THE HAGUE/ZAGREB, June 3 (Hina) - The Serb army was the aggressor on Croatian territory, a protected witness registered as C-47 told the trial chamber of the Hague-based U.N. war crimes tribunal in the trial of former Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milkosevic on Tuesday.
THE HAGUE/ZAGREB, June 3 (Hina) - The Serb army was the aggressor on
Croatian territory, a protected witness registered as C-47 told the
trial chamber of the Hague-based U.N. war crimes tribunal in the
trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milkosevic on Tuesday.
#L#
"Our army was the aggressor on Croatian territory. It killed,
destroyed, occupied villages and towns and carried out ethnic
cleansing," said the witness who, as a leader of the Serb Radical
Party (SRS) and the Chetnik movement in Subotica, Vojvodina,
recruited volunteers from 1990 and led them to fight in Croatia and
Bosnia.
Asked by prosecutor Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff to describe the
difference between the media propaganda about Serbs being in danger
in Croatia and the true situation on the field, C-47 said he had
learnt "in war zones that this propaganda was untrue" and that the
situation was the opposite, i.e. that the ex-Yugoslav People's Army
(JNA), Territorial Defence (TO) and Serbian volunteers were the
aggressors in Croatia, as well as in Bosnia.
Following several weeks when witnesses from Bosnia took the witness
stand, C-47 again testified about crimes in Croatia.
C-47 spoke about the atrocities Chetniks did after the fall of
Vukovar, where he said he witnessed "raping, slaughtering, cutting
ears off and the massacring of Croatian civilians".
He pointed the finger to members of a Chetnik platoon, headed with
Duke Milorad Lancuzanin, aka Kameni. This platoon is connected with
the crime at Ovcara farm near Vukovar, where a mass grave was
found.
The witness confirmed Chetniks carried out the Vocin massacre and
spoke about the killing of Croats in Tordinci.
The witness described how, as a royalist, in 1990 he had made a
connection with Vojislav Seselj and founded a branch of Seselj's
SRS and the Chetnik movement in Subotica, to which he had recruited
some 300 volunteers, including "many officers and non-commissioned
officers of the JNA and police".
He also spoke about the campaign of chasing Croats and Hungarians
out of Vojvodina, in which radicals, Chetniks, local leaders of
Milosevic's socialists, but also the police, took part.
"Police officers themselves terrorised and physically abused
citizens of Croat and Hungarian backgrounds," C-47 said, adding
that Croats and Hungarians has been laid off from police and civil
services.
The witness spoke about the bombing of the cathedral in Subotica and
a Hungarian school, as well as other operations of terrorising non-
Serbs. During the campaign, he said, "about 20,000 Hungarians and a
significantly larger number of Croats were displaced" from
Vojvodina.
"Croats' eyes should be taken out with rusty spoons, chase them all
off to Croatia and accommodate Serb refugees in their homes,"
Seselj said at a 1991 rally in Subotica, according to the witness.
At the rally, Seselj called on the creation of a Greater Serbia on
the line Virovitica-Karlovac-Karlobag, which, said the witness,
had even been written into the Radical Party and Chetnik movement
statute.
C-47 spoke about the training of volunteers on JNA and police
training grounds in Subotica, and their being equipped ahead of
going off to the war front, at Bubanj potok, near Belgrade.
The trial chamber heard an audio tape of a part of Seselj's
interview in which he said that "Milosevic gave weapons, uniforms,
buses, all technical equipment and army barracks in Bubanj potok
(to the Chetniks in 1991) and everything functioned better".
"This is absolutely correct," said the witness, confirming the
veracity of the tape. He continues his testimony tomorrow.
(hina) lml sb