by Dejan ANASTASIJEVIC
To swallow a frog: The case of "the Vukovar three" is one of those ticking bombs left by Milosevic to his heirs. The indictments and arrest warrants have been handed to the FRY authorities in 1994, while Milosevic, trying to get rid of sanctions, was still toying with the idea of cooperation with the Tribunal. Thus, against his will, he accepted to publish in the government-controlled press a Tribunal's add with the request for their surrender and even arrange that the request be personally handed in to all three of them. At the same time, the military prosecutor, also against his will, initiated an investigation regarding the massacre in Ovcara, just so it could be said that "our institutions are working on this". The case did not move from there and when the authorities severed every cooperation with the Tribunal because of the NATO bombardment, it seemed that Mrksic, Radic, and Sljivicanin could rest assured that they were safe. Until Doris Pack, on whose opinion depends the fate of a significant part of financial and political support to post-Milosevic Serbia, "asked her interlocutors to check whether it was possible to arrest the three". "We did not get an answer," she explained at a press conference," but we gave them the idea to arrest them". The idea is probably good, but it prompts in many individuals from the military and civilian leadership the sensation described by the late Croatian Defense Minister, Gojko Susak, as "swallowing a live frog".
The trouble is that, unlike in some other cases under jurisdiction of the Hague Tribunal, about Ovcara almost everything is known. This is one of the best-documented and most thoroughly investigated crimes in the Yugoslav wars. Namely, there is no doubt that after the capture of Vukovar on November 19, 1991, members of the First Guard Brigade took about three hundred men from the Vukovar hospital. It was suspected that these men were members of the Croatian National Guard, disguised as patients and hospital staff. It is also clear that these men were moved to an improvised camp set up at the Ovcara farm, about ten minutes by car from Vukovar. Two days later the Army turned the captives over to the units of the Eastern Slavonija, Baranja, and Western Srem Territorial Defense [a type of national guard in the former Yugoslavia]. These units massacred the prisoners the very same day and immediately buried them in a mass grave in Ovcara. An investigative team of the organization Physicians for Human Rights in 1992 exhumed the corpses and carried out forensic analysis. According to their report 294 bodies were found in the grave, most of them belonging to males, but also including a few women, elderly, and a boy. According to forensic analysis, most of them were executed by shots in the head from a firearm, although a handful died from knife wounds or their heads were smashed by blunt objects. It was favorable for the investigators that the United Nations troops secured the location in Ovcara immediately after their arrival in Slavonija in January 1992, and thereby prevented the destruction of evidence. From the moment when the forensic analysis results were published (January 1993) all claims of the Serb authorities that the whole thing is a Croat fabrication and that animal bones were buried in Ovcara became obsolete.
Promotion for the Hague: Unfortunately for the suspects, their role in the massacre is also not questionable, mostly thanks to Sljivicanin, at the time a major and commander of a unit, who was during the siege of Vukovar promoted into "new Sava Kovacevic" [legendary partisan commander from WWII] and "the knight of Vukovar" by the regime-controlled media. He obviously liked that and without hesitation posed for the cameras and gave numerous interviews. Thus, it happened that he was recorded shouting in front of cameras at the representative of the International Red Cross demanding to enter the hospital and threatening that he would throw the representative in the river Vuka. Sljivicanin, after it had been noted somewhere that he had identified himself too much with the new role, was quickly promoted and quietly moved to Podgorica. After the indictment he was moved closer to the headquarters, after another promotion, to the Center of Higher Military Schools in Belgrade. He is there even today with the rank of colonel, but in the meantime he has lost the desire to talk to journalists. Radic, who in Vukovar commanded a special unit of the military police within the First Guard Brigade, was directly responsible for the transfer of the prisoners from the hospital (through the back door, while Sljivicanin carried out his show for the cameras in front of the main entrance). During the war he was discharged at his own request and it is assumed that he lives in Belgrade. General Mrksic, who was indicted based on command responsibility, on the other hand, remained active in the Yugoslav Army and reached the position of the commander of the Special Forces Corps. Immediately before the fall of Knin he was reassigned to the Army of Serb Krajina. He also lives in Belgrade and can be seen from time to time at a produce market, selling pears.
The extradition of Sljivicanin will be the biggest problem for the new authorities, and especially for president Kostunica, who is also the Commander in Chief of the Yugoslav Army. In Sljivicanin's case the authorities would extradite an active officer. Besides almost instinctive distaste apparently demonstrated by Kostunica with respect to the Tribunal, the extradition of Sljivicanin could alarm numerous members of the Yugoslav Army who have reasons to fear that they could in the near future share his fate. However, it is not very likely that the arrest and delivery of the "three" could cause mass demonstrations similar to those that are these days shaking Croatia. The Federal Justice Minister, Momcilo Grubac, has these days openly stated what his colleagues from the authorities are reluctant to say - that the new federal law, that will be adopted and enacted in a few months, will allow the arrest and extradition of Slobodan Milosevic to the Tribunal. Once that morsel slides down, then all the other frogs will make it easier down the throat.