Feral reveals: how Nacional, President's office and the counter-intelligence agency got involved in defense of General Gotovina with assistance of intelligence forgeries and misinformation

Ante, Watch Out, Flier!

by Ivica DJIKIC

Feral Tribune, Split, Croatia, June 20, 2003

Thus, first of all, the mentioned weekly magazine published a photocopy of the document that, together with other found material, should assist the fugitive general in proving that the charges made in the Hague are baseless. The document is a flier. In its upper left corner there is the coat of arms of the so-called Krajina. Under the coat of arms we can read the Republic of Serb Krajina, and below that the Ministry of Defense. The text of the flier is as follows: "Because of the expected attack of the Ustashe Army, and with the goal of providing conditions for the final defense, I order that all civilians evacuate the region where the fighting is expected to take place in the direction Benkovac-Zegar-Srb". The signature is that of the Chief of Staff of the Serb Army of Krajina, General-Colonel Mile Mrksic, with the seal of the Krajina Ministry of Defense. The flier, written in Cyrillic, and distributed during the operation Storm in Knin and the surrounding region, should, according to new Gotovina's saviors, be the proof that the Croatian authorities did not expel about 150,000 Krajina Serbs, but that their evacuation was organized by the Krajina authorities led by General Mrksic, who is currently on trial in the Hague.

The problem with the so-called evidence in Gotovina's favor is, however, in the fact that Feral Tribune as early as February 10, 2001 published an almost identical document showing convincingly that it was actually a forgery created by Croatian intelligence services. The flier published in Feral Tribune has the design and content as the one shown in Nacional, except that the evacuation direction is different, Knin-Plavno-Licka Kaldrma. Everything else is exactly the same and, most importantly for the whole story, the illogical features of both fliers are also the same. Namely, in both fliers, it is interesting to pay attention to the seal at the bottom of the document. The seal includes the words the Republic of Serb Krajina, Ministry of Defense, Knin. However, in both fliers, in the word Ministry, three letters (MINIstry) are written in the Latin alphabet! At the same time, these are the only letters in the Latin alphabet in the whole document. The mentioned two documents are also connected by the lack of one letter s in the letterhead of the fliers. Therefore, Feral Tribune obtained the said document almost two and a half years ago, from sources in the Ministry of Defense and the Counter-Intelligence Agency (POA), which reveals another similarity between the fliers published in Feral Tribune and Nacional. Ivo Pukanic, the author of the article trying to prove Gotovina's innocence, wrote in the last issue of Nacional the following: "That extremely complicated documentation (in which our flier takes a very prominent place, Ivica Djikic's remark) was delivered by Franjo Turek, head of the POA, at the request of the President's Office".

Franjo Turek is the very same Turek who knows very well that the alleged Mrksic's order was actually a typical example of forgery produced by great Croatian spies Markica Rebic and Davor Domazet Loso, who, on the eve of the operation Storm, decided to flood Krajina from the air by forged fliers in which Serb military leadership called for organized evacuation of their civilian population. Feral's journalist Frenki Lausic, who wrote about this intelligence forgery, acquired, in addition, the article written by Admiral Domazet with the title "Final operations of the Croatian Army" (Hrvatski Vojnik [Croatian Soldier], April 1997), in which Domazet, at the time the leading Croatian counter-intelligence expert, indirectly admits that the flier was a clever ruse whose goal, of course, was the easiest possible expulsion of Krajina Serbs. Admiral Domazet never denounced the article he had written, nor did he deny charges made in Lausic's article.

However, even in absence of Domazet's article and common sense, it still would not be difficult to figure out that the said document is a forgery. It is sufficient to find a few more documents produced by the Ministry of Defense of the so-called Krajina and check whether any other document contains a seal with three letters written in the Latin alphabet. As we are convinced that such, partially Latin seals will not be found, it will become obvious that the said fliers were produced by Croatian intelligence agents who are obviously programmed to every time leave evidence of their deeds, mostly typographical errors. Namely, one only need recall fliers produced by Markica Rebic that were distributed in 1993 in central Bosnia and north-western Hercegovina. In the fliers a fictitious Mujahedin organization called for jihad against Croats. And everything would have been fine if General Markica knew how to spell Allahu ekber. Let us remind our readers that that forgery was unmasked at the time by Nacional.

Therefore, as we have a hard time believing that the best local intelligence-journalistic-advisory-legal brains did not notice peculiar specs of the Latin alphabet in otherwise Cyrillic documents and since we doubt that some of them do not recall the article published on February 10, 2001, in Feral Tribune, one is forced to conclude that in the action of "saving the general" they have not refrained from using very thin spy forgeries that could, on the other hand, easily assume a totally opposite significance of that intended. Namely, those Croat forgeries could be used as evidence that Tudman's authorities did indeed plan and incite expulsion of Krajina Serbs. Things could be additionally complicated if it turns out that Serb civilians did disproportionally suffer casualties along the evacuation routes recommended in forged fliers, and already there are indication that that was indeed the case. For example, more than twenty civilians were killed in the village of Plavno, and, as we saw, one of the suggested evacuation routes was Knin-Plavno-Licka Kaldrma.

As they quickly resort to clumsy Rabic-Domazet's forgeries, Gotovina's protectors do not refrain from totally ignoring those parts of the indictment that charge the fugitive general with not preventing and punishing the savaging of Krajina by Croatian soldiers in which at least 150 civilians were killed, while several thousands of Serb houses were looted, burnt, and razed to the ground.