovica, Stajicevo, Begejci, Nis, as well as at a military prison in Belgrade.
It has asked Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic to launch an investigation into the allegations. It will also ask Croatian state prosecutor Mladen Bajic to investigate the claims and to forward any evidence that is uncovered to his Serbian counterpart.
The NGO says that after the Yugoslav People’s Army, JNA, occupied the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar in November 1991, some 8,000 civilian prisoners were transferred to JNA-run camps in Serbia.
According to Vukovar 1991, nearly 300 prisoners were killed at these detention centres between October 1991 and August 1992.
The head of the NGO, Zoran Sangut, acknowledged that there was likely to be resistance to any investigation.
“There are forces in Serbia and Croatia who don’t want to prosecute these crimes,” he told a conference in Belgrade on May 22.
Sangut spent more than four months in three of the camps, and not a day passed when he wasn’t beaten, he said.
During the conference, he described how he saw soldiers kill prisoner Djuro Tvorek in Sremska Mitrovica.
“I condemn all concentration camps. I have visited the Italian camp at Molat, Jasenovac in Croatia, and the German [camp at] Mauthausen. I hope there will never be a repeat of concentration camps in world history,” said Sangut. The three sites were the location of Italian Fascist, Croatian Ustasha and Nazi concentration camps, respectively, in the Second World war.
Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for the Serbian war crimes prosecutor’s office, told IWPR that his office had already opened two preliminary criminal investigations into allegations relating to Serbian detention centres.
“In 2006 and 2007, we formed two cases about prison camps in Serbia. and we are strengthening our cooperation with the Croatian prosecutor’s office,” he said.
“We will work on this request for an investigation which we received from Vukovar 1991. We have grounds to suspect that prison camps did exist in Serbia. Our goal is to discover the truth because this is the only way for reconciliation between the two nations,” he said.
Sangut said the dossier compiled by the NGO included the names of prisoners held in the camps in Serbia, as well as the names and nicknames of those who abused them.
He nevertheless praised some guards and commanders who, he said, helped the prisoners survive.
“Aleksandar Jeftic from the camp in Stajicevo saved 200 Vukovar prisoners and we suggested that Croatian president Stjepan Mesic honour him with a medal. There was no reply to this proposal,” he said.
The NGO states that 3,500 to 4,000 Croats were held in the Sremska Mitrovica prison from November 18, 1991 to August 13, 1992. Police, army and prison guards beat them with sticks on their hands and legs when they arrived and all their personal property was taken away and never returned, Vukovar 1991 claims.
At Stajicevo, prisoners were interrogated and beaten every day, the food was bad, and they were forced to live and work in cattle sheds. The situation was the same at Begejci, it says.
When prisoners finished their “sentences”, they were given written confirmation of the time they had spent in the camp.
The conference saw a copy of a document which said that one man, Dalibor Baranj from Vukovar, was in the Livadice camp from November 19 to December 2, 1991. It was signed by camp commander Major Zoran Randjelovic.
Natasa Kandic, executive director of the Humanitarian Law Fund, the Serbian NGO which organised the conference, said her group possessed information that showed there were more than 1,300 prisoners-of-war in Stajicevo, some 600 in Begejci and another 500 in army custody in Nis.
“We have a great deal of evidence about the existence of prison camps for Croats in Serbia in the Nineties. We are asking for a criminal investigation to be opened against all the people who were involved in this serious violation of human rights,” Kandic told the conference.
“The camps were opened by the JNA in 1991 and senior officers knew about it. But Serbia is still denying that these camps ever existed.”
While Kandic said that war crimes prosecutors in Belgrade were independent and were doing their job professionally, she criticised them for not launching investigations into higher-level officers suspected of war crimes.
“Yes, they charged colonels and lower officers, but some of the most senior army officers were left out of criminal investigations and have never been charged.”
Serbian army officials and the Ministry of Defence declined to comment on the allegations.
Kandic’s deputy Sandra Orlovic said the most upsetting allegations relating to the camps were those involving young children.
“Two children, five and seven years old, were held in the Stajicevo camp with their mother. They slept on the floor in the stable ‘like sardines’, they said. One day, a soldier took one of them away and said he would stay at his house if his daughter liked him, but he was soon returned,” said Orlovic.
Aleksandar Roknic is an IWPR-trained reporter in Belgrade.
