YakimaGulagLiteraryGazett

Srebrenica Video Vindicates Long Pursuit by Serb
Activist

By Daniel Williams
washingtonpost.com
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 25, 2005; A15

BELGRADE -- Human rights sleuth Natasa Kandic, a wisp
of a woman with a boyish haircut, spent hours in the
cafes of Sid, a town in northern Serbia, listening to
whispered tales of Balkan war killings. Then one day,
she heard about the videotape.

It showed the summary executions in 1995 of six Muslim
men and boys from the Bosnian city of Srebrenica. It
had been passed around as a war souvenir among members
of a shadowy Serb military unit called the Scorpions.
Its commander had ordered copies destroyed, but one,
she was told, still existed, held by a dissident member
of the unit.

Since that day in 2003, she searched until she found
the video. She gave it to the U.N. war crimes tribunal
in The Hague, where former Yugoslav president Slobodan
Milosevic is on trial, and to television stations in
Serbia, where it triggered a sudden self-examination in
a society that viewed itself as the prime victim of the
Balkan war atrocities of the 1990s.

On the tape, burly Serbs dressed in camouflage, with
cigarettes dangling from their lips, order bound
prisoners into a small meadow, then shoot four of them
in the back, at a time. The remaining two are ordered
to carry the corpses into a wrecked white house.
"You're the winners," one Scorpion barks at the body
bearers, who are then also gunned down.

The broadcasts on June 2 ripped away the veil of
secrecy and denial of Serbian military operations in
Bosnia during the 1992-95 war, particularly the
massacre of as many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys in and
around Srebrenica. No longer was it possible to label
atrocity tales as Bosnian Muslim propaganda amplified
by inventive foreign correspondents, as many Serbs had
done for a decade. The cold, relaxed pace of the
executions undermined the common opinion that whatever
happened in the Balkans was done in the chaos of war.

For Kandic, the video was a vindication. For almost 15
years, she labored to uncover atrocities committed by
all sides in the Balkan wars, but most notably, crimes
committed by her own people. During the 1990s, when
Serbs fought wars in Croatia, Bosnia and the Serbian
province of Kosovo, newspapers and officials variously
labeled her as a prostitute, spy, traitor and lunatic.

These days, she gets phone calls from strangers
praising her work. Police rounded up eight Scorpion
suspects a day after the video was broadcast. A ninth
was later detained in Croatia. Serbian Prime Minister
Vojislav Kostunica called the executions a "brutal,
callous and disgraceful crime against civilians."

Speaking last week in Washington, the chief U.N. war
crimes prosecutor for the Balkans, Carla del Ponte,
said that during her recent visit to Serbia, she "could
feel the impact of this video on all elements of
Serbian society."

Kandic exudes little joy. A debate in parliament over a
war crimes resolution last week degenerated into a
dispute over whether Serbs were the main victims of
atrocities, she noted. Moreover, the broadcast of the
video has yet to result in the arrest of Ratko Mladic,
the Serb general directly in charge of the Srebrenica
operation. U.N. officials have repeatedly charged that
he is hiding in Serbia.

"This government refuses to break with Milosevic's
criminal state," Kandic said.

Kandic spoke on the balcony of a small Belgrade
restaurant, chain-smoking and answering frequent calls
on her cell phone. She travels around the city without
bodyguards, though she acknowledges that someone might
want to take revenge for the Scorpion arrests. Her
activism is nothing new.

Before the wars, she was a sociologist. After
hostilities began in 1991, she decided to research
human rights abuses connected with the fighting. She
founded the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade,
organized candlelight antiwar vigils and mounted
petition drives to protest the use of Serbian troops in
the conflict with Croatia. "I documented abuses against
Croats and was called a traitor," she said. "Then
against Muslims. The same reaction. When I documented
abuses against Serbs, there was silence."

During the conflict in Kosovo in 1999, she said, she
traveled by taxi to the provincial capital, Pristina.
Ethnic Albanians were being expelled or fleeing in fear
from towns and villages. Serbian police looted and
burned their homes. At police checkpoints, Kandic
convinced guards that she was on her way to rescue Serb
relatives, and they let her pass.

Kandic dodged NATO bombs as she traveled from town to
town. She collected testimony on expulsions and mass
killings. Once, security agents detained her for eight
hours on the way to the southern city of Prizren.
"First, they said: 'We know who you are. You could be
disappeared.' But they let me go," she recalled. "Look
at me. I'm little. I'm a woman. I'm not a scary
person."

Kandic, 59, considers the waning years of Milosevic's
rule, which ended in 2000, the most dangerous period of
her career. It was a time of assassinations and
roundups of journalists, opposition activists and
student protesters. "Until then, Milosevic ignored us,"
she said. "We were few and served one purpose. He could
point to us as proof of democracy."

In 2000, Col. Svetozar Radisic, then the Yugoslav army
spokesman, told reporters that Kandic "should be
sentenced for what she is doing. A person who puts
forth such allegations might be a psychiatric case."
She remained free even as she organized legal defenses
for Kosovo Albanians held in Serbian jails.

In Sid, she was looking into a mass killing during the
Kosovo war when she heard about the Srebrenica tape.
Originally, 20 copies were made, she said. Later the
Scorpions' commander realized the images could be used
against him and ordered them destroyed. However, one
Scorpion, who was at odds with his comrades and was not
present at the executions, made an extra copy for
himself. Fearful, he hid the tape with confidants in
Bosnia, Kandic said. She set out to find it.

Other Scorpions, who had learned she was looking for a
copy, began to scour Sid for it and harassed anyone
they thought might have it. Finally, Kandic found the
tape in Bosnia. She agreed to publicize it only when
the owner and other informants were out of Serbia. That
was accomplished on May 20.

The Scorpion tale provides a key to proving high-level
Serbian responsibility for war crimes, Kandic said.
"The Scorpions just didn't wander around on their own.
They were ordered from place to place. . . . They were
integrated into the war machine."

The Scorpions were first dispatched to guard oil fields
in Croatia and to fight. They later took part in the
siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. When Mladic
launched an assault on Srebrenica in July 1995, he used
Scorpions to evacuate and kill Bosnian prisoners,
Kandic said.

The Scorpions also appeared in the Kosovo town of
Podujevo on March 28, 1999, and massacred a group of 14
women and children in the walled garden of a small
house. The local commander of the Scorpions unit in
Podujevo, Sasa Cvjetan, stood trial in Serbia last year
for the killings. He was found guilty and sentenced to
20 years in prison -- a sentence imposed again last
week after a retrial. Kandic was deeply involved in
bringing the Podujevo case to trial and was on its
trail in Sid when the story of the Srebrenica tape
surfaced.

The video begins with the Scorpions taking blessings
from a Serbian Orthodox priest in Sid, then traveling
through the Balkan countryside and sleeping in a wood.
Six bound prisoners are shown being transported in a
truck. Later the Scorpions force them to lie face down
on the roadside. The captors taunt them.

"Did you ever have sex?" asks one commando. "Never?"

"You're innocent?" asks another. "I'd be innocent,
too."

There is discussion about whether the video camera has
sufficient battery power to record the whole scene and
whether the tape needs changing. When all the bodies
are in the house, one Scorpion demands permission to
fire three more bullets at the corpses.

The tape ends with a pig roast.

Kandic wrapped up the interview after a caller told her
the Serbian government was willing to open a war crimes
investigation in another case she had worked on. A Serb
paramilitary commander named Nebojsa Minic, who
allegedly killed numerous civilians in western Kosovo
when he ran a unit called Lightning, was under arrest
in Argentina. She had fingered him as a culprit.

"All these cases are important," Kandic said and rushed
off.

__________________