Witness Tortured by Seselj's Volunteers

A Croatian ex-soldier, testifying at the Hague tribunal this week, described how members of a party headed by a radical Serb politician on trial for war crimes “brutally tortured” him.



Witness Vilim Karlovic, a former member of Croatian National Guard, said he was only saved by the kindness of two Serb officers, and that he never saw the other Croats who were captured alongside him again.



“It was horrible. They hit us with hands, legs, wooden sticks. I saw that one of them even had a metal chain. You could hear people crying and screaming,” said Karlovic, when asked to describe what went on at the Ovcara farm complex outside the Croatian town of Vukovar.



The indictment against Vojislav Seselj alleges that volunteers from his Serbian Radical Party, SRS, tortured and murdered some 200 Croats taken from the Vukovar hospital to the Ovcara farm in November 1991, after the town fell to Serb forces. He is also accused of inciting Serbs to drive Bosniaks and Croats out of parts of Bosnia and Croatia.



The prosecutors say Seselj “espoused and encouraged the creation of a homogenous ‘Greater Serbia’” through his speeches and actions.



Karlovic said that shortly before Vukovar fell into Serb hands, he heard Seselj’s amplified voice calling on Croatian forces to surrender.



The defendant claimed this was “ridiculous and hypocritical” and said Karlovic could not be sure the volunteers who abused him were SRS volunteers at all.



“They were obviously Serb volunteers from Croatia who wanted revenge for the crimes that Croatia committed against Serbs,” reasoned Seselj.



But Karlovic said the SRS volunteers were “recognisable because of their long beards and traditional uniforms”. He referred to his captors as Chetniks, a second world war-era term for Serb nationalists.



He said that after they entered the farm, “about 50 Chetnik volunteers were already there and started hitting the detainees”. The witness explained that he managed to plead with one of his captors to save him, but “never saw anyone from the Ovcara farm again”.



During cross-examination, Seselj blamed the Ovcara crimes on the Yugoslav Peoples Army, JNA.



Two former JNA officers, Veselin Sljivancanin and Mile Mrksic, have already been found guilty by the international court for the crimes in Ovcara, and sentenced to 5 and 20 years in prison respectively.



Karlovic testified that he was later taken to the Velepromet centre for detainees, where he saw Chetnik volunteers question prisoners and “murder several of them, even one 14-year-old boy”.



“When I was taken for questioning, the Chetniks brought me to a house nearby where they brutally tortured me. There were 20 of them and they would have killed me, but I was saved by two Serb officers who risked their lives to save me,” he explained.



According to Karlovic, he later found out that the names of those men were Predrag Milojevic and Marko Ljuboja, and testified in their defence at a trial in the Belgrade War Crimes.



“They were both accused of crimes committed in Ovcara, but I can’t believe those men could be murderers. I’m happy I managed to free Ljuboja with my testimony, but Milojevic was unfortunately found guilty and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment,” stated the witness.



Seselj, meanwhile, claimed that the two officers had in fact been SRS volunteers and that their trial had been cooked up “to create an artificial link between me and Ovcara”.



The defendant also accused Markovic of having been “coached and prepared for testimony by the Croatian government”.



Prosecutor Daryl Mundis protested fiercely against this accusation, as did the witness who said he had not been in touch with anyone from the Croatian government for over a decade.



“My story is tragic as it is and I don’t need to add anything to it, and I would never compromise my integrity in such a manner,” said Karlovic.



Seselj cut his cross-examination short to protest the trial chamber’s refusal to allow him to question the witness about Croatian crimes against Serbs.



The prosecution then produced another former member of the Croatian National Guard to talk about the fate of the prisoners in Vukovar.



Dragutin Berghofer was also a prisoner in the Velepromet centre, where he recalled “Chetnik volunteers murdering and beating detainees. There was a pile of blood and hay on the floor and a lot of lives were lost”.



Seselj refused to cross examine this witness because his statement had been admitted by the trial chamber before he gave his testimony.



“I will only cross examine witnesses that testify in person here, the others just don’t exist to me,” he said.



At the end of the week’s hearing, Seselj told the judges that the tribunal’s legal aid department had refused to compensate him for the costs of his defence because there was “insufficient proof that he is not able to finance it himself”.



“The reason [they] gave me is that I have not submitted information about my family possessions, which is true - I refuse to give out this information and no one can make me,” stated Seselj.



“[I might] not be able to continue the defence because there is a lack of funds to conduct research.”



The trial chamber will address this issue during next week’s hearing, which starts on March 18 2008.



Denis Dzidic is an IWPR-trained reporter in Sarajevo.