The Documentation and Information Centre Veritas pointed out that tomorrow marks the anniversary of one of the gravest crimes against Serbs in the area of the municipality of Sisak, when members of the Croatian armed forces, on August 22, 1991, killed 15 civilians and wounded dozens, but that no one has been held accountable for it.
As Veritas stated, members of the Croatian police and the National Guard Corps in transporters with JNA markings, unprovoked, “thundered” through several villages and randomly shot at locals.
In the bloody raid on Serbian villages, the attackers were stopped by the locals of the village of Brđani, who, hearing the gunfire through other villages, quickly organised and set up a successful ambush, writes the Veritas statement.
After this event, Serbs from the Serbian villages of Caprag no longer went to work in Sisak, but organised the defence of their villages and homes, and soon formed a municipality which, according to the area where the mentioned villages are located, they named Caprag, with its seat in Gradusa, which was part of the Republic of Serbian Krajina.
The criminal complaint of the victims’ families against the four “Zenge” for war crimes against the civilian population was dismissed by the County State Attorney’s Office in Sisak in September 2006, with the explanation “that their relatives were killed in an armed conflict between paramilitary groups of the so-called SAO Krajina and the Croatian army or were collateral damage of that armed conflict,” Veritas announced.
The lawsuits for compensation for damages by the families of the victims were rejected by Croatian courts due to the statute of limitations and lack of evidence, with the obligation for them to compensate the state for litigation costs, which amounted to several thousand euros.
Some of these proceedings also reached the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, but it rejected their requests due to the expiration of the six-month deadline between “the last investigative action or their knowledge of the inefficiency of the investigation at the national level” and the submission of the request to that court.
According to Veritas’s data, in Sisak and the surrounding areas, in the summer and autumn of 1991, at least 119 people of Serbian nationality were liquidated, of which 97 were civilians, including 11 women. Of the total number of liquidated, 80 have been buried and the remains of the others are still being searched for.
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Source: Veritas, Photo: EPA/ATTILA KISBENEDEK