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WAR CRIMES ARRESTS

Accountability for war crimes punishes those who have committed atrocities, provides a measure of respect for the victims of serious abuse, and helps societies come to grips with the past and move forward. Human Rights Watch strongly supports the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and considers it the obligation of the authorities in the territory of the former Yugoslavia to hold accountable those responsible for wartime atrocities. Such accountability efforts must of course comport with international fair trial standards. Unfortunately, to date, many of the Croatian authorities’ war-crime prosecutions of Croatian Serbs have been ill-founded, reflecting an apparently discriminatory and abusive exercise of prosecutorial authority that has had a detrimental effect on minority return.

Cases against Croatian Serbs often do not reach the trial stage at all, because the prosecutors drop charges against the arrested person during the investigation. Of the total of forty-one arrests in 1999, 2000, and the first half of 2001, thirty-one persons were released.²⁵⁷ Of fifty-nine Serbs arrested in 2001, only twenty were in prison as of December 2002, according to the Serb refugee organization Veritas.²⁵⁸ That many of the charges against Serbs are eventually dropped, might reflect a measure of judicial integrity. Nonetheless, the apparent abuse of prosecutorial discretion by the Croatian authorities has created a perception among Serb refugees that at least some of the arrests and trials are pursued solely to deter return. In addition, only arrests (and not subsequent acquittals) have been publicized, both in Croatia and in Serbia and Montenegro. The thought of a possible arbitrary deprivation of liberty discourages many Serbs from returning.

The number of war crimes arrests of Croatian Serbs increased substantially in 2000-2001 and has been a major deterrent to return for Serb male refugees, most of whom at some stage of the war fought against government forces. In the words of a Croatian Serb who was arrested on war crime charges that were subsequently dropped, “After my arrest and the months I spent in prison, my friends say they are unwilling to take a risk and return. I was thinking about returning, but not anymore.”²⁵⁹

Many arrests are based on long-standing indictments after years of inactivity. Around 2,000 war crimes indictments were outstanding in the second half of 2001.²⁶⁰ The indictments were dormant under the government of Franjo Tudjman, but the new government began to act upon these indictments in the second half of 2000. While in 1999—the last year of Tudjman’s rule—there were only five war-crime arrests in Croatia,²⁶¹ in 2000 the number rose to around twenty,²⁶² and in 2001, according to Veritas, there were fifty-nine war crimes arrests, of which several took place abroad, on the basis of Interpol arrest warrants. In 2002 the number of arrests fell: as of November, according to Veritas, twenty-seven Croatian Serbs had been arrested on war-crime charges in Croatia, of which nineteen were returnees;²⁶³ the OSCE mission in Croatia identified twenty-eight arrests in 2002, including arrests of fifteen returnees.²⁶⁴

The most significant problem with the war crime arrests in the past three years has been that credible evidence against the indictees generally has been lacking. As an international official in Knin observed: “Almost every Serb man, who at the time of the war was between eighteen and sixty years old, wore a uniform at some stage of the war. That makes them [to ethnic Croats] already ‘guilty’ in some way and creates a pressure. And then, if they hear that somebody was arrested who everyone believes could never commit a crime, or that another person was arrested during his seventh trip back to Croatia, it will definitively have an impact on the person’s willingness to return.”²⁶⁵

The tide of arrests came at the end of 2000, after a decision of the Chief State Prosecutor to task the county prosecutors with reviewing all the war crimes cases that involved arrest warrants that had not been acted upon, although the accused lived in Croatia.²⁶⁶ While some charges were dropped during the review process,²⁶⁷ most arrest warrants were confirmed.²⁶⁸ Subsequently, as detailed below, the police have arrested dozens of returnees without sufficient evidence for bringing charges.

Guilt by Association

A major problem with the war-crime cases against Croatian Serbs has been the use of group indictments that fail to specify an individual defendant’s role in the commission of the alleged crime.²⁶⁹ A number of Serbs have been indicted as a member of the responsible unit, or merely by virtue of being present at the location where a war crime was committed. Often in such cases, when the defendant is arrested and interrogated, it turns out that the prosecution lacks evidence linking him directly to the crime and drops the charges. What remains, however, is the negative effect of the arrest on other male refugees who fought in Serb formations during the war.

Human Rights Watch received a number of reports of apparently ill-founded indictments of large groups of Serb men. In August 2001, Human Rights Watch interviewed two men from a group of twenty-one individuals indicted in 1993 for war crimes in the Sisak area. The indictees were accused of committing crimes as prison guards in the town of Glina during the war. Both men interviewed by Human Rights Watch were returnees. Rade Vekic (41) and Branko Ljiljak (35) were arrested on March 1-2, 2001 and tried between April and July 2001. Vekic and Ljiljak had both worked in the juvenile center that was used as a detention center during the war, but at the time of the abuses neither was working in the center. Of ten prosecution witnesses, none recognized them as being present in the prison.²⁷⁰ The court acquitted both of the defendants on July 17, 2001.²⁷¹

In another case, Hungarian police arrested Momcilo Draca (35) on May 31, 2001 at a border crossing between Serbia and Montenegro and Hungary. He was one of twenty-seven suspects in killings of Croat civilians in 1991 in the village of Skabrnja.²⁷² Hungary extradited Draca to Croatia in October 2001. On December 20, 2001, Draca was released after the county prosecutor dropped the war-crime charges.²⁷³ In August 2001, German police in the city of Broemerworde arrested Mile Grbic (42), pursuant to an arrest warrant issued by Croatia and forwarded through Interpol. The German authorities released Grbic in mid-January 2002.²⁷⁴ On March 4, 2002, the county court in Gospic, Croatia, withdrew the charges against Grbic and fifty-seven other persons contained in a joint indictment.²⁷⁵ On June 4, 2001, Croatian police arrested Djuro Djuric (47) at a border crossing between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Along with thirty-four other Serbs, Djuric was suspected of having participated in the killings of civilians in two villages near Dvor na Uni.²⁷⁶ Djuric was released on August 17, 2001.²⁷⁷

Frequent Acquittals and Dropped Charges

According to the U.N. Commission for Human Rights, in 554 verdicts for war crimes and genocide reached by Croatian courts between 1991 and 1999, 470 individuals were sentenced in absentia.²⁷⁸ Some Serbs who had been convicted in absentia returned to Croatia and were arrested and retried. In most cases, the defendants have been acquitted after the retrial.

In 1996, a Croatian court sentenced Croatian Serb Sava Grulovic in absentia to serve five years in prison for alleged war crimes. Upon returning to the Knin area in 2000, Grulovic (then 65) was arrested, retried, and acquitted.²⁷⁹ Dragan Jakovovic (41), sentenced in absentia to twenty years in prison and arrested in February 2001,²⁸⁰ was released in April 2001 after the state prosecutor amended the charges to armed rebellion, to which an amnesty applies. Natasa Jankovic was sentenced in absentia to six years in prison in 1996, arrested in January 2001, and acquitted after a retrial in June 2001.²⁸¹ Zeljko Bjedov, arrested in December 2000, faced retrial in June 2001, during which the 1992 verdict in absentia was overturned due to lack of evidence.

As of July 2001, there had been only three cases in which returnees were found guilty in a retrial following previous conviction in absentia. Dragoljub Vasilijevic, sentenced in 1997 to two-and-a-half years in prison, arrested in October 2000, was sentenced to one year in prison at a retrial in May 2001; Slavko Drobnjak (30), arrested in July 2000 and retried in November that same year, was sentenced to twenty years in prison; and Nebojsa Jelic (40), arrested in April 2000, was retried in November 2000, and sentenced to five years in prison.²⁸²

The higher number of acquittals than convictions in retrials is not surprising, because a person would be unlikely to return to Croatia if he had indeed committed a war crime. Rather than proving the responsibility of the defendant, an earlier war-crime conviction reached in absentia in Croatia usually indicates little about the extent of the evidence against him. Human rights lawyers in Croatia are nevertheless reluctant to suggest to those who are convinced that they are innocent to return for retrial. The Croatian judiciary is not devoid of political bias, all the more so as the judges appointed after the Tudjman government’s purges still hold their posts. In one case, in May 1999, several Serbs from the so-called Sodolovci group voluntarily appeared before the Osijek county court for retrial, only to be convicted again. In November 1999, the Supreme Court annulled the judgment.²⁸³

Human Rights Watch interviewed Jovanka Nenadovic, a woman from Pakrac, who was arrested in October 2000 and spent three months in detention before the state prosecutor dropped war crimes charges against her. Nenadovic was accused of committing the murders of seven Croatian soldiers in 1991. Her age and physical condition should have signaled to a well-intentioned state prosecutor that the charges were spurious—she was 58 years old at the time of the alleged crime, and she had difficulties moving due to bayonet wounds by Croatian Ustasha (pro-Nazi fascists) in World War II. According to the indictment, “during the investigation a witness stated that he had heard that Jovanka Nenadovic participated in torture of prisoners.”²⁸⁴ Such hearsay was sufficient to keep the elderly woman in prison for three months.

Vaso Gavrilovic, from Dalj, was arrested in January 1999. The Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the situation of human rights in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), the Republic of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina visited him one month later.²⁸⁵ In subsequent months, no hearing was held or scheduled, nor did Gavrilovic see a judge or a state prosecutor. A year after the arrest, he was simply told that he was free, without further explanation.²⁸⁶ Gavrilovic was 70 years old at the time of the arrest; he had refused to flee the area even though his name was on the posters anonymously hung up in Dalj, containing the names of twenty-seven alleged war criminals from the municipality.²⁸⁷ Although most ill-founded cases end in acquittal or dropped charges, the threat of arrest and prolonged detention is enough to deter return of refugees.

Discriminatory Prosecutions

The perception that war crime prosecutions are manipulated to deter innocent Serbs from returning has been reinforced by the authorities’ apparently discriminatory approach to war crime accountability. There are currently 1,467 pending war crimes cases, 99 percent of which involve non-Croat suspects.²⁸⁸ Starting in 2001, the government has prosecuted ethnic Croats as well as Serbs for war crimes. Still, in 2002, eighteen Serbs and only three Croats were convicted on war crimes charges, while three Serbs and fourteen Croats were acquitted.²⁸⁹ With one sole exception,²⁹⁰ Croatian judicial authorities still have not dealt in a credible way with cases in which ethnic Croats were responsible for the killing of dozens of Serbs, as in the cases of the Pakracka Poljana,²⁹¹ Sisak,²⁹² or Korana bridge.²⁹³ The proceedings against Croats so far have as a rule pertained to crimes that resulted in significant loss of lives.²⁹⁴ In contrast, the Croatian authorities have in some cases indicted Serbs for relatively minor violations of the laws of war, such as the theft of flour from a house (pillage) or the knocking out of a tooth (inhuman act).²⁹⁵ Depending on the circumstances of the case, such actions could possibly amount to war crimes. However, Human Rights Watch is unaware of any case in which an ethnic Croat was prosecuted on war-crime charges for abuses of this kind. Taken together, these prosecutorial practices amount to discriminatory enforcement of the law.

Alternative: Provisional Release Pending Trial

In the past two years, most arrests and war-crime trials of Serbs have resulted in dropped charges or acquittals. The record warrants greater resort to provisional release of indictees during pre-trial proceedings. Such a policy would reduce the appearance of a manhunt against male Serb returnees, reinforced by the extensive media coverage of every arrest. The risk that the suspect would flee justice unless promptly arrested would seem limited, since the mere fact of his return to Croatia attests to either his innocence or, at minimum, a willingness to have guilt or innocence established in court proceedings.