A new dossier published by the Humanitarian Law Centre NGO documents the role of the Serbian police, army and State Security in the forced displacement of Croats from Serbia during the 1991-95 war.
Vesna Abjanovic was 11 years old when four armed and uniformed men came to her family’s home in the north-western Serbian village of Morovic, on October 23, 1991.
According to a dossier published in Belgrade on Thursday by the Humanitarian Law Centre, the armed men arrived in two grey cars with Yugoslav People’s Army licence plates to take Vesna’s father, Mato Abjanovic, to a local police station “for interrogation”. Mato and his brother Ivica went with them.
“Father and uncle have never returned; all trace of them has been lost ever since,” Vesna Abjanovic told a press conference to launch the dossier, which accuses Serbian troops and police of complicity in crimes against Croats in Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina during the war.
The HLC announced that it will file a criminal complaint to the war crimes prosecutor’s office over the disappearance of Mato and Ivica Abjanovic.
The kidnapping of the Abjanovic brothers is just one of 11 cases documented by the HLC in the dossier. A total of 17 people disappeared or were killed in the incidents documented.
The dossier explores the “campaign of intimidation and pressure” against Croats in Vojvodina, conducted in order to make them leave Serbia.
“The evidence in this dossier shows that members of Serbian police and army participated in individual acts of violence against Croats,” said the author of the report, Jovana Kolaric from the HLC.
Kolaric said that the HLC found two Serbian State Security documents showing that the agency “had information on the killings of Vojvodina Croats” and also played a part in their forced evictions.
The documents, which are included in the report, were found in the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Kolaric added that a protected witness codenamed C-048 testified at the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that State Security followed and eavesdropped on Croats from Vojvodina, as well as playing a role in attacks on them.
According to the dossier, the persecution of Croats and non-Serbs was carried out according to the same or a similar pattern across Vojvodina.
Persons unknown to locals would visit Croat homes, asking the owners if they are interested in exchanging property.
This would be followed by threats over the telephone, letters and leaflets, menacing graffiti, and even the placing of explosives and throwing of bombs. There were cases of physical violence, as well as the murders of Vojvodina Croats.
At public gatherings, mostly organised by the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, Croats were threatened and given eviction ultimatums.
Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the UN court in The Hague for nationalist speeches he made in the Vojvodina village of Hrtkovci, but was not sent to prison because of the time he had already spent in custody.
The HLC dossier alleges that some figures in the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, which broke away from the Radical Party in 2008, have also been linked to the ultranationalist party’s anti-Croat policy.
Another protected witness at the Hague Tribunal alleged that the current Serbian parliament speaker Maja Gojkovic, formerly a Radical Party official, attended a meeting at which Seselj and the local party leadership discussed the expulsion of Croats, the report says.
The report also alleges that Milan Bacevic, a former government minister who is now the Serbian ambassador to China, advocated in an article in Vecernje novosti newspaper in 1992 that Serbia should banish as many Croats as Serbs were banished from Croatia.
The Balkaninsight
