Serbian Ex-Official Blames Mladic for Croatia Crimes
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During the cross-examination of a witness, Simatovic’s lawyer Vladimir Petrovic quoted an entry that Mladic, then commander of the Knin Corps of the Yugoslav People’s Army, wrote in his work notebook on November 17, 1991, one day before the attack on the Croatian village of Skabrnja.
One of the tasks mentioned by Mladic in his notebook was: “To move the armed battalion towards Skabrnja and Nadin, in order to wipe them out”.
“Clean up the Nadin-Skabrnja area well,” Mladic’s directive to his forces said.
Simatovic’s lawyer suggested to prosecution witness Marko Miljanic, the commander of the village defence force in Skabrnja, that “those orders, unfortunately, ended up in tragedy in your village of Skabrnja”.
“Probably, I am not sure, but probably,” Miljanic responded.
During his testimony on Tuesday, Miljanic said that Serb paramilitary volunteers and police killed 75 Croats, “mostly civilians”, in Skabrnja on November 18 and 19, 1991 during the attack by the Yugoslav People’s Army.
According to the charges, the forces that committed the crimes in Skabrnja were under the control of the Serbian State Security Service, which was led by defendants Stanisic and his former deputy Simatovic.
Stanisic and Simatovic are being retried for the persecution, murders, deportations and forcible resettlement of Croat and Bosniak civilians during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
According to the charges, they were part of a joint criminal enterprise led by former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, aimed at forcibly and permanently removing Croats and Muslims from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to achieve Serb domination.
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 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 Thursday.
Stanisic however is not present in court because the trial chamber granted him temporary release until September 27.
According to the findings of doctors in The Hague and Serbia, Stanisic is suffering from a chronic digestive tract illness and depression.
