Stevan Budac was arrested at the end of last week after the Croatian indictment and another Serb was “locked up” at the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina a week ago
After exchanging the sharp, at the moments pretty low, diplomatic darts between Serbia and Croatia, it seemed that the truce was finally active. Truth be told, nothing new was exchanged in the past few days, but two Serbs were arrested in the last week because Croats charged them with war crimes and one of them for suspicion that the participated in the crimes on Kosovo and Metohija.
The last such example was the arrest of Budac Dzekson (50) in Romania, in the harbor Galac on the Danube. Stefan was arrested during the document control of the shit under the Serbian flag, and he was working on engine maintenance.
According to the data from the Croatian indictment, Stefan is charged with the crimes over Croatian and Hungarian citizens in the village Zmajevac during 1991. Savo Strbac, the president of the Document Information Center “Veritas” said that he spoke with his family today.
- I am waiting for them to come during the day to see what will happen. The family is shocked, when something like this happens, everything turns in the family. Stevan has been working on a ship for years, he has spent the last few on this one. He came to Serbia in 1993 from Baranja with his wife and four little daughters – Strbac said.
This is the 168th arrest of our people by Croatian warrants since 2001 until today.
- Up to 58 Serbs were extradited to Croatia, and 23 of them were released after extradition. That is a large percentage and it shows that there are so many unfounded indictments against Serbs. Croats were charging Serbs as they wanted, and the fact that there are investigations and around 5.000 criminal charges against 3.800 Serbs is enough to see that it is ridiculous – Strbac explains.
- Those are not secret indictments, but secret lists that are kept away from us. When the investigation is opened it is no longer a secret. According to the last list which was delivered to Serbia in 2013, there were 1.557 who went through the process. We added 200 more people on this list in the meantime – Strbac said.
He explains that the lists are not final, because the war crimes do not get old. Croatia is exploiting this fact, they have a lot of people working on it. New investigations were started against 55 more people from November to April.
- Croats have degraded this serious crime into an ordinary crime. Serbs are charged for the killing of horses as pigs as war crimes, one man got eight years in prison for killing four horses and three pigs. Stealing house appliances, stealing of turkeys and a slap to imprisoned Croat can't be war crimes. Those can be ordinary criminal acts – Strbac explains.
On the other hand, there was a practice in Croatia for a long time that the people and the army who are “defending” themselves can't commit war crimes, and all of their crimes are justified.
While they are working full steam, we arrested only a few Croats suspected of war crimes and we returned them all to the countries from where they came from.
- Serbia has submitted indictments with 80 names to Croatia, and they quickly passed a law by which all Serbian verdicts were null and void. Now, they want to go step further and to bring this to the regional jurisdiction, to prevent Serbia from suing their veterans, because the war was not led on the Serbian territory – Strbac said and warns that the “season of arrests is beginning” because people travel more in this period.
- Our estimates are that Croats will open new charges as long as this generation lives – Strbac said.
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