Welcome to the living village

"You see these houses, that's the village from which they attacked us, everything is so close", my friend shows me the green areas with his right hand as he drives me to Škabrnje, a village 15 minutes away from Zadar in Croatia.

More than 30 years have passed since the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and paramilitary formations from Serbia and the surrounding areas invaded the village and killed more than 40 civilians, among them women and elderly people.

"All night before the attack, tanks were working in Biljan, we heard a noise," says local church bell ringer Zoran Ražov. At that time, the twenty-four-year-old guy spent there, like most of the previous nights, on guard duty. Early in the morning, the tanks were already within reach of the village. Locals took shelter in seven or eight basements, most houses did not have them. Shells started falling from all sides.

"I ran to the basement where mine is." You can't go out and say how many shells were falling. The cattle came, the treasures were rustled, the cows cried out. In the basement, people faint, they are crying," Ražov recalls, as we sit in the part of the church where there are photos of the killed veterans.

photo: a. Stankovic

On November 18, 1991, tanks and armored vehicles entered the village of about two thousand inhabitants, where only a few days earlier, on November 6, part of the population had returned to their "houses and treasures" after the signed truce. Members of the Serbian forces were banging on the basement door, threatening and asking the population to leave, Neven Šegarić, who was 11 years old at the time of the attack, testified before the International Court in The Hague. According to that testimony, everyone came out except his grandmother, after which one of the soldiers shot into the basement.

Before they took him to Benkovac, he returned to the basement and found her body. As a child, he witnessed the murders of his fellow citizens, mostly elderly people. Šegarić states that soldiers with JNA insignia entered the basement first, followed by "volunteers", i.e. paramilitary formations. In order for the army to enter the houses, people would cover the children's mouths so that they would not reveal the basement. They waited for the night to walk through the fields to the neighboring villages. Razov moved the semi-mobile grandmother to safe territory with a cart.

"It rained the day before. Two planes circle and throw light flares and whoever they see, they drop bombs. We start and then we stop, so you don't know where the minefields are, so where you will get out, and then our people are waiting, and now our people don't know if we are civilians or who it is," Ražov remembers. The road that can be reached today in about twenty minutes was covered for hours that night.

The attack on Škabrnje was led by JNA units, specifically the 180th Motorized Brigade of the 9th Corps and the 63rd Parachute Brigade from Niš, and Territorial Defense units, which included volunteers from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, also participated.

"Those units corresponded to the JNA, and among them were members of the special police unit of the Public Security Station Benkovac, trained in Golubić," explains Jovana Kolarić from the Fund for Humanitarian Law, a non-governmental organization from Belgrade that has been documenting war crimes in post-Yugoslavia for three decades. space.

ROLE OF PARAMILITARY FORMATIONS

Former high officials of the Republic of Srpska Krajina - Milan Martić and Milan Babić - were convicted for the crime in Škabrnja before the court in The Hague. In the verdict against Martić, at that time the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Serbian Autonomous Region of Krajina, it is stated that paramilitary formations from Serbia and BiH participated in crimes and looting after the capture of the village: "By 1994, about 90 to 95 percent of Škabrnja was destroyed."

Martić was sentenced to 35 years for war crimes and persecution of the civilian population in Croatia.

That the JNA had planned the attack in advance is confirmed by an entry in the diary of a convict for the most serious war crimes, at that time the chief of staff of the Knin Corps, Ratko Mladić, who wrote on November 17, 1991: , let it be done for two days", and then states that it is necessary to "delete it". Mladić was later, as a general of the Army of Republika Srpska, sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity and genocide in Srebrenica. Not for Škabrnja.

However, that crime was part of the indictment against the former president of Serbia and FR Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, as well as the heads of the State Security of Serbia, Jovica Stanišić and Frenki Simatović, before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Milošević died before the verdict, and Stanišić and Simatović were convicted of, among other things, joint criminal enterprise and the creation of paramilitary formations used in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Contrary to the hopes of many that they will be judged for Škabrnja as well, there was not enough evidence for the two of them that they contributed to the crimes of the units and police of SAO Krajina and TO.

"The case of Stanišić and Simatović is very important because thanks to it we know which units were in that area, we have testimonies about the involvement of volunteers from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in attacks on Croatian villages. We can monitor how the arming and logistical assistance to the units in the Krajina area went," notes Kolarić from the HLC.

The individuals who participated in those attacks, he says, were later formally employed in the Special Operations Unit of the Department of State Security of the MUP of Serbia. One of them is Goran Opačić, who was convicted in Croatia for the crime in Škabrnja.

Opačić is mentioned in JNA documents that were part of the investigation into the massacre in Škabrnja. In an official note dated March 8, 1992, the JNA concluded that the members of the Benkovac TO were responsible for the murders, that is, "volunteers from Serbia and Opačić's group." Under the label "military secret" is a list of people who were in the volunteers, and which they got through other channels, because "attempts to get information through official bodies were not met with understanding". According to that list, the volunteers were, among others, from Loznica, Belgrade, Novi Sad.

In 1997, at the review of the Special Operations Unit in Kula, Opačić received an award presented to him by Jovica Stanišić.

Then Frenki Simatović confirmed in his speech that the Unit was present. on the territory of Croatia since October 12, 1991 and that she participated in the battles in, among others, the Benkovac zone, and that she "gave important support to the liberation of all areas of the Republic of Serbian Krajina".

JUDICIAL LIMBO

"The crimes in Škabrnja and Nadin are among the most serious committed during the war," notes Vesna Teršelic from the Croatian non-governmental organization Documenta, which deals with dealing with the past.

Despite this, three decades later, trials continue before the courts in Croatia, and only Zorana Banić and Jovan Badžoka have served their sentences for crimes. They remained inaccessible to the Croatian judiciary, and some of them are in Serbia and BiH, where they did not answer to the domestic judiciary.

The most important judgment was passed before the County Court in Zadar in 1995. 18 people were convicted in absentia because "they destroyed residential, economic and sacred buildings almost completely without any military need, after which they forcibly pulled out the sheltered civilian population, mostly women and elderly people, as well as children, from basements and other sheltered areas. they killed at least forty-four people", according to Documenta.

For the crime in Škabrnja, before the County Court in Split, criminal proceedings were conducted against members of the TO Benkovac Zoran Tadić and Milan Gnjidić, both of whom are unavailable to the Croatian judiciary. By the way, Gnjidić was released at the end of November 2023 due to lack of evidence, and because of fear of extradition, Tadić, as the former commander of the Volunteer Platoon TO Benkovac, defected to Loznica from Australia.

In 2019, the Humanitarian Law Fund requested the War Crimes Prosecutor's Office to investigate it, and two years earlier they filed a report against six identified and two unidentified members of the JNA and the Territorial Defense for the murder of 48 civilians in Škabrnja and Nadin.

"To each of our inquiries, the Prosecutor's Office would reply that it was acting on the basis of a criminal complaint, without specifying specifically how, but even seven years later there is no indictment for these crimes," notes Kolarić. Until the conclusion of this text, the Prosecutor's Office has not responded to the inquiry about the status of the reports, nor whether an investigation is being conducted into the crime in Škabrnja and the surrounding villages.

photo: h. joy

MARASHKA TIME

In the summer months, Škabrnjani are in the orchards, it's time to harvest the famous Maraška cherries. It is quiet in the village, only a few people stop by the cafe across the street from the church. A little higher, surrounded by houses, in one of the settlements there is a memorial - at the place where there was a mass grave of more than 20 people killed in the months after the capture of the village.

The monument with the silhouette of a bird in a black marble block seems familiar - it is also the same in Vukovar, a city in the south-east of Croatia, which was captured by the JNA forces and paramilitary formations from Serbia on the same day, November 18, 1991. Just two days later, more than 200 people will be killed in Ovcara.

However, unlike Vukovar, which bears the state seal of the city of heroes and is commemorated every year by the highest Croatian officials, Škabrnja does not gain such importance.

"Not everything has been done for timely processing of war crimes. It is not clear to me why the proceedings against Zoran Tadić are being conducted only now. Like the residents of Škabrnja and Nadin, I wonder why the indictment was only brought in 2022", says Teršelic and adds that the association has long been warning about the insufficient capacities of the police and the state prosecutor's office to investigate all crimes.

A foreigner would never say that this village was burned to the ground and destroyed in the early nineties.

"Right after the storm, we came here to see, all of Škabrnja came. Everything was demolished. My house was blown to the ground, but we came back. The whole village was at mass that year in 1995", remembers Zoran Ražov. He returned with his family in 1998.

Almost three decades after the crime in Škabrnja, which on November 18 and in the months after that lost, according to the mayor, about five percent of the entire population, today there are more births than deaths. In Croatia, where the migration of the local population mainly to the countries of Western Europe is a big problem, this is rare.

"Today, about 1.700 inhabitants live in Škabrnja. From a place that was completely destroyed in the Homeland War, everything was rebuilt within twenty years. More and more young people are returning to us or staying after completing their education", says Škara.

He explains that the younger generations, to which he belongs, must never forget what happened. "We have to live on, and build a better place for us and the generations to come," adds Škara.

At the "Vladimir Nazor" school, where, according to the testimony of Neven Šegarić, it was written "Welcome to the dead village" when he returned as a teenager, today about 170 students are enrolled, and there are over 50 in the kindergarten. "I am especially glad who are born more than die. We have two classes of children in the school. That means a lot to me", says Zoran Ražov.

He is one of the few who wants to talk about the horror they went through: "It's hard, even today when I'm fed up, nausea hits my head, images come back, I can't sleep."

As we drive towards Zadar, it is impossible to look at the surrounding roads and orchards without wondering if tanks were passing by there, if columns of civilians were hiding in those places at night. Zoran's voice helps: "If they built me ​​four houses in Zadar, I wouldn't live there." This is wealth and beauty and peace - my earthly paradise."

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