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The defence suggested that the witness, former Serbian Red Berets fighter Dejan Sliskovic, did not know who was in charge of the operation.
Prosecution witness Sliskovic testified last week that Stanisic ran the operation in western Bosnia in 1994 and 1995 and that Simatovic relayed his orders to the units involved.
Sliskovic, a former member of the Serbian State Security Service’s Anti-Terrorist Actions Unit, JATD, said he participated in the Pauk operation alongside members of the Red Berets, the Serbian Volunteer Guard commanded by Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan, the Scorpions unit and other Serb forces.
He said he was a member of the security team guarding Stanisic’s command post in the wartime self-proclaimed Serb-led Republic of Serbian Krajina rebel statelet in Croatia.
During cross-examination, Simatovic’s lawyer Vladimir Petrovic asked Sliskovic who the commander of the Pauk operation was.
Sliskovic first replied it was Serbian State Security agent Milan Radonjic, and that his deputy was Dragan Filipovic. After a second question from the lawyer, Sliskovic added that the commander of the JATD was Simatovic.
“Radonjic was below him,” said Sliskovic.
Stanisic, the former chief of the Serbian State Security Service, and his former assistant Simatovic are charged with having been protagonists in a joint criminal enterprise led by then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, aimed at permanently and forcibly removing Bosniaks and Croats from large parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to achieve Serb domination.
Although the indictment does not charge Stanisic and Simatovic with crimes committed in the Pauk operation, the prosecutors are presenting evidence about the operation in an attempt to show the defendants’ pattern of behaviour as protagonists in the joint criminal enterprise.
Stanisic and Simatovic are charged with persecution, murders and deportations in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, according to the charges were committed by members of the Red Berets, the Serbian Volunteer Guard and other units controlled by the State Security Service.
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 will resume in late August after the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals’ summer break.
