BELGRADE, June 20 /SRNA/ – The Hague Tribunal has held no one responsible for the crime against Serbs committed on the Miljevci Plateau by Croats even 27 years later, although there is a video tape on the crime filmed by the perpetrators themselves, which was being rented as a horror movie in video clubs across Europe, the Documentation-Information Centre “Veritas” announced.
Veritas notes that only two members of the Croatian army were sentenced to three years in prison for this crime before the Croatia’s courts.
The statement reminds that on 21 June 1992, the Croatian Army attacked the positions of the Serb Territorial Defence on the Miljevci Plateau near Drniš and took control over seven villages.
On the eve of the attack, the Croatian side asked the Serbian side to refrain from possible provocations over the International Children's Festival which was supposed to be held in Šibenik that day, while it ruthlessly attacked Serb positions in the morning of that very same day.
It was the first major attack by the Croatian military forces on Republika Srpska Krajina /RSK/ after UNPROFOR assumed the role of protection forces in RSK.
On June 30 of the same year, the UN Security Council issued the Resolution 762 condemning the operation and demanding the withdrawal of Croatian forces to their initial positions, which Croatia refused.
The epilogue of this insidious attack is 40 killed Serb members of territorial defence, most of whom were massacred after they had surrendered.
Instead of returning the bodies of the dead to their families, Croatian authorities ordered Serb prisoners, under the death threat, to throw them into a karst pit intended for large-scale waste.
The Split Radio Station, in the manner of extreme cynicism, broadcasted the names of the killed Serb soldiers along with the sounds of the Serbian national anthem with various insults.
Between July 17 and September 1 of the same year, the Croatian side, through the UNPROFOR, handed over 21 bodies that were either not buried or buried outside the cave and the bones extracted from the cave by speleologists, packed in 20 sacks mixed with animal bones, which hindered identification.
The Serbian side put together 40 bodies out of the bones and body parts, 28 of whom were identified and buried in family tombs, while 12 unidentified bodies were buried in a mass grave at the new cemetery in Knin, where they still lay today.
After the fall of RSK, neither the international community nor Croatia showed any interest to exhume those mortal remains in order to identified them via DNA method.
After that, 17 prisoners of war who survived were exchanged in Nemetin on August 14, 1992, following torture in the prisons “Kuline” in Šibenik, “Lora” in Split and “Kerestinac” in Zagreb.
After many years of criminal proceedings, in September 2014, the Split County Court sentenced two Croatian Army members – Ante Babac to three years and eight months in prison and Mišo Jakovljević to three years in prison for the killing of a prisoner of war Miroslav Subotić, a member of the RSK Territorial Defence from the village of Ervenik near Knin. The sentence was confirmed by the judgment issued by the Supreme Court of Croatia on September 6, 2017.
No one has been prosecuted before the Hague Tribunal for the crime committed on the Miljevci Plateau, despite the fact that a lot of valid evidence has been delivered to all relevant local and international organisations and institutions dealing with human rights and war crimes.
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