Croats Leave Bloody Trail of Serbian Dead

They found Sava Babic’s body in the back of her broken-down yellow Fiat, her legs and a walking cane protruding from a rear door.

The 82-year-old Serbian woman had been shot in the cheek. She was discovered by the same team of U.N. civilian police officers who had visited her three days earlier and had heard her complaints about Croatian soldiers trying to steal her car. The U.N. officers were bringing food to Babic when they found her.

Babic was one of an estimated 2,500 Serbs who stayed behind in the Krajina region of Croatia after it was recaptured by Croatian forces in an August offensive that sent more than 180,000 Serbs fleeing. Her murder is being described as part of a campaign of harassment and intimidation by Croatian forces against Serbian civilians that continues two months after the offensive ended.

Since Aug 5., officials from the United Nations, United States, Europe and human rights groups have documented widespread looting, robbery, arson and, now, murder in the Krajina. Most of the victims have been elderly Serbs, and many of the perpetrators, say reports and officials, have been Croatian security forces. Thousands of Serbian homes have been ransacked and torched, and more than 100 people killed, long after the combat ceased.

The human rights officials accuse the Croatian government of tolerating the atrocities in a deliberate effort to discourage Serbs from returning, despite a stated policy of welcoming them.

Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, after first denying that abuses were taking place, on Friday acknowledged their existence but insisted that returning Croatian refugees exacting revenge have been responsible. Tudjman, a key U.S. ally, said 24 people had been arrested in connection with 36 killings of Serbs and that seven other murder cases and more than 600 looting incidents are under investigation.

“We have done everything in our power to stop the unlawful acts, and now the courts will do their job,” Tudjman said.

Yet even as he spoke, there were signs here in the remote hills of the Krajina that Croatian authorities were trying to cover up evidence of some of the most grisly murders.

The worst incident to come to light has been the Sept. 28 massacre of at least nine elderly Serbian civilians in the small village of Varivode southeast of Knin, the town that served as the Krajina Serbs’ capital during the three years they held the Krajina.

The murders have been well documented by U.N. investigators who reached Varivode on Oct. 2, finding pools of blood as well as blood-splattered walls and bullet holes in four homes. Two survivors have reported hearing gunfire on the afternoon of Sept. 28.

“We found the signs of a considerably violent action,” said an internal U.N. human rights report. “There were no signs of any military fighting, only of what can be described as cold-blooded killing.”

When U.N. officials returned over the weekend, however, they discovered that the blood had been washed or burned away in some places.

In a home where bullet holes and blood splatters had earlier been found on the side of a stove and a wall, someone had moved a chair to hide the evidence. In another home, where a large pool of blood had been found on the patio, someone had covered the site with straw and positioned a bench over it.

On Sunday, Croatian military police staffed a checkpoint at the entrance to the town and denied access to a U.N. team, which was eventually able to enter by a back road, according to a member of the group.

Milan Pokrajac, 74, who heard the Sept. 28 gunfire and is the lone Serb remaining in Varivode, has been placed under police guard, although U.N. investigators are still allowed to talk to him. A witness, Bojanka Milosevic, 42, who has said she hid when she heard the shots, was spirited away by Croatian authorities to an island off the coast. U.N. officials, however, said they have been granted access to her.

The U.N. monitors who first reached Varivode on Oct. 2 also found plastic surgical gloves at several of the bloody sites, indicating that an official investigation had at least been started. But requests thus far for police reports or autopsy reports have been rebuffed, U.N. officials said.

Crosses with the names of the Varivode victims were discovered in the rapidly expanding Serbian cemetery in Knin on Oct. 2, but U.N. investigators have not been able to determine when the victims were buried.

Family members have also complained that they were not informed of their relatives’ deaths until after the burials, and at least one relative is demanding an exhumation of the grave site purported to contain her parents, Jovan and Marija Beric.

The dead ranged in age from 65 to 84.

The Serbian cemetery is a veritable work in progress. Approximately 250 new graves have appeared in recent weeks, about half with crosses marked with two N’s, for “no name.” Huge pits have already been dug, apparently in expectation of more bodies.

Varivode is only the most dramatic instance within the emerging pattern of abuse. Babic, the woman found in the back of her Fiat, was killed Sept. 4 in the hamlet of Mokro Polje after having been seen last by U.N. officials on Sept. 1. On Sept. 9, two women were shot to death in their home in the town of Brgud, 15 miles west of Knin, and then, judging by bloodstains, dragged outside and propped up against a wall, where they were found by European Union monitors two days later.

In a town called Grubori, Croatian security forces attacked on Aug. 25, setting at least 18 houses afire and killing six people. One was an 80-year-old Serbian man found in his pajamas with a bullet in his head that had been fired at close range; another was a 65-year-old man who had his throat slit, and yet another was a 90-year-old woman who burned to death, according to U.N. reports.

Six villagers survived because they had left the town to attend a U.N.-sponsored meeting on how to become Croatian citizens. They told investigators that they observed two columns of Croatian soldiers approaching the village after they left. A bit later, plumes of smoke began to rise from Grubori.

Lt. Gen. Ivan Cermak, the Croatian army commander for Knin, acknowledged civilian deaths at Grubori but said they occurred during a firefight with Serbian “renegades.”

Croatian soldiers are also being accused by U.N., EU and other monitors of intimidating Serbs by demanding money from them or by stealing their cattle, sheep, money and possessions. Some looters have been so thorough as to take kitchen sinks and bathtubs.

U.N. and human rights officials contend that the Croatian government is doing little to discourage the atrocities and in fact is hoping to send a deliberate message to Serbs that they are not welcome--and that those who left should not consider returning.

“There seems to be no direction from the top giving police the authority to arrest unruly soldiers or unruly civilians,” said Allun Roberts, U.N. spokesman in Knin. “Either they can’t control it or they don’t want to.”

The government changed the law last month to limit the amount of time in which a Serb can reclaim his home to just 90 days. The bureaucratic hoops that Serbs will have to jump through just to return to Croatia are so numerous as to make the journey almost impossible, U.N. officials say.

The Serbs who fled the August offensive had lived in the Krajina for centuries but rebelled in 1991 when Croatia announced its secession from the Yugoslav federation. The war in Croatia that followed left 10,000 people dead until a cease-fire ended the fighting and brought in U.N. monitors.

The United Nations failed, however, to re-integrate the mutinous Krajina into Croatia proper, and the Tudjman government finally lost its patience on Aug. 4. In just three days, the Croatian army seized control of the region and drove out the Serbs.

The mistreatment now of the Krajina’s Serbian minority by the Croatian government poses a delicate problem for the Clinton Administration, which has become a staunch ally of Tudjman and gave tacit approval to the recapture of the region.

John Shattuck, U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights, toured the Krajina area last week and condemned the Croatian government for allowing a “climate of impunity” to reign. He indicated that Washington might revoke financial aid and political support if Tudjman fails to prosecute those responsible for murder and other crimes against Serbs.