The oath of silence among the witnesses and perpetrators of the crimes against civilians in Gospic was established after the political decision of Tudman's state leadership to stop the investigation and give up prosecution of the suspects taken into custody in late 1991, led by Tihomir Oreskovic. The silence was broken in 1993 by Milan Levar, Zdenko Ropac and Milan Bando, who with their media appearances in the end prompted the Hague investigators to check the evidence received from the Serb side and international sources in Croatia and augment it with information obtained from the witnesses still living there.
The change of government earlier this year in Croatia stopped the opening of the case in front of the Hague Tribunal and redirected it towards domestic judicial bodies, which got a chance to finish the investigation started in late 1991. The current progress of the investigation in front of judge Sajonara Culina indicates that evidence collected in 1991 directed the investigation above all towards shedding light on the origin of the crimes, i.e. towards establishing who, when, and how started spinning the wheel of death which extinguished innocent human lives in Gospic and Karlobag, and in the area around these towns. Ante Klaric, at the time the chief of the Crisis headquarters for Lika and Gospic, gave a detailed description of the scene of crime in his letter to president Tudman, published in entirety by Feral in 1997.
The overture started on October 13, 1991, when Croat units tried to liberate Licki Osik and Ljubovo, but after initial successes had to give up and withdraw to their starting positions. According to Karic, the units that managed to temporary enter Novi Licki Osik "destroyed and liquidated 80 Chetniks [Serbs] and they themselves [Serbs] admit to heaving 48 dead." However, regardless of the number of casualties, according to Karic, because of those losses the Serb paramilitary units in revenge killed in Siroka Kula and Lipova Glavica "about 14 women, children, and elderly; they also took 10-15 persons away". The chain of retaliation continued in Gospic.
The investigation in Rijeka has so far concentrated on shedding light on the beginning of the revenge against Serb civilians, actually the fateful meeting of a part of the Gospic Crisis Headquarters, for whose organization and decisions Tihomir Oreskovic is the chief suspect. Levar, Ropac, and Bando first spoke out about that meeting, held on October 16, 1991. The meeting ended with all the participants, led by Tihomir Oreskovic and the commander of the Gospic Brigade Mirko Norac having to participate in the execution of a group of Serb civilians near Pazariste. However, their testimony, since it was second hand evidence, was only an indicator that needed to be followed in order to discover the origin of the crime in Gospic.
The investigation started making progress only after the participants of the deadly meeting decided to talk about it. Feral first published a part of the statement given by one of them. True, we mistakenly identified him as the former Gospic Police Chef Ivan Dasovic also a participant of the meeting. Several sources confirmed that in the 1991 investigation he, together with the SZUP chief Mirko Kasumovic gave a statement to police investigators. Today, after Ivan Dasovic and his predecessor at the head of Gospic Police Zeljko Bolf gave their statements in front of judge Sajonara Culina, it is clear that parts of Bolf's statement were originally published in Feral, rather than those of Ivan Dasovic; it is clear that the source which gave us the wrong information did that consciously in order to indirectly exert pressure on Dasovic and other members of the meeting to talk about it.
However, besides Bolf's statement, Feral knows for sure that there are statements of other participants of the deadly meeting. For example, S.G., a former Yugoslav People's Army lieutenant, who was forced to prove his courage and loyalty to the Croatian side by participating in an execution of Serb civilians, has stored his statement in a safe place. As a potentially unreliable participant in the crime, who could have "blurted out" any minute, S.G. was continuously persecuted and maltreated, verbal threats were interspersed with beatings, which prompted him to put his statement on paper and put it in a safe place, in order to thereby protect himself from persecution and murder, which had been threatened. In the Hague investigation, the statement also turned him into a candidate for a witness in the possible trial, which would ultimately make his situation easier even in the case if he were among the defendants in the trial.
The situation with a part of other participants in the meeting is similar. In the forest near Pazariste they had to participate in the bloody retaliation against Serb civilians. Some of them have these days decided to testify in front of the investigative judge from Rijeka in order to prove that they participated in the execution of a group of Serb civilians against their will, under the threat of death. According to their claims, the execution was ordered and organized by Tihomir Oreskovic and Mirko Norac.
So far five witnesses have confirmed in the investigation that the meeting was held, so that the continuous attempts of Oreskovic's defense attorneys to convince the public that the investigation hasn't progressed at all and that the witnesses have not incriminated their client, are wearing thin; those attempts are only a part of the propaganda battle on the eve of the completion of the investigation. After this week's testimony of retired General Mirko Norac, as well as leaders of security and police services who participated in the 1991 investigation, the investigation about the origin of the crime in Gospic will, most likely, be finished and will focus on the discovery of the details about the way the crime was committed, if sufficient evidence hasn't been obtained so far.
Bando does not hide that he was in the group of military policemen that, led by Juro Tomljenovic, arrested condemned Serbs in Karlobag. He adds that Serbs were loaded on specially prepared trucks. Then specially selected soldiers drove them towards the Velebit mountain. Bodies of some of them were found near the mountain pass towards Gospic because of which, on behalf of their families, attorney Slobodan Budak soon afterwards filed criminal charges against unidentified perpetrators. However, all these years these charges have collected dust in the drawer of the Lika State prosecutor.
Besides Zdenko Bando there are probably other witnesses who could precisely identify all military policemen and their commanders who participated in the arrests of condemned Lika Serbs, and they know very well who among them issued which part of the order, who only took people into custody, and who participated in executions. Similarly the places where most of the arrested Serbs were imprisoned before the execution are also known. They were mostly kept in Perusic, Zablate, at the farm owned by the former Yugoslav People's Army, and in the prison in Gospic. Several imprisoned Serbs can testify about that. They survived mostly thanks to interventions by the state leadership. Some Croats, who were imprisoned at the same time for other reasons, as for example Stjepan Krizmanic who testified about that in Feral can also confirm this information.
Among other Krizmanic described that several nights in a row he was taken with a group of imprisoned Serbs in front of an execution squad. However, unlike the Serbs, who were all killed, he was merely exposed to a fake execution, in order to admit whether he was involved in weapons smuggling and, if he were, with whom. Krizmanic also claimed that for a while he had been taken to Zablate to perform forced labor. Serbs imprisoned there also worked in the fields. These Serbs later disappeared.
Furthermore, the Gospic Police, in a pine forest near Smiljan discovered several graves in which bodies of several murdered Serbs from Karlobag were found, but after the Police investigation the evidence was removed. Milan Levar and Tomislav Oreskovic who at the time worked as a police investigator in the Gospic Police, showed to Feral's journalists emptied graves, whose photographs were published in Feral, and they also claimed that the investigation records about the discovered bodies still exist. Before he was killed, Milan Levar informed us that the whole forest had been cut down and the soil leveled by bulldozers.
In any case, in spite of continuous hiding and removal of evidence, moving of corpses to inaccessible ravines, including Saran's Ravine in the memorial park Jadovno [site of Ustashe concentration camp in WWII], and in spite of incessant intimidation and pressure on witnesses who were more or less prepared to testify about crimes, the investigation has collected enough evidence so that only divine force can at this point stop the issuing of indictments against at least the key creators and participants in the crime. Unfortunately, it seems that Milan Levar was right in this respect as well.
Namely, whenever he was warned that he was risking too much and could easily be killed, he responded that if that happened, the Hague Tribunal or the Croatian judiciary would be forced to initiate a criminal prosecution of criminals in Gospic, because he had collected and saved so much evidence that they would not be able to endlessly delay the processing of the collected evidence.