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“Mr. Milošević, the three or four houses that were in Saborsko, those people were with us up to the fall of Saborsko itself. They were together with us. And we didn't have any problems with them, neither did they have any problems with us. We were together during the war, and they were my neighbours. I knew them.” Vlado Vuković, a Croat man, describes relations between Serbs and Croats in his village in eastern Croatia. He testified in the case against Slobodan Milošević on 3 July 2003, and in the case against Milan Martić on 27 and 28 March 2006.
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Tensions in the central-eastern area of Croatia had already been simmering when on 1 April 1991, an armed clash between Croatian and Serb forces occurred amidst the natural beauty of the Plitvice Lakes National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site. At that time Vlado Vuković, then a 29-year-old police officer, had been serving in the police station in the town of Ogulin, located in the area. In response to the incident at Plitvice, he and a group of some 20 employees of the Ogulin police station moved to Saborsko, a village of some 300 households situated close to Plitvice, and set up a police outpost. In the evidence Mr. Vuković gave to the Tribunal’s Office of the Prosecutor and to the court in the cases against former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and former Croatian Serb leader Milan Martić, he described how tensions in the area increased in the spring and summer of 1991.
Mr. Vuković related that in April 1991 local Croatian Serb leaders organized a protest in the neighbouring town of Plaški demanding an ethnically pure Serbian police force. In June, Serb police officers changed the patches on their uniforms to read ‘Milicija Krajina,’ indicating their loyalty to efforts to create a Serb-dominated state. In the same time period, Martić’s Police (“martićevci”), commanded by Milan Martić (whom the Tribunal would later convict of crimes committed in Croatia), appeared in the area and stopped and searched buses carrying civilians.
On the morning of 5 August 1991, Mr. Vuković had just finished working the night shift as the operations/duty officer of the Saborsko police, when Serb forces attacked the village. Between 6.00 and 10.00 in the morning, some 80 shells fell in the village, although Mr. Vuković said those shells did not cause any damage. Most of Saborsko’s civilians - including women, children and elderly - who had left the village on 5 August when the shelling started, returned the following day. They were very afraid, said Mr. Vuković, and sought to protect themselves in shelters as the shelling continued.
The police force in Saborsko at that time numbered some 30 officers, including Mr. Vuković. In his testimony, Mr. Vuković described what it was like to serve as a policeman during the shelling of Saborsko: “A policeman doesn't have a mortar, a cannon, a tank. A policeman has his personal weapons; a rifle and a pistol. [The policemen] didn't come to wage war up there, they came to preserve public law and order and the state of security. Who knew that there would be an open attack on the 5th of August?”
Mr. Vuković said that Serb forces shelled Saborsko nearly every day after 5 August, sometimes using cluster bombs, and destroying many houses. “[T]here [were] daily 100 to 200 shells being thrown on [the village of Saborsko] up until the 23 September [1991],” said Mr. Vuković. “And we asked for aid assistance because we were left on our own, and they kept shelling. The 122-millimetre shells were used, as far as I know. And later on, God knows what else was used.”
Mr. Vuković gave evidence that he and two other police officers were captured by members of Martić’s police on 29 September 1991. They were first taken to the jail in the town of Plaški where members of Martić’s police beat Mr. Vuković several times during the 12 days that he was there. “Nikola Madaković, a Serb leader, beat me one day with his belt,” said Mr. Vuković. “I knew a number of the police that were there as they had been with the police when I worked with them”.
Then, Mr. Vuković was transferred to the prison in Korenica, located in the same area of eastern Croatia, where he was also severely beaten. “[M]y teeth were knocked out, I was cut [in the face with a knife] and then placed in solitary confinement. These beatings happened very often.”
After approximately 12 days, he and other prisoners were taken by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) to an airport near Bihać, located on the Bosnian-Croatian border, where he was held for more than five days. He was beaten there by JNA military police, who had formerly been Serb police colleagues from Zagreb. He was next transferred to the Manjača detention camp near Banja Luka, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he was detained in cattle hangars. On 9 November 1991, he was exchanged with about 200 other prisoners for Serb JNA officers and soldiers.
Several years later, on about 6 or 7 August 1995, during Croatia’s armed operation, to recapture Serb-held parts of its territory (called Operation Storm), Mr. Vuković returned to Saborsko. He could not recognize his village. “It didn’t exist”, said Mr. Vuković. “It was all overgrown and the road was overgrown. It was all covered with bushes. There was nothing there. It was a ghost place, just thorns and bushes.” When asked whether Saborsko’s houses were damaged, Mr. Vuković replied that “[i]t’s not just that they were damaged; they didn’t exist. I didn’t see a single house. I only recognized the church. It was a heap of rubble.”
On 18 October 1995, Mr. Vuković began assisting a team from Zagreb with exhumations in Saborsko. The first mass grave site they exhumed in the area, at a place called Popov Šanac, had 14 bodies, while the second, at Borik (Brdine), had three bodies in one grave and one body lying on the ground. They also found ten skeletons of elderly people in the charred remains of their homes. “They were all people who were roughly about 60 to 70 years of age, women too, and men”, said Mr. Vuković. “….[A]ll of them were civilians…except…a Croatian policeman.” In all, there were about 28 or 29 bodies found in the village and seven were still missing on 27 March 2006 when Mr. Vuković testified before the court in the case against Milan Martić.
Vlado Vuković was the 200th witness to testify in the trial against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević, on 3 July 2003. In this case, many victims’ testimonies were submitted in written form as an exhibit, and appeared before the Tribunal to answer questions from the accused or the court. Vlado Vuković related these events to an investigator of the ICTY’s Office of the Prosecutor on 18 and 20 January 2001. Slobodan Milošević, who was charged with crimes committed in Saborsko, Croatia, among other places, died in custody on 11 March 2006, and proceedings against him were terminated. On 27 and 28 March 2006, Vlado Vuković testified about the same events in the case against one of Slobodan Milošević’s co-perpetrators, Croatian Serb leader Milan Martić, whom the Tribunal convicted and sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment.
>> Read Vlado Vuković’s full testimony and witness statement in the case against Slobodan Milošević. Read also his full testimony in the case against Milan Martić, on 27 March 2006 and 28 March 2006.