Serbian Security Chiefs ‘Seen in Croatia Conflict Zone’

Former Yugoslav People’s Army colonel Radoslav Maksic told the Mechanism for International Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday that he saw defendants Stanisic and Simatovic twice in the self-proclaimed, Serb-led Republic of Serbian Krajina wartime statelet in Croatia in the autumn of 1991.

Maksic told Stanisic and Simatovic’s retrial that he was sent to the town of Knin to assist in the organisation of a Territorial Defence force for the Republic of Serbian Krajina, and that he saw “crimes, burning, robbery and murder” while he was there.

He testified that Republic of Serbian Krajina officials did nothing to punish the perpetrators of the crimes, and that nothing was done by the Serbian defence ministry, to which Maksic and his superiors reported.

Maksic said that he saw Stanisic and Simatovic in Korenica and at the Knin fortress, and that he thought they were helping Milan Martic, who was the interior minister of the Republic of Serbian Krajina at the time, to organise local Serb police. Martic was convicted of war crimes in 2007.

Maksic denied that he met with the defendants, however.

Asked what Stanisic and Simatovic were doing in the Republic of Serbian Krajina, the witness replied that he “did not know then, or even now”.

But he added that Stanisic “definitely did not come on an excursion”.

Asked whether the Serbian Security Service, which Stanisic headed, had any authority over the Republic of Serbian Krajina at the time, Maksic replied: “I do not know.”

Stanisic and his former Serbian Security Service deputy, Simatovic, are accused of participating in a joint criminal enterprise aimed at permanently and forcible removing Croats and Muslims from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia, which would then be incorporated into a unified Serb state.

The indictment charges them with persecution on racial, religious and political grounds, as well as murders, deportations and the forcible resettlement of Croat and Bosniak civilians.

Stanisic and Simatovic both pleaded not guilty in December last year after the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia overturned their acquittal in their first trial.

The tribunal ruled on December 15 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.

Maksic will face cross-examination at the next hearing on Thursday.