Milica StojanovicBelgradeBIRNMarch 23, 202315:05The Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre urged Serbia to start prosecuting surviving members of notorious criminal Zeljko ‘Arkan’ Raznatovic’s Serbian Volunteer Guard for their role in wartime crimes in Bosnia and Croatia.
This post is also available in this language: Shqip Bos/Hrv/Srp
Zeljko ‘Arkan’ Raznatovic in Sanski Most in Bosnia in September 1995. Photo: EPA PHOTO/FILES.
The Humanitarian Law Centre NGO published a dossier on Thursday about the crimes committed by the Serbian Volunteer Guard paramilitary unit, also known as Arkan’s Tigers, and urged the authorities in Belgrade to prosecute any suspects who are still alive.
The HLC’s director Ivana Zanic said that so far, none of the unit’s members has been put on trial in Serbia. Arkan himself was shot dead in Belgrade in 2000 and several of his fighters have also been killed since the 1990s.
Zanic explained that the dossier was based on publicly available police and military documents and testimonies from the Hague Tribunal, media coverage of the unit’s crimes and testimonies gathered by the HLC in itself. In the dossier, the HLC identifies by name 189 alleged members of the Serbian Volunteer Guard.
“The goal of this dossier, definitely, is that after 30 years these crimes are investigated and that those responsible, who are still alive and are in Serbia, are prosecuted and punished,” Zanic told media at a presentation of the dossier in Belgrade.
The dossier’s author, Jovana Kolaric, said that “the findings of this file show that members of the Serbian Volunteer Guard participated in murders, captures, imprisonments, mistreatment and forced displacement of civilians” in various areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period from 1991-95.
“Their activities in all these areas were accompanied by looting,” Kolaric told the presentation.
The dossier alleges that the Serbian Volunteer Guard was involved in crimes in villages like Laslovo, Dalj, Tenja, Luzac and Erdut in Croatia, and in Bijeljina, Zvornik, Sanski Most and other places in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It says that the Serbian Volunteer Guard worked with the Yugoslav People’s Army, the Bosnian Serb Army and Serb forces in Croatia, as well as with Serb police in both countries, “or was subordinated to them for the purposes of military operations”.
Dossier author Jovana Kolaric (left), HLC director Ivana Zanic (centre) and ‘Vreme’ journalist Filip Svarm at the presentation in Belgrade. Screenshot: Facebook/Fond za humanitarno pravo.
“These regular police and military forces were actually aware of the violent behaviour of the Serbian Volunteer Guard and reported on their role in the imprisonment, mistreatment, and murder of civilians in their documents, but there would always be no appropriate reaction,” Kolaric said.
“The only situations in which the Serbian Volunteer Guard came into conflict with regular military and police forces were actually situations when the Serbian Volunteer Guard abused the officers and soldiers of those formations,” she added.
According to the dossier, from its establishment in 1990 to its disbanding in 1996, the Serbian Volunteer Guard numbered around 300 permanent volunteers, among whom were some women, while between 4,000 and 5,000 volunteers passed through the unit in total during this period.
The training of the first group of Serbian Volunteer Guard fighters was carried out by members of the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit of the Serbian Interior Ministry.
The dossier says that when volunteers joined the Serbian Volunteer Guard, they signed a contract for three, six or 12 months.
“Although they did not have regular salaries, they were paid 300 to 400 German marks per month for participating in actions, while SDG officers received about 1,000 German marks,” it says.
During the Trnovo/Treskavica, Pauk and Banja Luka operations in 1994 and 1995, members of the unit were on the Serbian Interior Ministry payroll, it claims.
It also says that Arkan’s fighters “received weapons, ammunition and other equipment from the Ministry of the Interior of Serbia, the JNA [Yugoslav People’s Army] and the Serbian Defence Ministry, as well as from various public and private enterprises”.
It added that “they also got the vehicles by looting, very often [UN peacekeeping force] UNPROFOR jeeps that they would repaint”.
Source link: balkaninsight.com
