Residents of the village of Crkvina near Samac who are of Serbian nationality are reluctant to talk about the events from the beginning of the 1990s in this village, for which the former heads of the State Security Service of Serbia, Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, were sentenced to 12 years in prison in the first instance in 2021.
At the end of January, their appeal hearing was held, and the final verdict is expected in July this year.
The indictment and first-instance verdict against Stanisic and Simatovic show that the crimes in Samac were planned months earlier in Serbia, from where the paramilitary units were sent. The former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 during the trial, was also accused of these crimes.
The political, police and military leaders of that municipality during the war, as well as the Republika Srpska (RS) led by Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, were convicted of crimes.
This small town, in the north of the country, was called Bosanski Samac until the beginning of the war, and the prefix ”Bosanski” (”Bosnian”) was deleted in 1992, and later by the judgment of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
What happened in the Crkvina at the beginning of the war?
Serbian paramilitary formations, including the Special Operations Unit of the State Security Service (called the “Red Berets” – ”Crvene beretke” or “Grey Wolves” – ”Sivi vukovi”) and the Serbian Volunteer Guard of Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan, as well as the police and the Army of the RS supported by units of the Yugoslav People’s Army, took power in Bosanski Samac on April 17th, 1992.
In the next few months, they arrested and tortured hundreds of Bosniaks and Croats. More than 10,000 were expelled, two-thirds of whom never returned. Many were killed.
The mass grave in which the remains of 14 bodies of the murdered were found and identified was discovered on December 7th, 2008, under three meters of garbage, in a former gravel pit on the banks of the Sava.
Sulejman Tihic, former president of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), was one of the inmates from Samac. He testified in The Hague that he was beaten in the camp by Zvezdan Jovanovic, who, together with Red Berets commander Milorad Ulemek Legija, was convicted in 2009 as the perpetrator of the murder of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003.
War crimes in the area of Samac were part of the indictments and/or judgments of the Hague Tribunal against Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, Vojislav Seselj, Biljana Plavsic, Momcilo Krajisnik, Mico Stanisic, Slobodan Milosevic, and Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, Radio Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
