by Ivica DJIKIC
During the past few years significant amount of bloody details about all those events has leaked into the public, but very little is known about a sizable operation that involved physical elimination of distinguished Serbs in Sisak, the operation that had the character of an extremely important national task. While recently there has been a lot of discussion of Pakracka Poljana, Gospic, Sibenik, Karlovac and Lora in Split, in the domestic judicial circles, as well as in the Hague, the same circles have been intensively silent about the Sisak book of the dead and those who are responsible for its existence. The story that follows is only one of tens of similar stories...
At this point it should be stressed that in those years only dangerous lunatics used ethnic categories in their assessment of individuals. Namely, no one normal during those years paid attention that doctor Stanka was a Croat, while her husband Damjan was a Serb. However, soon some screwed up times came around and in those times ethnicity was the most important detail in everyone's resume. One's survival depended on that detail.
"I was active in the SDP and thus became the mayor. Damjan never cared about politics. He was busy with the orchard, children and his job," says Dr. Stanka Zilic-Gregurincic. The summer and autumn of 1990 were pretty quiet but the blood that would be spilled in the coming months could already be felt in the air. Dr. Stanka occasionally received threats from arrogant local HDZ supporters, but she did not get too concerned about them. During all that time Damjan traveled regularly to work in Sisak and continued to ignore politics despite being a Serb.
One day - it was already the summer of 1991 - he returned home from work, for the first time anxious and worried. He told his wife that afternoon that he was on the list.
"I asked him what list he was talking about, but he only repeated that he was on the list. Soon afterwards he told me that he had signed a loyalty oath to the Croatian state, and that the management of the Sisak oil refinery had demanded from all the Serb employees to sign that oath. Besides signing the oath, those days he also spoke for the Croatian TV. He said that Serbs were not endangered in Croatia, that no one was persecuting them and that they should continue living in their homes and with their neighbors," says Stanka Zilic-Gregurincic. One morning, while he was driving on the road along the Kupa river towards Sisak, Damjan was stopped by Croatian policemen who maltreated him for hours. They suspected him of smuggling weapons for the Serb rebels, who had by that time started playing dangerous war games. Engineer Zilic at that time started realizing that things were getting out of hand, but deep inside he felt safe, as he knew that he had never harmed anyone.
"We saw that the madness was spreading, and I was receiving more and more threats, so that our life in Petrinja was becoming increasingly difficult. Damjan began saying that the situation in the refinery was increasingly tense as well. In order to get away from all that, we decided to go to the seaside in August, and we sent our son Nenad to England to study English. Daughter Biljana was a student in Zagreb," says Stanka. When they got back from the vacation, everything had already changed.
"They did not intend to kill us. If that were their intention they could have easily entered the house and killed us both. They just wanted to scare us," says Dr. Stanka and adds that Croatian soldiers raged that night through Petrinja, burning Serb houses and scaring people. The following morning Stanka and Damjan went to see their daughter in Zagreb and decided to stay with her. However, Damjan did not want to lose his job, so that he traveled every morning by train to Sisak. However, due to frequent emergencies the train sometimes only went as far as Lekenik and engineer Zilic was late for work.
"Although at that time he was the chief of production at the refinery and although they knew very well why he was late for work, the porters, because he was late, refused to allow him to enter the refinery and he would only be allowed in after an intervention by the CEO," says his wife. Damjan then took a sickness leave, as he had trouble with his backbone. He daily attended physical therapy, but he was told from the refinery that he had to attend therapy in Sisak, instead of in Zagreb. Namely, the management of INA's oil refinery in Sisak was doing all it could to find an excuse to fire engineer Zilic.
"When I realized that Damjan was not at home I went to the nearby restaurant Alkar in the Zagreb district of Utrine and asked the waitress whether she had seen my husband, as he frequented the restaurant. She said that they had had a wedding reception the previous night and that they were closed. Afterwards I went to see my daughter in Dubrava and told her that Damjan was gone," relates Stanka Zilic-Gregurincic. Biljana Zilic then went to the police station in Remetinec and wanted to report the disappearance of her father. However, the policeman told her that she had to wait for 48 hours before reporting a disappearance. However, when she told him the surname Zilic he told her to go home and that police would come to their apartment soon.
"And indeed, policemen soon came to our apartment and told us that Damjan had been killed. Murderers had taken his personal identification card but had forgotten to take his national health service card so that he was identified," says Stanka. Later the incident was reconstructed. On Saturday, November 23, in the afternoon, someone whom Damjan Zilic recognized knocked on the door. Damjan left the apartment with the visitor. It seems that the bait was the wedding reception of a refinery worker Zeljko Brigljevic at Alkar restaurant. However, instead to the wedding reception, the engineer was taken to Jakusevac. He was killed by blows to the head with a wooden mallet and his corpse was thrown in the Sava River.
However, the river washed his corpse on the shore the following day and police found the murderers some ten days later. Their names are - Robert Ahmetagic, Damir Saric, Dragan Kostric and Vinko Kovacevic. Before joining the Croatian National Guard, all of them worked for the Sisak oil refinery and in the statements to the investigative magistrate said that they had been tipped off that Serbs who plan to destroy the Croatian state gather in Alkar restaurant in Zagreb. They also said that they had been ordered to kill Damjan Zilic, a Chetnik. The fact that Zilic had nothing to do with Chetniks was mostly irrelevant at that time in Croatia.
"The defense tried to prove that my husband should have been killed and I am convinced that expensive Zagreb lawyers could not have been paid by those wretches. The defense must have been paid by someone in whose interest it was that they be acquitted. Besides, the four defendants were visited in prison by Ivan Bobetko and Bosiljko Misetic, who was at the time the Minister of Justice," says Stanka.
After several months spent in custody, Ahmetagic, Saric, Kostric and Kovacevic were released. They ere supposed to undergo psychiatric evaluation in the hospital in Vrapce. The evaluation was never carried out and Stanka Zilic-Gregurincic was left in shock one morning in 1993 when she heard on the radio that the murderers of her husband, based on the general amnesty law, had been acquitted of all charges. Although the prosecutor appealed the acquittal, the Supreme Court confirmed the lower court's decision.
"My daughter wrote to Carla del Ponte and informed her about our case. One of the secretaries at the Hague Tribunal wrote back and informed us that they had already known about that case but that the Croatian authorities should initiate a new trial," says Dr. Stanka. She adds: "I do not know whom to approach in the government. I do not know whether that makes any sense. I do not know whether they would be willing to do anything..."
"They are convinced that nothing has changed here after January 3. I agree with them, although I was a SDP member for years," says Stanka, who left the party immediately before the murder of her husband. She concludes: "No one can bring me back my husband. A part of my life has been irretrievably stolen and destroyed. But I want to see justice done and to see murderers held accountable for their crimes. However, I doubt that I will live long enough to see that happen in this state..."