Last Thursday, two of Bosnia and Herzegovina´s most prominent publications/news-sites: Faktor and Slobodna Bosna revealed the news that the current Minister of the Interior of RS ( Republika Srpska enitity) Dragan Lukač was caught on tape abusing a captured, young Bosnian soldier who was later on Dragan Lukač´s order taken away and killed by another Serb soldier, (the young soldider was brutally executed with a bayonet).
According to Faktor and Slobodna Bosna: On the footage released you can clearly see Dragan Lukač, then commander of the Banja Luka detachment of the “special brigade of Republika Srpska Police”. Lukač and rest of the Serb soldiers on the tape are seen physically and verbally abusing the captured young soldier whose name was Nedžad Dizdarević. The young soldier was forced to wear a fez and after a couple of questions the visibly terrified young soldier was taken away on Dragan Lukač´s order. On the footage you can see Lukač telling the others to “take him away”. Dizdarević was later killed by a one Pavle Gajić from Ključ. Gajić admitted to killing Nedžad Dizdarević during his war crimes trial in 2011. According to Faktor; the Bosnian Court sentenced Gajić to seven years in prison for the brutal murder of Dizdarević a member of the Bosnian Army from the Bihać area. Gajić was sentenced in June 2011 after a plea bargain where he admitted to murdering Dizdarević.
Gajić admitted that he had as a member of Bosnian Serb rebel army unit “Orlovi Grmeča” (The Eagles of Grmeč) in November 1994 in a neighbourhood called Sokolac (Bihać municipality) killed the young soldier using a bayonet. According to the presiding judge Vesna Jesenković; the video evidence as well as witness testimony confirm that on the 24th of November 1994 Gajić killed the visibly frightened prisoner; Nedžad Dizdarević by slicing his throat with a bayonet. Nedžad Dizdarević, a native of Velika Kladuša was only 22 years old when he was brutally murdered by Pavle Gajić. According to Slobodna Bosna, one of the reasons for the low sentence of only seven years for the brutal murder was partly due to admittence of guilt, as well as other extenuating circumstances which have raised eyebrows since the news broke. According to the court, his invalid status, Gajić´s personal family situation, as well as his uneplyoment were taken into account at the time of sentencing, while another news-site published a more detailed description of Dizdarević´s execution in the form of and excerpt from the verdict.
According to court records, after the Serb takeover of Sokolac, Dizdarević who was captured during the attack was taken to a spot near the village mosque where a large number of Serb soldiers had gathered, they had heard over the radio that someone had been captured and they “wanted to talk to him”. As seen on the footage, after the abuse and the “questioning” Lukač told the others to take him away. Dizdarević´s throat was slit, which killed him, afterwards several Serb soldiers fired their guns into his dead body, leaving wounds of his face, head and neck.
The Bihać enclave found itself under a vicious three way, three-and-a-half-year siege, in part by the VRS (Bosnian Serb Rebel Army), the forces of the Republic of Sebian Krajina (Rebel Croatian Serbs) as well the quisling followers of Slobodan Milošević ´s puppet and convicted war criminal, Fikret Abdić later on during the war. But the citizens of Bihać, Cazin and Bužim, the three towns affected by the s siege, managed to hold on, along with refugees from towns in North West Bosnia that had been “ethnically cleansed” by Radovan Karadžić´s Bosnian Serb extremists.
As I´ve written on this blog before; Lukač and the RS Ministry of the Interior are seen by independent observers in Bosnia and Herzegovina to be in essence acting as Milorad Dodik´s Preatorian Guard. In fact, at the beginning of the year Lukač held a press conference in Banja Luka where he accused an independent journalist and blogger Slobodan Vaskovič of trying to destroy the entity’s institutions. “For years, Slobodan Vaskovič with his blog has been calling for the destruction and undermining of the institutions of Republika Srpska, especially the Ministry of Interior,” Lukač told the press that day.
The bizarre notion, that a blogger can “destroy the institutions of RS” shows the conspiratorial nature and the volatility of the Dodik-regime and his aides. Vaskovič has not made his feelings about the RS government a secret, regularly calling it a criminal organisation on his blog which is more or less exclusively dedicated to documenting the malfeasance and criminal activity of the leading politicos in RS.
Vaskovič fired back instantly, accusing Lukač of war crimes, including the murder of a young Bosniak in Bihać in 1992, a one Jasmin Kajtazović. At the time I honestly didn´t think much about it, sadly Vaskovič didn´t offer any proof and his blog post was more of a rant where Vaskovič accused Dragan Lukač of Jasmin Kajtazović´s murder and tried to chip away at Lukač´s image as a Serb strongman by saying that he had spent a large part of the war on the other side, i.e. Bosnian Army and various militias, that he met regularly with Hamdija Abdić-Tigar, one of the Bosnian Army commanders in Bihać and that it was the murder of Jasmin Kajtazović that led to his transfer to Serb-held territory, according to Vaskovič; he was transferred in order to avoid retaliation for Jasmin Kajtazović´s murder.
The problem with Vaskovič ´s claims is that he offers very little proof, and there is nothing out of the ordinary about former soldiers meeting each other, even soldiers that served on opposite sides, it happens all the time, even in Bosnia. Unfortunatly for Vaskovič he still mostly known in Bosnia for a tape that surficed in 2011 showing what he himself did during the war. That being said, if one is to treat Vaskovič with some benevolence, the video of Lukač ordering the young soldier to be “taken away” shortly before he had his throat slit gives some weight to his claims about Kajtazović. Vaskovič, as a veteran journalist also probably knows more about Lukač´s past then he´s willing to share in a blogpost and should the day come and Dragan Lukač finally brought before a Bosnian court whatever Vaskovič knows about him might be useful.
However as Bosnian writer Amila Kahrović – Posavljak points out for Tacno.net, Dragan Lukač may never see his day in court, that´s in part due to the state of the Bosnian society as a whole, a society that has decided to tolerate the results of the heinous mass atrocities of the 1990´s. To her Dragan Lukač is a symbol of the criminal policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide of the 1990´s. A policy which as she points out led to the birth and consolidation (thru Dayton) of Republika Srpska. Kahrović – Posavljak also points that since its formation at the beginning of the 90´s MUP RS has only served one purpose; ethnic cleansing and genocide or it´s legalization. “The Ministry of the Interior” starting in the early 90´s worked together with Serb paramilitary units like Vojislav Šešelj´s White Eagels or Sima´s Chetniks. A lot of times the groups were subordinate to the MUP RS.
As Kahrović – Posavljak points out: “MUP RS reached the pinnacle of its existence in July 1995 with genocide in Srebrenica. Verdicts at the ICTY have also legally established the role of MUP RS in the conflict. The campaign of the 90´s has continued into this century with members of MUP RS showing up at the doorstep of returnees, under the pretence of seeing if the people registered at those homes were the ones really living there, all that continued until SNSD (Milorad Dodik´s party) got what it wanted, a new law which seeks to finish the ethnic cleansing of the 90´s. This is just one of many examples. MUP RS never gave up on its wartime “legacy” but instead has continued with the same ideological platform.”
The other side of the story according to Kahrović – Posavljak is the silence of Sarajevo, above all the fighters for human rights, the cultural elite, and the BiH Prosecutor´s Office. As she rightly points out had this footage, the footage of a minister taking part in the murder showed up anywhere else in the world, that minister would along with the entire government that protects him, and the prosecutors that remain silent be removed. But as Kahrović – Posavljak says; in Bosnia none of that will happen, simply because the ideology of Republika Srpska has happily come togheter with Sarajevo´s Bosniak political elite.
However, for Kahrović – Posavljak the saddest role here is played by activists in Sarajevo. According to her; easily recognizable by their concern for the fate of the Canadian squirrel, the lack of parking space for bycilces in Sarajevo and the fact that women don´t have the same rights as men in Papua New Guiana and Afghanistan. As she says; “they´ll happily keep tabs on Aleksandar Vučić´s idiotic statements in the media, or the appointment of ministers in Croatia, but they´ll somehow miss that the Minister of the Interior of RS has taken part in a war crime. Is their silence based on the fact that it´s not that fancy to talk, make appeals, protest or seek immediate removal from office? Or is it that pointing out the war crime of a minister in the RS goverment is uncool and won´t lead to reconciliation and all the other cool stuff which lead to even cooler grants. All that remains unknown….”
Kahrović – Posavljak ends by rightly pointing out that Republika Srpska is abundantly clear when it comes to what they want. The reaction of unofficial and official Sarajevo, the NGO sector as well as the government leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth, because it shows a willingness to accept war crimes. As well as the fact that Banja Luka, as well as Mostar have been written out of the sphere of interest, and aside from that when a crime (along with the silence of the moral watchdogs) can act as means to an end, that means a compromise with fascism, something which all of them are fighting against, at least on paper.
BiH News Platform 