The Devil's Garden: A War Crimes Investigator's Story

8. The Conspirators

109 8 z The Conspirators T hey came from the secret police and from the highest ranks of the JNA. They included members of the Presidency of the SFRY and individual presidents of several constituent republics. One was perhaps the most feared and deadly killer in all of Europe. Sometimes they met behind the closed doors of a president’s office. On other occasions their violent ambitions took them to smoky dens frequented by gangsters and prostitutes. They employed both old-fashioned coded messages and encrypted electronic communications systems to further their deadly conspiracy. These were members of Slobodan Milošević’s inner circle, the alleged participants in a joint criminal enterprise that was spawned in Serbia and reached throughout the Balkans and beyond. They held the innocent citizens of Yugoslavia at their mercy—and they dispensed cruelty instead. These conspirators were tapped into organized crime, and they often controlled the mob. Political assassins were at their disposal. They were never quite sure who was working for whom, but they had connections with members of foreign intelligence services, including the U.S. CIA; the Soviet Union’s KGB; and Shin Bet, the Israeli State Security Agency. They had one objective: to seize about one-third of Croatia and form a Greater Serbia. History is replete with territorial ambitions and human rights violations in Eastern Europe. In 1990 the conspirators’ ambitions were focused on the Republic of Croatia, an area largely inhabited by peaceable civilians. 110 / THE DEVIL’S GARDEN Most of its residents were Croats or Croatian-Serbs, but they shared their neighborhoods with other ethnic and religious groups—Muslims, Ruthenians , and Hungarians among them. Members of all these groups would fall victim to the conspirators’ perfidy. To carry out the objective of the joint criminal enterprise, Milošević’s inner circle set a number of strategies in motion. Croatian generals in the JNA were abruptly relieved of their commands. Weapons were taken away from Croatian citizens, and Croats were removed from government posts in their local communities. In some ways, the Croats who were only forced from their homes were the lucky ones. Too many others fell victim to extermination, murder , rape, torture, and unlawful confinement. Their homes and churches were destroyed. In some cases, entire villages were razed, leaving no trace of the peaceful inhabitants who had lived there in an atmosphere of brotherhood and unity. To carry out these unlawful operations, the conspirators needed forces on the ground. And in one way or another, they controlled them all: the JNA, the DB, TO, special volunteer paramilitary units, and the police— both regular uniformed officers and special operations units. Their reach was so pervasive that many otherwise amiable Croatian-Serbs came to believe they must persecute their own Croatian neighbors, lest they themselves be killed. The propaganda machine became an essential component of the criminal enterprise. Through black-flag special operations and effective use of the media, the conspirators convinced many Croatian-Serbs that the atrocities committed against their people during World War II were occurring once again. Serbian TV networks broadcast images of brutally murdered Serbs—although, in reality, many of the bloody corpses were either dead Croats or Serb victims who had been murdered by Serb forces. To make the operational aspects of the conspiracy possible, the inner circle gained control of all organs of the federal government, including the Presidency, and gave itself the ability to pass laws whenever it chose. The conspirators controlled the banks, and other revenue came streaming in from both legal and illegal sources. With these funds, the conspirators purchased weapons and ammunition, paid informants and assassins, and saw that regular and irregular forces were properly trained and equipped. The Conspirators / 111 This circle encompassed the men ultimately responsible for the heinous crimes that occurred throughout Croatia—crimes that shocked the conscience of humanity: The destruction of Vukovar, including the abduction and murder of 264 unarmed hospital patients and others; the siege and attack on Dubrovnik; the execution of innocent civilians from Erdut, whose bodies were dumped into wells; and the ruthless murder of helpless women, children, and elderly men, some of them wheelchair-bound or bedridden, in Croatian villages such as Baćin, Voćin, and Škabrnja. Through our investigations, we identified the units—and sometimes the triggermen—directly responsible for perpetrating these crimes. Through diligent police work, we often tracked down the individual commanders on the ground...