BELGRADE, June 20 /SRNA/ – The director of the Veritas Documentation Center, Savo Strbac, has said that only two persons were symbolically sentenced to a total of seven years in prison for the massacre of 40 Serbs, members of the territorial defense, on the Miljevac Plateau near Drnis, while other perpetrators, who are known, are free and enjoy all benefits of the Croatian society.
On the occasion of the 26th anniversary of the monstrous crime on the Miljevac Plateau, Strbac told SRNA that people from the Croatian Army and politics who planned, ordered and conducted the operation, are known.
He has said that one of them is Ivan Bacic, who conducted the operation “without agreement from the Croatian Army and state leadership,” and who has not been prosecuted either before Croatian or Serbian courts which are entitled to do so, or before the ICTY.
“With evidence in our possession, we are trying to force courts in Croatia or Serbia which still have this regional jurisdiction, which means that they can prosecute crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, including the crime on the Miljevac Plateau, to do something, but for the time being, there is no any response or proceedings,” Strbac has said.
He has stressed that the whole Europe in a way is trying to force Serbia to give up this regional jurisdiction, which Belgrade does not use, and it should, since thus justice for this and numerous other crimes against Serbs would be served at least partially.
Strbac says that Bacic relatively often speaks to the Croatian media, describing and bragging about the events of June 21, 1992, saying, among other things, that Croats used a ruse when they asked UNPROFOR to convey to Serbs “to refrain from provocations” during the Festival of the Child in Sibenik only to attack them.
“The 40 killed members of the Serbian territorial defense, majority of whom were massacred after they surrendered, is the sad epilogue of this attack /which was conducted in the presence of UNPROFOR/. Instead of returning the bodies of those killed to their families, the Croatian authorities ordered Serbian inmates, under the threat of death, to throw them into karst pits intended for bulky waste,” Strbac has said.
He has said that from July 17 to September 1 that year, Croatia surrendered by way of UNPROFOR to the Serbian side 21 bodies which were not buried or were buried outside the pit. Bones were removed from the pit, put into 20 bags and mixed with animal bones, which aggravated the identification.
“Of 40 persons’ mortal remains, 28 have been identified and buried in family graves, while 12 unidentified persons have been buried in a joint grave at the new cemetery in Knin, where they still rest,” Strbac says.
He has said that after the fall of the Republic of the Serbian Krajina, neither Croatia nor the IC demonstrated any interest in exhuming and identifying these mortal remains using a contemporary DNA method.
Strbac has said that those who committed the crime on the Miljevac Plateau filmed it on a video tape, which, as a sort of a horror movie, was rented in video clubs all over Europe.
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