The decision by Milan Levar, 43, the former commander of a reconnaissance intelligence unit; Zdenko Bando, 41, a former military police commander, and Zdenko Ropac, 45, a former secret intelligence police officer, to approach The Hague is one of the very rare cases in which senior officers have volunteered to describe abuses committed by their own soldiers to the tribunal.
New York Times
12. 02. 1998.
HDZ Mafia Terrorizes Croatia’ Soldiers – “Traitors”
Croatian Whistle-Blowers Claim Persecution
by CHRIS HEDGES
ZAGREB, Croatia – Three former Croatian soldiers who provided testimony and documents detailing the killing of scores of ethnic Serbs and Croats by the Croatian army say they have been repeatedly beaten by unidentified assailants, their vehicles have been firebombed and they receive almost daily death threats.
The men, who gave their evidence to the war crimes tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands, say they witnessed scores of abductions and killings in and around the town of Gospic during Croatia’s 1991 war of independence from Yugoslavia.
They say that hundreds of ethnic Serbs, as well as Croats who opposed the nationalist movement, were executed and buried in mass graves around Gospic by the Croatian army, paramilitary groups and the police.
They also contend that documents they have turned over to The Hague implicate senior Croatian officials, including Defense Minister Gojko Šušak, in the killings. The Croatian government denies that its senior officials were involved in human rights abuses during the war.
The decision by Milan Levar, 43, the former commander of a reconnaissance intelligence unit; Zdenko Bando, 41, a former military police commander, and Zdenko Ropac, 45, a former secret intelligence police officer, to approach The Hague is one of the very rare cases in which senior officers have volunteered to describe abuses committed by their own soldiers to the tribunal.
But the men, two of whom have fled their native town of Gospić because of attacks, said in interviews recently that the tribunal took so long to investigate the reports of massacres that local authorities had time to destroy some of the evidence.
They also assert that the tribunal has not provided them and their families with promised protection.
“We do not understand what is going on,” said Levar, who first met with tribunal investigators last August in Gospic, 100 miles south of Zagreb.
“We have been branded traitors. We live under constant pressure. The police chief in Gospic and the local army commander are war criminals. What kind of protection can we expect from these men?”
Christian Chartier, the spokesman for the tribunal, said in a telephone interview that it was not the tribunal’s policy to comment on its investigations. But Chartier confirmed that investigators had met with the three men and twice offered them “proposals for protection” that he said the former soldiers had “turned down.”
“We are still discussing this with them,” he said, refusing to elaborate. “We are hopeful that a proposal may be accepted.”
The men say that a few of the mass graves were cleared by the Croatian military shortly before tribunal investigators visited Gospic last summer, but that other sites remain untouched. The men, two of whom went to The Hague in December to meet again with investigators, also said they turned over videotapes showing Croatian forces killing civilians.
“I was in a position to see everything that was happening,” Bando said. “The orders to carry out these killings came to us from the Ministry of Defense. Those who committed these crimes were never punished, in fact they were promoted within the military, the police and the political structure. They remain in power. We find this inexcusable.”
Bando, who is unemployed and facing an unexplained eviction notice from his small apartment in Zagreb, said that in October 1991 local police officials pulled up to his office with a truck piled with bodies, including those of women and children.
“Blood was dripping through the floor boards,” he said. “These people had just been executed. The driver was looking for a place to bury them.”
Levar said he witnessed the deaths of about 50 people. Ropac said that he knew of 127 ethnic Serbs who were killed in Gospic before he left the town and “that the figure grew later.”
The allegations of widespread killings by nationalist Croats around Gospic were bolstered last September when one of the executioners, Miro Bajramovic, confessed in The Feral Tribune, an independent weekly, to the murder of 72 civilians. Bajramovic was arrested after the publication of the confession and remains in prison.
The three former soldiers said that Bajramovic was being subjected to frequent beatings and intense “psychological torture” by his Croatian jailers.
Their accusations have been impossible to substantiate, though. Gospic, which had some 15,000 inhabitants before the war, is now a forlorn, heavily damaged town with just 3,000 people.
The former soldiers angrily assert that those who carried out the abductions and murders came from “the scum of the town” and were primarily interested in looting the homes and property of the Serbs and Croats they killed.
“These people killed my town – the town of my father and grandfather,” Levar said.
“I doubt it will ever revive. They killed it to get very rich. This dirty money keeps them in power. All we want is for them to pay for their crimes.”
