No Serbian Security Link to Training Centre in Croatia – Witness
Prosecution questions defence witness on his own past as a member of Serb forces operating in Croatia.
No Serbian Security Link to Training Centre in Croatia – Witness
Prosecution questions defence witness on his own past as a member of Serb forces operating in Croatia.
A defence witness in the trial of former Serbian State Security, DB, officer Franko Simatovic this week claimed that the agency had nothing to do with a training centre for Serb forces set up in Croatia’s Krajina region in 1991.
Simatovic is currently on trial at the Hague tribunal together with former DB head Jovica Stanisic. They are charged with participating in a joint criminal enterprise with the aim of forcibly and permanently removing non-Serbs from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia, through persecution, murder and deportation.
Stanisic served as DB head from 1991 to 1998, and Simatovic worked under his command as head of a special forces unit known as JSO, or the Red Berets.
According to the indictment, Stanisic and Simatovic established, organised and financed training centres for paramilitary units from Serbia, which were then sent into Croatia and Bosnia, where they committed crimes and forced non-Serb populations out of the towns and villages they took control of. The indictment alleges that these paramilitary groups acted in close coordination with the Yugoslav People's Army, JNA, and with locally-recruited Serb forces known as Territorial Defence, TO.
Goran Opacic, who testified this week via a video link from Serbia, said that he had been a member of “various [Serb] units” during the 1991-95 war in Croatia. He told the court that he did “not have any title or rank in the army”, and that his only motivation was to “protect and serve”.
A Croatian court sentenced Opacic in absentia to 20 years in prison in November 2005, after finding him guilty of the November 1991 murders of dozens of Croat civilians in the village of Skabrnja in Krajina.
Opacic told tribunal judges this week that he had been a member of a TO unit stationed in Benkovac in the Krajina area of Croatia, and also a member of the “Knindze” or “Knin Ninja” paramilitary unit. This unit, commanded by Dragan Vasiljkovic, allegedly committed a number of crimes against non-Serb civilians throughout Krajina.
Vasiljkovic was allegedly employed by the DB to train paramilitaries in special operations techniques at a facility in Golubic, a small village north of the town of Knin in Krajina. He is currently in prison in Australia awaiting extradition to Croatia, where he is facing war crimes charges.
Asked by Simatovic’s defence council Mihajlo Bakrac about JNA reports that Opacic’s TO unit committed war crimes against Croats in the village of Skabrnja in November 1991, the witness said this was “simply lies directed at discrediting an honest unit of men who would never hurt or harm anyone”.
He added that the JNA was “motivated” to discredit him because he had previously described the army’s recruits as “cowards”.
Speaking about Vasiljkovic and the training centre in Golubic, where Opacic spent time between August and October 1991, the witness said that there was“no connection whatsoever to DB and Serbia, since the entire facility and the personnel who were there were supported by Krajina [self-declared Serb entity in Croatia] and paid by them, not by Serbia”.
During his cross-examination of the witness, prosecutor Dermot Groome devoted a significant amount of time to Opacic’s past, stating that there were court verdicts against him relating to violent behaviour, and that he was involved in “smuggling cigarettes and household appliances”.
Opacic dismissed the allegations which he said were “lies and fabrications of the worst kind”, adding that he had never been a “criminal in any way”.
In the examination-in-chief, Opacic denied that he had been a member of the DB's Red Berets unit. He said that in 1997, he found himself by chance in the northern Serbian town of Kula, where the unit was headquartered, and a friend gave him a Red Berets uniform to wear because President Slobodan Milosevic was coming on a visit.
During cross-examination, Groome showed the court video footage from a Red Berets ceremony held in Kula, in which Opacic is seen wearing a camouflage and a red beret and shaking hands with Milosevic. Stanisic is also seen giving a present to Opacic, congratulating him on his war record, and describing him as an “example of courage”.
This, claimed the prosecutor, was unequivocal evidence of Opacic having been involved with the DB from the “very early days”.
“One may think what one wants to,” Opacic said in response to the video, “but none of it happened that way.”
The trial continues next week.
Velma Saric is an IWPR-trained reporter in Sarajevo.
