BELGRADE, December 23 /SRNA/ – Veritas Centre director Savo Strbac says Zagreb which recently issued criminal reports against a group of Serbian generals for shelling Banski Dvori in 1991 keeps forgetting that Croatian pilots killed Serbian children and the elderly in refugee convoys in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Strbac notes that the refugee convoys were no threat to the Croats and that Croatia does not intend to punish those pilots and calls them knights and heroes instead.
In a statement for Srna, Strbac recalls that the BiH Prosecutor’s Office is conducting an investigation about shelling of refugee convoys on the Petrovac and Prijedor roads in August 1995 which left 13 Serb civilians, refugees from the Republic of Serbian Krajina, killed and several dozen wounded, and that it cannot seem to finish the probe since Croatia won’t submit the names of the pilots who operated the aircraft during the shelling of convoys.
“What’s more, official Croatia denied up until 2013 that its airplanes ever took part in the shelling, accusing Serbs of ‘shelling their own people’,” said Strbac.
When the Croatian magazine Vojna povijest /Military History/ reported on all activities of the Croatian air force in Operation Storm mentioning both the Petrovac and the Prijedor road, the Croatian side admitted in writing that “the Croatian army did indeed carry out certain operations against Serb motorised armoured convoys in the BiH territory but that their targets were not Serb civilians,” recalled Strbac.
“So, if the Croatian prosecution bodies could wait 26 years for valid evidence to prosecute the former members of the Yugoslav People’s Army /JNA/ for the shelling of Banski Dvori, where there was one civilian casualty and four wounded, I wonder what prevented them from prosecuting the people responsible by command responsibility and killers on the Petrovac and Prijedor roads when they had evidence in their hands, and why they failed to act upon a letter of request by the BiH Prosecutor’s Office to let the BiH authorities prosecute them at least,” Strbac asked.
The answer lies in the double standards of European Croatia, according to him.
“Their pilots, who murdered children and the elderly in a foreign state, who posed no threat to them whatsoever, are ‘knights’ and ‘heroes’ which is what /Rudolf/ Peresin was posthumously called by the first Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and Croatian General Antun Tus, while the JNA pilots and their subordinate officers, who shelled a legal military target were ‘killers and war criminals’. Such double standards cannot build either reconciliation or trust,” Strbac stated.
According to the Veritas data, in the shelling of the Petrovac road near the settlement of Bravsko, on August 7, 1995 the Croatian air force killed Darinka Drca /68/ and her grandchildren Jovica Drca /6/ and Mirjana Dubajic /21/, Nevenka Rajic /11/ and her brother Zarko Rajic /9/, and Krstan Vukovic /44/ and his son Darko /13/. Casualties were also Branko Stjelja /72/ and his son Mirko /34/, and Milka Kovacevic /83/.
In the attack, dozens of refugees were injured and the aircraft that shot them was a MiG 21 which took off from the Split airport.
Only a day later, on August 8, on the Novi Grad-Prijedor road in the village of Svodna, two Croatian MiG-21s, which took off from the Zagreb Pleso airport shelled a refugee convoy killing Marija Galoza /76/, her son Rade Galoza /40/, and Mile Malobabic /42/, and severely wounding four children and four women.
In Operation Flash, which came before Operation Storm, a Croatian MiG-21 dropped four cluster bombs over Bosanska Gradiska killing Nemanja Golic /9/ and his sister Dajanu Golic/6/. Their mother Gordana and three neighbours were severely injured then.
The aircraft was downed right after it dropped its fatal cargo by the Army of Republika Srpska /VRS/ and pilot Rudolf Peresin, a JNA deserter, fell into the Sava River together with the broken plane.
The Serb side notified the International Court of Justice about these Croatian operations in the Croatia and Serbia’s mutual lawsuits on genocide.
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