by Zoran DASKALOVIC
As some witnesses decided on their own to volunteer to testify, the State Prosecutor's Office, which is coordinating the investigation, expects and hopes that more witnesses will come forward when the investigation truly kicks in, despite the pressure and obstruction in Sisak, which is horrific even today. Nevertheless, despite everything, the mosaic of crime and perpetrators is slowly coming together.
Based on the information that has made it through to the public during the last ten or so years, and on the testimonies and rumors that have been making circles in Sisak all this time, crimes were mostly premeditated. Allegedly, the current investigation confirms that. Feral received information confirming that much from the headquarters of one of state intelligence services, whose members did their part in Sisak this summer. They, allegedly, obtained evidence that crimes had been committed based on previously compiled execution lists.
However, the state prosecutor's office, on the other hand, claims that so far none of the services or institutions participating in the investigation has submitted a report. Consequently, there are no reports regarding evidence about the premeditated nature of crimes. Therefore, it is still unclear whether the investigation will focus on the direct perpetrators of crimes, or will follow the evidence trail and include those who ordered and organized crimes, or later suppressed evidence and protected perpetrators of crimes from prosecution.
Most crimes were committed at the time when Ivan Bobetko, as the president of the Crisis Headquarters and the commander of the Croatian National Guard, and Djuro Brodarac and Vladimir Milankovic, as the chief and deputy Police chief in Sisak, respectively, were on the top of the pyramid of authority in the city. Perpetrators of crimes are mostly their subordinates. Thus, if it is proven that crimes were indeed organized, the trail of evidence may eventually lead the investigation to their door. True, in February 1992, Broadarac stated that the Police in Sisak had taken into custody 12 persons on suspicion of killing some of ethnic Serb residents, but they were never charged or tried. The interview given by Vjekoslav Vidovic, president of the Supreme Court of Croatia at the time when abovementioned crimes took place in Sisak, in 1995 and published in Feral, indicates that at that time the Court in Sisak had collected documentation about some of the crimes.
Vidovic had learned about that in an unusual manner. Namely, he was contacted by two judges from Sisak who requested to urgently meet with him. Aware that this was a very unusual and obviously important request, Vudovic agreed to immediately see them. Although the judges came to Zagreb, in the end they did not say anything extraordinary to Vidovic. However, his impression was that at the last moment they changed their minds and gave up. Thus, he went to Sisak, with support of presidents of departments of the Supreme Court, to try to find out what was actually happening there. Vidovic learned in Sisak that the city was in clutches of fear, fear that verged on panic, since corpses of about ten residents had been found floating in the Kupa River. Those residents had been previously denounced on the pages of Slobodni Tjednik magazine as Serb or Communist spies.
One of the judges who requested to see Vidovic attended the identification of the corpses, so that the court had documentation about those crime scene investigations. However, after that none of the competent institutions did anything to establish who and why had committed those murders. Fearing for their lives, judges from Sisak tried to prompt an investigation into those crimes with the assistance of the Supreme Court of Croatia. Vidovic informed the then Prime Minister Franjo Greguric about everything, and gave him a report compiled by a Supreme Court judge upon return from Sisak.
However, nothing happened after that. Vidovic was soon fired from the Supreme Court. Before leaving the court he requested from the Supreme Court archives a copy of the report regarding crimes committed in Sisak, but was told that the report had allegedly disappeared. It is not known whether the documentation on crimes collected by the Court in Sisak is also missing, or what has happened with the autopsy reports compiled by the Sisak Hospital Pathology Department covering autopsies of about 40 murdered residents of Sisak.
Still, if all or most of those pieces of evidence had been destroyed in the meantime, their reconstruction, with assistance of those who collected that evidence in the past, is definitively possible even today. First witnesses who have recently testified in the Court in Sisak, started piercing the mystery of crimes that neither Kupa nor the Sava River managed to totally hide ten years ago. Bodies of some of the murder victims floated up along their shores and were mostly buried at the Sisak cemetery with all the evidence of crimes on them. That evidence and witness testimony would have to explain many of crimes, and bring the perpetrators to the court, even though today many in Sisak, even some of those who participate in the investigation, are doing everything to make sure that that does not happen.