SAKIC PLEADS NOT GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS - EXTENDED

ZAGREB, March 15 (Hina) - I absolutely do not feel guilty for any of the criminal acts I am charged with. I understood the indictment and my conscious is clear, Dinko Sakic, a former commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp during WWII, said before the Zagreb County Court on Monday. Sakic was present at the two-hour reading of the indictment Monday, charging him with having committed the harshest and most deadly form of crime - war crime against civilians. The Croatian criminal law envisages a prison sentence of at least 20 years for such a crime. The 34-page indictment was read by County State Attorney Radovan Santek and his deputies Janjko Grlic and Dunja Pavlicek-Patak. The indictment states Dinko Ljubomir Sakic (born 1921) had as commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp from April until November 1994, abused, tortured and killed prisoners, and allowed his subordinates to do the same, due to which more than 2,000 people had died in the camp during the time Sakic was commander. The indictment recalled that pursuant to the implementation of Nazi and racial laws and legal provisions against political opponents of the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), tens of thousands of civilians, mostly Jews, Roma, Serbs and Croats, were abused, tortured and killed in the Jasenovac camp. The indictment maintains that: "- he subjected the internees to excessively hard physical labour, starvation, physical and mental abuse which led to severe impairment of their health and, in a large number of cases, to death, - a large, undetermined number of the sick and unfit for labour were executed after being singled out from the camp hospital and internee huts, - during the period between April and November of 1944 individual internees continued to be taken to the "Zvonara" building, where such internees were tortured and abused, an undetermined number of them to death, following "investigations" of alleged offences, - he allowed individual members of the Ustasha Defence, alone, without provocation and wantonly to abuse and kill individual internees, justifying such acts by alleged escape attempts and alleged slackness on extra-camp labour, as well as by other "offences", which resulted in the death of an undetermined number of internees. - under a system of individual and collective punishment, aimed at intimidating others, a number of internees were singled out, mostly at random, from "camp musters" and executed within the camp and on the camp execution sites ? granik, Gradina, Mlaka and others ? for alleged offences, so that, during his term of command from April to November 1994, on a number of occasions individual internees and groups of more than ten internees, with an undetermined total number were executed, some of whom were left hanging from posts in the camp for days, the internees Albert Izrael and cap-maker by the surname of Nisim among them, - in the summer of 1944, prompted by the alleged escape of a musician internee named Wollner, he ordered a muster of the entire camp and singled out a number of internees, mostly members of the musical section and Jews, who were then taken to "Zvonara" and subsequently executed, while he personally shot dead internees Avram Montiljo and Leon Perera with his pistol in front of the muster, - on account of the internees organising themselves under the leadership of Remzija Rebac, on 21. September 1944, he ordered a muster of the entire camp in front of which a group of 20 internees, including Remzija Rebac, Ladislav Matej, Musafija Heinrich, Dmitar Boskovic, Nikola Pejnovic, Branko Vojnovic, Stevan Zivkovic, Boro Sekulic and Pero Krajnovic, were executed by hanging, while he personally shot Dr Mile Boskovic dead with his pistol, - from August to October 1994, after a number of railway cars full of internees and a number of groups of civilians from south of the river Sava had been brought to the Jasenovac camp, the execution of the said persons was carried out at granik and Gradina, resulting in an undetermined number of deaths, - t h e r e f o r e, in breach of the rules of international law in times of war, he ordered and carried out torture, inhuman treatment and killing of civilians and ordered and carried out measures aimed at intimidating, terrorising and forcing civilians to forced labour, as well as starving and collectively punishing them, - by such acts ? he committed a crime against humanity and international law - a war crime against the civilian population". The County State Attorney motioned in the indictment that 29 witnesses be called to testify in the trial, among which three are new witnesses, as well as three witnesses who are to speak about the historic circumstances in which the crime had been committed. He also proposed that extensive documentation be read and examined. The documentation, he said, relates to crimes the defendant had committed while commanding the camp. In the statement of reasons, the State Attorney said 35 former inmates of the Stara Gradiska and Jasenovac concentration camps had been questioned during the investigative procedure, as well as five former prisoners who were found to have indirect information about the events in question. Also, six other witnesses were questioned about the circumstances of time in which the crime had been committed. Apart from the above, during the investigation procedure, the archive materials of the Land and State Commissions for the Determination of Crimes Committed by the Occupying Forces and their Collaborators have been collected from the Croatian National Archives, the Croatian National History Museum, documentation created by the work of the Jewish Community of Zagreb, the Government of the USA, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the Federal Justice Ministry of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The indictment continues with an overview of testimonies of 26 witnesses. According to the County State Attorney, "the testimonies of the witnesses that were heard complement and corroborate each other, both regarding the circumstances in which certain criminal acts were committed and the knowledge of the commission of specific criminal acts, and as such they fully support the conclusion that the crimes the accused is charged with did in fact occur". The indictment holds Dinko Sakic accountable for everything that had been done to civilians during their confinement in the camp. It was reiterated that the investigative proceedings revealed that from April to November of 1944 Dinko Sakic was commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp, prior to which he had been a member of the Ustasha defence at the Stara Gradiska and Jasenovac concentration camps. "The seriousness of the acts of the accused Dinko Sakic is reflected in particular in the fact that during his term as camp commander, the inmates continued to be treated in the same way: executions, abuse, torture, starvation?. Therefore, upon taking command duty, Dinko Sakic did nothing to prevent such treatment of the inmates; on the contrary, in some instances, he personally took part in such treatment. This certainly indicates that the accused showed willingness to persevere in the commission of the acts he is charged with," the indictment stresses. Sakic carefully observed the reading of the indictment with the occasional smirk and shaking of the head when his name was read in connection with witness affidavits. The Zagreb County State Attorney's Office issued an indictment against Dinko Ljubomir Sakic on December 14, 1998. The indictment was forwarded to the County Court in Zagreb on December 15, and on January 18, 1999, it became valid as the defendant's appeal was dismissed. The indictment was not read at the start of the trial scheduled for March 4 due to the health condition of the defendant. The trial was postponed at the suggestion of medical forensic experts. (hina) lml jn