Former Paramilitary Denies Serbian State Support Witness was member of Arkans Tigers.

By Velma ari - International Justice - ICTY, TRI Issue 725, 20 Jan 12

The trial of two former Serbian intelligence officials continued this week with the appearance of a defence witness who claimed that the Serbian State Security Service, SDB, had not helped Serb paramilitaries in Bosnia during the 1992-95 wa r. Franko Simatovic commanded the SDBs special operations unit during the period rel evant to the indictment, while his co-accused, Jovica Stanisic, was his superior as director of the SDB. The two are charged with participating in a joint criminal enterprise with the a im of forcibly and permanently removing non-Serbs from large areas of Croatia an d Bosnia through persecution, murder and deportation. Part of the indictment deals with the SDBs relationship with a number of paramili tary groups. According to the indictment, Stanisic and Simatovic helped establis h, supply with arms, and finance paramilitary groups acting in close coordinatio n with the Yugoslav Peoples Army, JNA, the Serb Territorial Defence, TO, the Bosn ian Serb Army, VRS, and the Serb Army of Krajina, SVK, a Serb force operating in Croatia. One of these paramilitary groups was the Serb Volunteer Guard, also known as the Tigers, commanded by Zeljko Raznatovic aka Arkan, an infamous Bosnian Serb warlor d. Raznatovic was indicted by the Hague tribunal in March 1999, but was assassin ated in Belgrade in 2000. This weeks witness, Jovan Dimitrijevic, now an official with the Serbian Football Federation, was a member of the Arkans Tigers from late 1991. He appeared in court to testify on the forces relationship with the SDB. The indictment against Simatovic and Stanisic alleges that the Serb Volunteer Gu ard was under SDB control, something the defence is trying to refute. Earlier in the trial, Srdjan Grekulovic, a witness for Stanisics defence, also tried to ref ute these allegations. Dimitrijevic told the judges this week that his first meeting with Arkan occurre d in 1991, in the town of Erdut in eastern Croatia. There, Arkan gave everyone a quick round of introduction and wanted to know more about all the new recruits, t he witness said. I told him that I had a university degree in economics, to which he [Arkan] said, Wow, finally we have someone who can read and write. The witness said the unit was as far as I understood, integrated into the Serb TO , whose government [Serb-run administration in Eastern Slavonia] paid for its ex penses, while the TO provided the first weapons [for the unit]. The JNA helped, too. He noted that additional weapons were captured in fighting with Croatian forces. Asked by Simatovic s defence lawyer Mihajlo Bakrac whether the SDB supported the Guard in any way, the witness said that he was quite sure in fact, sure that the force didn t receive any support from the SDB.

Dimitrijevic then repeated this answer, stating that it was true of the entire S erbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, MUP, of which the SDB was part. Noting that he spent the whole time until March 1992 at the facility in Erdut, D imitrijevic said he recognised many faces of different people coming to visit the centre regularly. The witness said they included the local chiefs of Serb entities such as Krajina president Goran Hadzic, the commanders of JNA units deployed in the area, and Serb leaders from Bosnia, including Biljana Plavsic. According to Dimitrijevic, Plavsic and other Bosnian Serb leaders visited the cen tre to instruct an operation to be carried out in Bosnia in March 1992, namely in the northeastern Bosnian towns of Bijeljina and Zvornik, because Arkan was famil iar with the region; he was from there. The witness explained that he only went to Bijeljina after the operation there wa s completed. The operation was done swiftly, and quite efficiently, and the JNA ap proved of how it went, he said. From Erdut, Dimitrijevic said, he moved to Belgrade to coordinate logistics for the Serb Volunteer Guard. He had an office in Arkan s home there, and became fri ends with him, he said, as they shared a passion for football. Dimitrijevic said that while he was in Erdut, his work included a number of diff erent tasks, many of them administrative in view of his academic background. The whole paperwork rested with me, I wrote order documents to have weapons trans ferred from the Eastern Slavonia authorities, and from the JNA, he said. Dimitrijevic remembered having also occasionally carried out background checks o n prospective members of Arkans force, one of whom was Milorad Ulemek-Legija, a f ormer French Foreign Legion member who has been sentenced for initiating the mur der of Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic. I cant remember when it was, but it was after Zvornik, some time in April 1992, he recalled. He seemed a good guy and kept a steady progress in the unit. He was a v ery active instructor at Erdut. Ulemek-Legija was later to join the SDB, in 1996. I remember that Arkan was prett y mad at [him] because of that... relations between the Guard and the SDB were a nything but good, the witness said. During cross-examination, prosecutor Maxine Marcus returned to the witnesss claim that important regional chiefs visited the training facility in Erdut. The witnes s confirmed again that this included Ilija Kojic, Eastern Slavonias defence minis ter, and his deputy Milan Milovanovic. Did you, however, know that they were employees of the Serbian MUP at that time? t he prosecutor asked, to which the witness replied that he had not known that. Marcus went back to the 1992 operations in Bosnia, showing the witness an infamo us photograph taken by Israeli photographer Ron Haviv, which featured a man visua lly identifiable as a member of the Guard kicking an injured man lying on the gro und. After she asked him whether he recognised anyone on the photograph, the witness said that he did recall the Guard member. He said, Arkan personally punished him and kicked him out of the unit. Referring to his work as a logistics officer for the Serb Volunteer Guard, prose

cutor Marcus showed Dimitrijevic pay lists from the SDB, with which the witness claimed he was completely unfamiliar. I really don t know anything about this; I m seeing this for the first time, he sa id. The money we had as a unit didn t come from the SDB. I already said who suppo rted us. Asked whether any criminal activity was involved in supporting the unit, the wit ness said that this was not the case, as Arkan owned several legal companies whic h provided a part of the funding, as did donations from good people. Asked about individual names on the list, he recognised many of them, including that of the man identified in the Haviv photograph, who appeared on documents da ted much later after his supposed exclusion from the unit. I guess what happened is that he was rehabilitated. People change; some of their mistakes are forgiven, Dimitrijevic said. Stanisic and Simatovic, arrested by the Serbian authorities on June 13, 2003, ha ve both pleaded not guilty. The trial continues next week. Velma Saric is an IWPR-trained reporter in Sarajevo.