Re: [Marxism] re: Milosevic's '89 speech

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

John M Cox wrote:
> Just a short note on Milosevic's speech on the 600th anniversary of the
> Kosovo battle: I agree with Michael's comments on this speech, as with
> almost all of his analysis on Yugoslavia 

Really? Do you agree with this:

But as one Zagreb politician told the press: Tudjman may have made 
mistakes with regard to his republic's Serb minority, while Milosevic 
wants to destroy Croatia; there is no comparison between the two.

Zagreb academic Rada Ivekovic told Green Left Weekly, “Up to and during 
the election campaign, Tudjman was more pronounced in his right-wing 
[nationalist] claims than now because, after he came to power, he had to 
play the moderate within his party ... There are people in the HDZ more 
to the right than he is, including the defence minister [Sime Djodan], 
and there are other rightist parties.”

Tudjman's moderation in dealing with Serbia's aggression produced open 
tension within the ruling party and the postponement of a session of the 
Sabor early this month as HDZ hardliners increased pressure for 
returning sacked cabinet ministers to their posts, for a general 
mobilisation and for the declaration of a state of war in Croatia.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1991/23/23p17.htm

----

The New York Times
September 5, 1997, Friday, Late Edition - Final
Croatian's Confession Describes Torture and Killing on Vast Scale

BYLINE:  By CHRIS HEDGES

DATELINE: GOSPIC, Croatia, Sept. 3

A former Croatian militiaman who acknowledges that he killed 72 
civilians, tortured prisoners with electric shocks and ran a death camp 
has described in a chilling interview his journey from foot soldier to 
coldblooded killer during Croatia's war for independence.

The militiaman, Miro Bajramovic, implicated senior Croatian officials in 
at least 400 executions of ethnic Serbian civilians by death squads six 
years ago, triggering impassioned denials of responsibility by senior 
Government officials and his immediate arrest.

"I am responsible for the death of 86 people," Mr. Bajramovic said in an 
interview with The Feral Tribune, the independent Croatian newspaper. "I 
go to bed with this thought and, if I sleep at all, I wake up with the 
same thought. I killed 72 people with my own hands. Among them were nine 
women. We made no distinctions, asked no questions. They were Chetniks 
and our enemies. The most difficult thing is to ignite a house or kill a 
man for the first time, but afterwards everything becomes routine."

The Chetniks were Serbian nationalist guerrillas who occasionally 
cooperated with the Nazis during World War II.

Mr. Bajramovic, who said he was speaking out of guilt and bitterness, 
said he had come forward because the state had failed to reward him for 
his services. In the interview, he asserted that he and three comrades 
had executed at least 400 ethnic Serbs on the orders of Croatia's former 
Interior Minister, Ivan Vekic.

The Government in Zagreb has questioned Mr. Bajramovic's credibility, 
and the former Interior Minister has denied that he ordered Croatian 
soldiers to "liquidate" Serb civilians.

Mr. Bajramovic, a former police officer, called the paper on his own 
initiative and was arrested on Monday along with three police colleagues 
hours after the interview appeared on newsstands.

The account is extraordinary for several reasons. Mr. Bajramovic is not 
under indictment by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. 
An investigation by the tribunal into his paramilitary unit, led by an 
ultranationalist, Tomislav Mercep, was dropped recently for lack of 
evidence, according to United Nations officials close to the 
investigation. Furthermore, Croatian authorities, despite persistent 
reports by Serbs and human rights groups of widespread atrocities, have 
also failed to investigate the wartime killings.

Human rights workers described the interview as a watershed. "This 
testimony exposes for the first time the internal workings of Croatian 
authorities during the war," said Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, the head of the 
Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. "All other reports of a 
Government campaign to carry out atrocities against the ethnic Serbs has 
come to us from anonymous sources."

In the interview, Mr. Bajramovic, who is 40, he said he and his 
colleagues ran an elaborate detention center in Pakracka Poljana and 
Medurici, 60 miles southeast of Zagreb, where prisoners were tortured 
with electric shocks or doused with gasoline and burned alive. He said 
nearly all the prisoners were executed and buried in mass graves.

The three accomplices he named in the interview, Munib Suljic, 38, Igor 
Mikula, 26, and Nebojsa Hodak, 31, were arrested on Tuesday, a day after 
Mr. Bajramovic. The four men are to appear before an investigative judge 
in Zagreb.

Croatia's move in 1991 to secede from Yugoslavia, led by staunch 
Croatian nationalists such as President Franjo Tudjman, saw pockets of 
Serbs, backed by Belgrade, seize rebel enclaves inside the country. The 
largest of these was the Krajina region, which was not taken by Croats 
until 1995. As the Serbs advanced on mountain towns like Gospic, not far 
from Krajina, nationalist paramilitary groups like the one led by Mr. 
Mercep sent volunteers and weapons to hold back the Serbs. Most of these 
groups were directed by the Ministry of Interior.

Mr. Mercep, at the time, was one of the leading members of Mr. Tudjman's 
ruling Croatian Democratic Union. He currently heads a small political 
party in Zagreb and has refused to comment on the accusations.

Mr. Bajramovic complained in the interview that other paramilitary 
leaders had gotten rich from the looting of Serb property and their 
ascension to power while he was impoverished and without work.

"I was silent about this for a long time, expecting that someone in this 
country would remember that I exist," he told the newspaper. "My 
children eat just like Mercep's do, yet he has two houses in Zagreb, two 
apartments and a house on Brac and he came from Vukovar without a kuna 
in his pocket."

Croatian officials in Gospic, a depressed town of 8,000 people that once 
was home to about 3,000 ethnic Serbs, were uncomfortable when questioned 
about the allegations.

They did not deny that such killings took place, but disputed how many 
were killed and who was responsible.

Ante Frkovic, the region's deputy in the Croatian Parliament, for 
example, said that the numbers of ethnic Serbs killed in Gospic was "at 
least ten times less than the number given in the interview."

Dane Simic, a senior commander in the town during the war, acknowledged 
that widespread abductions and executions of Serbian civilians took 
place in Gospic in October and November of 1991, but he insisted that 
these killings were not carried out by the Croatian paramilitary units 
but by "Croats from mixed marriages and Serbs who wanted to damage 
Croatia's image abroad."

At the start of the 1991 war, separatist Serbs, backed by Belgrade, 
moved to seize chunks of Croatia, including Gospic. Hastily organized 
Croatian militias struggled against the Serbs and the country saw savage 
fighting that left some 10,000 dead. The dark and desperate days of the 
Croatian struggle for independence also led to wholesale attacks on 
ethnic Serbian civilians, a half million of whom were eventually driven 
out of the country and remain in exile.

Mr. Mercep's unit, called Autumn Rains, arrived in Gospic in September 
1991, a few months after the war began. Once the front-line fighting 
ended in early September, the unit turned its attention to the 9,000 or 
so Serbs who lived in and around Gospic.

"It was enough to be a Serb in Gospic to mean that you did not exist any 
more," Mr. Bajramovic said. "Our unit liquidated some 90 to 100 people 
in less than a month there."

"The order for Gospic was to perform ethnic cleansing, so we killed 
directors of post offices and hospitals, restaurant owners and many 
other Serbs," he said. "Executions were performed by shooting at 
point-blank range. We did not have much time. The orders from our 
headquarters were to reduce the percentage of Serbs in Gospic."

Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal, has 
requested information on the four men arrested. The tribunal has 
indicted 18 ethnic Croats for war crimes, but all of them are accused of 
atrocities committed in neighboring Bosnia.

Mr. Bajramovic said his unit had killed mostly Serb civilians but also 
unsympathetic Croats. He named a Croatian woman, Marina Nuic, whose 
death he says he now regrets, as one of the victims.

He describes how prisoners were kept in the basement and in classrooms 
of a school in Pakracka Poljana and taken out at night for "interrogation."

"Do you know the best way to interrogate prisoners?" he asked. "You burn 
them and pour vinegar on the wounds, mostly on the genitals and the 
eyes. Then there is a field telephone that can be plugged into a Serb. 
It is a direct current, but it does not kill them."

"The prison commander, Mijo Jolic, made them sing the Croatian anthem," 
he said. "Today he owns restaurants all over Croatia. Why don't I have 
anything?"

Periodically, Mr. Bajramovic said, Mr. Mercep, once a close ally of 
President Tudjman, would order the unit to "clean up" all the prisoners, 
a euphemism meaning they had to be executed. He said the Interior 
Minister, Mr. Vekic, "knew everything."

"I can tell him how many orders our unit received from him," he said of 
Mr. Vekic. "He would tell us to do this or this. We always completed his 
orders. These were mostly executions."

Mr. Vekic, quoted by Agence France-Presse, told the Slobodna Dalmacija 
daily that Mr. Bajramovic is a liar. "He lies saying he took part in 
fighting, in saying he had killed people. No one acted as he said," Mr. 
Vekic told the newspaper.

"We killed both Serbs and Croats in Pakracka Poljana," he said. "The 
village was echoing with screams. People heard the cries and screams 
coming from the prison, but they were afraid to say anything to us."

"According to my estimate, there were 280 people all together killed in 
Poljana including ten women," he said. "Besides Marine Nuic, there was 
Nada from the village of Kusonja who was infiltrated among us. There was 
a very old lady also in whose house they found a sniper rifle. Except 
for this old lady, all women were raped and then killed."

Mr. Bajramovic names victims he gunned down himself. And he says that at 
least 50 Serbs from Zagreb were transported to the improvised prison for 
torture and execution. Many of the Serbs, he said, had to dig their own 
graves.

"There was Ilija Horvat, whose only sin was to invite Croats and Serbs 
into his home," he said, of one man who was killed.

Mr. Bajramovic's unit roamed Zagreb at night wearing unmarked uniforms 
and driving vans without license plates looking for Serbs, he said.

The unit also amassed tens of thousands of dollars from looting Serbian 
homes and at one point two members began shooting over disputed funds, 
he said. The money, he said, made many of the members of the group, 
including Mr. Mercep, wealthy.

"Sometimes we executed people in their homes and then blew up the 
house," he said. "There were no bodies left. There were many houses like 
this, mostly in the village of Bujavica."

Mr. Bajramovic, along with some other members of the unit, was 
imprisoned by the Croatian authorities early in 1992 but released some 
three months later with no charges filed.

Victor Ivancic, the editor of The Feral Tribune, said he had received 
numerous death threats since the interview appeared on Monday. The paper 
says it has a transcript of the interview, and each page carries Mr. 
Bajramovic's signature.

Mr. Bajramovic said he believes he is in danger. "I don't feel relief 
after telling you about all this. I am afraid of my unit. They are 
experienced professionals who do not miss often. I know The Hague is 
unavoidable," he said, referring to the war crimes tribunal.





--

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org



_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism