This dirty war, one of the dirtiest in recent history, will be remembered after the bestial killing of civilians and prisoners of war. By destroying thoroughly Vukovar, house by house, Gen. Kadijevic's army and Serbian paramilitary formations killed thousands of people. After the city fell, mass executions of captured Croats occured. It is estimated that several hundreds were killed on that occasion while a certain number were allegedly transported to Serbia. Of course, the Croats were not innocent in the conflict with the rebel Serbs. Crimes in Gospic and other places are the object of an international investigation. In every war, a crime and revenge go hand in hand, closing the infernal cycle of death. During the war in Croatia many prisoners of war were shot on the spot, as is confirmed by many mass graves. Hatred was stronger than any human concern.
The Serbs installed crime into their greater Serbian project as the goal of the war. They committed such atrocities against Bosniak [Bosnian Muslims] people that even their descendants will have to pay for the sins of the ancestors. The whole Bosniak families were killed in many burned to the ground villages. The number of the missing is in the thousands. The Belgrade regime claims there are no prisoners of war in its territory, but the reliable UN sources signal the opposite, stating that some may be held in the camps close to Nis and abandoned Aleksinac mines. Manfred Novak, chief of the U.N. commission for missing persons, stated that almost 600 requests to the Belgrade authorities remained unanswered due to their refusal to cooperate with the U.N.
Milosevic's police is also quiet about the abduction of a group of Muslims from the train at the station in Strpci, which happened at the end of March 1993. Although only an episode in the mass suffering of civilians, this abduction is one of the greatest mysteries of that kind in this war. Strpci is a small train station on a short stretch of the Belgrade-Bar railroad which passes through Bosnia. On the tragic day, a group of armed men boarded the train and took away 20 passengers after checking their identity papers. Two months later, Slobodan Milosevic received the relatives of the abducted citizens of unrecognized Yugoslavia, promising to "turn heaven and earth" and clarify the destiny of the missing. As usual, Milosevic didn't fulfill the promise. Instead, the Pale authorities said that "the army of the republic Srpska destroyed a paramilitary group which was responsible for the abduction." Until today, the destiny of the abducted passengers is not known.
There are different data about the number of missing in Bosnia-Hercegovina. International Committee of Red Cross, the most competent organization in this area, will have a difficult task in Bosnia. It is never easy to find the truth in these painful questions. Sarajevo and Pale are locked in fruitless negotiations about the release of about 400 persons from the jails on Kula and Tarcin respectively. Sarajevo persistently insists on clearing up the destiny of 178 Bosniaks-muslims from Hadzici who were taken from their homes in May 1992. The only condition of the government of Bosnia-Hercegovina for the release of all Serbs jailed in Tarcin is that [the authorities in] Pale say anything about the destiny of those people. The destiny of 28 Croats from Bugojno, who according to their relatives were taken by the bosniak army is also unclear.
Politics, in principle, does not have an ear for human suffering, especially during a war. Just before the unsuccessful meeting of the above mentioned commissions in Belgrade a Yugoslav representative said:" our concern in this matter should not be thr politics but the people and their families. We should help them." Deception, therefore, [even] before [the meeting started.] everything else. Because the true concern here is the politics and not the people. Gogol, in "Dead Souls" testifies about the way in which the functionaries in imperial Russia counted the dead as the living in order to steal their income. The politics in this war deals in living and dead.
The Serbs confirmed several months ago that they had on their lists 25 persons sought by the Croatian side. However when the UN representatives went to find those people, they did not find anyone. Recently, a group of Croats deported from Western Slavonia to the Serb jails in 1991 was somehow tracked down. But what about hundreds and hundreds of others, still classified as missing? Maybe a few of them are still in a camp or a jail. The majority was probably massacred. That is typical of this war. The truth about them is buried for now, but it will come to the surface one day. The tragedy is in the fact that nobody wants to announce that truth to the people; that is a crime of politics against the families of the missing and abducted.