Engineer Describes How Croat Troops Destroyed Houses

A military engineer this week told a Zagreb war crimes court how men in Croatian army uniforms wantonly demolished Serb-owned villages when they were forced to retreat from the “Medak Pocket” in 1993.



Jozo Nenadic accused the top commanders in the government and the army of having ordered the demolition, saying it only happened after then-interior minister Ivan Jamjak toured the area.



He was addressing the trial of Generals Mirko Norac and Rahim Ademi, who are accused of being in command of troops that killed at least 29 Serb civilians, many of them women and elderly people, during the operation. The indictment also alleges that five Serb prisoners of war were killed.



Croatia sent troops in 1993 to seize the Medak Pocket, a Serb-held patch of land that they feared could provide a launch pad for Serb forces wanting to cut Croatia in half.



“If the 9th brigade wanted to destroy houses, they had a military justification to do it during the incursion, because there were no houses without weapons, and the concept of nationwide defence made every house a bunker. They took guns, and cases of ammunitions out of almost every house,” said Nenadic.



But he said he had been shocked to see houses being destroyed during the retreat, which was forced on Croatia by the United Nations.



“People in Croatian Army uniforms conducted the demolition and the arson [of houses] after the action, but I do not know who they were because I had never seen them before,“ said Nenadic.



But Nenadic had words of comfort for Ademi, who nominally commanded the troops on the ground. He said the then head of the army Janko Bobetko had led the operation himself, and often issued orders bypassing both then-defence minister Gojko Susak and commanders in the field.



“Bobetko wanted to have the main role in every operation, from Operation Maslenica to Operation Storm, and always found a way to communicate with the executors of the action. This meant the chain of command leading through Minister Susak was often skipped,” he said.



He described a meeting in the hotel Velebno after the battle, when Bobetko even mocked Ademi for his Albanian surname.



“When Ademi tried to say something, Bobetko told him that he did not have anything to do with it and did not even know Croatian well,” recalled Nenadic.



A standard tactic of the defence teams has been to try to shift the blame between the two defendants, and a defence witness for Norac did more of the same this week.



On November 21, Croatian Secret Service operative Luka Jagic told a completely different story to Nenadic, saying that Ademi had been in charge of the operation.



“The action was commanded by Ademi who issued a written command about the attack which was delivered on the field after a few days, and later he gave a spoken command for the retreat,” said Jagic, who said “all the commands came from the headquarters commanded by Ademi”.



Jagic said Sector 1, which was controlled by Norac, existed only on paper, despite Bobetko having decided to create it.



Ademi disputed the witness’s testimony, saying he was not in command of the operation. He also denied the order to attack was delayed, and said the order to retreat had not just been verbal.



Earlier this week, the trial heard from a Serb who had been part of a group of around 50 Serb soldiers sent to bolster the defences in the Medak Pocket a few days before the Croatian forces attacked.



He said the village of Divoselo, where he was based, was mainly occupied by aged civilians, although a number of them were armed. The Serb Territorial Defence Forces were meant to provide a sense of security for the civilians although in the end they did not fire a single round, he said.



After the Croatian forces started shelling the village, he along with around seventy civilians and soldiers escaped on foot, walking for three days and nights. He thought the Croatian soldiers must have seen them, and decided to let them pass.



The trial of Ademi and Norac this week also heard testimony from Željko Karan, the chief of the department for forensic medicine in the Bosnian Serb-held town of Banja Luka. He examined corpses that the Croatian forces handed over to the Serbs, as well as those found by the United Nations.



He said that several of the victims showed the “characteristic body positions” of people who had been burned alive, but he did not find any signs of torture, sexual abuse or mutilation on the 72 bodies he examined.



He concluded that most of the people died during military operations, although one body had two stab wounds in the chest and one dead woman had cut fists and burns over more than a third of her body.



The trial will resumes on November 26.



Goran Jungvirth is an IWPR reporter in Zagreb.