Red Berets Fighter: Serbian Official was Our Commander

A protected witness codenamed RFJ-150 told the Mechanism for International Tribunals in The Hague on Tuesday that defendant Franko ‘Frenki’ Simatovic was “the commander-in-chief” of the unit in 1995, while his co-defendant Jovica Stanisic was “the chief”.

The witness said he joined the Red Berets unit or ‘Frenki’s Men’, as they used to call themselves, in June 1995 at the age of 18.

When asked why the unit was called ‘Frenki’s Men’, the witness replied: “After our commander at the time – Frenki Simatovic.”

Witness RFJ-150 added that Stanisic, the chief of the Serbian State Security Service, was above Simatovic in the chain of command.

He recalled how Simatovic gave “a motivational speech” to him and other members of the unit at a military base during their training.

“He asked: ‘Which of you is ready to go into military action, knowing they would not come back?’ Almost all of us stood up. He said our unit had to execute any task, whether in Serbia or abroad, but that President Slobodan Milosevic’s door was always open for us,” RFJ-150 said.

When asked how he interpreted Simatovic’s comment about Milosevic’s ‘open door’, the witness said it meant the Red Berets’ members “would be provided with whatever they needed to make the unit efficient”.

The witness mentioned Zvezdan Jovanovic as one of the senior instructors who trained him.

Jovanovic supervised training for “silent liquidations” of the enemy, RFJ-150 said.

Serbia jailed Jovanovic for 40 years for the murder of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2013.

Stanisic and his former State Security Service deputy Simatovic are on trial for persecution, murders and deportations during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

According to the charges, the Red Berets were under the control of the Serbian State Security Service.

The indictment alleges that Stanisic and Simatovic committed their crimes as part of a joint criminal enterprise aimed at forcibly and permanently removing Croats and Bosniaks from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which would then be incorporated into a unified Serb state.

They both pleaded not guilty in December 2015 after the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia overturned their acquittal in their first trial.

The appeals chamber ruled that there were serious legal and factual errors when Stanisic and Simatovic were initially acquitted of war crimes in 2013, and ordered the case to be retried and all the evidence and witnesses reheard in full by new judges.

The trial continues on Wednesday.