15. 02. 1998.

HDZ Mafia Terrorizes Croatia' Soldiers - "Traitors"

Croatian Whistle-Blowers Claim Persecution

By CHRIS HEDGES

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 Susak, 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 Gospic 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."

17.09. 2000.

A Croat's Killing Prods Action on War Atrocities

 By CARLOTTA GALL

Carlotta Gall

GOSPIC, Croatia, Sept. - Milan Levar always knew he might be killed and gave a trusted friend a letter naming the 4 men he thought were most likely to order his assassination and 10 more who would carry it out.

Mr. Levar, Croatia's most outspoken critic of crimes committed by Croats in Croatia against minority Serbs, was killed by a bomb in his backyard in Gospic on Aug. 28. His five-page handwritten letter makes sad, and damning, reading.

The four men Mr. Levar suspected of plotting to kill him were men he had been accusing since 1997 of committing war crimes against the Serbs of Gospic, a hardscrabble town of 5,000 set in the thick forests and craggy white mountains of a region that was notorious even in World War II for being the home of hard-line Croat nationalism.

Mr. Levar said these four men were responsible for killing dozens of Gospic Serbs in 1991 and 1992, during and after the six-month war the Croats waged against rebel Serbs and the Yugoslav Army after Croatia declared independence.

But it took the killing of Mr. Levar, a former military intelligence officer in his mid-40's, to push the government to act on his information. Two weeks after his death, special policemen in khaki uniforms and berets surrounded buildings in the town and detained several men in connection with crimes committed against civilians during the war and with Mr. Levar's death.

In a parallel raid in Zagreb, the police also arrested Gen. Tihomir Oreskovic, long accused by Mr. Levar of leading the killings of Serbs in Gospic, and brought him to Gospic to join the other detainees. The general headed Mr. Levar's list of people who he believed wanted him dead.

Gospic still bears the scars of war, but exudes a calm that masks a Violent past and enduring hatred and fear.

Deep gashes from mortar shrapnel still scar the walls of buildings, a result of shelling by Serbian forces in 1991. The former Serbian quarter was devastated, each house methodically demolished with explosives, the work of vengeful Croats. Serbian forces seized control of part of the town in 1991, but within weeks were repulsed by the Croats, who held the town for the rest of the war.

Milica Majic, 68, a Serbian widow dressed in black, still lives on her Farm in Smiljansko Polje, just on the edge of Gospic. Her husband was beaten and shot beside his tractor in the fields behind the house in 1992. "I don't know who killed him," she said. "I am a Serb, and he was. That's why they killed him."

Over 100 Serbs are missing from the area around Gospic, the site of the first death camp established for Jews and Serbs by the Ustasha who ruled the Nazi puppet state of Croatia during World War II.

Mr.Levar collected evidence of the atrocities committed here by Croatian troops and paramilitary units in 1991 and 1992, witnessed some events here himself and said, in an interview just 12 days before his death, that up to 500 civilian victims might be buried in this area. When he started speaking out in 1997, the Croatian government refused to accept that Croats did any of the killing, which both sides carried out.

In the interview, Mr. Levar said he was speaking out because the truth had to be told. "They killed my people, my friends," he said. "It is my Business to say something of what happened."

In the smashed Serbian suburb on the south side of town lies a small enclosed orchard. Plum trees heavy with fruit bowed over what appeared to be graves marked with simple wooden crosses. On a visit here with Mr. Levar in August, it appeared that someone had been digging, opening graves. The grass was young and the soil loose underfoot.

"We are walking on top of a morgue here," Mr. Levar said.

The cemetery was one of several mass graves Mr. Levar said he knew of. A bulldozer had broken through the fence of the orchard, and there could be as many as 100 bodies in a pit between the trees, he said.

Even he was nervous and did not stay long in the place. The victims may not have all been Serbs. Croats who objected or got in the way were also killed, he said. "And the same people are still in power," he remarked, alluding to local authorities, most of whom are still dominated by the hard-line nationalist party of the late President Franjo Tudjman.

Mr. Tudjman, who died in December, resisted almost all requests for cooperation with the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

However, the new government, led by Prime Minister Ivica Racan, and the new president, Stjepan Mesic, have allowed investigators from the tribunal into Croatia. Earlier this year, they performed their first exhumation in the country, digging up 10 bodies from a septic tank near the orchard cemetery in Gospic.

"He felt it was a personal victory that they came," said his widow, Vesna Levar, sitting in their kitchen surrounded by photographs of her husband and candles. Nevertheless, it made their situation more precarious, she said, and her husband had finally decided to take her and their 10-year-old son, Leon, abroad.

"In the last two months leading up to his death, he was intensively seeking to leave the country," she said. He spent hours assembling documents and depositing them with friends.

The new government's policy of cooperating with The Hague has alarmed many Croats, in particular members of the Croatian Army and of Mr. Tudjman's party, the Croatian Democratic Union.

Dobroslav Paraga

"Those responsible have begun to feel endangered now," said Dobroslav Paraga, the leader of the Croatian Party of Rights and the friend to whom Mr. Levar entrusted the list of those he suspected would kill him. "If Tudjman were alive, there would be no chance that The Hague would be walking around Gospic."

Mr. Paraga said he suspected that Mr. Levar was killed not only because he was a witness, but also to scare future witnesses and deter the government from pursuing war criminals. "The intention was to scare the democratic movement in Croatia, to shut people up, and if not block, then drastically reduce, cooperation with The Hague," he said.

In Gospic, the issue raises charged emotions. Before his death, a waitress seethed at the mention of Mr. Levar. "What do you want with that traitor?" she snarled. Mr. Levar said people knew deep down that he was telling the truth. "I know my people and I know they want to find out what happened," he said.

There was a miserable turnout at his funeral, with barely 60 people and few locals. "The entire circumstances were terrible," Mrs. Levar said bitterly.

"It could not have been worse had an animal died." A government delegation came from Zagreb, but the mayor, Milan Kolic, declined to attend.

"Mr. Levar is not a person who has done anything more or less for this town, and I do not see why the mayor should attend the funeral," he said in an interview.

Fear kept most townspeople away, said one resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Sixty to 70 percent of the town would have gone to the funeral if it were not for fear," he said. Everyone had been shocked by the murder, he said.

"Whatever he used to say, to kill a man in his own backyard, in front of his child, that's a crime and must be punished."