BELGRADE, August 21 /SRNA/ – Veritas Centre for Collecting Documents and Information reports on the 25th anniversary of the killing of Caprag Serbs that in the spring and summer of 1991, at least 118 Serbs including 97 civilians of whom 11 were women were executed in the Croatian city of Sisak and neighbouring places.
People were killed in their homes, on the streets, at work, and usually taken to the previously set-up places, such as the former medical institution Jodno and the former compound ORA, not far from the Galdovo Bridge, where they were tortured and eventually killed and their bodies thrown into the Sava River.
Only 40 of the total number of the executed were actually buried, while earthly remains of the remaining 78 are still listed missing.
After failing to obtain justice for the victims before the Croatian and European courts, victims’ families in the Caprag villages hope that they will succeed before a Serbian court that is competent for all war crimes committed in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia /SFRJ/.
One of the gravest crimes against the Serbs in Sisak occurred in the early morning of August 22, 1991 when members of the Croatian Ministry of the Interior and Croatian National Guard Corps (Zenga), virtually unprovoked, riding armoured personnel carriers carrying the emblems of the Yugoslav People’s Army /JNA/, “stormed through” the Serbian villages of Blinjski Kut, Kinjacka, Brdjane, Cakale, Blinjska Greda, Bestrma and Trnjani, shooting at everything that moved.
On that day they killed 15 Serbs and wounded dozens more. The bloody raid on the Serbian villages was halted by the people of Brdjani who, hearing the shooting noise coming from other villages, quickly grouped and set up a successful trap.
In the attack on the Serbian villages, Croatian forces killed Ranko Martinovic /42/, Nenad Pajic /40/, Stevo Simic /54/, Lazo Stanic /57/, Ljuban Tatisic /59/, Mladen Vranesevic /53/, Milan Miso Vucinic /47/, Dragan Bekic /39/, Dragan Biskupovic /45/, Zeljka Boinovic /23/, Pero Crljenica /50/, Nedjeljko Nedjo Cajic /45/, Ratko Djekic /73/, Milan Kladar /51/, and Radovan Kragulj /36/.
Everyone apart from Zeljka Boinovic had been married. They left behind 32 children, 18 sons and 14 daughters.
Veritas notes that Zoran Vranesevic, son of the killed Mladen Vranesevic, was going to his father’s funeral from Belgrade where he worked as a policeman and never made it.
Four members of the Croatian police reserve units stopped him at Odri check point, arrested him and killed him by firing three bullets at him, leaving his body at the bank of the Sava near the Old Bridge, where it was found five days later.
After the atrocity, the Serbs from the Caprag villages never went to work in Sisak again, instead organising a defence from their villages and houses, and soon formed a municipality which they named Caprag after the region their villages are situated in. The seat of the municipality was in Gradusa, a town that belonged to the Republic of Serbian Krajina at the time.
In December 2006, the County Prosecutor’s Office in Sisak rejected the victims’ families criminal report filed against Zenga members Ivica Kovacic, Vlado Celcic, Kruno Vlasic and Milan Subic, justifying the move by ruling that the families’ relatives “were killed in combat” between the paramilitary groups of the Serbian Autonomous District /SAO/ Krajina and the Croatian army or “were collateral victims of that combat.”
The Croatian courts dismissed the damage claims filed by the victims’ families declaring the statute of limitations and lack of evidence about the participation of the Croatian army in the “harmful event” and ordered the victims’ families to pay for the costs of court proceedings totalling several hundred euros in some cases.
After the cases were closed by the Croatian courts, some of them were taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Several of those, including the applications by relatives of the killed Dragan Bekic, Nenad Pajic, Milan Kladar and Radovan Kragulj, lodged in late 2012, were dismissed by the ECHR in September 2014 as they were lodged outside the six-month time limit after the “last investigative steps were taken or the applicants learnt that there had been no effective investigation at the national level.”
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