Glavas Refused Permission to Attend Parliament

Croatian war crimes suspect Branimir Glavas was refused permission to attend the opening of parliament this week, despite having been elected to the chamber late last year.



Judge Zeljko Horvatovic ruled that his presence was not necessary at the first sitting, even though Prime Minister Ivo Sanader earlier said he would attend the inaugural session.



Glavas has been on hunger strike for two months to protest the refusal of the Zagreb court trying him for war crimes to release him from custody, and his health has deteriorated significantly. On January 11, the same day as the inaugural session, Glavas was released from prison due to his poor health. It is unclear when his trial will resume.



While ex-general Glavas, along with six other Croatians, is accused of murdering Serb civilians at the beginning of Croatia’s 1991-5 war of independence, he remains a popular politician in his native Osijek, a city in the far east of the country.



Glavas is on trial with Dino Kontic, Ivica Krnjak, Gordana Getos Magdic, Mirko Sivic, Tihomir Valentic and Zdravko Dragic.



This week, the trial chamber also heard allegations from some of the other defendants that the police had sought to extort confessions from them.



Although Dragic earlier confessed to police that he participated in the killings, he told the court he had been tricked into it by his cousin, police officer Vjekoslav Tapsanj.



Although he admitted membership of a patrol unit headed by a now-dead war crimes suspect, he said he was only in that unit between November and Christmas 1991 and never fought with it.



Dragic claimed he had been threatened with another prosecution, and also offered the status of a protected witness if he testified against Glavas and the other co-accused.



“In the worst case scenario, I was to get two or three years in prison, but the probability was that I would be a free man. It should say in that statement that the act was conducted under compulsion,” he said.



Dragic said Tapsanj had shown him a statement on a computer screen and told him, “Here is everything, read, learn and that is how you are going to testify.”



Another controversy emerged regarding a meeting between former Osijek chief of police Vladimir Faber and the sister of defendant Getos Magdic.



Getos Magdic, who has been in custody for more than 14 months already, accused Osijek chief of police Vladimir Faber of trying to force her sister to pass on instructions to her to accuse Glavas of ordering the murders.



She said Faber had offered her a shorter prison term in exchange for her testifying against Glavas. Ana Marija Getos recorded the meeting, and a transcript was published in the Nacional news weekly.



Sanader ordered an emergency investigation into the affair, while Glavas’s attorneys have demanded that Faber be removed from the Parole Commission



The interior ministry said on January 9 that the meeting had been conducted entirely at Faber’s own initiative and without its knowledge. The state attorney’s office, meanwhile, said that while it did not know the meeting had taken place, it could not question Faber’s professional integrity.



The trial this week also heard from Kontic’s defence. He denied all charges in the so-called “Sellotape case”, in which the defendants are accused of covering their victims’ mouths with sticky tape and dumping their bodies in the river Drava.



Serb civilian Radoslav Ratkovic is the only survivor of the crime.



Kontic dismissed allegations that he drove Dragic, who is his brother-in-law, to the site where the civilians were allegedly killed.



“I drove Zdravko Dragic during the war, I don’t remember exactly where but certainly I didn’t drive him to any kind of execution, neither was I present during such a thing,” said Kontic.



Kontic also said he had never seen Ratkovic before. Valentic also denied ever knowing Ratkovic, “I didn’t know him, nor did I know he was hurt, like it says in the indictment.”



Valentic said he would never harm anyone, whatever religion they were. He said, for example, that he had saved one Serbian family from Sarvas by bringing them to Osijek.



Goran Jungvirth is an IWPR journalist in Zagreb.