Local Justice – Brcko: Interrogation of Monika Simonovic’s soon

Monika Ilic born Simonovic was arrested on December 20 this year on the basis of international arrest warrant under suspicion that she committed war crimes against Bosniaks and Croats in the Luka prison camp in Brcko.

The international arrest warrant for Monika was issued by police agencies on the basis of order issued by the Brcko District’s Basic Court and she was arrested by members of the Ministry of Interior of Republika Srpska, the Banja Luka Centre for Public Safety and police of the Brcko District.

“We expect her to be escorted to the offices of the Brcko District Prosecution during the day (December 21), where she will in accordance with the law be interrogated as a suspect under grounded suspicion that she committed war crimes against the civilian population,” said Zekerijah Mujkanovic, chief prosecutor in the Brcko District Prosecution.

After the interrogation, said Mujkanovic, the Prosecution would recommend to the Brcko District’s Basic Court to remand her in custody since she represents a flight risk.

According to the testimony of former camp prisoners, Monika Ilic born Simonovic was a girlfriend of Goran “Adolf” Jelisic, sentenced by The Hague Tribunal to 40 years of prison for crimes in the Luka camp in Brcko.

Although to many she seemed like just a little girl, the witnesses claim that Monika committed some of the most brutal crimes in the camp in 1992.

“She did things no one would have at that age. She was a little girl with only a woman’s name. She was not a woman, she was a monster. There aren’t many people like that. Was she born like that or was she taught, or did she do all that unknowingly?” wonders Dzafer Deronjic, former prisoner from the Luka camp.

Monika is remembered also by Amir Didic, who refuses to speak about her any more, but at the trial in The Hague he said that she and Jelisic beat him in Luka several times a day.

“They cursed my Muslim mother and said that all of us should be killed. She repeated: ‘Why don’t you kill him, why do you even talk to him?’, while Goran Jelisic beat me with a baton and a fire hose. They did what they very well pleased,” said Didic in 1999 before the Tribunal.

Dzafer Deronjic says that Monika searched the prisoners almost every day “and took from them everything she could” and that “she did what she very well pleased.”

“People told me she broke a bottle and cut a prisoner. I saw the man bleeding but did not see the moment itself when she did it. (…) At one time she came with an escort who had a bloody knife and made us lick off that blood,” recalls Deronjic.